pardonmymannerssir

[pardonmymannerssir]

Title: just a thousand miles between me and paradise

Rating: M

Link: AO3

Pairings: Kaidan/Female Shepard

Synopsis:

They made her birthday a galactic holiday, erected a dizzying array of monuments, and opened probably a hundred different museums with varyingly authentic amounts of her possessions—some of which Kaidan even donated. They named ships and schools and children -of all species- after her.

Shepard would have hated it.

———————-

Chapter Two

The soft blue light from the fish tank and the blinking life support indicator above their heads cast Shepard’s cabin in a wavering, uncertain glow. Dreamlike, Kaidan reached out to trace a finger along the smooth curve of Shepard’s shoulder. Being here with her, like this, always felt vaguely as though it were happening to someone else.

Her eyes were closed, her breathing steady, but her full lips twisted up into a gentle smile, making his heart clench. She looked so soft like this, so relaxed and comfortable with him. It seemed unfair that someone could be so beautiful and so confoundingly capable at the same time.

He’d been a goner from the moment he met her.

“I miss them,” he whispered, hardly meaning to speak as he ran his knuckles down her side, feeling the ridges of her ribs and the flex of her muscles as she shifted. Goosebumps rose across her skin in his wake, and he felt the familiar, almost primal satisfaction of her reaction to his touch.

“Miss what?” she whispered back. These moments often felt sacred. Delicate. Like if they talked too loudly or moved too suddenly, everything would shatter.

“Your scars… not that I want you suffering,” he added, feeling an embarrassed flush rise up his chest. “Just… they made up who you are.”

He missed the scars because they served as a map for him to follow- footnotes and addendums to her life that he could see and catalogue. Stories on her skin for him to touch and taste and memorize. She had a few fresh ones, but they were uncharted landmarks, representing events he had missed, dark spaces unexplored.

She rolled onto her side towards him, her breasts pressed together and one arm splayed between them. Her eyes opened, gleaming in the faint light as she studied him through thick lashes. He took her hand in his, and she threaded their fingers together. He felt like maybe they were the only two people left in the galaxy -the prospect wasn’t as unwelcome as it should have been.

“I miss them too, a little. My body didn’t feel like mine again for a long time.”

He unfolded his other arm from where it was tucked under his head and idly played with her hair, letting the soft, freshly washed strands glide through his fingers. Her eyes fluttered, and she hummed like a contented kitten, and his heart clenched again. God, he loved this woman.

“I should have been there,” he said, untangling his hand from hers and spanning the warm breadth of her belly, thumb brushing over an angry scar near her navel.

“I got that one shaving,” she teased, and he pinched her lightly before dragging her body flush against his.

“I should have been there,” he repeated, the familiar guilt a heavy weight in his gut that not even her naked body could fully distract him from.

“I’m glad you weren’t,” she said, tone sincere as she slid her leg between his, “it was a shitty fight and a bad day -bad week really. But I’m glad you’re here now.”

She nudged his nose with hers, and her lips ghosted across his, making his pulse jump.

“Me too,” he murmured, arching her neck with his hand so he could press his next words against her pulse point. Her fingers wove through his hair, nails biting into his scalp and raising the hair along his arms.

“I love you.”

And, unspoken but pulsing beneath the surface on a constant loop -Please, please don’t leave me.

—-

“I think I’ve pinpointed her location to here,” Miranda tapped away at the navigation console, and the star map hovering between them zoomed in on an unfamiliar star system. “A small colony that Cerberus has apparently maintained for years and managed to keep off the Alliance and Council radars. From what I can tell, they also seem to have managed to avoid the Reapers.”

Kaidan looked up and met her gaze across the miniaturized cosmos. The glow of the star map created shifting patterns across her face, making her expression even more difficult to read than usual. The ship—not the Normandy, an old Cerberus model Miranda had apparently managed to acquire through not exactly legal means—hummed and vibrated around them. Kaidan had missed the sound—had missed the feel of space travel.

“I have been able to find out almost nothing else,” Liara admitted, pacing away from them to look out the window of the hull. Kaidan could tell she was frustrated.

“You said almost nothing,” he pressed. He hoped he sounded calmer and more collected than he felt -internally, the lid was a pretty loose on the jar.

Liara sighed, her back still turned. “There are scattered reports of missing equipment and cargo in the nearby star systems, nothing that would obviously tie them together, but my gut tells me that they are related.”

“What kind of cargo?” Miranda asked, folding her arms over her chest.

Liara turned back toward them. “Most of it was simple things—food, fuel, tools… but a few years back, a shipment of advanced medical equipment went missing. There was an investigation, but nothing could be discovered.”

“Ha!” Talia said trumphantly from the opposite corner of the room. “That’s the evidence we needed! Do you think they… rebuilt her? Like you did the first time?”

Miranda sighed, her brow furrowing. “That’s hard to say… the money and time it took to repair Shepard the first time was, well, exorbitant. If her injuries were less severe than the first time, then perhaps.”

Kaidan quietly and deeply hated how they were speaking of Shepard as if she were some sort of machine that had fallen out of commission, so he wisely kept his mouth shut.

