#...millions of people in the past have sat and devoted their time and effort into all of this...

[uncanny-tranny]

If I'm honest, the whole "love in every stitch" saying for fiber artists does not apply to me, like. I'm trying to get this fucking hook into stubborn yarn and I'll be stabbing it like it owed me money. Is that love because I hope not 😭💀

[tracybirds]

Paper Dreams

John receives a prestigious invite and he’s not sure how to respond.

Many thanks to @gumnut-logic for the encouragement because I am nerves!!

*                      *                      *

The crisp white envelope was heavy in his hands as he hurried from the room. Paper was a formality, a mark of distinction that would surely draw his brothers’ unwanted attention. Letters didn’t just arrive unannounced in this era of high-speed data connections and quantum supercomputers. In fact, they didn’t arrive at all.

So, John was more than a little apprehensive when Grandma Tracy silently handed him the sealed envelope and walked away.

It took only a few short minutes to read through the contents and he sat back against the window in his room, the words whirling in his mind.

Mars Colonisation Project. Distinguished candidate. Invited to apply.

An opportunity of a lifetime.

A way to prove for once and for all that he was more than his father’s famous name.

John clutched at the letter, the paper crinkling in his grasp. He mouthed the words as he read them, over and over.

He looked up at the sound of a loud yell calling his name, hurriedly shoving the letter into the envelope and dropping it at his side. Snatching up a nearby tablet, his flushed ears were the only hint of the letter that remained when Gordon shoved open the door.

“John, dinner, hurry up.”

His brother tore out of the room before he could respond.

*                      *                      *

John slipped into his seat, mouthing an apology to Grandma Tracy as he did.

“Finally!” cried Alan. He wriggled back in his seat, staring hopefully at the food. “Grandma said we had to wait for you, you took forever!”

“Is Dad not eating?” asked Virgil. “I heard him come in.”

“He’s taking it in the study tonight,” said Grandma Tracy, shaking her head slightly. “Brains dropped by and they’re holing up together on that project of theirs.”

John glanced over at the conspicuously empty seat at the head of table. They all knew what ‘that project’ meant.

In the heady rush of excitement, he’d all but forgotten the silent expectation that accompanied his studies and extra-curriculars for the past five years. A pet project alone wouldn’t have been enough to deter him from his own ambitions, but the Thunderbirds, they offered something different, something more than the office politics of academia, squabbling over research grants.

He’d never known anything that could compete.

Until now.

“Hey,” said Virgil in a low tone, nudging him from his thoughts. “You okay?”

John pulled himself back into the present with a slight grimace.

“Fine. Just thinking about an assignment.”

Virgil nodded slowly, looking him up and down with a critical eye.

“Are you going to eat anything, or just push it around?”

John automatically lifted his fork, blinking as the peas fell back to the plate and landed in a pile of mushy, grey potatoes.

“Actually, I’m not that hungry.”

“Can I have yours?” asked Alan, already reaching over to grab at his plate.

“Not hungry, John?” asked Grandma Tracy. “You’re not coming down with something, are you?”

She examined the pinched look in his face and the nervous twist of one hand inside the other.

“No,” said John, wishing he hadn’t said anything. The last thing he wanted was any level of scrutiny. “I’m fine, Grandma, honest.”

He let Alan scrape his leftovers from his plate, realising with a pang than he’d had another growth spurt over the previous semester at his boarding school.

If he left for Mars, he’d return to a brother he’d hardly recognise.

Colonisation was a long-term project, the result of years in planning and decades of dreams. Countless people would put their life’s work into its development and they had every right to expect the same of their astronauts. The application process alone was heavily involved and would severely limit time with his family, to say nothing of the many years ahead for him on Mars if he made it all the way into space. He’d be travelling millions of miles from home, only to find himself living with a group of strangers that he couldn’t escape without logging an external environment report.

He didn’t even like sharing a bathroom at the university housing that much.

Still the piece of paper called to him.

“Can I be excused?”

Grandma Tracy nodded and he hurried from the room, not noticing her troubled look.

The warmth of the room followed him into the hallway and he shut the door firmly behind him. He thrust his hand into his pocket, searching for the reassuring touch of cool paper.

It was real.

It was real and if he let the opportunity pass by, he might regret it for the rest of his life.

Or he might be wasting his time, pinning his hopes on something that would only serve to distract him in the long run. He could only imagine what Scott would say, who’d never once taken his eye off a prize once he’d decided to aim for it.

He didn’t know what to do, didn’t know what he wanted, and found himself climbing into the cramped space under the roof that had generously called a playroom, then a study, then an attic.

He blinked as the bare bulb overhead lit the small room, filling it with old memories and dust.

His first telescope was still standing in the corner, pointing high in the sky and he lifted the edge of his T-shirt to wipe the dust away. Surrounding it, lay stacks of books that his mom had picked up from the local thrift store, that Mrs Delaney, the owner, put them aside just for him.

John walked carefully among them, tugging the small window open and staring out into the night. The stars shone bright in the clear, crisp air.

Crouching down, he peered through the eye piece, adjusting the focus with a practiced hand. The little reflector was nothing like the giant telescopes available at the college department, and he had to hold his breath to stop the stand from wobbling. But the universe was still out there, the same as it was when he was a kid, still holding an infinite number of mysteries despite the years he had spent uncovering the rules that held it together.

He looked up, eyes darting through the familiar patterns, searching for the anomaly he knew was wandering between Gemini and Taurus.

And there it was.

Mars.

A planet with so much to offer the world they lived on. Where he could work with a team of people who loved space just like him, where he could devote his life to researching astronomy from a new perspective and developing technology for interplanetary life for generations to come.

Where he could leave his mark alongside all the heroes of his childhood. Alongside his dad.

“After all, why shouldn’t I go?” he said, scowling up at Mars.

“Go where?”

John spun around with a start.

“Kayo! When did you get in?”

She shrugged, propping up her head with her hand.

“Long enough to see you come up here,” she said. “I waited for you, but then Mrs Tracy said you hadn’t eaten. Figured something was wrong.”

She looked him up and down with a piercing eye. John tried not to squirm. He’d always felt Kayo had something of a sixth sense when it came to knowing things that should have been a secret.

“Seems like I was right,” she said, raising an eyebrow.

“Everything’s fine.”

“Then where are you planning on going?”

“Nowhere. I don’t think, that is…”

He flopped down and tilted his head back with a huff.

“Not right now, at any rate.”

Kayo pulled herself up onto the floor and drew the ladder upwards.

Neither spoke as the trapdoor shut with a small ��click’.

The dust swirled in the air, dancing in the shafts of light above them.

“Is it a graduate program?”

“No.”

“An international program?”

“No.”

“A long-term space colonisation program for specially selected candidates who have already proven themselves in the fields of communications, astrophysics and astrotechnology?”

John stared at her.

She shrugged.

“It’s my job to know.”

“So, why even ask?”

“I’m trying to get you to lower your guard.”

She smiled at the dumbfounded look on his face.

“You’ve met Brains, right? He’s got some server tracker that flags your name. They asked your advisor for academic and personal references months ago.”

“Oh God,” said John, dropping his head in his ands and staring wildly at the floor. “Does Dad already know?”

Kayo shook her head.

“Dad and I do. Security details and all. But we don’t tell him that kind of stuff, you know, he’s not spying on you.”

“You’re right, that’s a real comfort,” said John, drily.

Kayo tossed her head.

“I’m just saying.”

Her eyes softened as she watched him draw his knees close to his chest.

“He doesn’t know.” She hesitated, still watching him. “Would it be all that bad if he did though?”

John huffed a little, still staring at his knees.

“International Rescue’s all we’ve ever talked about,” he said. “I didn’t think there’d be anything else I wanted. What if I let him down?”

“He’s already proud of you, John.”

“But we’ve been working towards it for so long now. This would change everything. Delay the full scope of the project for months, or years even.”

Kayo snorted.

“You really think Jeff Tracy, resident billionaire and with access to the best tech in the world, wouldn’t be able to find another genius astrotechnician and communication expert?”

John shot her a withering look.

“Okay, so maybe he’d have to find two super geniuses.”

She easily dodged the picture book he threw in her direction.

“Leave off,” he said, rolling his eyes.

Kayo spotted the slight smile though, and grinned broadly in return.

“Can I?” she asked, nodding at the space between him and the wall.

John nodded and shuffled over as best he could, trying not to topple the book stacks around them.

Kayo wriggled into the gap, and John paid her no mind.

He hadn’t thought of who would take his place because, of course, someone must. He’d been preparing for an International Rescue without him, one where his family diverted communications for a few years and focused their efforts on establishing themselves on land and sea until Alan stepped into his role on Thunderbird Five.

He hadn’t imagined an International Rescue where he wasn’t even needed.

Kayo seemed to sense the turn in his thoughts, nudging him gently to pull him from them.

“He wouldn’t trust them half as much as you, you know.”

John shrugged.

“I don’t want to disappoint him,” he said slowly, choosing his words carefully. “But I don’t want that to be the only reason I don’t go.”

He took a deep breath, and glanced back up at the slowly setting planet.

“And I want to go,” he admitted. “I do. I need to tell him.”

Kayo nodded, a sad look in her eyes. They sat in silence together, lost in their own thoughts. The bustle of the house downstairs filtered upwards. Muffled bangs and indistinct shouts of Gordon and Alan playing some ridiculous game, loud music from Virgil’s room – the kind he put on to drown out any interruption to his painting. Grandma Tracy seemed to be having some kind of one-sided conversation with herself, until John remembered, with a pang, that it was Saturday morning out in Guam and she was likely speaking to Scott at that very moment.

Kayo sighed and dropped her head on John’s shoulder.

“I’d miss you though.”

John swallowed carefully past the sudden lump in his throat.

“I’d miss you too.”

*                      *                      *

John was too old to be summoned to his father’s study, but somehow deliberately interrupting him felt worse. Nausea sat like a rock in his stomach, his voice box left in tatters as he knocked on the solid oak door.

“Who is it?”

He couldn’t reply.

His eyes flitted across the family photos that littered the hallway, landing finally on the image of his father and crewmates waving to the masses as they entered the Herschel-VI.

The photograph didn’t show the way his father was blind to the crowd, his farewell only for the woman who stood half a mile from the launchpad, proud, so proud, and sick with worry too. She held tight to her eldest son with one hand, and rested her other on the stroller she was rocking back and forth. She didn’t see the way he had wriggled out of his restraints nor how he was preparing to drop to the ground and run away, already intent on chasing after his father at three years old.

Jeff Tracy, first man on Mars, opened the door with a frown and a touch of impatience, and John knew there would be no escape this time.

“John.”

“Dad.”

His throat closed around his words and his hand closed around the letter in a fist.

Jeff looked down at the sound, and looked back at John, an assessing look in his eye. He stepped back wordlessly and John entered the severe room.

“What’s happened, son?” he asked, holding his hand out for the letter.

He smoothed down the crumpled edges as he read, his eyes leaping from phrase to phrase on the page.

“Well, it seems congratulations are in order. I assume you intend to accept?”

The knot in John’s chest loosened and he collapsed into the chair opposite Jeff.

“I intend to apply,” he corrected, staring down at the desk between them.

“John, they don’t reach out like this unless they want you onboard. They intend you to be on that shuttle, regardless of the formalities the bureaucrats put in place.”

“Yeah.”

Out of the corner of his eye, he could see the blueprints, Brains’ small, neat handwriting annotating each design and his father’s looping comments scrawled liberally across them.

Jeff followed his line of sight and smiled.

“Five won’t be operational for a few more years, you know that. Don’t let her be what holds you back.”

“But this was always it, this is why I’m getting space rated. And the satellite network still needs to be launched, and the orbital mechanics calculated.”

“An opportunity like this doesn’t come your way twice, son.”

John stopped.

“You think I should accept. If they say yes.”

