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suzey8888 · 3 years

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“I cannot tell you that Hitler took Austria by tanks and guns; it would distort history. If you remember the plot of the Sound of Music, the Von Trapp family escaped over the Alps rather than submit to the Nazis. Kitty wasn’t so lucky. Her family chose to stay in her native Austria. She was 10 years old, but bright and aware. And she was watching. “We elected him by a landslide – 98 percent of the vote,” she recalls. She wasn’t old enough to vote in 1938 – approaching her 11th birthday. But she remembers. “Everyone thinks that Hitler just rolled in with his tanks and took Austria by force.” No so. Hitler is welcomed to Austria “In 1938, Austria was in deep Depression. Nearly one-third of our workforce was unemployed. We had 25 percent inflation and 25 percent bank loan interest rates. Farmers and business people were declaring bankruptcy daily. Young people were going from house to house begging for food. Not that they didn’t want to work; there simply weren’t any jobs. “My mother was a Christian woman and believed in helping people in need. Every day we cooked a big kettle of soup and baked bread to feed those poor, hungry people – about 30 daily.’ “We looked to our neighbor on the north, Germany, where Hitler had been in power since 1933.” she recalls. “We had been told that they didn’t have unemployment or crime, and they had a high standard of living. “Nothing was ever said about persecution of any group – Jewish or otherwise. We were led to believe that everyone in Germany was happy. We wanted the same way of life in Austria. We were promised that a vote for Hitler would mean the end of unemployment and help for the family. Hitler also said that businesses would be assisted, and farmers would get their farms back. “Ninety-eight percent of the population voted to annex Austria to Germany and have Hitler for our ruler. “We were overjoyed,” remembers Kitty, “and for three days we danced in the streets and had candlelight parades. The new government opened up big field kitchens and everyone was fed. “After the election, German officials were appointed, and, like a miracle, we suddenly had law and order. Three or four weeks later, everyone was employed. The government made sure that a lot of work was created through the Public Work Service. “Hitler decided we should have equal rights for women. Before this, it was a custom that married Austrian women did not work outside the home. An able-bodied husband would be looked down on if he couldn’t support his family. Many women in the teaching profession were elated that they could retain the jobs they previously had been required to give up for marriage. “Then we lost religious education for kids “Our education was nationalized. I attended a very good public school.. The population was predominantly Catholic, so we had religion in our schools. The day we elected Hitler (March 13, 1938), I walked into my schoolroom to find the crucifix replaced by Hitler’s picture hanging next to a Nazi flag. Our teacher, a very devout woman, stood up and told the class we wouldn’t pray or have religion anymore. Instead, we sang ‘Deutschland, Deutschland, Uber Alles,’ and had physical education. “Sunday became National Youth Day with compulsory attendance. Parents were not pleased about the sudden change in curriculum. They were told that if they did not send us, they would receive a stiff letter of warning the first time. The second time they would be fined the equivalent of $300, and the third time they would be subject to jail.” And then things got worse. “The first two hours consisted of political indoctrination. The rest of the day we had sports. As time went along, we loved it. Oh, we had so much fun and got our sports equipment free. “We would go home and gleefully tell our parents about the wonderful time we had. “My mother was very unhappy,” remembers Kitty. “When the next term started, she took me out of public school and put me in a convent. I told her she couldn’t do that and she told me that someday when I grew up, I would be grateful. There was a very good curriculum, but hardly

any fun – no sports, and no political indoctrination. “I hated it at first but felt I could tolerate it. Every once in a while, on holidays, I went home. I would go back to my old friends and ask what was going on and what they were doing. “Their loose lifestyle was very alarming to me. They lived without religion. By that time, unwed mothers were glorified for having a baby for Hitler. “It seemed strange to me that our society changed so suddenly. As time went along, I realized what a great deed my mother did so that I wasn’t exposed to that kind of humanistic philosophy. “In 1939, the war started, and a food bank was established. All food was rationed and could only be purchased using food stamps. At the same time, a full-employment law was passed which meant if you didn’t work, you didn’t get a ration card, and, if you didn’t have a card, you starved to death. “Women who stayed home to raise their families didn’t have any marketable skills and often had to take jobs more suited for men. “Soon after this, the draft was implemented. “It was compulsory for young people, male and female, to give one year to the labor corps,” remembers Kitty. “During the day, the girls worked on the farms, and at night they returned to their barracks for military training just like the boys. “They were trained to be anti-aircraft gunners and participated in the signal corps. After the labor corps, they were not discharged but were used in the front lines. “When I go back to Austria to visit my family and friends, most of these women are emotional cripples because they just were not equipped to handle the horrors of combat. “Three months before I turned 18, I was severely injured in an air raid attack. I nearly had a leg amputated, so I was spared having to go into the labor corps and into military service. “When the mothers had to go out into the work force, the government immediately established child care centers. “You could take your children ages four weeks old to school age and leave them there around-the-clock, seven days a week, under the total care of the government. “The state raised a whole generation of children. There were no motherly women to take care of the children, just people highly trained in child psychology. By this time, no one talked about equal rights. We knew we had been had. “Before Hitler, we had very good medical care. Many American doctors trained at the University of Vienna.. “After Hitler, health care was socialized, free for everyone. Doctors were salaried by the government. The problem was, since it was free, the people were going to the doctors for everything. “When the good doctor arrived at his office at 8 a.m., 40 people were already waiting and, at the same time, the hospitals were full. “If you needed elective surgery, you had to wait a year or two for your turn. There was no money for research as it was poured into socialized medicine. Research at the medical schools literally stopped, so the best doctors left Austria and emigrated to other countries. “As for healthcare, our tax rates went up to 80 percent of our income. Newlyweds immediately received a $1,000 loan from the government to establish a household. We had big programs for families. “All day care and education were free. High schools were taken over by the government and college tuition was subsidized. Everyone was entitled to free handouts, such as food stamps, clothing, and housing. “We had another agency designed to monitor business. My brother-in-law owned a restaurant that had square tables. “Government officials told him he had to replace them with round tables because people might bump themselves on the corners. Then they said he had to have additional bathroom facilities. It was just a small dairy business with a snack bar. He couldn’t meet all the demands. “Soon, he went out of business. If the government owned the large businesses and not many small ones existed, it could be in control. “We had consumer protection, too “We were told how to shop and what to buy. Free enterprise was essentially abolished. We had a planning agency

specially designed for farmers. The agents would go to the farms, count the livestock, and then tell the farmers what to produce, and how to produce it. “In 1944, I was a student teacher in a small village in the Alps. The villagers were surrounded by mountain passes which, in the winter, were closed off with snow, causing people to be isolated. “So people intermarried and offspring were sometimes retarded. When I arrived, I was told there were 15 mentally retarded adults, but they were all useful and did good manual work. “I knew one, named Vincent, very well. He was a janitor of the school. One day I looked out the window and saw Vincent and others getting into a van. “I asked my superior where they were going. She said to an institution where the State Health Department would teach them a trade, and to read and write. The families were required to sign papers with a little clause that they could not visit for 6 months. “They were told visits would interfere with the program and might cause homesickness. “As time passed, letters started to dribble back saying these people died a natural, merciful death. The villagers were not fooled. We suspected what was happening. Those people left in excellent physical health and all died within 6 months. We called this euthanasia. “Next came gun registration. People were getting injured by guns. Hitler said that the real way to catch criminals (we still had a few) was by matching serial numbers on guns. Most citizens were law-abiding and dutifully marched to the police station to register their firearms. Not long afterwards, the police said that it was best for everyone to turn in their guns. The authorities already knew who had them, so it was futile not to comply voluntarily. “No more freedom of speech. Anyone who said something against the government was taken away. We knew many people who were arrested, not only Jews, but also priests and ministers who spoke up. “Totalitarianism didn’t come quickly, it took 5 years from 1938 until 1943, to realize full dictatorship in Austria. Had it happened overnight, my countrymen would have fought to the last breath. Instead, we had creeping gradualism. Now, our only weapons were broom handles. The whole idea sounds almost unbelievable that the state, little by little eroded our freedom.” “This is my eyewitness account. “It’s true. Those of us who sailed past the Statue of Liberty came to a country of unbelievable freedom and opportunity. “America is truly is the greatest country in the world. “Don’t let freedom slip away. “After America, there is no place to go.” Kitty Werthmann ***Re-read the part where she says “everything was free” - healthcare and so on. Very much worth reading twice.****

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aion-rsa · 4 years

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Stargirl: How Cindy Burman Became the Most Intriguing DC TV Villain

https://ift.tt/2ZMmxp2

This article contains Stargirl spoilers.

Stargirl is the sort of superhero show that has no right to be as good as it is. A story about a teenager discovering a glowing, sentient staff and fighting supervillains with names like “The Gambler” in a costume that’s little more than a midriff-baring Captain America rip-off should, in all honesty, be a joke. Therefore, the fact that it’s actually one the best DC television series currently on the air may come as a surprise to many, but this little show has proven over the course of its first season that there’s basically nothing it can’t do.

A perfect mix of heartfelt optimism and deep cut fan service, Stargirl soars because it trusts both its characters and its audience. This is a show that encourages its viewers to embrace complexity and to hold often competing concepts together in the same moment for maximum narrative impact. Stargirl itself exists in a similar duality, a show with a classic comic book feel and bright tone, but whose youthful verve and risky storytelling points the way to the exciting and different things this genre is still capable of doing.

And there’s no better example of this than Cindy Burman, who is simultaneously a monster and a horribly lost teenage girl.

When we first meet Blue Valley High HBIC Cindy she appears to be little more than your average mean girl. A less interesting Cheryl Blossom-type, her only goal seems to be to make herself the center of attention at all times, whether that means sabotaging another student’s election as class president, winning the school talent contest with subversive-for-Nebraska dance moves or simply being rude to new students. Entertaining, yes – but probably not that important to the overall story that Stargirl was telling.

This is an assumption that turns out to be the furthest thing from the truth.

Because Cindy is a character – much like Stargirl itself – that’s much more complex and nuanced then she appears at first glance. The DC TV universe’s first teen supervillain, Cindy is vicious, dark, and deadly by turns. Yet, even as Stargirl acknowledges her evil nature, it also takes pains to make sure she remains at least somewhat relatable, allowing Cindy to occupy an intriguing liminal space within the narrative. She’s a teenager who knows too much to enjoy her status as a high school queen bee, but who is still seen as too young to have a proper seat at the Injustice Society’s table. She’s both the Dragon King’s daughter and someone who was likely one of his very first victims. And she’s both determined not to need anyone, and miserably lonely at the same time.

In the “Shiv” two-parter that essentially serves as Cindy’s origin story, we see a girl who is condescending and cruel, but who also desperately wants to find someone who can understand what she’s going through. She repeatedly tells her father how frustrated she is by being “all alone up there” in the world of Blue Valley, forced to date a boy that she doesn’t even like that much in order to monitor him for the Injustice Society and unable to tell the truth about herself to any of her supposed friends. The Dragon King – like so many fathers of teens before him, supervillain or no – refuses to see her for who she is, offhandedly recommending she fix her problems by going shopping or throwing another party.

Stargirl Season Finale Ending Explained and Unanswered Questions

By Rosie Knight

Both the show and actress Meg DeLacy do a great job making Cindy sympathetic without undermining or trying to justify just how truly terrible she is. She’s a girl who hides deep insecurities behind a performative bitchy persona, but who also has no problem casually murdering her father’s brainwashed lackeys (for what is apparently not even close to the first time). It certainly makes sense that Cindy might be drawn to Courtney Whitmore, a new girl with a forthright attitude and little respect for the established way things work in Blue Valley. Who better, after all, to truly see you than someone who doesn’t know you at all?

It would be easy for Stargirl to insist that Cindy and Courtney are destined to be enemies because Starman and Dragon King were, their vendettas predetermined long before these girls even knew who the other was. But like so many other tropes this series has tackled this season, the show isn’t content with anything so basic. Instead, when it pulls out the traditional “we’re not so different, you and I” speech that often passes between a hero and a villain, the conversation lands differently – because Stargirl has taken the time to show us long before this moment that it’s a cliché that’s actually mostly true in this case.

In a different world, it’s pretty easy to imagine how these girls could have ended up in each other’s places, through accidents of birth or circumstance. In this one, it’s still not completely outside the realm of possibility to envision them as a sort of uneasy frenemies at some point in the (distant) future.. The Cindy who visits Courtney’s bedroom to taunt her and threaten her friends is also there because she’s literally never had anyone she could talk to about this whole superhero and/or supervillain lifestyle before, and that’s a true gamechanger for her.

Stargirl has already hinted there’s still more to Cindy than we viewers know. According to Beth, she used to be nice before her mother died, and it wasn’t until afterward that she became the “scariest kid in fourth grade”. Given that the show has repeatedly hinted that she somehow caused her mother’s death, that seems as though it’s probably when her father started experimenting on her, and we’ve yet to truly see the extent of how that’s affected her.

Yet, despite the Dragon King’s repeated abusive and cruel behavior, Cindy remains convinced her father loves her. She even still covets his good opinion – or, at least, she does right up until the moment she stabs him through the chest. Much like everything else involving this character, CIndy’s murder of her father is a complicated decision, an act that appears to be as driven by pain as much as it is by fury.

Stargirl: What is Eclipso?

By Rosie Knight

(No matter how messed up she is, hearing that her father – and all his supervillain friends – considered her a failed experiment has to hurt.)

And though Cindy doubtless mourns her father in her own way (if he’s even actually dead for real), she’s also eager to establish herself in his place as the new de facto head of the next generation of the Injustice Society. Though Cindy is knocked out by Courtney during the battle in the season finale, we see her retrieve a jewel from what is presumably her father’s vast archive of unlabeled evil materials.

Before the screen goes dark, she addresses it as “Eclipso,” indicating that she’s well on her way to building her own version of the Injustice Society (surely Cameron Mahkent or Isaiah Bowin might have some legacy anger issues to work out next season?). But what that will ultimately look like is anyone’s guess – particularly since this show has already proven that it’s both willing and eager to take the road less traveled, narratively speaking.

Will Stargirl and Shiv somehow become besties who do one another’s nails and have sleepovers? Probably not. But that doesn’t mean that there’s no room for something else between them, either. Particularly since they’ve both moved out from under the shadows of the men they once called their fathers and are forging their own paths.

After all, Stargirl is a show that’s strengthened by the familiar ground of comic book clichés, rather than weakened by them – and all because it doesn’t count on vague tropes to do its heavy narrative lifting. Instead, it leans into these familiar aspects, sharpening their edges and allowing the familiar bones of old stories to light our path to new ones.

The post Stargirl: How Cindy Burman Became the Most Intriguing DC TV Villain appeared first on Den of Geek.

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missing-marvel · 5 years

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The Shape of You (Pt. 1)

Pairing: Vision/Reader

Tags: Slow burn, multi-chapter, self-indulgent Shape of Water AU ???

Part 2

A/N: Guess who’s back? I bet you thought I was dead. Well surprise, I’ve got ANOTHER Vision fit for ya cause Endgame did my boy dirty. As you may have noticed, this is an AU. It’s set after AoU but kinda diverges from Civil War... You’ll get it as you read. And yeah, I pretty well am taking the whole premise of The Shape of Water (cause it’s a gorgeous movie if you haven’t seen it!) but you don’t have to know literally anything about that movie.

Also! This is gonna be a long chapter cause there’s a lot of stage to set so buckle in kids.

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A harsh beep sounded from the terminal as you clocked in for the day. It was like your second alarm clock. One in the morning to get you out of bed, a second one when you got to work to get you out of your head. No amount of coffee would make you properly awake this early, but you were getting used to it. A government job expected you to work on a strict schedule, even if you were just a custodian.

You’d been working here for a couple months now. Supposedly this place had some pretty secret government projects going on, but you hadn’t seen anything interesting just yet. It must be true though, considering how much screening you went through when you applied for the job. Not to mention the amount of forms you had to sign. No employer went to that much trouble unless they had something to hide.

You didn’t expect today, however, would be the day things finally got interesting.

You made your way to one of the many maintenance rooms to grab your gear. Before you got there, however, you ran into your boss, Ronnie.

He was a skittish man, always nervous about something or other. He was also incredibly annoying. He’d do anything to get attention from the higher-ups. He was always gunning for a promotion, though he had been in this position far longer than you’d worked here. Most of what you knew about him came from break room gossip.

