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tanoraqui · 4 years

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*chinhands* so tell me about guinevere being gay and doing crimes in space

There are three rules that an e-space* Navigator lives by:

Know who you are

Know where you’re going

Know where home is (just in case)

*“espace”, more often; hyphens don’t survive casual parlance; it’s short for “extra-space” because scientists aren’t always good at naming things. just thank god for the one physicist who raised an early objection to “subspace”, even though in early models of layered reality, what came to be known as “espace” was, indeed, below our space.)

The third is easiest, because it’s drilled into every recruit from the second they’re brought to the Lighthouse - which is usually at an age so young they’ll forget having lived anywhere else before. There might be an official name for the headquarters of the Navigators’ Guild on paperwork somewhere, but inside the space station’s halls and outside it, on every ship and planet and empty space between stars in the galaxy, it’s the Lighthouse. There’s a general understanding of why: it’s where navigators call home, where they can look to for aid and succor when the seas turn rough, in this space and the other.

Most people don’t understand, though. Because most people are not navigators: they have never stayed awake while every other mind in the ship was sent very carefully and very deeply into sleep, while the ship passed across a crackling boundary between this reality and another. They have never held themselves together in a world where up was not quite down because neither of those terms applied, where colors were tastes were neither, where time and space were both only suggestions, and the map is a matter of focus in your mind.

You are lost as the default, in espace. Or, “lost” isn’t a term that applies, because all reference points are only in your mind, and if you don’t have your destination absolutely clear, you will be lost in the metaphorical sense as well as not quite the literal. So the politer, more bureaucratic line is that navigators (orphans, usually) are taken in so that their training can begin as early as possible, the truest truth is that it is so that when they begin their training, they will have somewhere to come back to. (Their very secretive training; it’s not, allegedly, sink or swim, but the Guild protects the secret of how it trains its navigators more closely than it guards anything.) So that no matter what, if they lose track of their destination - too unfamiliar, or even unwanted - they can always remember the Lighthouse. The bunkbeds and warm corridors of the dormitories; the creatively placed asteroid ring, more for agility practice in dart-fliers than anything else; the iconic long body of the station itself, modeled half-seriously after a lighthouse of old (symbols can matter in espace), floating amidst darkness and a starry background, the nearest planet several standard-orbits away for the sake of autonomy…the navigator’s last and truest port in a storm.

The earlier a young navigator-to-be can fix that in their heart, so surely that they’ll know the exact moment its closest, to fire the engines to make the jump back, the more likely they are to, indeed, return home.

The second has been touched on! Navigation in espace is a matter of focus and knowledge, intuition, sense of the shape of a world without shape and essence of a world - or rather, a very specific part of a world - in which its rarely manifest. Many navigators dabble in art of some kind - painting, sculpture, crochet, poetry - because it helps them capture what cannot otherwise be captured. Or maybe so much time in espace means they can’t help but see this world differently as well, and need an outlet…opinions differ. Among navigators. Person to person, you know?

Anyway, because of this quirk of interstellar travel, most planets have, gloriously from a worldbuilding perspectively, entirely in-canon motivation to have highly specific unique traits. The easier a planet or station is to remember, itself and only itself, the less likely ships are to be lost on the way to it. So there’s a planet in Alpha Centauri renowned for its deserts, and its annual global competition, bringing thousands of would-be bakers, confectioners, and more each year. There’s a space station circling Rigel where every citizen proudly gets a new tattoo each year, and so does the station itself, vast stenciled artworks commissioned by the ruling council and drawn by artists in space suits. There’s old Red Mars itself, now more a tourist trap than anything but still just as proudly rust-colored, the closest any interstellar ship is allowed to the nature reserve of Earth.

So, know where you’re going, because going back to the Lighthouse gets you safe, but it doesn’t get you paid. The Guild cares for its navigators, it really truly does…on average. But there are bureaucrats and business managers in there, too, and they know they’re sitting on the galaxy’s most valuable monopoly.

And first: know who you are. Nothing in espace is real the way it is in standard space, including the self. Don’t worry about the crew or the passengers, or even the materiality of the ship itself - the ship AI will keep track of them, as well as of time as it should be passing. Nothing determinedly holds to numerical time like a digital mind. They’ll keep track of the navigator’s physicality as well - that’s what the biotagging chip is for. But most navigators do some sort of dance, martial art, or other exercise as well, to give themselves a better sense of, well, themselves - it’s always good to have a backup. Any passengers and crew are so unconscious that they may as well be inanimate, which is why an AI can keep track of them jus fine - the navigator, of course, is awake for the whole voyage.

So, the woman who in another life might be named Guinevere…

Her first name is Djinn, because a lot of navigator orphans are named after mythical creatures or heroes, from one culture or another, that can fly. A lot others are named after mythical heroes or creatures known for sight. The people in charge of children at the Lighthouse are a bunch of nerds, really, or they were once, and tradition stuck.

Her last name is probably Navigator, because being named after your profession is as old as civilization, and there are fewer things its easy to be proud of than being an official Guild-licensed navigator. You get to choose a surname when you get your license, and like many before her, Djinn chose that.

Once a navigator has their license, they’re more or less loosed unto the galaxy, if they want to be. You’re welcome to work as an independent contractor, so long as you still pay your percentage back to the guild of every navigating fee, and don’t undercharge the Guild minimum.

Djinn elected not to do that, actually. She wanted to travel, of course, to fly, to spend as much time as possible in hte giddy twistedness of espace. But she didn’t want to manage her own business, and she didn’t mind the Guild taking a little higher percentage to have jobs lined up for her. And she was good, oh, she was good, so it wasn’t long before she was flying precious cargos and even passenger ships - small ones, to start, and not particularly pricey (not used by the affluent, that is, who would pay more for a more experienced navigator, with more successful trips under their belt). But still, a very promising career, and she was comfortable.

She always has a sketchbook, luxurious paper so she can save or destroy the drawings as she wants, rather than wipe them clean from a laminate. Physical rather than digital, because she’s drawing this world, she says, so it has to have real mass - but she almost only ever uses pale colors. Bright things, she saves for paint, when she has time and space and money for an easel, and that art is twisting and bright and incomprehensible to everyone but a fellow navigator - and even then, most understand what she means, but now how she’s representing it. No one really experiences espace the same way.

She’s short of stature and of hair, skin probably #C26604-ish? and walks with a dreaminess in her eyes and the confidence of someone who knows she’s weird - as most navigators do. Also, definitely practices some science fiction equivalent of judo. Has slightly more energy than she needs at any given moment, and when she decides to move fast, will do so. Physically, emotionally, and in terms of decision-making - will put off decisions if they’re unpleasant, but will make them quickly if they’re not, and commit 100%. Stubborn or determined, however you want to phrase it; holds grudges…but if pushed to reconsider something, will do so, and will willingly change her mind. Often in the 100% opposite direction from before.

(It’s hazardous to go into espace unsure of what you want in life.)

Also, she’s not actually a licensed navigator anymore, by Guild rule. See, I said she was good, right? Really good? So, most navigators have a seat on the bridge - they don’t really need to be there, but it feels right - and that’s where they stay for the duration of the espace journey. Easier to focus if you don’t need to move, don’t need to think about anything but where to go and when (”when” maintained by the ship’s clocks) exactly to make the jump back to get there. There are probably IV tubes and catheters and everything, because it can be a several subjective hours sometimes, and better safe than sorry.

But Djinn was good, oh, she was really good, and she didn’t need that stuff. She didn’t want that stuff. Always a little more energy than necessary for the moment, remember? So her knee jiggled, and that was fine. She stood and stretched, and that was fine. She paced the bridge, alone save for the AI, and thought about the swirling patterns on the outer skin of that one station, or the best donut she’d ever tasted on that one planet (she always wanted to be more of a sweet tooth than she actually was.)

None of this was per regulation, but it was the sort of thing that got comfortably ignored by the Guild, if you admitted it - and you were encouraged to, for your own safety as a navigator and that of your ship, and in the interest of more data gained about espace travel. And then not reported on to whoever’d chartered the navigator, so long as the nav was back in their seat by the end and got the ship to its destination just fine, because what the layperson didn’t know couldn’t hurt them.

But, well…

It doesn’t get much harder to hold yourself and everything under your care together as they are the longer you’re in espace - additionally, but not multiplicatively, much less exponentially. Time and space still function in a way, so trips between this planet and that are known to have a certain average amount of time, but it’s flexible. If a navigator can confidently know themselves through, and the ship AI has a confident grasp on everything else, there’s no reason she shouldn’t pause in her destination-seeking, or at least not focus quite so hard, and just…wander the ship for a while. See the sights (that aren’t quite, here.) Enjoy the upsideways-tasting sensations.

So, Djinn met an AI with whom she really got along, did a couple trips in a row on that ship specifically, and then talked them into covering for her while she stole stuff from the passengers. More for fun than anything, honestly. But she got…well, she got caught, mostly, more than she got anything particularly valuable (probably?). (She got away with it like a dozen times, first, though.) And stealing from passengers while traveling through espace, while nearly unprecedented, is illegal by the laws of every place of origin she flew from…which is what applies on-ship until the destination is reached, by interstellar law.

More importantly, it was against Guild rules. They claimed precedent, because the Navigators’ Guild looks after its own, so Djinn wasn’t imprisoned anywhere. But her license was revoked for 7 years.

We meet her sometime in year 4, maybe 5 of that probably, I think on the equivalent of Jackson’s Whole.

#uhhhh #my fic #original fic #science fiction #arthurian legend #astria et al #hermionehair goylebrain

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pbiskillingmehere · 5 years

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NSFW Alphabet: Antony x Maeve

Authors Note: Oh my GOD this took longer than I expected it to. There were a lot of surprises with this one, actually.

Tag List: @claudevonstruke @bacchantony @choicesarehard @give-me-ernest-sinclaire @regina-and-happiness @simsvetements @thechoicesvita

A = Aftercare (What they’re like after sex)

Sex doesn’t end when they both come. Sex ends when they’re both so spent they can’t possibly go at it one more time. After hours of rolling over and switching positions and changing rooms, they usually just fall into bed, breathing heavy, and pass the fuck out. Then when they wake up, they take a bath so long and languid they practically prune themselves.

B = Body part (Their favorite body part of theirs and also their partner’s)

Maeve wouldn’t tell a soul, but her favorite spot on her own body is where her tattoo is inked. It’s been the only constant in her life and a way to connect to her past even in the smallest way.

On Anthony though, she loves his shoulders. Gods, she loves his shoulders. Whenever he gets out of bed and stretches his arms above his head, muscles rippling and scars stretching, she practically purrs and bites her lip.

And every time, without turning around he says, “You had better get that lusty look out of your eye, darling, or a man might do something about it.”

She would do no such thing.

For Antony, he thinks his legs are his best feature, and shows them off often, much to Maeve’s delight. Years of training and battle made them powerful and toned, and he was proud of it.

Curves were common enough on any woman, but if Antony was a more prolific man he could write poetry about her hips. The curve of them fit perfectly in his hand, and he loved nothing more than sucking bruises into the dip of skin next to her hipbone. And when she moved them? It undid him like nothing else.

C = Cum (Anything to do with cum basically…)

Antony tries to get Maeve to come in his box at the arena. Often. The crowd can only see the top half of their bodies when they’re seated so Antony can have his hand under her skirt as much as he wants. As soon as he would touch her knee, Maeve would shoot him a dirty look, mouthing, Don’t.

Antony would raise his eyebrows in mock innocence, hand sliding higher under silken fabric. It irked her that this was a game they both knew she was going to lose, and Antony reveled in it. He liked winning nearly as much as she hated losing.