“Don’t you?”

There it was. His father’s blessing laid out in front of him, just waiting to be taken up like a pennant.

Everything they’d worked for, everything they’d sacrificed, gone. In its place, a single shining achievement, a global community on their sister planet. The first of its kind.

It had been a long time since John had allowed himself to dream his own dreams.

“Alright,” he said, a giddy rush spinning his head so that he hardly knew what he was saying. “I’m gonna do it.”

[bakingandbooks3]

Hold My Girl

For @sayosdreams​, I hope you like it <3

Nesta has never been the party person, and never would be. She had her people, friends from law school, and family, but parties weren’t her scene. Especially after a day like today.

Nesta woke up with the pit in her stomach, again, and knew that today would not be good. She tried to do her comfort routine: go on a run, take a long hot shower, cuddle Ivy (her kitten), and do anything to take her mind off the nothingness.

It didn’t work.

She had started seeing a therapist a few years back, trying to finally come to terms with her past and childhood. Her weekly sessions started after a bad experience on a drunken night when she realized that the path she was on wasn’t what she wanted in life. The partying, the drinking, the hangover after.

Her younger married sister had other thoughts.

“Oh come on Nessie, you never come out anymore! Please, it’s just one night out and all of us will be there. Me, Rhys, Mo-”

“Feyre, what part of no do you not get? I’m not in the mood to go out, I don’t feel good and can barely keep food down as it is. I don’t need you and your husband making eyes at each other all night to compromise that.”

“Well damn, Nesta, you don’t have to be so rude about it. You never come out anymore and we miss you, can you seriously not handle one night of fun? I mean, come on, stop neglecting us and-”

Nesta pulled her ear away and ended the call, she didn’t need to hear what came next. The routine never died; Feyre would try to guilt-trip Nesta and Nesta would stand her ground, while wallowing in her own despair.

The neon-lit clock on the edge of her kitchen island read a quarter past eight. Too early to sleep and too late to be productive.

Nesta’s health mentally hadn’t been in a good place for a long time, since her parent’s deaths and the… accident not too long after. Yes, she might’ve been one of the top students in law, proving to be a formidable future lawyer, but she was empty. Waking up was not just opening her eyes, it was pulling herself out of a grave and struggling through her day. Nesta would eat hardly anything and could barely keep her eyes open.

So, when therapy started she tried her best. The steps were small, but steps all the same; eating a full meal, writing down the positives in her day, putting away the bottles for more than 12 hours. Unlike her sister, Nesta was never one to boast of her accomplishments. Nesta had been fighting the fight of her life and was starting to see the end. But, to get further sometimes you have to take a small step back.

Today she went back a bit.

She could hear her sister blowing up her phone, most likely angry texts harassing her, but Nesta knew better than to leave the phone completely. She settled on putting Feyre on silent, thinking about how nice life would be if the human Feyre had a silent button.

Drowned in her thoughts, sitting at the kitchen island Nesta picked at her food. It was half-eaten, but that was better than she thought she could do. She picked up the plate and put it in the fridge making her way to the bedroom up the stairs, after checking her door was locked.

She pulled herself underneath the covers and nuzzled up between the duvet and weighted blanket she had sprawled on the massive bed. Nesta liked her house cold and her blankets stacked, it was cozy for her and made it easier to sleep.

Nesta didn’t turn or spook when she heard the keys in the front door, she already knew the only person with the second set. He’d probably shown up to the bar where Feyre was at and realized she wasn’t there. How quick he was to change his plans.

Cassian loved a lot of things about Nesta, her storm-struck eyes, the small laugh she made at his god-awful jokes, her devotion. It was hard not to love all that, too bad people were intimidated by the rough exterior to see what was underneath. He loved his friends, but he knew them too well- Nesta wasn’t like them and was pushed aside because she wouldn’t bend to their mold. He knew that there was more behind it than just resilience, but he also knew better than to push it.

They had started seeing each other not long ago, about two months at most. Nesta didn’t want to move fast at all, but Cassian understood. He was patient, and even though he was more than ready to make things official, he gave her the time she needed.

When he told her that he wanted her after a long night of arguing about some stupid mishap, she told him where she was. The bareness, the vulnerability, it just made Cassian's thoughts more clear, the words ringing in his head again.

“Cassian, I’m not doing good. I haven’t been for a while, and I don’t know if I will be for a long time. I’m trying my best, to be a good sister, a good friend, but your… people are overwhelming me. I’m not asking you to choose between me and them, I would never. I just want you to understand that sometimes I can’t be around you all together, it’ll break what I’ve worked so hard to make of myself.”

He didn’t have any idea how bad it was until then, and he couldn’t believe how calm she was. Where he was a burning flame that kept her warm, she was the waves that covered him in peace.

Cassian knew it was one of those days and had seen her little signs; the porch light wasn’t on, her bookmark was away from her book, and Ivy wasn’t curled up with Nesta but just waiting at the door. So, he took off his shoes by the door, and picked up Ivy, kissing her nose and taking her upstairs with him.

He found Nesta in her bed, curled up underneath her millions of blankets, and couldn’t help but think how precious she was.

“Hi, Cas.”

“Hi beautiful, can I sit?”

The blankets ruffled a bit and a muffled “sure” came out.

He put Ivy by Nesta’s head and pulled himself under some of the covers, careful not to invade Nesta’s space. He knew that when she wanted him close she would say something.

It felt like hours he just sat there, looking at the walls in her room and this place that was so hers, when she finally turned and laid her head in his lap.

“Hi again.”

“Hi, again Nesta.” He chuckled.

She burrowed deeper, hiding her blushing face, “I’m sorry for not going out tonight, I don’t feel good.” He could feel how bad she felt and he couldn’t pinpoint if it was guilt for not going or guilt for him coming and leaving his friends.

“Sweetheart, it’s okay. I already told them I wasn’t going tonight because I had plans to come see you, but I just told them I had work to do. Don’t feel bad, I wanted to be here and spend time with you, even if you don’t feel the best.”

“I know, Cas, I do. I just… I don't feel good today. It’s been tough.”

Cassian knew this was her way of letting him know to be near. He picked her head up off his lap and gave her a quick kiss on the forehead before pushing her back to her own side. Pulling up the covers for her to come closer, she dove into his arms and curled up into his chest like little Ivy, who was asleep at the end of the bed. With Nesta in his arms and the world asleep outside, he knew this is what he wanted.

Nesta wasn’t saying much but she was grateful she didn’t have to. It had taken them a while to get here, to get Cassian to understand her and what was going on. He was quick-tempered at first, but over time grew more patient and soft with every passing day. Nesta knew that his efforts were building the foundation of something more than what they were now, but he wouldn’t push it, he’d hold back for her as long as she needed. Nesta was falling for him, and although she was scared to admit it with every passing day he made her feel more and more like she was doing the right thing. Being his was easy.

~

Not long after she began to lay in his arms Nesta fell asleep. The relief Cassian felt was immeasurable, he knew how hard it was for her to stay asleep or even fall asleep in the first place. He took a small triumph in making her comfortable enough to sleep with him near, but would only give himself that. Nesta was not his project, or a broken toy to fix- like her sister acts like she is- and she wasn’t something to be mended. No, even though neither one of them would say it aloud, Nesta was his girl. She was more than capable of fighting her own battles, but he’d always be there to hold her hand on cloudy days.

[alittlewhump]

Unbidden - Act 5, chapter 5

Masterlist | Previous | Next

Content warnings: Food mention, fantasy religion mention, body horror mention

Morgan had slipped away from the crowd still thronging around the waypoint in Harrogath. They had swept Blaise up in their enthusiasm, cheering her prowess with the bow. Not wanting any part of the festivities, Morgan had quickly eyed up the thinnest part of the crowd and woven his way through the gaps until he was on the outside of it. It forced him to take the long way around the city to reach the barracks, but that was fine. Better that than the alternative.

His route took him past a tent where Cain was bent over a parchment, writing in his careful, unhurried way. An air of serenity surrounded him, as it so often did. Morgan stopped without consciously deciding to. Perhaps he, too, could find some peace here. Just for a moment.

He approached hesitantly, not wanting to interrupt. It could be enough just to observe, to watch an expert in his element. But Cain glanced up as he dipped his quill into the ink pot, a smile spreading over his face as he noticed Morgan.

"Ah, Morgan. I didn't see you there, friend. To what do I owe the pleasure?"

"Hello." The familiar cadence of the scholar's voice was even more soothing than just his presence. Morgan wanted more of that. Cain had always been willing to speak; surely this wouldn't be too much to ask. "What are you working on?"

"As it happens, I've been recording some of the history of the barbarians here. Most of their stories are passed down orally, but I find them quite worthy of preserving in a more lasting fashion."

"Could you please tell me more about that?"

Cain shuffled in his seat, setting his quill aside and folding his hands on the tabletop. "Nothing would please me more."

Morgan lost track of time as he listened to Cain retell tales of the brave and wondrous exploits of the ancient Bul-Kathos, who Cain suspected may have actually been a real person, one of a few original nephalem from the early days of the world. He was feeling a little more like himself by the time Blaise poked her head in.

"Thought I might find you here, Morgan. Chief elder Nihlathak is asking for you." She wrinkled her nose. "Pushy guy, wouldn't take 'no' for an answer. He's waiting in the great hall. You can come with me, but we don't have to hurry. He can wait. You should at least get changed first."

Cain regarded Morgan as he stood. "Did you get what you came for?"

"Yes," Morgan replied. "Thank you."

"Always a pleasure, my friend," Cain smiled serenely before returning to his quill and ink pot.

"So," Blaise said as they walked, "learn any new information about Baal?"

"No." He let a few steps pass in silence. "I just wanted to hear a story," he added.

"Well, Deckard has a million of them. Did..." Blaise's step faltered for a second. "Did you tell him? About... last night?"

"No." Just like that, the heaviness was back in the pit of his stomach, as though it had never lifted.

"Did you want me to do it?" The question was meant in kindness, he was certain.

"You can do what you like," were the words that came out of his mouth in response, uninflected and low. Blaise winced.

"I just - I mean, I thought it might - shit," she said. An icy trickle of fear slithered in to curl around the weight in Morgan's core. You keep making her upset like this, it observed. She's going to get rid of you too, if you keep it up. She knows how easy it is now. He bumped up against her gently, looking for the right words to use.

"I trust your decisions," he tried. "I don't want to think about it right now."

"Yeah," she said, "okay." She brought her arm up to rest across his shoulders for a moment, and the fear thawed a little. She waited outside the barracks as he changed out of his armour and pulled on a warm wool sweater over top of a lighter shirt, to keep the rough material off of his skin while still taking advantage of its warmth. Then it didn't take long before they were at the great hall.

"What does Nihlathak look like?"

"Big guy, you won't be able to miss him."

"Everyone here is big," Morgan pointed out. Blaise laughed.

"Yeah, they make 'em large in these parts. I haven't felt this small since I was a kid. Don't worry, I'll point him out."

She didn't need to. He called out from the head of the long table when he saw them enter. It was the large man whose leg he had mended, who had identified his... origin. Blaise returned to a seat near the other end of the table.

"Morgan! My people have been telling tales of warriors risen from the earth itself. Come, sit by me and talk and eat." Morgan wanted to do none of those things. He approached anyway.

"Chief elder," he said with a polite bow of his head. "How is your leg?"

"Good as new." He gave it a hearty slap to illustrate. "Malah finished what you started. Of course, if she'd been there in the first place, I could have seen the battle firsthand! Still, I am warmed to see so many I thought lost to us returned. Sit, eat, celebrate with us. Maybe you can tell me the secret of how our uphill battle turned in our favour."

Morgan sat at the table, which was laden with food and drink. The crowd was boisterous, shouting joyfully and slamming their tankards together. It was at odds with the cold, hollow feeling he'd been trying to shake.