“Different assignment for you today. It’s a big one. You cannot mess this up.” Ronnie shuffled the folders and loose papers in his hands. He was always carrying papers it seemed. You had no idea what any of them were for. You were half convinced it was just his way of looking ‘professional.’

“Yes sir,” you droned, already tired of Ronnie’s crap. He was your superior though, and you couldn’t risk being snappy with him. “What will I be doing?”

“Report to Lab 205. You and a handful of others will be the only custodial staff allowed in there for the foreseeable future. There’s a very special asset about to be moved here and it’s extremely important that we don’t screw this up.”

Lab 205 was on the second basement level. You’d only been down there a handful of times and you certainly weren’t familiar with it.

“All due respect sir, but am I the best choice for something like that? I’ve only been here a couple months and—“ Before you could finish your thought, Ronnie cut you off.

“Ah ah ah!” There he went again, making that God-awful sound. There wasn’t anything more condescending than the sound Ronnie made when interrupting people. “I don’t choose the people for the job, I just give them the news. Just report there in 5 minutes and someone there will tell you what to do. I’m sure if you can’t handle this, they’ll find someone more suitable for the job.”

And with that, he simply walked away. What an ass. One day he was gonna get smacked in the face. You didn’t let it get to you, however, as he did this with just about everyone on the custodial staff.

You made your way quickly to the elevator, silently hoping you remembered the way to the lab.

___

You made it with no time to spare. Turns out, you didn’t remember the way to the lab. You had just spent the last 4 and a half minutes frantically combing the floor for the right room. Why did this place have to be so damn big?

Several faces turned toward you when you burst into the room, sweaty and out-of-breath as you had been running. There were four other people in the room wearing custodial uniforms, all giving you looks of disapproval. Their attention was brought back to the front of the room fortunately, when a sharply dressed woman cleared her throat loudly.

‘Oh great, another Ronnie,’ you thought. You suppressed the urge to roll your eyes and stood at attention as she spoke.

“As I’m sure you’ve been told, the five of you are going to be the sole custodians responsible for the care of this lab for the foreseeable future.”

It was only now that you fully noticed the size of the lab. The ceiling was higher than every other room in the building (that you’d been in) and the whole space was filled with so many computers and monitoring stations that there was hardly any walking room left. At the back of the room was a glass wall of some kind, separating you from the back wall. Behind the glass was mostly empty space aside from some complex-looking machinery.

“The new asset is being brought in tomorrow. That means you have today to get this place spotless. This is easily the most important thing ever to be housed in this facility so I expect all of you to maintain complete secrecy. Anything you see in this room from now on is completely confidential. As I’m sure you all understand, any divulgence of confidential information will result in immediate termination and legal action will be taken.”

You exchanged a few nervous glances with your coworkers but said nothing. You had no idea what you were getting into.

The woman’s expression suddenly turned chipper and she clapped her hands together cheerfully. “Well! I expect nothing short of perfection from you all. Now get to work!” With that, she turned and exited the lab.

___

It had been a long, grueling day. Cleaning that lab had proven far more work than you expected. Every time you thought you were done with an area, a supervisor would tell you to do it again, better this time.

But now you were home, stretched out on the sofa to relax your aching muscles. You lived in a small apartment uptown. You tried to avoid the word ‘dingy,’ opting instead for ‘modest.’ Sure the place was small, there was a spider problem, the temperature was always slightly off, and plenty more problems you’d gotten used to but it was yours. There was nothing better than going home to a space to call your own at the end of the day, even if it was dingy.

You worked long shifts, leaving little time for activities in the evenings. On the plus side, you got long weekends. This meant your nightly routine consisted mainly of eating, showering, watching TV for a little while, and going to sleep. Today was no different.

However, as you lay in bed, you found your mind wandering. You thought about this ‘asset’ being brought into the lab. You had endless theories about what it could be. You were secretly hoping it was a live alien. How cool would that be? A stream of ideas fit for a sci-fi novel ran through your head until you inevitably fell asleep.

_____

So it wasn’t an alien. At least, you didn’t think it was.

You and the other four custodians had been permitted to be in the lab when the asset was brought in, much to your surprise. Presumably, they thought that if you got to see the ‘asset’ right away, you’d be less likely to snoop later. The five of you stood in the corner, enthralled by the scene in front of you.

A couple men in military uniforms had wheeled in some kind of container, large enough to hold a person. Through the glass on the front, you almost thought the thing inside was a person. But when you got a better look, you could tell it was something inhuman.

The figure inside had their eyes shut. At first glance, their face appeared human, until you noticed that their ‘skin’ was a deep red and green with clearly artificial design. With all the commotion, you unfortunately couldn’t see much more than that.

A man in a lab coat was fussing over every little thing. He would snap at the men pushing the container, saying things like ‘this is worth more than you’ll make in your lifetime’ and ‘if I find one scratch on that machine you’re both fired.’

While the man was utterly exasperating to listen to, his complaining informed you that the figure was in fact, a machine.

“It’s... an android?” You mumbled under your breath and your coworker next to you looked over.

“What’s so special about an android?” she asked, keeping her voice low so as not to get in trouble. “Hasn’t the government been building robots for years?”

Thinking about it, you realized she was right. The government had already created some fairly advanced robotics that were far from secret.

“There must be something special about this one,” you said. “Something worth studying. Maybe it’s foreign?”

Suddenly another coworker that had been listening in gasped. “Oh my God you guys,” he said, his voice trailing off.

“What? What is it?” You were surprised by his outburst and too impatient to deal with it.

“What if... what if that’s the Avengers’ android? The one that got destroyed right before they disappeared.”

If that was the case, it certainly hadn’t been destroyed. When Ultron was threatening humanity, news that the Avengers had built another android to fight him was a bit upsetting to most people, the government in particular. Luckily, it worked out. The news hadn’t given a lot of details but the planet was still intact so they obviously did something right.

The government disagreed, however. They thought the Avengers needed more accountability. They tried writing up laws of sorts to control them, but it didn’t go so well. When the Avengers had tried to fight the laws, they were forced to go into hiding. At one point, a government assault team had been sent to stop them. They failed of course, though there were no casualties. Unless you counted a destroyed android. Like, completely destroyed. The news footage had shown a massive explosion. The government even released an official statement saying the android could not be recovered and the rest of the Avengers escaped. Looks like the conspiracy theorists were right about this one.

While no one in the general public knew much about the android, there was still footage of it from Sokovia. At the time, you’d been impressed. Leave it to Tony Stark and Dr. Banner to build something that advanced.

If it was here now, that meant the government wanted to study it. Stark wasn’t known to like sharing his most advanced tech, and this clearly had been no exception.

You let this new information settle in as you continued watching the scene unfold.

_____

The excitement settled down pretty quickly. The guy in the lab coat, who you’d learned was called Dr. Newmann, rushed from computer to computer, looking over the shoulders of the lab assistants and criticizing anything and everything. You quickly learned to tune him out. You didn’t bother his work, and he didn’t bother you.

Right now you were supposed to be checking the printers for paper and ink. They were brand new, brought in this morning specifically for this lab.

However you couldn’t help but let your eyes wander to the back of the room. The android was no longer in the container it had been transported in. It was now behind the glass wall, lying on some kind of table and connected to countless computers and machines.

When Dr. Newmann wasn’t yelling at lab assistants, he was in there, fussing over the android like it was his damn child. You could hear him drone on about the discoveries they were going to make into Stark technology. You had a sudden image of what the government could do with that sort of power, but shoved it to the back of your mind before you could dwell on it.

What you really wanted was to get a better look at the android. The other custodians’ interest had diminished rather quickly but you couldn’t help but continue to be curious. Unfortunately, you wouldn’t be able to get anywhere near that glass with Dr. Fussy over there, not even for a quick look.

Your watch beeped suddenly, signaling the time for your lunch break. That was all the distraction you needed to forget everything you were doing and leave.

______

You’d finished your lunch a little early today and decided to get back to work right away. Perhaps if you got everything done early you could go home sooner.

You were surprised to find the lab empty when you got back. All the lab assistants as well as Dr. Newmann were absent. They must all be on their lunch breaks.

The android was still in the same place, unsurprisingly. You briefly thought about going over to sneak a look, but anyone could come in at any second. You didn’t know what kind of trouble you’d be in if you got caught. They seemed to take this thing pretty seriously.

You decided to do the reasonable thing and just get back to work. You started collecting the little trash bins by many of the desks that had already filled with paper. It was amazing how many notes these guys wrote down in just a day.

As you knelt to pick up a crumpled paper that was on the floor, you noticed what looked like a drawing on one of the corners. You carefully unfolded the paper, smoothing it out on your knee. It was a sketch of the android’s face, messy, but recognizable. A bunch of notes and equations surrounded it, practically illegible. One thing stood out to you, which was a question mark with circles around it. A line connected the mark to a point on the android’s forehead. There was an indent of some kind, though you couldn’t tell if it was deliberate or if something was missing. Your main focus was on the drawing itself though. It was surprisingly detailed. You thought that whoever drew it could’ve had a future in art, maybe in another life.

Well you had managed to do the smart thing for all of thirty seconds. Now your curiosity was getting the better of you. You knew the old slang about curiosity and the cat. You also knew the ending of it.

‘Curiosity killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back.’

Stuffing the paper in your pocket, you carefully approached the glass, cautious of the many wires that snaked across the floor. You couldn’t go inside. The only door in the glass was opened with a full handprint scan. Specifically, Dr. Newmann’s. Not that you wanted to go inside, anyway.

Up close, you were surprised and just how much detail the android had. Aside from the color, its face looked almost scarily human. In fact, it’s whole body seemed organic in shape, for lack of a better term. Though you did recognize the odd indent in its forehead from the sketch. It definitely looked like a part was missing. Overall, it didn’t look like what you expected a robot to look like; all blocky and mechanical like in the movies. It looked like a person.

“What the hell are you doing?!” You hadn’t even realized you were practically leaning on the glass until the furious voice of a lab assistant snapped you back to reality.

“I’m s-sorry! I-I was just looking, I swear! I didn’t touch anything!” You frantically backed away from the glass.

The lab assistant marched over to you, eyeing you over before looking back towards the android. She was silent for several moments as you stood frozen in fear, expecting the worst.

When she seemed satisfied in her examination of the situation, she spoke up, “You’re lucky I wasn’t Dr. Newmann. He would’ve had you out of here faster than you could even blink.”

You let out the breath you didn’t realize you were holding. You couldn’t afford to lose this job. You especially couldn’t afford whatever lawsuit against you would ensue if they thought you had damaged anything.

“I’m sorry Ma’am. It won’t happen again.” Your voice still shook as you tried to come down from your panic.

“It better not. I may not be here next time.” Suddenly, her frown picked up into a slight grin and she glanced back and the android before turning to you again. “Although... it is pretty cool huh?”

Was she... messing with you? Was this a test?

“Y-yeah. Hey, if I can ask, that is the Avengers’ android, isn’t it?” You had to ask. If anyone was going to tell you, it was the lab assistant that just saved your job.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Her smile disappeared as quickly as it had come and she turned back towards one of the computers, but if you didn’t know any better, you’d swear she’d winked at you.

There wasn’t time to question it, however, as Dr. Newmann and the others walked into the room. You returned to the trash cans as quickly and nonchalantly as possible, still wrapping your mind about what had just happened.

____

The next several days were uneventful. You kept to your duties, careful to avoid another close call. Today, however, you’d been told you’d have to stay late with two of the other custodians. Apparently, the security guard had been in an accident and you were the only last minute options. Technically, you were all trained in very basic security skills. It was mandatory for the job, partly because a lot of custodians had to stay late when almost everyone else has gone home. You guessed it was cheaper to train people the extra skills rather than hire a whole ton of security guards.

In preparation, you were drinking coffee during your afternoon break. Only the sweet embrace of caffeine was going to get you through this night. On the plus side, you were getting a ton of overtime.

It was that time of day where a large portion of the people here were starting to go home. You watched as one-by-one, the lab slowly emptied, leaving you alone with the two other custodians you’d spoken to on the day the android had been brought in.

As the night drew on, you took turns doing various tasks around the lab to keep busy. At any given time, however, somebody had to be in the actual lab itself. Right now, that was you. One of your coworkers was out walking the halls and the other had snuck outside for a cigarette. You were alone.

There were only a few lights on in the lab; just a couple of the ceiling lights as well as the main light that lit up the space behind the glass wall. It was like a spotlight shining down on the android.

It had been days now and you had no idea what they’d learned from this thing. It was still shut down. You weren’t sure if it was powered off or just straight up broken.

You turned your back on the android, slowly pacing back to the other side of the room. You barely made it a halfway, however, before a loud crash behind you nearly made you jump out of your skin.

You spun around reflexively, looking for any sort of intruder. What you saw instead was far more surprising.

The android was awake. It was also on the floor. It seemed to have fallen off the table. It sat upright, one arm braced against the side of the table. It was looking around as if dazed and you briefly made eye contact. The first thing you noticed was the striking artificial blue of its eyes, unlike anything you’d ever seen before. The thought was fleeting, however.

In a moment of pure panic, you dove behind a desk, pretending like the android hadn’t seen you when it most definitely had. You heard more clattering come from behind the glass. You peeked over the edge of the desk and watched as the Android seemed to struggle to stand. Now that it was on its feet, you noticed something you’d hadn’t seen before.

The android was damaged. There were gashes in its artificial skin of varying severity. It placed a hand gently on a particularly nasty looking cut on its arm and for a moment, you felt a pang of sorrow for the thing. Could it feel pain?

That was when you decided this thing probably wasn’t a threat to you. You weren’t sure what told you that exactly, but you weren’t afraid. You were intrigued, in fact. You were the first person to see the android awake.

You slowly stood up from behind the desk, once more approaching the glass.

The android tried to say something, but you couldn’t hear it. At first you thought it was because of the glass, but the android’s reaction said otherwise. It’d only appeared to say a couple words before it stopped. A confused expression crossed its face and it turned away, raising a hand to its throat tentatively. It began to speak again, but once more was silent. You couldn’t identify the look in its eyes when it turned back to you.

“Can you hear me?” You spoke up only a little, not knowing how soundproof the glass was, but also not wanting your coworker in the hallway to hear.

The android merely looked at you a moment and you assumed it hadn’t heard you. Before you could speak again, however, it nodded.

A small part of you felt overjoyed. You weren’t sure why, but the fact that you could communicate was strangely exciting. Maybe it was the fact that you, not a lab assistant or that ridiculous doctor, but you got to be there when the android woke up.

“Can you speak?” Your mind was suddenly racing and you had to restrain yourself from just spouting out endless questions.

The android frowned before shaking its head. It gestured towards its throat and you understood.

“You’re damaged...” You weren’t asking so much as simply repeating what it had been trying to say. The android nodded solemnly. You wondered how much more damage it had sustained that wasn’t visible.

“Does that-“ you gestured to your arm, mirroring the spot on the android that appeared damaged. “Does it hurt? Can you feel it?”

The android’s expression suggested that the answer wasn’t as simple as a ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ It started gesturing something with its hands and it took you a moment to realize it was miming writing.

“Oh! Are you asking for something to write with?” The android nodded excitedly. You almost turned to look for paper before stopping, your shoulders slumping in disappointment.

“I’m sorry. I can’t get you paper ‘cause I can’t open that door.” You pointed toward the glass door and the android followed your gaze. “Only Dr. Newmann can, and he’d never let anyone else in.”

The android approached the glass calmly and you found yourself backing up subconsciously. It raised a hand to the glass and much to your shock, it phased right through. It stopped abruptly after its hand was through the glass just past the wrist. It appeared that the damage on its arm was stopping it. The android pulled its arm back in frustration before looking back to you. It waved its hand in a way that told you to step back. You did so without question.

You only realized what was happening when the android pulled back a fist and struck the glass with a wicked punch. You reflexively flinched away at the contact but the glass didn’t move. It barely even made a sound. There was no sign of damage.

The android’s eyes were wide in shock and it struck again, the glass still not budging. A small part of you was glad, not wanting to be held responsible for a possible robot rampage. But the look on the android’s face when it realized it was trapped filled you with guilt. Despite its inhuman appearance, this time you recognized the expression as fear.

As the android took a step back, you came up with an idea. You grabbed a pen and paper off the nearest desk and approached the glass again, earning a quizzical look from the android. You took a seat on the floor, gesturing for the android to do the same.