“Explain it again,” Liara said, “the message you found.”

Miranda nodded. “When Shepard broke away from Cerberus, EDI and the Alliance triple verified that there was nothing they could detect that would allow Cerberus to, say, infiltrate her in any way, which -after reviewing all the reports you provided Liara- I believe are accurate. The message I found indicated that a failsafe was activated, something internal to Shepard herself, and not able to be remotely activated by Cerberus, but one that provided an alert if triggered.”

“Severe brain trauma,” Liara said, tone cold, removed. “It was meant to protect her brain in the event that she died.”

“From what I have gathered… yes,” Miranda confirmed, and Tali hung her head a little as if it were hard to hear. “And well, as I have said, I believe it also indicates that Shepard’s memories have been preserved somewhere… offline.”

“Which is when EDI got involved?”

Kaidan frowned, wondering what he had missed. “EDI?”

Miranda nodded. “Yes, you see, I couldn’t discover the location of her memory files. Liara couldn’t either and then-“

“We heard that Joker managed to get EDI back online, and we enlisted her help,” Liara said.

“How long did it take her?” Tali asked, a hint of a smile in her voice.

“Five minutes,” Miranda said drily.

“In our defense,” Liara interjected, “we had collected most of the necessary intel. She was just able to find the missing pieces and fit it all together.”

“Which is when you came to me,” Kaidan said slowly.

“Yes, Major, that's when I came to you,” Miranda said. “According to EDI, Shepard’s memory files were sent to a facility in the star system adjacent to where I believe Shepard is being held. The facility has been abandoned for years now, but… well, who knows what we might find there, and I could use the backup.”

“And you’re sure Shepard is there… alive?” Tali asked.

Miranda braced her hands on the console and leveled a stare at each of them in turn. “I need to be very clear with all of you… I’m not sure of anything. I… well, I wanted to be before I came to any of you, but I can’t do this myself, and I think you all deserve to find out the truth, one way or another, as much as I do.” This last bit she said while holding Kaidan’s stare.

Liara dropped her gaze. “Alright… so we go to this facility… we find Shepard’s memory file and then what?”

“We get to this secret colony, upload her memory file… and get our Shepard back,” Miranda said like it were simple, easy even, and there was a hint of steel in her voice. “Are you in?”

“I’m in,” Liara said immediately, almost before Miranda finished speaking.

“Me too,” Talia said. “I’ll help however I can.”

They all looked at Kaidan, who felt as though he weren’t fully attached to his own body anymore.

“Okay… okay, I’m in,” he said, trying not to hope. Trying to protect what was left of his broken, shattered heart as long as he could. To hope now and find nothing would be… well, he wasn’t certain he could survive it.

“Alright,” Miranda said with a firm nod. “Let's go get our girl.”

—-

They called her Hanna, but she knew that wasn’t her name.

She knew it wasn’t her name in the same way that she knew that she wasn’t really a farmer. She liked it well enough -farming that is. The sun and fresh air were nice, and she wasn’t expected to do much, no more than she wanted to. Her recovery had been long and terrible, or so they told her —she didn’t really remember any of it— and she was supposed to take it easy. Not push herself. Still, as she snipped vegtables and weeded garden beds, she knew deep down inside herself that this life wasn’t hers.

“The brain trauma was significant,” Dr. Reeves —her sister in law, apparently— told her, patting her gently on the knee. “It will take time for your memories to return, if they return at all.”

She had strange dreams sometimes, but they were more like echoes… voices heard from far away. Some of them were scary and violent, even in flashes. Others left her aching, empty, and alone, longing for something… or someone.

A name burned at the tip of her tongue.

Not-Hanna’s days bled together, and she found her gaze turned ever more often upward, lingering on distant stars. Some nights, she stayed up long past lights-out to stare through the dark spaces between, searching. She felt as though something was calling to her, as if she were meant for more, and it was there, beyond the atmosphere, waiting for her.

“You said there are others out there, aliens, I mean,” she said to Vivian, Dr. Reeves's friend and their neighbor, as a strong breeze rustled the wheat fields beyond. The swaying stalks made a pleasant sound, reminding her of something else, something she couldn’t quite name. That happened to her a lot and it was pretty damn annoying, to be honest —like the tickle of a sneeze that never came.

The two of them were sitting on the back patio of the Community Center, sharing a plate of cucumber sandwiches and some lemonade, legs dangling off the wooden deck. There was the faint sound of children’s laughter from the schoolyard just down the road, and birds chirped in the nearby trees. It was an idyllic, perfect day. But Not-Hanna felt nothing but a rising restlessness coupled with a growing sense that this was all… wrong somehow.

Vivan hesitated for a moment, hardly at all really, but Not-Hanna was perceptive. The question made the other woman uncomfortable, and her answer was guarded. “Yes, there are… a few.”

“And they never come here?”

“No… this place is protected.”

“Protected from what?”

Vivian seemed to have a bit of difficulty swallowing and took a long sip of lemonade. She wouldn’t meet Not-Hanna’s eye. “Well, from unauthorized visitors.”