"There's no secret," he said, "it was just a good day. You knew it would happen."

"I what?" Nihlathak leaned in close. "What are you saying?"

"Yesterday," Morgan elaborated, "after I bandaged your leg, you said the tide of battle would soon turn. You were right."

"Hah! I was!" Nihlathak leaned back to drain his tankard. "I still want to hear of these earthen warriors you raise. What are they?"

"Golems. I put magic into the ground and it does what I ask."

"You make it sound so simple, but I've never seen such a thing before."

"I can demonstrate any time you wish, chief elder."

"Perhaps later, eh? Right now I am in the mood for tales!"

"I'm no storyteller," Morgan warned him. He didn't like it here, with the noise and the smells and the happy groups of people who belonged together. It was all too much. He wanted to leave.

"Oh, go on, you must have some stories in you. How did you get that scar?" He gestured to the most visible one, the thick line marking Morgan's throat nearly from ear to ear. "Scars always come with a story."

"Demon slit my throat."

"Oho! See, that's a tale! How did you survive that?"

"Healing potion."

"You're right," Nihlathak grunted. "You're no storyteller."

"Is that why you asked for me?"

"No! No, I just wanted to see that everyone got their place at the feast table."

That was good, Morgan thought dully. Equitable, fair. It was no longer his place to judge those things. Hard to break a lifetime of habit.

"Thank you for your hospitality," he said, forcing himself to stay seated. Instead of standing, he took a small bite of food. He couldn't be bothered to taste it. Instead of leaving, he took a drink of ale. That was tasteless too. He waited until he saw another person leaving the hall. That meant it was finally acceptable to go, which he did. Nihlathak had moved down the table and was occupied with Blaise and some of the other warriors, undoubtedly getting the stories he wanted. It saved Morgan the trouble of excusing himself.

Once he was out in the cold, quiet air again, it occurred to him that he didn't have a goal in mind. He wandered a little, thinking about nothing, letting his feet carry him where they would. They took him up to a corner near the smithy. The blacksmith, Larzuk, was there, along with Cain. They were leaned over a workbench with their backs to him. It looked like they were examining something. Larzuk was making expansive gestures and Cain was nodding thoughtfully. Morgan turned around. He had already interrupted him once today. It wouldn't do to take up any more of his attention.

Morgan went to the bathhouse instead. It was quiet there, with so many at the feast. He had what should have been a reasonably pleasant bath, scrubbing the grime of the day's efforts from his skin with hot water and a rough cloth. The world was going blunt around the edges again, though, so he couldn't say for sure. He was half dressed afterwards, squeezing the last of the water out of his hair, when his solitude was interrupted. The bathhouse door opened behind him, and a conversation became audible as its participants entered the building.

"- that level of control. Certainly not so many at once." That was Icharion. He was clearly speaking to someone else, though. Morgan could probably still slip by without comment.

"What a pity. Strong steel will always win out over magic, but I am beginning to see its use." That was Nihlathak. The bath must have taken longer than he'd thought. "Ah, so this is where you slipped off to, Morgan! So quiet, like a ghost."

So he wouldn't escape cleanly after all. Morgan turned to give the men a cursory bow of acknowledgement.

"I'll take that demonstration you offered," Nihlathak continued. "Tomorrow, when the light is good, eh?" Morgan nodded, and Nihlathak grinned. "Good. What, you never seen scars before, boy?" He nudged Icharion with his elbow. "You see a warrior with no scars, you know he hasn't seen real battle. That's how you get stronger. Gonna see plenty the longer you stay here. Get used to it."

Icharion was staring openly, looking faintly horrified. But his eyes weren't on any of Morgan's scars. "Your arm - is that a golem?"

"It is," Morgan confirmed. Its smooth surface did rather stand out in comparison to the bare skin of his torso. He had never bothered smoothing down the snarl of tissue at the place where it joined the original limb, either, where he'd had to improvise the connection. It was ugly, but it served its purpose. Icharion's lip curled.

"How could you claim devotion with that monstrosity attached to you? Those arts are forbidden. You know the laws better than anyone." The accusation lit a brief flare of indignation inside Morgan, but it died quickly. His dedication had been pointless in the end, after all.

"I have broken no laws in this," he said.

"You shall not forge a construct in taking the flesh of the dead," Icharion recited in retort, "neither the flesh of the living."

"Neither the flesh of others living," Morgan corrected flatly, pulling his shirt on over his head.

Icharion opened his mouth to reply, then closed it again, frowning. "Surely that's not the way it was intended," he said after a moment, sounding a little uncertain. Morgan shrugged.

"Some laws are explicit with regards to one's own self. That one is not."

"Hah! Clever. I like you more and more, Morgan." Nihlathak was watching their exchange approvingly, his arms crossed over his chest.

Icharion took a halting step forward, as though he was struggling between being intrigued and repulsed. "But why? What made you take such an extreme measure as that?"

Morgan slipped his sweater on over his shirt, tugging at the neckline until the rough wool stopped dragging on his skin. "Irreparable damage."

Icharion's eyebrows rose. "Noted."

Morgan waited a beat, but there seemed to be no more questions for him. He left without another word, heading for the barracks. There was no point in trying to find further distractions. The relief they offered was too fleeting. The fighting earlier had been tolerable, though. Perhaps the barbarian battle party would be able to move faster now, to catch up with Baal before he reached... whatever his goal was. It would probably be easier to defeat him with so many strong warriors on the attack at once. And then what? He wasn't ready to think about that yet. Instead, he closed his eyes and slipped into the familiar meditative space that held nothing, and waited for the morning.

[vamonumentlandscape]

Poplar Forest & Bedford

When we first arrived at Poplar Forest that lies on the outskirts of Lynchburg in Bedford County, we were blown away by the beautiful landscape that surrounded Thomas Jefferson’s retreat. Our team had heard such good things about the historic site from those who work there, our professors, and fellow students, we knew it was a must see spot. When we walked into the visitors center, we were greeted by the most kind staff member that we have encountered at any historic site. He was helpful, sweet, and even asked us about our research. We felt very welcome as soon as we walked through the door. To begin the tour, we started with a fifteen minute video introduction to Poplar Forest. Before the tour began, we realized our tour guide seemed to have little enthusiasm when one man asked her if she was our tour guide and she responded with a flat “yes.” After that odd encounter, we watched the wonderfully done film on Jefferson’s retreat home. The short video captured the stories of Jefferson, the enslaved people who worked there, and the importance of the architecture of the site. We were all looking forward to the tour of the historic home and the rest of our day at Poplar Forest after this.

We began the tour outside of the octagonal mansion with our tour guide explaining the symmetric architecture that Jefferson wanted to experiment with. By combining all of the techniques he had seen in Europe, he created this small, yet grand mansion as his getaway. But, he is not the one who put the physical labor into creating this architectural masterpiece. The enslaved people of Poplar Forest are the real champions of constructing the illustrious home. Our tour guide made that clear when she described much of the back-breaking work the enslaved people, like John Hemings, put into the building. She pointed out the only asymmetric detail, the wing of the home, where the enslaved people spent most of their days cooking, cleaning, and keeping the home the way Jefferson wanted. Unlike other Jefferson designs, there was no other wing to complete the symmetry. As Travis McDonald would explain to us later, “the second wing is the million dollar question.” Speculation from staff who have greatly studied the wing says it was just unnecessary to add another space to the home. We walked a little further to see the newly reconstructed carriage turnaround to what it would have looked like in Jefferson’s day. At Poplar Forest, the staff has taken huge steps to ensure the complete correctness of their rebuilding of the home. Our tour guide made sure we knew this once we entered the home. We were all impressed by the moulding, exact replicas, and specificity of the measurements for the rooms. Not only is the representation of the home wonderfully done, but the interpretation was wonderful. Though our tour guide was a bit quiet and unenthused, she did not refrain from allowing Jefferson to be talked about as human and did not glorify him. She was able to express his architectural genius all the while letting us know he did not build one piece of it. He was wholly dependent on enslaved laborers to have his elitist lifestyle. It was encouraging to see a second site where Jefferson was able to be learned about earnestly and not in a God-like manner. Our tour guide also explained to us in the parlor room how he had a more familial side with his granddaughters who frequently accompanied him at Poplar Forest. In the last room, we got to see the room that mirrored Jefferson's bedroom. While his room was fully restored, this room was used as a progress room to show how the staff at Poplar Forest worked to recreate the Jeffersonian home after it had undergone fire and renovations from other residents. Also in this room was an original John Hemings door. This was a site to see as we all know that he was responsible for most of the ornate mouldings and doors in the original home. We all enjoyed the house tour and were incredibly impressed with all the work the staff at Poplar Forest has done in the short 40 years they have been a museum. In the grand scheme of things, 40 years and starting from scratch is not long for the project that they had ahead of them.

In the basement and the wing of the mansion is an exhibit dedicated to the enslaved workers of Poplar Forest. This was not a part of the house tour, but we made sure to see all that was displayed on our own. We saw the familiar name of John Hemings featured throughout. Without his tireless efforts, the home would not have been able to feature such unique architectural details. Though Thomas Jefferson was a master architect, he was never doing the hard work of actually building what he designed throughout his life. It was enlightening to see what archaeological finds have been discovered at the site. There was one display case that featured a series of items collected by rats in the attic of the home between 1846 and the 1960s, which was far beyond Thomas Jefferson’s ownership of the property. There were fragments of book pages, newspapers, clothes, and more. We walked over to see what was displayed in the wing between the east side of the home and the east mound, and we were amazed to find the kitchen with fireplaces, hearths, and a cook’s quarters. On display in one of the rooms was a letter from Hannah, an enslaved woman, written to Thomas Jefferson. In the letter, she expresses sadness about his inability to visit Poplar Forest that Fall and she also paraphrased the Bible - “we ought to serve and obey his commandments that you may set to win the prize and after glory run.” We believe this letter clearly shows a level of hopelessness and despair within Hannah, but it also depicts a unique dynamic of an enslaved person being allowed the ability to write. This must have been a unique circumstance. We are extremely pleased with the archaeological excavations done to bring the Wing of Offices back to their original form. Past the East mound are structures of the era beyond Thomas Jefferson’s ownership of the property and contained the living quarters of enslaved people during the antebellum era up through emancipation. There was a small exhibit in one of the spaces that allowed further learning about the enslaved. Down the hill and near a modern residential community is a reconstructed enslaved person quarters known as the North Hill site. It was built with logs and had a chimney lined with clay to avoid the spread of fires. A small garden likely existed since food rations were so limited. It was amazing to see the basic shape and size of what the enslaved lived within and is a stark contrast to the extravagance of the mansion. Reconstructing such structures allow sites like Poplar Forest to share the hard, yet necessary, truths of what enslavement looked like.

Our last stop after the gift shop at Poplar Forest was to Travis McDonald’s office. McDonald is the Director of Architectural Restoration at Poplar Forest. He has been with the foundation from the very beginning. His skills of being an architect, a restorationist, and a historian in his own right made him the perfect candidate for the position he has held for over 30 years. We were all so thankful that we got the opportunity to speak with him about Jefferson’s historic retreat. As we sat down in his office, the walls were lined with shelves encasing what seemed to be hundreds of books. On his desk and floor there were even more. The books that caught our attention were the Annette Gordon-Reed books, The Hemings of Monticello and Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings. His devotion to the ever evolving story of Jefferson was told to us before he even began talking. He told us right off the bat that Poplar forest “strives for historical accuracy over idealistic perceptions.” Since we have been to many historic sites across the state this summer, we have seen a few places that do the opposite. It is so impressive that the foundation has wanted to do this from the very beginning. They have cut no corners in perfection - literally. He explained to us that Jefferson was not the originator of his own ideas, but a master of self-education. He was able to learn and combine many pre-existing cutting edge architectural techniques. From masters of the art like Andrea Palladio, Jefferson was able to utilize his knowledge and European ideas to create his own style. McDonald continued to give us wisdom when he connected his specialty of architecture to history. “Architecture is a lot like history. It gets reinterpreted as new evidence is found and progress can be made.” Our last question for McDonald was about his feelings towards the current issues of Confederate monuments. His answer blew all of us away as it contained sincere emotion and toiled thought. “I had to separate myself from seeing them as art and architecture. As a professional architect and restorationist, that is how I saw and appreciated them for a long time. But now, I have been able to separate myself from that and see what they truly mean.” It was enlightening to hear a professional who has been in his field for decades to share his feelings with us. Travis McDonald was so welcoming and we are so thankful to have had the opportunity to gain insight from him.