Antony wasted no time in plunging his fingers into her, the penetration so quick that it made Maeve cough out a breath and clutch her seat as she jerked. He would spend the next few minutes watching her squirm and try to regulate her breathing as he plunged is his fingers into her and pressing lightly in just the right place.

When she came--and she always did--she would look to the sky, mouth slightly agape as she let out a long unsteady breath. Her small victory would be that she never cried out when he made her come at their seats, maintaining at least some level of secrecy of what they were doing.

This, however, was nothing compared to what Maeve would do to him in the litter on the way home.

D = Dirty Secret (Pretty self-explanatory, a dirty secret of theirs)

Maeve once almost knocked him out.

Antony was this close to dismissing a poor unsuspecting servant just so there wouldn’t be any witnesses, but Maeve gently reminded him that turning him out wouldn’t make him unsee the ordeal.

It was midday and Antony was picking up speed in his movements, hitting deep and barely pulling out of her before thrusting back in. He pulled one of her legs over his shoulder, biting the skin above her knee, and Maeve threw her head back in a desperate pant. They were both shining with sweat and getting lost in the crescendo of the moment.

They were both supposed to be out attending to the upcoming celebrations, but Maeve seemed to have other plans when she took him into his mouth and drove him so insane he almost had no choice but to throw her on the bed and have his way with her.

They were both so close. Maeve grabbed his hands and pressed it to her bundle of nerves in a silent command, roughly biting his shoulder as she did so. She was about to cry out her pleasure when the servant walked in, likely to attend his duties in Antony’s chamber.

In an instant, Maeve’s leg dropped from Antony’s shoulder as she bolted up in surprised, her forehead catching the sensitive underside of his jaw.

Antony’s shout of pain combined with the horrible realization at what was going on had the servant stuttering apologies and fleeing the room.

No longer inside her, but on his back on the opposite end of the bed, Antony had his arm thrown over his eyes, his muscles tight in the manner when one was in a tremendous amount of pain but didn’t want to show it. She had hit enough men in that particular spot to know that it usually knocked them unconscious and that Antony was lucky that the same didn’t happen to him.

Maeve rubbed her forehead, breathing heavily as she finally processed what had just happened, then she laughed. Loudly.

Antony looked over at her to find her bent in hysterics, one hand muffling her laughter, the other clutching her side. Before he could ask why in all the gods’ names was she giggling, she wheezed, “All of your battles and victories, and you almost get taken out by a blow in the middle of fucking,” and she fell to her side shaking.

He wanted to be angry, or at least vaguely annoyed, but he found himself chuckling, then laughing just as uncontrollably as she was at the absurdity of it all.

As she finally caught a few deep breaths, she crawled over to him and pressed a gentle kiss to the side of his face, stroking the spot where she struck as she murmured apologies.

As amusing as they found it, and with the mood sufficiently ruined, they agreed they would not be bringing it up again, especially when some discoloration appeared there a few hours later.

E = Experience (How experienced are they? Do they know what they’re doing?)

Obviously, neither of them are blushing virgins. Between Antony being, well, Antony, and Maeve being taught the ways of the bedroom for eight years, they are both quite experienced, and enjoy reaping the benefits of it.

Many of the less experienced women Antony had been with had been taught a man’s pleasure was the priority, not hers, and he loved taking the time showing them the contrary. However, that is not the case with Maeve.

One of Antony’s favorite things about her is how confident she is in taking her own pleasure, telling him exactly what she wants and how she wants it. When she gets especially impatient, she would just grab his hand and put on her breast or clit or wherever it was she needed him most. Luckily for her, he didn’t usually need too much direction.

F = Favourite Position (This goes without saying)

It honestly depends. A lot of the time, Antony enjoys taking her against walls or on top of tables and pretty much any other inappropriate place, but when they’re in a proper bed, that’s a completely different story.

He likes to be on his knees, Maeve’s pelvis lifted as he drives into her, thrusting hard and deep and he grabs her breasts. And based on the sounds she makes, she likes this position as well.

However, there are times where she pushes him back on to the bed and growls at him and rides him without abandon, and it's hard and fast and so hot for both of them.

G = Goofy (Are they more serious in the moment, or are they humorous, etc)

Post-coital is when they’re the silliest, laying in bed, catching their breath and smiling like fools. There’s a lot of play fighting actually. He’ll feel particularly annoying and will try to tickle her or push her buttons, and she’ll try to shove him off the bed and then they’re rolling around the bed in laughter rather than lust. This, of course, is quickly followed by playful bites which lead to less than playful touches, which leads to them fucking again. It’s a cycle they’re content with.

H = Hair (How well groomed are they, does the carpet match the drapes, etc.)

They both keep it neat. Sometimes Maeve will pull back on the meticulous courtesan grooming routines she usually does to see how he’ll react, and she’ll get little more than a raised eyebrow from him and receive no less passion.

I = Intimacy (How are they during the moment, romantic aspect…)

They think they’re careful with not getting too romantic with each other, but they fail really spectacularly. There are too many things they respect and adore about each other.

She’s not proud of it, but sometimes Maeve would use sex as an excuse to get out of talking intimately or romantically with one another. She was scared, so she retreated into something that she could handle. However, she’s quickly realizing that knowing him and being with him is already so far beyond what she vowed to protect herself from.

J = Jack Off (Masturbation headcanon)

Before they finally came together, they had both spent many nights thinking about one another, and thinking led to other things.

Sometimes, Maeve will get things started when she knows he’s on his way back to his villa, and he’ll walk in to find her naked on the bed, legs spread and fingers working inside her. He makes a sound so guttural that she almost stops, but she just says, “Are you going to help me finish or not?”

Sometimes he’ll just stay where he is, perfectly content with the sweet pleasure of watching her, but other days his impatience to be inside her wins out and he barely strips before climbing on top of her and sliding into her heat. On those days he always takes her hard and fast, driven made by the obscene image of her in his bed pleasuring herself.

K = Kink (One or more of their kinks)

Okay so they’re not into choking or breathplay per se, but one time when Maeve was on top, dizzy with lust, she thoughtlessly put her hand on his throat, and the whole world seemed to freeze crystal clear.

She was about to pull her hand away and apologize, but he caught her wrist. She met his gaze, and his eyes were nearly black with lust.

Keeping his gaze, she kept riding him, leaving her fingers at his neck, her pace a little slower, a little more deliberate. She didn’t tighten her grip in the slightest, traversing uncharted territory.

His trust hit her like a blow, crackling through her body and igniting her. She moved her forefinger across his pulse, feeling the rapid beat of his life under her hand. The movements of his hips became more rapid and slopier as he whispered filthy things to her. She came hard and suddenly, nearly falling on top of him. She met his eyes, seeing the mix of desire and raw affection there. He smiled. Breathing heavy, she removed her hand from his throat and entwined her fingers with his.

L = Location (Favourite places to do the do)

If it’s frequented by the Roman elite, they like fucking there, particularly the Basilica. They both enjoy their personal brand of a ‘Fuck You’ to the rich bastards they hate. And if they happen to get a little carried away and happen to break some things, that only sweetens the deal. And despite his proclamation that they’re both meant for better things, Maeve has gotten Antony to roll around in the dirt with her more than once.

M = Motivation (What turns them on, gets them going)

Whenever Maeve does something clever, Antony feels his desire for her hit him like a bolt, so he wants her often to say the least. They both get especially turned on when they’re working together to do something especially devious. They may joke with one another in the moment, mocking the Senate or whatever senator is their latest target, but as soon as their alone they barely give themselves the time to push clothes out of the way to get to one another.

N = NO (Something they wouldn’t do, turn-offs)

Full stop, Maeve will not do bondage. Even if she trusts Antony, even if its for the sake of pleasure. Her whole body outright rejects the concept of being bound again.

Luckily, Antony is keen enough to avoid even suggesting it. It’s not really a preference of his anyway. Every couple has boundaries. Including them.

O = Oral (Preference in giving or receiving, skill, etc)

In the past, if Antony heard a man does not give oral, he would straight up tell them that they are bad and sex and when their wives leave them for his bed don’t blame him.

Then he met Maeve.

Nowadays he just stops at telling them they’re bad in bed and their wives and mistresses probably hate them.

Maeve thinks this is hilarious and refrains from commenting if she happens to be in the room for this.

She gets a perverse sort of pleasure out of getting the great and powerful Marc Antony on his knees solely for her wants and pleasure. Sometimes she’ll stare at him a moment too long and he’ll understand this immediately.

“I think you’re confused as to who is at whose mercy here, lovely,” was one of his many coy comments.

Without missing a beat she said, “That remains to be seen.”

Then he smiled her and went down on her with renewed enthusiasm, pressing his hand into her stomach and nibbling and sucking everywhere but where she wanted him the most.

She stayed quiet in these moments, unwilling to let him hear her whine or pant despite the snake of fire coiling and hissing in her abdomen.

“You’re awfully quiet, Maeve. I suppose I just have to devote more time to foreplay.” Then he kissed her hipbone.

Her nails scraped his scalp in protest.

“Words, Maeve,” he teased, running a hand up her calf. “Pretty one preferably.”

“I want. Your mouth. On me,” she said with as much control as she could muster.

He leaned back, raising a brow.

“Please,” she ground out, willing to sacrifice some degree of her pride to just come already.

“Good girl.”

P = Pace (Are they fast and rough? Slow and sensual? etc.)

Like the position they're in, it depends on the context. Sometimes they’ll cycle through quick and rough, lazy and fun, and tortuously slow in a single evening.

Q = Quickie (Their opinions on quickies rather than proper sex, how often, etc.)

Quickies are a necessity of fucking in public spaces as often as they do. However, Antony is known to get grumpy if he doesn’t get a full look at her naked form under him and to take his sweet time in private on a regular basis. Sometimes when responsibilities only leave room for stolen moments, Antony’s need to act recklessly flares. This has led to an argument or two.

“You can’t just abandon everything because you’d rather spend the day in bed, Antony,” she said to him one day. She was dressing and he was still naked in his bed, trying and failing to convince her to spend the day between the sheets. She had his schedule memorized at that point and knew that it was unwise decision to neglect his duties that day.

He stared at the ceiling, bare limbs akimbo.“What is the point of having the power that I do if I can’t decide what to do with my time?” he replied petulantly.

She came to the foot of the bed and crossed her arms.“You’re right; you can do whatever you want with your power. Like throwing it all away for your whims.”

“And here I thought you liked my whims,” he said, sliding to the end of the bed and taking her hips in his hands.

She gave him a chaste kiss. “I like your whims when you don’t have both Caesar and Cassius breathing down your neck. I’d take on some of the burden myself if it was acceptable--And don’t give me that look. You and I both know that just because you can make it acceptable doesn’t change that Caesar would not have it. Especially if we are to go along with this plan of you ‘gifting’ me to him.”

He pressed his forehead to her stomach. “Don’t remind me,” he grumbled.

“I supposed that young man who ran wild never thought of the weight of everything he wanted,” she said gently, stroking his head.

He pulled her down for another kiss, this one longer and slower. “No, I supposed he didn’t.” Then he looked up at her with a smile. “I’ll be myself again in a few days’ time.” Then he rolled her around back into the bed. “After I fuck you good and proper,” he said, crawling up her body.

R = Risk (Are they game to experiment, do they take risks, etc.)

Maeve favors calculated risks. Antony can afford to be a little more reckless because he has more secured power. However, she likes to play a game where she wears something especially scandalous--like when she was trying to seduce him--when they’re out at public functions, and she stays on the opposite side of the room for as long as she can, indulging men who drooled over her and panted for the scarcest interaction.