It was still for a moment, as if deciding whether or not to trust you. It must’ve decided you weren’t a threat because it mimicked your actions, taking a seat in front of you.

You froze for a moment, realizing this was the closest you’d gotten to the android. The only other person that had been this close was Dr. Newmann. You wondered what the man would think if he saw you right now. You silently gave thanks there were no cameras in here. They had worried about them being hacked and causing a security breach.

Your attention back to the matter at hand, you clicked the pen and set both it and the paper on the floor as close to the glass as possible.

“If you can at least reach your hand through the glass, you can write on here to talk. It’s not the fanciest method of communication but it should work.”

The android reached for the pen, slowly this time, so as not to worsen its damaged arm. To your surprise, it simply wrote, “Thank you,” on the paper in immaculate handwriting. Oddly, it wrote the words upside down, not needing to turn to the paper for you to read.

You didn’t have time to respond, however, as it continued writing.

“Where am I?” It asked.

“A government facility,” you said, noting the immediate look of alarm on the android. “I don’t know how they found you, but you’ve been here several days. I’m just a custodian, not a scientist. I don’t know much of what goes on around here.”

Rather than responding, the android looked back at the computers and machinery with newfound worry.

“Where did you come from?” You tried to distract it with another question.

It didn’t even need to finish writing before you knew what it was saying. “The Avengers.”

You muttered a soft ‘woah’ under your breath. “We wondered if that was the case. So, did the Avengers give you a name?”

You wanted to ask more about the Avengers, but you doubted you’d get many answers. This android just woke up and found out it’s trapped in a government facility. It wasn’t likely to start spilling secrets any time soon.

The android finished writing, moving its hand to reveal “I am Vision,” written on the paper. You weren’t sure what you’d been expecting, but it wasn’t that. Still, the name seemed fitting. The name reminded you of the android’s eyes. Now that you were close, you noticed not only their vibrant color, but the intricate detail in its eyes.

“That’s an interesting name. Fitting.” The android broke eye contact to write a response. Now that you knew it had a name, it didn’t feel right to keep referring to it as, well, ‘it.’ You realized this wasn’t a simple machine. It may well be as alive as you were. In that case, it seemed appropriate to say ‘he.’

“It was Thor’s idea,” he wrote. You couldn’t help but chuckle. Somehow you found the image of the Norse god of thunder naming this robot to be quite funny. It made you realize just how little you, or anyone else for that matter, really knew about the Avengers.

Suddenly, you heard the door to the lab jiggle and panicked, grabbing the paper and sprinting over to the door.

You grabbed the door as it began to swing open to see your coworkers. Luckily, as long as you held the door open only about halfway, they couldn’t see the android—Vision— behind you.

“Your shift’s up. You can go home for the night. Hey, uh, are you okay? What’s that—?” Your coworker tried to reach for the paper in your free hand but you quickly stuffed it in your pocket, trying to appear inconspicuous and failing.

“Oh just some doodles,” you said, letting out a strained chuckle. “I got bored. Hey you guys wanna give me just a minute? I need to round my stuff up and then I’ll go.” Your coworkers glanced at each other before giving you a look.

“Uh, sure, whatever you say.” You muttered a quick ‘thanks’ in response and closed the door on them without further explanation. You turned back to find Vision standing up now, watching you intently.

“I have to go.” Vision tried to gesture something but you cut him off. “There’s no time. If I’m in here much longer they’ll figure out something’s up. Dr. Newmann and the other researchers will be here in a few hours. I don’t know what they want from you but one thing I do know is that that man is crazy. He’s obsessed with this whole project.” Vision pointed at you in a questioning manner as you picked up your coat.

“I’m really sorry I’m not more helpful. I won’t be back until after the weekend. I don’t know what you’re going to do but just...” You suddenly wondered what you were thinking. Was Vision in danger? It’s not like they could hurt him, right? He’s a machine. But still, you didn’t trust the people here. And a bad feeling in the back of your mind made itself known. You stopped before you reached the door.

“Just be careful.”

---

Part 2

#vision x reader #vision/reader #marvel fanfiction #vision

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thestrippershateyou · 5 years

Text

I’m forced to conclude that radfems who advocate gender separatism have never actually lived it for any amount of time longer than it takes to go to the bathroom or get dressed in a locker room.

I used to be a practicing Muslim. Mosques are almost all gender separated. I’ve never actually been to a mosque that wasn’t and even the most liberal one I went to that didn’t have actual solid barriers up for meals and had mixed gender festivals still had separation for almost everything else. I know there’s some in recent years with female Imams and no separation and I know there’s a Muslim LGBT summer retreat that has no separation but I’ve never gone.

And, don’t get me wrong, I enjoy the separation there. Most of the women I know either do or are neutral about it. I’ve even seen women advocate for more separation or say they’re going to start wearing niqab unless it’s made so that no men can even glimpse them from afar. But here’s the thing...None of these women are living this 24/7. This is in western mosques. So the mosque is a refreshing break from the rest of life. Not something that they’re wanting in every aspect of life.

Let me fill you in on what happens in gender separation:

- Husbands and wives cannot pray side by side at mosques. Mothers cannot pray beside their sons and Fathers cannot pray beside their daughters. I’ve never seen children over the age of about 5 with their opposite sex parent in the prayer area and not older than maybe 10 for meals. At home, the women stand behind the men who lead prayer. But at mosques you’re behind a partition at a minimum and likely in entirely separate rooms. Sometimes you can only watch on a monitor and hear through a speaker.

- Spouses and even parents can’t contact each other unless they’ve got their phones on them and on sound or vibrate which isn’t always a thing at events and especially not during prayers. I’ve seen fathers standing at the tiny window of space in the barricade trying to wave and get their wife’s attention because their son needs something out of the car and she’s got the keys, needs to run home, needs something from mom, etc but his wife didn’t see him and no one will speak to him because he’s a man and he’d face backlash if he just walked over to find his wife. I’ve seen women doing the same thing trying to contact their husbands.

- If you’re bringing a guest to the mosque that is the opposite sex, you can’t go with them to their area. So if a son converts and decides to invite his mother or sister to learn more about Islam, then she’s is going to have to go stay fully separate from him in a room full of strangers. If she doesn’t speak Arabic, she’s going to be very lost.

- Families cannot eat meals side by side in mosques or the community centers commonly attached to them for events/holidays. Ramadan dinners (iftars) are a big damn deal and families cannot share them if they’re attending the community dinners at Mosques. They have to choose between family and community.

- Meals are stupid wasteful too because there has to be 2 of everything. 2 buffets, 2 dessert tables, 2 seating areas (sometimes 2 rooms even), etc. If you can’t provide two of everything, men and women have to be fully separate when going through the lines which takes up so much extra time. Regarding the wastefulness? You got a giant expensive decorated cake for Eid? Cool. Now you gotta pay for 2 of them because you can’t just cut a pretty cake with writing on it in half and carry the other half to a separate room. You gotta make all your dishes twice over with separate serving dishes instead of just making one big one and sharing it. You gotta order pizza (or whatever delivered food) in even numbers instead of just ordering odd numbers and sharing it. Towards the end of meals, I’ll see people going around and combining the dishes to bring more to the sex that has run out of something or to prepare take out boxes. And there’s almost always take out boxes because there’s almost always so much extra food that people take home whole other meals.

- Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha are the two Islamic holidays....and families can’t pray and eat together for them at the mosque. Imagine if you couldn’t watch your own child open Christmas presents because you were their mother and your child was a 15 year old boy. There’s literally only TWO EIDS and if you celebrate them at the mosque, then you do it without the members of your family who aren’t the same sex.

- Wedding receptions are often gender separated. This means a husband and wife can’t even celebrate their own wedding together. The wedding itself will almost always be separated as well though you’ll be in the same room for that of course and obviously the couple is together when signing the Nikkah. But they’ve got to separate for the reception.

- Non school classes (I never went to an Islamic school and can’t speak for that but I know the smaller one attached to my Florida mosque had mixed classes due to being so small. The graduating class there in my year was like 7 people.) and sports are separated. This means if there’s not enough demand for EACH SEPARATE CLASS then one sex won’t have a class. Men almost always get more classes and sports because a lot of them don’t have enough interest only among women for women to have one. At one mosque I used to go to women got ONE SPORT NIGHT A WEEK because that was the only night they could drum up enough interest and get enough women to show up to shut down the community center to men to all men and boys. Men got the other six nights. ICLR, my prefered of the local mosques, actually had TWO WHOLE YOGA CLASSES FOR WOMEN but they couldn’t maintain enough interest in them. If you could mix men and women, you’d have enough attendance for almost any sport or class you want. But without mixing, the smaller attendance events get cut. Unlike with men, there’s no rule in Islam that says women actually have to go to the mosque ever if they don’t want to. So the result of this is that men wind up more involved in the community there.

And finally...

- Western dating is...not really a thing. It’s changed more with dating sites and tinder and the like. But a lot of marriages (especially first marriages) are still worked out through a glorified game of Telephone. Here’s how it goes... - A person glimpses someone of the opposite sex they decide is physically attractive from what they can see of them (modesty is a big thing in Islam for men and women). They have most likely never spoken to this person except maybe basic greetings in passing and might not even know their name because of the separation. So you’ve got nothing more than “I think they’re physically attractive” to decide if you want to build a lifelong relationship with this person. - They go to their opposite sex sibling (if they have one), a close friend’s opposite sex sibling (if they have one, and if their friend if on board with chaperoning the conversation), or their opposite sex parent (if they have one who is also Muslim, alive, around, and agreeing with their pick) and say “Hey, so I saw this person who I think is attractive. I’d like to get to know them and see if they’re interested in marriage” - That opposite sex person goes to the person deemed attractive and asks if they would be interested in getting to know the original person with the intent of marriage if everything works out. The answer is largely gonna depend on “do I feel like getting married at this point in time” and “are they physically attractive?” because, again, that’s all you get to know about them when you are separated - If yes, then families get together and work out chaperoned public dates. If you’re like me and you don’t have a family then you will likely either not get married in the mosque community or you will have to find a family to adopt you. Not literally, of course. Just in a parent friend kind of way. I had a husband and wife kind of adopt me like that because their little daughter decided I was her sister now. They told me if I ever wanted to get married to let them know and they’d find me a good spouse.

Now. All this assumes that radfems gender separatists aren’t just lesbians who are advocating for heterosexuality and bisexuality to be abolished from humanity. But we all know that won’t happen so let’s not entertain idiocy. And of course this is just mosque things and not all of life. And yet there’s already problems with it. Especially in the dating thing. But also...if I need spiritual guidance from the Imam? I gotta go find his wife. If I need to discuss something like renting the community center or finances with the mosque board? Gotta go hope they didn’t gender segregate that too or else I gotta go find the brother I don’t have.

Story: When I was 18, my (non muslim) grandparents were being abusive and my phone had gotten wet and broken. So a woman from the mosque wanted to use mosque charity funds to get me a phone to they could keep in contact with me and I could call them for help if I needed it. She had to call up her husband to drive back out to the mosque and talk to the Imam because the woman in the mosque’s board (Yes, only one. Mosque male population vastly outnumbers the female population. The one was specifically there to counter the separation so women didn’t have to talk to men to communicate with the board) was out of town. Because, of all people, the imam ESPECIALLY couldn't be seen violating the gender separation and especially not with so young and so unmarried a woman as me. So what should have been a 15 minute “can I fill out this form for these funds?” turned into over an hour because her husband had to find someone to wait at home for their kid who was on the way home from school.

In short. Gender separation can be fine when it’s a short time and not strictly enforced. Women only spaces are a great concept though measures should be taken for things like emergencies. But asking the world or even a whole individual society to be like that? Oh hell no. That’s not how societies were meant to be. And if you’re out here advocating it then I’m honestly forced to conclude you’re just talking out of your ass, are reacting based purely on emotion with no logic, and that you have no idea what you’re talking about.

#radical feminism #radfems #gender separation #islam #gender segregation

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joonieflower · 6 years

Text

Playboy!Namjoon Pt. 9 (last part)

Pt. 1 / Pt. 2 / Pt. 3 / Pt. 4/ Pt. 5/ Pt. 6/ Pt. 7/ Pt. 8/

Warning:Smut and bad attempts at humour ahead!!

*********************************************** “How long has she been like this?”

Jin is standing next to Somi, looking at you slumped against a table at the resting area at KCon. Even from afar they could see exactly the moment you cringed at your own memories.

"Dunno, maybe two weeks? She's been listening to old Avril Lavigne songs nonstop, I'm worried."

"The Under my Skin album?"

"Yeah."

Seokjin hums, patting the younger girl on the top of her head. "You did well in calling me, little one. Namjoon is being stupid as well, said something about she avoiding him when she went to Yoongi's studio?"

"Oh," Somi nods, "that does sound like her, she does tend to avoid her problems."

He turns around, beginning to type a text on his phone. "Well, we'll fix this today. You should call Jackson, this is what you'll have to do..."

✧

"How would I know I was on speaker?"

You turn your head to the other side, staring at the window, blatantly ignoring Jackson as Somi snickered beside you, making you turn to you glare at her. "You shut your fetus mouth or I won't talk to you too."

She rolls her eyes at you, pretending to lock her lips. You sigh. You were all in the restaurant of the hotel you were staying for KCon, and you still were dying of embarrassment even after almost two weeks since The Incident.

"I mean," Jackson continues, ignoring the murderous look you throw his way. "If I didn't tell him would you?"

"I wouldn't, you know why?" your voice is low as you glare at him, and he flinches in his seat. "Because I didn't want to be rejected!"

Somi unzips her mouth. "People think you're so chill, Unnie. But you're actually the least chill person alive."

You gasp. Now even your own child is attacking you.

But well, she does have a point. You know you're not making things easier by literally hiding behind something every time Namjoon comes in the same room as you but what else could you do? If he caught you he would probably ask to talk, so he could reject you gently because that's the type of person Namjoon is. And if you could choose, you would choose not to be rejected at all.

You sigh loudly, dropping your head on the table. The hotel restaurant had been booked for all the idols that were staying at this hotel, so there wasn't anybody in here at practically midnight before a full day of rehearsals for the upcoming concert. Somi was the only one stupid enough to think it was a good idea to come down here and eat. And sure, you are hungry, but room service is a very real thing that you would rather be indulging yourself with.

An also very real thing is that you know for a fact that BTS will also be staying at this hotel. Which is, quite frankly hilariously tragic. Now you had to be aware of your surroundings here too so as not to bump into a certain tall man.

You grab your phone, focusing on it instead of the two idiots you are sitting with. You faintly hear the sound of three people sitting down at your table, but you're not bothered enough to look, just think it must be the rest of the Got7 boys.

"How’s your boyfriend?"

You blink up at Yoongi, sitting across from you. You relax a little, already accustomed to him after spending so much time together while you two worked on your song. “Which one?”

“Which one is it this time? I don’t know their names, I just know you stopped recording two times to chat with them”

“Oh, I’m trying to get V this time. It’s been going well, he’s got a lotta baggage though.” Taehyung chokes on his drink loudly and you realize how that must have sounded to him. “What? Jesus, not you, I’m playing Mystic Messenger.”

“Oh, good, geez," he laughs awkwardly, "Of course not."

A familiar hand reaches for a fry on your plate. Sehun smiles at you, winking. "Long time no see."

You scoff. "Jackson-ah, go get me another milkshake."

"Jackson-ah? I thought you called him oppa." Yoongi looks at the two of you, confused.

"Oh, yeah, I used to." you smile sweetly at the blond men that's already standing up to go get you another drink," That was when I respected him"

Sehun whistles. "Someone's feisty. Did you not get enough sleep? You get like this when you're tired."

"Do I look like I'm tired?" you shoot back, scrunching your nose having none of his friendly manners. You didn't hate him anymore, but you two were still far from being friends.

"Nah, you look pretty." he smiles, looking behind you at something.

Jackson hands a milkshake from behind you, talking to somebody in English. You ignore him. “I don’t need you to tell me I look pretty, I know I do,” you say, slurping your milkshake angrily, then, after a second, considerably more subsided, “Thanks anyway.”

Somi eyes you two suspiciously. "Since when are you two on good terms? Are you my dad again?"

Jacksons conversation halts, but you pay him no mind. You stretch yourself across Sehun's lap, his hands coming to your waist so you won't fall face first as you shove a handful of fries in the maknae's mouth, "Mind your own business, you little brat. "

“I mean, I feel like I'm entitled to know, am I not your child?”