We ventured into the small town of Bedford after visiting Poplar Forest. In our earliest research, we found an article on “The War Between the States Museum'' at the Bedford Museum and Genealogical Library. Just from the title, we knew we needed to go see whatever it was. Of course, “the war between the states” is a lost cause term to amplify that states rights was the reason for the Civil War instead of the obvious cause: slavery. We went in and it was a dark, dimly lit place. There were a few staff members and they were kind to us when we asked for admission in the museum. The gift shop was filled with outdated books, old postcards, and Confederate memorabilia, so we gained more insight onto what was ahead in the exhibit spaces. We took what the museum employee called the “slowest elevator in the county” up to the top floor where the exhibit on the “war between the states'' was displayed. We walk in and it is a large room with many glass cases. Again, very dim and not well lit, we strained our eyes to read the exhibits. The first exhibit you see in the space is on “Blacks Service.” All of our mouths dropped. It was an exhibit amplifying the myth of Black Confederates. Yes, Africa Americans served in the Confederacy, but not by their own will. They served as enslaved persons to those in the war. None of us could barely stand to be in the museum any longer after this, but we pushed through. Confederate flags were everywhere, the use of the word “Yankee”, and an exhibit on how Jefferson Davis’ release from prison was “a way to heal the deep divide between the U.S.” was on display. It was mind blowing to see this shrine to the Lost Cause only thirty minutes away from Randolph. At the end of the exhibit, we noticed a little sign on the wall that said the Sons of the Confederate Veterans still meet at least once a month in the room. We were all in disbelief from the complete bias and shrine-like nature of the museum. We traveled downstairs to see the other exhibits on local Native Americans, local African Americans, WWI, and WWII. The Native American exhibit looked like it was a project that the local middle school students put together. The information was not terrible, but the display was embarrassing. The information was presented at an education level for 5th graders, yet there was no signage dictating that it was a children’s exhibit. In the local African American exhibit, there were artifacts from the former all-Black high school, the African American sheriff who just retired, and Carol M. Swain, the African American conservative political science professor and Republican advocate. It was nice to see the information displayed about successful locals, but the message was clear. Overall, the museum experience was subpar. We all knew what we were walking into, but somehow it was worse than we could have imagined. We hope one day that the staff at the Bedford Museum and Genealogical Library will improve their interpretation.

Before we left the town of Bedford, we took a close look at the Confederate monument that stands in front of the Bedford County Courthouse. The text at the base of the high obelisk below a carved battle flag says “Bedford honors her heroes; proudly rejoicing with the living; sincerely mourning the dead. Their history is its brightest pace...This stone is erected to keep fresh in memory the noble deeds of these devoted sons.” Obviously, this monument reeks of the lost cause and does not honor a piece of history that all can be proud of. Taking down such a problematic statue would not be “erasing history,” as Bedford supervisor candidates stated in 2017. The public should play a role in discussions of what to do with the obelisk, but it certainly does not belong in front of such an important government building. Once again, the United Daughters of the Confederacy supported the construction of a heinous monument at a time (1909) when African-Americans faced acts of discrimination and bigotry. If people were able to put themselves in the shoes of those most affected by the presence of such an awful monument, then we would finally be able to make lasting changes for the betterment of us all.

[apostateangela]

LIGHTSWITCH LIVING

In April of 2018 I had a life altering experience. I attended a production of The Book of Mormon musical. I hadn’t been to church for over a year. I thought I had pretty much separated myself from that world- at least in my mind and heart.

I was wrong.

The leaving of a religion and culture is not as easy as cutting an umbilicus.

It is more like the unraveling of a tightly woven tapestry. In my case a tapestry I had been weaving for almost a half of a century. While it is true, I had torn large holes in the fabric that had surrounded me and shrouded every part of me.

I still stood in the tatters, unable to shed them completely.

I felt naked enough, as I have described. So much so that I didn’t notice that a great deal of the LDS church and its teachings still clung to me.

I don’t know how much is there still.

It’s difficult to rewrite your DNA.

There are moments in your life where you know an impetus has been reached.

Personal iconic moments that change who you are forever.

A handful of happenings that can be listed as pivotal and undeniably valuable, priceless even.

The night I experienced The Book of Mormon musical was one of these moments.

Understand, I have almost died in a roll over car accident, I have been married only once, I have given birth to four children; I do not classify this night lightly.

The evening began having dinner with two people who have deepened in value through the previous year or so and who I’ve come to rely on and love. They have supported me in my journey and maintained their interest through the challenges I’ve faced trying to find myself and in shedding my dogmatic skin.

While we ate dinner, I ended up sharing some cultural stories, one of which had to do with the day I said ‘fuck’ for the first time; I was 45 years old.

(maybe I’ll post that story later, as language is interesting to me, and all culture has language)

We laughed and enjoyed the food and made our way to the theatre.

I should say that I had been prepping for this experience for some time. I had been exposed to and enjoyed other film and media by the creators of BOM musical.

I had been overjoyed at Orgasmo (I was seriously, Lisa).

I had watched a fair amount of South Park, including the Mormon episode, and was convinced that Matt and Trey were the Shakespeares of our time.

(Shakespeare critiqued his society and did it in the language of the masses)

But no amount of prelim could prepare me for the unraveling that was to occur.

The first thing I encountered as we approached the theatre were the real Mormon missionaries handing out Book of Mormons and offering to tell, “The real story of the Book of Mormon.”

This made me laugh as well as feel some kind of transferred shame as my oldest son had served a mission, and the silliness of the juxtaposition was not lost on me.

Little did I know how deep that shame would go.

The musical is outlandish and poignant.

That is an incredible combination.

The provocative, set against the innocent ignorance and pitiful reality, creates a mirror with the clarity of 4K.

Looking at the sharp edges of my life performed on stage, well…

I wept through the whole thing.

It was such a cutting revelation;

the places in my psyche held in the dense ideological fabric shredded.

I sat sobbing, fibers ripped from the lungs of my identity,

gulping fresh outside air and asking myself,

“How did they know?”

I really can’t do a play by play, there’s too much.

But there are two pieces that are important to recognize as they pulled out so many threads embedded deeper than I knew.

Two songs: Turn it Off, and I Believe.

The Turn it Off scene is set with the group of young Mormon male missionaries talking about their struggle and failure preaching the gospel in Africa. The lead in to the song is that any negative thoughts are not valuable or valid and should be simply “turned off.”

Here is a portion of the lyrics:

I got a feeling

That you could be feeling

A whole lot better then you feel today

You say you got a problem

Well that's no problem

It's super easy not to feel that way

When you start to get confused

Because of thoughts in your head

Don't feel those feelings

Hold them in instead

Turn it off, like a light switch

Just go click

It's a cool little Mormon trick

We do it all the time

When you're feeling certain feels

That just don't feel right

Treat those pesky feelings like a reading light

And turn 'em off

Like a light switch, just go "bap"

Really, what’s so hard about that?

Turn it off

Turn it off

I hunkered in my balcony seat, clinging to the arm of the dear man beside me, shook at the cultural distillation of one of over sixteen million people’s core perspectives, myself included. That’s the current Mormon membership worldwide. But, that may not totally track as many are converts because of the barrage of missionary work the Church puts forth and as such may not have this perspective.

Narrowing it down, I’ll just say, four and a half million people in the western states Mormon corridor where settlements were directed in the early days of the church (Utah, Idaho, Nevada, Wyoming, Arizona, California, Colorado, and Montana). Here is where the culture of the Church is the strongest and so these people would be impacted by the specific concept of turning off your feelings. (to say nothing of the generations past)

This story is about me, but I wanted to give you some scope.

As I listened to the words of that song my emotional life flashed before my eyes.

That life was dark, because it was all kept inside.

What I heard and saw in my mind were the phrases and faces holding me to task and forcing my hand to the lightswitch.

Early memories of my father refusing to speak to me if I were crying.

Berating me and sending me from the room if I exhibited any emotion of any kind besides happiness.

Sitting in my bedroom or going on long walks as a teenager and talking to myself out loud, trying to sift through the feelings I wasn’t permitted to voice.

Then my mother eavesdropping at my bedroom door and confronting me with the implication that I was ‘crazy’ if I talked to myself and explaining for the hundredth time that I should simply talk to God; pray and hand my troubles over to Him.

That I should seek the blistering sunny side of every trouble, doubt, or powerful emotion because “Heavenly Father only gives us what He knows we can handle” and “Everything happens for a reason, we just have to have faith until the reason reveals itself”.

Remembering countless moments in church when any voice of dissention was silenced by similar instruction and an added challenge of repentance because, “If you are having negative feelings you must not be living righteously and need to fix that problem in order to be happy again.”

It seemed almost as if emotion had been attached to sin all my life.

There is a reason Mormons have the stereotype of being happy, nice people.

It is because they must learn to “turn off” every other emotion, impulse, or desire.

Everything else must be tempered, internalized, or fought against; anger, confusion, sadness, depression, lust, anxiety, and fear--to name a few.

One of my challenges and gifts is that I’m an empath.

I feel other’s emotions, and emote powerfully as well.

I’m a two way conduit of emotion.

Can you then imagine the pain, the shame, the harrowing binding this very Mormon concept caused me?

Add to the previous childhood examples my narcissistic husband’s constant critique of my emotional persona and his efforts to condition the “turn it off” in me.

He shushed me thousands of times.

He told me I was irrational and too much constantly.

His said there was something broken inside me way before he broke me himself.

And so I wrote all my feelings into poetry journals and cried myself to sleep thousands of times lying right next to him.

All these things and more exploded in my chest and raced through my mind as I listened and watched fictional Mormon boys sing about turning off their feelings about abuse, death, and rejection. An upbeat song about stamping out your very self, because the church told you it was wrong.

How did they get it so right?

How did they turn this thing that most outside people don’t understand into a catchy Broadway tune that tore my heart’s blindfold to pieces?

I reeled in my seat through the short remaining moments after Turn it Off until intermission. With the blindfold off I watched the ridiculousness of my church and culture pointed out through song and dance with satirical exactness.

But more than that, I felt the weight of millions of people who hadn’t been able to process or share their feelings.

And we had been taught that damaging practice in the name of God!

I didn’t move through the intermission.

I just cried and shook my head and was held and listened to as I tried to explain my distress.

One of the things I remember saying was, “But I believed. I really believed all of it.”

And I had.

I had deeply believed with all my heart.

I had proclaimed that testimony to others.

I had supported my son in the arrogant practice of Mormon missionary work; spreading the message that we know better than you and our truth supersedes your truth.

We had been wrong.

I had been so very wrong.

The first song out of the gate after intermission that hit me was, you guessed it, I Believe.

Being in the middle of that piece of my processing, ashamed and astonished and sorrowful at having believed it all, then being hit with a song that demonstrated both the deep devotion of Mormon belief AND the blindness of that kind of belief… How did you know Matt and Trey? How?

The music is perfect.

The refrain I BELIEVE is touching--sung out strong, the notes held.

The words are simple and use the exact phraseology that Mormons say to each other and themselves.