“Who decides who is authorized?”

“Um, well, Dr. Reeves, I suppose.”

Not-Hanna contemplated this, eating another sandwich as she considered the shape of the moon in the sky before them. “Does anyone ever leave?” she asked.

She could feel Vivian’s eyes boring into her at the question, but she played dumb and forced her body language to exude casual interest.

Vivian carefully wiped her lips with a napkin and said, tone cool. “Why would anyone want to leave?”

——

Garrus met them planetside, just outside the dilapidated Cerberus base.

“Vakarian,” Miranda said by way of greeting. “Glad you could make it.”

“Where’s Tali and Liara?” Garrus asked, words clipped, Shepard’s rifle balanced on his shoulder.

“I asked them to remain aboard in case we needed tech support or extraction. Where’s your transport?”

“In orbit, once we’re done here, I’ll send them home and come with you.”

“Perfect,” she said and unholstered the gun at her hip.

“Place seems deserted,” Kaidan said from his position on the crest above.

The old Cerberus base was laid out below him, sprawling and large, partially concealed by huge trees and dense, blue and green foliage. The air was hot and sticky, and sweat pooled at the hollow of his throat and the back of his neck. He never thought he’d missed the desert, but the present humidity level was really helping him understand what people meant when they talked about a dry heat.

“A shame,” Garrus said darkly, as if he wanted nothing more than a good fight.

Kaidan didn’t really blame him. He felt like he was on the brink of flying out of his own skin; a good firefight might have been grounding.

Miranda led the way down and through the valley below and then managed to get them past the front doors. It was eerie inside the old facility—dark and silent, smelling of rot and mold as the sun shone through from high above, where the ceiling had either caved in… or been blown apart. A cursory glance had him leaning towards the latter—you see enough buildings blown up, and you start to get a sense for such things.

Eventually, they found a lab deep within the facility that Miranda seemed to think was what they were looking for. Kaidan and Garrus watched the doors as Miranda frantically tapped away at a computer, arguing with Liara and Tali over the com as she attempted to hack in.

“You really think she’s alive?” Garrus asked quietly, peering into the dimly lit hallway beyond.

Kaidan, who’d been trying very hard to disconnect his brain from his body as much as possible, went still. “I… I don’t know.”

The turian grunted. “Would be a hell of a thing, coming back from the dead twice.”

Kaidan didn’t know what to say, so he said nothing. They were silent for a long moment, the only sound Miranda’s frantic typing and agitated grumblings into her Omni tool.

“I guess… well, I guess we have to be sure, at least,” Garrus murmured, more to himself than Kaidan.

Kaidan nodded and said, because it was true, “She’d do it for us.”

Garrus glanced over at him. “She would. For you, though… I think she’d tear the galaxy apart.”

Kaidan didn’t think he meant this to be a condemnation, but it felt like one anyway. “I'm not sure I can take losing her again.”

“If she’s alive, we’ll find her, and we’ll bring her home and the two of you will get mated, or married, or whatever it is you humans do and you’ll have a gaggle of soft skinned, foul mouthed little hellions,” Garrus said, voice cracking a bit and Kaidan had to tamp down on his biotics hard to keep from doing something insane, like throwing a toppled desk through the lab observation window.

“Don’t,” he managed through gritted teeth. “Please, I can’t-“

Garrus lashed out, gripping him hard by the shoulders with both hands, and shook him. “Listen Alenko, you better pull your shit toegther, because if Shepard’s out there and you don’t put your whole ass into finding her, you’ll always, always regret it. She might need help, okay? She might need us. So Get. Your. Shit. Together.” The turian punctuated these last words by shaking Kaidan in tandem.

Kaidan shoved free, barely managing to contain himself as he stepped back, eyes burning and biotic energy sweeping over him like a lightning storm. Fuck, he thought, fuck he’s right. He drew in a deep breath, then another, willing himself to consider it. Really consider it.

Shepard was alive.

Shepard was out there somewhere, waiting for them to find her.

Waiting for him. For a life with him.

They hadn’t really talked about it, the future, especially there at the end when the chances of success had seemed nonexistent. It would have been stupid to talk about the future; it would have jinxed it, but they slipped up sometimes. Talked about things they wanted to see, stupid shit they wanted to do toegther, always with “once all this is over” tacked on like some kind of shitty sales tax.

He would always regret how much time he’d wasted after Horizon. He had been right not to trust Cerburs but fuck it all he should have trusted Shepard. He should have been there with her, then, and at the end and, and- “Now,” he whispered to himself. He needed to be there for her now, even if it killed him.

He felt himself deflate, collapse in on himself, his biotics simmered then disappated and two tears slipped free as he squeezed his eyes shut.

At that moment, an alarm blared, and overhead lights began flashing red. “Defense systems have been activated. Repeat, defense systems have been activated,” a robotic and strangely cheerful voice announced over the intercom.

“Well,” Miranda said blandly, “The good news is… I got the data files. The bad news is... it looks like you boys will have some work to do after all.”

Garrus grinned and flicked the safety off his gun. “Hell yes.”

——

They showed her old recordings of herself.

