#(Time did in fact remember that trick. They all got kicked out of the port)

[riddlemearose]

you're taller. how fucking dare you.

“Tune!” Link hears someone yell and, even though it’s been almost two years since he’s heard that name said by that voice, he still recognises it on the spot.

He turns, peering around the armful of supplies he’s holding. There’s a young man in green with a familiar blue scarf approaching them at high speed, just barely below a sprint.

“Din’s tits.” Tetra says from beside Link, baffled.

“You’re seeing this too?” Link asks, and sees her nod out of the corner of his eye.

The Captain skids to a stop in front of them, out of breath, and grins as bright as the sun. “Ha! We found you!”

“How in Cyclos’ damned name are you here?” Link replies, awed, all but dropping the equipment in his arms. The closed crates clatter to the ground, missing the toes of his boots by inches.

“L-long story.” The Captain pants. “Holy shit, you both got taller.”

“That is how the passage of time works.” Tetra immediately counters, a smirk on her face.

The Captain snorts, loud and undignified, and shakes his head, studying them both “How long has it been for both of you?”

“About two years.” Link answers, looking him over as well.

It’s hard to tell but he thinks the Captain looks a bit older. Not by much but just enough to suggest that time had passed. And, way more importantly, Link definitely got taller over the past two years! He comes up to the Captain’s shoulders now.

Ha, that’s a clear sign that Link absolutely will outgrow him. That’s what the Captain gets for spending the entire war teasing him and Mask with stupid shit like ‘What’s the weather down there like?’

Well, his fun and games are all over now because Link is definitely going to have the last laugh! 

“The sword is new.” The Captain eyes the Phantom Sword on Link’s back, a displeased frown tugging at the side of his mouth. “Second quest?”

“Second quest.” Tetra agrees with a dismissive wave of her hand. She squints back at him and teasingly points out, “You don’t look that old yet.”

“Thanks.” The Captain rolls his eyes. “Your concern for my life is very touching.”

“Well, you’re not dead at least.” Link offers, already ducking under the Captain’s retaliating swat that's aimed for the back of his head.

Despite his reaction, the Captain still looks fond. Link needs to tease him about that too: Captain Link, tactician and war hero extraordinaire, has gone soft.

“I do need to speak with you for a second, Tune, before he gets here.” There’s an almost tense edge to his voice, which doesn’t exactly bode well given Link’s past experiences with that tone.

Link frowns. “Who are you—”

“Warriors!” A new voice calls. They both turn to see a man striding towards them. He’s older than the Captain with shiny plate armour and interesting tattoos on one side of his face that Link can't quite make out from a distance.

Link squints at him. There’s… something about him, something that pings in the back of Link’s mind.

“Oh boy.” The Captain – Warriors, Link guesses, though that’s a pretty shit name if it’s really what he’s going by – mumbles under his breath, then waves at the man. “Over here, Time! I found him!”

Time’s face brightens – who’s picking these names they’re horrible – as he smiles, stopping beside them. He looks at Link and his smile turns smug. “Tune! I told you I was going to be taller than you.”

What? Link’s nose scrunches up. What the fuck is that supposed to mean?

Warriors smacks a hand to his forehead with a near-silent groan, but says nothing. Link peers up at Time’s face. Shit those tattoos are very vivid. And familiar. Why… does he recognise them?

Wait.

Wait.

He’s seen that pattern before. He knows that pattern, WHAT?!

Link splutters and points an accusing finger at Time, furious. “Mask!? When did you get old?! WHEN DID YOU GET TALL?!”

Mask—Time—whatever-his-name-is throws his head back and laughs, somehow managing to retain that smug grin all the while.

“How do you think I feel?” Warriors grumbles in quiet commiseration, his hand still pressed against his forehead.

“I DON’T CARE ABOUT YOU!” Link yells, waving his hands madly. “HE’S TALLER THAN ME!”

Damn every goddess Link can think of. And he’d just celebrated that he was pretty sure he would be taller than the Captain too WHAT THE FUCK?!

“I’m taller than both of you.” Time agrees cheerfully, still looking way too smug.

Link literally has to glare up at him – fuck, he hates that there’s this much of a height difference, Mask is such a DICK – and crosses his arms. “I hate you. How old are you? You look ancient.”

“Older than you.” Time replies instantly, meeting Link’s gaze head-on and completely ignoring his insult.

Rude. Rude.

Link studies him again, this time from a tactical angle rather than a general glance. He thinks, pondering the scheme forming in his mind over for a moment.

… You know what, yeah. He’s pretty confident that he can easily go for Mask’s knees, just like he used to. Mask looks old enough to have forgotten about that trick.

There will be absolutely no consequences for doing this. Link’s got this in the bag; Mask is gonna feel his wrath.

[jaydeemainmansblog]

And here we go you know what really grinds my gears The fact that Pensacola did not one computer on the end of their blocks okay just that run down apartment hotel Love you guys using me for an antenna screaming to pick up brakes on my ear

And Jacksonville and Hartford what are these cities all have in common they're using me for an antenna to scream to pitch that breaks glass in my ear out and I think I'm wired to the soundtrack of the cars driving by

You know you tell Colorado I'm not having sex with their daughter because she's freaking me out #hartford no they're they're using the little girl's voice over to satellite okay we nicknamed it Queen of the South Camila Harris... I think it's just Camila in the TV show..... Of them using a voice outside and and using good sounds yeah Orlando called it using good sounds no Port Orange Orlando called it using good sounds to trick me that we're in a city full of white people it rather it in a city full of of black people

That's right I had to deliver my address listen little white girl Dallas you're not in charge you have a City full of black people listen white girl of Kansas you're not in charge of cities field of black people

Anyways of them all being neighbors I'm so excited I'm listening we decided not to go back to Pittsburgh I think it's just if your salad wants to continue playing with fire okay we will move our arguments and start calling out the Chinese girls and every black girl around here I believe me I will continue to call out every Chinese girl and every black if you want to continue threatening States and threatening other cities rather than this one here in Hartford

It's a waste because you know what I'm going to get stranded down there and I got to deal with all those black skin car drivers of a Pensacola and Jacksonville and I don't want to deal with them again

But most importantly I just I thought I'd get online to the number one say Hartford I appreciate your offer but your your whites and girls something's wrong with them you know we have we have declared it and in Jacksonville she was shivering and shaking on every corner because the black skin and continue to kill little white skin boys in front of the super Walmart she was shivering and shaking on every corner cuz the black skin man could you kill little white skin boys in front of the Winn-Dixie... Right b**** right b****

And and again on a scale of 1 through 10 how bad do your little boys how bad do your men's balls stink...

But I don't know where we're going to have to read change the archive Virginia field a racist family Boston failed racist family and of course Colorado everyone knows them for a failed racist family oh

I said report #901 you're not going to believe what I found where I found it your satellite maker woman is talking to me now DCF has handed me over all the boys as as their guardian as their fathers okay because she's an unfit racist... They keep on talking to me about some imaginary better white boy a white white man and once again this is why this is what really grinds my gears at the end of this is all said and done they tried to force me to forget about all the good black people that I've lost all the good black boys and girls and all the good black men and women and and and pretend that it never happened and continue screaming in my ears at that accent you know... It's an x-ray flash card as is what it is one is a smoky screen one is gray and and the other one is it's completely black like a black flash card that they slap down or every time they say the word n***** so so again to put me in that dark hole it's unbelievable the little white hair girl still won the race yeah the little white hair grow is still marveled on every corner it is remembered on on every corner and on every corner of the salad is kicking and punching every black girl that we see

The problem I have which I'm going to draw blood from your family and I'm going to I'm going to see punitive damages is this little white hair white skin boy being worth more than this little black hair white skin boy that little two foot one that little 3 ft one and also more than your little black boy I can't live in a world where we dedicated our whole life to these black boys and girls and at the end of the day we have to we have to go to some little black girl's funeral and look at a picture of a white hair white and girl on the wall or go some little black boys funeral and see a picture of a white hair white skin boy on the wall

So so again for the inevitable to have happened you know we did call into action we're asking you guys to change your ways Colorado instead of sacrificing your white daughters sacrifice the black ones for the sanctity of of the next Colorado and the other country Virginia were asking you the same thing at Tennessee or ask you to stay strong as the only city having the few white hair white and girls left

No for you guys to be submitted by Tennessee it the fight was over before it begun again we are advising you guys instead of Colorado on every corner build a tendency on every corner and have that beautiful accident of that black girl sent it every one of these cities against you to throw out your trash or to tell your kids

[ugly-crying-over-bucky-barnes]

Roguish Women Part 48

Summary: Kate is an American who fled to Paris to escape her past life. Now she's dancing and  playing the part of a courtesan at the Moulin Rouge. There she meets Tommy Shelby who thinks she can be useful in expanding his empire. But has he been blinded?

Part 48: Kate and Tommy’s wedding. During the reception, Alfie asks a serious question. 

            “Tommy and I are getting married tomorrow. I still can’t believe it. Even saying it out loud is like a surprise.” Kate laughed softly to herself. She was in the stables, taking her time grooming Blue. It was spring and his winter coat was shedding off and Kate wanted to see his black coat gleaming in the warm sun again. She spoke softly with the gelding as she combed his made and brushed his coat.

            Although she was happy about finally getting to the altar after such a long time of waiting, nerves were starting to get the better of her. With her past and with Tommy’s, it was hard to tell what the future held. But what Kate wanted was to at least try to guarantee a good life for their children.

            Besides, she decided that maybe she was still clinging to the idea that she didn’t deserve love. Something that she knew Tommy struggled with too.

            “I’m sure everything will go alright. At least Tommy’s already gone through a wedding before.”

            “Oi, heard that.”

            Kate poked her head out of the stall and smiled. Her fiancée was walking down the stable aisle. “I’m just stating facts.” She replied with a smug look. "Out of the two of us, you're the one with wedding experience." 

            Tommy chuckled and pecked her lips. “You might want to duck out while you can, the boys are coming soon.” The day before the wedding, Arthur set up to go hunting in Warwickshire to celebrate with just the lads. “And they’ve already had a go at some champagne.”

            “Well, I’ll make myself scarce. I don’t want to ruin the fun.” She teased.

            “Oh please, they’d get a kick out of you coming along.” Tommy stroked Blue’s nose as he poked his head out of the stall to greet him. “Want me to take him?”

            “What do you think?” Kate cooed to the gelding. “Do you want to go along for the hunt?” She patted his strong neck. “I think he’d have fun. Lord knows I can’t entertain him much.” She rested a hand on her stomach. It was more than obvious that Kate was pregnant. At five months she had gone through a variety of getting dresses rehemmed or buying new clothes all together.

            “I’ll take good care of him,” Tommy promised and began to head to the tack room. But his fiancée stopped him.

            “Y’know, I was talking to Frances today,” She said. “Um, about the nursery.”

            The two had talked plenty about the pregnancy and subsequently the child or children, depending on if Polly was right. They had even discussed names. But the upstairs of Arrow House had become like a minefield.

            Grace’s room was locked and only Tommy had the key. The unfinished nursery that adjoined the room was still under debate. Kate felt as if it was her duty to make sure she wasn’t forcing him into anything. The estate had more than enough rooms to accommodate them if he wanted to close off that part of the hallway.

            Yet Tommy had pushed his feelings down. Deep down. As if he was trying to force everything to be okay.

            “The nursery is half done.” He replied. “All the furniture is new; we’d just need another cot if it’s twins like Pol says.”

            “If it’s twins then maybe we should use one of the bigger rooms?” She moved cautiously through the conversation. The last thing she wanted to do was put a damper on his day. But she still thought it was important.

            He met her eyes. “Kate, we talked about this.”

            “I know I just worry that you’re not addressing how you feel.” She touched his cheek. “The more honest you are with yourself; the easier life is.”

            “We have time on another day to discuss it further.” He kissed her cheek. “Go on back to the house and rest. We’ve got a big day tomorrow.”

 ~~~~~~~~~~

            “I think you’re right about twins, Pol,” Ada said.

            “When have I been wrong?”

            Kate chuckled softly. She turned right and left to look at herself in the mirror. Ada wasn’t joking. She remembered seeing Ada and Esme pregnant and they didn’t show nearly as much as she did. Especially in a wedding dress, it was hard to conceal. Not that she particularly meant to. She didn’t think anyone who was coming to the wedding that day would be openly critical. “Are there twins in your family?” She wondered.

            “Maybe a pair on the Strong side,” Polly recalled and walked over to place a dazzling barrette in Kate’s hair to hold back the curls from her face.

            “I didn’t know my mother’s side of the family very well,” Kate admitted. “It may be from her family.”

            Polly pivoted the conversation. “Are you sure about walking down the aisle alone? Arthur said he would walk with you.”

            “Yeah, he talked to me about it yesterday.” Kate mindlessly adjusted her dress in the mirror, smoothing a hand over her baby bump. “I appreciate it, but I’ll be alright.” There was never a point in her life where she pictured anyone giving her away. She never pictured herself walking down the aisle, to begin with. Her father was never fit enough to be that sort of figure in her life before his death. She felt much more comfortable making the short walk by herself. That's how she found her way to Tommy, all on her own.

            “Here.” Ada helped Kate step into her heels so she wouldn’t have to bend down.

            “Well, if you change your mind, I’m sure Arthur won’t mind the short notice.” Polly smiled and made sure every Kate’s hair was in place.

            Ada glanced up as she fixed the straps of Kate’s heels. “Is it true you invited Alfie Solomons?” She wondered.

            “I know his popularity in the family is mixed but he’s a good friend.” Kate asserted so there would be no confusion on the matter.

            “It’s your day. Whoever you want at your wedding, you can invite.” Polly nodded in agreement. Although in the back of her mind she hoped that Tommy had prepared the others to see Alfie. She didn’t want the wedding erupting in chaos over some old bad blood.

~~~~~~~~~~~ 

            “I’m leaving.”

            “Brother, easy.” Tommy grabbed Arthur by the suit sleeve before he could storm across the lawns and out of sight.

            The guests were starting to take their seats and it just so happened that Alfie Solomons had a near front-row seat to watch the affair. He had a beautiful woman on his arm, Mabel. She looked less like the painfully shy thing that Kate had met at the boxing match. In fact, she was positively glowing with happiness as she exchanged kisses with her sister and the other ladies of the Forty Elephants.

            “You invite him to your fucking wedding? Your home?” Arthur seethed under his breath trying not to cause too much of a scene until he had an explanation.

            “Kate invited him,” Tommy replied quietly, not to draw attention to them. “And I won’t have you fighting with him on my fucking wedding day. I’ll keep him away from you if you promise you won’t kick-off. If you upset Kate, you're dead.”

            Arthur narrowed his eyes and reached into his coat pocket for his flask. “Could’ve warned me.” He muttered.

            “I did tell you. Not my fault you were too high on snow not to remember.” Tommy let go of Arthur’s sleeve, confident that his threat had done the trick. “He’s retired, anyways.”

            “Men like that don’t retire.” Arthur tucked his flask away.

            "Men like us don't retire." Tommy clarified. 

            The sun had come out, thankfully, for the wedding. Although Polly wanted the union to be under God’s watchful eye, Tommy and Kate had balked. Kate was unsure if she wanted to step on a nerve and get married in the same church Tommy and Grace did. There was no use in being forced to relive painful memories on what was supposed to be a happy day.

            Kate suggested perhaps getting married outside. Arrow House had plenty of room out in the lawns. And it reminded her of John and Esme’s wedding. There was something so romantic to her about the beautiful countryside in the spring.

            Tommy agreed and a suitable wedding venue was arranged. They were just fortunate that the weather had held and it hadn’t rained like the week before.

            So many times, Tommy had thought he’d lost Kate for good. On his journey to bring her home, he was restless as they crossed the Atlantic.

He hardly slept at all, spending most of his time, smoking on the deck of the ship. In the night, he waited until land came into view. But the inky black expanse of the waters and the night sky gave him nothing.

            He tried to think of what to say to her. The last words she spoke to him still cut so deep. He knew they weren’t true. She still loved him. But she was trying to keep him safe, trying to sacrifice herself.

            He pictured beating Santo Leoni into a bloody pulp. The sound of the gun as he put a bullet through the man’s head.

            Finally, the coast came into view. Exhausted but the drive to bring Kate back to safety kept him awake and alert.

            On the phone, Frank told him that Kate was fine and that she had killed Santo herself. Tommy hung up and could barely stand still as he waited. The wait at the port felt longer than the entire trip across the ocean. Every second dragged on until the car pulled up.

            Kate threw herself out of the car before it had even stopped. Tommy felt so much relief he could’ve cried. He vowed to himself that he would never let her go from that point on.

            “You look like you’ve gone into a dream state,” Kate murmured to him when Tommy took her hand.

            “I’m trying to convince myself it isn’t a dream.” He replied with a soft smile.

 ~~~~~~~~~~

            “Oh, they’ve been inseparable since he left for Margate. Lillian said Mabel hasn't come back to Camden since she first visited him. She simply had her stuff sent to her. Been there ever since and has no plans of leaving.” Alice loosely held the champagne flute in her hand. She and Kate were speaking on the edges of the dancefloor. "Of course, everyone's talking about it, but nothing to change. They seem to be in love, far as Lillian says." 

            Arrow House was abuzz with energy after Tommy and Kate married. The reception was considerably less proper compared to Tommy’s first one with Grace. With no cavalry members in sight, it was a little more relaxed. Not to mention the number of criminal masterminds in attendance. But truthfully, they were the most fun.

            Kate looked smug watching Alfie and Mabel talking across the dance floor. “Well, I won’t say I told him so.”

            Alice smiled and finished her champagne. “Alfie handed over some paperwork to me this morning.”

            “Oh?”

            “Wants me to take over the bakery.”

            Kate tried to play it cool even though she was excited for her friend and even more excited that Alfie had gone through with what he said. Maybe this was his final act of retirement and his acceptance of his new life with Mabel. “Well, you have the support of the Peaky Blinders.”

            “Just can’t wait to see Sabini’s face when he finds out.”

            “Ha,” Kate snorted. “I’d like to see that too.”

            “Mind if I interrupt?” Tommy stepped into their conversation.

            Kate beamed. What had been such a beautiful ceremony was melting into the ideal she never knew she wanted. A life forever by the side of the man she loved.

            “Of course.” Alice smiled. “I’m going to go find Lillian and Ruby.”

            Tommy took Kate’s hand and led her to the dancefloor. Holding her close, they began to sway together to the soft jazz music.

            “You haven’t gone off to meet with some crazy Russian duchess again, have you?” Kate teased.

            He chuckled. “For a Shelby wedding, this has been very uneventful.”

            “The night is still young.” She murmured in his ear with a smile.

            “I like it better this way.” He admitted. “I didn’t want anything to happen, it wouldn’t be fair to you.”

            “You’ve always treated me like I’m some sort of royalty.” She lightly ran her fingers up the nape of his neck.

            “That’s how you deserve to be treated. Every day I was apart from you, I promised I would make it up to you.”

            “Tom, you don’t need to beat yourself up because of the past. I’m here, we’re finally married. We’re going to be parents soon. Everything that happened, happened. And despite all of it, all my paths lead back to you.” She stopped dancing a moment so she could look him in the eyes. “And they always will.”

            Tommy saw the world in her eyes. A world very unlike the one he had planned for so many years. In Kate’s eyes, he saw himself walking away from everything. Moving into Arrow House permanently. Raising the children, they would have. Spending his days riding horses, hunting, and being the best father, he could.

            Those blue eyes invited him to do all of that and more. But he couldn’t. Not yet.

            He gently kissed her, hoping that he could hold steady onto his given path.

 ~~~~~~~~~~

            “Thought I’d find you out here.” Tommy sat down on the front steps next to Alfie. “Mabel was asking around for you. Kate had me come look for you.”

            Alfie seemed to snap out of his thoughts. “Oh, congratulations, mate.” He hadn’t really heard what Tommy had said to him. “Kate’s very happy. Y’know, before all this she’d come into me office. I figured it was because she was doing her fucking job but then she’d start lamenting to me about you. Like I were her gossip buddy.” He snorted and shook his head. “She wanted nothing more than to have you but didn’t think she deserved it. Of course, you and I both know it’s the opposite way around, innit?”

            Tommy shrugged.

            “I don’t deserve Mabel. Not in a million years. Not even if God himself came down and told me we were meant to be.”

            “I thought you two were hitting it off. That’s what Kate said.”

            “I ain’t never been so happy.”

            Tommy raised an eye at him. “Then what’s the problem, Alfie?”

            The man beside him took a heavy deep breath. “I’m dying, Tom. I told Kate at the boxing match. I’ve got skin cancer and it’ll kill me in a couple of years if I’m lucky. That’s why I want you to kill me.”

            After two blows, Tommy was a bit speechless. Alfie was dying and he wanted him to kill him. In what world were they living? This certainly wasn’t the man who had threatened to shoot Tommy on many occasions.

            “I’m not going to kill you, Alfie.”

            “Oh, c’mon you know you’ve wanted to fucking put a bullet through me head ever since we met. I ain’t blind. Now I’m giving you the option and you turn it down like a scared little boy?” Alfie wasn’t angry. When he was angry, everyone around him knew. No, this was fear. Fear coming from a man who claimed to be fearless.

            “What would that do to Mabel? Aye? And d’you think Kate would ever speak to me if I did?” Tommy questioned harshly. “You’ve got another part of life to appreciate, try not to skip out on it.”

            “Yeah, how much you think I’m gonna enjoy that while I’m rotting away?” Alfie demanded. “While Mabel watches?”

            Tommy shook his head. The logic wasn’t lost on him. How many nights had he been wide awake wondering how long he had to suffer? How much longer would he tolerate the pain and weight of the world? How many times had someone held a gun to his head? How many times was he completely at peace with the cold metal of a gun pressed against his skin? How many times had he waited patiently for that click and then….nothing.

            “I’m not killing you.” He said again. Because if Tommy had given in, he wouldn’t be sitting there. Married and about to be a father. “We’ll get the best doctors in London to help.”

            “Oh, right. So now you’re my saving grace?” Alfie rolled his eyes. “Fucking ridiculous. I don’t want some fucking doctor drugging me up. I ain’t gonna roam around life high like you lot.”

            “I know you don’t think you deserve Mabel. Maybe you don’t. Maybe I don’t deserve Kate. But look at us, aye? They’re still here with us. You fucking need God to come down and explain that to you?”

            Alfie grunted and crossed his arms over his chest. “I knew you’d be no fucking help.”

            “Take it up with Kate. See how she reacts and then you’ll realize how much easier I was on you.” Tommy replied and lit up a cigarette. “She’d go ballistic.”

            The two men sat out in the breezy spring night. Past the gravel drive was nothing but dark countryside with the sounds of nocturnal life.

            “I saw the ring Mabel was wearing.” Even at his own wedding reception, Tommy was perceptive. He could never turn it off even if he wanted.

            Alfie merely muttered something incoherent under his breath.

            “So, I invite you to my wedding but I’m not given the same courtesy.”

            “It were a gift.” He grumbled crankily. "Can't I buy jewelry for her without people getting their knickers in a twist?"

            Tommy tapped the ash off his cigarette to the step beside him. “So, no plans then?”

            “Her mum threw a fit when she found out. Even in retirement, I’m still the devil of Camden. No one wants their women near me. Her mum hated that we were friends when we were kids. Guess she thought she was in clear, that I wouldn't ever go near Mabel again.” He let out a humorless laugh. "Guess she were wrong and now I'm corrupting her thirty-four-year-old daughter. S'fucking ridiculous." 

            “Since when have you cared what anyone else thinks?”

            “I don't. But Mabel's getting an earful every night. Ain't fair to her." Alfie shrugged. “Just know there won’t be no blessings coming my way, that’s for sure.”

            “Except for Kate.”

            He laughed. “It’s tough to disappoint her, innit?”

            “I think she’d be disappointed if I killed you especially if she found out you asked me to do it.”

            “There’s just no pleasing some people.” Alfie shook his head.

            “Come on.” Tommy stood up. “Don’t want Kate thinking you’ve skipped off without saying goodbye to her.”

Permanent Tag: @papa-geralt-of-cirilla @biba3434 @kimmietea @karmezii @enrapturedbythemoon @vampgirl1997 @tarafaithe @evelynshelby

Tag list: @radical-gecko @actorinfluence @meltingicequeen @merlettina

Masterpost

PB Masterlist

[worryinglyinnocent]

Dead Man Walking (6/?)

Summary: Prime Ministers don’t normally wake up in morgues after they’ve been murdered, but that’s exactly what Robert Sutherland has just done. Right in front of Lacey’s nose. With limited resources and not knowing who to trust, Sutherland and Lacey must work together to get to the bottom of the attempted assassination.

Based loosely on this dream I had.

Rated: T, eventually E.

Note: This is meant to be ‘darkly humorous and amusing mystery’ rather than ‘gripping political thriller’…

[One] [Two] [Three] [Four] [Five] [AO3]

===

Dead Man Walking

Six

“So, I’ve got two questions.”

Considering what they were about to undertake, Carrie would have forgiven Ursula for having many more than two questions. Carrie herself had several questions, most of them coming back to the ultimate question, one to which she did not know the answer: why had she drunk so much elderflower wine tonight?

“Fire away.”

“How are you going to get in once we get there, and do you even know what you’re looking for once you get inside?”

Carrie pondered these questions for a moment. They were certainly very good questions, and shamefully enough, they were not among the questions that Carrie had been asking herself. 

“Actually, I’ve thought of a third.” Ursula glanced over at her passenger. “Are you completely, absolutely insane?”

“Darling, you have to be a little bit mad to work in the civil service, it’s the only way that any of us are able to survive all of the politicians.” She paused. It was true that she had launched into this plan without much of, well, a plan, but one thing that years of working with Sutherland and everyone else in government had taught Carrie was that she was very good at thinking on her feet. It made her proud to remember just how many seemingly inevitable catastrophes had been avoided at the last minute due to her quick intervention. 

Failed assassinations had never yet featured on the list, but it seemed like as good a thing as any to add to her repertoire. 

“Right.” Ursula was silent for a long time as they drove through the countryside, the dawn beginning to break over them. “And about the other two questions?”

“Well, considering how hushed up Spencer is trying to keep everything at the moment, I should imagine that I’ll be able to get in on sheer audacity alone. I’m the PM’s Chief of Staff, they’re not going to stop me without good reason, even if Spencer told me to go home.” 

“Right.” Ursula was still clearly unconvinced. “And what are you looking for when you get there? I highly doubt that the culprit will have left a lot of evidence lying around. This isn’t Midsomer Murders.”