Here’s just a piece:

I believe that the Lord God created the universe

I believe that he sent his only son to die for my sins

And I believe that ancient Jews built boats and sailed to America

I am a Mormon

And a Mormon just believes

You cannot just believe part-way, you have to believe in it all

My problem was doubting the Lord's will, instead of standing tall

I can't allow myself to have any doubt, it's time to set my worries free

Time to show the world what Elder Price is about, and share the power inside of me

Unthreaded, the remnants of my belief were washed away by music and performance.

I was unbaptized.

The second half of the musical is everything that South Park is, offensive and wickedly funny and I could almost hear Kyle say, “You know, I learned something today…” when the show came to an end.

I wanted to say it too.

Yes Kyle, I learned something today.

I learned so many things.

And I unlearned some things as well, or I started to at least.

Satire is a mirrored sword that shows us the truth we are afraid to see as it cuts the fallacy away. That is why Mormons often walk out of The Book of Mormon musical.

Not because it is offensive, but because it shows them the truth behind the carefully constructed myth.

And believe me, that is not an easy thing to see.

It makes you want to run.

I felt that urge many times during the show.

Luckily, I had stopped running from the truth by then.

I stayed till the end.

And was transformed by it.

I walked out of that theatre stipped bare.

Able to move, able to see, able to feel,

able to better understand the unhealthy deception that had kept me bound.

I metaphorically hobbled away,

my spiritual feet unbound and ready for the next step.

If you are Mormon, or have ever been Mormon,

Please

Please

Please, I beg you,

Go experience the genius that is The Book of Mormon musical.

And turn on the light.

-Angela

[theliberaltony]

via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

In the calm before 2020, FiveThirtyEight is taking a look at the ideas and people who are nudging the country’s rapidly changing political conversation in one direction or the other. We’re calling these people and ideas “nudgers.” (Creative, we know.) Our second nudger? Michelle Obama.

“If you make me miss Michelle, that’s grounds for breaking up,” a young woman said into her phone Wednesday night in Brooklyn. She was crossing the street to get to the Barclays Center, where former first lady Michelle Obama was speaking. While most authors struggle to corral their mother’s friends into a bookstore, Obama is a month into a six-month-long worldwide stadium book tour. The events are political rallies masquerading as pop culture phenomena. The talk brought out vendors selling bootlegged T-shirts with her face on them and “Black Is Beautiful” pins. Women, many of them dressed to the nines, some still in workwear, streamed into the stadium.

To these attendees, Obama’s life story and public image have merited all that enthusiasm, and they aren’t alone in thinking so. Her memoir, “Becoming,” is massively successful, having already sold 3 million copies. It has also provided Obama with a vehicle for her Trump-era cause: appealing to the better angels of the Democratic base. The book itself, meanwhile, digs into her life pre-politics with surprising candor and introspection.

“When they go low, we go high,” Obama said at the 2016 Democratic National Convention during former President Barack Obama’s last year in office. It’s a speech and phrase that have been invoked many times by Democrats during the Trump presidency, sometimes to refute the premise of the quote. Earlier this year, Eric Holder, who served as her husband’s first attorney general, memorably said, “When they go low, we kick them. That’s what this new Democratic Party is about.” Hillary Clinton said of Republicans, “You cannot be civil with a political party that wants to destroy what you stand for.”

Michelle Obama is not beyond a Trump dig, of course. (“Bye, Felicia” is what she says she was thinking when she was waving goodbye at the end of President Trump’s inauguration day.) But the former first lady wants things to be more civil from the Democratic side. “We call it empathy — being able to step into someone else’s shoes,” Obama told the Brooklyn crowd, urging them to keep an open mind in the current political climate.

Obama herself embodies a refutation of Trump’s America — she is one of the world’s most famous women, and she is black. She has been savvily using that to her advantage. Her talk in Brooklyn was backlit by photos of her from her time in the White House, in which she hugged children, military veterans and her husband. She spoke about her rise from the black middle class of Chicago to Princeton and Harvard. She talked about empathy and open-mindedness, but also about how “hope is not a passive word — it doesn’t just happen, you have to actively work for hope.” The Brooklyn crowd, many of whom were black women, could hardly miss Obama’s point. Especially when she added that “the people who want something else are going to the polls too.”

One can easily imagine Michelle Obama as a star surrogate for a 2020 presidential candidate (though she likely won’t be a candidate herself). The book talk, moderated by a breathless Sarah Jessica Parker, felt like a stump speech in places, as Obama emphasized her work with military families and her accomplishments in bolstering nutrition awareness in schools. She was funny in person, even while telling jokes I’d seen before in news clips, and it struck me that the tour was a canny way for Obama to continue to demonstrate her influence — and her husband’s influence — on not just the Democratic Party, but on American culture.

If the book tour is unabashedly aimed at empowering women (who are, not coincidentally, the driving force of the Democratic Party base), the book itself is a more nuanced rumination on life than you’d expect given the breathless “girl power” tone that some internet coverage of Obama adopts.

When I sat down to read “Becoming,” I, like so many, already knew the top takeaways: Obama had a miscarriage, used IVF to conceive her daughters, smoked pot in high school and said she would “never forgive” Trump for promoting the conspiracy theory that her husband was born in Kenya.

But the achievement of the first half of the book is her unerring ability to spell out the sacrifices of ego and time she made when she chose to spend her life with “a guy whose forceful intellect and ambition could possibly end up swallowing” hers. (In the second half of the book, Obama’s prose is almost imperceptibly smoothed out by the political realities of needing to not to spill too much tea on her White House years.) She’s an acute social observer, particularly when it comes to her husband: “In my experience, you put a suit on any half-intelligent black man and white people tended to go bonkers. I was doubtful he’d earned the hype.” And she is honest about what marital compromise actually looks like: “Our decision to let Barack’s career proceed as it had — to give him the freedom to shape and pursue his dreams — led me to tamp down my own efforts at work.”

While the circumstances of her compromise might be extraordinary — doing it for a man who would become president — the dynamic is familiar to millions of American women. It resonates with the mommy-tracked and the deferred dreamers, the ones who enthusiastically “like” articles about how Grandma Moses didn’t become a famous artist until her late 70s.

Yet compared to the first half of her book, Obama has been curiously flattened in her public image. She remains all smiles, perfectly toned arms and confident red lipstick in our popular imagination. Not much of the frustration and disappointment she so honestly articulates in her book take center stage.

And perhaps that flattening has something to do with her devotion to her overarching political cause — because Michelle Obama, whether she likes it or not, is a figure of great political import. She knows some Americans are craving a figure of inspiration and positivity in a time of national divisiveness (the irony being that there are probably very few Republicans attending her stadium tour). For so long, Obama was, as she put it, “a missus defined by her mister.” In a Democratic Party that is looking for lodestars to guide its way, Obama’s power is both dynastic and iconoclastic — a reminder of the romanticized past administration and a politician who claims she isn’t one. She knows the potency of that paradox: People trust you more when you don’t seem thirsty for the glory.

[lirlovesfic]

The Choice

A Doctor Who fanfic Summary: After GitF, the TARDIS brings the Doctor, Rose, and Mickey back to the estate to solve a problem involving the TARDIS herself. But when they see a familiar face, the face of someone who should not exist, they realize the problem is deeper than they thought and could endanger the Doctor’s very existence. Primary characters: Ninth Doctor, Tenth Doctor, Rose Tyler, Mickey Smith, Jackie Tyler. Genres: Romance, mystery, adventure, drama, character study, HN AU, fobbed!Nine, sick TARDIS. Pairings: Nine/Rose, Ten/Rose Rating: Adult

Warning: None for this chapter

a/n: I am currently working on editing this chapter-by-chapter, with the hopes of completing a chapter a day until I catch up with myself. As I mentioned in a previous post, I’m doing it to try to get back into the swing of writing and to build some momentum in order to finish this. Also, there have been some tiny things nagging at me for a while (grammar, punctuation, etc.) so I’ll be correcting as many of them as I can find as I go. The story will not change. In fact, most of the changes are going to be so minor that I doubt anyone (besides myself) will notice. But to keep me on target, I’ll be posting it all here as I go, with links to the other websites it’s on. I hope you enjoy it.

This chapter: on AO3, on TSP, on ffnet

Chapter Four—London, 7 July 2007 and 8 July 2007

On their way back to the TARDIS, Mickey decided not to go with them.

"We've been gone three months," he said. "I've got to check to see if my flat is still mine and find out where my stuff is."

"Do you want me to go with?" Rose asked.

"Nah," he said. "I figure I'd go back to the pub for a bit afterwards. Unless you wanna come with?"

She rolled her eyes. "Oh, yeah, I'd love to sit around and watch you watch more telly," she said sarcastically.

Once back at the TARDIS, the Doctor immediately began to work on the console, trying to get more information from the TARDIS's memory banks. For a while Rose sat on the jump seat, hands under her thighs, feet swinging back and forth, as she watched him work. Normally when he worked on the TARDIS he'd keep up a running commentary, explaining to her what he was doing and why, and even if she didn't understand a word he was saying she'd feel like she was a part of everything. But this time he was completely silent. She knew it was just an indication of how serious he felt the situation was, but she still felt oddly excluded in a way she hadn't ever felt with him before they had met Reinette.

After a few more minutes of staring at him staring at the monitor, she got restless and got up to get something to read. Months earlier, before he had changed even, the Doctor had given her her own storage space in the console room. It was a small compartment under one of the floor gratings where she could keep some of her own stuff so she wouldn't have to run back to her own room every time she wanted something. At the time it had felt almost as momentous as when he had given her a key to the TARDIS. The Doctor had blushed, actually properly blushed, when Jack had compared it to him emptying out a drawer in his bedroom for her.

Rose got out a paperback novel and returned to the jump seat, but she wasn't able to concentrate on it. Instead her mind kept returning to the tiny glimpse she had had of her first Doctor. She reread the same page three times, not remembering a single word of it, as his face swam in front of her eyes.

She threw the book down on the seat next to her.

"Stop it," she muttered to herself.

The Doctor looked up. "What did you say, Rose?"

"Nothing," she said. "Sorry."

He nodded and returned to what he was doing.

Well, there wasn't anything she could do here, she thought. Anything she did would just distract him, and she clearly needed a distraction as well. She considered going out to try and find Mickey, but she knew from experience that sitting around the pub would be as boring as sitting around the console room.

Lord, what had she done on Saturday nights on the Estate before she had run off with the Doctor?

Clubbing, she reminded herself. Mickey had been right. She had spent a lot of time clubbing with Keisha, Shareen, Susie and Rita. She briefly considered ringing one of them, maybe even getting together, but she quickly rejected the idea. She knew Susie and Rita had blokes and would want to be with them on a Saturday night. She wasn't sure whether Keisha and Shareen had boyfriends, but if they didn't, and if they were anything like they used to be, they'd probably want to go pub crawling or something. She didn't want to go with them to try and pick someone up at a club, that wasn't her anymore.

But even if they didn't want to go out, what would she talk to them about anyway?

What have you been up to the last couple of years, Rose?

Oh, I ran away with an alien from outer space. He has a time machine, and we've not only traveled millions of years in the future, but into the past as well. I've met a bodiless head in a jar, cat nun nurses, a woman who had had so much plastic surgery she had turned herself into a bitchy trampoline, and a werewolf from outer space. I've even met the Prime Minister and Queen Victoria.

No. The last time she had tried to talk to Keisha about what she had been up to she'd had to lie through her teeth about the Doctor, something Keisha hadn't noticed at the time because she was distracted by her own problems. She couldn't count on that this time.

She wandered the corridors for a bit, taking peeks into rooms she had never been in before—and why did the TARDIS have an entire room devoted to shoelaces, anyway? Finally, she watched a movie in the media room and went to bed.

Once there, though, she tossed and turned as her mind raced. Ever since Christmas in Cardiff in 1869, she had known that with a time machine the Doctor could take her into the past, where people long dead were alive again. But even after meeting Charles Dickens, Reinette, even her own father and herself as a baby, it had never occurred to her that she could ever see a past version of the Doctor himself.