Penetrating couldn’t begin to describe Antony’s gaze, boring into her as she plays with the jewelry at her throat and breasts, drawing attention to the generous amount of chest and stomach she has on display. Every muscle in his body is tense, both of his fists pressed into strong biceps as his eyes burned through her over a senator's shoulder.

He tries to call her over to his side a few times, but she always manages to slip away, only incensing him further, maybe brushing a man’s shoulder as she went.

Once he gets her alone, he presses her flush against the nearest wall and growls. “You are playing a very dangerous game, Maeve.”

Her smile is absolutely wicked. “Are you going to punish me?”

S = Stamina (How many rounds can they go for, how long do they last…)

Yo if they didn’t have shit to do they would test exactly how long they can go without stopping for breaks, but the estimate is a while. Antony didn’t get his reputation as the biggest slut in the Roman Empire by being a minute man. And Maeve is a warrior and a courtesan. Enough said. Like Messalina who? (If you don’t know who she is, look her up you will not regret it).

T = Toy (Do they own toys? Do they use them? On a partner or themselves?)

Sorry folks, I am not putting “ancient Roman sex toys” in my browser. I love ya’ll, but there are some things my FBI agent can’t take.

Nevertheless, Antony’s take on sex toys would be “the day I need help pleasuring Maeve is the day I no longer deserve to be in her bed,” which is dramatic to say the least but this is Antony we’re talking about.

As for Maeve, maybe if she was more inclined to masturbate she would be down with using them, but she’s pretty occupied with Antony.

U = Unfair (how much they like to tease)

No one likes teasing the way Antony and Maeve do. It’s as routine to foreplay as kissing is. They're both used to being the seducer, so it becomes a battle of the wills sometimes, but they wouldn’t have it any other way. Teasing doesn’t usually end in begging (most of the time) but the opposite. She might shove him up against a wall and put her tongue down his throat, or he might grab her roughly and bend her over the nearest surface. The delayed gratification of it all made fucking hurried and passionate and heady.

V = Volume (How loud they are, what sounds they make)

After the whole fiasco with the servant, Antony uses it as a convenient excuse to justify them being as loud as possible.

“Just so no one around here is confused as to what they may or may not be interrupting,” Antony said breathlessly when Maeve noticed how vocal he was becoming--and how vocal he was trying to get her to be for that matter.

Despite her training as a courtesan, Maeve wasn’t overly fond of making too many noises, but with Antony, he makes that nearly impossible sometimes. If he bit or sucked the right spot, catch the right angle as he plunged into her, she would let out a breathy cry or moan. Antony considered each sound that made it past her lips to be a lover’s victory.

W = Wild Card (Get a random headcanon for the character of your choice)

Maeve really wants to see Antony fight, fantasizes about it. Not in battle necessarily, but regular training exercises would satisfy her. She didn’t go to the barracks or training area very much; she had no valid reason to be there, so she had never seen him wield a sword or javelin or any other weapon for that matter. She had seen his muscles work and his skin sweat when he fucked her, but some carnal part of her wanted to see the careful power that was required of fighting. To see actually labor over something, and in own dominate way, brought obscene images of stripping off his armor and fucking him on the ground of the practice ring to her mind.

She would never tell Antony that thought, of course.

X = X-Ray (Let’s see what’s going on in those pants)

Antony is pretty damn big. LIke he can put his money where his mouth is with all of the big dick energy he throws out there.

Maeve has no complaints.

Y = Yearning (How high is their sex drive?)

I mean...if I haven’t answered this question already then I really haven’t done my job, have I?

Z = ZZZ (… how quickly they fall asleep afterward)

Most of the time they have sex until they pass out, usually at the same time. But sometimes, when one of them has a lot on their mind, something they can’t shake, they stay up a bit longer. Usually, its Maeve, as she’s typically the more anxious of the two. She doesn’t seem that way but she’s good at hiding it. Her body will be exhausted but her mind whirs. There are some days where she wonders how long she’ll last before she runs out of borrowed time. Then she might plot and little more and maybe if she--

Then an arm would wrap around her middle, and Antony would pull her to his chest, the warmth of his body seeping into her. Suddenly, the fear and intrusive thoughts would subside, and not long after she would snuggle closer and slowly drift off.

#ACOR #choices acor #playchoices acor #a courtesan of rome #marc antony x mc #mc x marc antony #pixelberry

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romanssippycup · 6 years

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Sleep x Virgil Headcannons

This is my first post with Remy or (Sleep). I probably won’t be doing much with him sense he isn’t an actual side and maybe is only canon in the vine verse. But, I still think I should give some headcannons on all the four ships I have seen Remy with. I know I have only seen RemyxVirgil, but I wanted to delve into the other ships a bit., so I’ll do that at a later date. If you want to be tagged in those, comment on or reblog this post. Hope you enjoy.

Sleep x Virgil

(I figured I might as well start out with the most popular ship with Remy. I definitely do ship these two together.)

-Sleep and Virgil’s relationship is like an upgraded version of Prinxiety. There is no malice behind the locked doors of the past, and they have nothing against each other. Sure they might badger, but there is no potential for hurt feelings

-When Virgil does get into an existential crisis (Which does happen a lot), Sleep will come and calm him down, often throwing an arm over his shoulder and offering gentle words of encouragement, or

-Sleep sings primarily lullabyes and no one can convince me otherwise. It calms Virgil down even faster than Patton’s hugs!

-When Virgil and Remy don’t feel like allowing Thomas to get sleep, they will both be brats and hit the town together. Whether it’s a concert, ice cream date night, or a back street bizarre, they always have fun together.

-Sleep will ask Virgil to do his nails for him. His colors he goes with are either pink, teal, white and black patterns, all black, purple and black (for his Virgeypoo), magenta, and once he tried yellow, but immediatly hated it. His face showed so much disgust, Virgil practically died from laughter.

-Sleep is a barista. Because he represents the subconscious and the unconscious he can delve into dreams and almost conjure similar to Roman, except it is a bit different. He can’t just pop anything in and out of existence at will. It has to have shown up in a dream while thomas was unconscious or sleeping. Doing this He’ll make Virgil tons of different coffees to try.

-Virgil will often let Sleep borrow his Ipod, or music to listen too. Remy knows a lot about bands and will continuing reccomending other bands he knows Virgil might enjoy. A couple of them being Skillet, Red, Shinedown, and Starset.

-Virgil and Remy both enjoy piercings and tattoos. They aren’t real so the things they get are never permanent, but it’s always cool to change one’s complexion, even for a night. Dying their hair is also something they enjoy. Remy isn’t much of a punk, but that doesn’t mean he won’t do some punkish things every once and awhile.

-HORROR MOVIES! Remy loves them. He gets so spooked though, but the rush of adrenaline is what he lives for. Virgil doesn’t mind them too much, especially when Remy accidently ends up on his lap, fearful of what’s gonna happen next. ;)

-Remy absolutely HATES it when Virgil sits on counters...or anything not meant to be sat on. It is his pet peeve! He will forcefully move Virgil if he finds him sitting on anything other than a floor, chair, or sofa. If he opens a cabinet and finds him sitting in there. He will glare from over his sunglasses, and drag him out. Virgil is usually a giggling mess from his upset face.

-Remy enjoys Crofter’s. You wouldn’t expect it, but he really does. So whenever Virgil is in the fridge he always grabs an unopen jar and gives it to his boyfriend, so that the other two jam-loving aspects don’t stick their spoons in it first.

-Remy doesn’t really care for poetry at all sadly, but he will support Virgil in his efforts to make good poetry. He figures if it’s something his boyfriend likes, then he can appreciate that he likes it.

-Remy and Virge are the exact same height. They constantly tease each other about pretending to be taller however. Using each other as arm rests and such.

-Remy also has a myspace account. They talk frequently on there, knowing Patton won’t find their conversation so they don’t have to be “nice”.

-Virgil enjoys stealing Remy’s sunglasses. He has to be on guard all the time because he never knows when his shades will be on some one else’s face.

-Because Sleep isn’t a side, he can spend all the time he wants in Virgil’s room without becoming corrupted. They often play video games together or do sleepovers and watch movies. Roman would be jealous, because Remy get’s to look at Virgil’s Nightmare Before Christmas posters.

-Sleep loves cats. Most of his instagram and tumblr feed is just all pictures of cute, dumb kitties. Virgil let’s him sleep with his stuffed cat toy every once and awhile just because he knows Remy loves it.

-Remy enjoys hanging off the back of the couch or chairs. For one who asks his boyfriend to sit properly he surely doesnt. The little hypocrite! He’ll even slide down the banisters or hang like a bat to talk on the phone.

-Remy is a big cuddler and will bring Virgil in for a hug whenever he gets the chance. His embrace is a little rougher than Patton’s, but Virgil still enjoys it anyways.

-Remy loves puns. But he likes riddles even more, much to the dismay of Virgil because Remy usually gives him a time limit to figure it out, stressing him out even more. This usually ends with Virgil punching Remy playfully in the shoulder, and then a cuddle session after apologies and regrets are shared.

#thomassanders #thomas sanders #sanderssides #sanders sides #virgil sanders #anxiety sanders #ts virgil #virgil #sleep #ts sleep #sleep sanders #remy sanders #remington sanders

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verrottweil · 7 years

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a semblance of familiarity

on ao3

alu/seras bonding, can be taken as strictly gen or a prelude to more.

He disinterestedly watches her change into a new uniform. Her mop of blonde hair clings wetly to the nape of her neck and the width of her hunched-together shoulders, she sits daintily on her bed with one leg crossed over the other, trying to do the front hooks of a form-fitting black bodice with a furrow between her brows and her inner cheek carefully clenched between her teeth. He suspects Walter will get her a coffin soon enough.

Seras had protested his presence at first, when she emerged from the shower in a full-body towel and saw him seated at the sorry excuse for a dinner table in her claustrophobically small room.

But he was her sire and he would burke no insubordination from her.

Folding both hands in his lap, he settles down low against the backrest of the chair, stretching his long legs out in front of him, the heels of his leather riding boots clacking hollowly on the stone floor. Alucard catches the nervous glance she gives him from the corner of her eye and offers her a toothy grin. It’s enough to make her fumble with the last hook, almost nick her finger on the brass, and shirk even more into herself. He chuckles and nonchalantly looks away.

What are you doing here?! Seras had yelped, not knowing how to react aside from wrapping her arms around herself, I’m not decent! As if he was supposed to care about decency.

He hadn’t answered her question, assuming his intentions were rather evident: she’s gotten hurt and it was still his duty to check on her, since she had refused to drink his blood. While Alucard was often baffled by human behavior, he supposed getting stabbed by consecrated bayonets and carrying the dismembered head of someone close to them were legitimate reasons to be unsettled. She had been so distraught during the incident.

But his fledgling would only grow stronger from the experience, because there’s no other outcome his pride will allow.

Seras puts on a clean blouse, buttons up and adjusts the collar. Next to her on the bed are a pair of thigh-highs and a short skirt, the rest of her uniform, with the colors muted in the dim lighting of the room to a matte olive. Her movements are quick and practiced, she seems to have rehabilitated well despite her reluctance to consume the blood bags Walter dutifully brings her every evening.

“Police girl,” Alucard calls, taking note of how she perks up at the nickname, tilting her head to the side to face him with her wide, expectant eyes. He holds his chin high, peering at her from behind the yellow-tinted glass of his shades, and says, “Anderson could’ve easily killed you, you know.”

Her shoulders slump at the words, as if she takes them for a beratement instead of an assessment. He blinks. How curious, he thinks amusedly, watching her fumble with the hemline of her blouse.

Seras heaves a heavy sigh and mutters defensively, “I couldn’t bloody well leave your head behind—” here she hauls a hand through her wet hair, bares her expressive gaze to him and continues, “—I thought I’d lost you, master.”