“How many times do I have to tell you that-”

“Oh,” Yoongi interrupts your bickering, “hi Namjoon.”

With a yelp, you lose your balance and roll under the table.

You lie there for a couple of seconds with your eyes closed, praying to any God for even the smallest possibility that Namjoon didn't see you there.

“Hey,” he says, now kneeling so he's able to get his head under the table too. You let out a dying whale noise. “Are you okay, angel?”

“Can you Google for me if it's possible to die of embarrassment?”

He chuckles, extending his hand to you so he can pull you out. “It wasn't that bad.”

His hand is soft on yours, the size of it familiar as it lingers for a couple extra seconds before he let you go, walking over to the other side of the table, sitting beside Yoongi and across from you.

“How can you still be so clumsy?” Sehun questions, stealing more of your fries.

“Oh, shut up.” You mumble, refusing to look at anywhere else beyond the plate in front of you. “What are you even doing here, anyway? You're not staying in this hotel.”

He gives you a large grin. “I came to see you, of course.”

You steal a glance at Namjoon, who's looking at the both of you with his arms crossed, brow frowning. His other two group mates are looking at you with equally confused expressions. “He's joking.” You explain quickly. “Right?”

He laughs. “I missed you, you know that. But yeah, I came for Jackson, we're going out later.”

Namjoon stare is still heavy on you, and this is too much. You're not mentally prepared to deal with him, not yet. Not when you were supposed to go on stage to introduce some other idol group together tomorrow. When you already would have to pretend not to love him in front of thousands of people. And the addition of Sehun isn't better either, you might have started to forgive him but you weren’t completely ready to be friends yet. Especially not with Namjoon watching you so intently, a silent question in his eyes.

You get up abruptly. “I’m going to bed. Don't stay up too late, Somi.”

Ignoring Somi calls behind you, you make your way to your shared room, resting your head on the elevator mirrored wall. God, what a mess of things you had made by falling for Namjoon.

✧ “She left before he could even get jealous,” Jackson complains, slumping in the little chair in Jin's room.

“He did get a little jealous,” Sehun says, leaning against the beige colored walls. “He looked like he wanted to punch me.”

“She also looked like she wanted to punch you.” Yoongi makes a clicking noise from the back of his throat from across the room. “They both are so stupid. I bet the only way for them to finally talk and get the fuck together is if we lock them in the same room.”

Seokjin's head shot up, his eyes shining with a dangerous glint. “Yoongi, you’re a genius! Okay, so this is what we need to do now…”

You slump against the black couch at Yoongi’s studio. “Please tell me we’re done. I don’t think I can do ad-libs anymore, my throat will fall off if I try.”

Yoongi snorts, clicking on something in the big monitor in front of him, checking again what you had just recorded with the rest of the song. “I hardly think that's possible. And I still think you should let me add the rap after the bridge, I'm sure Namjoon would be willing to do it.”

“I don't think he would.” You answer him, voice weaker than before.

“I don't think there's a single thing he wouldn't do for you.” He spins around in his chair, now staring directly at you “ You two should talk, don't think I haven't seen how you're doing your best at avoiding him after Jackson fucked up.”

“Oh my God" you hide your face behind your hands with a grunt. “You know? Namjoon told you?”

He at least has the decency to look a little apologetic. “In his defense, it's not like it was hard to tell even before. You both have been acting like you're dating for a long time.”

“What?” You sputter, looking up again. “No, we- no?”

“Come on, he keeps clothes at your place. He sleeps there. He never did that to any of his hookups before, you've got to at least know that. And he talks about you all the time, it's actually disgusting, to be honest.”

You decide not to answer, instead, you begin turning this new information in your head. This was Yoongi, after all. He wouldn't be saying these things if he didn't think they were true. You sigh, looking at the screen of his computer, checking the time.

You opt to change the subject, “We should finish for today, it's getting late and I know it's your day off.”

He curses when he checks the clock. “Shit, finding a taxi is going to be a bitch.”

You jiggle your car keys at him. “I can give you a ride. You deserve after all the hard work you've put in helping me’

He points at two boxes next to the couch. “Great, so I also deserve help carrying those boxes right?”

You shrug, going to lift one of the boxes, your arms protesting the added weight. “Let's go.”

He somehow managed to make you help him bring it all the way up to his dorm, but only after saying after he saw you hesitating. “The coast is clear, he's not here. Go in already, I don't work out and my arms are hurting.”

He leads you through the living room, pointing down in the general direction of the floor indicating that you could just drop the thing down. “You can open the fridge and get a drink, you must be thirsty. I'm going to drop those in my room and I'll be right back."

He does not come right back, instead, he takes a long time. You drink the banana milk slowly, looking around. The place was surprisingly neat despite seven boys living together.

You hear footsteps coming your way again, so you set the little plastic bottle down, getting ready to live.

You hear Namjoon before you even see him. “Hyung, is that you? Do you know where everyone went?”

You duck the second he enters the kitchen. But not before seeing his eyes growing wide when he spots you.

You peek from behind the kitchen counter, smiling sheepishly as Namjoon gaped at you, confused in his Ryan pajama set. You look around, thinking of the easier escape route.

“Uh,” he says finally, “I’m awake, right?”

You nod, biting your bottom lip nervously. “Yoongi asked me for help with some boxes… I think he went to his room? So yeah, I’ll get going now.”

You circle around him to get to the living room, where the door is. You can hear him following you faintly beneath the sound of your heart beating like crazy.

Just as you reach the door, you both see it at the same time. A white paper, glued to the door with a pink tape.

“TALK, U SUCKERS. WE’LL BE BACK TO UNLOCK YOU TWO IN THE MORNING.”

“Did they…” Namjoon begins to say incredulously as you reach and try to open the door maniacally, pushing and pulling it as you turn the handle. “Oh, they did. They really did.”

You turn around, staring at him. “Don’t just stand there, don’t you have a spare key?”

He goes back to the room he came from, and you can hear him shuffling things around before he says, softly but full of emotion. “Fuck,”

Fuck indeed. You take a deep breath, looking around. For a second you think about jumping out of the window, but you realize how ridiculous you’re being. Sure, avoiding him is one thing, but were an adult, right? You could talk to him like a civilized human being.

You fish your phone from your back pocket, dialing Yoongi’s number. Not that it does much, it only goes straight to voicemail.

“This is kidnapping, Min yoongi,” you say, through gritted teeth. “I don’t know what kind of parent trap bullshit you’re all trying to pull in here but I suggest you just come and open the door for me before I call the firefighters to tear it down.”

When you press the red símbolos on the screen to end the call, Namjoon is by your side again. The two of you stare at each other for a second before looking away.

This was it, wasn't it? He would finally reject you now. And then you two would have to awkwardly share the house until they finally decided to let you out to die quietly in your own house.

Namjoon is the one who breaks the silence, “I was watching cartoons, maybe you want to watch it too? To pass the time, I mean.”

After hesitating for a second, you nod. “Okay.”

He points at the couch, clearly inviting you to sit down. Which you do, gladly, watching him as he moves through his own house this time. You were so used to seeing him just at your apartment that sometimes you forgot he existed beyond it.

He finally sits down again, quickly starting Netflix and selecting We Bare Bears. You snort at the choice.

“What? It's a nice show.” He says, sounding defensive.

“I know it is, is just… you're Panda.”

He turns his nose up in the air, “I like to think I'm Polar.”

“Oh, Joonie.” You say pityingly, patting his thigh in a very condescending way. “You're definitely Panda.”

He tries not to smile at you, bit fails after a second. “Yeah, you're right, angel.”

You take your hand off of his thigh with the nickname, pretending to focus on the cartoon on the TV. You chest feel tight again, heart beating fast against your sternum making you wonder for a second if you're having a heart attack.

The tension is palpable, curling around you, trying to coax you into turning at Namjoon to watch him. You don't. You keep staring ahead, fingers digging in between the couch cushions to stop your hands from.wandering elsewhere.

You are, in fact, so focused on not looking at Namjoon that you jump a little when he pauses the episode.

“We really should talk.” he finally says.

You still won't look at him. “Don't feel like it.”

“Babe-”

“Don't.” You say quickly, finally looking up at his eyes, finally seeing the intensity of his gaze over you. “I know what you'll say, and believe me, I really am not in the mood to be locked in here with you after this.”

you can see him beginning to open his mouth to say something back, so you quickly continue. “I didn't want to hear it back in the car, and I don't want to hear it now. I just want things to be like they used to between us again.”

“You don't.” He says firmly, face darkening with a tint of irritation. “You don't know what I was going to say because you told me to pretend nothing happened before I could say anything, and then proceeded to avoid me every time we're in the same room. If you want things to be like they used to be you have to start acting like my friend again. You literally walked out of a room the other day because I was in there too. How do you think that makes me feel?”

“I was embarrassed, can you blame me?”

“Why?” He asks, raking a hand through his hair. “I get that maybe it wasn't the best way to tell me, but if Jackson hadn't said that would you have?” Again, the same question. God, why couldn't he just forget it? It was exactly because of this that you knew you two shouldn't have this talk. He was paving the way to reject you in the gentlest way possible.

“No.” You get up. “Because is stupid, I wasn't supposed to fall for you! We were already stretching things too far by being friends and fucking at the same time, Namjoon. I don't even know why I thought I could just sleep with you, actually, not knowing that you don't do relationships.”

“There you go again. Where the hell did you hear that? You said the same thing before.”

You falter a little. “I mean, you said that. When we started.”

He shakes his head, getting up too and standing in front of you. “I've never said that to you. To Jin maybe, when he started to notice my feelings for you. But that was just me in denial.”

You search through your memories of all your conversations, all of the texts you exchanged. You fall back on the couch. Yeah, he was right. He never actually said that.

“Wasn't it implied? This wasn't supposed to be more than a friend with benefits deal. You just talked to me because you got horny after seeing me perform. Wasn't that what happened?”

He kneels in front of you, eyes level with you once again as he basically cages you with one arm on each side of your hips, not allowing you to run anymore. “No.”

“What?”

“I asked Jackson for your number a year ago.” He begins, one of his hands caressing the rip at your knee, picking gently at the fishnets you're wearing underneath the distressed jeans. “ He didn't give it to me, he told me you were dating. It was Sehun, right? I can't believe Allkpop really got one thing right. Anyway, I asked again a month before I sent you a text. He said he had to see if he could give it to me first. He cares about you, you know, you should forgive him.”

“I already did.” You say, gulping hard around nothing. “But… what?”

He laughs a little, his chest vibrating against your knees. “I've had a crush on you for, fuck babe, I don't know. 2 years? I saw your debut stage since then I've thought you were the most beautiful person I've ever seen.”

“Don't fuck with me, Namjoon.” You whisper, heart beating faster yet.

He takes your hands on him, kissing your knuckles.

“I'm not. You can ask Yoongi. I've watched every one of your lives on V-app. I never said anything to you because I thought you knew. You had to know, baby. Didn't you notice how I look at you?”

“Why? I mean, you can have anyone, I saw how easily you can find someone new at Jackson's party. Why me?”

He sighs, closing his eyes for a second. “And so can you. Have you looked at yourself? You're funny, you care so much about those around you, you're so, so talented angel. And you chose me. Why is it so hard to believe I would choose you too?”

You look around, trying to find something else to focus besides his face, staring at you so openly now. “What can even happen between us, Joon? We both have our groups to think about. It's not like we can-,”

He stands up, running a hand through his hair. “We both also have great people to look after us and amazing fans. Why are you so set on finding a way away from me? I'm here, baby, and I'm yours. I've been yours for a while now. I'm not saying we should, I don't know, announce it to the world. What I'm saying is that just being with you is enough for me. Knowing you're mine as much as I'm yours, I don't care about who else knows, as long as you let me love you.”

Your vision blurs and you can make Namjoon coming back to you, his long fingers softly wiping the stubborn tears that had managed to scape. “I'm scared.” You whisper, closing your eyes against his soft touch. “This could go so wrong, Namjoon.”

“This could go right, too.anything could go wrong, the improbability of everything in life is what it makes it so thrilling. But, the same improbability leans it as much to a good outcome than to a bad. Don't you want to know what will happen?” He says, lips a whisper away from yours. “You’ve got me, angel. Are you also mine?”

You nod yes, finally looking at the man in front of you. Namjoon, who understands you better than anybody else. Namjoon, who listened to you as you whined about being a leader and offered advice. Namjoon, who made you playlists and took photos of random dogs just to make you happy.

The smile he gives you is so big that his eyes disappear, dimples on full display and you can't help yourself when you lean forward and closes the distance between the two of you.

You had been kissing Namjoon for almost half a year now, but this kiss was different. You didn't have to worry about him figuring out your feelings about him because he already knew. He knew, and he reciprocated it. You smile against his lips, pulling him closer, wrapping your arms around his neck.

Things, of course, don't stay so sweet for long. His hands hover over your hips. “Can I?”

You nod a little too fast. “Please.”

And then he's kissing you again, hands sliding under the Hem of your shirt, sliding it over your head. His mouth moves downwards, every kiss against the curve of your chest, your waist, your hips making you shudder, skin riding with goosebumps.

He nips at the skin over your hip bone, making you gasp, his fingers making quick work of your zipper. “Don't tease me.”

“You like it, though.” He smiles up at you, his cute dimples showing a Stark contrast with the lewdness of the situation you were both in.

You give him a half-hearted grunt, knowing well that you couldn't argue against that. He was right.

He finally looks down at your pants again, the open zipper exposing the stockings underneath. “Shit, who put you in those fishnets? Are you trying to give people a heart attack?”

You wiggle your hips a little, his eyes never leaving the sight of your skin peeking through the criss-cross lines as his fingers gently pull it up, testing out the elasticity. “Don't you like it? You can just take it off then, right?”

His eyes meet yours again, the predatory look he has is one you're familiar with. “Fuck, angel, maybe I'll just leave it on.”

When he finally gets rid of your pants, leaving you only in your fishnets (today was laundry day, so all your underwear was being washed. You're actually grateful for deciding going commando when you see the look on Namjoons face when he realized you're not wearing anything else) you realize where you're both at. “Joon, the boys sit on this couch! Are you really planning on doing this here?”

His head shoots up, a bewildered look on his face. “Shit, you're right. Here, wrap your legs around my waist.”

“What are you doing?”

He lifts you up, quickly making his way to the second room on the long corridor. You barely notice Taehyung part of the room before you're both going through the entryway to Namjoons side, blissfully secluded by a wall.

His bed is so comfortable it startles you for a second, but then your attention is aimed somewhere else. At Namjoon, to be more precise. He's getting rid of his clothes, with his shirt off and his pajama pants hanging low on his hips, you can see exactly how much time he's been spending at the gym lately. You're a little breathless by watching him alone when he hovers over you again.

“Can you say that again?” He asks, lips barely a whisper away from yours.

“W-what?” You stammer, so unlike yourself it actually makes you blush. The effect the tall man had on you was something to be studied.

“That you're mine.”

You pull him down on you, his bare skin hot against yours, and it's so perfect you wonder for a second if you're dreaming. “I'm yours, Joon.” You repeat, bringing his lips down to yours. “Now can you please get inside me? I've missed you like crazy.”

He chuckled, kicking off his pants.”So demanding, angel.”

“You like me like this.” you purr at him, smiling. “Now, you said something about leaving the tights on? How are you gonna fuck me then?”

He laughs a little, fingers trailing the line the piece of clothing makes over your sex. “You're so crass. But since you asked, love, I'm going to fuck you-” his other hand joins, pulling the fabric apart, leaving a rip exposing you to him “-like this.”

You shiver. “Oh.” is all you can say when he slips one finger inside of you, curling it as he starts moving it. “Joon, please don't tease me…”

He kisses your lips, and you can feel him smiling. “Let me get a condom, then.”

You hold his arm, stopping him from leaving. “You don't have to, I mean… we didn't use once, I'm still on the pill. We could…”

“You sure?” He asks, looking into your eyes to see if that was really what you wanted.”

You blush, and it's so ridiculous. You shouldn't be embarrassed by this. You two had done this same thing before.“I want to feel you.”

He kisses you again, settling himself between your legs. He makes a low grunting sound as he slides inside of you. Your nails scrape his back as you let out a moan, the stretch so good it makes breathless.