As she fell asleep, her mind returned to the tiny glimpse she had had of him in the garage.

And longed for another one.

~oOo~

The Doctor huffed in irritation as he yet again watched the images on the small screen built into the TARDIS console. Nothing he did was clearing up the static in the display.

"Rose, this looks less like interference in the CCTV and more like actual damage to the TARDIS memory core. I can't figure it out. Any ideas?"

When Rose didn't answer, he looked up from the monitor. She wasn't there. He scanned his Time Sense only to realize to his surprise that it had been more than four hours since they had gotten back to the TARDIS. She must have gone to bed, he told himself.

Disappointed by her absence, he frowned and turned back to the screen.

~oOo~

"Exterminate! Exterminate!"

Beams of deadly light lit up the night. He could hear the sounds of explosions, of feet running, of desperate parents calling for their lost children.

"Exterminate! Exterminate!"

Giant pepper pots swooped out of the sky and floated above the ground, shooting everything in sight.

"Exterminate! Exterminate!"

Children screamed in fright and pain.

Fire. Fire everywhere. Burning everything in its path.

"No more," he muttered, his voice low and cold.

"Exterminate! Exterminate!"

"No more," he growled angrily.

"Exterminate! Exterminate!"

"NO MORE!" His voice rang out over the din. "NO MORE! NO MORE!"

Heart pounding and chest heaving, John shot up, instantly fully awake. This nightmare had been the worst yet. He reached over for his sketchbook, and stopped. His hands were shaking. Besides, there was nothing about this nightmare he wanted to remember.

In an effort to calm himself he closed his eyes and took in several deep lungsful of air, blowing them out slowly. Gradually his heart rate slowed.

The images made no sense to him. They had, could have, no basis in reality. But dream images often were symbolic of something else, he reminded himself. The dreamscape seemed clearly to be symbolic of a battle of some type.

For the first time, it suddenly occurred to him that he might have been a soldier.

He could have kicked himself. How could he have been so stupid? Why hadn't he thought of that before? The vast majority of the dreams he had were of war, albeit in a futuristic setting. Perhaps he was suffering from amnesia brought on by some form of post-traumatic stress disorder.

Knowing he wouldn't get any more sleep, he got out of bed and sat down in front of his computer. His fingers flew across the keyboard. In his effort to try to find out who he was, over the last several months he'd hacked into a half-dozen computer databases and created false accounts so he could easily enter any time he wanted. The first time he had broken into one of the websites, he had wondered where, how and why he had learned how to do it, but now he just accepted the fact that he could and was grateful for the skill set.

This time he broke into the websites of the armed forces rather than that of Scotland Yard or the NHS. It took no more effort for him than hacking into the others had. But several hours later he knew no more than when he had begun. Since the nightmare had featured a ground battle, he searched the army database for soldiers, regardless of name, matching his general description who were either retired or missing-in-action and presumed dead. When he had found nothing he had expanded his search to the navy and the RAF. Still nothing. A dead end.

John sat back and frowned at the computer. Now what?

What about the girl?

He had concentrated on searching for himself on the internet, but he hadn't searched for her, in part because there hadn't been a way of looking for someone based only on hair color. He hadn't known anything else about her, not her name, not what she looked like, not even if she was real. But now he knew she not only existed, but she was here, on the Powell Estate.

He retrieved his drawing and scanned it into his computer, but the photo recognition software couldn't get a match on the internet off of his drawing.

Another dead end.

He glanced at the clock and groaned. Not quite 8 am. And it was Sunday. He hated Sundays. They were so boring. The garage was closed on Sundays. And he had no odd jobs scheduled for the day. Maybe he'd go into work anyway, he decided.

Just as he was about to get up, the black cat jumped in his lap.

"You still here?" he asked with a quirk of one eyebrow. "You're not movin' in, you know." The cat butted her head against his hand and he sighed. "Alright, let's get you something to eat. But then I'm puttin' you out, because you're not movin' in."

The cat purred.

~oOo~

The next morning Rose slowly awoke in her room in the TARDIS. Although she couldn't rightly remember, she knew she had dreamed of her first Doctor. Right after the Doctor had regenerated, she had dreamed of his previous self every night, but it had been months since the last time.

She closed her eyes and buried her head back in her pillow, trying to recapture her dream. But there was no use. She was too awake.

Yawning widely, she sat up and stretched, wondering what time it was. She didn't have a clock in her room in the TARDIS. There was no real point. No job, no set schedule, and, as the Doctor frequently reminded her, no time in the conventional sense aboard the TARDIS either. With time travel, she could wake up only to find herself on a planet that was entering its nighttime hours or vice versa. When she had first begun traveling with him she had developed a killer case of jet lag trying to keep track of where and when they were, until the Doctor told her not to worry about it and work within her own circadian rhythms.

But they were on the Estate. There was actual linear time here. If they ended up stuck here for a while she might actually need a clock. She shuddered in disgust. She hadn't needed a clock since she had worked at Henrik's.

After showering and getting dressed, Rose stopped by Mickey's room. He wasn't there. Nor was he in the kitchen. Neither was the Doctor. After having a much needed cup of tea from the perfectly hot, never empty pot on the counter, she looked around for Mickey a bit more before wandering into the TARDIS console room.

The cavernous room appeared to be empty as well. Only the telltale whirr of the Doctor's sonic screwdriver told her he was there somewhere.

She found him sitting on the floor, wedged under the console. Disconnected wires, bits of electronics, and other things that looked more grown than made emerged from the bottom of the console and hung loose around his head and shoulders.

He was sonicking something that looked a bit like a glowing aubergine. Nearby was a box containing a half-dozen more of the egg-shaped things, and another lay on the grating next to him. Unlike the others, that one had a smoky appearance to it, resembling nothing more than a giant, burned-out light bulb.

She stood there for more than a minute before he realized she was there.

"Oh, Rose," he said when he finally noticed her. "You're up."

Well spotted, she thought, biting back the sarcastic reply. She was still irritated by his ignoring her the previous night. But that wasn't fair to him, she reminded herself. He was busy with a crisis, and it wasn't his job to pay attention to her. "What are you doing?" she asked instead.

"Replacing some ganglionic circuits from the TARDIS's neural net," he told her. He pointed the sonic at a couple of the hanging wires. They moved towards one another, twisting themselves together and reattaching themselves. When they were finished, it was impossible to see where one had ended and the other had begun. "And I'm almost finished. Unfortunately the static in the CCTV playback was more than static. It was actual damage to the TARDIS's memory core itself." He pointed his sonic screwdriver at the aubergine thing again. As the sonic whirred, its glow brightened.

"Do you know where Mickey is?" she asked.

"Did you check his room?"

She rolled her eyes. "Yes."

"Kitchen?"

"Yes."

"Game room?"

"Yes."

"Swimming pool?"

"He's really not much of a swimmer," she told him.

"Library? No, he wouldn't be there," the Doctor said, answering his own question.

Before Rose could defend him, Mickey burst into the TARDIS, breathing hard as if he had just run a long distance flat out. He bent over, putting his hands on his knees, and gasped for air.

"I am so out of shape," he complained.

"Where were you?" she asked.

"My flat," he told her. "I found out someone paid my rent for six months in advance. But that's not important." He turned to the Doctor. "I know where he is."

~oOo~

"I was just walkin' down the street, on my way back to the TARDIS, when I saw him," Mickey said for the fifth time as they stood across the street from the auto repair shop. Unlike the day before, since it was Sunday morning the street was almost deserted. "He was comin' out of the bakery eatin' a doughnut and carryin' a cup of coffee so I followed him."

"And he went into the garage," the Doctor said. It was clear he wanted less to clarify what Mickey had said than to just stop him repeating himself again.

"Yeah," Mickey answered.

"Hmm." The Doctor cocked his head and stared at the garage thoughtfully. "Well, assuming he's still in there, this is probably my best chance to get a good look at him. What's the best way to get in there unnoticed?"

"Through the office?" Rose suggested.

"It'll be locked," Mickey warned, "and before you suggest unlocking it with your sonic, there's an alarm. Same as the back way."

"I could silence the alarm," the Doctor said, "but he'd still hear the door open and close."

"Y'know, if all you want is to take a look at him, there's a couple of windows in the back. They've got bars across them, but we always keep them open at least a little for ventilation."

The Doctor's mouth twisted into a small grin. "That might work," he said. "You two stay here."

Darting between two parked cars, he took off across the street. Rose started to follow, and Mickey grabbed her arm.

"He said to stay here," he said.

"And since when did either of us ever listen to him?" she asked. She shook off his hand and followed the Doctor, and after a moment's hesitation Mickey followed her.

In the alley behind the garage, the Doctor was standing on a dustbin which had been rolled against the wall and was looking into one of the narrow windows along the eaves. Rose quickly climbed up next to him. She could hear the quiet strains of classical music filtering through the open window.

The Doctor didn't show any surprise at seeing her there.

"Did you see him?" she whispered. He placed a finger over his lips and then gestured at the window. She peeked in.

At first she couldn't see anyone, but then she spotted someone's legs sticking out from under the bright red Vectra in the repair bay directly in front of them. Although it was impossible to see who it was, she knew it was him, if for no other reason than she recognized his heavy black work boots.

"You think that's the man you saw yesterday?" the Doctor whispered.

Rose moved her mouth close to the Doctor's ear. "Yeah, that's him."

"Are you certain?"

"Yes," she said firmly. "Do you feel that echo you were talking about?"

The Doctor shook his head. He pulled his sonic out of a pocket and aimed it through the window. The tip lit up in blue, but she couldn't hear its familiar whirr. In the distance, a dog began to bark.

"What are you doing?" she asked.

"The sonic is capable of producing sounds that Time Lords can hear but are far above the range of human hearing," he told her.

Rose looked back in the window. John Smith hadn't moved from his position under the car.

"One more scan," the Doctor said in a low voice. This time the sonic made a quiet whirr, barely audible to Rose even though she was right next to it. The Doctor's brow furrowed as he examined the readings. "He's not a Time Lord. He's completely, one hundred percent human."

"So that's not you after all," Rose said. "He just looks like the old you." She was surprised to feel a wave of disappointment.

"It's a little more complicated than that," the Doctor began, but he was interrupted by a loud crash. They turned as one towards the source of the sound. Mickey had rounded the corner and tripped over a wheelie bin. It had upturned and spilled its contents all over the alley.

Rose heard a sound coming from the inside of the garage and turned back to the window. John Smith had rolled out from under the car he had been working on and was headed towards the back entrance. She nudged the Doctor.

"Time to go!" he said. He hopped off the dustbin and caught Rose as she jumped off. The three ran, rounding the corner just before the back door opened. As they ran, Rose heard a familiar voice coming from the alley behind her.

"What a mess," John said loudly. "Stupid apes."

~oOo~

Back at the TARDIS, the Doctor immediately returned to his position underneath the console. "It's even more important now that I find out exactly what happened," he told them. He quickly replaced the remaining burned out globules.

"Because he wasn't you?" Rose asked.

"No," he replied. "Because he was."

"What?" Rose gaped at him. "But… but… you said he was human. One hundred percent human. If he's human, how is he you?"

"I don't think I can recover all of the missing CCTV footage," the Doctor said, ignoring her question. He pulled his glasses out of his pocket and pushed them on as he stood. With one slender finger he flipped a switch on one of the control panels and the whole room went black except for the console. The faint glow cast odd shadows around the room and gave his skin a bluish cast. "Most of the sections that are missing are too badly damaged to recover, but I don't think I really need them. The most important bit is at the end. I have managed to enhance the footage we've already seen, though. If I can just get an additional second or two to play back in addition to that, it might be all we need."

"Doctor, if he's you, why is he human?" Rose asked.

He looked up and met her eyes. "That's what I'm trying to figure out."