Tipping his head back and closing his eyes, he tries to throttle the nostalgia that threatens to rise from his gut at the fragile, vulnerable and slightly accusatory tone of her voice. Nostalgia for another life. He hears her standing up, balancing on one foot, back on two as she puts on the skirt, the same routine for the socks, shuffling around, and then footsteps echoing louder as she comes closer. There’s the scrape of wood over stone and a soft ‘plop’ as she sits down.

Alucard levels her a look when he hears something sturdy clank against the surface of the wooden table. She’s brought a hand mirror, an antique thing with the Hellsing crest engraved in the silver and he briefly wonders if Walter gave it to her or if she snatched it from somewhere in the mansion. In her other hand, she has a simple, plastic hairbrush. He suspects it’s always been hers, it certainly looks that way.

When Seras starts to struggle with the tangles in her hair, he chuckles, and the sound catches between the four walls and the damp, low-hanging ceiling of the basement, an echo.

She huffs in frustration, levelling him a disgruntled look from underneath her blonde fringe, plastered against her forehead in wet strips of hair. With a flourish, he gets up from his chair, the tails of his coat bellowing with his movements when he rounds the table and approaches her; she throws a bewildered glance over her shoulder when he comes to stand behind her.

After plucking the brush from her grasp, Alucard motions her to look straight ahead and hold the mirror properly.

“You didn’t drink the blood,” his tone of voice’s deceptively conversational, more easy-going than the grin toying along the corners of his dangerous mouth. He gingerly swipes back a few strands of hair from her temple.

He remembers thick, dark hair between his slender, childish fingers; the multi-colored mosaic on the walls was glittering under the sunlight cascading inside from the high windows, the floor was padded with heavy, finely-threaded rugs and cushions, the ceiling thinly-veiled with the smoke from the pipes, and there were feminine voices all around him. They deemed him less than a man, sending him into the sultan’s harem with just one order, a boy like you is hardly a boy at all.

Humiliation had burned angrily on his cheeks that day, when he’d entered the room on bare feet.

They had dragged him through the grand gates of the Topkapı palace by the scruff of his neck, as one of the many foreign princes held hostage by the Ottoman sultan, as a spoil of diplomatic warfare. His pride still flares at the thought that he was bartered like common stock, cattle. They had trust him into servitude, snatched the cross from his neck and dressed him in light, linen clothing, fed him sherbet and taught him the symbolism behind Divan poetry. And they were watching him, always watching him from the shadowed corners of the palace, to see if he would finally bend to Muslim customs, to Muslim traditions.

Seras is talking to him, a soft explanation in a softer voice, “I’m sorry, master, but I couldn’t, not yet I couldn’t—”

Nothing but a hum in acknowledgement, not betraying his mind’s elsewhere.

Do not burn what you intend to pillage, the sultan sneered at him when he spoke in his Turkish tongue. How subtle the threat behind those words, he sometimes muses. Do not squander what you might use someday.

“Master!” She yelps out when he tugs hard on her hair, making her neck curve backwards painfully, the teeth of the brush caught stuck in knots.

Blinking owlishly, Alucard snaps back to the present. He hushes her, brings one hand to the handle of her jaw and continues what he started, noticing how her hair tends to tangle together along the width of her shoulders. By her reflection in the mirror, he sees how she throws him another wary glance, but he only shakes his head to ease her worry. His grin stretches when she finally relents, showing off all his sharp teeth when she exhales loudly and relaxes under his touch again.

Gentleness was something he thought to have forgotten, but it seems his body has remembered how to brush a woman’s hair properly.

Elisabeta, a whisper of a name haunts the back of his mind. Elisabeta at the hearth as she takes off her maramă, and her long tresses come tumbling down her back like they were made to be run through by your fingers, and her eyes are reflecting the warm glow of the fire as she bravely looks up to you with your war-torn hands and your bloodied armor. He combs through Seras’ hair with his fingertips to make sure there are no more knots to be untangled.

It draws an approving hum from her and he wouldn’t be surprised if she’s close to dozing off.

Elisabeta undressing and bidding him closer with a coy smile; Elisabeta throwing herself off the battlements; Elisabeta dead. He unconsciously forms a fist against the first knob of her spine, holding onto strands of hair as the memories chase each other out in front of his eyes. Mina with her big blue eyes in her modest sleeping gown, staring at him in wonder; Mina and her parted lips, ravenous, covered in blood, his blood; Mina dying, Mina dead. He shakes his head lightly, sliding his knuckles between her shoulder blades, letting her hair slide through his fingers. Seras strapped to the chest of that FREAK, staring at him in wonder; Seras dying. Seras undead.

One word pulls him from his reverie, such a soft-spoken admission it might as well have been an exhale.

Father.

Alucard can feel his fledgling stiffen when she realizes she said it out loud. It’s comical how she abruptly drops the hand mirror, and how the heavy thing clatters unceremoniously on the wooden table, and how she snaps her head back to regard him with wide eyes. He laughs in the face of her embarrassment.

“I didn’t… That’s to say— I mean, I did, but I didn’t mean it,” Seras stutters, turning to him in her chair with one hand on the backrest and the other pushing her away from the table, and she takes a deep breath to compose herself, “I wasn’t thinking, master.”

“So it se ems,” there’s no mercy in his teasing reply, the only note of humor being the curt chuckle he ends the statement with.

Walter later tells him that Seras was orphaned from a young age, and he merely dips his chin and smirks knowingly, saying that he figured as much.

After he’s put the brush down, he motions her to sit straight again and her slightly cross expression changes into one of wonder. Alucard gathers her glossy hair in one hand and slowly rakes his fingers through, watching how the strands gracefully fall back against the nape of her neck and her shoulders, done away -for once- with the spikes.

He smirks then, when she starts to tremble a bit, and comments idly, “Is this the point where I say you look presentable, pretty even—” and here his grin threatens to split his face apart, “Daughter-mine?”

Seras sounds so mortified, so human, like she’d hide her face in her hands and refuse to look him in the eye ever again. “Master! Could you shut up, please?!”

And Alucard can only spit his cruel laughter at the inexplicable fondness that blossoms behind his ribcage like a field of roses and threatens to choke him on its flower petals and thorns.

#alucard #seras victoria #seras #aluseras #alusera #hellsing #alucard x seras #dad's home for dinner #hellsing fic

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ascensionstories-blog · 7 years

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Menace #26: The Menace, the Savage, and the Witch

Menace felt his hand clutching firmly to Vanish as he tore through the streets of the city. Beads of sweat raced off his forehead, a gust of wind raging against his face as he ran. The walls of the buildings that lined the city melded together in one multicolored blob against his hypersensitive eyes, but he couldn’t stop to drag his goggles over his eyes. He kept running. As he saw what he hoped to be the Spring Praestan, he came to a screeching halt, losing his grip on the super villain who skid across the ground in front of him. Nate frantically wiped the sweat from his eyes as he shoved his goggles against his face, opening them to see Clyde, lying leisurely against the front steps of the tattered, broken building.

The Spring Praestan had not looked wonderful for many years, but recently it came to look far worse. The columns that held the front facade were crumbling, the glass window pane that ran up the building was more cracked than not, and the cement used to construct the foundation was uneven and blackened. The sky lied, as it showed a clear blue picture, and Nate knew that such a day could never be so bright. Bids chirped somewhere in the distance. Nate ran his hand over his head feeling the wetness of his hair through his fingerless gloves. He turned his focus back to Vanish.

“You know you can’t win, right?” The villain asked him, tucking his hands behind his head to act as a pillow. “Would you like to just sit here, instead? When everyone is done fighting, I’ll vanish away, you’ll go back and say I got away, and that’ll be that. No harm, no foul. I don’t care too much for the Gentleman, or his plans. I’m particularly unmotivated in this case, I’m sorry to say.”

“Where is Eloise?” Nate inquired, remaining squared and ready as Vanish yawned and stretched out his legs.

“Now why would I tell you that? Besides, I thought you and your little twerp were practicing to get you over to the other side anyway. Why, on God’s green Earth, would I ever want to ruin your fun?”

“Is she safe?”

“As safe as anyone ever is over there.”

“That’s not good enough,” Nate said, almost yelling at the relaxing man. “Get up, I’m going to hurt you.”

“Oh, then when — if — you win, I’ll just tell you everything, is that your master plan?”

“Nope,” Nate responded, “I’m just going to hurt you.”

As Vanish stood, reaching his arms to the sky and twisting his back, Nate entered into the third stage of his powers, and he heard slow footsteps from behind him.

“Now, how did I know that you were going to be a pain, Vanish?” The Gentleman called to him from behind Nate. He was wearing his trademark, smiling mask and suit jacket over a white, button up shirt and black tie. His dress pants were cuffed just above his black shoes, and he held a black cane that clicked against the ground as he stopped.

“Obviously because you’re so smart,” Clyde spat back, then laughed at his own statement. “Can’t you just appreciate that I haven’t killed him yet?”

“No,” the Gentleman responded. “Now go get the amulet.” “And leave you to fight the kid?” Vanish said. Menace stood directly between the two bickering villains, feeling awkward and enraged. “With none of your minions and no bystanders? Do you have a death wish?”

“Perhaps one, for you,” the Gentleman said.

Nate was nervous again. The Gentleman didn’t do anything by accident, he knew. Something was coming. His eyes shot back and forth between the two super villains. His heels dug into the ground and he pressed his tongue to the roof of his mouth.

“Do it,” one of them said, and Vanish was behind Nate, throwing rope around his arms, tethering them apart, then in front of him as Nate turned, casting rope around each leg, pulling his weight out from under him as he fell. The Gentleman forced something into Nate’s mouth, and his eyes began to shut.

Jenny was pissed. She had leapt onto the Count as he began to fly away, and continued on him as he darted towards his mansion, then clung to him as he crashed through the window, but following him through the darkened house was another story. From the outside, the house had looked well-lit enough, with large lights dancing around the burlesque house. Inside, however, no natural light entered the corridors, save for the small light entering through the one, now-broken window. The room she was in was constricting, with only a chair and a desk to it, with a waste bin against the wall. She didn’t want to move from it, as it was the only lit area in the house.

C’mon Jen, she chided herself, You’ve handled much worse. She stepped forward, into the darkened corridor, and she forced her eyes to adjust. The corridor was smaller than the room she was in, hardly enough space for one person to walk through, with doors spaced ever so often on either side. She paused to listen. Small pounds, like feet walking, echoed from further down the corridor. She began to run towards them, through the constricting corridor, until she saw the outline of a bat-like figure leaping on all fours through the darkness. She sprinted towards him, giving her feet extra support as she dashed forward to barely grab the leg of the terrifying beast, which immediately began to shriek. Jenny's first reaction was to cover her ears, but she forced away her impulse, deafening herself through her powers as she slightly enlarged her canine teeth into pronounced fangs before digging them into just above the heel of the monster, hoping its anatomy stayed human-enough to still have calf muscles. She pressed her teeth further into the vampire before ripping whatever she held firmly from his body. He may have been shrieking, she couldn't tell. The darkness, the silence, and the atmosphere almost reminded her of her time in the jungle. She stood and dug into the wall with her hand, elongating her fingernails to give her a better hold inside the wall. Only then did she open her mouth to release whatever she had torn from the beast, which began to drag itself away.

She stepped forward after it, slowly, before stopping herself. Nate, she thought, then turned and ran towards the window.