“Maybe not, but I’ve played enough games of Cluedo in my time, and you can’t deny that this is a large and ominous country house.”

They were nearing the Chequers drive now, the house just visible in the distance, and Ursula nodded.

“Yep, very large and ominous, I’ll definitely give you that. I thought we’d established that he was poisoned, not hit with any lead piping.”

Carrie sighed theatrically. “Do you have to spoil my analogies? I’m doing the best I can here.”

For the first time since they had first met her on their journey to the hospital, Ursula really laughed. It was a genuine laugh of amusement, nothing sarcastic or malicious in it, and Carrie smiled. 

“OK, I’ll trust your judgement,” she said eventually. “Now, do I just drive straight up, or should I park around the corner, or what? And please don’t suggest speeding through the barrier, I don’t think that the insurance would like me for that.”

The security checkpoint was coming up, stereotypical red and white barrier across the road. 

“You might as well drive on up.” Carrie squinted through the windscreen, trying to see who was on duty in the security booth, but it was impossible. “There’s no point in trying to sneak in if there’s no need to.” She rummaged in her bag for her ID as Ursula inched the car closer and closer to the barrier.

Steve was on duty in the booth, and Carrie thought that she might be in with a chance. She’d spent enough time at Chequers that she knew all of the security staff probably better than they wanted her to, and Steve was one who could be considered a friend in a time of need. She hoped. 

Steve looked at her ID, at her, back at her ID, and then at his watch. 

“It’s five o’clock in the morning,” he said. 

Carrie raised an eyebrow. “You don’t say.”

Steve looked at her in disbelief. “What could possibly be so important that it can’t wait until later?”

Carrie was about to say something along the lines of the Prime Minister being dead, but she stopped herself just in time. “When did you come on shift, Steve?”

“Two o’clock.”

“And has Spencer spoken to you at all about certain events that transpired last night in this very building?”

Steve shook his head as he handed her ID back to her, and Carrie gave a theatrical sigh. 

“Well, I’m sure that what you don’t know can’t hurt you, but there’s certainly a lot that we’re going to have to catch you up on at some point. Suffice it to say, I have some urgent business to attend to.”

“Do you want me to phone up to the house and let them know you’re coming?”

“No, no,” Carrie said, hoping that she didn’t sound too hasty. “They’re expecting me. I’m sure it won’t take long, but you know how they all are.”

No elaboration was needed. Steve did indeed know how the Civil Service were, having worked alongside them for enough years to be able to take all the red tape in his stride. 

The barrier lifted up and Ursula proceeded up the driveway towards the house. 

“I can’t believe that worked,” she said. 

“Oh, I can.” Carrie grinned. “Spencer likes to play his cards close to his chest. He always has, it’s one of the many things about him that really, really infuriates Robert.”

“Right…” They fell silent again until they were parking up in front of the house, whereupon Ursula spoke again. 

“You know, I’ve never really known what this place looked like until now. I’ve always known vaguely that Chequers was a place and the Prime Minister lived there sometimes, but I’m not sure what I was expecting. So, this is what my hard-earned taxes go towards.”

“Yep, mine too.” Carrie patted her new friend’s arm. “Now, you just wait here, and I’ll go and see what I can find.”

“Are you sure you’re going to be all right on your own?” Considering how sceptical Ursula had been for the entirety of the night so far, Carrie was quite touched by her concern. “I mean, you’re already hungover if not still drunk.”

Carrie was not quite as touched by that remark, and she hopped out of the car. “I’ll be fine, darling. I always land on my feet.” This statement was not helped by her losing her balance as she tried to shut the car door, and she caught Ursula’s raised eyebrow. “I’m fine!”

She stood outside the house for a long time, pondering the best way in. On the one hand, just going up and knocking on the front door probably wouldn’t get her very far, because the people inside the house would be aware of everything that had happened overnight, and Spencer had likely instructed them not to let her in. On the other hand, given the vast amounts of CCTV around the place, sneaking in through a window was not going to be a valid idea either. 

Still, nothing chanced, nothing gained.  She could always think up a new plan later. Carrie strode up to the front door and knocked sharply. Not that she really needed to knock, they would have seen her coming. Announcing her presence loudly might not have been the best option, but she had a few tricks up her sleeve yet. Namely, the fact that Robert was indeed still alive and kicking, and not in the hospital morgue where he was supposed to be. This would have thrown Spencer off balance, and hopefully, he would be so busy trying to perform damage limitation that she would be able to work around him.

Sure enough, a few moments later the door opened, and Carrie stepped inside to find herself face to face with a bleary-eyed security guard.

“Good morning, Charlie.”

Charlie looked her up and down and then up at the clock on the wall. “You’re here early. Spencer said that you’d gone to stay with your mother after…” The sentence trailed off. 

“Yes, yes.” Carrie waved Charlie’s statement away. “I forgot some things, darling. You know, with everything going on, my head was all over the place.” She caught the guard’s slightly incredulous look. “Well, more all over the place than it already was. If you just let me through like a sweetheart, I’ll be in and out in two minutes.”

Well, that wasn’t likely, considering that she still didn’t really know what she was looking for in terms of evidence, but no-one else needed to know that.

Charlie was definitely in two minds about the whole thing. Whilst the internal security team were definitely aware of what had happened, Carrie wasn’t sure how much Spencer would have told them about the events that had occurred after the Prime Minister had been taken away, and whether or not he would have instructed them to keep her out of the building after he had sent her home. 

Finally, Charlie stood back and let her through. “All right. But be quick. Spencer’s in a real mood tonight. I mean, it’s a huge shock, I can understand that, but he’s being even more of an arsehole about it than usual.”

Carrie air-kissed both of Charlie’s cheeks before practically dancing through the metal detector. “Darling, you’re a treasure.”

She was in, and no real subterfuge had been needed. Now all she needed to do was find her evidence whilst hopefully avoiding Spencer. 

The first port of call was Robert’s office. The open doorway was sealed off with strips of police tape, and it took a bit of wriggling to ease her way inside. For a brief moment she wondered if she should have worn gloves to avoid leaving fingerprints, but then she remembered that she was in here so often that all her prints would be all over everything anyway. 

The coffee cup that Robert had drunk from, and that had most likely poisoned him, was conspicuously absent. Spencer had obviously taken away that particular shred of evidence. There wasn’t likely to be anything else in the room. Carrie leaned back against the desk with a sigh, finally accepting that she had not thought this through properly. 

It was as she was looking at everything on the desk that inspiration struck. It would be a tricky idea to pull off, but if it worked, it was the best shot that she had. 

She needed Spencer’s phone. He never went anywhere without it and if there was going to be anything incriminating anywhere in Chequers, then it would be there. The downside to this, of course, was that he never went anywhere without it, so getting her hands on it would be difficult. 

She straightened up and squeezed out of the doorway again, creeping down the corridors on bare feet towards the office that Spencer used on the rare occasions that he came down from London. She could hear him talking as she got closer, and it made her smile to hear that he seemed rather flustered. 

Carrie inched closer, trying to get the gist of what was being said. Maybe this conversation would be enough in itself and she wouldn’t need his phone after all. She grabbed her own, setting it to record, and she pressed herself up against the wall. 

“Yes, I know that bodies don’t get out of morgues without assistance!” Spencer was saying. “No, I don’t know where he’s gone! I can understand kidnapping a living Prime Minister but kidnapping a dead one is just ridiculous!”

There was a long pause; Carrie couldn’t make out the voice on the other end, but they didn’t sound impressed. She wondered who on earth he could be talking to, her heart beating painfully in her mouth. Since beginning to suspect Spencer, she’d always had the horrible sinking feeling that he wasn’t working alone. Although he was certainly scheming - he wouldn’t have risen to his current lofty position had he not been - she didn’t think that he was intelligent enough to think up an assassination plot all on his own. Especially not one that used a niche poison that simulated natural death like Robert’s had been. 

Robert had his enemies, all politicians did, and being Prime Minister meant that he had more than most. Carrie shook her head, not wanting to get into that train of thought. She worked with all the cabinet on a daily basis and whilst she knew that there were power struggles and more than one person with their eyes on Robert’s job, she didn’t think that any of them would stretch to murder. 

She hoped none of them would stretch to murder.

“Yes, I’m sure!” She could hear the exasperation in Spencer’s voice and pressed a hand over her mouth to stop her from giggling and betraying her position. Oh, this frustration really couldn’t have happened to a nicer person. “Look, he’s dead, he can’t exactly have gone far. Yes, I’m sure he’s dead!”

Carrie began to creep away. She’d heard more than enough, and Charlie might be coming to look for her at any moment. She was almost at the end of the corridor when she heard Spencer’s door open, and she jumped through the nearest doorway to avoid detection, ending up in the small cloakroom where visitors could freshen up before meeting the Prime Minister. There was some kind of commotion going on at the front of the house, and her stomach churned, hoping that Ursula was still ok in the taxi. 

Spencer marched down the corridor, right past Carrie’s hiding place none the wiser, and began barking orders. Carrie peeped out, waiting until the coast was clear before scuttling back towards the front door and Charlie.

The guard seemed rather relieved to see her; the front door was open and from outside, Carrie could see Ursula being herded back towards the car by one of the other guards.

“Is everything all right?” Carrie asked. 

Charlie nodded. “She was trying to get in to look for you, muttering something about being left stranded without you paying the fare. Did you get what you were looking for?”

“Oh, yes. It was a very successful trip, thank you, Charlie.”

Carrie waltzed out of the door towards Ursula, whose expression turned into one of relief as they walked quickly towards the car. 

“Don’t worry, I’m here. Your fare will be paid in full as soon as we get back to my mother’s.”

“I, erm, I wasn’t actually worried about the fare.” Ursula looked up from fastening her seatbelt, her face a little sheepish. “I was more worried about you. I thought a distraction might help and it was the only thing I could think of.”

Carrie could only nod, stunned. “Well, it certainly worked, thank you.”

“Glad to be of service. Did you get it? Well, I don’t exactly know what ‘it’ is supposed to be. Did you get something?”

Carrie waved her phone. “I did indeed.”

“Great.” Ursula seemed genuinely happy to hear of the successful plot, and the trip back to the de Ville residence was made in uncharacteristic quiet. Carrie kept glancing sideways at Ursula as she drove, still gobsmacked that Ursula had been worried about her and had tried to help in her not necessarily legal endeavours, especially after everything else that had happened during the night. 

She was definitely beginning to see her new friend in an entirely different light.

[smallbutplucky]

A Dutiful Son -The Chronicles of Varric Tethras

For a while, I was working on a fan fiction chronicling a younger Varric’s life before he met Hawke and give some insight into what I believe shaped him into the Dwarf we all know and love. I’ve gotten distracted with a few projects and so this story is probably going to sit for a while, but I thought I’d post a few roughdrafts of the earlier chapters to see if anyone would even read the full thing someday. Feel free to give feedback! *Update 3/19/19 - I’ve received enough feedback from people that I’ve decided to continue writing this story. Still deciding whether to just post here on Tumblr or make a Fanfiction.net account. Varric crashed to the ground in a cloud of dirt and sawdust. The lad blinked away stars as his eye stung from the sucker punch he just received. The clatter of his stool falling with him drew the attention of everyone in the Saucy Maid Tavern, who paused in their drinks to watch the unexpected show. The two sailors he played against looked furious to say the least after the Angel of Death card was played and Varric revealed a winning hand, earning him the rather impressive pile of coins in the middle of the table. Varric tried to compose himself on the ground as Gael stomped around the table and leaned menacingly over the dwarf.

 “You little shit!” Gael growled as his shipmate Elias reached across the table to look at Varric’s fallen hand of cards. “ You cheated, dwarf!” Varric scoffed and looked quite wounded at the accusation despite the truth that he had in fact, cheated. Two of the barmaids and the old man in the corner all kept tabs and gave him signals on what his opponents had in hand. But he wasn’t about to own up to that. “I cheated? where did you get those Serpent cards?” “The same place you got those Angels. I knew you were cheating!.” “Oh yeah? How?” the Dwarf challenged as Elias tossed Varric’s cards across the table.  “Because that wasn’t the hand I dealt you!” Gael emphasized with a solid kick to Varric’s stomach, leaving the young Dwarf breathless. Gasping for air, Varric staggered to his hands and knees, hoping the beer and meat pie from earlier weren’t going to make a reappearance. As he desperately sucked in air, he could see that neither the barmaids nor the old man were going to jump in and help him, but then again he wasn’t paying them to fight for him--only to cheat. “You  Dwarves think you’re so clever, but you’re a damn fool if you think you’re getting a sovereign of our money!” “In fact,” Elias smirked, pulling out his purse “I think the pot will go to us today.” Varric balked at the sound of his coin falling into the human’s purse, but consented with a smile as he sat back on his heels..“Seems fair, let it be known a Dwarf keeps his honor when beaten.” The Tavern patrons chuckled at Varric’s assertion and began returning to their drinks. Varric started to rise to his feet but Gael firmly gripped the Dwarf’s shoulder, keeping him off balance.  “You’re not getting off that easy, Dwarf.”  “How can we be sure you won’t try to cheat our friends out of their money if they come here?” Elias wondered,  tightened the strings on his purse with a dramatic flare and tossing it on the table. “I think we need to make sure you remember this little lesson.” Before Varric could register what the human was implying, Gael grabbed him by the shirt and slammed him onto the table. Elias slowly rose from his chair and drew a long thin knife from his belt, the metal gleaming in the lantern light. The Tavern fell in a hush at the sudden promise of violence. “Enough of that, serrahs, you leave that lad alone!” The bartender barked from behind the bar, “I won’t have Dwarf blood all over my tables!” “You stay out of this, old man!” Elias ordered, pointing the knife menacingly at the bartender. “This Lowtown trash needs to learn!” Gael leaned over Varric, splaying the Dwarf’s arms and holding them down. Varric struggled futilely to free his arms from under the much bigger human as Elias twirled his knife perversely in his hand. “Tell me, Dwarf” Elias sneered, as he leaned over to look Varric in the eyes “how attached to your nose are you?” “Very.” Varric snarled, quickly jamming his knee up and hitting Gael firmly in the groin. The human sailor fell to the ground with a groan as Varric took advantage of his free arms to grab a tankard and slam it into Elias’s face. Elias dropped his knife and gave a howl of pain as blood gushed from his nose. Scrambling off the table, Varric snatched the heavy purse and tucked it in his belt as he bolted from the tavern, a chorus of farewells, cheers, and laughter following him. Pausing in the door, Varric gave an elegant bow as the two sailors struggled to recover from their injuries.  “Until the next time, Saucy Maid!” “There won’t be a next time if you don’t start running laddie!” a patron called out as the humans stumbled towards the door. Crap. Varric cringed as he turned and made a break for the streets of Lowtown. Dodging between beggars and jumping over merchant tables, Varric chuckled to himself as  he peeked over his shoulders and found the sailors nowhere in sight. Trotting amiably down a set of stairs, his eyes swept the corridor, looking for anything familiar. Varric silently chided himself, realizing that he may have gotten turned around in his heroic fleeing. Spotting a familiar looking door, Varric’s eyes brightened as he suddenly remembered the path to take to get back to Hightown. Taking a left, Varric found himself in a dead end alley. Grumbling to himself, Varric  realized just how lost he was when the sound of boots pounding pavement echoed towards him. Frantically looking for something big enough to hide behind, Varric froze in dread as Gael and Elias stumbled into the alleyway. Panting with a wild look in their eyes, Varric tried to put on a disarming smile as they prowled towards him. Well, shit.

“Oh, hello boys!”

“Didn’t think you’d see us so soon?”  Gael smirked, cracking his knuckles ominously.

“Hoping, would be the better term.” the Dwarf admitted, backing away from them. “You aren’t still sore about what happened back there--” “You broke my nose!” Elias cut in, his nose, indeed swollen and bruised.

Varric grimaced at Elias’s bloody face, and felt his stomach drop into the Deep Roads as he realized he was in for a lot worse than just a sliced nose now.

“When we’re done with you dwarf, we’re tossing whatever’s left onto the first slave ship we see!” There it was.

One dwarf against two angry humans was not going to be a fair or long fight. Watching Elias and Gael pull out their knives, his breath hitched as he reached behind his back for his own blade. Licking his lips, his mind raced for a plan that would end with him walking out of the alley alive, and only one came to mind. Letting go of the hilt of his sheathed knife, he put his hands up disarmingly.

“Now wait a moment, serrahs.” Varric reasoned, standing his ground against their approaching figures. “I think we’re missing a prime opportunity here. Now I can understand you wanting to pay me back for the broken beak, but hear me out first.” Gael and Elias shared a hesitant look, and while they did not sheath their weapons, neither took another step towards Varric. Taking a moment to lay out his proposition, Varric decided honesty would be the key in this battle. “ Now did I cheat in that game? Yes-- yes I did. But, so did you. And if either of us played against any other drunk, we would have walked away with lined pockets and no one would have been the wiser. We’re all clever men here, that’s the only reason we all got caught! Now imagine if we combined our techniques? We’d be set!” “You’d be set!” Gael pointed out “Our boat leaves tomorrow, you’d vanish with our tricks and our money--again!” “You wound me, Gael.” Varric mourned “Naturally I’d keep a book of my winnings and every time you came into port, a heavy purse with your names on it would be waiting for you in Kirkwall. What do you say?” The two looked as if they were considering letting Varric go with all his body parts in place, when a deep voice echoed into the alley. “There you are Varric!” Peeking between the two sailors, Varric gave a huge sigh of relief at the sight of two of his house servants at the entrance of the alcove. Hugin, while not a particularly impressive dwarf, served as Bartrand’s steward, and that came with experience in fighting in back alleys when deals go bad. Behind Hugin was Mori, the house kitchen boy, and a good friend of Varric’s. While he didn’t really engage in Guild business, a few drunken nights on the town taught Varric that the boy had a mean right hook. Luck seemed to be on Varric’s side tonight.  Good, the bitch owed him a few. “Everything alright here, Messer?” Hugin pressed, eyeing the two humans warily. “Just having a friendly conversation.” Varric smiled at Gael and Elias pointedly. “Walk away Dwarves, our quarrel is with this Lowtown trash, not you.” Gael warned, turning to brandish his blade at the two house servants. 

“Messer Varric  is hardly Lowtown trash!” Mori chuckled. “He’s of house Tethras, and a high standing member of the Dwarven Guild.

“I suggest you run back to your boats, humans.”  Hugin offered, pulling out a knife of his own. “Unless you plan to make enemies of the Guild today.”

Both humans stiffened at the thought, and skittish looks crossed their faces. Even if they survived this skirmish in the alley, crossing the Guild meant a Coterie knife in your back or a poisoned drink with your supper. Suddenly a little card game seemed a petty thing to lose a life over.

Elias quickly sheathed his blade and Gael reluctantly followed suit.  They cautiously edged closer to the two dwarves and the only exit, holding their hands up in a sign on peace.

“Forgive us Serrahs, we meant no offense.” Elias begged.

“They had a little too much to drink.” Varric offered with a shrug “Just got carried away.”

“Exactly!” Gael smiled back at Varric wiltingly. “The drink went to our heads! We meant no--We’re sorry!”

Mori took a step aside and the two sailors bolted without another word, spending the rest of the month looking over their shoulders for assassins in the dark.

Varric gave an exaggerated sigh of relief and happily approached the house servants.

“Andraste’s sweet ass, am I glad you two showed up!” He chuckled as Mori reached out a hand and pulled Varric into a brief embrace. “Who knew Rivaini’s were such terrible card players?”

“Who knew a dwarf could be so bad at cheating?” Mori snickered. “I keep telling you, don’t play all your cards at once!”

“Yeah, I’ll remember that next time.” Varric grumbled as he tenderly felt at his swelling eye. “Thanks for coming along like that.”

“It wasn’t by accident, your brother sent us to find you.” Hugin jumped in his voice dropping into a whisper, “He has some important family matters to discuss.”

“Does he?” Varric groaned, already bored at the idea of talking business with his brother.

“Yes.” Mori added, “He sent us after you hours ago but you weren’t at the Guild meeting like you said you’d be.”

A light went off in Varric’s head as he recalled that’s what he was doing out of the mansion that day. Well, he was supposed to, but he decided to take a detour to a few Taverns along the way. Bartrand was not going to be happy to hear that.

“Yeah about that,” Varric chuckled nervously as the three Dwarfs ascended the stairs to return to Hightown. “Let’s not tell him about this little adventure, shall we?”

                 ____________________________________________

Staring at his reflection in a display of polished dwarven armor, Varric sighed as he noted the greenish purple hue that was beginning to stain his cheek and eyelid. A maid scurried behind him as the household began lighting the fires and lanterns for the evening. By the time Varric and his escort had returned to the Tethras house, the sun had begun to set over Kirkwall, meaning Bartrand had been waiting almost all day for Varric to come home. And if there’s one thing Bartrand wasn’t it was patient.

The black eye throbbed on his face as he made his way down the stairs and towards his brother’s study. Bartrand was always a stickler for appearances, and while this would not be the first black eye Varric had worn to his office, he knew Bartrand would take it as a personal offense that his little brother had the nerve to allow himself to even get clocked in the face. 

Bartrand took a lot of things personally.

Coming to the study, Varric took a deep breath before rapping on the solid oak door.

“Come in.”

Slowly creeping open the door, Varric’s eyes swept the room for his brother until he found him at a bookshelf shoving a piece of folded paper into a book. Quickly returning the tome to its place on the shelf, Bartrand turned and locked eyes with his beloved baby brother.

“You filthy lying little nug-humper, where have you been all day? And don’t say the Guild meetings, I know for a fact you weren’t there!”

Varric quickly shut the door and countered his brother’s steps as he made his way across the room.

“I may have gotten a little...sidetracked along the way.”

“So I’ve heard.” Bartrand grouched, taking a seat behind his desk. Almost disappearing behind mountains of paperwork. “Wasting the day away in Lowtown taverns cheating Rivaini sailors out of their money.”

“If you’re having me followed, why bother asking me what you already know?” Varric sighed, plopping recklessly in a chair. “This is why we never have anything to talk about at dinner.”

“Dammit Varric, you were supposed to represent our family at that meeting! What are the other houses to think of us if one of us isn’t there?”

“That maybe we have more interesting things to do?”

Bartrand’s face was taking on a hue of red, and the little vein on his forehead began pulsing. There was a pool going around of when and who was going to cause it to burst. If Varric was allowed into the pool he would bet on himself, he was very good at testing his brother’s limits.

Bartrand slammed his hands on his desk, sending papers flying as he stood and stared down at his brother furiously.

“Loitering in low-class taverns, gambling away family money, and getting knocked around like a kitchen elf--by humans no less! Is it your life’s mission to bring shame down on this household?”

“Don’t you think father beat me to that punch, brother?” Varric’s voice faltered at the end of his comment, knowing he just went too far.

“Don’t push me Varric.” Bartrand glowered, his voice quiet like a storm. “I’m this close to throwing your sodding ass out on the street!”

Varric sullenly looked away from his brother, their game no longer fun. Plucking a quill from Bartrand’s desk, he twirled it silently as he waited for Bartrand to calm down and continue.

“This ‘reckless little brother’ act  is getting old, Varric. As are you. You’re 26 now, it’s time you start stepping up and being an active member of this family and our business ventures.” Varric stopped fiddling with the feather as he felt the point of this meeting coming close. “I have a job for you, it’s important, it’s dangerous, and it’s the last chance I’m giving you to prove yourself worthy of the name Tethras.”

Rising from his desk, Bartrand paced to the fireplace contemplatively; coming to the hearth, he stared into the fire intently. “I’ve been brokering a deal with a lieutenant of the Coterie, Dougal Gavorn. Our profits and product are growing, and I can’t rely on hired idiots to keep them safe anymore.”

Bartrand turned to find Varric contrarily depositing the quill into its stand before examining his nails for ink stains. With a harrumph Bartrand pressed on.

“I have a shipment coming in from Orzammar at the end of the week, a test run to see if those nug-humpers can actually provide the security we need. They’ll intercept the caravan in the Free Marches and bring it to Kirkwall, and I want you there to make sure those thugs don’t run off with my property!”

Varric quickly twisted in his chair and stared at his older brother is shock.The name Dougal Gavorn was completely foreign to Varric, and while he did try to keep tabs on all the dangerous people his brother allied with, Varric made it a point to avoid the Coterie when he could. He’d heard stories in taverns and the few Guild meetings he did attend, and they sounded like nothing but backstabbers and cut-throats .A bear he’d rather not poke. Yet here Bartrand was tying a juicy steak around his neck and telling him to go make friends with the bear.

“And uh-- how exactly do you suggest I do that, dear brother?” Varric chuckled, as he anxiously joined his brother at the fireside, already imagining his body lying dead in a ditch.

“I’m not exactly a warrior or marksman, Bartrand!”

Bartrand huffed, and reached over the fireplace, yanking the crossbow that was mounted above the mantle, he shoved it his brother’s hands. Leaning towards his brother he gave him a derisive leer, clearly enjoying Varric’s distressed face.

“Then you better start practicing.”                         _____________________________________

Trudging from Bartrand’s office, Varric wearily hefted the crossbow over his shoulder as he processed what just happened. Not only had his flesh and blood threatened to cut him out of the family, he also elected him to go on a dangerous  adventure out of the city with some of Kirkwall’s least savory citizens. 

Some days Varric wondered if Bartrand found ways to torment him just because he actually had a life.

And people who liked him.

More or less.

Scaling the stairway slowly, Varric decided to dump the lump of wood and metal in his room before going to dinner when a loud crash and the excited voices of women drew him down the left wing of the manor towards his mother’s room. Coming to her door, he tried to make out the commotion inside when it abruptly swung open and a young dwarf maid named Mela came barreling out of the room, slamming into Varric and sending them both to the floor as something small and expensive flew over them and shattered against the hallway wall. The maid scrambled off of Varric and desperately grabbed the knob of the door, yanking it shut behind her as something sturdy collided with a thud.

Expelling an exhausted sigh, Mela leaned against the door in defeat until she realized just who she had leveled onto the floor.

“Oh, dirt and spit!” the maid spluttered, as she grabbed Varric’s arm to help him up. “Please forgive me Messer Varric, I didn’t mean to knock you over, it’s just--you see--your mother she--!”

“Problems, Mela?”

Mela straightened hurriedly “It’s my own fault Messer, I tried to convince her to eat some of her dinner. Lady Tethras hasn’t been eating much lately.”

“Hmm.” Varric muttered as he and Mela switched positions at the door.