"Right." Stupid question, she thought, silently chastising herself.

The Doctor threw a lever forward. A hologram of the very room they were in superimposed itself on the real console room, making the room look like a 3-D movie being watched without the special glasses they always gave you. Rose was surprised to see minute changes had been made over time, changes she had never noticed. A switch and a dial were currently reversed from their original placement on the console. The door leading deeper into the TARDIS was a different shape than it had been. And the jump seat was not only a foot away from its original location but it was larger as well.

The holographic TARDIS door opened and the translucent shape of Rose's first Doctor walked into the room and crossed to the console. He wandered around it, flipping switches carelessly. He stopped in his tracks and winced before continuing to program in the next set of coordinates.

"Stop," said the current Doctor, and the image froze. He walked to the console and examined the controls. "Looks like I just programmed the coordinates for the Powell Estate."

"So… if the coordinates are set for the Estate, is this when you were coming back for me?" Rose asked.

"Yeah, must be," he told her. He looked up at the ceiling. "Forward, normal speed."

The holographic Doctor began to move again. Grimacing, he rolled his left shoulder and tilted his head left and right as if he was trying to relieve a cramp in his neck.

Smoke began to rise from somewhere within the console, and for a second Rose thought it was real. She only realized it was part of the holographic display when the younger Doctor reacted to the sight.

"No, no, no, no, no!" he shouted. He rushed around the console, appearing to run through the current Doctor. He pulled his sonic screwdriver out of the pocket of his leather jacket. As he began to sonic one of the control panels, his TARDIS lurched. He leaned forward and grabbed onto a protrusion near the central column while he continued to use his screwdriver on the panel.

"Freeze," the current Doctor said. He leaned through the hologram of his previous self and examined the controls. "Hmm. I seemed to have bumped the chrono-temporal relay switch. Reset the arrival time for… Huh. New Year's Eve, 2006." He frowned.

"That was six months ago!" Mickey exclaimed.

"But… but we were on the Estate then," Rose said to the Doctor. "We didn't leave until a few days after that." She gestured at the holographic Doctor currently sprawled all over the console. "Do you mean that you and… you were both there at the same time?"

He looked over his glasses at her. "Me? I don't mean anything." He looked puzzled for a moment. "No, that's The Restaurant at the End of the Universe," he said. He glanced at the ceiling. "Forward."

The entire image shimmered and was replaced by static. The Doctor pulled his sonic screwdriver out of his pinstriped pocket and aimed it at one of the controls. The holographic console room reappeared. The leather-clad Doctor was hunched over in pain. He staggered a few steps forward and fell to his knees before collapsing on the floor. In the background they could hear the Cloister Bell ringing, but weakly, as if from a far way off. The helmet that the Doctor had shown her before dropped from the ceiling and fitted itself to the holographic Doctor's head.

"Freeze," the pinstriped Doctor said again. He walked over to his previous self and knelt beside him. He pointed at the helmet. "That's a Chameleon Arch. Has the capability of rewriting a Time Lord's entire biology, changing every cell and turning him into a completely different species. This piece," he pointed out a circular part in front, "stores the Time Lord's true identity while he's in another form. It appears that the TARDIS used the Chameleon Arch to turn me human for some reason." He grimaced. "Could have been worse, I suppose. She could have turned me into anything. Could have ended up a Denebian slime devil or a Canidine Rosikan or something. Could have even ended up as a Slitheen."

Rose slowly walked over to the hologram of her first Doctor and crouched next to him. Now that she could get a closer look at it, she realized the Chameleon Arch didn't really look much like a helmet at all. The metal structure had a main arch that stretched across the top of his head from side to side, held in place with horizontal bars that clamped onto the sides of his head and large disks that pressed against his temples. Another secondary arch stretched from the central arch to his forehead, holding the circular thing the Doctor had pointed out tightly against his younger self's forehead. It appeared to be a silver fob watch, not unlike the one her great-grandfather had had, but this one had the Doctor's circular language engraved into the lid.

Despite being unconscious, the holographic Doctor's face was twisted in pain. Biting her lower lip, she reached out a hand as if to touch him before pulling it back. She drew in a shaky breath.

"Wouldn't that hurt, changing species like that?" Mickey asked

"Yes," the Doctor said shortly. He began to wander the room, ducking his head to look under the jump seat and behind the coral struts. "The only reason she would do something like this is if there was no other choice. The real question is what that was."

At his matter-of-fact tone, Rose stared at him in disbelief. He sounded as if he didn't care what the other Doctor had gone through. Same man, she reminded herself finally. He might not remember it, but he's the one who went through it.

"What are you lookin' for?" Mickey asked.

"The TARDIS locked me out, therefore she's been injured. I'm trying to figure out what could have caused it. I'm also looking for anything out of place," the Doctor answered. "Like this." He pointed under the console. A holographic sonic screwdriver lay on the grating under it. "I must have dropped it when I collapsed."

Mickey and Rose joined in the search, but they couldn't find anything.

"Forward, one quarter speed," the Doctor said.

The Cloister Bell resumed its weak tolling. As they watched, the holographic Chameleon Arch detached itself from the younger Doctor's head and withdrew into the ceiling of the console room, leaving the fob watch on the floor in front of the Doctor's face. The light illuminating the holographic console room flickered, briefly turning mauve before returning to its normal color. The grating under the Doctor rose up on one end, causing him to roll towards the door. It opened by itself.

As the holographic Doctor rolled from one section of grating to another, new sections of the floor would rise up, slowly forcing him towards the door and out of the TARDIS. Then the door shut behind him. The light began to flicker in mauve again.

"Stop!" the pinstriped Doctor yelled, and the image froze. He rushed to the door and knelt down, staring at something on the floor. When he looked up again, his face was visibly pale, made worse by the mauve light shining on his face.

"What is it?" Rose asked.

"The fob watch. It got stuck on the floor between the ramp and the threshold of the door. It's still in the other TARDIS, and as long as it's there, he can't change back."

[armeniaitn]

Well-Connected Policy Intellectual Lukyanov: Russia Does Not Have To Interfere In Belarus ...

New Post has been published on https://armenia.in-the.news/politics/well-connected-policy-intellectual-lukyanov-russia-does-not-have-to-interfere-in-belarus-38901-23-07-2020/

Well-Connected Policy Intellectual Lukyanov: Russia Does Not Have To Interfere In Belarus ...

Fedor Lukyanov, Editor-in-Chief of Russia in Global Affairs, and one of Russia’s foremost policy intellectuals, sat down for an interview with Alexey Solomin on Echo of Moscow radio station that covered many foreign policy areas. Lukyanov was blasé about the Belarus elections as that country has nowhere to go but Russia. The main task of diplomacy in the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan is to avoid all-out war, as a negotiated compromise was not in the cards. China was a challenge and not a threat to Russia and particularly in terms of territorial expansion. Erdogan turned Hagia Sophia in Istanbul back into a mosque, because he is an Islamist and not because he sought to irritate Russia. Russia’s military may be fond of Khalifa Haftar, but Russia is not committed to anyone in Libya. Excerpts from the Lukyanov interview, with Solomin’s questions in bold type, follow below.[1]

Fedor Lukyanov (Source: Interfax.ru)

― […] I would like to start with Belarus. An acute situation there arose after the CEC [Central Election Commission] refused to register opposition candidates. What, from your point of view, is real Alexander Lukashenko’s rating in the country now?

― […] I can’t judge what his real support is. We have polls, which give diametrically opposed results: the official ones show 80% [support]; oppositional ones show only 3%. I do not think that either of the two corresponds to reality. By the atmosphere, and collating different facts, we can assume that, of course, the real support is lower than of that President Lukashenko is used to.

And the campaign is going very stressfully. We observe this … I have little doubt in a result of these elections. But what will happen next… I think that very difficult times are in store for Alexander Lukashenko, because during this campaign it turned out that he is opposed and has a major beef with Russia and even tries to exploit the “Russian factor” that allegedly has a role in his election campaign.

But he has nowhere else to go. However after the elections have proceeded and concluded, the same set of question on which Russia and Belarus have been clashing for a minimum of a year and a half to two years will resume on everything that is related to the so called union state in its new meaning. But in general, Alexander Grigorevich’s space for maneuver is narrowing although he is a skilled player and a very strong fighter….

― […] I would like to know about Russia’s position. Does [the Kremlin] want Lukashenko to be the president for a new term?

― Russia, it seems to me, this time is in a perfect position. Russia does not have to do anything…

― Just observe.

– Just observe:  In Russia, Lukashenko is hardly a favorite candidate …. If it were a different country and a different leader, all those words that were addressed to Russia over the past year and a half, would not have been left without a resolute response…but it is clear that Lukashenko does not enjoy the warm affection that he previously enjoyed in Moscow …

― So why is he [Lukashenko] forgiven this. You said that the things that he uttered towards Russia, would not have been forgiven if they were said by someone else?

― [The Kremlin] has a very long history of relations with him. After all, Alexander Lukashenko has been in power for 26 years. So on the one hand, they just got used him. On the other hand, there is an understanding that, in general, he and the Republic of Belarus have no other options. Economic ties [between Russia and Belarus] are so close and deep that it is impossible to change them without catastrophic consequences for Belarus…

― […] Does any of Alexander Lukashenko’s rivals carry a “Kremlin mark”?

― Almost no opponents nor remain for Alexander Lukashenko. I doubt that one of them has a Kremlin mark…Perhaps your listeners will not believe it but Russia has no special need to interfere in the Belarus campaign… the previous trend [in Moscow – Minsk relations] will remain: a gradual forcing of Belarus to a new closer relations and economic ties. If somehow this will not happen, then, I repeat once again, the space for maneuvering for any Belarus leader of is very narrow…

― […] Before the amendments to the Constitution, political scientists discussed at a serious level the possibility of the union super state [of Russia and Belarus] … supposedly Vladimir Putin could be the head of this state after the end of his presidential term. Is this project completely discarded today…?

– …Even if there is an idea that Belarus needs to be integrated in some way, this has nothing to do with the prospects of Vladimir Putin. Because Vladimir Putin is an experienced politician and has been in this business for a long time… to make his future dependent on relations with another country, especially with the complicated relations that developed with Belarus, would be short-sighted from his perspective…

― […] Aggravation of the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan… what triggered to this escalation?

― Well, this, in general, does not matter. It could have been an accident, or it could have been a desire to check the enemy’s readiness… conflicts, incidents in such cases and in such zones erupt, are programmed. The next question is always a desire and ability to stop this escalation… And the incident is difficult, because there are a lot of victims. On the Azerbaijani side, the casualties are very significant: a general got killed and senior officers.

And given the existing tension in both societies (in Azerbaijan in particular), this is a very sore subject …. It is obvious, that Azerbaijan accumulated strong resentment and dissatisfaction with the situation. This is a rather complicated issue for the Azerbaijani leadership, because it is impossible to change anything radically.

If, God forbid, a full-blown conflict breaks out, no one of the external players will allow it to develop…

― [Recently] Polad Bulbuloglu, the Azerbaijani ambassador to Russia, said, that 10 million people [in Azerbaijan] cannot wait 30 years for 2.5 million people [Armenians] to live the occupied territory… Do you think that the rhetoric of the Azerbaijani authorities indicates a readiness for a military solution?

― No, I do not see any readiness for such actions. This rhetoric is being repeated regularly… the Azerbaijani leadership is very experienced and they are well aware that the 10 million people, of course, cannot wait, but they have to. And in this regard, changing the status quo by military means, in my opinion, is in principle impossible. And the point here is that a certain balance has developed. Azerbaijan had quite an unsuccessful military experience, and [we shouldn’t forget about] external factors. Russia is a military ally of Armenia. Naturally, Russia doesn’t not want to get into a situation where it would have to defend one of its important partners (via military means) again another of its important partners. Armenia is a formal ally, and Azerbaijan is simply an important country for Russia…

― The political leadership of Azerbaijan bears certain risks if it fails to convince its people that this issue will be resolved somehow?