He starts moving slow, hips rhythmically moving him in and out of you, and it's so good, so perfect that it has you moaning his name through the kiss. Both his hands are holding your wrists above your head, to prevent you from trying to make his hips go faster.

It's perfect, his slow and careful motions. But it's not nearly enough. You whine, trying to move your hips faster from under him with no success.

“Why are you being so vanilla? You can still fuck me and love me at the same time.”

His movements stop while he says, huffing “I was trying to be romantic.”

You lift your head to give a quick peck on his lips. God, Namjoon has such gorgeous lips. “You can romantically fuck me harder then.”

He gives you another animalistic grunt, sliding off of you to twirl you around so you have your chest pressed against the mattress. He leans over you. “Like this, baby?” He asks, cock slamming into you so hard it makes all your breath come out in one go. “It's this how you want me to fuck you, pretty baby? You like it dirty, don't you?”

You gasp as he continues ramming into you, “Yes, Oppa. Don't stop.”

One of his hands tangles itself in your hair, curving your head back so he can kiss you. “I won't. I'm gonna make you cum all over my cock, angel.”

You moan again when his other hand comes to your clit, the circular motions with the way his fucking into you making you so close already.

It had been a while since you had slept with Namjoon, but God, he didn't forget how to make you crazy. His mouth is sucking at your neck in a way you know will leave a mark, but you can't bring yourself to care. All you care about now is Namjoon, Namjoon inside of you, his smell surrounding you, his voice, moaning profanities against your skin as you clench around him.

“Oppa,” you half choke, half moan, tears starting to collect in the corners of your eyes from all the intensity. “I'm close.”

His rhythm gets even more intense. His voice is rough as he says, “Fuck baby, come for me. Show me that you're mine. You feel so good, angel.”

You do, calling his name louder than you ever did before as e pleasure builds up until it explodes, making you a trembling mess in his hands as his hips never stop.

He comes on your ass, making you look behind you to see him staring down at you, at the white streaks on your butt. You laugh softly, a little high from your orgasm. “Peaches and cream.”

He snaps out of his trance, leaning down to kiss your cheeks. “Chocolate cheeks,” he sings, voice light as he smiles fondly at you, moving his lips so he can kiss the middle of your back, between your shoulder blades. “Chocolate wings.”

He lies down next to you on his bed, pulling you closer to him. “Now that’s all I’m going to think about when I sing my part of that song, are you happy?”

“I mean, wasn't this what you were thinking while you wrote it?”

“Nah, I just wrote it to for the aesthetic. I just thought it sounded good. Deep, y'know?” he nuzzles your hairline with the tip of his nose. “And now people think I'm a pervert because of it”m

“I mean, they're not wrong, are they?” He laughs, kissing your forehead before getting up, pulling you behind him so you two can shower.

After Namjoon cleans you (not without pressing you against the cold wall for a second round halfway through, not that you're complaining), you both lie in his bed. You're wearing one of his pajamas sets, the cuffs rolled up so it can fit you. You sigh happily with your nose pressed against his neck, feeling his scent again.

“So, how do you wanna go about this?” He finally says. You look up at him from your spot under his arms. “We tell our companies, right?”

You nod. “Of course we do. I don't think we should go public, not yet at least. But yeah, not telling our companies would be stupid, they can help protect us.”

He kisses the top of your head. “Okay, let's do it tomorrow. The boys already know, I guess, so you only have to tell your kids.”

You grin at him.”Somi is gonna call you dad just to get a kick out of it.”

He fake shudders. “Oh God.”

“Oh, yeah.” You lift yourself on your elbows, face lurking over his. “Can you rap on my song? Yoongi Oppa said your voice would fit.”

“Of course. But do you really have to call him Oppa? Are you two already this close?”

You kiss him. “Don't be jealous just because I'm friends with your friends too.”

He chuckles, so you settle again. Snuggling with him, you feel happier that you did in a very long time.

“Hey, are you scared?” his voice his quiet, but it's enough to bring you back from almost falling asleep.

You think about it for a second. “I'm not scared, I have you with me.”

His dimples are in their full glory as he smiles big at you, lips meeting yours again.

“Me too, angel. I'm not scared if we're together.”

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

(a/n: ITS FINALLY DONE!!! i FINALLY FINISHED IT!!

I really took my time it with bascially because this is my first fic ever, and i dind’t want it to end. Hopefully i’ll be able to finally edit all the errors i’ve made throughout this history so it’s actually readable tlol

Anyways, I love Namjoon, and I’m a sucker for happy endings!Hmu if you spot any grammar mistakes, or just if you want to punck me for taking so long. Than you so much for reading this until now, ily!!!)

#bts smut #rm smut #rap monster smut #bts angst #bts fic #bts fluff #namjoon fluff #namjoon smut #namjoon x reader #namjoon x you #my fics #playboy namjoon #censura de stefanny

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weeniewrites · 3 years

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OKAY ONE LAST POST BECAUSE IM ABSOLUTELY TERRIBLE AT NOT TALKING

its a more serious one though, so if you dont wanna see me be more personal go ahead and skip i dont mind. im gonna ramble abt the shame i feel with having sadistic thoughts and fears of sexual agency, and kinda, sex in general, maybe some self destructive behaviors? kinda honestly putting my soul out there. its a bit of a vent post. im not having a bad night or anything, just thinking a lot, and want to get those thoughts out of my head

i, really outta do some research on actual sadism or just, see other people who have similar thoughts cause ill admit i feel a lot of guilt about it. like id never, ever, EVER want to hurt another person, and the idea of even spanking someone consensually is very scary to me

but this isnt a new thing for me, some of the first things i found arousing as a kid involved pain. i was fascinated by inuyashas blood covered hands, and rewatched part of a youtube letsplay over and over and over again just to hear the noise link made when he got injured again. same with part of that animated 2ne1 music video where the villain grimaces when his car gets hit. these are really vivid memories for me so like, i know this isnt some suddenly new thing for me. (im also repulsed by gore but can also find it beautiful in art, and writing violent stuff is therapeutic for me but can be REALLY triggering if im reading it)

and i dont know if that sorta, anti kink purity culture thing the internets been moving towards has contributed? to that shame i feel, or if thats just my empathy acting up. because i really do care strongly for people, basically every person i ever meet. and i, sort? of understand the appeal of masochism myself, and i definitely understand the appeal of domming. but i dont understand how to control a scene, how to start up a scene, how to monitor the subs mental state, how to even take that control in the first place because even imagining doing that scares me so, so fucking badly

so i write noncon dom stuff, so i dont have to figure out how to get them there, or how to keep them safe, and i get to satisfy that deep hidden desire to scratch and claw and smile and laugh at someone shaking and crying in fear. or if its soft, just taking care of them and loving them and being loved and needed i can imagine companionship in the only way i understand how, through sex. ive had very few long lasting close friendships, ive never had a crush, and honestly im not, sure? i enjoy sex? like i like being touched but once i have to do it back i get really scared (unless we take things really slow, but im also very inexperienced). i just like being desired, or honestly getting touch of any kind and thats the only way i know how to ask for it

and i kinda, only realized that fear recently. i dont think i had it when i was 18 and I was just starting to interact with people online. but back then i wouldve never dreamed of flirting with anyone either. (had that fuckin trauma BOY HOWDY)

um, to bring this around to what brought these thoughts out, a while ago i was flirting with a friend, we just did that for fun absolutely no sexual or romantic intentions involved. and they told me about how sore they were and i responded back with a grin and giggle and a growl and a laugh and said all the different ways id love to bend and prod them to make it worse because, well, I’m a sadist. and they liked it. i got dizzy with how much i enjoyed that teasing. i literally started slurring my words and had to stop because i couldnt talk anymore, just drool and lay in a warm fuzzy heap of satisfied feelings.

and then afterwards we talked for a bit and as i calmed down and came back to myself i just, i felt like i was going to burst out of my skin, shakey and unsteady, head buzzing, nearly obsessive with the need to tell them i’d never hurt them and make sure i hadnt. so i told them. tried to keep control of myself but i cried. i was near fucking inconsolable. i was terrified i made them uncomfortable, went too far though everything was consensual and it was just flirting, not even explicit! teasing at the maximum! we’d said far spicier things before! they knew i’d never hurt them never want to hurt them never dream of hurting them. and i still cried. i felt wrong. i felt mean i felt horrible, and i’d enjoyed it

and im still a sadist, i find specific kinds of pain arousing, i dont like scarring or blood, preferring discomfort over all, and occasionally i write much much darker content that i dont find sexually appealing, but helps me get out my anger and other emotions i dont know how to process otherwise, and sometimes its just, fun? i know i dont want to hurt people, and i know these things are helpful for me, but i still feel shame

honestly a lot of the kinks or fetishes i used to like, im not sure if i do anymore, either because i just, dont, or ive realized theyre not as acceptable as i once thought, or theyre just not as common online anymore. and i dont feel comfortable sharing them, whether out of fear of rejection, or of making someone else uncomfortable. considering some of the stuff i enjoy imagining or writing i cant read myself. thats, kindof a weird contrast isnt it? (but that might also be because when i was younger, much younger, id read very dark fics, or angst, or look at gore, animal death, death and the nearly dying, as a form of self harm, purposefully seeking out what i knew would trigger me just to keep me dissociating for as long as possible so i wouldnt have to feel, and i’ll admit this is still a mild problem for me, but ive gotten leagues, leagues LEAGUES better. and i try very hard to heed warnings, because i know no one would want me to do that with their works)

cant i just have fun, do i have to have all these shames and memories to go along with this kind of stuff. whyd i find it when i was younger. why do i so closely associate porn and sex with pain when ive never really stopped consuming it. why cant i admit i just want to be held and told im important and enough instead of imagining getting dicked down by men who i both wouldnt be attracted to irl and be scared of

#weenierambles #tw vent

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icat8 · 7 years

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Boy on the Train

Request: I was wondering if you could write this story (Spider Man): a girl meets Peter Parker and instantly falls in love, she is also a new Avenger. So Spider Man and her are partners and Spider Man flirts with her (not knowing who she is). She ends up being kidnapped and Spider Man/Pete must save her. @rawrimanugget

A/N: Sorry this took so long! A lot of stuff came up this past week :P But thank you so much for requesting this! Anyone who wants to make a request, please do so! I had a lot of fun with this (also I totally went overboard lol)

Masterlist

You were in the middle of reading your favorite book for the millionth time when the subway train screeched to a stop in front of you. Not wanting to lose you place (or any reading time for that matter), you continued to read the words on the page as you stepped into the train. Your mother probably would have yelled at you for being so distracted had she been there, so thankfully she wasn’t. Just as you were about to look up to find a seat, you felt the train lurch forward, and gravity did its dirty work. As you fell through the air, you prayed that you wouldn’t get hurt and more importantly that your book’s cover didn’t bend.

Fortunately, the expected impact never happened. Instead, a pair of strong hands squeezed your arms, keeping you in place.

Oh no, you couldn’t help but think. I just pissed off some creepy subway rider, and now he’s going to kill me for falling on him and skin me and throw the remains in a dumpster and…

“You okay?” your rescuer’s voice asked from above you, disrupting your thoughts of violence.

Strange, he doesn’t sound that mad…or menacing for that matter.

You slowly looked up to see a teenage boy about your age with a worried look on his face. You couldn’t help but get lost in his chocolate eyes.

“Uh, you okay?” he asked again, immediately bringing you out of your trance.

Your eyes widened and you let out a cough in embarrassment as you stood up straight.

“F-fine. I’m fine,” you stuttered a quick apology. “Thank you.”

He gave a soft smile that sent butterflies fluttering in your stomach, and he said a quick, “No problem.”

He slowly started to turn around, about to find another place on the train.

No! I can’t just let him walk away! you desperately thought while looking around for a conversation starter.

“Your shirt!” you cried out.

He quickly looked down at his shirt, brushing it off, while asking, “What? Is there something on it?”

Good, he stayed.

“No, it’s just it’s for Midtown School of Science and Technology!”

“Yeah, that’s kinda where I go…”

“Really? I just started there!” you exclaimed with way too much enthusiasm.

“Oh, that’s cool. Name’s Peter by the way,” he replied, sticking his hand out.

You all too readily reached out to grab his perfect hand.

“Y/N,” you smiled.

You started to feel the train slow to a stop, and a second later Peter waved and said, “Well, this is my stop. See you around I guess.”

And there goes the most perfect guy ever, you sullenly thought.

An hour later, you stepped out onto the top floor of the overly large and slightly intimidating Stark Tower. It was your first day working with the Avengers, and you had no idea what to expect. The second you had walked into the overwhelming tower you had immediately forgotten all about the boy you met on the train.

“Hello?” you called out to the virtually empty floor, but no one responded.

“Helloooooooo!” you tried again.

This time a voice over the intercoms yelled back, “Hey! We’re in the meeting room. Just head down the hall in front of you!”

Shrugging, you did as you were told until you came to the door of a large meeting room. You quickly made sure to pull your mask over your face—something you probably should have done before even entering the tower—and turned the knob.

When you stepped foot into the room, you were slightly underwhelmed. You were expecting to see the entire team, but instead all you saw was a large monitor with Tony Stark’s face on it and a guy sitting at the table with a blue and red costume on. Strangely, he was jumping up and down as if he couldn’t wait for whatever news Stark had.

It took you a second to realize that the hero wasn’t wearing a mask, and he didn’t seem to notice your arrival. You knew that secret identities were sacred and something that should be respected in the world of heroes, but you couldn’t help yourself. You looked closer at him and realized exactly who it was: the boy from the train!

“Glad you could finally join us, Clairvoyant,” the billionaire smirked from the screen, pulling you from your thoughts.

Peter jumped in his seat in shock, quickly pulling the mask over his face as if you totally hadn’t just seen him.

“Sorry,” you mumbled in response to Tony, quickly getting into a seat of your own. “I still don’t know how to use the subway to go anywhere. I never used them back in my old town.”

“Whatever. Let’s get to the important stuff,” your new boss shrugged. “As you can tell, the team is out on a mission right now, so we can’t be there. But there’s still some shady business going on in New York right now according to our sources. Possibly Hydra stuff, but we don’t know. We need to do recon on the meeting that’s going to take place soon, and that’s where the two of you come in.”

The boy across from you almost gave you a heart attack when he excitedly yelled, “I can do it, Mr. Stark. You can totally count on me! I’m always ready to do whatever’s necessary!”

“Yeah, Spider-Man, I know. You won’t let anyone forget you’re ready to help,” Tony chuckled. “But it’s going to be the two of you working together. Y/N, I assume you know about Spider-Man and his powers.”

You nodded in agreement.

“Good. So Spider-Man, this is Clairvoyant. She can read minds from a distance amongst other newly developing powers. Basically, she’s perfect for a stake-out. Now that you’re both up to speed, I’m going to send you the case file. Go over it and do as it says. And for God’s sake please don’t try to intervene.”

He looked pointedly at Spider-Man at this last sentence.

A second later, the file appeared on the screen, and you both took your time reading it, making sure to not miss a single detail. Once you were ready to head out, you made your way towards the door.

“Where you going?” your new partner called out.

“Out the door?” you answered. “How else are we going to get to the location?”

“Through the air,” he replied with an air of haughtiness, hands confidently placed on his hips.

You raised an eyebrow under your mask see and retorted, “I read minds, not fly.”

“Who said anything about flying?”

You couldn’t see his face, but you were pretty sure he was smirking.

What is he talking about? You wondered just before you felt yourself being hoisted up into his arms.

Without warning he jumped out a nearby window (much to your dismay).

You grasped onto him as tight as possible, eyes shut. You wanted to scream, but you were so terrified that you couldn’t let a sound out.

“Cool, huh?” Spider-Man chuckled. “Being in the air is just such a great feeling, and you can see literally everything. I do all my best crime-fighting from up here. It’s a lot easier to catch the bad guys when you have the upper field. Actually, I stopped about five muggings just last week like this.”

Through all of his ramblings, you could feel yourself easing up and enjoying the ride. In fact, you started to enjoy it a bit too much.

Dang, I did not realize that Peter had this much muscle on him when I first saw him on the subway! you thought. And man, his suit highlights some pretty great aspects…

After several minutes, you finally arrived just outside of the criminals’ meeting location. The plan was for the two of you to hide in a nearby warehouse where you were to listen in on their conversation while Spider-Man sent out a drone to give you video footage of the transaction.