Courtney felt like a hero. She sat just below the Cube in the middle of the Wharton State Forest, staring down the Bloodhound. The girl opposite her had a freckled face and long black hair; she would be beautiful if she hadn’t drenched her face with black mascara. She was wearing all black, too, which Courtney didn't like, because she was dressed in all white. There was too much poetry in this meaningless scuffle, she thought, Why can’t fighting sometimes just be fighting? She moved the winds to surround her, hovering slightly in front of the tree, and continued to make awkward eye contact with the girl before her, realizing, unhappily, that both their eyes happened to be brown, as well.

“Nate told me about you,” Courtney said to the Bloodhound. “Said your name was Marie, way back when. It’s a pretty name, I don’t know why you gave it up. My name’s Courtney, not that you asked, I just thought you should know.”

“You’re either really new at this, or exceptionally annoying,” the villain commented, and Courtney disliked her even more.

“And then I heard a little bit about you from Anthony too,” the White Witch continued, “He said that he pounded you into the ground in one hit.” Courtney paused, feeling like her taunting wasn’t enough, she added on, “Bitch,” and tried to keep from smiling, but failed. Inside the winds she felt a small jolt of electricity surround her, just enough bouncing around to sound like cackling laughter. That’s new, she thought. The two continued to stare at each other. “What is the Gentleman planning?” She decided to ask finally, afraid to make the first move.

“So you’re both new and annoying,” Marie responded. “Look, if you’re just going to make small talk, I’m going to leave.” She turned to walk away, but as she did, Courtney’s winds firmly shoved her backwards, onto her butt, a few feet away from Courtney. “Ow,” she muttered.

“Yeah, the weather’s been weird all day,” Courtney joked, hearing her lightning continue to surge around her. “Answer my question?” She asked again, more forcefully.

“Bite me, girly,” the Bloodhound responded, and Courtney threw her up against a tree, continually pressing against her with gusts of wind. Marie’s hair was blown completely out of her face, and her eyes were beginning to well up. “You really suck, did you know that?” Bloodhound, pinned against the wall, yelled at her over the winds.

“No, no,” Courtney corrected her, “I blow,” she started to laugh at her own joke and electricity surged through her wind, up against the Bloodhound’s body, who, feeling the jolts, howled in pain as the electricity danced across her body, burning through her clothes, leaving singed lines across her body. “Whoops,” Courtney said, releasing Marie from her powers, letting her fall, unconscious, to the ground. The White Witch rushed over, reaching her hand to the girl’s burnt wrist and waited. She continued to move her fingers up and down the wrist, holding them there for a few seconds before moving again. Finally, she felt a small, repeated thump against her fingers.

“Well, that was shocking,” she mused, then suddenly jumped back from the villain, as to not electrocute her once again.

She turned, lifting herself into the air, and flew about the treetops and towards the Spring Praestan, towards Nate.

#menace #original #oc #writing #writers #fiction #sci-fi #superhero #story #short story #chapter26

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djatoon · 5 years

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Fantastic article. A must-Read for all parents and/or teachers.

“1. To be a parent is to be compromised. You pledge allegiance to justice for all, you swear that private attachments can rhyme with the public good, but when the choice comes down to your child or an abstraction—even the well-being of children you don’t know—you’ll betray your principles to the fierce unfairness of love. Then life takes revenge on the conceit that your child’s fate lies in your hands at all. The organized pathologies of adults, including yours—sometimes known as politics—find a way to infect the world of children. Only they can save themselves.

Our son underwent his first school interview soon after turning 2. He’d been using words for about a year. An admissions officer at a private school with brand-new, beautifully and sustainably constructed art and dance studios gave him a piece of paper and crayons. While she questioned my wife and me about our work, our son drew a yellow circle over a green squiggle.

Rather coolly, the admissions officer asked him what it was. “The moon,” he said. He had picked this moment to render his very first representational drawing, and our hopes rose. But her jaw was locked in an icy and inscrutable smile.

Later, at a crowded open house for prospective families, a hedge-fund manager from a former Soviet republic told me about a good public school in the area that accepted a high percentage of children with disabilities. As insurance against private school, he was planning to grab a spot at this public school by gaming the special-needs system—which, he added, wasn’t hard to do.

Wanting to distance myself from this scheme, I waved my hand at the roomful of parents desperate to cough up $30,000 for preschool and said, “It’s all a scam.” I meant the whole business of basing admissions on interviews with 2-year-olds. The hedge-fund manager pointed out that if he reported my words to the admissions officer, he’d have one less competitor to worry about.

When the rejection letter arrived, I took it hard as a comment on our son, until my wife informed me that the woman with the frozen smile had actually been interviewing us. We were the ones who’d been rejected. We consoled ourselves that the school wasn’t right for our family, or we for it. It was a school for amoral finance people.

At a second private school, my wife watched intently with other parents behind a one-way mirror as our son engaged in group play with other toddlers, their lives secured or ruined by every share or shove. He was put on the wait list.

Places at the preschool were awarded on a first-come, first-served basis. At the front of the line, parents were lying in sleeping bags. They had spent the night outside.

The system that dominates our waking hours, commands our unthinking devotion, and drives us, like orthodox followers of an exacting faith, to extraordinary, even absurd feats of exertion is not democracy, which often seems remote and fragile. It’s meritocracy—the system that claims to reward talent and effort with a top-notch education and a well-paid profession, its code of rigorous practice and generous blessings passed down from generation to generation. The pressure of meritocracy made us apply to private schools when our son was 2—not because we wanted him to attend private preschool, but because, in New York City, where we live, getting him into a good public kindergarten later on would be even harder, and if we failed, by that point most of the private-school slots would be filled. As friends who’d started months earlier warned us, we were already behind the curve by the time he drew his picture of the moon. We were maximizing options—hedging, like the finance guy, like many families we knew—already tracing the long line that would lead to the horizon of our son’s future.

I stood waiting in the cold with a strange mix of feelings. I hated the hypercompetitive parents who made everyone’s life more tense. I feared that I’d cheated our son of a slot by not rising until the selfish hour of 5:30. And I worried that we were all bound together in a mad, heroic project that we could neither escape nor understand, driven by supreme devotion to our own child’s future. All for a nursery school called Huggs.

New York’s distortions let you see the workings of meritocracy in vivid extremes. But the system itself—structured on the belief that, unlike in a collectivized society, individual achievement should be the basis for rewards, and that, unlike in an inherited aristocracy, those rewards must be earned again by each new generation—is all-American. True meritocracy came closest to realization with the rise of standardized tests in the 1950s, the civil-rights movement, and the opening of Ivy League universities to the best and brightest, including women and minorities. A great broadening of opportunity followed. But in recent decades, the system has hardened into a new class structure in which professionals pass on their money, connections, ambitions, and work ethic to their children, while less educated families fall further behind, with little chance of seeing their children move up.

In his new book, The Meritocracy Trap, the Yale Law professor Daniel Markovits argues that this system turns elite families into business enterprises, and children into overworked, inauthentic success machines, while producing an economy that favors the super-educated and blights the prospects of the middle class, which sinks toward the languishing poor. Markovits describes the immense investments in money and time that well-off couples make in their children. By kindergarten, the children of elite professionals are already a full two years ahead of middle-class children, and the achievement gap is almost unbridgeable.

On that freezing sidewalk, I felt a shudder of revulsion at the perversions of meritocracy. And yet there I was, cursing myself for being 30th in line.

not long after he drew the picture of the moon, our son was interviewed at another private school, one of the most highly coveted in New York. It was the end of 2009, early in President Barack Obama’s first term, and the teachers were wearing brightly colored hope pendants that they had crafted with their preschoolers. I suppressed disapproval of the partisan display (what if the face hanging from the teachers’ necks were Sarah Palin’s?) and reassured myself that the school had artistic and progressive values. It recruited the children of writers and other “creatives.” And our son’s monitored group play was successful. He was accepted.

The school had delicious attributes. Two teachers in each class of 15 children; parents who were concert pianists or playwrights, not just investment bankers; the prospect later on of classes in Latin, poetry writing, puppetry, math theory, taught by passionate scholars. Once in, unless a kid seriously messed up, he faced little chance of ever having to leave, until, 15 years on, the school matched its graduates with top universities where it had close relations with admissions offices. Students wouldn’t have to endure the repeated trauma of applying to middle and high schools that New York forces on public-school children. Our son had a place near the very front of the line, shielded from the meritocracy at its most ruthless. There was only one competition, and he had already prevailed, in monitored group play.

Two years later we transferred him to a public kindergarten.

My wife and I are products of public schools. Whatever torments they inflicted on our younger selves, we believed in them.

We had just had our second child, a girl. The private school was about to start raising its fee steeply every year into the indefinite future. As tuition passed $50,000, the creatives would dwindle and give way to the financials. I calculated that the precollege educations of our two children would cost more than $1.5 million after taxes. This was the practical reason to leave.

But there was something else—another claim on us. The current phrase for it is social justice. I’d rather use the word democracy, because it conveys the idea of equality and the need for a common life among citizens. No institution has more power to form human beings according to this idea than the public school. That was the original purpose of the “common schools” established by Horace Mann in the mid-19th century: to instill in children the knowledge and morality necessary for the success of republican government, while “embracing children of all religious, social, and ethnic backgrounds.”

The claim of democracy doesn’t negate meritocracy, but they’re in tension. One values equality and openness, the other achievement and security. Neither can answer every need. To lose sight of either makes life poorer. The essential task is to bring meritocracy and democracy into a relation where they can coexist and even flourish.

My wife and I are products of public schools. Whatever torments they inflicted on our younger selves, we believed in them. We wanted our kids to learn in classrooms that resembled the city where we lived. We didn’t want them to grow up entirely inside our bubble—mostly white, highly and expensively educated—where 4-year-olds who hear 21,000 words a day acquire the unearned confidence of insular advantage and feel, even unconsciously, that they’re better than other people’s kids.

Public schools are a public good. Our city’s are among the most racially and economically segregated in America. The gaps in proficiency that separate white and Asian from black and Latino students in math and English are immense and growing. Some advocates argue that creating more integrated schools would reduce those gaps. Whether or not the data conclusively prove it, to be half-conscious in America is to know that schools of concentrated poverty are likely to doom the children who attend them. This knowledge is what made our decision both political and fraught.

From October 2017: Americans have given up on public schools. That’s a mistake.

Our “zoned” elementary school, two blocks from our house, was forever improving on a terrible reputation, but not fast enough. Friends had pulled their kids out after second or third grade, so when we took the tour we insisted, against the wishes of the school guide, on going upstairs from the kindergarten classrooms and seeing the upper grades, too. Students were wandering around the rooms without focus, the air was heavy with listlessness, there seemed to be little learning going on. Each year the school was becoming a few percentage points less poor and less black as the neighborhood gentrified, but most of the white kids were attending a “gifted and talented” school within the school, where more was expected and more was given. The school was integrating and segregating at the same time.

One day I was at a local playground with our son when I fell into conversation with an elderly black woman who had lived in the neighborhood a long time and understood all about our school dilemma, which was becoming the only subject that interested me. She scoffed at our “zoned” school—it had been badly run for so long that it would need years to become passable. I mentioned a second school, half a dozen blocks away, that was probably available if we applied. Her expression turned to alarm. “Don’t send him there,” she said. “That’s a failure school. That school will always be a failure school.” It was as if an eternal curse had been laid on it, beyond anyone’s agency or remedy. The school was mostly poor and black. We assumed it would fail our children, because we knew it was failing other children.

That year, when my son turned 5, attending daytime tours and evening open houses became a second job. We applied to eight or nine public schools. We applied to far-flung schools that we’d heard took a few kids from out of district, only to find that there was a baby boom on and the seats had already been claimed by zoned families. At one new school that had a promising reputation, the orientation talk was clotted with education jargon and the toilets in the boys’ bathroom with shit, but we would have taken a slot if one had been offered.