Varric worried about his mother’s health. She hadn’t seen the sun in months and seems to be wasting away more with each passing day. The healers say it’s an ailment of the liver, brought on by her drinking after her husband’s passing. A terrible refuge from the disillusionment of life Ilsa Tethras suffered at the reckless hands of her husband Andvar.

Varric knocked lightly on the ornate bedroom door.

“Mother? Are you awake?”

Something collided with the other side of the door, as a shakey voice retorted.

“Of course I’m awake! How can I sleep with an assassin trying to kill me?”

Shooting the baffled Mela a wink, Varric ventured into his mother’s room, leaving the door ajar should he need to retreat from his mother’s throwing arm.

The room was dark and stale as Varric tread carefully into the room. A soft crunch below his boot made him examine the mess in front of the door; some tableware, a shattered bowl, and what looked like porridge cluttered the door frame. The fireplace burned a dull orange as its embers began to die from neglect. Peering into the gloomy room, Varric’s eyes scanned over the shadows until they came to rest on a small lump hunched on a chaise lounge. Varric deposited his crossbow at the foot of his mother’s bed and made his way across the room to her. Edging closer, his eyes adjusted to the dark and he reached out to touch his mother’s shoulder.

 “Mother? What are you doing out of bed?”

“Who are you?” Ilsa hissed, stumbling off the lounge and crawling away on her hands and knees.. 

“What are you doing in here? Did she send you in? That little assassin, she’s trying to kill me, I know she is!”

Sighing to himself, Varric chased after her, gently grabbing her arm he forced his mother to face him. In a soothing voice, as if coaxing a spooked animal, he tried to find where his mother’s tangled mind was. “Mother, do you know where you are? Do you know who I am?” “What a stupid question, of course I know where I am!” Ilsa glowered straightening with indignation.  “We’re in Orzammar, in my bedroom. And you better pray to your ancestors my husband doesn’t find you in here, assassin!” Varric’s heart clenched as he realized how far she had regressed. With guiding hands, he encouraged her to her feet and began helping her hobble to bed. “No mother, I’m not an assassin.” He explained as she sank onto her bed with a labored groan. “You’re in Kirkwall, topside, remember? You moved here with Father and Bartrand years ago.” “Kirkwall.” Ilsa parroted, as she tried to rub at her swollen legs, her breathing grew pained and Varric swept her hands aside and proceeded to massage her ankles. “Where’s Andvar?” Varric’s ministrations hesitated for a moment before he continued, moving on to her calves, he always hated this part. “Father’s not here anymore, he died...a long time ago. Do you remember?”  “Oh,” Ilsa mumbled quietly, the shimmer of tears glittered in her eyes as she looked away from Varric. “Oh yes, that’s right...” “Do you know who I am?” Varric wondered, leaving his mother’s legs to take her hands gently in his.  “No.” Varric pressed his forehead into their joined hands, fighting the urge to run away. To leave her in the dark, in the past, and pass the responsibility to someone else. But she was his mother. She needed him. “I’m Varric.” He explained, his voice wavering in frustration. “My name is Varric, I’m your son. You’re m-my mother.”  “Varric...I remember that name.” Ilsa mused as Varric stood and moved towards the fireplace. Varric swallowed the lump in his throat and poked at the embers. As he added more logs to the grate, he could feel his mother’s eyes on his back. “You’re my son?” Ilsa asked, trying to piece together her memories.  “That’s right, mother.” Varric plucked the tinder from a box from the mantle. “And... we’re in Kirkwall....” After a few moments of striking the flint against the fire steel, Varric sparked the fireplace back to life. The room brightened considerably, and he turned to see his mother had climbed under her covers, her eyes closed and chest rising and falling. Kneeling  next to her bed, Varric, watched her for a few moments. Stroking a hand that lay on her swollen stomach, he examined the yellow tint her skin had grown in the past few months. With gentle touches, he ran his fingers through her thinning hair, remembering when her tresses were a soft gold. Nowadays her hair hung limp and lifeless, all the color and vibrancy gone. Ilsa began to stir from the caresses and slowly gurgled awake. Stifling a yawn, her eyes darted around the room as she drew herself up on her pillows until they came to rest on Varric. A light seemed to flicker in her eyes. Her expression softened and a small smile graced her lips as she tentatively reached out to her son. “Oh,Varric!” She whispered, tenderly pressing her hand to his cheek. “What’s wrong my treasure?” “Nothing Mother...nothing.” Varric smiled, cradling his hand over hers. “How are you feeling?” “Oh, I’m fine.” she croaked, leaning back into her pillows “Although some food would be nice. That maid, I don’t like her. She doesn’t listen, she brings me poor food and refuses to give me wine. I think she’s trying to kill me! Be a dear and fire that maid, she’s good for nothing, and I don’t trust her.” Varric held his tongue as he considered his mother’s request. Mela was a good girl, a hard worker, and had served the Tethras family well. She had come all the way from Orzammar at his request to care for his mother as her health declined this past two years. Glancing up at the thick dusty curtains that shut out all light from his mother’s room, Varric’s heart tightened at the lengths he’d gone to let his mother believe she was still in Orzammar. Her memory had vanished into the bottom of a bottle, clinging more and more into the past, back when father was alive, when their family name held true power, and everything was simpler. He tried his best to keep her with him in the present, but at times like this, her poor memory could be used to his advantage. “Of course mother,” He soothed, brushing a few stray strands of her faded blond hair from her forehead. “Whatever your heart desires. I believe Hugin has a niece who could take your maid’s place. Her name is Mela, I’ve mentioned her to you before, haven’t I?” “Mela,” Ilsa mused staring up at the canopy of her bed as she tried to remember. “The name does sound familiar. Yes, I believe you have mentioned her before. Anyone would be better than that imbecile I have now. How soon can she start?” “As soon as possible, I’ll have Hugin send for her.” “You’re such a good boy, Varric.” Ilsa beamed as Varric stood and went to the door. After a few hushed words, Mela scurried off to the kitchens to bring Varric a jug of water and another meal for his mother. Closing the door, Varric turned to his mother as she sat poised with her arms out to him. “Come here, my treasure.”  Crossing the carpet, he perched on the bed and leaned into her embrace. For a moment, he was a child again, safe in her arms as she hosted salons. She used to smell of rose and mint, and on impulse Varric breathed deep in her neck and in an instant, he was dragged back to the present. She smelled nothing like that anymore, now only a sweet and rotten musk hung around her. She smelled like liquor, like sickness, like death. He hated the smell and yet, he pulled her closer as if he could feel his mother’s life slipping through his fingers like sand. “What is that doing here?” Varric focused his thoughts and pulled away to look at his mother’s face. Her amber eyes were fixed at the crossbow at the end of the bed. Detaching from Ilsa’s arms, Varric reached back and brought the wretched lump of wood between he and his mother. “Bartrand gave it to me.” he explained, twinging at the cord of the weapon. “It was my father’s.” Ilsa muttered, tracing the ornate handle reminiscently. “I had no idea this made it to the surface. We had to leave so quickly, I thought it was lost forever.” Varric’s breath hitched as he realized his mother was having a full moment of clarity. They were so rare nowadays. Normally she only existed in the past or in the present, never both at the same time. “Why would Bartrand give you this?” his mother edged, locking eyes with her youngest son. “I’m um--going away for a while, and I’ll need it.” Varric explained, rubbing at the back of his neck. “Away?” His mother gasped, taking hold of her son’s hand. “Where?”  “Now don’t worry yourself mother, I’ll only be gone for a week at most. Bartrand has some business with the Coterie--” “Bartrand!” Ilsa spat, “He never comes to see me, he wants me to just hurry up and die. All he cares about is money and business. He’s just like his father, and to make deals with the Coterie--!” A wild look grew in Ilsa’s eyes and with surprising strength, her hands clamped down hard on Varric’s and she lowered her voice conspiratorially.“He’s going to kill you!” “What? Mother, calm down, Bartrand would  never betray me.” “No, no Varric!” Ilsa wailed, grasping at his shirt and trying to pull him close. “He’s just like his father, he’ll sacrifice anything for money!” “Mother, please!”  But it was no use, Ilsa was gone. Varric tried to pull himself free on his mother’s clawing hands as she grew more frantic, his skin stinging as her nails dug desperately into arms  “He’s going to take you away from me! My son, my little treasure! He wants me dead, he wants you dead!”   Varric managed to pry himself free of her grip and  tumbled off the bed, taking the crossbow with him. In her fit, Ilsa buried herself under her blankets and pillows, her muffled wails and accusations growing softer and softer until the room was silent. Varric stared in horror at what he just witnessed, as the small lump under the blankets rose and fell with his mother’s breaths. “Mother?” A soft knock at the door broke the spell as Mela announced herself from the other side. The soft shuffle of sheets drew Varric back to the bed and his mother sat there, staring at the fire as if the last few moments had never been. She sat stiff, staring into the fire, her mind clearly elsewhere. “Mother, I have to go now. One of the maids has brought you dinner.” “Send her in, I’m famished.” “Yes mother.” “And send someone up with more firewood.” “Of course mother.” Ilsa pulled her blanket up to her chin and glared at Varric with crafty eyes. “And stop calling me mother. I don’t know who you are, but you’re certainly not my little Bartrand.”  Varric blinked back a few rebellious tears as he bowed his head in apology.  “Of course, sorry mothe--sorry.” “Don’t you come near me again, or I’ll have my husband kill you! He’s a very important dwarf, you know? We are the noble house Tethras!”  “Of course, Lady Tethras. You’ll never see me again.” With a short bow, Varric grabbed the crossbow and spun on his heels, making his way to the door. Throwing it open, he stepped aside as Mela made her way in. The maid stopped short as she saw the grief in Varric’s eyes, she looked to her lady, before offering him a small smile. “She’s just having one of her bad days.” Varric blinked back any emotion Mela could read and wandered through the halls to his own room. Tossing the crossbow onto his desk, Varric sank into his chair with a sigh.

 Laying his head in his arms, Varric’s thoughts drifted to memories and soon he fell into a heavy sleep, his cheeks sticky with tears. 

[knightofbalance-13]

https://queenypie.tumblr.com/post/178782465728/how-not-to-write-yang

Here’s a deal for you: you stop mentioning Miles, I’ll stop doing this.

I decided to watch the last 1/3rd of volume 5 to try and grasp how truly disappointing the finale really was. Needless to say, even burying my expectations, I was shook by how awful it was.

I’ve caught you lying in all your posts on RWBY. You bitching about the finale is more evidence it was good than bad at this point.

With that said, this post will focus on Yang and Build up + Payof

Spoiler alert: They just vomit up what Dudeblade says and never talk about payoff until the final paragraph.

Of all of the characters to suffer from Miles’ Chronic inability to both build something up and have that same thing pay-off-

Between Red Vs. Blue that builds up Church degrading due to being an AI fragment and paying off in the most memorable ending to an arc the series has had, let alone the build with General Kimball being so openly and irrationally hostile to Republic of Chorus and paying off with a deconstruction of how people view each other in conflicts (all of this done BEFORE RWBY mind you)

And Camp Camp where there is a three season long build up of David’s worship of the Camp Camp’s founder and paying off with him having his adoration in the founder crushed alongside having built up Max’s cynicism for two seasons ending with the reveal that his parents never cared about him so he had a very GOOD reason to be cynical.

And Nomad Of Nowehre where there is an entire season f build up with how the Nomad just running and running from everyone only makes his situation worse and makes the people he cares about leave him which pays off with him finally fighting back and defeating both of his major opponents in the first season.-

If that issue even exists which, considering your history of editing out information and lyinbg just to create issues that don’t exist, it may not:

It’s probably KERRY’S issue, not MILES.

You know Kerry, the OTHER guy who writes for RWBY except he’s the DIRECTOR of the show so writing mistakes would be his fault even more so.

Or are you blaming Miles because he’s a widely hated guy for no reason and Kerry would just push you away?

Yang gets it the worst.

No, that would be Jaune. The guy whose built up as an important character with Monty then gets sidelined for Volume 3, has all his development funneled into Ruby in Volume 4 and gets less screentime, less lines and less focus than ILLA in Volume 5.

Huh, Miles also hates writing Jaune, mostly because you people won’t stop harassing him.

Funny how that works.

Ruby usually doesn’t get anything period, with the exception of the Silver Eyes which had basically two lines of introduction in volume 1 and have had two separate pay offs.

Which are....what exactly? Oh right, clarification is your kryptonite because making things vague makes it harder to disprove.

Weiss has had a family arc with good build up and a weak sauce pay off (but it was something).

How do you have a payoff for an ONGOING arc?

Blake has awful build up, because the white fang are a singularity point of failure, and even worse pay off, but she at least both.

And you completely failed at it so it’s more like RWDE’s the singular point of failure.

After going through an arc where the show tells Yang she’s incompetent -you be the judge on whether that’s accurate or insultingly wrong- 

Being FLAWED does not make one INCOMPETENT. You can be competent AND flawed at the same damn time.

For fuck’s sake, come back when the show treats the idea of Yang fighting as a joke like it does Jaune.

for using her rage ability and losing to people with far greater experience, you’d think the show would have the decency to at least have her refight those same people and get back at them.

Because it’s not like one of those character is gone (Neo), one of them has no way to even meet Yang again (Neon), one of them is the villain of a DIFFERENT CHARACTER (Adam) or that she HAS fought them, it just wasn’t focused on (Mercury).

But no, Yang has only thus far had a chance to fight Mercury again, and most of that was off screen before she just had to run to the plot.

Not like Raven is more important, more substantial and more emotional to Yang than Mercury and thus having THEM have a conflict is just better writing-Oh wait...

Also, Mercury doesn’t fit that critera. Yang won against him. A thrown fight yeah but your critera doesn’t fit. If you’re gonna be anal about this, so will I.

No rematch with Neo, Adam is no longer worth a rematch, and neither is Mercury after getting headbutted.

because durr pacing, what is that?

After being beat down by every villain like she’s the town bike

She lost twice, get over it. Fucking Weiss, Blake and Ruby have had a worse track records, let alone Jaune.

having her arm sliced off and having PTSD from the event

*points to the rest of the cast* They all have PTSD too. 

and having a best friend leave her and sending Yang to her lowest point

Really the only thing unique here is Yang losing an arm. And uh, according to RWDE standards: That’s nothing special.

what’s the payoff?

Nothing like what you’re gonna say next?

Yang gets insulted by her dad and told a tone-deaf story from Oobleck and Port and then just gets over her current funk.

A. So we’re gonna ignore how she acted in the Volume 3 finale being depressed and junk? You know, THE ACTUAL PAYOFF?

B. ‘tone-deaf’ says the person overlooking how Yang tries to talk down to her twice widowoed, numerous abandoned father about loss.

C. So we’re gonna ignore how she acts in Volume 4 Episode 9?

Oh, D. So jokes are serious now? okay, I’ll remember that when you joke about killing Miles.

Yang puts on the robot arm and the whole hesitancy to use it just vanishes. 

Because durr, I no understand basic human psychology like fear of change.

Yang spars with Tai and gets told to keep a cooler head. This alone lets her fight on par with villains who previously acted like she was leagues below them, despite now having trained barely any after a long period of doing nothing.

Because it’s not like the reason WHY Yang lost those TWO times was because of her anger issues aznd that was what was holding her?

because solving your issues...doesn’t solve your issues...

Or maybe you’re a liar.

Yang gets her arm sliced off by Adam, and not only does she not fight him, Blake manages to take Adam out with a move that he should be well aware of given their interaction in V3, and a smack to the back of the noggin.

Because not like Adam is not only BLAKE’S villain but Adam kind of reflects Yang so he has similar issues.

Also what about their interactions would show he expected that? That time where he fell for the EXACT SAME TRICK?

Pick just one of these four and with a little brain power you could come with an idea that has infinitely better payoff.

Self destruct in 3...2...1-

How about Tai give Yang a motivation speech

You mean what happened in canon no less than TWO times?

or Port give an actually heartfelt story,

You mean what he did in canon?

or Yang struggling to get used to the arm before doing crazy tricks in volume 5

You mean ignore all the training she did in Volume 4? The MONTHS of training?

or Yang running off to confront Adam before jumping in to help Ruby and Co like Blake does?

You mean leave someone, probably her sister, to fight the trained killer while she goes off into the courtyard to fight someone she didn’t know was there and get dogpiled and probably killed all WITHOUT the excuses Blake had (like not knowing about Ruby and the others as well as focusing on stopping Adam long with OUTNUMBERING him?)

Anytime you build up suspense for anything, it needs to have a pay-off.

You’re right but the thing is-

You completely ignore anything that makes RWBY function. As shown above, you listed two things that ALREADY HAPPENED and another two that would have contradicted the writing already, one of which would require Fairy Tail levels of plot armor to survive.

So why should anyone listen to you?

Look at the Karate Kid: the main character gets his ass kicked, gets trained by a martial artist, and then comes back to defeat the people who wronged him.

Yeah and if this happened in RWBY, you’d ask ‘why didn’t he fight the guy who wronged him?’ It’s not the writer’s fault you ignore facts.

There’s a problem, there’s build-up to a solution, and then there’s the pay-off. Yang in this situation would be Daniel if he got beaten up, trained my Mr. Miyagi, and then just went off to study abroad.

Except this is more like you watched the Karate Kid and then walked out of the theater half way through the movie and complained that it didn’t happen.

You say you’re gonna make more of these but what’s the point? We have enough liars to make another Senate and all you’re doing is vomiting up what Dudeblade has said.

You have no point in making these. There is no way anyone will listen to you aside from people who already agree with you and they can just listen to other people for that. Unless you’re doing this to try and control people but again, you’re just another brick in the wall. 

[iatethepomegranate]

Blue is the New Red Chapter 46

Masterlist

Note that due to tumblr being ridiculous, I no longer post external links on individual chapters. If you prefer to read on AO3, please refer to the masterlist link above.

Rated: M for torture, flashbacks, trauma reactions, PTSD, sexual assault of minors, consensual sexual content and related freaking out about it, drug references, non-consensual drug use, possibly underage drinking, homophobia and biphobia, references to self-harm, suicidal ideation and attempt. Chapter warnings:  animal cruelty, allusions to the sexual assault of minors, mentions of Wally's jerkass dad, hints of PTSD

Main Pairing: Birdflash

Status: Multiple chapters, in progress

Overall summary: Nightwing has finally made his return to the Team, but he finds the events of the past two years aren’t quite done with him yet.

Chapter notes:  Batgirl is participating in her first team mission, and Nightwing is finally back on active duty after his long absence.

Additional notes (and an apology): It's been far too long since I last updated. I'm so sorry. I wish I had a good explanation, but the fact is I just could not get myself into the right mindset to write this, let alone reread what I've written so I can remember how it goes. (See a longer explanation on the AO3 page)

Reminder: dialogue in bold is said through M'gann's mind link.

Chapter 46: Reconnaissance (Maybe)

It took Batman three tries before he was able to let Nightwing on the bioship the following morning. If it hadn't been for the smorgasbord of trackers embedded into every piece of Nightwing's uniform, he probably wouldn't have been allowed to go at all.

Batgirl squeaked when the seatbelt fastened itself over her chest. Nightwing, very charitably, he thought, did not laugh.

“You control the ship with your brain?” she asked Miss Martian once she'd recovered.

Miss Martian nodded. “I can also make her respond to commands from non-telepaths. I'll show you how to fly her one day.”

Batgirl rubbed the seatbelt between her gloved fingers. “Maybe once I've gotten used to this.”

“Wait until you see her shapeshifting,” said Kid Flash.

“You just want her to turn into that version of you with boobs again,” said Nightwing.

“Who can blame me? I'm hot.”

“Oh, grow out of your hormones already,” Artemis complained. “You don't hear Nightwing going on like this anymore.”

There was a very specific reason for that, but Nightwing made a conscious decision not to ruin the mood. At least it shut Kid Flash up, probably because he'd had the same thought. Artemis winced and opened her mouth to apologise, but Nightwing waved her off before she could. Better to just move on.

Miss Martian smiled awkwardly and called Batgirl over to show her how the bioship controls worked.

“Batman said he added colour change options to these suits, didn't he?” said Artemis, pressing various spots on the chest logo of her cold-weather uniform until it switched to her usual green. She pressed it again to switch back to white. “Nice.”

“I told him we wouldn't be very covert if we wore white indoors,” said Nightwing. “Nice to see he listened for once.” Nightwing hadn't had call to wear his new cold-weather uniform until today. Similar design to his usual costume, except in white, plus the cowl that had featured on his cold-weather Robin uniform. For the first time in a while, he felt naked without a cape. If the weather proved too punishing, he might have to add one for future missions.

“You stole that idea from me,” Robin complained. Seeing him in the same cold weather uniform Nightwing once wore brought on a feeling of nostalgia that he thought he'd finally gotten over.

“You snooze, you lose,” he said, shaking it off.

Everyone strapped into their seats and Miss Martian willed the ship into flight. It would take a few hours to reach their destination and Nightwing could barely contain his excitement. After such a long time of being stuck on the sidelines due to a never-ending parade of bullshit, he was finally back where he wanted to be, with his best friends in the whole world. There was that nagging fear in the back of his mind about what would happen if they came across the al Ghuls, but the likelihood of that happening was so remote that it didn't take more precedence than that.

Besides, there was nothing better at sharpening his focus than a good old-fashioned team mission. He already felt a thousand times smarter and they'd only just left home base.

“This is exciting,” Batgirl admitted. “I had no idea there was a team like this until a few months ago. How did you convince the Justice League to let you do this?”

“Well, to be fair, it started when KF, Aqualad and I broke into a supervillain's science lab without anyone's permission,” Nightwing said. “Then we found Superboy in a pod and busted him out. We also may have blown up the place, just a little bit.”

“Then we had to wait a thousand years for them to officially approve the team,” Kid Flash added. “Supey crashed at my place in the meantime.” The corner of his mouth tightened. “Well, I wouldn't call it my place anymore...”

“You've mentioned something about your dad before,” said Batgirl. “Ages ago, at that gala where you embarrassed Nightwing with that Enrique Iglesias song.”

“I'm amazed you remember that,” Kid Flash replied. “I don't even remember what I told you.” At least that eased some of the pain out of his expression, even if they were still talking about it.

“I have an eidetic memory,” Batgirl said. “Comes in handy. You mentioned Dick's—I mean Nightwing's—dad took the news about you two better than your own dad did.”

“Yeah...” His mouth tightened again. “He kicked me out of home last year. Been staying with my aunt and uncle.”

“That's horrible. I'm so sorry.”

Kid Flash shrugged, but no one believed he meant it. “My aunt and uncle have had all of us in the same room for a family dinner so it's not like he and Mum are out of my life completely. Just... mostly. I'm gonna invite them to my graduation. No idea if they'll show. No point dwelling on something I can't do anything about.”

Nightwing rested his foot on the edge of Kid Flash's seat; they were too far away for hugging, even if that's what he really wanted to do right now. A friendly foot of support would have to do.

“You really remember everything?” Zatanna asked Batgirl, who grasped onto the change of topic.

“No one remembers everything,” she replied, “but I can get pretty close.”

“Impressive,” said Aqualad.

The conversation very pointedly moved on, but Kid Flash had this faraway look in his eyes, even as he went through the motions of smiling and nodding at what the others said.

“Hey,” Nightwing said quietly. Superboy would hear, but he was pretty good at pretending he couldn't.

Kid Flash sighed. “I'm fine, babe. I just miss them sometimes.”

“I know.”

“I don't know whether I'm more afraid they'll come to my graduation and be horrible, or they won't come at all.”

“You sure you wanna invite them?”

“Yeah. I wanna know they care. If they care.”

“Whatever happens, you're surrounded by people who love you. And we're fully prepared to fight your dad if you want.”

Kid Flash snickered, just a little bit. “Please don't. He'll think we're moving into the final phase of the gay agenda: eliminate the heterosexuals.”

Nightwing cackled. “I'll pencil it in after brunch.”

The issue wasn't resolved, but the levity helped in the short term. Kid Flash relaxed in his seat over time and his father slowly filtered out of everyone's minds. There'd be time to deal with that can of worms later. No need to let it spoil the upcoming excitement of the mission.

Nightwing was so ready for this.

Miss Martian had to land the bioship a mile away from the facility due to a lack of surrounding cover, plus the thermal imaging at the base. Small groups wearing insulated costumes would have a better chance of slipping in undetected.

The team split into their squads and put some distance between each other, the better to trick the sensors. Zatanna prepared a teleportation spell for alpha squad while Nightwing hopped on Kid Flash's back for beta's run to the facility. Rocket expanded her bubble to include Superboy and Robin to improve the speed of gamma.

Alpha would arrive first and relay any immediate findings to the other squads. Batgirl was already a talented hacker and could handle any low-risk hacks, though anything more serious would have to await Nightwing's arrival. Batgirl was a quick study and would surpass him eventually, but that wasn't today.

Nightwing buried his face against Kid Flash's shoulder as they began to move. They screeched to a halt maybe a minute later, but he didn't get the chance to climb down before Batgirl's voice was in his head.

“I've got a virus into the external cameras. Nightwing should be able to take out the infrareds with minimal interference.”

“Thanks, BG.” Nightwing climbed off Kid Flash's back and they pressed themselves against the dull stone wall that surrounded the entire complex.

Miss Martian dropped to the snowy ground and rolled a few times. “There. My body temperature should blend into our surroundings if I'm quick. I'll find the sensors for you.” Martians already ran cooler than humans anyway. She camouflaged and phased through the wall.

“We're definitely safe from the infrared cameras here, right?” said Kid Flash.

“As long as we stick to the wall,” Nightwing replied. “The walls are insulated and the exterior cameras angled to watch for approaching invaders, remember?”

“I may have dozed off in the briefing a little bit.”

Whatever smartass reply Nightwing was cooking up had to be aborted when Miss Martian reappeared. They hugged the wall as they slipped in through a gate, the guard already unconscious, and then legged it to the security station.

Said station was a rickety little shack with a tin roof and a door thicker than its walls. Nightwing slipped inside with Kid Flash while Miss Martian stood guard outside.

Nightwing found a port on the three-monitor computer's CPU and pulled a plug from his wrist computer. He went slowly at first, just poking around in the guts of the programming to see what he had.

“Looks like the al Ghul techs added a shutdown sequence in a hurry,” he said, leafing through the programmers' documentation attached to the code. “Not part of the original programming. It's tied into some functions deeper in the facility.”

“Can you turn them off without alerting anyone?” asked Aqualad.