Many of them were of her playing with Dr. Reece’s daughters —her nieces— so Not-Hanna supposed it must be real. And she did love them, her nieces, even if she couldn’t remember them. They were sweet girls, curious and full of energy, and, as Not-Hanna grew ever more filled with an unexplainable sense of dread, she found more and more comfort in their innocent presence.

They alone felt safe. They alone didn’t try to pretend she was normal. They were too young to remember her much before her accident, Dr. Reeves insisted, but the girls always looked perplexed when their mother insisted Not-Hanna had been present for some event or another. She wanted to brush it aside, to let the feeling of unease go, but it settled in her bones and festered quietly.

One day, as she sat at the community dining hall surrounded by laughter and pleasant chatter, Not-Hanna realized that she didn’t trust the adults in the colony. Not a single one. Something about the way they all looked at her set her on edge, as if they were all looking at her all the time, watching, waiting. Observing.

There was also a distinct lack of familiarity.

For all that she had apparently spent most of her life in the colony, there was no camaraderie, no eager friends anxious for her welfare. No one tried to tell her an inside joke, remind her of past events, or talk to her much at all unless prompted. It was becoming a lonely and frustrating existence. Even Vivian avoided her.

Frankly, the charade was becoming insulting, and she wished she understood why it was necessary. Logic would dictate that it had something to do with her memories, who she was… or who she used to be. She began to wonder if she were, in fact, a prisoner.

Not-Hanna spent most of her evenings and free time with Dr. Reeves and her nieces, Vera and Devon. They played board games, listened to music, read books, and, on occasion, watched old movies on a projector the doctor set up outside on cool, clear nights. Those were the nights she liked best, the girls curled up on either side of her, an old pre-contact film playing.

Sometimes, she and the doctor would sit out there with a glass of wine after the girls had gone to bed. Sitting mostly in silence. Lacking the bulk of one’s memories made conversation a little challenging.

“What was my brother like?” Not-Hana asked one night, sipping from her glass and enjoying the semi-sweet burn down her throat.

Dr. Reeves hesitated, but there was a soft smile on her pretty face, one Not-Hanna had never seen before. “John was…Brave. Obstinate. Smart as hell but too restless to put it to much good use. Never could sit still for long. You… remind me of him.”

It was one of the first things the doctor had ever said to her that she actually believed.

Not-Hanna finished her wine and set her glass aside before folding her hands in her lap. She was tired of the games. “I don’t really belong here, do I, Dr. Reeves?”

The other woman finished her glass as well, setting it carefully beside Not-Hanna’s on the outdoor table between them. “You do if you want to,” she said carefully, not an admission, but close to it.

“And if I don’t?”

The doctor sighed. “Then I would ask you to trust me… and give me a little more time.”

Not-Hanna pursed her lips, listening to her gut because she had little else to go on. “Okay. A little more time.”

“And Hanna?”

“Yes?” Said Not-Hanna.

“Your name is Jane.”

——

“Well,” Tali said, “the colony has perhaps the most advanced defense system I’ve ever seen. I could barely get a read on it with the drone before it was obliterated.”

Miranda frowned, eyes narrowing, and Liara cursed. “We don’t have the resources to mount an assault."

“If only we knew of a ship designed to avoid detection,” Garrus quipped.

Kaidan smirked. “I’ll reach out to Joker.”

Later, alone in the comms room, James patched through from Normandy. “Commander Vega,” Kaidan said with a mixture of shock and genuine pleasure. The other man looked a bit sheepish.

“Major, Alliance records show you on leave… I have a feeling you didn’t ping us for vacation tips.”

“We need a favor… is this line encrypted?”

James frowned a little. “It is.”

“We… found her, Vega. We think -we’re pretty sure. Shepard, we found her.” Even saying the words felt like he was ripping off a limb.

James’s face turned to stone. “I’m going to need you to explain, Major,” he said after a long moment, voice rough.

Kaidan explained, and by the end, James was pacing in and out of the com display, massaging the bridge of his nose.

“Alright, Alenko… okay. I-shit. I don’t know what to think. But I trust you. If we’re going to use the Normandy for this, I’m going to need you to do so as a Spectre.”

Kaidan nodded; he’d anticipated this. “You got it. I’ll send the order after we're done here.”

James leveled a hard stare at him. “If she’s alive… I’m prepared to do whatever it takes, Alenko. Whatever it takes.”

“I know you are. So am I.”

“Good, send me the coordinates.”

[pardonmymannerssir]

I finished the games and thus I offer unto you, a fan fic.

Title: just a thousand miles between me and paradise

Link: AO3

Rating: M

Relationships: Kaidan/Female Shepard

Summary:

They made her birthday a galactic holiday, erected a dizzying array of monuments, and opened probably a hundred different museums with varyingly authentic amounts of her possessions—some of which Kaidan even donated. They named ships and schools and children -of all species- after her.

Shepard would have hated it.

[pardonmymannerssir]

I truly enjoy how much Animorphs is like “here are our young heroes, each with a distinctive trope to fill in the group!” And then it makes you watch how the pressure of each person’s role grinds them to dust. And also they have homework.