“Ladies first,” Peter said as he held the door to the warehouse open, waving his arm ceremoniously in front of him.

You giggled at his exaggerated chivalry.

Once the two of you were set up, and you were just waiting for the suspects to appear, you took a seat on the floor by a window. Spider-Man eased himself down next to you, unsubtly placing his arm right around you.

“You know,” he said, “I really like your costume. It’s really easy on the eyes.”

“Um, excuse me?” you squeaked in response.

Is he hitting on me? you wondered as butterflies started to form in your stomach.

Peter coughed out a quick reply. “I mean, it’s just really nice. Like, nice color scheme and stuff.”

“Oh, uh, thanks,” you say.

“So, you mentioned that you weren’t from around here. Do you have a lot of family nearby? Lots of friends? Boyfriend maybe?”

You smirked at his last question.

Just as you were about to respond, a loud commotion started outside. It almost sounded like gunfire. Spider-Man bolted up and ran towards the door.

“Where are you going?” you yelled out.

“To go take care of the bad guys,” he called back.

“But Mr. Stark told us not to intervene!”

“I can’t just let these guys get away with this! I’m a hero, and it’s my job to stop guys like them! I’ll be safe, I promise!” he said before completely leaving the building.

Several seconds later, you had a weird feeling in your gut. Someone was behind you; you could feel their thoughts but not quite comprehend what they were thinking. Just as you turned around to confront your assailant, the world went black.

Pain. That was the first thing you felt. You couldn’t open your eyes or hear anything because of the searing throb in your head. More importantly, though, you could feel that your mask was not on your face.

It took you several minutes to completely come to and even then the world was slightly foggy around you.

“Glad to see you’re awake, sunshine,” a gruff voice said from above you.

You choked out a response. “Who are you?”

“One of the men you were spying on. You see, my business partner and I had a feeling we may have some heroes snooping around our little exchange, so we set up a distraction. We thought we’d catch ourselves a real Avenger, but instead we found you,” he explained.

“So why am I here? Why not just throw me out?” you questioned.

“I think you’re way more valuable to us than any of the others, especially since you have that pretty little mind-reading head of yours. A lot of groups would pay a nice sum for a girl with your powers.”

Another man—a lackey you assumed—walked into the room and informed your captor that there was important business to attend to.

When the two men left the room, you began to panic.

How do I get out of here? I can’t be sold off to some villain organization!

That’s when you realized something very important: Tony had been helping you train a new ability. In theory, you should have been able to enter someone else’s mind and leave thoughts for them, but you had very minimal success thus far.

No—I can’t sit here and do nothing. I have to at least try. But who could I contact anyway? The Avengers are way too far away…Peter! I can call Peter! I just hope he’s close enough!

You mustered all of your strength and energy, thinking of your partner. You pictured him in your mind, hoping that would help form the connection you needed.

Spider-Man, please hear me! Please! Just follow our connection. Please!

You repeated this mantra over and over again for what felt like hours. You almost had no energy left to give when you suddenly heard a commotion outside of your door.

Gunshots reverberated down the hallway along with cries of pain right after. In a matter of seconds, the entire building was dead silent.

The door to your room slammed open, the boy you had been praying for standing right in front of you.

“Thank god, Clairvoyant. I thought I’d never find you!” he cried as he threw himself to the ground next to your crumpled form. “I’m sorry. This was all my fault. I should have just stayed put like you told me and—Hold on—I recognize you…from the train! I didn’t know--“

You cut off his sentence, lifting his mask just enough to press your lips to his. At first he sat rigidly, almost as if he was startled, but he quickly gave into the kiss. It was the most amazing kiss you had ever had, and you didn’t need to be able to read minds to tell that Peter felt the same way.

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junker-town · 4 years

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Gun violence, high school football and what coaches are doing to keep players safe

Gun violence, high school football and what coaches are doing to keep their players safe

If you ask Raekwon Robinson, a running back at Malcolm X Shabazz High School and Jaheem Burks’ best friend, what happened was ultimately their fault. It was Jaheem who wanted to go to Jersey City on that freezing January night in 2018 so their group of friends could go to a basketball game and then a party. Afterward, it was Raekwon who had insisted he was so hungry that they had to go to the store, even though it was after midnight.

“When I see [Jaheem] not doing what he used to be able to do, I choose to think about it, to see what could I have done differently,” Raekwon says, standing outside the Shabazz fieldhouse on a bright, blustery fall afternoon in Newark, New Jersey as he describes the regular flashbacks he still has. It’s just cold enough that he has a long sleeve shirt on under his pads, and clear enough that if you squint, you can see the New York City skyline from the field.

“I don’t want to blame it on myself, but I forced all of us to go to the store,” he says. “And because we went to the store, that happened.”

Jaheem, Raekwon and their friends were walking back from the corner store with juice tucked into their sweatshirt pockets. The closest chicken shack had already closed for the night, so as they walked back to the friend’s house where they were staying, Raekwon started putting in an order for Domino’s on his phone. It died because of the cold, and he looked up to find five men he’d never seen before in hoodies and ski masks staring at them from inside a car and on a nearby porch. It was odd, but none of them said anything so the group just kept walking — discussing pizza toppings, Raekwon remembers, smiling in disbelief.

A few seconds later, they heard gunfire erupt behind them. Raekwon and the rest of their friends took off running. “I was laughing because it caught me so off guard,” he says. “I was just like, wow, I might have a really crazy story.” Then a bullet flew by his head and hit an ambulance window. “I didn’t see it, I heard it,” Raekwon says. “That’s when I got scared.”

After the gunfire stopped, he heard Jaheem yelling. He’d been shot six times from his butt down to his calf, piercing his femoral artery. “I tried to get back up and run, but I got shot again so I stayed down on the ground,” says Jaheem, stoic and seemingly unperturbed by being asked to discuss the incident before practice, sharing his experience in measured, precise sentences just nine months after it happened. “First I was thinking about my life, to make sure I would make it,” he continues. “Control my breathing, stay calm. I just wanted the pain to go away.”

Raekwon found his friend sitting in a terrifyingly large pool of his own blood. The police, on high alert because of another shooting a few hours prior, had gotten there first, but Raekwon says they were simply documenting the wounds instead of tending to them.

“It was too cold to cry,” Raekwon says. “I was already shaking because it was so, so cold, and then I didn’t know what was going on. I knew he was going to be OK because it didn’t look like he was in pain, but the cops were yelling at everyone to back up and moving his body around all crazy — I’m like, stop moving him! That’s a puddle of blood that could probably fill up one of those whole boxes! [He points to a box of football gear.] The whole time they were moving him, more blood was coming out. There were no bullets inside him because they went straight through.”

He didn’t cry until the next day, when Jaheem’s aunt called and told him that Jaheem had been shot six times. “That broke me down,” Raekwon says. “I don’t believe Jaheem thinks about it — he still hasn’t cried about it, ever. I’m surprised.”

Jaheem had two surgeries; in one, they had to replace his artery. He spent two weeks at the Jersey City Medical Center before moving to a rehab facility in West Orange. At first, he would try to walk with a walker; every time he stood up, though, he got lightheaded because he’d lost so much blood. But once he got to rehab, he slowly learned how to walk again, going from a wheelchair, to crutches, to a cane, to just a limp that’s now all but disappeared.

“There was no way I thought he was suiting up this year,” Shabazz coach Darnell Grant, 47, says. “I’m like, ‘Listen man, you can take stats. I’ll put you in the booth, or you can help me coach.’ He looked me dead in the eyes: ‘Coach, I’m playing. You’ll see.’”

Natalie Weiner

Jaheem Burks (left) and Raekwon Robinson (right)

It’s a little slice of Americana right in the middle of Newark. The Friday night lights show two teams of teenage boys hopped up on Gatorade and bravado, butting heads on a brisk late October night. A healthy crowd of family, friends and neighbors cheer them on, many clutching lukewarm cups of ramen noodles or cocoa to fight the chill.

When the starting quarterback for the home team, Shabazz, is taken off the field after a hard hit, a new one steps in — a development that garners little fanfare from those in the stands, mostly content with the goose egg their opponents are laying.

But it should. The back-up QB is Jaheem Burks.

As he leads the team down the field, ultimately setting them up to score a touchdown, fans don’t know his name. They haven’t heard anything about a football player being shot. There’s no ceremony, no comment from the stadium announcer. Jaheem is just playing his game, exactly the way he wants; he’s already made the local news for his recovery, but there are plenty of people on the local news who hadn’t been so lucky. His own tragic accident (at Shabazz, they take care to call it an accident — “It wasn’t meant for him,” Grant explains) and return to football is barely a blip.

“We don’t play the pity party,” Grant says from his office the following week.

About an hour before practice starts, Grant sits behind his desk, hands folded, facing a few stacks of the academic progress reports he insists his players fill out each day. There’s a long table in the middle of the room where he meets with students, and sometimes monitors them during detention. When he’s not coaching the team, he’s the school’s dean of discipline, arriving at 7:50 a.m. to ensure kids are where they’re supposed to be, doing what they’re supposed to be doing. The last thing he has time to do is feed a redemption story that’s plenty remarkable on its own, for a community where honoring every victim of gun violence could easily become an all-consuming project.

“Don’t feel sorry for us,” he says. “These guys are champions.”

Grant is speaking literally: the team is defending its state title. Figuratively, they’re quite close to another, less tangible sort of triumph — this time, though, over much more brutal odds.

During his nine years coaching at Shabazz, Grant has lost four players to gun violence and had 10 players get shot, some on their way home from practice. One player was shot 14 times and survived. The day before our conversation, someone was wounded by gunfire near the school’s athletic field; the football team had been inside watching film, but a soccer game in progress had to be halted.

Last January, when Grant got the call that Jaheem had been shot, his reaction was one of relief. “I was just so happy he was alive,” he says. “That I didn’t have to go to another funeral.”

Grant is one of hundreds of high school football coaches across the country grappling with how to mitigate the effects of a problem they’re far from having the resources to solve: gun violence in America. Obviously, given that so far in 2019 over 10,000 Americans have died from a non-self-inflicted gunshot wound, it impacts almost everyone. But plenty of kids — especially those growing up in places like Newark, where such violence is numbingly ubiquitous — look to football to grant them a degree of immunity.

Conventional wisdom suggests that the sport offers an “escape” from under-resourced communities suffering from the effects of systemic neglect. If you work hard enough and make the right choices — playing football being one of the most accessible and appealing ways for boys, at least, to do that — you should be safe. A litany of cliches exist to describe the alternative: “Becoming a statistic.” “Dead or in jail.”

Grant knows most of his players have had someone in their lives for whom those cliches apply. “That’s why we have so many kids — we get the guys who don’t want that,” he says. His no-cut roster runs between 80 and 90 players from both Shabazz and smaller neighboring schools without football programs, depending on how many helmets he has. “They want to be something different.”

He also knows that concerns about concussions have cut into youth football participation nationally; in suburban Plainfield, New Jersey, where Grant has raised his six children, there’s no Pop Warner team for his twin seven-year-old boys. They have to drive to the next town over.

Shabazz, though, hasn’t experienced any decline. “It doesn’t affect us,” he says. “Football is going to come down to the people who have an option. My guys don’t have an option. They gotta play. They need to play. We don’t have lacrosse here. We don’t have established soccer here. Football, basketball, track. That’s the thing.”

Natalie Weiner

Coach Darnell Grant

But what Grant and his peers have found out the hard way is that even as it offers them structure and incentive, football alone is not enough to protect their charges. At least 67 boys and men 25 years old and under identified as current or former football players have been shot and killed in 2019 so far. Of those, 32 were under 18; the youngest, Washington, D.C.’s Karon Brown, was 11.

“What’s changed that now these kids growing up in the same neighborhood as I did gotta worry about life and death?” Grant remembers wondering in 2004 — the first time he lost a player, at a previous coaching job. He stood next to a high schooler who had been shot twice in the head, lying dead on the sidewalk a month after he’d gotten a scholarship offer from N.C. State. “I was so infuriated by the adults. What did we do differently? What didn’t we do for them that was done for us? Why is it no longer safe?”

It’s a detail that almost always makes the headline, whether the victim was 14 or 34: football player. Sometimes there’s a quote from the coach, or the school. Maybe the only photo in the local news files is one of the kid making a play. Maybe the yards he ran last season are somewhere toward the bottom. Very rarely do these stories get national coverage, with the 2015 murder of Zaevion Dobson — who was heralded posthumously as a hero — as one notable exception. But for many local outlets, the story is a depressingly familiar variation on the kinds of gun violence-related deaths that too often don’t get covered at all.

Its subtext is clear: this is not just another kid, this is a football player. A kid who tried; a kid who worked; a kid who was doing all the Right Things to avoid a fate as inevitable in America as fireworks on the Fourth of July. A football player died, and we should mourn more than we would otherwise but not that much, because another football player will die next week and next year, and we will pretend like it is exceptional when, in fact, it is the rule that children and young adults and old adults die preventable deaths every day because of the confluence of entrenched systemic discrimination and widely available lethal weapons.

We should mourn because he knew the odds were stacked against him and worked to overcome them anyway, as though his fate was ever fully in his own hands to begin with.

“You hear about kids that were the best that never was getting brutally murdered, and the story will be good until you bury them — about two weeks,” says Niketa Battle, 46, who lost a player each of his first two years as the head coach at Mays High School in Atlanta. He’s in year four. “But if a kid goes and plays in a DI program and gets in trouble, you’ll hear all about it. I always tell my kids, ‘Nobody cares if you get killed. Not at Mays. That’s what they expect, because of the area you live in.’ That’s the harsh reality.”

Somewhere deep down, maybe, we understand that each death signifies a greater failure. But it’s one that we tacitly accept with each “Football Star Shot and Killed” headline that passes by. An unfortunate one-off. How sad, we think. How terrible, as though a young person dying who didn’t play football is more tolerable. It’s a way to predigest tragedy, to filter an American epidemic into words we can understand: a football player died.

A little more than once a week, somewhere in America, a story like this runs.

Tyson Whiting

Football has been a lifelong love affair for Jaheem, who was born and raised in Newark. He watched Jerome Bettis run over people for the Steelers when he was five and has been a Pittsburgh fan ever since. That same year, his mother died of breast cancer (his dad is not in the picture), so Jaheem and his two older siblings went to live with his aunt and cousins. At nine, he started playing organized football; in middle school, he met Raekwon, his compatriot on and off the field. So when he was shot, his motivation to recover fully was clear.

“I couldn’t have that mindset like, just lay down and be lazy all day,” Jaheem says. Grant says he would have been a starter at receiver and defensive back his senior year had it not been for the shooting; he was back in the weight room at Shabazz before he was even officially back at school. “Obviously when I first got back, I wasn’t really running how I am right now. But I had to get up and work on my legs and try to get back on the field because I love football. That’s what I love to do.”

As for Raekwon, when he returned to school the Monday after the shooting, he dropped from honor roll to failing within a matter of weeks. “Before, I saw him every day,” he says of Jaheem. “I still see him every day. But just him not being around me, and I really couldn’t call him to speak to him... it was hurting me. I came to school just to come; I didn’t do nothing.”

It wasn’t the first time gun violence had impacted his life — when asked if he’d ever known anyone who was shot and killed, Raekwon holds up one hand to count and quickly runs out of fingers before giving up — but it was the first time he had witnessed it. Coincidentally he had signed up for an in-school leadership and healing program called the Bulldog Brotherhood, where he was referred to a counselor who helped him get makeup work to bring his grades back up. He says he learned about trauma from the program as he was experiencing it, which helped him.

“Being from where I’m at, I figured it would happen,” Raekwon says of the shooting. “I didn’t expect it, but I expected it. Not that we were doing anything wrong, I just — I don’t know. Around here, there’s no telling what happens.”

Data supports Raekwon’s grim hunch. Though gun violence statistics are notoriously hard to pin down, gun homicides tend to be concentrated where people are, in cities; small ones with disproportionate degrees of poverty, like Newark, tend to have higher rates. Fifty-two percent of gun homicide victims are Black men, according to the most recent available CDC data. Their reports also conclude that gun violence is the leading cause of death among Black children, who are 10 times more likely than their white counterparts to be shot and killed — a statistic that came perilously close to representing Jaheem and Raekwon.