“I can make it look like a malfunction, but they're gonna know about it.” It wasn't ideal, but that's what he had to work with. “Are you in position? We won't have long to get inside, and we'll have trouble getting out again if they fix the system faster than we can work.”

“Perhaps we should consult Batman. It may affect the League's mission if we are discovered.”

“Make it quick. We had to knock out a guard to get here and I don't know if there are any alarms in this system.”

There were a few tense moments, each longer than the last. Nightwing half-expected they would have to fall back, but Aqualad's voice filled his head again, giving the go-ahead to shut down the infrareds.

It only took a moment. He'd had plenty of time to plan how to do it, after all. Then they hurried out of the security building and through the nearest door, Miss Martian taking point. Invisibly.

“I found an alarm system,” Robin said. “Doesn't look hard to turn off but, you know...”

“Looks can be deceiving?” Nightwing replied.

“Well, this is Ra's al Ghul we're talking about.”

“If you are concerned, perhaps we should leave it alone,” said Aqualad.

“Sure thing, boss,” said Nightwing. “We'll avoid detection the old-fashioned way.”

Kid Flash stifled a snicker beside him. Old-fashioned for him meant tripping over things and falling right into the people they were trying to avoid. So maybe they wouldn't do that.

“Our priority is reconnaissance,” Aqualad pointed out. “No unnecessary risks.”

“You ever notice how our recon missions always end with explosions?” said Kid Flash. Aqualad didn't respond, but his annoyed vibes through the link got the point across. The link wasn't typically strong enough to pick up on specific emotions, but Aqualad was uniquely talented in that regard. He'd certainly had plenty of practice making his frustration with the team's nonsense clear without uttering a word.

The corridors were long and made of soulless concrete. It was not like Ra’s at all. He preferred old-fashioned stone whenever possible, but maybe it didn’t hold the heat in this climate.

“What’re you thinking?” asked Kid Flash

“This place doesn’t look like an al Ghul original,” Nightwing replied. “Maybe it’s an adaptation for the cold weather, or he doesn’t care about aesthetics in a facility he’ll rarely visit. I don’t know. It doesn’t feel right.”

“Maybe he didn’t build it,” suggested Artemis. “He could’ve found it abandoned or killed the original inhabitants.”

“Possibly. If he was desperate enough.”

Unfortunately, Nightwing had been hoping for a more traditional interior, because there tended to be little alcoves that made good hiding spots. No such luck here. He spotted a heating vent and Miss Martian floated up to test if it would open, but it wouldn’t budge.

“Fused shut,” she whispered. Damn it.

“That’d be too easy,” Nightwing muttered. Ra’s knew about the batfamily’s tendency toward air vents and had clearly taken steps to thwart their use.

“I could get it open,” Miss Martian said, “but it would make too much noise.”

They continued, peeking into solid metal doors as they went. Each room looked like a horror movie version of an examination room, some with beds or dental chairs or even metal tables. No computers or samples yet. Nothing they could work with.

“Found something,” said Batgirl. “In the heart of the facility. Some kind of computer server. There are cages, too. We haven’t gone inside yet. I think there may be an elevator in there. Get here quick.”

“On our way,” said Nightwing. Kid Flash’s running would be too loud, so they ran at a Nightwing-level pace instead. Well, Miss Martian flew a little ahead with her camouflage.

If there really was an elevator, maybe that would explain why there was so little of use on this level. It made sense, really. Any infiltrator worth their salt could get in here. Maybe the central chamber was more difficult, or at least the fact it was central would deter all but the most determined snoops. Ah, language.

All three squads met up at a giant pair of metal doors, all taking turns to peer inside. The door was electrified shut, linked to a keypad beside it.

“Does anyone else think it’s strange we haven’t seen anyone aside from that one guard?” said Robin.

“Super strange,” Nightwing agreed. He pressed a button on his mask and scanned the keypad, lighting up four fingerprints that denoted the most commonly-used buttons: 5, 7, 1, 4. There were 24 permutations of those four numbers, and trying them all in a brute-force strategy would undoubtedly trip another alarm.

There was a camera on the wall behind the team, which was dead. It must have gone off when the infrareds did… Nightwing hoped. If he could break into the system and find the camera footage for the code.

“I need to find another security room to have any chance of cracking this without ruining the mission,” he said. Sadly, Ra’s al Ghul knew better than to use WayneTech. “Think there’s one inside, or do we have to go all the way outside again?”

“We passed one on our route,” said Batgirl. “It’s a few doors down that way.” She pointed behind her, to Nightwing’s right.

“What do the rest of us do in the meantime?” asked Rocket. “I feel silly just standing around.”

“We look for alternative entrances,” said Aqualad. “I want everyone to know this place so well they could walk it blindfolded.”

“Now you sound like Batman,” said Robin, as Nightwing took Miss Martian and Kid Flash down the corridor to find the security room.

“I will take that as a compliment. Begin searching.”

The security room was the third door on the left of the concrete corridor. Nightwing had to swallow bile, because the stack of cassette tapes on the wall reminded him too much of Skinner’s compound. He shook his head to clear it.

“Get a fucking grip, Nightwing,” he muttered, crossing to the computer on the cheap grey desk before Kid Flash or Miss Martian could question or comfort him. It was a modern computer with a flat-screen monitor, and it took him moments to break in. Fortunately, the video records were archived on the computer itself. The tapes must’ve been old. Good. He didn’t want to look at them again.

Nightwing also didn’t want to delve too deeply into the video archives. He found a digital map of the facility with all the cameras marked and downloaded a copy to his wrist computer. He also passed copies to Robin and Batgirl.

He found the central chamber on the map and made a note of the camera’s codename: AX253. He then found that folder in the archive and started sifting through the footage until he found someone using the code. It was a bad angle, but it was all he had. He ran the video a couple of times and finally figured out the first digit: 4. That brought the possible number of combinations down to six. Better, but still too many to risk a brute-force approach. Most systems got antsy after more than three attempts, especially in places such as this. If he could piece together at least one more digit…

“What’s taking so long?” said Superboy. “Whatever you did to the cameras could’ve been fixed already.”

“It hasn’t,” Nightwing replied. “I need a few more minutes. Got one digit figured out. Need at least one more to make brute-forcing an option.”

“Genius takes time,” Kid Flash added. Nightwing would’ve elbowed him and told him to shut up, but he was busy.

He sifted through the footage and found a shorter person. Both people had been wearing labcoats. This one was a woman, and she fumbled the combination the first two times because her hands shook. She got it on the third because she went slowly, enough that Nightwing could pick up the whole combination. That was nice. He also knew the keypad could take at least two mistakes.

The combination was: 4157.

“Got it,” said Nightwing. “Anything cool on your end?”

“No luck,” said Zatanna. “That door is our only way in and out.”

“Wonderful.”

They headed back to the door and Nightwing keyed in the combination. The door buzzed and released. Aqualad tested the handle, and it turned.

There were more metal tables in the room, and fur was stuck in some of the cages. Nightwing made a beeline for the enormous computer that took up an entire wall, dragging Robin and Batgirl with him.

“Find another way down if you can,” Aqualad said. “I would prefer not to use the elevator.”

“Bit of a fire hazard if it’s the only option,” Kid Flash quipped.

“Would Ra’s al Ghul care?” said Robin.

“Probably not,” Nightwing replied, pulling a cord from his wrist computer and plugging it into a port. “As long as he gets out in once piece, most of his people are expendable. Hell, even he is to an extent. Yay, Lazarus Pits.” He shook off a sick feeling at the green memory and focused on breaking into this computer, explaining his steps to Robin and Batgirl as he went.

It was a simple enough task to log in and poke around in the files.

“Nightwing, what are we dealing with?” asked Aqualad, who was examining the elevator across the room.

Zatanna had freed some fur from a cage and was feeling it between her fingers. “This is real fur. A wolf, I think?”

Nightwing found some research notes. “I’m not sure what I’m looking at yet yet. KF, get your science brain over here and help me make sense of this. I think we’ve got some test results.”

“All the test subjects have codes,” said Batgirl, pointing to the screen. “Can we find what those mean?”

“Sounds like a good starting point,” said Kid Flash, zipping over to them. He rested his hand on Nightwing’s shoulder, leaning in to get a look as Nightwing sifted through the files until he found a name authority file. “Maybe that’s it.”

Nightwing opened it. “Each code translates to a Latin name and a number.”

“Scientific animal names?” Kid Flash suggested.

“Makes sense,” said Robin. “Zatanna, can we look at that fur?”

Zatanna brought it over. Between the five of them, they were able to identify most of the Latin animal names. Lots of wolves, which made since given the grey animal fur. There were also foxes, various kind of large-breed dogs, large canines, and even horses and a bear or two. Nightwing swore he saw the scientific name for an African elephant as well, which was just upsetting and made him think of the circus.

“So, they’re doing animal tests here,” said Kid Flash. “Can we save some of this data? Uncle Flash would have a field day.”

“I’ll save as much as I can,” said Nightwing. “We still need to take a look downstairs.”

“The elevator is not code-protected,” said Aqualad. “It would appear we are clear to use it, if there is no other option.” He sounded less than enthused. Nightwing couldn’t blame him. You never wanted to get stuck in an elevator when you weren’t supposed to be there at all. Sure, they could try the elevator shaft, but it was a bad idea when you didn’t know if you could get in and out of the elevator if the need arose.

Nightwing went back to the test results, but even knowing the code meanings wasn’t much help. He downloaded those records and went searching for a thesis statement that would explain all this.

Finally, he lucked out:

Mission: devise a method to command dangerous animals to control human population levels.

Classic Ra’s al Ghul. Environmentalism through genocide. How exactly was he trying to command these animals?

“There a lot of information,” Nightwing said. “We should probably leave a small team here to gather as much as possible and keep a lookout for any patrols. There has to be a reason we haven’t encountered many people yet.”

“Robin, Batgirl, are you confident continuing Nightwing’s work here?” asked Aqualad. “We may need him underground.”

“We can do it,” said Robin. “He’s done the hard work already.”

“Very well. New squad assignments: Robin, Batgirl and Rocket are to stay here. Everyone else, with me. Should we need to split further, I want Superboy and Kid Flash protecting Nightwing.”

Nightwing almost made a smartass comment, but it did make sense. He was the only hacker going underground. If something happened, the rest of the team could become trapped if they were unlucky.

They headed to the elevator and peeked inside. There was a hatch up top. Superboy gave Nightwing a boost so he could test the opening. It budged without too much effort, so Aqualad pressed the down button and they all climbed out the hatch. If anyone was in the room below, better they saw an empty elevator than one full of invaders.

Nightwing crouched on top of the elevator beside Zatanna as it lurched downwards. He checked over the blueprints he’d downloaded, but they didn’t provide any information on the bottom floor. They were going into this without any knowledge of what was down there.

“I figured out why the infrared cameras need to be turned off,” Robin said.

“We figured it out,” Batgirl cut in. “These animals are controlled by radio and light signals. The canine and feline animals are controlled by high frequencies, but some of the others are controlled by low frequencies.”

“The cameras interfere with the signals,” said Robin. “Also, they’re probably jammed full of machinery. Enjoy.”

“Thank you,” said Aqualad. Aloud he whispered, “Be ready. We could find anything down here.”

The elevator shuddered to a halt and the doors pinged open.

“Hello?” came a voice. “Who’s there?”

“Oh, god, has someone come to rescue us?” came another voice.

“Please, show yourselves.” A third voice.

The team shared a look.

“I’ll go,” said Superboy. “They’ll recognise my logo.”

“And you’re harder to shoot,” Artemis added.

Superboy didn’t dignify that with a response. Aqualad gave the okay, and he dropped through the hatch.

“Superman?!”

“That’s Superboy, genius. God, I thought you had a PhD.”

“Care to tell me what’s going on here?” Superman said.

“We were kidnapped months ago to work on cybernetic animals.”

“Are there more of you?” asked Superboy.

“Yes! Are you going to get us out?”

“Sure.”

Superboy followed the three people out of earshot, so Superboy narrated through the mind link.

“They’ve taken me to another door. There are dozens of scientists in there. One of them is telling me they have been stuck here for days. They have to swipe identity cards to get back in the elevator, but they stopped working. Someone needs to stay in the elevator to keep it open for us.”

“Can you get to the scientists?” asked Aqualad.

“We should… no. Their cards have stopped working on this door and they don’t know what would happen if I broke it. We need Nightwing.”

Aqualad nodded to Nightwing, who dropped into the elevator with Kid Flash.

This room had even more cages, and the metal tables were covered in fur and stained with blood. Kid Flash shuddered. Superboy and the three scientists were on the other end of the room. Someone inside the room was beating against the glass.

“Hi, everyone,” Nightwing said. “Now, let’s see what we’ve got here.” A scientist offered her key card and Nightwing tested it on the keypad. It didn’t respond at all. “Do the upstairs security features affect these cards?”

“No,” said the scientist. “We have to swipe for all the rooms around here. We can’t do our tests if we can’t get the doors open.”

“Are there any animals left on-site?”

“No,” said another scientist, wiping sweat off his brow. “Soldiers came in and loaded them onto trucks a few days ago.”

“Did they leave us to die in here?” said the third. Nightwing decided against answering, because the answer was absolutely yes.

“We’re here now,” he said instead. “What kind of security measures are down here?” The keypad didn’t accept any codes and had no way to plug in and open it with his computer.

“Not many,” said the first scientist. “We have emergency buttons to shut down everything, but I don’t think anything happens with the keypads.”

“Okay, but just in case, we have to get everyone out quickly,” said Nightwing. “Aqualad, we might have to smash the security measures to get people out of this room. Are we ready for that?”

“This is supposed to be recon only,” said Aqualad.

“I know. Call Batman while I see if we’ve got any other options?”

“I will. One moment.”

“I’m going to see if there’s another way to get this open,” said Nightwing, “but there’s a very good chance I’ll have to ask our muscled friend here to tear it off to get at the wires instead. Do you have any computers you can access?”

The scientists showed him to a few laptops. He saved the research files on there but couldn’t find a way to get into the security system. He hadn’t expected anything, given these scientists were prisoners and possibly geniuses, but it was worth a shot.

“Batman gives his approval to get the scientists out. He is sending backup to take them from there. We are to rendezvous at the front of the facility and then head home.”

“Sounds like a plan,” said Nightwing. “Okay, I can’t see any other options. Superboy, could you rip that keypad off the wall for me?”

Superboy tugged it off like a piece of gum from his shoe. The door was still shut, so Nightwing dug around in the wires until he found the right two and tapped the copper ends together to complete the circuit. The door slid open.

“Everyone out, please!” he called. “Go straight to the elevator. No dawdling.”

The trapped scientists flooded out and headed for the elevator. Nightwing nudged their three new friends to join the crowd. Not everyone could fit.

“We’ll take this group up and come back,” said Aqualad. Nightwing relayed that to the people stuck in the room.

“Everything’s going to be okay,” he promised. “Our teammates will be back with the elevator in a few—”

A growl erupted from one of the other rooms.

“Um,” said Kid Flash, “didn’t the scientists say those soldiers took all the animals?”

Well, shit.

[unsettlingshortstories]

The Graveless Doll of Eric Mutis

Karen Russell (2013)

THE SCARECROW THAT WE FOUND lashed to the pin oak in Friendship Park, New Jersey, was thousands of miles away from the yellow atolls of corn where you might expect to find a farmer’s doll. Scarecrow country was the actual country, everybody knew that. Scarecrows belonged to countrymen and women. They lived in hick states, the “I” states, exotic to us: Iowa, Indiana. Scarecrows made fools of the birds, and smiled with lifeless humor. Their smiles were fakes, threads. (This idea appealed to me — I was a quiet kid myself, branded “mean,” and I liked the idea of a mouth that nobody expected anything from, a mouth that was just red sewing.) Scarecrows got planted into the same soil as their crops; they worked around the clock, like charms, to keep the hungry birds at bay. That was how it worked in TV movies, at least: horror-struck, the birds turned shrieking circles around the far-below peak of the scarecrow’s hat, afraid to land. They haloed him. Underneath a hundred starving crows, the TV scarecrow seemed pretty sanguine, grinning his tickled, brainwashed grin at the camera. He was a sort of pitiable character, I thought, a jester in the corn, imitating the farmer — the real king. All day and all night, the scarecrow had to stand watch over his quilty hills of wheat and flax, of rye and barley and three other brown grains that I couldn’t remember (my brain stole this image from the seven-grain Quilty Hills Muffins bag — at school I cheated shamelessly and I guess my imagination must have been a plagiarist too, copying its homework).

This mission had nothing to do with us or with our city of Anthem, New Jersey. Anthem had no crops, no silos, no crows — it had turquoise Port-o-Pottys and neon alleys, construction pits, dogs in purses, bag ladies with powerful smells and opinions, garbage dumps haunted by the wraith white pigeons; it had our school, the facade of which was currently covered with a glorious psychedelic phallus mosaic, a series of interlocking dicks spray painted to the scale of Picasso’s Guernica by Anthem’s tenth-grade graffiti kings; it had policemen, bus drivers, crossing guards; dolls were sold in stores.

And we were city boys. We lived in projects that were farm antonyms, these truly shitbox apartments. If flowers bloomed on our sooty sills, it must have been because of some plant Stockholm syndrome, a love our sun did not deserve. Our familiarity with the figure of the scarecrow came exclusively from watered-down L. Frank Baum cartoons, and from the corny yet frightening “Autumn’s Bounty!” display in the Food Lion grocery store, where every year a scarecrow got propped a little awkwardly between a pilgrim, a cornucopia, and a scrotally wrinkled turkey. The Food Lion scarecrow looked like a broomin a Bermuda shirt, a broomwith acne, ogling the ladies’ butts as they bent to buy their diet yogurts — once I’d heard a bag boy joke that it was there to spook the divorcees. What we found in Friendship Park in no way resembled the Food Lion scarecrow. At first I was sure the thing tied to the oak was dead, or alive. Real, I mean.

“Hey, you guys,” I swallowed. “Look — ” And pointed to the pin oak, where a boy our age was belted to the trunk. Somebody in blue jeans and a T-shirt that had faded to the same earthworm color as his hair, a white boy, doubled over the rope. His hair clung tight as a cap to his scalp, as if painted on, and his face looked like a brick of sweating cheese.

Gus got to the kid first. “You retards.” His voice was high with relief. “It’s just a doll.” He punched its stomach. “It’s got straw inside it.”

“It’s a scarecrow!” shrieked Mondo.

And he kicked at a glistening bulb of what did appear to be straw beneath the doll’s slumping face. A little hill. It regarded its own innards expressionlessly, its glass eyes twinkling. Mondo shrieked again.

I followed the scarecrow’s gaze down to its lost straw: dark gold and chlorophyll green strands were blowing loose, like cut hair on a barbershop floor. Some of the straw had a jellied black look. How long had this stuff been outside of him, I wondered — how long had it been inside of him? I looked up, searching the boy scarecrow for a rip. A cold eel-like feeling was thrashing in my belly. That same morning, while eating my Popple breakfast tart, I’d seen a news shot of a U.S. soldier calmly watching blood spill from his head. Calm came pouring over him, at pace with the blood. In the next room, I could hear my ma getting ready for work, singing an old pop song, rattling hangers. On TV, one of the soldier’s eyes was lost behind the sticky pink sheet. The camera closed in; a second later the footage switched to the trees of a new country under an ammonia blue sky. I couldn’t understand this — where was the cameraman or the camerawoman? Who was letting his face dissolve into calm?

“Let’s cut it down!” screamed Mondo. I nodded.

“Nah, we better not.” Juan Carlos looked around the woods sharply; he looked up, as if there might be a sniper hidden in the pin oak. “What if this” — he pushed at the doll — “belongs to somebody? What if somebody is watching us, right now? Laughing at us…”

It was late September, a cool red season. The scarecrow was hung up on the sunless side of the oak. The tree was a shaggy pyramid, sixty or seventy feet tall, one of the “famous” landmarks of Friendship Park; it overlooked a ravine — a split in the seam of the bedrock, very narrow and deep — that we called “the Cone.” Way down at the bottom you could see a wet blue dirt with radishy pink streaks along it, as exotic looking to us as a sea floor. Condoms and needles (not ours) and the silver shreds of Dodo Potato Chip bags and beer bottles (mostly ours) had turned the Cone into a sort of sylvan garbage can. The tree spread above it like a girl playing at suicide, quailing its many fiery leaves.

Years ago, before we started loitering here in a dedicated way, the pin oak had been planted to commemorate an Event — there was an opal plaque nestled in its roots. We knew this much but we didn’t know more — some delinquent, teenaged forefather of ours had scratched out everything but the date, “1957.”

The plaque looked like a lost little moon in the grip of the tree’s arachnid roots. I always felt a little cheated by the plaque; it was a confusing kind of resentment; I didn’t really care about the “why” of the tree at all but I didn’t like how this plaque was an open secret either, a mystery that was always itching at us. It bothered me that we were so poorly informed about the oak’s first purpose that we did not even have the option of forgetting it, using our patented June 1 method, whereby we expulsed a year of school facts from our brains in spasms of summer amnesia. (Harriet Tubman — did he invent something? The War of 1812 — why did we fight that one? For tea? Against Mexico or Sicily?) Forgetting was one of my favorite things to do at Camp Dark; I felt like a squid, sending jets of inky thoughts into the Cone. The plaque was illegible, but the oak’s glossy trunk was covered in gougings that you could easily read: V hearts K; Death 2 Asshole Jimmy Dingo; Jesus Saves; I Wuz Here!!! We’d added ourselves:

MONDO + GUS + LARRY + J.C. = CAMP DARK

The “deep end” of Friendship Park we called Camp Dark. Camp Dark was Anthem’s lame try at an urban arboretum, a sort of surprise woods bordered by gas and fire stations and a condemned pizza buffet. THE PIZZA PARTY IS CANCELED read a sign above a bulldozer. These central acres of Friendship Park were filled with young deciduous trees and naive-seeming bluish squirrels. They chittered some charming bullshit at you too, up on their hind legs begging for a handout. They lived in the trash cans and had the wide-eyed innocent look and threadbare fur of child junkies. Had they wised up, our squirrels might have mugged us and used our wallets to buy train tickets to the true woods, which were about an hour north of Anthem’s depressed downtown, according to Juan Carlos — only Juan Carlos had been out there. (“There was a river with a purple fish shitting in it,” was all we got out of him.)

Recently, the Anthem City Parks & Recreation had received a big grant, and now the playground looked like a madhouse. Padded swings, padded slides, padded gyms, padded seesaws and go-wheelies: All the once-fun equipment had gotten upholstered by the city in this red loony-bin foam. To absorb the risk of a lawsuit, said Juan Carlos; one night, at Juan Carlos’s suggestion, we all took turns pissing hooch onto the harm-preventing pillows. Our park had a poopstrewn dog run and an orange baseball diamond; a creepy pond that, like certain towns in Florida, had at one time been a very popular winter destination for geese and ducks but which had for some reason fallen out of fashion in the waterfowl society; and a Conestoga-looking covered picnic area. Gus claimed to have had sex there last Valentine’s Day, on the cement tables — “pussy sex,” he said, authoritatively, horrifying us, “not just the mouth kind.” Our feeling was, if Gus really had tricked a girl into coming to our park in late February, they most likely talked about noncontroversial subjects, like the coldness of snow and the excellence of Gus’s weed, while wearing sex-thwarting parkas.

We’d started hanging at Friendship Park four years ago, when we were ten years old. Back then we played actual games.We hid and we sought. We did benign stuff in trees. We amassed a stupidly huge plastic weapons cache in the hollow of the pin oak, including a Sounds of Warfare Blazer that as I recall required something like sixteen triple-A batteries to make a noise like a female guinea pig putting a brave face on her tuberculosis. Those were innocent times. Then we got shunted into Anthem’s combo middle-and-high school, and now we came here to drink beers and antagonize one another. Biweekly we shoplifted liquor and snacks, in a surprisingly orderly way, rotating this duty. (“We are Communists!” shrieked Mondo once, pumping a fistful of red-hot peanuts into the sky, and Juan Carlos, who did homework, snorted, “You are quite confused, my bro.”)

Participation levels varied, but usually it was the core four of us at Camp Dark: Juan Carlos Diaz, Gus Ainsworth, Mondo Chu, and me, Larry Rubio. Pronounced “Rubby-oh” by me, like a rubber ducky toy, my own surname. My dad left when I turned two and I don’t speak any Spanish unless you count the words that everybody knows, like “hablo” and “no.” My ma came from a vast hick family in Pensacola, pontoon loads of uncle-brothers and red-haired aunts and firecrotch cousins from some nth degree of cousindom, hordes of blood kin whom she renounced, I guess, to marry and then divorce my dad. We never saw any of them. We were long alone, me and my ma.

Juan Carlos had tried to tutor me once: “Rooo-bio. Fucker, you have to coo the ‘u’!”

My ma couldn’t pronounce my last name either, making for some awkward times in Vice Principal Derry’s office. She’d reverted to her maiden name, which sounded like an elf municipality: Dourif. “Why can’t I be a Dourif, like you?” I asked her once when I was very small, and she poured her drink onto the carpet, shocking me — this was my own kindergarten trick to express a violent unhappiness. She left the room and my shock deepened when she didn’t come back to clean up the mess. I watched the stain set on the carpet, the sun cutting through the curtain blades. Later, I wrote LARRY RUBIO on all of my folders. I answered to RUBIO, just like the stranger my father must be doing somewhere. What my ma seemed to want me to do — to hold onto the name without the man — felt very silly to me, like the cartoon where Wile E. Coyote holds on to the handle (just the handle) of an exploded suitcase. Latching into pure space.

The scarecrow boy was my same height, five foot five. He had pale glass eyes and a molded wax or plastic face; under his faded brown shirt his “skin” was machine-sewn sackcloth, straw stuffed. So: He had a scarecrow’s body but a boy’s head. I took a step forward and punched his torso, which was solid as a bale of hay; I half expected a scream to roll out of his mouth. I looked down — I was standing on a snarl of his guts. Would a scarecrow’s organs look like this? I wondered. Like birds’ nests. A grass kidney, a flammable heart. Now I understood Mondo’s earlier wail — when the scarecrow didn’t cry out, I wanted to scream for him.

“Who stuck those on its face?” Mondo asked. “Those eyes?”

“Whoever put him here in the first place, jackass.”

“Well, what weirdo does that? Puts eyes and clothes on a giant doll of a kid and ropes him to a tree?”

“A German, probably,” said Gus knowingly. “Or a Japanese. One of those sicko sex freaks.”