[pardonmymannerssir]

It's only a passing thing, this shadow.

[pardonmymannerssir]

Maybe the collapse of democracy has made me fragile but Mordin nooooooo. That was so sad and beautiful.

[pardonmymannerssir]

Y’all I was not prepared for how awesome Liara is in ME2? She’s like the sweetest?? Bestest friend??? The friend hugs???? I love her 🥺

[pardonmymannerssir]

Finally playing the Mass Effects games like 15 years too late or whatever idk what is time but an endless illusion that crushes us all. But anyway, we’re romancing Kaidan, I got the man’s photo on my desk, I conceivably have access to communications cuz I’m out here messaging Anderson like it’s nbd and you’re telling me I can’t message my boyfriend SURPRISE IM ALIVE ??? No wonder he is apparently mad at me later like geeze.

[pardonmymannerssir]

If it makes anyone out there feel better my husband is a civil servant with the DoD… no one is taking the offer. A huge amount of the people he works with are Republicans and MAGAts- and they are pissed. (Ha, but also, not a great move if you’re trying to win any level of popularity or support.)

The article is under the cut because paywalls suck

This is an edited transcript of an audio essay on “The Ezra Klein Show.” You can listen to the conversation by following or subscribing to the show on the NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.

If you want to understand the first few weeks of the second Trump administration, you should listen to what Steve Bannon told PBS’s “Frontline” in 2019:

Steve Bannon: The opposition party is the media. And the media can only, because they’re dumb and they’re lazy, they can only focus on one thing at a time. … All we have to do is flood the zone. Every day we hit them with three things. They’ll bite on one, and we’ll get all of our stuff done. Bang, bang, bang. These guys will never — will never be able to recover. But we’ve got to start with muzzle velocity. So it’s got to start, and it’s got to hammer, and it’s got to — Michael Kirk: What was the word? Bannon: Muzzle velocity.

Muzzle velocity. Bannon’s insight here is real. Focus is the fundamental substance of democracy. It is particularly the substance of opposition. People largely learn of what the government is doing through the media — be it mainstream media or social media. If you overwhelm the media — if you give it too many places it needs to look, all at once, if you keep it moving from one thing to the next — no coherent opposition can emerge. It is hard to even think coherently.

Donald Trump’s first two weeks in the White House have followed Bannon’s strategy like a script. The flood is the point. The overwhelm is the point. The message wasn’t in any one executive order or announcement. It was in the cumulative effect of all of them. The sense that this is Trump’s country now. This is his government now. It follows his will. It does what he wants. If Trump tells the state to stop spending money, the money stops. If he says that birthright citizenship is over, it’s over.

Or so he wants you to think. In Trump’s first term, we were told: Don’t normalize him. In his second, the task is different: Don’t believe him.

Trump knows the power of marketing. If you make people believe something is true, you make it likelier that it becomes true. Trump clawed his way back to great wealth by playing a fearsome billionaire on TV; he remade himself as a winner by refusing to admit he had ever lost. The American presidency is a limited office. But Trump has never wanted to be president, at least not as defined in Article II of the U.S. Constitution. He has always wanted to be king. His plan this time is to first play king on TV. If we believe he is already king, we will be likelier to let him govern as a king.

Don’t believe him. Trump has real powers — but they are the powers of the presidency. The pardon power is vast and unrestricted, and so he could pardon the Jan. 6 rioters. Federal security protection is under the discretion of the executive branch, and so he could remove it from Anthony Fauci and Mike Pompeo and John Bolton and Mark Milley and even Brian Hook, a largely unknown former State Department official under threat from Iran who donated time to Trump’s transition team. It was an act of astonishing cruelty and callousness from a man who nearly died by an assassin’s bullet — as much as anything ever has been, this, to me, was an X-ray of the smallness of Trump’s soul — but it was an act that was within his power.

But the president cannot rewrite the Constitution. Within days, the birthright citizenship order was frozen by a judge — a Reagan appointee — who told Trump’s lawyers, “I have difficulty understanding how a member of the bar would state unequivocally that this is a constitutional order. It just boggles my mind.” A judge froze the spending freeze before it was even scheduled to go into effect, and shortly thereafter, the Trump administration rescinded the order, in part to avoid the court case.

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What Bannon wanted — what the Trump administration wants — is to keep everything moving fast. Muzzle velocity, remember. If you’re always consumed by the next outrage, you can’t look closely at the last one. The impression of Trump’s power remains; the fact that he keeps stepping on rakes is missed. The projection of strength obscures the reality of weakness. Don’t believe him.

You could see this a few ways: Is Trump playing a part, making a bet or triggering a crisis? Those are the options. I am not certain he knows the answer. Trump has always been an improviser. But if you take it as calculated, here is the calculation: Perhaps this Supreme Court, stocked with his appointees, gives him powers no peacetime president has ever possessed. Perhaps all of this becomes legal now that he has asserted its legality. It is not impossible to imagine that bet paying off.