That is not to say the experience of gun homicide victims — even those in a narrow category like current and former football players 25 and under — is homogenous. There have been at least 190 victims matching that description since 2017, according to the inevitably incomplete data collected by SB Nation. They lived in 38 states and Washington, D.C., in small towns and big cities alike. Some were white, some were Hispanic, most were Black. Some were shot in cases of mistaken identity, like Jaheem, or just caught in the crossfire; some were in disagreements that got heated. Some were victims of intentional murder, or of a stick-up gone wrong. Some — like Jordan Edwards, Isaiah Christian Green, Archer Amorosi, Leo Brooks Jr., D’Ettrick Griffin, O’Shae Terry and De’Von Bailey — were killed by police.

No matter the circumstance, most just wind up described as “in the wrong place at the wrong time”; a cliche that fails to account for the fact that they were exactly where they were supposed to be — walking to school or sitting at home or at a cookout to celebrate their graduation — and it didn’t make a difference.

“Nobody wakes up and says, ‘You know what, today I’m gonna plan on getting murdered,’” says Camden, New Jersey coach Preston Brown, 34, who leads the Woodrow Wilson High School team. He’s lost two players within the past year. “But there’s no margin for error. What might, in communities with more of a safety net, seem like harmless teenage shenanigans — seeing your friends, going to parties, getting a slice of pizza — become life-threatening.”

The way communities and media respond to these deaths tends to reflect how often they’ve seen them. Coach James Williams, who runs the team at Houston’s Fort Bend Marshall High School, lost his first player last December after seven seasons as the school’s head coach and 19 years in football. “It caught me completely off guard — it’s never something you think about or imagine would happen,” the 44-year-old coach says. He’d had players shot before, but never seriously injured or killed.

Williams’ Buffaloes had just closed an undefeated season and were preparing for a playoff run when 17-year-old Drew Conley, who had just transferred to Marshall that summer, was shot and killed by his uncle. “Definitely had a great personality — nothing but positives with that young man,” says Williams. “He made a big impact in a short time.”

The team, cheerleaders and band wore decals with his number — 3 — and hung up his jersey in a locker at their semifinal game four days later. “Remember 3” became both a rallying cry for the team and a hashtag, as Conley’s friends and teammates grieved and shared memories on social media. Conley’s funeral was two days before the team’s state championship game at Dallas Cowboys’ AT&T Stadium; five of his teammates were pallbearers. They wound up losing, a minor tragedy by comparison, but still heartbreaking given the shadow already cast over what should have been a pinnacle of Conley and his teammates’ high school experiences.

“Of course you want to win, but it was an accomplishment just to be there — especially under the circumstances they were in,” Williams says. “Losing a player two weeks before the state championship is such an emotional rollercoaster. The guys had to overcome so much, but they knew it was important to Drew, and that he wanted it badly for everyone.

“[Gun violence] is not prevalent where we are — it was just an unfortunate incident,” he continues. “Some areas have less crime than others, but there’s no safe area. At the end of the day, this can happen anywhere.”

For many other coaches — like Newark’s Darnell Grant — the first time they found out they’d outlived one of their players has long since past. Sometimes it’s too painful for both coaches and players to remember all those they’ve lost.

“It’s scary because the kids are kind of numb to it, to the point where every year you know it’s going to happen,” Brown says. Last fall, a recent graduate of his Camden program named Diquese Young, who had been accepted to college but deferred for a semester to help his mom, was shot and killed at 19. Six months later, Young’s good friend and former teammate Sincere Howard, 17, was also shot and killed. Brown recalls a recent shooting behind their field while the team was practicing; they paused to make sure it was safe and then went back to work.

“We kind of keep things among ourselves, and try not to focus on it so much,” he says. “The more you bring it up … there’s a whole tie-in of emotions, not only from the young people’s standpoint but for all of us, adults included.”

“I’m not going to say that my kids are insensitive to death, but they see it so often that it might be something that they’ve just grown to accept.”

“I’m just going to be honest with you: if I was in suburban Atlanta, [players dying] probably would have been more of a shock,” Battle says. “I’m not going to say that my kids are insensitive to death, but they see it so often that it might be something that they’ve just grown to accept. I hope I don’t come off as very numb. But here, if you don’t have some sort of a tough skin about where you’re working, it will eat you alive.”

Battle, who has lost two players in the past three years, estimates six Mays High School students were killed in that same period. Mays student D’Ettrick Griffin, who had played recreational football, was shot and killed by Atlanta police earlier this year. In August, two boys aged 12 and 16 were shot outside a Mays football game; the 12-year-old may not walk again.

“I ask myself, why do I watch the news all the time? I know it’s nothing but negativity about what’s going on within the community,” says the 46-year-old coach, who also teaches physical education. “But I have to turn it on because I’m worried about my kids.”

He sometimes finds himself sitting at his desk in despair — the same desk he speaks to me from, the same desk that’s his base from 7 a.m. to 8:30 or 9 at night during football season, the same desk that’s the destination of his 45-minute commute. “Half of me is questioning, like, ‘Why are you putting yourself through so much stress?’” Battle says. “When I got this head coaching position, I had no gray hair. I’m graying so fast now, it’s crazy. I don’t know when I can just go home and rest — I literally have to get in the house and turn my ringer off.”

Battle grew up in Tifton, Georgia, stayed in-state to play football at Savannah State and Georgia Southern, and entered the corporate world before beginning his career as a coach. “It just wasn’t fulfilling, knowing that was going to be my life for the next 25 to 30 years,” he says. So he quit, and started coaching in suburban Atlanta. Nineteen years later, his longest tenure has been at Mays — which has also been his most challenging position.

“In the suburbs, my worst fear was a kid going to jail,” he says, adding that his peers working in suburban schools are most concerned about keeping kids from vaping. “Now my worst fear is waking up to one of my kids having been killed.”

Battle lost his first players in 2011 while working as the head coach at Morrow High School. He remembers talking with them before summer started, wishing them well and offering some counsel.

“I told them, make sure you love on everybody because it’s not guaranteed that we’ll be around next year,” he recalls. “But I just meant that people might move with graduation. Two of the kids would end up being killed.” One died in a high-speed car chase, the other was shot. Recently he found out another former player from that same year had been shot and killed.

“When you were a part of those kids’ lives and then tragically, whether it’s one year later or 10 years later, they end up getting killed…” Battle trails off.

“You have kids that are very edgy, and think bad things might happen to them,” he concludes. “But it also happens to the good kids, the ones that don’t participate in any form of street violence. Some kids will wake up and try to live a different life, but just can’t escape it. But football is their outlet to try.”

***

It’s the same outlet that Battle, Grant and Brown found first themselves. All played football in high school and earned athletic scholarships to help pay for their degrees. What they ultimately decided to do with those degrees, though, was to return to places near where they grew up, eschewing any idea about “escape” as advancement. They chose to help more young men find the kinds of opportunities that are too often much harder to come by as Black students in underfunded schools; as sons whose families might be working long hours just to get by.

“If my coaches had just coached us, and didn’t take hold of us the way they did — be fathers to us, monitoring every aspect of our lives — most of us would not have made it,” says Brown, who graduated from Woodrow Wilson himself. Brown’s younger brother was shot and killed in 2011, at age 20. “When I became a coach, I could do no different than what was done for me. You have to do everything in your power to protect them.”

The first step is to keep players as busy as possible. Creating programming that compels them to be at school as long as they can stand — study halls, practices, weight training, film study, meetings, team meals — all year round, six days a week, takes precedence over designing plays or coming up with game plans. Often, the funding for such supplementary programming at already-strapped public schools comes out of their own pockets.

“Like I tell the kids, from 3:30 to 9:30, I’m with you,” Battle says. “Those are football hours. That’s the same time that kids are going to give to the streets. You’re not playing against an opponent, you’re playing against the streets. And the streets are going to win every time. But if I have them in football practice until 9:30 and they get home at 10, there’s nothing they can really do but go to sleep, come back and do it again.”

The streets, to Battle, mean gangs. In Atlanta the number of gangs has nearly doubled in the past decade, spurring Battle to speak with his players ever more regularly about why they should avoid them. During one such talk, a player asked to say something; when Battle told him to go ahead, he raised his shirt to show a bullet hole in his chest, telling the rest of his team, “Y’all don’t want to end up like me.”

“The thing is, if you don’t take an interest in the kids, who’s going to?”

“He comes out and works harder than almost all the kids on this team, and he’s sitting there with a bullet hole in his chest,” Battle recalls, still incredulous.

He believes his team can offer some of what the local gangs might seem to: a sense of belonging in the midst of an environment that he characterizes as “a war zone.”

“The thing is, if you don’t take an interest in the kids, who’s going to?” he asks. “A lot of kids will feel more like they’re worth something [as a gang member], because somebody’s telling them they’re doing well even though they’re doing wrong.”

In Chicago, coach D’Angelo Dereef has gone one step further in keeping his players physically away from their too-often violent Garfield Park neighborhood. He hosted a weeklong lock-in during training camp at Al Raby High School for the sixth season in a row this summer, a reaction to what he sees as a spike in gun violence.

“Every week is a violent week in Chicago — this is one week where their parents can be relieved,” he explains. Dereef, 46, initially came up with the idea not long after he moved to the city from South Carolina; tragically, he lost a student to gun violence almost immediately. “I was a 30-year-old man coming home crying to my auntie and uncle’s house,” Dereef remembers.

So he thought of doing a lock-in, which would at least be a temporary refuge. After facing initial resistance because of the cost, he finally got approval by assuring that he and the other coaches would collectively provide food and solicit donations from local businesses. It’s mostly subsidized by Dereef himself.

First, he takes their phones for the entire week. Instead, they focus on football and what might ultimately — and unfairly — be survival skills: conflict resolution and how to talk to police. Most important, though, is to “show them brotherhood, and make them one: one team, one family,” Dereef says.

His job isn’t over after the lockout, though; when we talk, he’s on his way to try to find out why a particularly promising kid has stopped coming to practice. Dereef gets frustrated when he sees people underestimate his players, or assume they’re unmanageable. “They’re not getting into their brains to figure out why,” he says. “It’s like putting a Band-Aid on a big cut — that’s not going to stop the bleeding. Why is this kid scared to come to practice? We need this kid here because this could save his life.”

A few weeks prior, he’d been negotiating with a freshman player’s parole officer to let him come to practice — the player had been found with an illegal gun and was under house arrest. “I told him, you’re 250 to 300 pounds — you’re a big ol’ target,” Dereef says. “People are going to hide behind you when they start shooting, and you can’t hide behind nobody. You’re a bulletproof vest for everybody out there. Don’t be a crash dummy, be with us.”

Tyson Whiting

No coach can be with their players all the time, though. “It’s the away time,” Grant says of the moments he worries the most. “It’s when they leave us. Right now we try to run a six-day-a-week program, 12 months out of the year. But that last day and a half, we don’t have them.”

“I just worry about what’s going on from Friday night after you get home from the game to Sunday afternoon,” says Battle. “As long as I can put my hands on them, I know they’re good. But once they leave, they’re going back to the same areas that they’re trying to fight so hard to get away from.”

The technology-enabled cure for that worry is lots of group-texting, and communication with teachers and parents; sometimes they’re just checking in to make sure players have made it home safely. On snow days, Grant has his players send him videos of themselves working out to keep them occupied.

All the coaches stay in touch with their alums, texting and calling to make sure they’re still pushing forward and staying safe. Dereef calls his former players every Sunday: “How’s school?” “Are you leaving the girls alone?” “Are you leaving the weed and drinking alone?” After all, their lives are only slightly less precarious once they get to school: 2019 Giants draft pick Corey Ballantine was shot while celebrating making it to the league, and his friend and Washburn University teammate Dwane Simmons was killed in the same incident.

“I never talk about football,” Dereef insists. “I got them prepared for football.”

“It’s about trying to build a surrogate family around the game of football, just to give them all the resources and access that everyone has every place else.”

Pushing students academically can be as simple as letting the players know that someone is watching, that someone cares. “Some kids, you grow up talking about the day at school at the dinner table every night,” Grant says. “My guys don’t always get that — and because it’s not a big priority in the house, it’s not their priority. It’s about trying to build a surrogate family around the game of football, just to give them all the resources and access that everyone has every place else.”

Grades are typically the coaches’ biggest concern: all aim to have 100 percent college acceptance rates for their players, even if they’re not going to play at the next level.

“My thing is to at least have the choice,” Grant says. When we meet, a scout is in the next room talking to some seniors on the team. “If I don’t give you an option, why wouldn’t I expect you to fall into the same traps as everybody else? I gotta give you something different.”

“All my kids aren’t going to be 3.0, 4.0 kids,” Battle says. “But if I can get a kid from an F to a C, just to be able to say, ‘I told you you could pass, you just gotta put your mind to it’ — that’s the little incentive they need to keep going, because they found someone that can believe in them.”

The hardest part of the job, the coaches say, is the feeling that it might be impossible to give the players enough. Feeding them once is something, but what if there’s no food at home? Finding a tutor might help their grades, but if they go home and the electricity is turned off, how can they do their homework? And of course the worst case scenario, the one that all of these coaches have already confronted: what if they do everything they can, and a player does everything he can — and still winds up dead before his time?

Like Diquese Young, the Woodrow Wilson player killed in 2018 who had deferred college to help his mom. “When he was in school, he was the perfect guy,” Brown says. “He did all his work, he did track and football, he was always on time, he was a leader. If there was beef among other people in school, he would be the dude that could mediate it without an adult being present. He had that kind of presence.”

Young was accepted to over a dozen schools. “It was a bad idea; he should have been away at college,” Brown says. “The hood doesn’t have any feelings.”

Or his friend and teammate Sincere Howard. Or Coach Battle’s players, Carlos Davis II and Marquez Montgomery, neither of whom will ever be older than 15. Or any of the other boys and men whose names make up the far-too-long list at the bottom of this story.

The worst has happened, but each coach has picked up the pieces and kept going. After all, there are too many good stories to let the tragedies drag them down.

“Just seeing the kids that wake up and have hope,” says Battle of what inspires him to keep coaching kids both on the field and through the many risks they face each day. “They light up, because they’ve probably been told for so long that this is your life, and this is what your life is always going to be — and then they get exposed to something else.” In 2018, he had 20 players sign National Letters of Intent out of a 39-player graduating class.

“There’s nothing you can do about what happened in the past,” Grant says. “The only thing you can do is try to make it not repeat itself — that’s the motivation to work harder.”

***

Jaheem and Raekwon are now roommates at William Paterson University — Jaheem wants to study computer engineering, and Raekwon wants to study math.

Grant helped see them off this spring, working with them to sort out their college prospects and, more importantly, taking Jaheem get shoes for the prom. Everything is almost back to normal, but might never be completely the same.

“He was such a goofy, silly, jovial kid,” Grant says. “Now you see a seriousness about him that you didn’t before. I look at him sometimes, like man, they took his childhood away from him. They made him become a man too fast.”

Raekwon says since the shooting, he’s stopped walking around his neighborhood. Unless he has a ride, he tries to stay in the house. “I was careful before, but now it’s just like...I don’t do much,” he says. “You won’t see me going to the store or anything like that.” This year, another player on the Bulldogs was shot and survived, as was another Shabazz student.

After nearly a decade at Shabazz, Grant is starting a new position coaching at West Orange High School. There’s no doubt he’ll still be mentoring his players off the field, but he acknowledges that working at a more diverse school — where his non-football hours will be spent on academics instead of discipline — will be different.

“At Shabazz, sometimes it was just about the bare necessities — things that are supposed to come from home and for whatever reason they’re unable to provide,” he says. “In West Orange, there are two parents in the house but maybe they’re both working in the city. Kids are kids — they face a lot of the same struggles.”

Coaches around the country will continue the thankless work that Grant did for years, the work of trying to protect players even after they’ve learned firsthand that their best efforts may not be enough.

“Man, I’ve got to make sure these kids know that I care about them,” Battle says. “I just don’t know if I, Lord forbid it, might lose another one this year. I hope the cycle is broken — I pray to God it is. But in the event that it’s not, this is the job that I signed up for.”

The problem is insurmountable, the violence inescapable. But every year, coaches like Battle will open their teams to all, padding their no-cut rosters with any kids who want a place to show up and be seen — regardless of how good they are at football. There are always more kids with more possibilities, and to these coaches, their lives are worth protecting with everything they have.

This piece is dedicated to all gun violence victims and survivors, and those who love them. Below are 190 football players 25 and under shot and killed between 2017 and November 2019.