Mondo rolled his eyes. “Maybe you put it here then, Ainsworth.”

“Maybe he’s a theater prop? Like, from our school?”

“He’s wearing some nasty clothes.”

“Hey! He’s got a belt like yours, Rubby!”

“Shut up.”

“Wait — you’re going to steal the scarecrow’s belt? That ain’t bad luck?”

“Oh my God! He’s got on underwear!” Mondo snapped the elastic, giggling.

“He has a hole,” Juan Carlos said quietly. He’d slid his hand between the doll’s sagging shoulders and the tree. “Down here, in his back. Look. He’s spilling straw.”

Juan Carlos was jerking stuffing out of the scarecrow and then, in the same panicky motion, trying to cram it back inside the hole; all this he did with a sly, aghast look, as if he were a surgeon who had fatally bungled an operation and was now trying to disguise that fact from his staff. This straw, I recognized with a chill, was fresh and green.

“You got your ‘oh shit!’ face on, J.C.!” Gus laughed. I managed a laugh too, but I was scared, scared. The straw was scary to me, its pale colors and its smell. A terrible sweetness lifted out of the doll, that stench you are supposed to associate with innocent things — zoos and pet stores, pony rides. He was stuffed to the springs of his eyeballs. Put it all back, Juan, I thought hopefully, and we’ll be OK.

“Uh. You dudes? Do scarecrows have fingers?” Mondo held the scarecrow’s left hand, very formally, as if he were suddenly in a cummerbund accompanying the scarecrow to the world’s scariest prom.

“I mean, usually,” he added lamely, as if this were a normal topic to solicit our opinions on, the prevalence of scarecrow fingers.

“His body is soft.” Gus demonstrated this for us, punching it. “But his face is, like, a wax? Not-straw. Some other shit. Plastic.”

Only it wasn’t generic, like a mall mannequin. Even the dark blue eye color looked particular, familiar. His features were weird and specific, like the face of a wax actress in a museum. Someone you were supposed to recognize.

“What the hell?” Gus whispered, twisting the scarecrow’s face by its plastic chin. The chin was pocked with a fiery braille of blemishes and cuts, so convincingly nasty that you half expected them to ooze. The longer I stared at him, the less real I myself felt. Was I really the only one who remembered his name?

“Weird. His face is cold.” Juan Carlos ran a long finger down the scarecrow’s crooked nose.

“He’s not wearing his glasses,” I mumbled. Now that I knew who this was I was afraid to touch his face, as if the humid wand of my finger might bring him to life.

“His face is hard,” Mondo confirmed, knocking on the scarecrow’s forehead. “His eyes are…uh-oh. Oops.”

Mondo turned to us, grinning.

“Oh shit!” Gus shook his head. “Put them back in.”

“I can’t. The little threads broke.” Mondo held out the eyes: two grape-sized balls, an amethyst glass soaked blue by the last light of day. “Any of you bitches know how to sew?” Intense pinks were filtering through the autumn mesh of the oak. It was dusk, sunset; the park was now officially closed. “Seriously?” Mondo asked, sounding a little panicky now. “Anybody got glue or something?”

I stared at the sprigs of thread where the scarecrow’s eyes had been. Now his face was putty white from the “T” of his nose to his forehead. A little firefly was lighting up the airless caves of the doll’s nostrils, undetected by the doll. You’re even blinder now, I thought, and a heavy feeling draped over me.

Then I heard the question I’d been dreading: “Don’t we know this kid?”

Now Mondo stood on his toes and peered into the scarecrow’s eyes with a shrewdness that you did not ordinarily expect from Mondo Chu — his mind was lost inside one of those baby-fat faces that he couldn’t seem to age out of, with big slabby cheeks that squeezed his eyes into a narcoleptic squint, although outside of school Mondo could get pretty annoyingly energetic. There was some evidence that Mondo did not have the happiest home life. Mondo was half Chinese, half something.We’d all forgotten, assuming we’d ever known.

In fact, as a “we,” Camp Dark was pretty fiercely uninterested in the details of its members’ lives outside of school or beyond the fenced urban woods of Friendship Park. Silence policed the shady meeting point under our oak. I didn’t know, for example, if Juan Carlos’s big sister was pregnant or just getting large on Hershey’s Kisses, or how Mondo got the yellowish bruises that covered his flabby upper arms. Inside of our “we,” nobody would ask you about your ma’s cancer or your alcoholic aunt, your moon-eyed half sister, your family’s debts, nobody commented on the emotions that might fly across your face and raise your fists and nobody demanded a bullshit weather report from you either, a reason for your anger — not like the teachers, who were always demanding that sort of phony meteorology from us. We cracked jokes together in Camp Dark, but I think it was the silence, all those unasked questions, that bound us. At school we beat down kids as a foursome and this too we did in an animal silence. We’d drag a hysterical kid behind the red-brick Science Building — this march could look a little medieval, like some Gallows Day parade, each of us taking up an arm or a leg — and then we would hammer and piston our fists into his clawing, shrilling body until the kid went slack as rags. For us, this process was a necessary evil. We were like four factory guys, manufacturing the quiet, a calm that was not available to us naturally anywhere in Anthem. We’d kneel there, panting together, and let the good quiet bubble around our fists like glue.

It was Mondo who cracked the mystery. He didn’t solve it, I don’t mean that — in fact he made the mystery much worse. That’s what I pictured anyhow, when Mondo tapped the mystery with his little eureka! hammer — hairline cracks appearing in a round, solid shell. Yolk came oozing out of the mystery, covering all of our hands, so that we became involved.

“Oh!” Mondo fell back on his heels and let out a bee-stung cry. “It’s Eric.”

“Oh.” I took a step away from the tree.

Juan Carlos paused with one hand lost in the doll’s back, still wearing a doctor’s distant, guileful expression.

“Who the fuck is Eric?” Gus snarled.

Then Mondo, grinning loonily like a Jeopardy! champ, grabbed the scarecrow’s left arm by the wrist and made it shake hands with the cold air between us. “Don’t you assholes remember him? Eric Mutis.”

Sure, we remembered him now: Eric Mutis. Eric Mutant, Eric Mucus, Eric the Mute. Paler than a cauliflower, a friendless kid who had once or twice had seizures in our class. “Eric Mutis is an epileptic,” our teacher had explained a little uncertainly, after Mutant got carried by Coach Leyshon from the room. Eric Mutis had joined our eighth-grade class in October of the previous year, a transfer kid. One day Mutant was sitting in the back row of our homeroom; the teacher never introduced him. Kids rarely moved to Anthem, New Jersey, and generally the teachers made the New Boy or the New Girl parade their strangeness for us; but Eric Mutis, who seemed genuinely otherworldly, much weirder even than the Guatemalan New Boy, Eric Mutis arrived in exile. He sank like a stone to the bottom of our homeroom. One day, several weeks before the official end of our school term, he vanished, and I honestly had not spoken his name since. Nobody had.

In the school halls, Eric Mutis had been as familiar as air; at the same time we never thought about him. Not unless he was right in front of our noses. Then you couldn’t ignore him — there was something provocative about Eric Mutis’s ugliness, something about his oblivion, his froggy lashes and his worse-than-dumb expression, that filled your eyes and closed your throat. He could metamorphose Jilly Lucio, the top of the cheer pyramid, a dog lover and the sweetest girl in our grade, into a harpy. “What smells?” she’d whisper, little unicorn-pendant Jilly, thrilling us with her acid tone, and only Eric Mutis would blink his large, bovine eyes at her and say, “I don’t smell it, Jilly,” in that voice like thin bluemilk. Congenitally, he really did seem like a mutant, incapable of shame. Even then, at age twelve, before our glands made us all swell into monsters, I felt allergic to the kid. His ugliness panned into a weird calm, and this combination was like a bully allergen. A teacher’s allergen, too — the poor get poorer, I guess, because many of our teachers were openly hostile to Eric Mutis; by December, Coach Leyshon was sneering, “Pick it up, Mutant!” on the courts.

The courts, the grass behind them — that was where Camp Dark came to order. We did what you might call these “alterations” on the blacktop. At recess we’d descend on Eric Mutis like deranged tailors, trailing these little threads of Eric’s spittle and Eric’s blood. But his costume — the smoggy yellow cloud of his hair, his sickly bus-terminal complexion — it was his skin. We could not free him, we could not torch the costume off him. He wouldn’t change, no matter how often we encouraged him to do so with our insults and the instruction of our “pranks” and fists. We stole his Hoops sneakers, hung them up on the flagpole, we smashed his gray Medicaid glasses three times that year, his hideous glasses, with frames the width of my TV set; and then he’d come to school in a new pair of the same eyesore frames, the same nine-dollar Hoops sneakers, fresh from the Starmart box. How many pairs of Hoops did we force him to buy — or, most likely, since Eric Mutis queued up with us for the free lunch program, to steal?

“Why are you so stubborn, Mutant?” I hissed at him once, when his face was inches away from mine, lying prone on the blacktop — closer to my face than any girl’s had ever been. Closer than I’d let my ma’s face get to me, now that I’d turned thirteen. I could smell his blue bubblegum, and what we called “Anthem cologne” — like my own clothes, Mutant’s rags stunk of diesel and fried doughnut grease and the sweet, fecal waft off manhole covers.

“Why don’t you learn?” And I Goliath crushed the Medicaid glasses in my hand, feeling sick.

“Your palms, Larry.” Eric the Mute had shocked me that time, calling me by name. “They’re bleeding.”

“Are you retarded?” I marveled. “You are the one bleeding! This is your blood!” It was our blood actually, but his voice and his monotone blue eyes made me furious. “WAKE UP!” I backed away to give Gus space to deliver an encore kick. “Listen, Mutant: DO…NOT…WEAR THAT UGLY SHIT TO SCHOOL!”

And Monday came, and guess what Mutant wore?

Was he wearing this stuff out of rebellion? A kind of nerd insurrection? I didn’t think so; that might have relieved us a little bit, if the kid had the spine and the mind to rebel. But Eric Mutant seemed terribly oblivious of his own appearance — that was the problem — he wore that stuff witlessly, shamelessly. We couldn’t teach him how to be ashamed of it. (“Who did this? Who did this?” our upstairs neighbor, Miss Zeke from 3C, used to holler, grinding her cross-eyed dachshund’s nose into a lake of urine on the stairwell, while the dog, a true lost cause, jetted another weak stream onto the floor.) When we took Eric Mutis around behind the red-brick Science Building, he never seemed to understand what his crime had been, or what was happening, or even — his blue eyes drifting, unplugged — that it was happening to him.

In fact, I think Eric Mutis would have been hard-pressed to identify himself in a police lineup. In the school bathroom he always avoided mirrors. The school bathroom was tiled, naval blue for boys, which made the act of pissing into a bowl feel weirdly perilous, as if at any moment you might get plowed under by an Atlantic City wave. Teachers used a separate faculty john; I’d cracked younger kids’ skulls on those tiles before. Eric the Mute knew this much about me — that was the one lesson he took.

“Well, hallo there, Mutant,” I’d whistle at him.

More than once I watched him drop his dick and zip up and sprint past the bank of sinks when I entered the bathroom, his homely face pursuing him blurrily and hopelessly in the mirrors. This used to make me happy, when kids like Eric Mucus were afraid of me. (Really, I don’t know who I could have been then either.)

“Well,” Gus sighed, dragging down his dark earlobes, which was his baseball signal to the rest of us that he’d lost it, his patience with our dithering voices, his faith in debate fertilizing an action. “We could do an experiment, like. Seems pretty simple. One way to find out what old Eric Mutant here — ”

“The scarecrow,” Mondo hissed, as if he regretted ever naming it.

Gus rolled his eyes. “What the scarecrow is doing in the park? One way to learn what he is supposedly protecting us from? Would be to cut him down.”

“But, Gus.” I swallowed. “What if something does come to Anthem?”

“Well, Rubby…” Gus shrugged. “Then we’ll have some fascinating new information about this scarecrow, won’t we?”

We had been riffing on this: What threat, exactly, was this scarecrow keeping away from Friendship Park? Not crows, that was for sure; but what was the Anthem equivalent, the urban crow? Rabid cats? A flock of mob gunmen, or sewer rats? Those poor Canada geese that kept getting sucked into the engines of jet planes at the Anthem airport? (That one was my idea.) What could a doll of a child scare away, a freak like Mutant?

The oak shivered above us; it was almost nine o’clock. Police, if they came upon us now, would write us up for trespassing. Come upon us, officers. Maybe the police would know the protocol here, what you should do if you found a scarecrow of your classmate strung up in the woods.

“I’m with Larry. I don’t think that’s a good idea anymore, either,” said Mondo. “To cut him down. What if something really bad happens? It would be our fault.”

Juan Carlos nodded. “Look, whoever put this up is one sick fuck. I don’t want to mess with the property of a lunatic…”

Juan was still enumerating his understandable concerns when Gus, who had fallen quiet, walking around the tree and finishing everybody’s brews, stood up. A knife sprang out of Gus’s pocket, a four-inch knife that nobody had known Gus carried with him, one of the kitchen tools we’d seen used by Gus’s pretty mom, Mrs. Ainsworth, to butterfly and debone chickens. Down went Eric.

“GUS!”

We stood up just as the scarecrow shucked the oak permanently, and plummeted into the sky.Watching him go over, I felt dread without a drop of surprise — it felt like we were watching a horror movie that we’d seen a thousand times before, The Scarecrow of Eric Mutis Dives Into the Cone! I can still see the stars swarming around the pin oak and Gus sawing at the rope, Gus giving Eric Mutis’s doll a little push — joylessly, dutifully, like a big brother behind a swingset — the plaque catching at him like a stumbling stone, illegibly flashing, the doll launching over the roots, headfirst, into a night that shrank him, into the Cone’s collapsing sky, the doll falling and falling and then, not. He landed on the rocks with a baseball crack. I don’t know how to describe the optical weirdness of the pace of this event — because the doll fell fast — but the doll’s descent felt unnaturally long to me, as if the forest floor were, just as quickly, lunging away from Eric Mutis. Somebody almost laughed. Mondo was already on his knees, peering over the edge, and I joined him: The scarecrow looked like a broke-neck kid at the bottom of a well. Facedown, his limbs all scrambled on an oily soak of black and maroon leaves and strata of our glass. Had it lost more straw? Black plants waved down there and I couldn’t tell which weeds might have belonged to the scarecrow. One of his white hands had gotten twisted all the way around. He waved at us, palm up, spearing the air with his long, unlikely fingers.

“OK,” Gus said, sitting back down next to where he’d dug his red beer can into the leaves, as if we were at the beach. “You’re all welcome. Everybody needs to shut up now. Let’s start the clock on this experiment.”

We emerged from the park at Gowen Street and Forty-eighth Avenue. A doorman waved at us from a fancy apartment building. Awnings sprouted above all of the windows like golden claws. When the streetlights clicked on without warning, I think we all stifled a scream. We stood on the dirty tarmac of the sidewalk, bathed in a deep-sea light. Even on a nonscarecrow day I dreaded this, the summative pressure of the good-bye moment — but now it turned out there was nothing to say. We split off in a slow way, a slow ballet — a moth, watching the four of us from above, would have seen us as a knot dissolving over many moth centuries underneath the green air. It occurred to me that, given the lifespan of a moth, one kid’s twitch would occupy a year of insect time. The scarecrow of Eric Mutis would have twirled down for moth aeons.

“What the hell is so funny, kid?” the doorman shouted. I had been spawning a slow smile on my face, imagining the decades of moth time going by as my smile grew: Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, sleigh bells ring, Mr. Moth, here comes spring…

That night marked a funny turning point for me; I started thinking about Time in a new way, Time with a capital “T,” this substance that underwent mysterious conversions. On the walk home I watched moths go flitting above the stalled lanes of cars. I called Mondo on the phone, something I never did — I was surprised I even had his number. We didn’t talk about Eric Mutis, but the effort of not talking about him made our actual words feel like fizz, just a lot of speedy emptiness. You know, I never tried to force Eric Mutis from my mind — I never had to. Courteously, the kid had disappeared from my brain entirely, about the same time he vanished from our school rolls. Were it not for the return of his scarecrow in Camp Dark, I doubt I would have given him a second thought.

I am in the shower, Eric Mutis is where? I tied myself to mental train tracks, juxtaposing my activities against Eric Mutis’s imaginary ones — was he blowing out twisty red and white birthday candles, doing homework? What hour of what day was it, wherever Eric Mutis had moved? I pictured him in Cincinnati squiggling mustard on a ballpark frank, in France with an arty beret (I pictured him dead too, in a dreamy, compulsive way, the concrete result of which was that I no longer ate breakfast). “You don’t want your Popple, Larry?” my ma screamed. “It’s a Blamberry Popple!” The Blamberry Popple looked like a pastry nosebleed to me. What was Eric eating? How soundly was he sleeping? (“Did we break Mutant’s nose?” I asked Gus in homeroom. “At least once,” Gus confirmed.) Now each of my minutes cast an hourglass shadow and I divided into two.

But inside the Cone, as it turned out, the scarecrow of Eric Mutis was subdividing even faster.

Every day for a week, we went back to stare at the facedown scarecrow of Eric Mutis in Friendship Park. It lay there in the sun, sleeping it off. Nothing much happened. There was a mugging at the Burger Burger; the robber got a debit card and a quart of milkshake. Citywide, bus fare went up five cents. A drunk driver in the Puerto Rican day parade draped a Puerto Rican flag over his windshield like a patriotic blindfold and crashed through a beautiful float of the island of Puerto Rico. Nothing occurred on the crime blotter that seemed connected to Eric Mutis, or Eric Mutis’s absence. No strange birds flew out of exile, no new shapes came to roost in the oaks of Friendship Park now that the scarecrow’s guard was down. Downed by us, I thought angrily, like a cut power line. Drowned in air, like the world’s stupidest experiment.

Had Eric Mutis’s scarecrow been babysitting a crop? Some Jersey version of the Amish seven grains? Years of city trash and plastic guns, that was Camp Dark’s harvest. I thought of the slippery weeds crushed underneath his face, the rocks and cans glowing like blind fish in the ravine.

“Did Eric have a dad? A mom?”

“Wasn’t he a foster kid?”

“Where did he move to again?”

“Old Mucusoid never said — did he? He just disappeared.”

At school, the new guidance counselor could not help us find our “little pal” — the district computers, she said, had been wiped by a virus. Mutis, Eric: no record. His yearbook slot was an empty navy egg between the school-mandated grimaces of Omar Mowad and Valerie Night. ABSENT, it read in red letters. We consulted with Coach Leyshon, whom we found face deep in a vending-machine cheeseburger behind the dugout.

“Mutant?” he barked. “That dipshit didn’t come back?” We broke into Vice Principal Derry’s file cabinet and made depressing, irrelevant discoveries about the psychology of Vice Principal Derry — his top drawer contained about five million pointless green pencils, a Note to Moi! memo, in pen, that read BUY PENCIL SHARPENER, and a radiant mélange of glues.

Next we consulted the yellow pages at the city library, Ma Bell’s anthology of false alarms — we thought we found Mutant in Lebanon Valley, Pennsylvania. Voloun River, Tennessee. Jump City, Oregon. Jix, Alaska, a place that sounded like a breakfast cereal or an attack dog, had four Mutis families listed. We called. Many dozens of Mutises across America hung up on us, after apologizing for their households’ dearth of Erics. America felt vast and void of him.

Gus whammed the phone into its receiver, disgusted. “It’s like that kid hatched out of an egg. What I want to know is: Who made him into a scarecrow?”

Again the yellow pages got consulted. This time we weren’t even sure what sort of listing to scout for. Who made a doll of a boy — some modern Mary Shelley? An artist, a child taxidermist? We looked for ridiculous things: SCARECROW REPAIR, WAX KIDS.

I found an address for a puppeteer who had a workshop in Anthem’s garment district. Gus biked out there and did reconnaissance, weaving around the bankers’ spires of downtown Anthem and risking the shortcut under the overpass, where large, insane men brayed at you and haunted shopping carts rolled windlessly forward. He spent an hour circling the puppeteer’s studio, trying to catch him in the act of Dark Arts — because what if he wasmaking scarecrows of us? But the puppeteer turned out to be a small, baldman in a daffodil print shirt; the puppet on his table was a hippopotamus, or perhaps some kind of lion. This Gus learned on his twentieth revolution around the workshop, at which time the puppeteer lifted the window, gave a friendly wave, and told Gus that he had just telephoned the police.

“Great,” sighed Juan Carlos. “So we still have no clue who made that doll.”

“But how the fuck you going to confuse a hippo and a lion, bro!” Mondo grumbled. Often Mondo’s reactions would miss the mark entirely and slam into a non sequitur, as if his rage were a fierce and stupid bird that kept landing on the wrong tree, whole woods away from the rest of us.

“Chu, you have a brain defect.” Gus stared at him. “Something that cannot be helped.”

“Maybe Mutant did it,” I said, almost hopefully. I wanted Eric to be safe and alive. “Did he know that we hang out in the park? Maybe he roped the scarecrow there to screw with us.”

“Maybe it was Vice Principal Derry,” said Juan Carlos. “One time, I’m walking to the bus, and I see Mutant in Vice Principal Derry’s office. Through that window that faces the parking lot, right? And I sort of thought, ‘Oh, good, he’s getting some help.’ But then Derry catches me looking, right? And he stands up, he’s fucking pissed, he shuts the blinds. It was so weird. And I saw the Mute’s mug — ” I could see it too, Mutant’s leech white face behind the glass, I had seen it framed in Derry’s office window, Eric Mutis swallowed in Derry’s leather chair, wearing his queer gray glasses. “And he looked…bad,” he finished. “Like, scared? Worse than he did when we messed with him.”

“Why was he in Derry’s office?” I asked, but nobody knew.

“I saw him get picked up from school,” Mondo volunteered. “After second period, you know, cause he had one of his twitch fests? The, uh, the seizures? And this dude in the car looked so old! I was like, Mutant, is Darth Vader there your dad?”

This too was something we all suddenly remembered seeing: a cadaverous man, a liver-spotted hand on the steering wheel of a snouty green Cadillac, tapping a cigar, and then Mutant climbing into the backseat, the rear window as foggy as aquarium glass and the Mute’s head now etched dimly behind it. He always climbed into the backseat, never used the passenger door, we agreed on that. We all remembered the cigar.

Gus hadn’t stopped frowning — it had been days since he’d told a truly funny joke. “Where did Mutis live in Anthem? Does anybody remember him saying?”

“East Olmsted,” said Mondo. “Right? With a crazy aunt.” Mondo’s eyes widened, as if his memory were coming into focus. “I think the aunt was black!”

“Chu,” Juan Carlos sighed. “That is not your memory. You are thinking of a Whoopi Goldberg movie. Nah, Mutant’s parents were rich.”

“Oh my God!” Mondo clapped a hand to his face. “You’re right! That was a great movie!”

Juan Carlos directed his appeal to Gus and me. “Kid was loaded. I just remembered. I’m, like, ninety percent sure. That’s why the Mute pissed us off so bad…wasn’t it? Dressing like he was on welfare and shit. I think they lived in the Pagoda. Serious.”

I almost laughed at that — the Pagoda was an antislum, a castle of light. Eric Mutis had never lived in the Pagoda’s zip code. In fact, I had visited the house where Eric lived. Just one time. This knowledge was like a wild thumper of a rabbit inside me. I was amazed that no one else could hear it.

Wednesday morning, I went to Friendship Park on an empty stomach, alone. The sun came with me; I was already an hour late for songs with Miss Verazain in Music I, a class that I was certainly failing, since I stood in the back with Gus and made a Clint Eastwood seam with my lips and sang only in my mind. It was the class I loved.

That day we were set to sing some classical stuff, words floating uselessly on the surge of one of those “B” or “C” composers, Bach or maybe Chopin, these dead men whose songs sawed through time with violins and uncorked a forest to let a soft green light flood out, and into the voices of my friends — back then I would have said that Music I calmed me down better than pot and I didn’t like to miss it. But I had my own business with the scarecrow of Eric Mutis. I’d been having dreams about both Erics, the real one and the doll. I twisted on my pillow and imagined it loaded with straw. In one dream, I got Coach Leyshon’s permission to sub myself in for him, lashing my body to the pin oak and eating horsey fistfuls of a bloodred straw; in another, I watched the doll of Eric Mutis go plunging into the Cone again, only this time when his scarecrow hit the rocks, a thousand rabbits came bursting out of it. Baby rabbits: squeamish, furless thumbs of pink in the night, racing lemming quick under the oaks of Camp Dark.

“Eric?” I called softly, well in advance of the oak. And then, almost inaudibly: “Honey?” in a voice that was not unlike my own ma’s when she opened my bedroom door at night and called my name but clearly didn’t want to wake me, wanted instead who-knows-what? A squirrel watched me with an aggravating fearlessness as I entered Camp Dark, scratching its chest fur like a man in a soiled little shirt. I kicked it away and got on my knees and held on to the oak’s roots like my bike’s handlebars, peering down into the Cone.

“Oh my God.”

Whatever had attacked the scarecrow in the night had been big enough to tear his arm off at the root. Green and beige straw spewed out of the hole. You’re next, you’re next, you’re next, my heart screamed. I straightened and ran and I didn’t slow down until I passed under the stone arch of Friendship Park and saw the violet-gray speck at the bottom of the hill that became the glass umbrella of the #22 bus stop. I did not stop until I burst into Music I, where all of my friends were doing their do re mi work. I pushed in next to Gus and collapsed against our wall.

“You’re very late, Señor Rubio,” said Miss Verazain disgustedly, and I nodded hard, my eyes still stinging from the cold. “You’re too late to be assigned a role.”

“I am,” I agreed with her, hugging my arm.

There was one day last December, right before the Christmas break, where we got him behind the Science Building for a game that Mondo had named Freeze Tag. The game was pretty short and unsophisticated — we made a kid “It,” the way you’d identify an animal as a trophy kill, if you were a hunter, or declare a red spot “the bull’s eye,” so that you could shoot it:

“Not it!”

“Not it!”

“Not it!”

“Not it!”

We’d grinned and our four bodies in our white gym shirts made a grin too, where we’d gathered in the witchy grass of the back-lot ball field. We were up to our knees in the grass, advancing. Two halves of a circle. We didn’t corner the kid, Mutis, we made actual lips around him. From above we would have looked like a mouth, closing. The rules were simple and yet Eric Mutis stared at us with his opaque blue eyes, staked to the field, and gave no sign of understanding it.

“You’re it,” I’d explained to Eric.

Everybody followed me toward Camp Dark in a line.