But Trump’s odds are bad. So what if the bet fails and his arrogations of power are soundly rejected by the courts? Then comes the question of constitutional crisis: Does he ignore the court’s ruling? To do that would be to attempt a coup. I wonder if they have the stomach for it. The withdrawal of the Office of Management and Budget’s order to freeze spending suggests they don’t. Bravado aside, Trump’s political capital is thin. Both in his first and second terms, he has entered office with approval ratings below that of any president in the modern era. Gallup has Trump’s approval rating at 47 percent — about 10 points beneath Joe Biden’s in January 2021.

There is a reason Trump is doing all of this through executive orders rather than submitting these same directives as legislation to pass through Congress. A more powerful executive could persuade Congress to eliminate the spending he opposes or reform the civil service to give himself the powers of hiring and firing that he seeks. To write these changes into legislation would make them more durable and allow him to argue their merits in a more strategic way. Even if Trump’s aim is to bring the civil service to heel — to rid it of his opponents and turn it to his own ends — he would be better off arguing that he is simply trying to bring the high-performance management culture of Silicon Valley to the federal government. You never want a power grab to look like a power grab.

But Republicans have a three-seat edge in the House and a 53-seat majority in the Senate. Trump has done nothing to reach out to Democrats. If Trump tried to pass this agenda as legislation, it would most likely fail in the House, and it would certainly die before the filibuster in the Senate. And that would make Trump look weak. Trump does not want to look weak. He remembers John McCain humiliating him in his first term by casting the deciding vote against Obamacare repeal.

That is the tension at the heart of Trump’s whole strategy: Trump is acting like a king because he is too weak to govern like a president. He is trying to substitute perception for reality. He is hoping that perception then becomes reality. That can only happen if we believe him.

The flurry of activity is meant to suggest the existence of a plan. The Trump team wants it known that they’re ready this time. They will control events rather than be controlled by them. The closer you look, the less true that seems. They are scrambling and flailing already. They are leaking against one another already. We’ve learned, already, that the O.M.B. directive was drafted, reportedly, without the input or oversight of key Trump officials — “it didn’t go through the proper approval process,” an administration official told The Washington Post. For this to be the process and product of a signature initiative in the second week of a president’s second term is embarrassing.

But it’s not just the O.M.B. directive. The Trump administration is waging an immediate war on the bureaucracy, trying to replace the “deep state” it believes hampered it in the first term. A big part of this project seems to have been outsourced to Elon Musk, who is bringing the tactics he used at Twitter to the federal government. He has longtime aides at the Office of Personnel Management, and the email sent to nearly all federal employees even reused the subject line of the email he sent to Twitter employees: “Fork in the Road.” Musk wants you to know it was him.

The email offers millions of civil servants a backdoor buyout: Agree to resign and in theory, at least, you can collect your paycheck and benefits until the end of September without doing any work. The Department of Government Efficiency account on X described it this way: “Take the vacation you always wanted, or just watch movies and chill, while receiving your full government pay and benefits.” The Washington Post reported that the email “blindsided” many in the Trump administration who would normally have consulted on a notice like that.

I suspect Musk thinks of the federal work force as a huge mass of woke ideologues. But most federal workers have very little to do with politics. About 16 percent of the federal work force is in health care. These are, for instance, nurses and doctors who work for the Veterans Affairs department. How many of them does Musk want to lose? What plans does the V.A. have for attracting and training their replacements? How quickly can he do it?

The Social Security Administration has more than 59,000 employees. Does Musk know which ones are essential to operations and unusually difficult to replace? One likely outcome of this scheme is that a lot of talented people who work in nonpolitical jobs and could make more elsewhere take the lengthy vacation and leave government services in tatters. Twitter worked poorly after Musk’s takeover, with more frequent outages and bugs, but its outages are not a national scandal. When V.A. health care degrades, it is. To have sprung this attack on the civil service so loudly and publicly and brazenly is to be assured of the blame if anything goes wrong.

What Trump wants you to see in all this activity is command. What is really in all this activity is chaos. They do not have some secret reservoir of focus and attention the rest of us do not. They have convinced themselves that speed and force is a strategy unto itself — that it is, in a sense, a replacement for a real strategy. Don’t believe them.

I had a conversation a couple months ago with someone who knows how the federal government works about as well as anyone alive. I asked him what would worry him most if he saw Trump doing it. What he told me is that he would worry most if Trump went slowly. If he began his term by doing things that made him more popular and made his opposition weaker and more confused. If he tried to build strength for the midterms while slowly expanding his powers and chipping away at the deep state where it was weakest.

But he didn’t. And so the opposition to Trump, which seemed so listless after the election, is beginning to rouse itself.

There is a subreddit for federal employees where one of the top posts reads: “This non ‘buyout’ really seems to have backfired. I’ll be honest, before that email went out, I was looking for any way to get out of this fresh hell. But now I am fired up to make these goons as frustrated as possible.” As I write this, it’s been upvoted more than 39,000 times and civil servant after civil servant is echoing the initial sentiment.

In Iowa this week, Democrats flipped a State Senate seat in a district that Trump won easily in 2024. The attempted spending freeze gave Democrats their voice back, as they zeroed in on the popular programs Trump had imperiled. Trump isn’t building support; he’s losing it. Trump isn’t fracturing his opposition; he’s uniting it.