Among the schools where we went begging was one a couple of miles from our house that admitted children from several districts. This school was economically and racially mixed by design, with demographics that came close to matching the city’s population: 38 percent white, 29 percent black, 24 percent Latino, 7 percent Asian. That fact alone made the school a rarity in New York. Two-thirds of the students performed at or above grade level on standardized tests, which made the school one of the higher-achieving in the city (though we later learned that there were large gaps, as much as 50 percent, between the results for the wealthier, white students and the poorer, Latino and black students). And the school appeared to be a happy place. Its pedagogical model was progressive—“child centered”—based on learning through experience. Classes seemed loose, but real work was going on. Hallways were covered with well-written compositions. Part of the playground was devoted to a vegetable garden. This combination of diversity, achievement, and well-being was nearly unheard-of in New York public schools. This school squared the hardest circle. It was a liberal white family’s dream. The admission rate was less than 10 percent. We got wait-listed.

The summer before our son was to enter kindergarten, an administrator to whom I’d written a letter making the case that our family and the school were a perfect match called with the news that our son had gotten in off the wait list. She gave me five minutes to come up with an answer. I didn’t need four and a half of them.

I can see now that a strain of selfishness and vanity in me contaminated the decision. I lived in a cosseted New York of successful professionals. I had no authentic connection—not at work, in friendships, among neighbors—to the shared world of the city’s very different groups that our son was about to enter. I was ready to offer him as an emissary to that world, a token of my public-spiritedness. The same narcissistic pride that a parent takes in a child’s excellent report card, I now felt about sending him in a yellow school bus to an institution whose name began with P.S.

A few parents at the private school reacted as if we’d given away a winning lottery ticket, or even harmed our son—such was the brittle nature of meritocracy. And to be honest, in the coming years, when we heard that sixth graders at the private school were writing papers on The Odyssey, or when we watched our son and his friends sweat through competitive public-middle-school admissions, we wondered whether we’d committed an unforgivable sin and went back over all our reasons for changing schools until we felt better.

Before long our son took to saying, “I’m a public-school person.” When I asked him once what that meant, he said, “It means I’m not snooty.” He never looked back.

Illustration of a hand holding a pencil

Paul Spella

the public school was housed in the lower floors of an old brick building, five stories high and a block long, next to an expressway. A middle and high school occupied the upper floors. The building had the usual grim features of any public institution in New York—steel mesh over the lower windows, a police officer at the check-in desk, scuffed yellow walls, fluorescent lights with toxic PCBs, caged stairwells, ancient boilers and no air conditioners—as if to dampen the expectations of anyone who turned to government for a basic service. The bamboo flooring and state-of-the-art science labs of private schools pandered to the desire for a special refuge from the city. Our son’s new school felt utterly porous to it.

I had barely encountered an American public school since leaving high school. That was in the late 1970s, in the Bay Area, the same year that the tax revolt began its long evisceration of California’s stellar education system. Back then, nothing was asked of parents except that they pay their taxes and send their children to school, and everyone I knew went to the local public schools. Now the local public schools—at least the one our son was about to attend—couldn’t function without parents. Donations at our school paid the salaries of the science teacher, the Spanish teacher, the substitute teachers. They even paid for furniture. Because many of the families were poor, our PTA had a hard time meeting its annual fundraising goal of $100,000, and some years the principal had to send out a message warning parents that science or art was about to be cut. Not many blocks away, elementary schools zoned for wealthy neighborhoods routinely raised $1 million—these schools were called “private publics.” Schools in poorer neighborhoods struggled to bring in $30,000. This enormous gap was just one way inequality pursued us into the public-school system.

We threw ourselves into the adventure of the new school. We sent in class snacks when it was our week, I chaperoned a field trip to study pigeons in a local park, and my wife cooked chili for an autumn fundraiser. The school’s sense of mission extended to a much larger community, and so there was an appeal for money when a fire drove a family from a different school out of its house, and a food drive after Hurricane Sandy ravaged the New York area, and a shoe drive for Syrian refugees in Jordan. We were ready to do just about anything to get involved. When my wife came in one day to help out in class, she was enlisted as a recess monitor and asked to change the underwear of a boy she didn’t know from another class who’d soiled himself. (Volunteerism had a limit, and that was it.)

The private school we’d left behind had let parents know they weren’t needed, except as thrilled audiences at performances. But our son’s kindergarten teacher—an eccentric man near retirement age, whose uniform was dreadlocks (he was white), a leather apron, shorts, and sandals with socks—sent out frequent and frankly needy SOS emails. When his class of 28 students was studying the New York shoreline, he enlisted me to help build a replica of an antique cargo ship like the one docked off Lower Manhattan—could I pick up a sheet of plywood, four by eight by 5/8 of an inch, cut in half, along with four appropriate hinges and two dozen plumbing pieces, if they weren’t too expensive? He would reimburse me.

That first winter, the city’s school-bus drivers called a strike that lasted many weeks. I took turns with a few other parents ferrying a group of kids to and from school. Everyone who needed a ride would gather at the bus stop at 7:30 each morning and we’d figure out which parent could drive that day. Navigating the strike required a flexible schedule and a car, and it put immense pressure on families. A girl in our son’s class who lived in a housing project a mile from the school suddenly stopped attending. Administrators seemed to devote as much effort to rallying families behind the bus drivers’ union as to making sure every child could get to school. That was an early sign of what would come later, of all that would eventually alienate me, and I might have been troubled by it if I hadn’t been so taken with my new role as a public-school father teaming up with other parents to get us through a crisis.

parents have one layer of skin too few. They’ve lost an epidermis that could soften bruises and dull panic. In a divided city, in a stratified society, that missing skin—the intensity of every little worry and breakthrough—is the shortest and maybe the only way to intimacy between people who would otherwise never cross paths. Children become a great leveler. Parents have in common the one subject that never ceases to absorb them.

In kindergarten our son became friends with a boy in class I’ll call Marcus. He had mirthful eyes, a faint smile, and an air of imperturbable calm—he was at ease with everyone, never visibly agitated or angry. His parents were working-class immigrants from the Caribbean. His father drove a sanitation truck, and his mother was a nanny whose boss had been the one to suggest entering Marcus in the school’s lottery—parents with connections and resources knew about the school, while those without rarely did. Marcus’s mother was a quietly demanding advocate for her son, and Marcus was exactly the kind of kid for whom a good elementary school could mean the chance of a lifetime. His family and ours were separated by race, class, and the dozen city blocks that spell the difference between a neighborhood with tree-lined streets, regular garbage collection, and upscale cupcake shops, and a neighborhood with aboveground power lines and occasional shootings. If not for the school, we would never have known Marcus’s family.

The boys’ friendship would endure throughout elementary school and beyond. Once, when they were still in kindergarten, my wife was walking with them in a neighborhood of townhouses near the school, and Marcus suddenly exclaimed, “Can you imagine having a backyard?” We had a backyard. Our son kept quiet, whether out of embarrassment or an early intuition that human connections require certain omissions. Marcus’s father would drop him off at our house on weekends—often with the gift of a bottle of excellent rum from his home island—or I would pick Marcus up at their apartment building and drive the boys to a batting cage or the Bronx Zoo. They almost always played at our house, seldom at Marcus’s, which was much smaller. This arrangement was established from the start without ever being discussed. If someone had mentioned it, we would have had to confront the glaring inequality in the boys’ lives. I felt that the friendship flourished in a kind of benign avoidance of this crucial fact.

At school our son fell in with a group of boys who had no interest in joining the lunchtime soccer games. Their freewheeling playground scrums often led to good-natured insults, wrestling matches, outraged feelings, an occasional punch, then reconciliation, until the next day. And they were the image of diversity. Over the years, in addition to our son and Marcus, there was another black boy, another white boy, a Latino boy, a mixed-race boy, a boy whose Latino mother was a teacher’s aide at the school, and an African boy with white lesbian parents. A teacher at the private school had once called our son “anti-authoritarian,” and it was true: He pursued friends who were mildly rebellious, irritants to the teachers and lunch monitors they didn’t like, and he avoided kids who always had their hand up and displayed obvious signs of parental ambition. The anxious meritocrat in me hadn’t completely faded away, and I once tried to get our son to befriend a 9-year-old who was reading Animal Farm, but he brushed me off. He would do this his own way.

The school’s pedagogy emphasized learning through doing. Reading instruction didn’t start until the end of first grade; in math, kids were taught various strategies for multiplication and division, but the times tables were their parents’ problem. Instead of worksheets and tests, there were field trips to the shoreline and the Noguchi sculpture museum. “Project-based learning” had our son working for weeks on a clay model of a Chinese nobleman’s tomb tower during a unit on ancient China.

Even as we continued to volunteer, my wife and I never stopped wondering if we had cheated our son of a better education. We got antsy with the endless craft projects, the utter indifference to spelling. But our son learned well only when a subject interested him. “I want to learn facts, not skills,” he told his first-grade teacher. The school’s approach—the year-long second-grade unit on the geology and bridges of New York—caught his imagination, while the mix of races and classes gave him something even more precious: an unselfconscious belief that no one was better than anyone else, that he was everyone’s equal and everyone was his. In this way the school succeeded in its highest purpose.

And then things began to change.

around 2014, a new mood germinated in America—at first in a few places, among limited numbers of people, but growing with amazing rapidity and force, as new things tend to do today. It rose up toward the end of the Obama years, in part out of disillusionment with the early promise of his presidency—out of expectations raised and frustrated, especially among people under 30, which is how most revolutionary surges begin. This new mood was progressive but not hopeful. A few short years after the teachers at the private preschool had crafted Obama pendants with their 4-year-olds, hope was gone.

At the heart of the new progressivism was indignation, sometimes rage, about ongoing injustice against groups of Americans who had always been relegated to the outskirts of power and dignity. An incident—a police shooting of an unarmed black man; news reports of predatory sexual behavior by a Hollywood mogul; a pro quarterback who took to kneeling during the national anthem—would light a fire that would spread overnight and keep on burning because it was fed by anger at injustices deeper and older than the inflaming incident. Over time the new mood took on the substance and hard edges of a radically egalitarian ideology.

At points where the ideology touched policy, it demanded, and in some cases achieved, important reforms: body cameras on cops, reduced prison sentences for nonviolent offenders, changes in the workplace. But its biggest influence came in realms more inchoate than policy: the private spaces where we think and imagine and talk and write, and the public spaces where institutions shape the contours of our culture and guard its perimeter.

Who was driving the new progressivism? Young people, influencers on social media, leaders of cultural organizations, artists, journalists, educators, and, more and more, elected Democrats. You could almost believe they spoke for a majority—but you would be wrong. An extensive survey of American political opinion published last year by a nonprofit called More in Common found that a large majority of every group, including black Americans, thought “political correctness” was a problem. The only exception was a group identified as “progressive activists”—just 8 percent of the population, and likely to be white, well educated, and wealthy. Other polls found that white progressives were readier to embrace diversity and immigration, and to blame racism for the problems of minority groups, than black Americans were. The new progressivism was a limited, mainly elite phenomenon.

Politics becomes most real not in the media but in your nervous system, where everything matters more and it’s harder to repress your true feelings because of guilt or social pressure. It was as a father, at our son’s school, that I first understood the meaning of the new progressivism, and what I disliked about it.

Every spring, starting in third grade, public-school students in New York State take two standardized tests geared to the national Common Core curriculum—one in math, one in English. In the winter of 2015–16, our son’s third-grade year, we began to receive a barrage of emails and flyers from the school about the upcoming tests. They all carried the message that the tests were not mandatory. “Inform Yourself!” an email urged us. “Whether or not your child will take the tests is YOUR decision.”