“Here comes the army!” cackled a bum with whom we sometimes shared beers, one of a rotating cast of lost men whom Gus called the Bench Goblins. He had a long stirrup-shaped face that grinned and grinned at us when we told him about the scarecrow of Eric Mutis. Long fingers brushed at the oatmeal of wet newspapers that covered his cheeks.

“No,” he said, “I don’t see nobody come this way with no doll.”

“One week ago,” I prodded, but you could tell that this unit didn’t mean much to the guy. He had amassed a slippery skin of newspapers on his legs with headlines from early August.

All last night it had rained; the leaves were shining, the red playground foam looked like a giant’s dental equipment. We marched forward. I wasn’t the oldest or the tallest but I was the leader now, and why? Just because I knew the bad scene waiting for us behind the treeline. And, in fact, I knew a little more about the real Eric Mutis than I was letting on. I had some brewing theories, nothing I was ready to voice, about why the scarecrow had arrived in our city. It is a very good thing that we elect our presidents in America, I thought, because this had to be the wrong basis for picking a leader — if I was at this particular moment the best informed about the danger we were heading toward, I was also the worst scared.

“So what do you think did it, Rubby?” Gus asked.

“Yeah. An animal, like?” Mondo’s eyes were gleeful. “Is it all clawed up?”

“You’ll see. I dunno, guys,” I mumbled. “I dunno. I dunno.” Each word crawled like a gray mouse up the bars of my ribs to my throat. Mice dug their pink claws into my belly and my heart. (Could mice have done that to the scarecrow of Eric Mutis? Chewed off and carried away a whole arm? Could ants? Maybe the threat was multiple, pestilential, and smaller than I’d thought.)

Hypothesis 1: A human is doing this.

Hypothesis 2: An animal, or several animals, are doing this. Smart animals. Surgical animals. Animals with claws. Scavengers — opossums or something, the waddlesome undertakers of the park.

Hypothesis 3: This is being done by…Something Else.

But when we reached the Cone and they peered over the edge — I hung back, leaning on the oak — everybody started to laugh. Hysterically, a belly-clutching laugh, like three hyenas, Gus first and then the other two.

“Good one, Rubby!” they called.

I was shocked. “Why are you laughing?”

“Oh, shit, that is a good one, Rubby-oh. This is a classic.”

“This is your best yet,” Juan Carlos confirmed with a gloomy jealousy.

“Dang! Larry. You’re like a goddamn acrobat! How did you get down there?”

Eyes were rolling at me in a semicircle. I found myself thinking of Eric the Mute, Eric the Mutant, and what we must have looked like to him.

“Wait — ” I rolled my wet eyes back at them. “You think I did that?” Everybody nodded at me with a strange solemnity, so that for a disorienting second I wondered if they might be right. How did they think I had managed the amputation? I tried to see myself as they must be imagining me: swinging down into the Cone on a stolen phys ed rope, a knife in my back jeans pocket, the moon hanging over Anthem in a crescent, its light washing over the Cone’s rock walls and making the place feel even more like an unlidded casket; I watched myself approach the doll in the reeds, the doll that had been waiting for my attack with a patience rivaled only by the real Eric Mutis’s; I heard the doll’s right arm ripping away as I grunted the knife into the fabric, the moon shining on, the world watching us out of one slit eye, like a cat, a cracked Anthem stray. And then what? Did my friends think I’d swung the arm back to the surface, à la Tarzan? Carried the arm out of the park in my book bag?

“I didn’t do it!” I gasped. “This is not a joke, you assholes…”

I got up and vomited orange Gatorade into the bushes. It was all liquid — I hadn’t been eating. Days of emptiness rose in me and I dry retched again, listening to my friends’ peals of laughter echo around Camp Dark. Then I surprised myself by laughing with them, so uncontrollably and with such relief that it felt like a continuation of the retching — like disgorging my claims of innocence and crawling on my hands and knees back inside our “we.” My lungs filled with and expelled this relief, which I knew would only last as long as we could loft the joke. After a while the laughter didn’t sound connected to any of us. It was like a thunderhead, a stampede — sound poured all over us. We blinked at each other, under the laughter, our mouths open.

“And the Oscar for puking goes to…Larry Rubio!” said Juan Carlos, still doubled over.

A bird floated softly over the park. Somewhere just beyond the treeline, city buses were wheezing a cargoload of citizens to and from work. Some of these were our parents. I felt a little stab, picturing my ma eating her yellow apple on the train and reading some self improvement book, on a two-hour commute to her job at a day nursery for rich infants in Anthem’s far richer sister county. I realized that I had zero clue what my ma did there; I pictured her rolling a big striped ball, at extremely slow speeds, toward babies in little sultan hats and fat, bejeweled diapers.

“My ma’s name is Jessica,” I heard myself say. I could not stop talking now, it was like chattering teeth. “Jessica Dourif. Gus, you met her once, you remember.” I glared at Gus and dared him to say he’d forgotten her.

“Rubio? Why… ,” Juan Carlos said slowly, picking around my body like an Inquisitor, “…the hell…are you telling us this?”

I was staring down at the scarecrow’s shredded body. A gash down his back had hemorrhaged a dirty-looking straw. A golden bird was hopping around down there, pecking and pecking. Now YOU need a scarecrow, I thought, watching the bird savagely tease out straw from the old hole.

“I’ve never met my father,” I blurted. “I can’t even say my own fucking last name.”

“Larry,” Juan Carlos said sternly, standing over me. “Nobody cares. Now you pull yourself together.”

What followed over the course of the next eight days progressed with the logic of a frightening nursery rhyme:

On Tuesday morning, the scarecrow’s hands were gone. Both of them. I pictured the white fingers crawling through the park, hailing a cab, starting a new and incognito life somewhere, perhaps with a family of unwitting tarantulas in New Mexico. Eric Mutis, the real Eric, he too could be living in a painted desert now, with a new father or a new guardian. Or in a mountain town, maybe. Living at a ludicrous altitude, his body half eaten by the charcoal clouds of Aspen. By the sea. In Salamanca, Spain. In a cold cottage on the moon.

By Wednesday, the scarecrow was missing both coruscating Hoops sneakers and both feet. Everybody but me snickered about that one. We’d stolen Eric Mutis’s Hoops maybe a dozen times last year, we stole Hoops from any kid stupid enough to wear them — Hoops were imitation Nikes, glittered with an insulting ersatz gold, and just the sight of a pair enraged me. The “H” logo was a flamboyant way to announce to your class: Hey, I’m poor! Once Gus and I had gotten a three-day suspension for jerking off the Mute’s Hoops sneakers and his crusty socks and holding an “America the Great” sparkler to his bare feet — just to mess with him.

“Larry!” Gus said, clapping my back. “How did you get out of the Cone with two shoes in your hands? This is some Cirque du Soleil bullshit! You got to try out for the Olympics.” He checked the backs of my arms for fresh nets of scrapes. “What, are you flying down there?”

“I am not doing this,” I said quietly. I was getting hoarse from saying that. I realized with a grim shock that I was leaning against the oak in exactly the spot where we’d found Mutis’s scarecrow.

“Maybe,” I said in a whisper, “we can fish him up…? Hook him out? Maybe we can get down there and, and bury it.”

“Are you crying, bro?”

Everybody complimented me on my “acting.” But they were the actors — believing their easy suspicion, pretending that I was the guy to blame. OnlyMondo would let me see his smile tremble, and I felt a little better, thinking hard at him: Mondo, whatever’s happening down there, I am not behind it, OK?

On Thursday, his second arm was gone. Ripped whole, presumably, from the cloth shoulder, so that you got an unsettling glimpse of the gray straw coiled inside the scarecrow. Not-it, not-it, not-it, I’d been thinking all week, a thorny little crown of thoughts.

“What’s next, Rubby? You going to carry a guillotine down there?”

Not it! I worried I was about to ralph again.

“You bet,” I said. “How well you all know me. Next up, I’m going to climb down there and behead Eric Mutis with an ax.”

“Right.” Gus grinned. “We should follow you home. We’re gonna find Mutant’s arm under your pillow. The fake one, and probably the real one too, you psycho.”

And they did. Follow me home. On a Saturday, after we discovered that the doll’s legs had disappeared — the scarecrow was starting to look like a disintegrating jack-o-lantern, pulpy and crushed, with a sallow vegetable pallor. I was “It.” I was the only suspect. Under a dreary sky we left the scarecrow where it was, everybody but me laughing about how they’d been fucked with, faked out, punked, and gotten.

“You rotten, Rubby-Oh,” grinned Gus.

“Something’s rotten,” agreed Mondo, catching my eye.

Afterward we walked very slowly across the park toward my ma’s apartment on First and Stuckey, where we lived in ear-splitting proximity to the hospital; from my bedroom window I could see the red and white carnival lights of the ambulances. Awake, I was totally inured to the sirens, a whine that we’d been hearing throughout Anthem since birth — that urgent song drilled into us until our own heartbeats must have synced with it, which made it an easy howl to ignore; but I had dreams where the vehicular screams in the URGENT CARE parking lot became the cries of a gigantic, abandoned baby behind my apartment. All I wanted to do in these dreams was sleep but this baby wouldn’t shut up! Now I think this must be a special kind of poverty, low-rent city sleep, where even in your dreams you are an insomniac and your unconscious is shrill and starless.

When we got to my place, the apartment was dark and there was no obvious sustenance waiting for us — my ma was not one to prepare a meal. Some deep-fridge spelunking produced a pack of spicy jerky and Velveeta slices. This was beau food, suitor food, a relic from my ma’s last live-in boyfriend — was it Curtis Black? Manny Somebody? Which one had been the jerky lover? As the son, I got to be on a first name basis with all of these adult men, all of her boyfriends, but I never knew them well enough to hate them in a personal way. We folded thirty-two cheese slices into cold taco shells and ate them in front of the TV. Later I’d remember this event as a sort of wake for the scarecrow of Eric Mutis, although I had never in my life been to a funeral.

They searched my apartment, found nothing. No white hands clapping in my closet or anything. No legs propped next to the brooms in the kitchen.

“He’s clean,” shrugged Gus, talking over me. “He probably buried the evidence.”

“I do think we need to go down into the Cone,” I started babbling again, “and bury him. What’s left of him. Please, you guys. I really, really think we need to do that.”

“No way. We are not falling for that,” said Juan Carlos quickly, as if wary of falling into the Cone himself.

Accusing me, I saw, served a real utility for the group — suddenly nobody was interested in researching scarecrows at the library with me, or trying to figure out where the real Eric Mutis had gone, or deciphering who was behind his doppelgänger doll. They already had a good answer: I was behind it. This satisfied some scarecrow logic formy friends. They slept, they didn’t wonder anymore. That’s where my friends had staked me: behind the doll.

“Let’s go there one night, and just see who comes to shred and tear at him like that. We’ll be the scarecrow’s scarecrow, haha… ,” I gulped, staring at them. “And then we’ll know exactly…”

Mondo winced and snapped the TV on.

“Nice try, Rubby!” Gus crunched through a taco shell. The pepper specks that covered the yellow shell looked exactly like the blackheads on Gus’s broad nose. “Oh, I bet you’d love that. Nighttime. Phase Two of your prank. Get us all good in Camp Dark. I can’t wait to see how this all turns out, kid — what sort of Friday the Thirteenth ending you got planned for us. But we are not just going to walk into it, Rubby.”

It felt like we sat there for hours before somebody asked: “What the hell are we watching?” Nobody had noticed or commented when the station switched to pure static. My ma had an ancient, crappy RCA TV, with oven dials for controls and little rabbit ears; I always thought it looked more authentically futuristic to me than my friends’ modern Toshiba sets. Spazzy rainbows moved up and down, imbuing the screen with an insectoid life of its own. Here was the secret mind of the machine, I thought with a sudden ache, what you couldn’t see when the news anchors were staring soulfully at their teleprompters and the sitcom comedy families were making eggs and jokes in their fake houses.

Eric’s face — the face of scarecrow Eric — swam up in my mind. I realized that the random, relentless lightning inside the TV screen was how I pictured the interior of the doll — void, yet also, in a way that I did not understand and found I could not even think about head-on, much less explain to my friends, alive. My apartment was as silent as the rainbowed screen; with the TV on mute you could hear a hard clock tick.

“Hey! Rubio! What the fuck we watching?”

“Nothing,” I snapped back; a wise lie, I thought. “Obviously.”

For three days, little pieces of the doll of Eric Mutis continued to disappear. Once the major appendages were gone, the increments of Eric’s scarecrow that went missing became more difficult to track. Patches of hair vanished. Bites and chews of his shoulders. By Monday, two weeks after we’d found it, over half of the scarecrow was gone; with a sickening lurch I understood that it was too late now, that we were never going to tell anyone about him. Nobody who saw the wreck in the Cone would believe that it had been a doll of Eric Mutis.

“Well, that’s that,” said Juan Carlos in a funny voice, gazing down at the quartered scarecrow. In the Cone, his light spring-and-autumn straw was blowing everywhere now. All that bodiless straw gave me a nervous feeling, like watching a thought that I couldn’t collect. His naked head was still attached to the sack of his torso, both of these elements of Eric Mutis intact and ghoulishly white.

“That’s all, folks,” echoed Gus. “Going once, going twice! Nice work, Rubby.”

I shook my head, feeling nauseated. I’m still not sure how that silence overtook us. How did we know that we’d missed our window to tell an outsider about the scarecrow? Why didn’t we at least discuss it — bringing the police to Friendship Park, or even V.P. Derry? This might have been an option last week but now, as mysteriously as the parts themselves had disappeared, it wasn’t; we all felt it; we hadn’t acted, and now the secret was returning to the ground. Eric Mutis was escaping us again in this terrible, original way.

That Friday, the scarecrow’s head was gone. Now I thought I detected a little ripple of open fear in the others’ eyes. It was me, I realized, that they were afraid of. All of the laughter at my “prank” had fizzled out. I was afraid of my friends — terrified that they might actually be onto something.

“Where did you put it?” Mondo whispered.

“When are you going to stop?” said Juan Carlos.

“Larry,” Gus said sincerely, “that is really sick.”

Hypothesis 4.

I think this knowledge sat on the top of my mind for days and days. But it must have been unswallowed, undigested, like a little white bolus of food on a tongue — because I didn’t exactly know it. Not yet.

“I think we made him,” I told Mondo that night on the phone. I don’t know how, I don’t mean that we, like, stitched him up or anything, but I think that we must be the reason…”

“Quit acting nuts. I know you’re faking, Larry. Gus says you probably made him. My dinner’s ready — ” He hung up.

About the static — sometimes that was all you could see in Eric Mutis’s eyes. Just a random light tracking your fists back and forth, two blue-alive-voids. When we laid him flat in the weeds behind the Science Building, it was that emptiness that made us wild. The overriding feeling I had at these times was that I couldn’t stop hitting him — OK, I shouldn’t be hitting him at all, I’d think, but if I stop I’ll make things worse. The right light would return to his eyes and he would know what I had been doing. Stopping the punishing rhythm, without any warning, I’d risk waking him from a dream. Me too, I’d wake up breathless. Somehow I swear it really did feel like that, like I had to keep right on hitting him, to protect him, and me, from what was happening. Out of the red corner of one eye I could see my own wet fist flying. The slickness on it was our snot and our blood.

Only one time did anybody stop us. “Leave him alone,” said a voice approaching from the awning of the Science Building. We all turned. Eric Mutant, breathing quietly in the weeds below us, rolled his eyes toward the voice.

“You heard me,” the voice repeated, and, miraculously, we had. We stopped. The four of us followed Mutis’s example, and froze. This voice belonged to our librarian, Mrs. Kauder, a woman whose red lipped face and white hair made her shockingly attractive to us. Here she came like a leopardess, flaunting all her bones.

Somebody wiped Eric’s blood onto his own sleeve, a decoy swipe. Now we could credibly asseverate, to the librarian or to Coach Leyshon or to Vice Principal Derry, that our assault on Eric Mutis had been a fight. The librarian fixed her green eyes on each one of us — every one of us except for Eric she had known in elementary school.

“Now you go back to your homerooms,” she said, in this funny rehearsed way, as if she were reading our lives to us from a book. “Now you go to Math, Gus Ainsworth — ” She pronounced our real names so gently, as if she were breaking a spell. “Now you go to Computers, Larry Rubio…” Her voice was as nasally as Eric’s but with an old person’s polished tremble. It was a terribly embarrassing voice — a weak white grasshopper species that we would have tried to kill, had it belonged to a fellow child.

“Remember, boys,” the librarian called after us. “That is a no-no! We do not treat each other that way…” She finished with a liquidy rattle, so that you could almost see the half-sunk moon of her optimism bobbing up and down inside the sentence (this librarian was a forty-year veteran of her carrels and I think that light was going out).

“Now you, Eric Mutis,” the librarian said softly. “You come with me.”

And here’s the thing: That was just a Wednesday. That was nowhere near the worst of what we did to this kid, Mutis. I think we needed the librarian to keep reading us her story of our lives, her good script of who we were and our activities, for every minute of every day — but of course she couldn’t do this, and we did get lost.

“Do you think Eric is alive?” I asked Mondo. We were alone in Camp Dark; Juan Carlos had improbably gotten a job as a Food Lion bag boy and Gus was out with some chick.

Mondo looked up from his Choco-Slurpo, shocked. Even the junior size of the Choco-Slurpo contained a swimming pool of pudding. The junior was like the idiot adult son of the gargantuan “jumbo.”

“Of course he is! He changed schools, Rubby — he’s not dead.” He sucked furiously at chocolate sludge, his eyes goggling out.

“Well, what if he died? What if he was dying all last year? What if he got kidnapped, or ran away? How would we know?”

“Maybe he still lives right around the corner! Maybe he helped you to put the scarecrow up! Is that it, Larry?” he asked, offering me the fudgy backwaters of the Choco-Slurpo.When Gus wasn’t around, Mondo became smarter, kinder, and more afraid. “Are you guys doing this together? You and Eric?”

“No,” I said sadly. “Mutant, he moved. I checked his old house.”

“Huh? You what?” Out of habit, Mondo heaved up to chuck the junior cup into the Cone, our trash can of yore, momentarily forgetting that the Cone was now a sort of open grave for Eric Mutis; with the freakishness of blind coincidence, Mondo happened to look up and notice an inscription on the sunless side of the oak; not new, judging from its scarred and etiolated look, but new to us:

ERIC MUTIS

SATURDAY

The letters oozed beneath an apple green sap and were childishly shaped; the kid had pierced the heart with a little arrow.When I saw this epitaph — because that is how they always read to me, this type of love graffiti on trees and urinals, as epitaphs for ancient couples — my throat tightened and my heart raced in such a way that my own death seemed a likely possibility. Mayday, God! O God, I prayed: Please, if I am going to die, may it happen before Mondo Chu attempts CPR.

“Look!” Mondo was screaming. For a moment he’d forgotten that I was supposed to be the culprit, the engineer of this psychotic joke. “Mutant was here! Mutant had a girlfriend!”

So then I filled in some blanks for Mondo. I offered Mondo the parts of Eric Mutis that I had indeed been hoarding.

Something was alive in the corner. That was the first thing I noticed when I set foot in Mutant’s bedroom: a stripe of motion in the brown shadows near the shuttered window. It was a rabbit. A pet, you could tell from the water bottle wired to its cage bars. A pet was not just some animal, it was yours, it was loved and fed by you. Everybody knows this, of course, but for some reason the plastic water bottle looked shockingly bright to me; the clean good smell of the straw was an exotic perfume in the Mute’s bedroom. “You think this will fit you, Larry?” Eric held out a shrunken, wrinkled sweater that I recognized. “Uh-huh.”

“You better now, Larry?”

“Terrific. Extra super.” I was, in fact, almost out of my mind with embarrassment — I had been riding my bicycle on the suburban side of Anthem, on my way to see a West Olmsted kid who owed me money, when I felt a fierce pain in my side and I went flying over the handlebars — I landed a little way from my bicycle, where I sat in the street watching the front bicycle tire spinning maniacally with a pebble in my fist that turned out to be my tooth. I knew the car — it was the green Cadillac. It was that gargoyle from the school parking lot who had almost killed me. I was still sitting in the road, hypnotized by the blue sea glare on the asphalt, when I watched a pair of Hoops sneakers come jogging toward me.

“Hi, Larry,” he’d said. “You all right? Sorry. He didn’t see you there.”

I had been planning to say: “Is that maniac your dad? Mr. Hit and Run? Your caretaker or whatever? Because I could sue, you know.”

Instead I watched my hand slide inside of Mutant’s hand and form a complicated red-and-white mitt. It was a slippery handshake, my palm bleeding into it, my bike stigmata — I waited for Mutant to say something about that time I smashed his specs. But his ugly, big-eared face lowered to me and then I was on my feet, following him through a scarred wooden door, number 52, the knocker of which was a brass pineapple with filth-encrusted tropical checkers. Tackiness and incoherence, that’s what awaited me in Casa Mutis, as augured by that fruity knocker — the living room was a zombie zone of grime and confusion. Chaos. The furniture was arranged in a way that made it look like a family of illegal squatters, the plaid sofa rearing on its side, even the appliances crouched. Mutant made no apologies but hustled me into a bedroom, his, I guessed; here he was, going through drawers, looking for a change of clothes to lend me. If I went home covered in blood and toting the twisted blue octopus of my bicycle, I explained, my ma, terrified by how close I’d swerved toward death, would murder me. I pulled Mutis’s sweater on. I knew I should thank him.

“That’s a rabbit?” I asked like some idiot.

“Yeah.” Now Eric Mutis smiled with a brilliance that I had never seen before. “That’s my rabbit.”

I crossed the room, in Eric Mutis’s boat-striped sweater, to acquaint myself with Eric Mutis’s caged pet, feeling my afternoon curve weirdly. It was sitting on a little mountain of food, the rabbit. It had piled that food so high that its tall ears had pushed flat against its skull, which I thought made this rabbit look like a European swimmer.

“I think you are spoiling that rabbit, dude.”

Big fifty-pound bags of straw and food pellets filled all the corners of the room, sharing space with less bucolic stuff: a shitty purple tape deck and a vat of roach-zapping spray, grimy cartoon-print pajama pants and underwear that looked like free-range laundry to me, no hamper in sight. Mutis had stocked this place for the apocalypse, turned his room into a bunny stronghold. (Where did Mutis get his rabbit funds from? I wondered. He got the free lunch at school and dressed like a hobo.) Pine straw. Timothy, orchard, meadow. Alfalfa — plus calcium! said one bag below a humongous Swiss cheese–colored rabbit with what must have been, for a rabbit, a bodybuilder’s physique. The rabbit smiled gloatingly at me, flexing muscles you would never suspect a rabbit possessed.

“My Christ, do they put steroids in that alfalfa?” I peeled off the price sticker, feeling like a city bumpkin. “Twenty bucks! You got ripped off!” I grinned. “You need to buy your grass from Jamaica, dude.”

But he had turned away from me, bending to whisper something to the trembling rabbit. Seeing this made me uncomfortable; his whisper was already a million times too loud. I felt a flare-up of my school-day rage — for a second I hated Eric Mutant again, and I hated the oblivious rabbit even more, so smugly itself inside the cage, sucking like an infant at its water nozzle. Did Mutant know what kind of ammo he was giving me? Did he honestly believe that I was going to keep his lovenest a secret from my friends?

I strummed my fingernails along the tiny cage bars. They felt like petrified guitar strings. “What’s his name?”

“Her name is Saturday,” said Eric happily, and suddenly I wanted to cry. Who knows why? Because Eric Mutis had a girl’s pet; because Eric Mutis had named his dingy rabbit after the best day of the week? I’d never seen Eric Mutis say one word to a human girl, I’d never thought of Eric Mutis as a lover before. But he was kicking game to this rabbit like an old pro. Just whispering a love music to her, calling down to her, “Saturday, Saturday.” Behind the cage bars his whole face was changing. Mutant kept changing until he wasn’t ugly anymore. What had we found so repulsive about him in the first place? His finger was making the gentlest circle between the rabbit’s crushed ears, a spot that looked really soft to me, like a baby’s head. The rabbit’s irises were fiery and dust dry, I noted, swiping hard at my own with Eric’s sleeve.

Inside the cage, the rabbit twitched phlegmatically, breathing underneath waves of Eric Mutis’s love. The rabbit didn’t change at all. Not one whisker trembled. This struck me as pretty rude behavior, on the part of the rabbit. I was just a bystander to their little feeding here, and I could feel my heartbeat getting steadily faster. Behind the bars, Saturday was wrinkling her nose into a joyless, princessy expression, as if breathing air were an onerous obligation that she wished she could give up. What was the big attraction here? I wondered. This pet rabbit had all the charm and verve of a pillow with eyes.

“Want to pet her?” Mutant asked, not looking at me.

“No.”

But then I realized that I could do this; nobody was watching me but Mutant and his voiceless rabbit. Some hard pressure flew away from me like air out of a zigzagging balloon. I let Mutant guide my hand through the door of the cage and brushed the green straw off her fur. Still I thought this pet was pretty stupid, until I petted her hide in the same direction that Mutant was going and felt actually electrified — under my palm, a cache of white life hummed.

“Can I tell you a secret?”

“Whatever. Sure.” At that moment, it was my belief that he safely could.

Eric Mutis opened a drawer; there was so much dust on the bureau that his elbow left a big tiger stripe on the wood. There was so much dust everywhere in that room that the clean gleam of Saturday’s cage made it look like Incan treasure.

“Here.” The poster he thrust at me read LOST: MY PET BUNNY, MISS MOLLY MOUSE. PLEASE CALL ###-####! The albino rabbit in the photograph was unmistakably Saturday, wearing a sparkly Barbie top hat someone had bobby-pinned to her ear, the owner’s joking reference, I guessed, to the usual, magical algorithm of rabbits coming out of hats — a joke that was apparently lost on Saturday, whose red eyes bored into the camera with all the warmth and personality of the planet Mars. Even “found,” hugged inside the photograph, the creature was escaping its owner. The owner’s name, according to this poster, was Sara Jo. “I am nine,” the poster declared plaintively. The date on the poster said “Lost on August 22.” The address listed was 49 Delmar, just around the corner.

“I never returned her.” His voice seemed to tremble at the exact same tempo as the rabbit’s shuddering haunches. “I saw these posters everywhere.” He paused. “I pulled them all down.” He stepped aside to show me the bureau drawer, which was filled with every color of the Miss Molly poster. “I saw the girl who put them up. She has red hair. Two of those, what are they called …” He frowned. “Pigtails!”