This is the weakness of the strategy that Bannon proposed and Trump is following. It is a strategy that forces you into overreach. To keep the zone flooded, you have to keep acting, keep moving, keep creating new cycles of outrage or fear. You overwhelm yourself. And there’s only so much you can do through executive orders. Soon enough, you have to go beyond what you can actually do. And when you do that, you either trigger a constitutional crisis or you reveal your own weakness.

Trump may not see his own fork in the road coming. He may believe he has the power he is claiming. That would be a mistake on his part — a self-deception that could doom his presidency. But the real threat is if he persuades the rest of us to believe he has power he does not have.

The first two weeks of Trump’s presidency have not shown his strength. He is trying to overwhelm you. He is trying to keep you off-balance. He is trying to persuade you of something that isn’t true. Don���t believe him.

You can listen to this conversation by following “The Ezra Klein Show” on NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts. View a list of book recommendations from our guests here.

[pardonmymannerssir]

Why does it feel like the people most obsessed with WWII learn the least from it???

[pardonmymannerssir]

[pardonmymannerssir]

My sister lived in China for years. It isn’t some horrible hellscape but government control and censorship are real. What China does to Tibetans is real. My sister was dating a man with a friend who was Tibetan, they were out partying one night, police showed up and no one ever heard from that guy again. Police and government officials denied seizing him. That’s a dramatic example but there are verifiable ones -you can’t watch movies with sex scenes (on the flights over I can attest), the health care is “free” but if you want it safe and decent you have to pay, while my sister was living there China denied their pollution levels were so high because of coal usage and banned all outdoor smoking in Beijing instead. They kicked thousands out of their homes for the Olympics and didn’t compensate them. They employed thousands to build the Olympic nest and didn’t compensate them. You don’t decide when the heater comes on, the government does. When my sister went back for a semester to study abroad, her instructor at the university required all cellphones and laptops and electronic devices to be handed over at the beginning of class because he wanted to teach a more accurate version of Chinese history but was terrified to do so.

RedNote was so positive because, as this post says, they literally cannot speak negatively about their government without fearing repercussions. This isn’t meant to be a hate on China, I visited my sister several times and enjoyed it every time. The people were beyond lovely, but the government control is 100000% real.

Do people not realize that RedNote is a propaganda platform?

Just, it’s a platform that’s designed to only show you good and wholesome content.

It sounds like a great idea, but it also means that you’ll never see the whole picture. You’ll never get those expose-like videos like you did on TikTok. You’ll never get the “this is how you should stand up for your rights” content on there. And you sure as hell won’t get anything less than the standard“China is the greatest country with thousands of years of history” propaganda-y lines in all of the Chinese-based videos you see.

“The internet lied to us about China, they’re so friendly and so welcoming” yeah they are, but it’s also partly because you can’t see anything else. It’s Censorship Central over there on RedNote, and you are getting fed Party-approved content like it’s 1930s Germany.

[pardonmymannerssir]

Character Headcanon: Poor Master Dennet

You know, I always feel a little sorry for Master Dennet. The Inquisitor is like, hey, I need a horse expert! Here is a horse expert! And he comes along to be your horse expert.

And for a while all is well. He brings his own fine horses, and the Inquisitor adds to the stable as she finds new breeding stock—often excellent. Where she got the charger from, he doesn’t know, and he feels too honored by having it in his care to ask.

And then the Inquisitor starts coming back with like… deer. And Dennet scratches his head, because he knows horses, and just because it has four hooves and you can put a saddle on it doesn’t make it a horse. Hell, the food and space and exercise requirements for a cob and a draft horse aren’t the same—a goddamn deer is presumably completely different. But he goes around Skyhold rounding up Dalish elves until he finds one who knew something about halla, on the principle that that’s probably the closest thing, and they work it out. (He’s always respected the way Dalish treat their halla, so it’s not that big of a leap. And even though Dalish—the Charger—doesn’t know anything much about how to raise halla, he looks the other way when she wants to spend half a day in the deer’s box stall being all affectionate at it. Can’t hurt.)

But deer of various kinds are at least still… well… grass-eating hoofed animals. Things don’t begin to really go sideways until they bring back the first dracolisk.

It’s a lizard. It’s a giant meat-eating lizard. Dennet is a master of horse, and he will stretch that to deer in a pinch, but asking him to figure out the care and feeding of big spiky lizard things is a bit much. It is—he tries to explain, first to Cullen and then to Josephine and finally to the Inquisitor herself—as if someone had decided that because you knew how to knead bread, you were obviously a master pugilist, because both things involved punching things. For his trouble he got a friendly clap on the shoulder and a “Just do your best! We can free up some funds to hire you more help!” (help from where? was he to hang up fliers somewhere for dracolisk handlers? where exactly was one supposed to go for that?).

(We will not even discuss the zombie horse with a sword through its head. We will not. The zombie horse got a stall to itself and was studiously ignored, on the principle that it was dead, and not much Dennet did could either help or hurt it.)