During the George W. Bush and Obama presidencies, statewide tests were used to improve low-performing schools by measuring students’ abilities, with rewards (“race to the top”) and penalties (“accountability”) doled out accordingly. These standardized tests could determine the fate of teachers and schools. Some schools began devoting months of class time to preparing students for the tests.

The excesses of “high-stakes testing” inevitably produced a backlash. In 2013, four families at our school, with the support of the administration, kept their kids from taking the tests. These parents had decided that the tests were so stressful for students and teachers alike, consumed so much of the school year with mindless preparation, and were so irrelevant to the purpose of education that they were actually harmful. But even after the city eased the consequences of the tests, the opt-out movement grew astronomically. In the spring of 2014, 250 children were kept from taking the tests.

The critique widened, too: Educators argued that the tests were structurally biased, even racist, because nonwhite students had the lowest scores. “I believe in assessment—I took tests my whole life and I’ve used assessments as an educator,” one black parent at our school, who graduated from a prestigious New York public high school, told me. “But now I see it all differently. Standardized tests are the gatekeepers to keep people out, and I know exactly who’s at the bottom. It is torturous for black, Latino, and low-income children, because they will never catch up, due to institutionalized racism.”

Our school became the citywide leader of the new movement; the principal was interviewed by the New York media. Opting out became a form of civil disobedience against a prime tool of meritocracy. It started as a spontaneous, grassroots protest against a wrongheaded state of affairs. Then, with breathtaking speed, it transcended the realm of politics and became a form of moral absolutism, with little tolerance for dissent.

We took the school at face value when it said that this decision was ours to make. My wife attended a meeting for parents, billed as an “education session.” But when she asked a question that showed we hadn’t made up our minds about the tests, another parent quickly tried to set her straight. The question was out of place—no one should want her child to take the tests. The purpose of the meeting wasn’t to provide neutral information. Opting out required an action—parents had to sign and return a letter—and the administration needed to educate new parents about the party line using other parents who had already accepted it, because school employees were forbidden to propagandize.

We weren’t sure what to do. Instead of giving grades, teachers at our school wrote long, detailed, often deeply knowledgeable reports on each student. But we wanted to know how well our son was learning against an external standard. If he took the tests, he would miss a couple of days of class, but he would also learn to perform a basic task that would be part of his education for years to come.

One day I asked another parent whether her son would take the tests. She hushed me—it wasn’t something to discuss at school.

Something else about the opt-out movement troubled me. Its advocates claimed that the tests penalized poor and minority kids. I began to think that the real penalty might come from not taking them. Opting out had become so pervasive at our school that the Department of Education no longer had enough data to publish the kind of information that prospective applicants had once used to assess the school. In the category of “Student Achievement” the department now gave our school “No Rating.” No outsider could judge how well the school was educating children, including poor, black, and Latino children. The school’s approach left gaps in areas like the times tables, long division, grammar, and spelling. Families with means filled these gaps, as did some families whose means were limited—Marcus’s parents enrolled him in after-school math tutoring. But when a girl at our bus stop fell behind because she didn’t attend school for weeks after the death of her grandmother, who had been the heart of the family, there was no objective measure to act as a flashing red light. In the name of equality, disadvantaged kids were likelier to falter and disappear behind a mist of togetherness and self-deception. Banishing tests seemed like a way to let everyone off the hook. This was the price of dismissing meritocracy.

I took a sounding of parents at our bus stop. Only a few were open to the tests, and they didn’t say this loudly. One parent was trying to find a way to have her daughter take the tests off school grounds. Everyone sensed that failing to opt out would be unpopular with the principal, the staff, and the parent leaders—the school’s power structure.

A careful silence fell over the whole subject. One day, while volunteering in our son’s classroom, I asked another parent whether her son would take the tests. She flashed a nervous smile and hushed me—it wasn’t something to discuss at school. One teacher disapproved of testing so intensely that, when my wife and I asked what our son would miss during test days, she answered indignantly, “Curriculum!” Students whose parents declined to opt out would get no preparation at all. It struck me that this would punish kids whom the movement was supposed to protect.

If orthodoxy reduced dissenters to whispering—if the entire weight of public opinion at the school was against the tests—then, I thought, our son should take them.

The week of the tests, one of the administrators approached me in the school hallway. “Have you decided?” I told her that our son would take the tests.

She was the person to whom I’d once written a letter about the ideal match between our values and the school’s, the letter that may have helped get our son off the wait list. Back then I hadn’t heard of the opt-out movement—it didn’t exist. Less than four years later, it was the only truth. I wondered if she felt that I’d betrayed her.

Later that afternoon we spent an hour on the phone. She described all the harm that could come to our son if he took the tests—the immense stress, the potential for demoralization. I replied with our reason for going ahead—we wanted him to learn this necessary skill. The conversation didn’t feel completely honest on either side: She also wanted to confirm the school’s position in the vanguard of the opt-out movement by reaching 100 percent compliance, and I wanted to refuse to go along. The tests had become secondary. This was a political argument.

Our son was among the 15 or so students who took the tests. A 95 percent opt-out rate was a resounding success. It rivaled election results in Turkmenistan. As for our son, he finished the tests feeling neither triumphant nor defeated. The issue that had roiled the grown-ups in his life seemed to have had no effect on him at all. He returned to class and continued working on his report about the mountain gorillas of Central Africa.

Illustration of the American flag with gold stars scattered on top

Paul Spella

the battleground of the new progressivism is identity. That’s the historical source of exclusion and injustice that demands redress. In the past five years, identity has set off a burst of exploration and recrimination and creation in every domain, from television to cooking. “Identity is the topic at the absolute center of our conversations about music,” The New York Times Magazine declared in 2017, in the introduction to a special issue consisting of 25 essays on popular songs. “For better or worse, it’s all identity now.”

The school’s progressive pedagogy had fostered a wonderfully intimate sense of each child as a complex individual. But progressive politics meant thinking in groups. When our son was in third or fourth grade, students began to form groups that met to discuss issues based on identity—race, sexuality, disability. I understood the solidarity that could come from these meetings, but I also worried that they might entrench differences that the school, by its very nature, did so much to reduce. Other, less diverse schools in New York, including elite private ones, had taken to dividing their students by race into consciousness-raising “affinity groups.” I knew several mixed-race families that transferred their kids out of one such school because they were put off by the relentless focus on race. Our son and his friends, whose classroom study included slavery and civil rights, hardly ever discussed the subject of race with one another. The school already lived what it taught.

The bathroom crisis hit our school the same year our son took the standardized tests. A girl in second grade had switched to using male pronouns, adopted the initial Q as a first name, and begun dressing in boys’ clothes. Q also used the boys’ bathroom, which led to problems with other boys. Q’s mother spoke to the principal, who, with her staff, looked for an answer. They could have met the very real needs of students like Q by creating a single-stall bathroom—the one in the second-floor clinic would have served the purpose. Instead, the school decided to get rid of boys’ and girls’ bathrooms altogether. If, as the city’s Department of Education now instructed, schools had to allow students to use the bathroom of their self-identified gender, then getting rid of the labels would clear away all the confusion around the bathroom question. A practical problem was solved in conformity with a new idea about identity.

Within two years, almost every bathroom in the school, from kindergarten through fifth grade, had become gender-neutral. Where signs had once said boys and girls, they now said students. Kids would be conditioned to the new norm at such a young age that they would become the first cohort in history for whom gender had nothing to do with whether they sat or stood to pee. All that biology entailed—curiosity, fear, shame, aggression, pubescence, the thing between the legs—was erased or wished away.

The school didn’t inform parents of this sudden end to an age-old custom, as if there were nothing to discuss. Parents only heard about it when children started arriving home desperate to get to the bathroom after holding it in all day. Girls told their parents mortifying stories of having a boy kick open their stall door. Boys described being afraid to use the urinals. Our son reported that his classmates, without any collective decision, had simply gone back to the old system, regardless of the new signage: Boys were using the former boys’ rooms, girls the former girls’ rooms. This return to the familiar was what politicians call a “commonsense solution.” It was also kind of heartbreaking. As children, they didn’t think to challenge the new adult rules, the new adult ideas of justice. Instead, they found a way around this difficulty that the grown-ups had introduced into their lives. It was a quiet plea to be left alone.

When parents found out about the elimination of boys’ and girls’ bathrooms, they showed up en masse at a PTA meeting. The parents in one camp declared that the school had betrayed their trust, and a woman threatened to pull her daughter out of the school. The parents in the other camp argued that gender labels—and not just on the bathroom doors—led to bullying and that the real problem was the patriarchy. One called for the elimination of urinals. It was a minor drama of a major cultural upheaval. The principal, who seemed to care more about the testing opt-out movement than the bathroom issue, explained her financial constraints and urged the formation of a parent-teacher committee to resolve the matter. After six months of stalemate, the Department of Education intervened: One bathroom would be gender-neutral.

in politics, identity is an appeal to authority—the moral authority of the oppressed: I am what I am, which explains my view and makes it the truth. The politics of identity starts out with the universal principles of equality, dignity, and freedom, but in practice it becomes an end in itself—often a dead end, a trap from which there’s no easy escape and maybe no desire for escape. Instead of equality, it sets up a new hierarchy that inverts the old, discredited one—a new moral caste system that ranks people by the oppression of their group identity. It makes race, which is a dubious and sinister social construct, an essence that defines individuals regardless of agency or circumstance—as when Representative Ayanna Pressley said, “We don’t need any more brown faces that don’t want to be a brown voice; we don’t need black faces that don’t want to be a black voice.”

At times the new progressivism, for all its up-to-the-minuteness, carries a whiff of the 17th century, with heresy hunts and denunciations of sin and displays of self-mortification. The atmosphere of mental constriction in progressive milieus, the self-censorship and fear of public shaming, the intolerance of dissent—these are qualities of an illiberal politics.

I asked myself if I was moving to the wrong side of a great moral cause because its tone was too loud, because it shook loose what I didn’t want to give up. It took me a long time to see that the new progressivism didn’t just carry my own politics further than I liked. It was actually hostile to principles without which I don’t believe democracy can survive. Liberals are always slow to realize that there can be friendly, idealistic people who have little use for liberal values.

in 2016 two obsessions claimed our family—Hamilton and the presidential campaign. We listened and sang along to the Hamilton soundtrack every time we got in the car, until the kids had memorized most of its brilliant, crowded, irresistible libretto. Our son mastered Lafayette’s highest-velocity rap, and in our living room he and his sister acted out the climactic duel between Hamilton and Burr. The musical didn’t just teach them this latest version of the revolution and the early republic. It filled their world with the imagined past, and while the music was playing, history became more real than the present. Our daughter, who was about to start kindergarten at our son’s school, wholly identified with the character of Hamilton—she fought his battles, made his arguments, and denounced his enemies. Every time he died she wept.

Read: How Lin-Manuel Miranda’s ‘Hamilton’ shapes history

Hamilton and the campaign had a curious relation in our lives. The first acted as a disinfectant to the second, cleansing its most noxious effects, belying its most ominous portents. Donald Trump could sneer at Mexicans and rail against Muslims and kick dirt on everything decent and good, but the American promise still breathed whenever the Puerto Rican Hamilton and the black Jefferson got into a rap battle over the national bank. When our daughter saw pictures of the actual Founding Fathers, she was shocked and a little disappointed that they were white. The only president our kids had known was black. Their experience gave them no context for Trump’s vicious brand of identity politics, which was inflaming the other kinds. We wanted them to believe that America was better than Trump, and Hamilton kept that belief in the air despite the accumulating gravity of facts. Our son, who started fourth grade that fall, had dark premonitions about the election, but when the Access Hollywood video surfaced in October, he sang Jefferson’s gloating line about Hamilton’s sex scandal: “Never gonna be president now!”