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happyhealthyfitmomma · 5 years

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“I cannot tell you that Hitler took Austria by tanks and guns; it would distort history.

If you remember the plot of the Sound of Music, the Von Trapp family escaped over the Alps rather than submit to the Nazis. Kitty wasn’t so lucky. Her family chose to stay in her native Austria. She was 10 years old, but bright and aware. And she was watching.

“We elected him by a landslide – 98 percent of the vote,” she recalls.

She wasn’t old enough to vote in 1938 – approaching her 11th birthday. But she remembers.

“Everyone thinks that Hitler just rolled in with his tanks and took Austria by force.”

No so.

Hitler is welcomed to Austria

“In 1938, Austria was in deep Depression. Nearly one-third of our workforce was unemployed. We had 25 percent inflation and 25 percent bank loan interest rates.

Farmers and business people were declaring bankruptcy daily. Young people were going from house to house begging for food. Not that they didn’t want to work; there simply weren’t any jobs.

“My mother was a Christian woman and believed in helping people in need. Every day we cooked a big kettle of soup and baked bread to feed those poor, hungry people – about 30 daily.’

“We looked to our neighbor on the north, Germany, where Hitler had been in power since 1933.” she recalls. “We had been told that they didn’t have unemployment or crime, and they had a high standard of living.

“Nothing was ever said about persecution of any group – Jewish or otherwise. We were led to believe that everyone in Germany was happy. We wanted the same way of life in Austria. We were promised that a vote for Hitler would mean the end of unemployment and help for the family. Hitler also said that businesses would be assisted, and farmers would get their farms back.

“Ninety-eight percent of the population voted to annex Austria to Germany and have Hitler for our ruler.

“We were overjoyed,” remembers Kitty, “and for three days we danced in the streets and had candlelight parades. The new government opened up big field kitchens and

everyone was fed.

“After the election, German officials were appointed, and, like a miracle, we suddenly had law and order. Three or four weeks later, everyone was employed. The government made sure that a lot of work was created through the Public Work Service.

“Hitler decided we should have equal rights for women. Before this, it was a custom that married Austrian women did not work outside the home. An able-bodied husband would be looked down on if he couldn’t support his family. Many women in the teaching profession were elated that they could retain the jobs they previously had been required to give up for marriage.

“Then we lost religious education for kids

“Our education was nationalized. I attended a very good public school.. The population was predominantly Catholic, so we had religion in our schools. The day we elected Hitler (March 13, 1938), I walked into my schoolroom to find the crucifix replaced by Hitler’s picture hanging next to a Nazi flag. Our teacher, a very devout woman, stood up and told the class we wouldn’t pray or have religion anymore. Instead, we sang ‘Deutschland, Deutschland, Uber Alles,’ and had physical education.

“Sunday became National Youth Day with compulsory attendance. Parents were not pleased about the sudden change in curriculum. They were told that if they did not send us, they would receive a stiff letter of warning the first time. The second time they would be fined the equivalent of $300, and the third time they would be subject to jail.”

And then things got worse.

“The first two hours consisted of political indoctrination. The rest of the day we had sports. As time went along, we loved it. Oh, we had so much fun and got our sports equipment free.

“We would go home and gleefully tell our parents about the wonderful time we had.

“My mother was very unhappy,” remembers Kitty. “When the next term started, she took me out of public school and put me in a convent. I told her she couldn’t do that and she told me that someday when I grew up, I would be grateful. There was a very good curriculum, but hardly any fun – no sports, and no political indoctrination.

“I hated it at first but felt I could tolerate it. Every once in a while, on holidays, I went home. I would go back to my old friends and ask what was going on and what they were doing.

“Their loose lifestyle was very alarming to me. They lived without religion. By that time, unwed mothers were glorified for having a baby for Hitler.

“It seemed strange to me that our society changed so suddenly. As time went along, I realized what a great deed my mother did so that I wasn’t exposed to that kind of humanistic philosophy.

“In 1939, the war started, and a food bank was established. All food was rationed and could only be purchased using food stamps. At the same time, a full-employment law was passed which meant if you didn’t work, you didn’t get a ration card, and, if you didn’t have a card, you starved to death.

“Women who stayed home to raise their families didn’t have any marketable skills and often had to take jobs more suited for men.

“Soon after this, the draft was implemented.

“It was compulsory for young people, male and female, to give one year to the labor corps,” remembers Kitty. “During the day, the girls worked on the farms, and at night they returned to their barracks for military training just like the boys.

“They were trained to be anti-aircraft gunners and participated in the signal corps. After the labor corps, they were not discharged but were used in the front lines.

“When I go back to Austria to visit my family and friends, most of these women are emotional cripples because they just were not equipped to handle the horrors of combat.

“Three months before I turned 18, I was severely injured in an air raid attack. I nearly had a leg amputated, so I was spared having to go into the labor corps and into military service.

“When the mothers had to go out into the work force, the government immediately established child care centers.

“You could take your children ages four weeks old to school age and leave them there around-the-clock, seven days a week, under the total care of the government.

“The state raised a whole generation of children. There were no motherly women to take care of the children, just people highly trained in child psychology. By this time, no one talked about equal rights. We knew we had been had.

“Before Hitler, we had very good medical care. Many American doctors trained at the University of Vienna..

“After Hitler, health care was socialized, free for everyone. Doctors were salaried by the government. The problem was, since it was free, the people were going to the doctors for everything.

“When the good doctor arrived at his office at 8 a.m., 40 people were already waiting and, at the same time, the hospitals were full.

“If you needed elective surgery, you had to wait a year or two for your turn. There was no money for research as it was poured into socialized medicine. Research at the medical schools literally stopped, so the best doctors left Austria and emigrated to other countries.

“As for healthcare, our tax rates went up to 80 percent of our income. Newlyweds immediately received a $1,000 loan from the government to establish a household. We had big programs for families.

“All day care and education were free. High schools were taken over by the government and college tuition was subsidized. Everyone was entitled to free handouts, such as food stamps, clothing, and housing.

“We had another agency designed to monitor business. My brother-in-law owned a restaurant that had square tables.

“Government officials told him he had to replace them with round tables because people might bump themselves on the corners. Then they said he had to have additional bathroom facilities. It was just a small dairy business with a snack bar. He couldn’t meet all the demands.

“Soon, he went out of business. If the government owned the large businesses and not many small ones existed, it could be in control.

“We had consumer protection, too

“We were told how to shop and what to buy. Free enterprise was essentially abolished. We had a planning agency specially designed for farmers. The agents would go to the farms, count the livestock, and then tell the farmers what to produce, and how to produce it.

“In 1944, I was a student teacher in a small village in the Alps. The villagers were surrounded by mountain passes which, in the winter, were closed off with snow, causing people to be isolated.

“So people intermarried and offspring were sometimes retarded. When I arrived, I was told there were 15 mentally retarded adults, but they were all useful and did good manual work.

“I knew one, named Vincent, very well. He was a janitor of the school. One day I looked out the window and saw Vincent and others getting into a van.

“I asked my superior where they were going. She said to an institution where the State Health Department would teach them a trade, and to read and write. The families were required to sign papers with a little clause that they could not visit for 6 months.

“They were told visits would interfere with the program and might cause homesickness.

“As time passed, letters started to dribble back saying these people died a natural, merciful death. The villagers were not fooled. We suspected what was happening. Those people left in excellent physical health and all died within 6 months. We called this euthanasia.

“Next came gun registration. People were getting injured by guns. Hitler said that the real way to catch criminals (we still had a few) was by matching serial numbers on guns. Most citizens were law-abiding and dutifully marched to the police station to register their firearms. Not long afterwards, the police said that it was best for everyone to turn in their guns. The authorities already knew who had them, so it was futile not to comply voluntarily.

“No more freedom of speech. Anyone who said something against the government was taken away. We knew many people who were arrested, not only Jews, but also priests and ministers who spoke up.

“Totalitarianism didn’t come quickly, it took 5 years from 1938 until 1943, to realize full dictatorship in Austria. Had it happened overnight, my countrymen would have fought to the last breath. Instead, we had creeping gradualism. Now, our only weapons were broom handles. The whole idea sounds almost unbelievable that the state, little by little eroded our freedom.”

“This is my eyewitness account.

“It’s true. Those of us who sailed past the Statue of Liberty came to a country of unbelievable freedom and opportunity.

“America is truly is the greatest country in the world. “Don’t let freedom slip away.

“After America, there is no place to go.”

Kitty Werthmann

#fitmom #news #america

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azveille · 5 years

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Lions Health wrap: Roche's reality show, Sanofi's sneezy AR push, SRO for Epidiolex and more

CANNES, FRANCE—As Lions Health wrapped up another year, attendees sifted their notes and pulled out a few common threads. Technology, for one, but not just for the sake of using a shiny new tool. Or as one Sanofi exec put it, "Technology in the service of creativity."

Marketing for good was another: aka, applying sharp communications brains to thorny public health problems. And then there were what Leigh Householder of GSW Health called "secret messages," exemplified in one campaign using crossword puzzle clues to spread the word about elder abuse in a way abusive family members might not catch—but their puzzling seniors would.

Overall? It's a big world out there, but while appealing to global markets is key for pharma success, sometimes scaling up a creative local campaign is the way to really reach consumers and their doctors. Read on for more.

Tuesday

Doctors aren't robots. Forget the charts and graphs, sales reps. Lead with your heart instead. That’s the message from Attila Cansun, a chief marketing officer at the newly rebranded P&G Health. Adapting a consumer marketing framework dubbed LoveBrands, Cansun and his team use a similar evaluation-and-revamp for the company’s doctor relationships. Story

The trust tour. GW Pharmaceuticals' strategy for promoting its new cannabinoid drug Epidiolex to doctors sounded simple—earn their trust. But that's easier said than done, no thanks to Kim Kardashian and her CBD-themed baby shower. So the company decided to take physicians to the source, namely its massive marijuana greenhouse, and show them cannabis-derived drugs are the real deal. Story

Get out the tissues. In the U.S., when seasonal sneezes come on, there’s no mystery about what to do next: Go to the drugstore for allergy medication. But what if that decision weren’t automatic? For Sanofi, as it launched its drug Allegra over the counter in Brazil, the answer was a mobile, augmented-reality campaign that could outfit users with red noses and watery eyes, similar to a Snapchat filter. It even animated sneezes, complete with droplets on the phone screen. Story

Hemophilia, humor and a hipster host. A reality show about hemophilia? And it's a comedy? That would be Roche’s Genentech and ad agency 21 Gram’s new YouTube series called “Challenge Accepted.” Each 15-minute episode of the show, which premiered last week, features a different patient, coach and lesson for boys and young men with hemophilia. And it gets that lesson across using humor—and some magic tricks. Story

Monday

Big winner. It’s been a long three years since a pharma jury here handed out Grand Prix honors. But Monday night, GlaxoSmithKline and its ad agency McCann Health broke through with a mobile app called Breath of Life, used to detect chronic obstructive pulmonary disease in older adults in China. Eli Lilly, ViiV and Merck were among the other pharma winners. Story

No-ad advertising. Marketers need to think big. Like saving-the-world big. That’s the advice McCann Health’s global chief creative officer, Matt Eastwood, offered up to kick off the Cannes Lions Health confab Monday. And what that means to Eastwood is advertising that “may not look like advertising,” he said. “It’s advertising while doing good.” Story

New light on MS. Multiple sclerosis symptoms can be confusing: They differ person to person and even day to day for the same patients. Roche's Floodlight Open app aims to clear that confusion for individuals by gathering personal health data every day and delivering real-world evidence for broader understanding of the disease. Story

Procter & Gamble showed up for Cannes Lions Health—and no wonder. The consumer packaged goods giant recently bought Merck KGaA’s consumer health division and rebranded it as P&G Health. Now, with teams of brand managers and concept demos on display here, it's serving notice—at least to consumer healthcare companies—that it’s in play. Story

Sunday

Shorted shortlist? The Pharma Lions shortlist for 2019 lives up to its name. Just 31 entries cleared the finalist bar this year, down from 53 last year. But it’s still good news for the 12 multinational pharmas in the running—and for the pharma marketers looking to eye the industry’s best at Monday night’s awards. Story

Breakout scouts. As Cannes Lions Health kicked off its sixth year Monday, attendees were looking for some breakouts. As in breakthrough technology, creativity that breaks barriers, groundbreaking global ideas and a chance to finally break with the backhanded compliment that Lions Health work is “good for pharma.” Story

Escaping the same-same. Bartle Bogle Hegarty’s roster of literal A-list clients—Audi, Absolut and AstraZeneca—earns it center stage at Lions Health with a consumer-to-pharma creative crossover pitch. Hint? Brand differentiation is job one, and to do that, drugmakers need to pull cliché imagery out by the root. Story

Heard around the Palais

Stand up for nontraditional creative. Getting the green light for a brand film targeted at physicians at a pharma company is not for the faint of heart. Even the best ideas face multiple hurdles. AstraZeneca’s Lions Health award-winning "The Attack" film from last year highlighted the risk of repeat heart attacks, but was "that close" to being killed, said Kyriakos Konstantinidis, global strategy director at AstraZeneca. That's what his boss told him later after winning four more global awards and industry impact, feedback and successes rolled in. It helped that Konstantinidis understood the vision that ad agency Havas Lynx brought with its ideas—his father had worked in the film industry and he grew up in and around it. Konstantinidis and Havas' perseverance not only led to the creation of "The Attack," but another new disease awareness film about cardiovascular risks around Type 2 diabetes that debuted recently. That patient-targeted film features a fisherman talking about the dangers of heart disease for Type 2 patients while his boat engine stalls, noting, "That's how dangerous Type 2 diabetes is. It can cause your heart, your engine, to fail." Konstantinidis urged the audience and pharma in general to take risks, albeit calculated ones with a strategy meets creativity foundation. "When you're working in the pharmaceutical industry which has a very conservative approach to these sort of ideas, and you have your colleagues and peers coming to you (after the campaign) to say, apart from congratulations, 'How did you do that? We want to copy that, we want to do the same brief. ... What is the direction I need to take internally to make this a success in order to get the buy in?' Then you know you have created a new area," he said.

Fighting fake news. Panelists from Johnson & Johnson, McCann Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention tackled the thorny problem of combating disinformation about vaccines. "It won't be a TV campaign," said Seema Kumar, J&J's vice president for innovation in global health and science policy. Social media might play a role, but it's really peer-to-peer and face-to-face that's most important, the panelists decided. How to make that happen? "I'm challenging you," panel moderator Rajesh Mirchandani, chief communications officer of the UN Foundation, told the audience.

VR for VR's sake. Too many pharma marketers are making the mistake of recruiting tech tools for jobs they can't do, or just using those tech tools poorly, said Sam Glassenberg, founder and CEO of LevelEx, which makes mobile games for physician training. For example, method-of-action presentations that used to be on big screens have moved into virtual reality. But zooming around a molecule in the virtual world while sitting still in the real one tends to make people nauseous. "The last thing you want a doctor to associate with your drug is nausea," Glassenberg said. The moral of the story is to use VR only when it's the only way to tell a particular story—and when you do, make it a spectator sport, he said.

Real-world evidence and technology are natural partners, said Alex Gilbert, head of partnerships at app developer Medopad, as he ticked off the ways his company’s working with life sciences companies such as Novartis to help collect the sort of patient data that can help drugmakers add new indications to existing drugs. “We’re now creating a living, breathing document of a patient," Gilbert said. “Your health record doesn’t have to be in the hospital. It’s here, created by you.”

Spending on real-world evidence has hit $1.48 billion, according to Simone Seymour, founder and CEO of the biometric textiles company Supa. Real-world evidence is “really hot right now” for personalizing products but “also for understanding how drugs are actually working.” Companies are tapping Supa’s tech—and its network of app users—to monitor and recruit patients for real-world evidence trials.

A GlaxoSmithKline toothpaste made to alleviate bleeding gums served as an example of why design should be at the heart of marketing in one session led by GSK's vice president of design and innovation Andrew Barraclough. "It's all about spitting blood," he noted, and blood imagery appeared on everything from the platelet-like motif on the toothpaste tube to the smartphone screen that started bloody and cleared from there. Then, in the Czech Republic, GSK flipped the idea to promote blood donations. "Don't spit blood, give blood" was the tagline for GSK's #bloodforgood campaign there.

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