“OK.” I grinned. “That’s bad.”

Suddenly we were laughing, hard, even Saturday, with her rumpshaking tremors, appeared to be laughing along with us.

Eric stopped first. Before I heard the hinge squeak, Eric was on his feet, hustling across the room on ballerina toes to shut the bedroom door. Just before it closed I watched a hunched shape flow past and enter the maple cavity of their bathroom. It was the same old guy who had almost mowed me down in the snouty green Cadillac on Delmar Street not thirty minutes ago. Relationship to Eric: unclear.

“Is that your father?”

Eric’s face was bright red.

“Your, ah, your grandfather? Your uncle? Your mom’s boyfriend?”

Eric Mutis, whom we could not embarrass at school, did not answer me now or meet my eyes.

“That’s fine, whatever,” I said. “You don’t have to tell me shit about your situation. Honey, I can’t even say my own last name.”

I barked with laughter, because what the hell? Where the hell had that come from, my calling him “honey”?

Eric smiled. “Peaches,” he said, “that’s just fine.”

For a second we stared at each other. Then we roared. It was the first and last joke I ever heard him try to make. We clutched our stomachs and stumbled around, knocking into one another.

“Shh!” Eric said between gasps, pointing wildly at the bedroom door. “Shhh, Larry!”

And then we got quiet,me and Eric Mutis. The rabbit stood on her haunches and drank water, making a white comma between us; the whole world got quieter and quieter, until that kissy sound of a mouth getting water was all you could hear. For a minute or two, catching our breath, we got to be humans together.

I never returned Mutant’s sweater, and the following Monday I did not speak to him. I hid the cuts on my palms in two fists. It took me another week to find a poster for Saturday. I figured they’d all be long gone — Eric said he’d torn them all down — but I found one on the Food Lion message board, buried under a thousand kitty calendars and yoga and LEARN TO BONGO! fliers: a very poorly reproduced Saturday glaring out at me under the Barbie hat and the words LOST! MY PET BUNNY. I dialed the number. Sure enough, a girl’s voice answered, all pipsqueaky and polite.

“I have news that might be of some interest to you.”

She knew right away.

“Molly Mouse! You found her!” Which, what an identity crisis for a rabbit. What kind of name is that? Worse than Rubby-oh. Kids should be stopped from naming anything, I thought angrily, they are too dumb to guess the true and correct names for things. Parents too.

“Yes. That is correct. Something has come to light, ma’am.”

I swayed a little with the phone in my hand, feeling powerful and evil. For some reason I was putting on my one-hundred-year-old voice, the gruff one I used when I ordered pizzas on the phone and requested the Golden Years senior discount. I heard myself reciting in this false, ancient voice the address of the house where Saturday and Eric slept.

At school, I breathed easier — I had extricated myself from a tight spot. I had been in real danger, but the moment had passed. Eric Mutis was not ever going to be my friend. Twice I called Sara Jo to ask how Molly Mouse was doing; her dad had gone to the Mutis house and via some exchange of threats or dollars gotten her back. “Oh,” the girl squealed, “she’s doing beautiful, she loves being home!”

Eric Mutis’s eyes, locked inside the gray corrals of his Medicaid frames, now became a second, dewless glass. Whenever anybody called him Mucus or Mutant, and also when our teacher called him, simply, “Eric M.,” his face showed the pruny strain of a weight lifter, puckering inward and then collapsing, as if he were too weak to hoist up his own name off the mat. When we hit him behind the Science Building, his eyes were true blanks. When we finished with him they had looked like a doll’s eyes — open, staring, but packed solid with frost, like the blue Antarctic. Permafrost around each pupil. Two telescopes fixed on a lifeless planet. Nobody had understood Eric Mutis when he arrived late in October and then by springtime my friends and I had made him much less scrutable.

“Larry — ,” he started to say to me once in the bathroom, several weeks after they’d come for Saturday, but I wrung my hands in the sink disgustedly and walked out, following Mutant’s example and avoiding our faces in the mirror. We never looked at each other again, and then one day he was gone.

Mondo and I crossed the playground in a slow processional. “Jesus H., are we graduating from something?” I grumbled. “Mondo, are we getting married? Dude, let’s pick up the pace. Mondo?”

Mondo had stopped walking in the middle of the playground. One of the few pieces of playground equipment that had survived the city pogrom and the red foaming were the zoo pogos, the little giraffe and the donkey on a stick. Mondo sat on it; the pogo groaned beneath his weight. He turned and looked at me with the world’s most miserable face.

“I am not going.”

I said nothing.

“I am changing my mind,” he said, the little pogo donkey listing east and west beneath him. He leaned a fat hand on its head and broke its left ear off. “Goddamn it!” He stood up, as if some switch inside him had broken off. I was glad that I wouldn’t have to convince him of anything. I was glad, even, that he was afraid — I hadn’t known that you could feel so grateful to a friend, for living in fear with you. Fear was otherwise a very lonely place. We kept walking toward the scarecrow.

“This is stupid,” he mumbled. “This is crazy. No way did we make the scarecrow.”

“Let’s just get this done.”

An idea had come to me last night, after telling Mondo the story of Saturday. An offering to make, a way to satisfy whatever force was feeding on the doll of Eric. It wasn’t a good one, but the other option was to leave the scarecrow untouched down there until it disappeared.

“Get what done?” Mondo was muttering. “You won’t even tell me why you’re going down there…”

“Do you want to go home? Do you want to wait until he’s totally gone?”

Mondo shook his head. His chubby face looked tumescent and red, not unlike the playground foam, as if his cheeks were swelling preemptively to protect him. Far away a plane roared over Anthem, dismissing our whole city in twenty seconds.

“Shut up, Larry!” Mondo yelped near the duck pond, when a car backfired and I jumped and brushed the flabby skin of his arm. “Watch where you’re going!”

Our flashlight beams crossed and blinded one another. After this we did not talk. Night had fallen hours ago — I didn’t want to be interrupted by anyone. Nobody was around, not even the regular bums, but the traffic on I-12 roared reassuringly just behind the treeline, a constant reminder of the asphalt rivers and the lattice of lights and signs that led to our homes. Friendship Park looked one hundred percent different than it did in daylight. Now the clouds were blue and silver, and where the full moon shone, new colors seemed to float up around us everywhere — the rusty weeds on the duck pond looked tangerine, the pin oak bulged with purple veins.

“How’s it going tonight, Mutant?” Mondo asked in a nervous voice when we reached the oak. He chucked something into the Cone — the plaster donkey’s ear. It landed squarely on Eric’s back. This was all that was left of the doll of Eric Mutis, his last solid part. Something had drawn its delicate claws down the scarecrow’s back, and now there was no mistaking what the straw inside it actually was, where it had come from — it was rabbit bedding, I thought. Timothy, meadow, orchard. Pine straw. The same golden stuff I’d seen bagged that day in the Mute’s dark bedroom. I took a big breath; I wished that I could imitate the scarecrow and leap into the Cone, swim down to him, instead of crawling along the rock wall like a bug.

“It’s moving!” Mondo screamed. “It’s getting away.”

I almost screamed too, thinking he meant the doll. But he was pointing at my black knapsack, which I’d slouched against the oak: a little tumor bubble was percolating inside the canvas, pushing outward at the fabric. As we watched, the bag fell onto its side and began to slide away, inch by inch, the zipper twinkling in the moonlight as the pouch pushed over the roots.

“Oh, shit!” I grabbed the bag and slung it over my shoulders. “Don’t worry about that. I’ll explain later. You just hold the rope, bro. Please, Mondo?”

So Mondo, staring at me with real fear as if we’d never met, as if I’d only been impersonating his good friend Larry Rubio for all these years, helped me to tie the eighteen-meter phys ed rope to the oak and loop one end around my waist. It took almost forty minutes to lower myself into the Cone, but in fact my friends’ suspicions had prepared me for this descent — I had already imagined myself backing into the ravine. I stumbled once and let go of the rock wall, swinging out, but Mondo called down that it was OK, I was OK (and I don’t think it’s possible to overstate the love I felt in that moment for Mondo Chu) — and then I was crouching, miraculously, on the mineral blue bottom of the Cone. The view above me I will never forget: the great oak sprawling over the ravine, fireflies dotting the lacunae between its frozen roots like tiny underworld lights. Much farther away, in the real sky, snakes of clouds wound ball round and came loose.

I crouched over the scarecrow’s torso, which at this moment could not have looked less like a scarecrow’s anything — if you didn’t notice the seam of straw, you might have thought it was a battered sofa cushion. Featureless and beige. I plucked up a green straw and felt a lurching sadness. Anybody with a mirror in his house knows the strangeness of meeting himself, his flaws, in light. This doll was almost gone, the boy original, Eric Mutis, was nowhere we could discover, and somehow this made me feel as if I had broken a mirror, missed my one chance to really know myself. I tried to resurrect Eric Mutis in my mind’s eye — the first Eric, the kid we’d almost killed — and failed. A face started to stutter together, shattered whitely away.

“You made it, Rubby!” Mondo called. But I hadn’t, yet. I unzipped my backpack. A little nose peeked out, a starburst of whiskers, followed by a white face, a white body. I dumped it sort of less ceremoniously than I had intended onto the relic of the scarecrow, where she landed and bounced with her front legs out. It wasn’t Saturday — I couldn’t steal Saturday back, I’d figured that would appease or solve nothing, but then this doll wasn’t the real Eric Mutis either. I’d bought this nameless dwarf rabbit for nineteen bucks at the mall pet store, where the Dijon-vested clerk had ogled me with true horror — “You do not want to buy a hutch for the animal, sir?” Many of the products that this pet store clerk sold seemed pretty antiliberation, cages and syringes, so I did not mention to him that I was going to free the rabbit.

Mondo was screaming something at me from the near sky, but I did not turn — I didn’t want to letmy guard down now. I kept my feet planted but sometimes I’d move my arms crazily, as if in imitation of the huge oak dancing its branches far above me. When I thought a bird was coming our way, I hollered it away. Shapes caught at the corner of my eye.Would the thing that had carried off the doll of Eric Mutis come for me now? I wondered. But I wasn’t afraid. I felt ready, strangely, for whatever was coming. The substitute rabbit, I saw with wonderment, was rooting its little head into the pale fibers sprouting out of the scarecrow; it went swimming into the straw, a reversal of its birth from my black book bag — first went with its furry ears, its bunching back, the big, velour skis of its feet. I was there, so no birds dove for it or anything. I was standing right there the whole time. I stood with my arms stretched wide and trembling and I felt as if the black sky was my body and I felt as if the white moon, far above me, unwrinkled and shining, was my mind.

“La-arry!” I was aware of Mondo calling me faintly from the twinkling roots of the oak, lit up all wild by the underworld flies, but I knew I couldn’t turn or come up yet. Owls, I worried, city hawks. The rabbit bubbled serenely through the straw at my feet. Somewhere I think I must still be standing, just like that.

[ellanainthetardis]

Prompt : what if effie had a tattoo somewhere? haymitch has seen it plenty of times but never realized it was about/for him.

Here it is! [X]

The Tattoo Mystery

Sleep was evading him.

His body was exhausted but his mind wouldn’t turn off. He kept mentally reviewing the attack plans for Four over and over again. They had been working on it for forty-eight hours now and it consummated Haymitch’s every thought. It beat thinking about anything else anyway.

Peeta and his high-jacked memories…

The demons he couldn’t quite ignore without a bottle…

“You are thinking far too loud.” Effie complained, burrowing a little against his chest, probably seeking his warmth.

She had developed a habit of using him as a portative heater system. She stole his clothes, borrowed his woolen sweatshirt in the middle of the day and never handed it back, only sighed in contentment at night once he was draped over her like an additional blanket…

Although to be fair, they were naked and sweaty.

And the blankets were scratchy – as she hadn’t failed to grumble about.

“It’s to compensate for you thinking so little.” he shot back a beat too late, running his fingers from her shoulder down her arm.

They were on their sides with his back to the edge of the mattress and the emptiness separating them from the floor while her knees were brushing against the wall. Why those bunk beds had to be so small, he couldn’t figure out.  And it wasn’t even because they didn’t have a family compartment. He had seen the beds in the Everdeens’ room and they weren’t any bigger.

He would have enjoyed some freedom of movement. He liked sleeping on his stomach better. Or on his back. His side wasn’t really a favorite position of his. Spooning Effie had its perks but he liked it better when she snuggled against him instead.

There was no really getting comfortable in those beds.

“I do not know how I can still marvel at your insensitivity.” she huffed. “What a thing to say to a woman whose bed you are sharing…”

“You dragged me to your bed, remember?” he snorted. “Come have dinner, Haymitch. Look at me sucking on that coffee spoon full of yoghurt, Haymitch. Walk me back to my room, Haymitch… Real subtle, you were.”

He could almost hear her roll her eyes.  “I am fairly sure I did not make any remark about the yoghurt. In fact, if I had made a remark, it is more likely I would have told you about how vile that thing they call yoghurt is.”

“I hate to break it to you, sweetheart, but I know your spoon number by now.” he mocked. She had perfected it over chocolate cake. There wasn’t anything she couldn’t turn into a sexy display when she wanted to.

“Fine.” she sighed. “I might have tricked you into actually getting into bed with me. It certainly wasn’t to think.”

“Pretty sure you made that clear.” he chuckled. The yoghurt show had given him  a good preview of what she had had in store and he hadn’t been disappointed. Then again, he never was.

She refused to be distracted though. “How long had it been since you slept?”

“Too long.” he admitted. He nuzzled her nape because it was right there. “Can’t shut off my brain.”

“I did a very good job of shutting off your brain.” she retorted. “You had to go and make it work again. You can be so annoying sometimes.”

Her tone was entirely teasing and he smirked, pressing an open mouth kiss against her neck, letting his tongue poke at her skin. She tasted a little salty and he kind of wanted more. His hand ended up on her belly, his thumb running distracted circles…

“Cause you’re a walk in the park, yeah?” he taunted right back.

“I am indeed, thank you.” she grinned. His hand drifted south and easily found her leg… “I do not have any trouble shutting off my brain…”

“You don’t say.” he chuckled, wedging his hand between her thighs.  

“You are nowhere near ready for a second round and I am tired, Haymitch.” she stated more plainly.

“By the time I get you through round two, I’d be up for round three.” he tried even though nothing was less certain. Since he had stopped drinking… They had given him meds that he regularly forgot to take because the side effects were actually worse than the shakes and the headaches. Like the fact he didn’t seem to be able to get it up for very long and not exactly at the firmness he was used to. He wasn’t sure he would be able to get hard again that night.

Still, if he wasn’t going to sleep…

“As tempting as the offer is…” she insisted, squeezing her thighs together so his hand was momentarily trapped before giving him back his freedom by shifting a little. It gaven him better access but he could take a hint and be a grown man about it.

“Fine…” he surrendered. He didn’t move his hand away though. He drew silly patterns on her skin, just because he was bored and he liked touching her, until he felt the familiar rougher patch under his fingertips. He smirked against her skin again as he retraced the shape of the tattooed butterfly on her inner thigh from memory alone. Perspectives made it look as if the blue butterfly was about to take flight from the flower it was on. He wasn’t a fan of tattoos or physical alterations but this one he had long reconciled with. She had had it for as long as he could remember, a secret next to her most private parts. “You never told me how you ended up with a butterfly next to your…”

“Language.” she muttered before he could finish. “Try to sleep. It is late and, no doubt, that thing around your wrist will beep and summon you back to Command any minute now.”

“Come on.” he whined without shame. “There must be a story there… How old were you when you got it?”

He had known her pretty young. She had been twenty-two when she had started as his escort although she had been twenty-five by the time they had started sleeping together and twenty-seven by the time they had bothered to properly remove clothes. After that… Well… After that he had become really familiar with that butterfly.

“Sixteen.” she sighed. “Tattoos were all the rage. My friends all wanted one, I went with them and once there… Let’s just say peer pressure is a terrible thing.”

He couldn’t see Effie Trinket being coerced into anything she didn’t want. Sixteen or not.

“Why a butterfly?” he asked.

It suited her though. Butterflies… They were good animals for her. Beautiful, delicate and yet a symbol of rebirth… Of hope. Of death – but that one he didn’t want to linger on.

She shifted awkwardly. “We should really sleep.”

His fingers danced on her skin, teasing.

“Got a boyfriend who was into butterflies?” he taunted with blatant amusement. “Thought you were going to keep him forever and it would be really romantic to have a symbol of undying love on your skin?”

She let out an annoyed sigh. “Something like that.”

She sounded a bit brisk and he couldn’t help his chuckles. “Good thing you didn’t get his name down there. Awkward for other guys.” She remained resolutely silent. He bumped her with his hips. “You have to tell now, Princess. Who was the guy? Some jerk, yeah?”

“He is certainly a jerk.” she snapped.

“Is?” he repeated, something dangerous now stirring in his chest. “You still see him around?” He tightened his hold on her and it didn’t escape her notice. Of course, it didn’t. She knew better than to call him out on his show of jealousy but she still grinned with satisfaction. Haymitch really wasn’t satisfied. “He’s that important to you?”

“Oh, I think at this point we can safely ascertain he is the love of my life.” she answer casually, as if they were still discussing Thirteen’s yoghurt. “I was twelve when I fell in love with him, thirteen when I swore I was done with him and sixteen when I fell in love again… Then, of course, I properly met him at twenty-two and decided I wanted nothing to do with him anymore because he can be so irritatingly rude… I was twenty-five when we slept together for the first time and I had to wait to be thirty-five for him to merely hint at having some semblance of feelings for me that weren’t linked to his penis. So, you see, it has been a long and eventful story.”

Haymitch wasn’t dense.

He could take a hint.

“I’m confused.” he frowned.

“Isn’t that role reversal refreshing?” she mused, moving his hand from her leg to her waist and forcing him to hold her tight. “Sleep now.”

He curled up a little around her, hooking his leg over hers when she folded the other one between her chest and the wall to roll a little more on her stomach. He ended up propped against her back but he didn’t mind. There was actually more space for him that way.

“But I don’t get it.” he protested against her nape. “So you had a crush on me when you were a kid…” That was more or less public knowledge. “What has that got to do with your tattoo?”

“It is embarrassing.” she grumbled. “Won’t you drop it?”

“No chance in hell.” he scoffed. “You know you’re gonna tell me or I’m gonna find out anyway…”

She sighed. “If you make fun of me, I am kicking you out of bed. Let this be very clear.”

“Fine.” he accepted without thinking twice about it. Her chances of succeeding in kicking him out of bed were equal to him dropping that line of enquiries.

Again, she let out a sigh. The reluctance was obvious in her voice. “When I was sixteen I met you in a club once. I tried to seduce you and you were not at all receptive. You were drunk, I believe.”

That would have made him twenty-one. He tried to remember but… “Got no memories of this…”

And why would he? Capitols had been flinging themselves at his head since his victory. He wouldn’t have made the difference between her and another one. Faces blurred, all the more so with the make-up altering their features so much. And Effie… Chances were he would have dismissed her outright as soon as he would have realized how young she actually was. He had been despicable, still was to some extent, but not to the point of taking advantage of younger girls. That had been the Capitol’s ploy, not his.

“I did not expect you to.” she confirmed. “Nevertheless… You were not… You were quite charming actually. Some idiot was bothering me, dancing too close, not taking no for an answer… You told him to leave me alone. It was quite the dashing rescue.”

He frowned, trying harder to recall… “You’re sure it was me?”

“You were with some other victors.” she said and although she was careful not to mention anyone by name, he supposed she meant Chaff. And, given the timeframe, probably Alina and Seeder. Maybe Beetee if they had managed to drag him to a club… Thinking about his friends… It made his heart clench. He hadn’t had time to properly grieve for them yet. He hadn’t had time to… Effie squeezed his hand. “You would not dance with me. Or have anything to do with me really. You called me a baby. I was quite vexed.”

“I bet.” he snorted. He didn’t have much on her in years. Five years was a nice difference in his opinion. Now. At twenty-one, five years younger would have been unthinkable.

“You were not mean about it though. You were more amused, I think.” she hummed. “To me, it was all very lovely and romantic… You said… Well… You said I made you think of a butterfly with my blue dress.”

He was sure she was blushing.

For his part, he contemplated that and snorted. “Yeah, I was probably wasted.”

“It meant the world to me.” she admitted, not sounding very proud of herself for it. “Anyway, when my friends dragged me to the tattoo parlor and time came to choose a design…” She shrugged. “I almost had it removed a few times when I decided you were more trouble than you were worth but I never could go through with it in the end. I like it. And I like the memory.”

It was almost beyond his understanding how she could treasure a random night he couldn’t even remember that much.

But…

“So the tattoo on your inner thigh is meant for me.” he smirked.

“That is all you would take out of this.” she sighed as if he was being insufferable.

“It’s on your inner thigh.” he snorted. “It’s so close to your…”

“I fancied myself in love with you.” she snapped. “And my mother would murder me if she knew about this. Obviously it is alright to have your breasts remove but get a tattoo?” She shook her head. “Where else did you want me to put it?”

“Ain’t complaining.” he denied. “Like it just fine where it is.” He tightened his hold on her waist a  little. “I like that it’s mine.”  

She hesitated for a second before breathing out. “Everything I have is yours. Haven’t you understood that yet?”

It was saying something without saying it.

Haymitch wasn’t sure he was ready for that Pandora box to open. He liked how things were right then. Easy despite the hell they were in. Being with her was a breath of fresh air in that place. They were less careful about hiding it, true, but he wasn’t sure he was ready for everyone to know either.

As for actually discussing his feelings… What was the point when they were so obvious? He had put her on his list, had made it very clear to everyone of importance in Thirteen she was under his protection and that he would get very, very difficult if anything happened to her…

“Maybe I should get a tattoo of my own.” he mocked. “Could get a clown painted on my ass… Oh… What about a parrot, sweetheart?”

“Horrid man.” she huffed but he suspected she knew he was only trying to lighten the mood. “I should have my name tattooed on your forehead. Perhaps that would keep those women away from you.” He rolled his eyes at that, more amused than annoyed by her repeated claims that some of the female refugees were very interested in him. He couldn’t see it. He didn’t even care to see it. She was the only woman he tended to notice. “Can we sleep now?”

“Yeah.” he surrendered at last. At least he could let her sleep while he tried to stop thinking about Four and the rebellion. Not that he was thinking about that now. No. Thanks to her, he was thinking about what she meant to him and why it had taken so long for him to admit it to himself and where they would go – could go – from there. It was at least fifteen minutes before he came to a conclusion on that front. “Sweetheart?” A sleepy hum was all he got in answer. “You don’t need to brand me with your name, you know? I’m kind of yours anyway…”

He was pretty sure she was asleep.

Mostly asleep.

He pretended he didn’t hear the three words she mumbled in her pillow.

Those words were too scary still.

[banesoka]

Untitled Pirate AU Fanfic

Part One

Cad Bane leaned against the steering wheel of the ship, looking out to the calm blue sea.  The wind pulled at the brim of his hat, the taste of salt and fresh air filling his lungs.  His pirate ship, Sleight of Hand, was one of the fastest and most feared of the Caribbean seas. Two other ships in his fleet, Xanadu Blood and The Justifier, followed close by.  He took quick glances back at the two other ships, as always admiring the beautiful woodwork along the bowstrips.

Sabine Wren, one of the youngest members of his crew but had lots of potential, walked up to him.  She pulled back her hair, the ends crudely cut by her knife, lips chapped and eyes bright.

“Just finished checking the tackle, Captain.”

He nodded in reply, then pulled out his spyglass and looked out to the horizon.  Only a few moments later he pulled it back.

“Port of Kiros is in sight at last.”

“Aye sir.”  She beamed with excitement.  They had been anticipating their attack on the Port for many weeks now.  Kiros was known as one of the wealthiest nations, having profited off their numerous sugar plantations.  The Port housed their largest plantation and housed the great Duchess Shaak Ti.  Rumors had also circulated around the ports that a young princess had recently settled in to live on the island as well.  Perfect place to raid.  Plenty of loot and treasure was waiting for them and they itched to get their hands on it.

Bane handed Sabine his spyglass, much to her delight.

“Tell me what you see, Wren.”

She took it and peered through at the land not far off.

“Two cannon towers on either side of the bay.  And two…no, three…three schooners.”

“This will be easy.  We’ll wait until nightfall.  Take them by surprise.  Go tell the crew.”

“Aye sir!”

Meanwhile, at the Port Kiros plantation, Princess Ahsoka and her aunt Shaak Ti had just finished a luxurious dinner and were relaxing in the parlor.  Ahsoka was looking out the window which provided a beautiful view of the city and the sea beyond.  She could smell the salt from her and it made her think of the trip she took her from her old home, back from the old Kiros land where she had been born and raised the first sixteen years of her life.  The plantation house was grand and beautiful and had everything a princess could ever want.  In the past two weeks she had been given so much by her aunt.

But something was missing from it.  Something nagged at the back of her mind like an itch she couldn’t scratch, no matter how she felt she should be happy here.  She just could not figure out what she did not have.

A servant brought them fresh drinks on a silver tray.  Aunt Shaak Ti quietly thanked them as they sipped their drinks.

“How have your lessons been going?” she asked her niece.

“I enjoy them.  I had no idea there were so many things to read about.”  She spent a few hours a day in the library, nose deep in a book, studying whatever topic her tutor had decided to teach for the day.  She tended to enjoy studying navigation, mechanical philosophy, and astronomy the most.

“I figured you would.  When you want more books let me know and I’ll have them brought here for you.”  Shaak Ti smiled a little.

“You have already been more around than my mama and papa.”  Ahsoka looked down at her drink.  “Sorry…I shouldn't speak ill of the dead.”

“It's no problem at all, Ahsoka.  I know how lonely you must get here sometimes.  But I've arranged for your lessons in advanced fencing and swordsmanship, so that will keep you occupied.”

That made Ahsoka brighten up.  She had been training in fencing for many years now and it was her favorite activity.  Not only did it make long dull afternoons go by quickly but she loved the use of balance and coordination that came with it.  Too bad her father had never approved of her handling a sword.

“Thank you Auntie.  I have been ready for them for a while now.”

Shaak Ti began to speak as she usually did about how the sugar plantation was doing as well as politics that always seemed to drive her mad.  And Ahsoka did as she always would and looked out the window again, letting the sea carry away her imagination, wondering what was out there.  She had heard many stories spoken by the people of Port Kiros.  Stories about mermaids that sang you to sleep while dragging you to the sandy floor.  Of giant monsters that climbed down from the stormclouds.  And of course of the terrible pirates roaming the waters, some that took no prisoners and would even eat sailors if given the chance.