The morning after the election, the kids cried. They cried for people close to us, Muslims and immigrants who might be in danger, and perhaps they also cried for the lost illusion that their parents could make things right. Our son lay on the couch and sobbed inconsolably until we made him go to the bus stop.

The next time we were in the car, we automatically put on Hamilton. When “Dear Theodosia” came on, and Burr and Hamilton sang to their newborn children, “If we lay a strong enough foundation, we’ll pass it on to you, we’ll give the world to you, and you’ll blow us all away,” it was too much for me and my wife. We could no longer feel the romance of the young republic. It was a long time before we listened to Hamilton again.

A few weeks after the election, our daughter asked if Trump could break our family apart. She must have gotten the idea from overhearing a conversation about threats to undocumented immigrants. We told her that we were lucky—we had rights as citizens that he couldn’t take away. I decided to sit down with the kids and read the Bill of Rights together. Not all of it made sense, but they got the basic idea—the president wasn’t King George III, the Constitution was stronger than Trump, certain principles had not been abolished—and they seemed reassured.

Since then it has become harder to retain faith in these truths.

Our daughter said that she hated being a child, because she felt helpless to do anything. The day after the inauguration, my wife took her to the Women’s March in Midtown Manhattan. She made a sign that said we have power too, and at the march she sang the one protest song she knew, “We Shall Overcome.” For days afterward she marched around the house shouting, “Show me what democracy looks like!”

Our son was less given to joining a cause and shaking his fist. Being older, he also understood the difficulty of the issues better, and they depressed him, because he knew that children really could do very little. He’d been painfully aware of climate change throughout elementary school—first grade was devoted to recycling and sustainability, and in third grade, during a unit on Africa, he learned that every wild animal he loved was facing extinction. “What are humans good for besides destroying the planet?” he asked. Our daughter wasn’t immune to the heavy mood—she came home from school one day and expressed a wish not to be white so that she wouldn’t have slavery on her conscience. It did not seem like a moral victory for our children to grow up hating their species and themselves.

We decided to cut down on the political talk around them. It wasn’t that we wanted to hide the truth or give false comfort—they wouldn’t have let us even if we’d tried. We just wanted them to have their childhood without bearing the entire weight of the world, including the new president we had allowed into office. We owed our children a thousand apologies. The future looked awful, and somehow we expected them to fix it. Did they really have to face this while they were still in elementary school?

I can imagine the retort—the rebuke to everything I’ve written here: Your privilege has spared them. There’s no answer to that—which is why it’s a potent weapon—except to say that identity alone should neither uphold nor invalidate an idea, or we’ve lost the Enlightenment to pure tribalism. Adults who draft young children into their cause might think they’re empowering them and shaping them into virtuous people (a friend calls the Instagram photos parents post of their woke kids “selflessies”). In reality the adults are making themselves feel more righteous, indulging another form of narcissistic pride, expiating their guilt, and shifting the load of their own anxious battles onto children who can’t carry the burden, because they lack the intellectual apparatus and political power. Our goal shouldn’t be to tell children what to think. The point is to teach them how to think so they can grow up to find their own answers.

I wished that our son’s school would teach him civics. By age 10 he had studied the civilizations of ancient China, Africa, the early Dutch in New Amsterdam, and the Mayans. He learned about the genocide of Native Americans and slavery. But he was never taught about the founding of the republic. He didn’t learn that conflicting values and practical compromises are the lifeblood of self-government. He was given no context for the meaning of freedom of expression, no knowledge of the democratic ideas that Trump was trashing or of the instruments with which citizens could hold those in power accountable. Our son knew about the worst betrayals of democracy, including the one darkening his childhood, but he wasn’t taught the principles that had been betrayed. He got his civics from Hamilton.

Read: Civics education helps create young voters and activists

The teaching of civics has dwindled since the 1960s—a casualty of political polarization, as the left and the right each accuse the other of using the subject for indoctrination—and with it the public’s basic knowledge about American government. In the past few years, civics has been making a comeback in certain states. As our son entered fifth grade, in the first year of the Trump presidency, no subject would have been more truly empowering.

“If you fail seventh grade you fail middle school, if you fail middle school you fail high school, if you fail high school you fail college, if you fail college you fail life.”

Every year, instead of taking tests, students at the school presented a “museum” of their subject of study, a combination of writing and craftwork on a particular topic. Parents came in, wandered through the classrooms, read, admired, and asked questions of students, who stood beside their projects. These days, called “shares,” were my very best experiences at the school. Some of the work was astoundingly good, all of it showed thought and effort, and the coming-together of parents and kids felt like the realization of everything the school aspired to be.

The fifth-grade share, our son’s last, was different. That year’s curriculum included the Holocaust, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow. The focus was on “upstanders”—individuals who had refused to be bystanders to evil and had raised their voices. It was an education in activism, and with no grounding in civics, activism just meant speaking out. At the year-end share, the fifth graders presented dioramas on all the hard issues of the moment—sexual harassment, LGBTQ rights, gun violence. Our son made a plastic-bag factory whose smokestack spouted endangered animals. Compared with previous years, the writing was minimal and the students, when questioned, had little to say. They hadn’t been encouraged to research their topics, make intellectual discoveries, answer potential counterarguments. The dioramas consisted of cardboard, clay, and slogans.

Illustration of a school desk with gold stars overlaid on top

Paul Spella

students in new york city public schools have to apply to middle school. They rank schools in their district, six or eight or a dozen of them, in order of preference, and the middle schools rank the students based on academic work and behavior. Then a Nobel Prize–winning algorithm matches each student with a school, and that’s almost always where the student has to go. The city’s middle schools are notoriously weak; in our district, just three had a reputation for being “good.” An education expert near us made a decent living by offering counseling sessions to panic-stricken families. The whole process seemed designed to raise the anxiety of 10-year-olds to the breaking point.

“If you fail a math test you fail seventh grade,” our daughter said one night at dinner, looking years ahead. “If you fail seventh grade you fail middle school, if you fail middle school you fail high school, if you fail high school you fail college, if you fail college you fail life.”

We were back to the perversions of meritocracy. But the country’s politics had changed dramatically during our son’s six years of elementary school. Instead of hope pendants around the necks of teachers, in one middle-school hallway a picture was posted of a card that said, “Uh-oh! Your privilege is showing. You’ve received this card because your privilege just allowed you to make a comment that others cannot agree or relate to. Check your privilege.” The card had boxes to be marked, like a scorecard, next to “White,” “Christian,” “Heterosexual,” “Able-bodied,” “Citizen.” (Our son struck the school off his list.) This language is now not uncommon in the education world. A teacher in Saratoga Springs, New York, found a “privilege-reflection form” online with an elaborate method of scoring, and administered it to high-school students, unaware that the worksheet was evidently created by a right-wing internet troll—it awarded Jews 25 points of privilege and docked Muslims 50.

The middle-school scramble subjected 10- and 11-year-olds to the dictates of meritocracy and democracy at the same time: a furiously competitive contest and a heavy-handed ideology. The two systems don’t coexist so much as drive children simultaneously toward opposite extremes, realms that are equally inhospitable to the delicate, complex organism of a child’s mind. If there’s a relation between the systems, I came to think, it’s this: Wokeness prettifies the success race, making contestants feel better about the heartless world into which they’re pushing their children. Constantly checking your privilege is one way of not having to give it up.

On the day acceptance letters arrived at our school, some students wept. One of them was Marcus, who had been matched with a middle school that he didn’t want to attend. His mother went in to talk to an administrator about an appeal. The administrator asked her why Marcus didn’t instead go to the middle school that shared a building with our school, that followed the same progressive approach as ours, and that was one of the worst-rated in the state. Marcus’s mother left in fury and despair. She had no desire for him to go to the middle school upstairs.

Our son got into one of the “good” middle schools. Last September he came home from the first day of school and told us that something was wrong. His classmates didn’t look like the kids in his elementary school. We found a pie chart that broke his new school down by race, and it left him stunned. Two-thirds of the students were white or Asian; barely a quarter were black or Latino. Competitive admissions had created a segregated school.

His will be the last such class. Two years ago, Mayor Bill de Blasio declared a new initiative to integrate New York City’s schools. Our district, where there are enough white families for integration to be meaningful, was chosen as a test case. Last year a committee of teachers, parents, and activists in the district announced a proposal: Remove the meritocratic hurdle that stands in the way of equality. The proposal would get rid of competitive admissions for middle school—grades, tests, attendance, behavior—which largely accounted for the racial makeup at our son’s new school. In the new system, students would still rank their choices, but the algorithm would be adjusted to produce middle schools that reflect the demography of our district, giving disadvantaged students a priority for 52 percent of the seats. In this way, the district’s middle schools would be racially and economically integrated. De Blasio’s initiative was given the slogan “Equity and Excellence for All.” It tried to satisfy democracy and meritocracy in a single phrase.

I went back and forth and back again, and finally decided to support the new plan. My view was gratuitous, since the change came a year too late to affect our son. I would have been sorely tested if chance had put him in the first experimental class. Under the new system, a girl at his former bus stop got matched with her 12th choice, and her parents decided to send her to a charter school. No doubt many other families will leave the public-school system. But I had seen our son flourish by going to an elementary school that looked like the city. I had also seen meritocracy separate out and demoralize children based on their work in fourth grade. “If you fail middle school,” our daughter said, “you fail life.” It was too soon for children’s fates to be decided by an institution that was supposed to serve the public good.

Read: Poor kids who believe in meritocracy suffer

I wanted the plan to succeed, but I had serious doubts. It came festooned with all the authoritarian excess of the new progressivism. It called for the creation of a new diversity bureaucracy, and its relentless jargon squashed my hope that the authors knew how to achieve an excellent education for all. Instead of teaching civics that faced the complex truths of American democracy, “the curriculum will highlight the vast historical contributions of non-white groups & seek to dispel the many non-truths/lies related to American & World History.”

“Excellence” was barely an afterthought in the plan. Of its 64 action items, only one even mentioned what was likely to be the hardest problem: “Provide support for [district] educators in adopting best practices for academically, racially & socioeconomically mixed classrooms.” How to make sure that children of greatly different abilities would succeed, in schools that had long been academically tracked? How to do it without giving up on rigor altogether—without losing the fastest learners?

We had faced this problem with our daughter, who was reading far ahead of her grade in kindergarten and begged her teacher for math problems to solve. When the school declined to accommodate her, and our applications to other public schools were unsuccessful, we transferred her to a new, STEM-focused private school rather than risk years of boredom. We regretted leaving the public-school system, and we were still wary of the competitive excesses of meritocracy, but we weren’t willing to abandon it altogether.

The Department of Education didn’t seem to be thinking about meritocracy at all. Its entire focus was on achieving diversity, and on rooting out the racism that stood in the way of that.

Late in the summer of 2018, a public meeting was called in our district to discuss the integration plan. It was the height of vacation season, but several hundred parents, including me, showed up. Many had just heard about the new plan, which buried the results of an internal poll showing that a majority of parents wanted to keep the old system. We were presented with a slideshow that included a photo of white adults snarling at black schoolchildren in the South in the 1960s—as if only vicious racism could motivate parents to oppose eliminating an admissions system that met superior work with a more challenging placement. Even if the placement was the fruit of a large historical injustice, parents are compromised; a policy that tells them to set aside their children’s needs until that injustice has been remedied is asking for failure. Just in case the implication of racism wasn’t enough to intimidate dissenters, when the presentation ended, and dozens of hands shot up, one of the speakers, a progressive city-council member, announced that he would take no questions. He waved off the uproar that ensued. It was just like the opt-out “education session” my wife had attended: The deal was done. There was only one truth.