Dennet knew that he was in over his head and then some when the Inquisitor showed up with a charming grin and a giant fucking nug, and all he thought was, “Better see if any dwarves know what to feed it.” (Dagna does, but he’s a little afraid because she keeps having these ideas for ‘experimental feed,�� and….)

At least his life is never boring.

[pardonmymannerssir]

Hi I have some thoughts and no where else to put them so here you go. I used to blog semi-professionally across le internet like ten-fifteen years back. Mostly freelancing but made some semi-decent money for a bit. I used to get all the stereotypical misogynistic shit comments one would expect as a woman with opinions on the internet and everyone all the time would be like ‘it’s just trolls no one actually thinks like that it’s just for attention.’ So anyway I think maybe people actually think like that and that maybe we should have taken the trolls at face value.

In conclusion: maybe if we’d been less accepting of horrible misogynistic trolling previously there might be less of it now in our politics, ya know?

[pardonmymannerssir]

Chapter 4 - Stipulations

New chapter up!

Link: AO3

Rating: M

Relationships: Female Inquisitor/Cullen Rutherford

Content warnings: some violence, discussions of past abuse and trauma, explicit content.

Synopsis: Ten years after the dissolution of the Inquisition, new threats pull Cullen back into Evelyn Trevelyan’s orbit. Maybe this time, he’ll finally find a way to tell her how he feels. Ideally before the world ends. Again. (Set during the events of Veilguard. Beware of spoilers.)

Excerpt:

“We haven’t the resources to send many, if any, men with you, Inquisitor,” Leliana says grimly, “and Josie and I may only be of so much help.”

The Inquisitor nods. “I have the Blades, though I’ll be leaving a number of them behind to guard Leon in my absence. I can handle this on my own. I have to.”

With sudden clarity, Cullen recalls that last goodbye at Skyhold, the Inquisitor -Evelyn, his mind whispers- riding away from him. Remembers how much it had pained him to send her off into the world and into danger again and again. He remembers how much he wished he could go with her. How much he’d wanted to protect her, to help her. 

He realizes that this time, at this moment, nothing is stopping him. 

“I’m going with you,” he announces, interrupting something Leliana had been saying. All four women look at him in surprise. 

[pardonmymannerssir]

Restless Dreams - CH 3

New chapter up!

Link: AO3

Rating: M

Relationships: Female Inquisitor/Cullen Rutherford

Content warnings: some violence, discussions of past abuse and trauma, explicit content.

Synopsis: Ten years after the dissolution of the Inquisition, new threats pull Cullen back into Evelyn Trevelyan’s orbit. Maybe this time, he’ll finally find a way to tell her how he feels before the world ends. Again. (Set during the events of Veilguard. Beware of spoilers.)

Excerpt:

“Hello, Cullen,” says a quiet, familiar voice from the shadows, and he snaps around. 

Standing in the flickering torchlight, auburn hair falling in curling tendrils to frame a face that has hardly changed in the decade since he’d seen it last, stands the Inquisitor. She is wearing nondescript trousers and a brown tunic with a leather overcoat and a finely made emerald cloak fluttering down to her ankles. Her eyes, a hazel green, glimmer golden as he stares at her in shock. If he had hoped that time and distance would make her less beautiful to him, he would have been sorely disappointed. If anything, the years have made her only more lovely, sharpening her features into a sophisticated sort of beauty that steals his breath away.  

“Inquisitor,” he manages, and she winches a bit. The expression passes quickly but not quickly enough. 

He knows that look. What it means. He’d undeniably used her title as a shield during their years in the Inquisition. It had been… stupid. Unfair to her, no matter how he might have felt about her. So, despite the danger, mostly to himself and his stupid old heart, he gives her what she wants. 

“Evelyn,” he breathes, and if it sounds more like a benediction than a greeting, well, he is a weak man. 

[pardonmymannerssir]

I tried to resist writing a Cullen fic set during Veilguard and failed.

Click the link if you want your romantic leads 35 years and older or have a Cullen needing reading glasses kink.

—

Restless Dream

Link: AO3

Rated: M

Relationships: Female Inquisitor/Cullen Rutherford

Content warnings: some violence, discussions of past abuse and trauma, explicit content

Synopsis: Ten years after the dissolution of the Inquisition, new threats pull Cullen back into Evelyn Trevelyan’s orbit. Maybe this time, he’ll finally find a way to tell her how he feels before the world ends. Again.

(Set during the events of Veilguard. Beware of spoilers.)

[pardonmymannerssir]

Always been my favorite scene in all the movies ❤️

the whole sequence of Gandalf sensibly taking matters into his own hands at Gondor and using Pippin to carry out his plans of lighting the beacons and then the gorgeous chainlink shots of the beacons being lit across the mountains and then Aragorn bursting through the door to say “The beacons are lit! Gondor calls for aid” with such excitement and hope and love in his whole being and everyone looking to Theoden and him taking a moment to wrestle with the weight of his decision and his old grievances and hurts but then choosing to rise above and say “and Rohan will answer” ————-

makes me want to throw up I love it so much.