When Shaak Ti finally left for the evening, Ahsoka did what she did almost every night and snuck out her window upstairs.  In her big cumbersome pink princess dress, she climbed the trick and mortar to the top of the mansion. The fact that Togrutans were traditionally bare foot helped her greatly, and she had never liked shoes much anyway.  As a child she climbed every tree she could find  She climbed to her favorite spot. The highest spire with a single pole flying the Tano family crest. She let the cool night air blow between her head tails and under her skirt. She came up here every night to just think or not think and just read the stars.

After a while sitting there staring up at the stars Ahsoka thought something strange in the sea. It looked like a shadow. And it was growing closer. Growing up near the sea taught her that this meant a ship was approaching. She tried to tell herself is was just a merchant or a late night fisherman. But the ship was too big and she got a bad feeling about it.

Suddenly one of the ships shot a cannon at the tower, then another ship shit at one of the schooners.

She covered her mouth in horror and alarm.

“Pirates," she said to herself. She had read stories about them but had never seen any before. They terrified her.

She heard the bell in the tower begin clanging before another cannon took it out. She tried to climb as fast as she could back inside but moving fast caused her to loosed some of her concentration. She accidentally grabbed a loose bring and fell. But tonight she was lucky and slid against a cloth over hand and into a cart full of soft hay.

The screams of the townsfolk began to ring through the night.  A few buildings were already in flames from the explosions.  Ahsoka climbed out of the cart without a scratch on her. Her dress wasn't even ripped. She looked around as she straightened her tiara and found she was on the lower streets outside the castle walls.  That meant she would have to walk all the way around the castle to get back in. Cannons continued firing and she saw fire begin to spread across the beach over the schooners. Soldiers were being killed left and right, their screams echoing. She saw the largest pirate ship, black as the night, land at the bay and pirates began heading for the beach in swarms.

There was no time to run around the castle and her elaborate dress would only draw their attention. She could only resort to hiding.

"Find the duchess and the princess!" she heard a voice shout. The accent sounded foreign but Ahsoka guessed maybe it was Duros mixed with something else. "Don't harm either of them. Kill everyone else." The Pirates laughed and stormed into the mansion. From Ahsoka's hiding place she could see them cut down the guards. One of their swords fell and landed right next to her.

She scooped it up. She couldn't stand to see people dying especially if it was to protect her. Anger in her stirred at the pirates’ cruelty, their bloodlust of killing innocent people without a care.  And her anger drove her to pick up the sword and approach the man who had spoken.  Her small Togrutan fangs began to glisten in the moonlight.

As she crept up behind him, she could only see him as only a shadow at first.  He was leading his crew into the mansion to take all the loot they could carry and he stood at the top of the steps leading to the main entrance.  His pirates hooted and hollered as they stormed inside.  As Ahsoka got closer she could make out more of his features. A large wide brimmed hat, glowing Duros eyes, a scarred weathered face, a large leather coat, and bloodstained black boots.

She lashed at him with her sword trying to remember all her training at once.

He turned around and blocked her attack. He grinned wildly at her. "Well if it isn't the little princess."

"Leave this place and go far away!”  she meant it to sound demanding and intimidating but it came out like a kid asking her parent for a cookie.

He laughed. "Cute little thing." He sliced at her dress, tearing part of the front off.

”I am the future queen of Kiros! You will not speak to me like that!”

"You're no queen anymore. Now you're the honored guest on Sleight of Hand." He parried her blow and struck her sword, twisting it out of her hand with a devilish grin.

Despite her efforts to hide her fear, Ahsoka’s chest heaved and her eyes got big.  He was much taller than her and any second he could stab her or slice off her head.  She looked around at all the dead scattered around the front of the mansion lying in pools of blood.  Most were guards but there were also servants and their families and even a few other nobles who lived with them in the mansion.  She knew all of them by name. They were more like family than her dead parents.  With a deep breath Ahsoka looked back up at the Duros pirate.

"If I go with you…will you stop the killing?” she asked.

He didn’t move but his gaze was locked on her every move.

"I would consider it,” he finally answered.

"Fine then.”  Ahsoka turned and tried to run.  Maybe she could grab another weapon in time.

He ran after her and grabbed her by the back of her dress.

“Noble effort, little lady, but did you really think that would work?” He dragged her back to where two of his crew members stood by. "Bind her and take her to the ship, then make sure she doesn't escape.”

"Aye captain." One of them grabbed her arms and the other bound her wrists tightly.

"No!! Let me go!”  Ahsoka struggled and kicked at them. One of them took a sharp kick to the groin and doubled over in pain. The other grabbed her ankles and began tying them together. The first one snarled at her and grabbed her chin.

"Feisty little brat aren't you? Well we'll fix that." He pulled out a boot polish rag and stuffed it in her mouth, then wrapped rope around her head forming a gag.

She slowly stopped fighting them realizing there was no point.  Tears flooded her eyes as they carried her to the ship, past the burning town and the villagers who ran for safety before they were slaughtered.  When she was on board another pirate who seemed to be the first mate took one look at her before saying, “Take her to the captain's quarters.”

[darklingichor]

A Newbie Looks at The Gilmore Girls Revival. Winter: Rory

So Rory doesn't have a lot going on in Winter except starting her slow process of falling apart. Rory in the revival has gotten a lot of flack from what I have read. Steming mostly from the fact that she is very entitled and is not being exactly morally upstanding, what with her affair with Logan while both of them are involved in relationships. I agree with these criticisms, but I will explain why they didn't ruin anything for me.

Her entitlement isn't fully on display in Winter in that she's not looking to get something for nothing. She's crashing at loved one's houses, sure, but that happens when someone travels a lot. I have an uncle that, when I was a kid,  would show up every six months or so and stay with us because he worked on a fishing boat and he needed a place to stay when the boat was in port. No big deal, he's family and he would try to pick up part time work when he wasn't needed on the boat and he would help around the house. Rory wasn't just bumming rooms and couches, she was trying to find work. Freelance anything is unpredictable. Presumably her friends and family don't mind helping her.

The relationship stuff... Well from what I have seen of the show and read, when it comes to matters of the heart, Rory's code is somewhat flexible. Is it right? No, absolutely not. However, Rory's not written to be perfect, she's written to be human, humans do stupid and sometimes hurtful stuff. Lots and lots and lots of people cheat in relationships. It isn't right, but it doesn't make these people evil or even unlikable, it makes them flawed. Now, am I saying that Rory and Logan should get a pass for playing with fire?  Fuck no! If Odette found out and we had a scene where she threw all of Logan's stuff down a trashsoot while kicking him in the balls, and then slapped Rory silly, I would have cheered because they would have deserved it. But, I would still like the characters. Rory isn't a role model, she's a character written for entertainment it is her flaws and the fact that she has to learn from her mistakes (often needing to relearn from the same mistakes) that makes her who she is.

The Paul thing didn't bother me for two reasons. One, looking from it outside the realm of fiction, neither one of them seem all that into to the relationship. I mean, we see Paul in two scenes for the entire year, even later when Rory moves home. The rest of the time it is only through Rory's phone we know he's still around. They are "together" for nearly three years by time they actually break up. No arguments about her always canceling on him? No text saying "we need to talk" that Rory promptly forgets about? I wouldn't be all that surprised to learn that Paul kept forgetting about Rory and actually had notes that he reviewed before talking to her. He wasn't in love, he just has a better short term memory.

Two, Paul was clearly a joke. I don't mean that in a mean "That dude's a fucking joke" type of way, I mean that Paul was just written to inject a little more humor into Rory's storyline. You know what? I did find it funny! It was funny that this person who all the important people in Rory's life met, is so forgettable that he's essentially a walking Jedi mind trick for the whole of Stars Hollow! Luke and Lorelai's reaction when they first re-meet Paul was one of my favorite jokes in Winter. When things get serious later on the mood is always lightened by Rory getting a text, or a notification reminding her to break up with him. The whole thing is so ridiculous that it can be nothing but a joke. Something I always try to remember when watching tv, a movie, reading a book: sometimes things are just jokes or plot devises, not something that is indicative of the character's core personality. Like in Harry Potter. In the fourth book, Harry spends a huge chunk of time learning the summoning spell for the first task. Very soon after he gets stuck in the stairs under his cloak and drops the still active Marauder's Map. Why doesn't he summon it to him? Because if he had, the book wouldn't go forward. You can make other arguments that are valid: Harry's under stress at that moment and just didn't think, someone might have heard him say the spell. Both true but when it comes down to it, even though this is often pointed at to call Harry an idiot, he's not. He just just had a forehead slap moment for the benefit if the plot.

If it were just Rory forgetting about Paul it might say something about Rory's character, but because everyone has a Paul shaped hole in their memory, I see it as simply a running joke. Like Kirk and... Every thing he does.

What we do see of Rory is interesting. She's in her own stage of denial. The journalism thing hasn't worked out the way she wanted it too. We only know of one piece that she's gotten a lot of buzz on in the nine years that we haven't followed her and now she's sort of adrift, literally and figerativly. I mean she has her life spread across Connecticut in boxes! But she's insisting that she's okay, that it is an adventure. Unless she changes drastically after the midpoint of season three, I don't think this can possibly be true. Rory plans. There is no way she's okay with the fact she can't find her underwear. Is it any wonder that she's tap dancing in the middle of the night for stress relief? I loved that, by the way for three reasons: 1. It was funny, 2. I'm always so anxious that I immediately wondered if that would work, and 3. That ridiculous thought made me laugh even more!

More than one person had commented to Rory in the original show that she wasn't cut out for journalism. Jess was one that I saw in season 2, and I read that Logan's dad was another. Don't know if there were others that I haven't gotten to yet. I have mixed feelings about the fact that the goal Rory worked toward the entire series ends up being for nothing.

On the one hand, I sort of like that she had to find a different path. A lot of people don't end up doing what they thought they would do when they were in high school, let alone Jr. High and grade school. That doesn't mean they're a failure, it means they changed. Even three seasons in, I can see that Rory has tunnel vision. "This is where I'm going to go, this is what I'm going to do, no deviations." But in doing that she's really limiting the ways she can be happy. That sort of culminates in the revival as she is struggling to find her niche. On the other hand it bugs me that having her not find some place in the field of journalism that fits her is a little like a big "I told you so" from all the jerks. So I don't know how I feel about Rory's slow decent into a career crisis. But without it the character wouldn't have much of a conflict beyond her love life.

However, I think the benefit of being more flexible in your goals is brilliantly demonstrated by the juxoposition of Lane and Paris. Paris seems to have toed the line, done what she set out to do (and a bunch extra as we find out later) she's successful but unhappy because she's got herself so boxed into how things are "suppose" to be that when something deviates things start to unravel.  She even said of Doyle that she knew it was over when he decided to do something creative.

Lane in the other hand, seems to have a little bit more of a laid back philosophy. We see later that she works in her mom's store and her husband (though not enthusiastically) works outside the band. They still work on the band, they still have their passion for music. Life had other plans but they rolled with it. Even the conversation between Lane and Paris about the twins illistrates this. Paris badgering Lane about which fertility specialist she used and Lane saying "I just had them"

Anyway, the whole Naomi thing was really interesting. I love the actress that plays her and I loved that the character is so insane. I sort of think that being a biographer would be a good fit for Rory. She's good with people, she can write and she can find genuine interest in any story, if all of the books she read are any indication. So far in the original series she seems to read a lot of biographies and special interest books.

Too bad her first foray into it was with a woman who can't seem to talk about her own life. I also think the fact that Rory's even considering writing a book with her as a sign that she is at least a little bit open to new job avenues.

The other bits an pieces of Rory in Winter are great, loved her interactions with Paris and Lane I liked the talk she and her mom have in the middle of the night. All in all her plotline in this episode really does help you catch up with where she is at 32.

[getseriouser]

20 THOUGHTS: Tackling the Big Issues

“IT is a collision sport and it takes bravery to play, so players get hurt in all sorts of ways in our game.

“I know we’ve got to try and legislate to stop things we have control over. I think occasionally in our game people are going to get hurt.

“Maybe we should take tackling out if you want to reduce concussion.”

The words of Luke Darcy, an AFL MVP winner, club best and fairest, All-Australian, prominent football media identity and respected analyst of the game.

Those are fairly provocative words by the ex-Bulldog but it’s somewhat where we are.

As we’ll discuss to kick off this week’s column, it’s not so much about what you think of the Dangerfield and then Grundy suspensions, but what players are expected to do going forward in those situations, that’s the key.

  1.    So last week we had the Patrick Dangerfield tackle, and two week suspension (down to one with an early plea remember, so deemed worthy of two), this week we have Brodie Grundy done for three. Sure, Ben Brown is concussed, and the head needs protection, but in reality what would a player do differently if they have their time again in that situation, that’s the question none of the media heroes are answering when they have a go (you’re up soon Robbo).

 2.    What was he supposed to do differently? Let the player go? He wouldn’t then get the free kick. Could he have turned him backwards? The laws of physics says nooo. Let one arm go? Then Brown can handball. This is not about a Pies player been given a lesser suspension, the year is well shot and he could do with a rest probably anyway, this is about going ��ok, what you did earned you three weeks, in order to have avoided a suspension you should have done ‘this’ instead”. What exactly would ‘this’ be? No idea.

 3.    Jack Ziebell’s tackle in isolation looked worse. But Adam Treloar rubbed his head, got up, got on with it, and Ziebell was not even assessed by the MRP. Brown met the Etihad carpark roof flush on his jaw and as a result, Grundy has a fortnight off. The rules are to suspend actions, but so much of this comes down to outcome. What about a knee into the back of the head in a screamer which leads to a concussion? Grundy didn’t intend to injure but his actions caused it. Where’s the difference. Oh, so much grey…

 4.    And finally, our man Mark Robinson, the Donald Trump to the football media this year. His criticism of Collingwood is one thing and I’m not interested in that enough, nor would all of you be, so that aside there was another great line from someone having a shocker of a year. He wrote “it was, said Buckley, the perfect tackle. The fact is it was a perfect tackle until Brown was knocked out.” So if Brown didn’t get concussed, from the same action, it was perfect Mark? But the outcome totally changed how you perceive the mechanics? C’mon Robbo…

 5.    Alrighty, how about our poor man Rocket? Delivered a sh#t sandwich apparently, which is everyone’s favourite selection off the lunch menu, he nursed the club through a period of little change, good or bad, and he departs with the Suns in essentially the same predicament as before. A waste of time sadly. This club needs fresh blood badly, and Mark Evans has to be entrusted to find the next Luke Beveridge, to fire a cracker up the collective backsides of everyone, the playing group, assistants, the whole club. The Giants are toying with their premiership chances, yet the Suns are so off the radar it’s not funny.

 6.    The Gold Coast have had a strange 2017. Still a lot of talent but it’s been a long time since they smashed the Hawks in Round 3. Since then, yes, they did defeat the Cats at home Round 7 but not much else. When do they make finals? Next year? Couldn’t be certain, in fact you’d bet against it. They need something bold, they need relevance.

 7.    And then there is Tom Lynch, the Suns co-captain. Let’s clear something up first about player movement at the top end, the big guns: the idea that a club starts to talk to a prospective target around this time of year is laughable. Sydney basically had Lance Franklin’s commitment within weeks of the previous year’s Grand Final, Patrick Dangerfield essentially told Geelong he would head home many months out as well. So, with Lynch, a restricted free agent in 14 months’ time, a Victorian who is one of the very best key forwards in the game, will attract many, many suitors down in Melbourne. And without a coach locked in for next year as of this week, I would expect many persuasive conversations to be had between clubs and his management, where a pseudo commitment made for a move in 2019 would be no complete surprise. He would be a megastar if he moved to Carlton or Collingwood.

 8.    Port Adelaide have problems. This column has rated them highly but lately they are turning their narrative into this year’s flat track bullies. They are not able to get a decent scalp against their name, and come finals it will difficult to overturn that. Their record against top eight sides gets worse. It was damning on the weekend – the Crows alone have their measure, that’s four Showdowns in a row now.

 9.    The one’s to get back on are the Giants. Sure, it’s one game against Melbourne in Canberra and this season has taught us to not react to small samples, the ups and downs are crazy, but getting Stephen Coniglio back, going a bit smaller to improve their forward pressure (Rory Lobb or Johno Patton to miss) and a fit Brett Deledio as an x-factor, they can still win this absolutely. If they get on a run now, you could argue they’ll be super difficult to stop going all the way.

 10.  Right, we’ve done this once before and it resulted in a 14 goals to one halftime result the following weekend. But these Tigers are in this up to their necks, we must concede. And it’s because whatever they are doing, it just works. The Dogs on paper didn’t work, as a serious flag threat, last year, especially with their injuries, but when it just goes right and you can keep it going, big things happen. The Tigers have got a formula that works and they have momentum. Two bad losses aside it’s been a perfect season really. Can Richmond do it, from a top four spot, an easier run than what the Dogs had? Viable.

 11.  The big tick for Damien Hardwick has been going small. No Ben Griffiths or tall support for Jack Riewoldt. On the weekend, it was super small with the latter’s absence. Small blokes up forward in 2017 does the trick. Hawthorn had no run out of defence on Sunday, and that’s where the Crows and Giants are great, so Richmond may possess the weapon to stop the two best teams. Are they ‘good’ good enough though? Interesting to see how the Crows and Tigers fare in September, one going small inside 50, one with three talls.

 12.  Toughness in the middle is what really wins a flag though. Adelaide has the Crouch brothers (if you don’t know Brad and Matt well enough, you will over the coming years, both are absolute ‘jets’) and Rory Sloane of course, Giants have Cal Ward, Stephen Coniglio, Dylan Shiel plus a bunch of guys prepared to cross the line at times. Richmond? Do they have ‘trenches’ blokes? Not sure. We will see.

 13.  Geelong are shot. They are too easy to beat. The fact they only have six losses against their record this year is an achievement in itself. No Joel Selwood the rest of the year, no Tom Hawkins for two weeks, the Tigers ‘should’ nobble them down the highway, then they are mega vulnerable to the Pies who have beaten them earlier in the year and finally an improving Giants. Trouble.

 14.  West Coast need more than a list chop, some heat on Adam Simpson is necessary. This isn’t a bad list. The knee injury to Nic Naitanui hurts, sure, but the losses to Collingwood and St Kilda shouldn’t happen, plain and simple. Don’t blame it all on the list. This team should make finals, probably win one, but will miss altogether. If they have even the slightest poor start to next year, watch them spin it into ‘the rebuild we need to have’, which is such an indictment on the football department who could be doing so much better.

 15.  Some love for two retiring greats this week. One, Jobe Watson, a Brownlow Medallist, yes, he won, you can put that asterisk there all you like but in reality, amidst the murky, dark waters of that whole drugs saga, he was the best and fairest player in 2012. Ex-captain, three-time club best and fairest, a champion bloke too, a great career. But also to Matty Boyd, a premiership player with the Bulldogs who stuck thick and thin through all the hardship years. A 300-game player, three-time best and fairest, a highly-underrated player who we salute too. Well done to both Jobe and Matthew.

 16.  Over to Perth, firstly, Harley Bennell watch. Only five kicks two weeks ago and Peel Thunder had a bye last weekend, the progress back for him has been nothing short of unspectacular. His off-field behaviours are better from all reports, but getting to 100% looks a long shot. Ross Lyon seems invested, given their long path back to the premiership window allows the time Bennell may need, but gee, looks long odds.

 17.  And just lastly, watch the Jesse Hogan space. Been an incredibly tough year off the park for the Dees spearhead, and whilst all above board and in the right spirit, there’s a sense at the Dockers he may want to look at returning back to WA for personal reasons. Emphasise ‘may’. I would not be shocked at all at the end of the season if this comes to a head and Freo might be in talks to bring Hogan home.

 18.  Onto this weekend’s footy, Friday night is huge. The Dogs need to win, they have a lot to play for. Their form has been better but still not super. Anyone other than the Lions probably gets them last Saturday. They got away with it. The Giants, they’re pursuing good form to set up an attack on the Crows, to keep top two and try and get two finals at Spotless before an MCG appearance on the last Saturday in September. The Giants are the better team, they should be winning this, but there’s just enough fight in the reigning premier to make it an earnest contest.

 19.  Saturday afternoon down the Cattery, Geelong host Richmond. We’ve put a line through the hosts, and we’ve acknowledged the Tigers as being legitimate so place your bets accordingly. However, the last time we gave the Tigs a wrap the Saints dismantled them like you wouldn’t believe, and the Cats have a knack for winning when this column thinks they shouldn’t. So all we know for sure is that it will be interesting!

 20.  And lastly this week, Sunday lunchtime at the MCG, Melbourne host St Kilda. The Demons need to get one back, its been a while now since their good wins against the Bulldogs and West Coast in Perth. Three losses in their last four games, they still have a kind draw to get into that 5th or 6th spot, but gee, a loss here and they are really up against it. For the Saints, this is a team who have enough in their side good enough to warrant maybe that 8th position but every week is an elimination final for them going forward. Will be highly motivated and keen to make amends for Round One too. Could be a belter.

(originally published August 9)

[hulstores-blog]

Wireless Best Bluetooth Headphones for him and her

The regiment arrived beautiful versatile headsets.

Thin, portable and wireless - is the Plantronics The BackBeat SENSE . The first wireless headset on the market that are unequivocally like women. It is necessary to take note of before the New Year.

We will look at the design, but also listen. Because we, the men, interested in simple things: how they sit and sound. The rest will leave to our beauties. Plantronics - well done

Included is a carrying case with two zipper pockets.

Company I remember since it flooded the market available Bluetooth-headset - and it was over 10 years ago for best bluetooth headphones 2017 for working out . Since then, it improved everything: the approach to content body to the sound quality.

Today, Plantronics best bluetooth headphones 2017 for working out  are very good, not only cost, but also the premium model. For example, we had to review Backbeat the PRO - one of the first on the market with active noise cancellation and a decent design. Judging by the comments, many readers such later acquired and soul in them is not fer.

New, brighter model SENSE can also recommend with confidence, because they compare favorably with the other models in the current market:

very very light, almost weightless;

made soundly and firmly;

do not look "mugs" on her head, wearing not ashamed;

a very long time working on a single charge;

AI have a Russian-speaking assistant (need to ask);

They have a funky You .

A kick-ass feature

At the bottom of one of the best bluetooth headphones 2017 for working out  have a little red button. About her dream since childhood as the very first put on the headphones in my life.

Backbeat SENSE able to temporarily mute the music and play everything that happens around you. By pressing the red button the track becomes very quiet, but instead starts a built-in microphone. It turns out that you start to hear everything that is going on around you, but do not remove the headphones.

This is especially important because SENSE simply smart sound insulation, even better than my current "favorites" from Bose. Whenever something needs to be heard, it is not necessary to put the track on pause: simply turn on this mode.

The trick: thus it is possible to eavesdrop on others, pretending to listen to music. The microphone amplifies voices;)

Who needs it: cyclists, motorcyclists, joggers, office staff and students. Anyone who can not completely forget about the world for the sake of their safety.

I demand that this feature started adding in all the wireless headphones on the market. Of course, I will not hear, but sorry. wear sensor

If you take off the bluetooth headphones, the music will pause. And if you put on the back - will start from the same place. No it is not necessary to press the buttons.

The headphones are embedded smart sensors is following the fact whether their owner is. The same feature that is missing in other wireless best bluetooth headphones ... By the way, a similar system is in other headset from Plantronics. For example, in the already mentioned PRO.

More is good headphones

Of course, taking SENSE only because of one "spy" function is not necessary. How about a great design? I got to test the white-brown model, and she instantly looker.

In general, the market has two versions, including black and brown. Last stressed men (my IMHO).

Headband made double for a comfortable fit: the plastic bezel closed soft-grip leather lining, and steel plate with the logo serves as an additional rib rigidity, a kind of bumper, providing the strength and minimizes background noise while moving.

Sami headphones emphasized large, with wide soft "pillow" ambyushury with leather covering. Perforation in the center hides speaker mesh and a 40-mm open-end speakers. When worn, they are not under pressure , and, oddly enough, is not very hot. Most likely, somewhere cut vent.

While they tested, just colder - as it turned out, SENSE can wear a hat a la ear. Heat plus favorite music without wires. And the phone does not have to get his hands trembling.

Bluetooth - the future

Now everyone is saying that Apple is about to give up the audio ports in the next iPhone. So, for the Bluetooth-headset lined up, and a lot of interesting models appear on the market.

But do not wait for them, because they already have enough choice to suit all tastes. SENSE perfectly suited as a wireless headset: they are built-in microphone and remote playback controls (and talking too). The buttons are not touch-sensitive, for which a special thank you. Click clear, sharp. Songs change instantly, the sound delay and the minimum - as the best representatives of the market.

In addition to Bluetooth, the headphones come with the NFC module, through which the owners of Android-smartphone will be able to one-touch "pairing" headset and bypass the traditional search process devaysa the BT menu. The same does not prevent add to the iPhone, but here we already Plantronics does not help ...

During testing the headphones threw in a bag, and the bag and I have repeatedly shared several thick walls. No break;) Bluetooth Class 1 passport allows up to 100 meters working range.

Total Time headphones wireless operation - "has never charged for two weeks." Okay, on the passport - 18 hours of continuous operation. The figure is not from the ceiling, I now have 10%. Excellent result. According to the manufacturer, on a full charge takes 2.5 hours.

SENSE is also possible to simultaneously connect two devices. As soon as the first stop is the play, the headphones will switch to the second. And back.

Sound

From wireless headphones usually require some delightful sound. Nevertheless, Backbeat SENSE pleased in this regard. To describe briefly, airy, bright, with a biting, but not uterine bass. Excellent disclosed modern tracks in the style of trip-hop and EDM, a very pleasant flow of jazz and instrumental compositions. Bright vocals - also a plus, as well as high margin volume.

Cons also has: a wireless signal can not cope with the powerful Zaruba quick power-metal. But I do not think that with this design, the ears will take bearded metallyugu :) For the rest, they play just as nice to be expected.

The sound of a wire from the kit (which, by the way, is also a control unit and a microphone) I did not like. It was to be expected when running a wireless mode, the headphones work DAC and signal enhancer, leveling defects as BT and any weakness speakers themselves.

In short, the ears should listen without wires :)

Good Christmas gift

My wife is still no wireless headphones, but the idea of ??it very much. This is the first model on the market, which I confidently gave her (gifts, shh). It looks stylish, plays well, has a very useful feature and works for so long that I have not given it to a portable battery;)