― Of course… This is also true for Armenia. The economic situation in Armenia, as I understand it, is rather difficult, the pandemic struck the country quite painfully. Therefore, both countries need some positive stories…

― The Karabakh problem has indeed lasted about 30 years. Can you recall a period when the parties were at least a little closer to a compromise solution? …

― […] There was once a period of very intense diplomacy. If I remember correctly, when Dmitry Anatolyevich Medvedev was the president of Russia, he devoted a lot of time [to this issue], he met with Aliyev and Sargsyan several times. And really put a lot of effort into it… Anyways, there has been no war in Karabakh since the mid-90s. But I am afraid that there is no chance to achieve anything through negotiations… the idea that Azerbaijan unlawfully lost territories, which must be returned, is rooted in the Azerbaijani political narrative. And in Armenia, respectively, the opposite is true – “Karabakh being a part of Azerbaijani was the historical injustice, which was corrected, and we won’t let it be changed.” …

― Do I understand correctly, that a compromise is impossible?

― The compromise, of course, implies concessions. Today I can’t imagine what could be done. For external mediators … maintaining a balance and the prevention of war is the main direction of diplomatic efforts. In fact, no one seriously expects that in some historical perspective we will be able to resolve this conflict.

― […] So, from your point of view, did Nikol Pashinyan’s rise to power in Armenia give hope that the Karabakh issue would be changed in a positive way?

― In my opinion, no, because, as I said before, this issue is not connected with personalities… the previous two presidents of Armenia were both natives of Nagorno-Karabakh, veterans of the Karabakh war. And, of course, during their presidency, in principle, the conversation could not even start… he [Pashinyan] has nothing to do with this Karabakh region, it would be very difficult for him, even if he wanted to, to make a decision that could affect the status of Karabakh…

― The Armenian ambassador Vardan Toganyan drew attention to a statement made by Turkey. Turkey supported the Azerbaijani side. Is there Turkish influence?  And if so, how strong and important is it?

― […] Turkey now has its own problems. The fact that Turkey is a close ally of Azerbaijan is not news at all. The fact that Turkey cannot settle relations with Armenia because of Karabakh is also a fact… I think, Turkey will certainly fully support Azerbaijan rhetorically. Will it intervene in other ways? I think not.

― Lets move the conversation to other neighbors. After the words of Deputy Prime Minister Alexei Reznikov, talks began about a possible Ukrainian withdrawal from the Minsk agreements. Dmitry Kozak already commented on this issue: “Russia expects some more clear statements on this subject.” From your point of view, is Ukraine really going to quit these agreements?

― I do not think anyone wants these agreements to end. Just for one simple reason: there is no legal basis between Russia and Ukraine for dealing with the well-known problem of the East of Ukraine, except for the Minsk agreements… The Minsk agreements create a sort of a framework for the political and diplomatic process. Even if this process doesn’t go anywhere…

Theoretically, Ukraine can leave Minsk agreements, it has every right to do so. In that case the peace process will freeze in an incomprehensible and very dangerous form. Because there would be no basis [for negotiations] at all. Conflict, in principle, can flare up again it will take only one provocation ….

― Does this mean that these documents should be at least revised in order for them to work?

― Revision in this case is impossible, because we must remember the circumstances under which these agreements were signed… there was an agreement to end the war, which was very brutal at that time. And in fact, those points, which are being disputed now by the Ukrainian side (and, in particular, by comrade Poroshenko), were signed by him precisely in order to stop a very difficult conflict… To reach some sort of revision, which would suit everyone is simply impossible… I believe that any revision can only happen, through an outbreak of a military conflict. But no one is interested in this. God forbid that this should happen.

― […] Let’s talk about a different topic … What the Far East means for Russia? Some compare the Far East with the colonies of an empire. Some say that Moscow actually has long lost control of this region, and this region is very economically dependent on the countries that border it. Do you think this is true? …

― […] I think that this metaphor, that the Far East supposedly has always been a colony, is false. Because in a colony there is always a colonized population and some kind of community that becomes an alien population… As for the Far East dependence upon the neighboring countries, it certainly exists, but not to such an extent that one could say that Moscow does not influence this territory anymore…

The question, it seems to me, is different… For the last 10 years Russia has intensified its policy of the so-called “turn to the East”, that is, to intensify its presence in Asia… This turn is going on rather “creakily”, but, nevertheless, is taking place. This is a large federal, state-wide project, which is associated with the Russia’s position in Asia. But the inhabitants of the Far East, of course, have their own needs, aspirations and demands … Now, as those people do not really feel the results of this policy, this apparently, frustrates the population …

― It is just, that in this connection, some suggest that there is a risk of Moscow losing the Far East. The more entrepreneurial (for example the same Chinese) who are economically very strong, will influence the region.

― […] According to my not very qualified estimates, this is quite exaggerated. There is no doubt that the Chinese, of course, see all of Asia and all of Eurasia as a potential space for their entrepreneurial efforts. But some sort of an assault, in my opinion, is impossible… Is China a threat? China is, as people like to say now, a challenge. It’s different … to imagine that China will want a piece of Russian territory is unimaginable. China has completely different tasks, completely different problems, especially now, when their confrontation with the United States resembles a real Cold War.

… of course, I agree with many colleagues, who say that for the coming decades there will be no more important task for Russia than building positive, constructive working relations with China, which at the same time would not make Russia dependent on China.

― […] You mentioned a serious conflict between China and the United States. Please rate the likelihood of an open military conflict between the two countries. How real is it today?

― Today, this is completely unrealistic. No one can imagine such a scenario … in the current situation it is simply impossible, because the losses of the parties involved will be huge, and the interdependence of China and the United States remains extremely high.

In addition, at the moment, the United States is controlled by a man who is not a warrior at all. That is, Trump prefers any other means of influence and pressure, but not military ones. China also does not feel ready, as it seems to me.

[…] In addition, both countries are powerful nuclear powers. America is a superpower, China is just a nuclear state, but it has the means to “respond” [to the US].

Now, the main front of confrontation between China and the United States is not a military one. It is the economy: there were technological opportunities that China has actively used in recent years, and now the US is trying to stop them. This is a rather fierce and serious battle… This aggravation is extremely unnerving, for most Asian countries, especially for the region of Southeast Asia. All Southeast states, in general, have benefited a lot from the previous era of globalization, when China and the United States worked harmoniously within the framework of global economy… This [conflict] will lead to dramatic changes in the world. So far, no one can even understand what those changes might be.

― […] Let’s get back to Turkey. There are two topics: the first one is related to the Hagia Sophia. Do you think these actions by the Turkish leadership irritate Moscow? … ― Well, I think that it caused some frustration in Kremlin. Especially for those who view religion as an important topic. But in general, the whole hype around this topic (not only in Russia, but around the world) surprised me… Erdogan is an Islamist. He came to power as an Islamist. He was always a very deeply Muslim. His actions in this regard, I think, are fully consistent with his beliefs.

In addition, Constantinople fell [to Turks] around 500 years ago. And, I’m sorry for the cynicism, but maybe it’s time to get used to the fact that Hagia Sophia is not an Orthodox church. Actually, until 1934 it was a mosque. These are the internal dynamics of Turkey, … this is Turkish territory and Turkey’s building too. Therefore, one can be indignant, but, strictly speaking, there is no ground for the claims.

Erdogan in Hagia Sophia acting upon his beliefs (Source: Dailysabah.com)

― From your point of view did Erdogan want to offend Russia?

― I think that in this issue he wasn’t even thinking about Russia. This is in general a domestic policy of Turkey…

― Another topic related to Turkey is about Libya. Do you think there is now an understanding of how this conflict is developing? The Libyan forces (the parliament that supports Haftar) are calling on Egypt to become a party to this conflict.

― Egypt is already a participant in this conflict… it seems to me that, firstly, Russia is not the main player in this conflict… Turkey plays a key role, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates play a key role… By and large, Russia does not have any important interests there…

― You are talking about Russia’s distancing from the parties to the conflict. But Turkish President Recep Erdogan accuses Russia of using Wagner PMC in Libya.

― Russia might be using Wagner PMC, or Wagner PMC might be using Russia to earn money there under the Russian flag. I do not know. But the fact is, that Russia is present in this conflict. It is true that there are many in Russia (especially among the military) who sympathize with Haftar.

But Russian politics in this case is really quite diversified. Russia does not have any kind of strict obligations to any of the participants…

  [1] Echo.msk.ru, July 15, 2020.

Read original article here.

[toshootforthestars]

When some economists advised sending every American a check, Pelosi shot that down, arguing against money for millionaires. This culminated in a means-tested $1,200 stimulus payment. You only got the money if your earnings were under $100,000 per year, based on earnings data as far back as 2018. This deprived people who subsequently may have lost their job from getting relief.

A separate legislative response purported to provide sick leave to workers, except employers with more than 500 workers and those with fewer than 50 were exempted from the requirement. When asked about this, Pelosi said large employers should provide sick leave themselves, without government subsidies (workers needing paid time off might not have minded). Meanwhile, several legislative efforts promised free COVID-19 testing for all, but the health care industry has managed to find loopholes there too: Reporters keep finding people paying thousands of dollars.

Meanwhile, while Pelosi took the lead on the initial, smaller bills, she allowed Mitch McConnell to write the vehicle for economic relief, known as the CARES Act. McConnell casually drew up a $4.5 trillion “money cannon” corporate bailout, which rapidly rescued the investor class before it was even spent. Who drafts the baseline legislation makes a big difference: If Pelosi had written the CARES Act, it could have included such ideas from her caucus as government-provided payroll support, increased food stamps, guaranteed vote-by-mail to ensure voting rights during the pandemic, significant state and local aid, free coronavirus treatment, assistance for the U.S. Postal Service (which may go belly-up come September), a national contact tracing program, and much more. Instead, they just got to tweak McConnell’s work, without altering its tilt toward the powerful.

Relief for individuals, like the one-time stimulus checks and boosts to unemployment insurance, was clumsily implemented and, most important, temporary. Pelosi and Schumer touted stringent corporate-bailout oversight, but Trump fired the inspectors general charged with monitoring it, and Pelosi and McConnell spent months failing to name a chair of the only entity Trump couldn’t meddle with, the Congressional Oversight Commission.

These failures were Pelosi’s alone. She deliberately slowed allowing members to vote remotely or through a proxy while lawmakers were locked down at home. Because of this, during the crucial months of March and April, Pelosi became a one-woman House of Representatives, unilaterally writing legislation or negotiating with Republicans, and presenting the finished product to House members, take it or leave it. This effectively disenfranchised hundreds of millions of Americans and limited the Democratic Caucus to issuing press releases while Pelosi did the work of governing. But this power grab wasn’t put toward anything resembling a clear goal.

After four bills passed, Pelosi got around to putting together a bill, the HEROES Act, which included all of the important pieces she deferred in other legislation. But by this time, Republicans had their corporate bailout and could ignore further efforts. The HEROES Act was another unfocused wish list, which Democratic leaders telegraphed as a messaging bill to set up future negotiations. As of press time, those negotiations hadn’t begun.

The bill also included random giveaways. It extended small-business grants to K Street lobbyists, even though lobby firms were still as busy as ever trying to win perks for their clients. This would amount to Congress donating to the groups that devise campaigns intended to influence them, and as former members often gravitate to K Street, would have lawmakers handing over money to their future employers, which is about as corrupt as you can get.

UNDERLYING THIS ALL, incredibly in the midst of a crisis, was a Pelosi tendency that had grown over the years: obsessive concern with deficits. Pelosi rolled back student debt relief in the HEROES Act after learning that it would cost $100 billion more than expected. This was a $3.2 trillion messaging bill not designed to become law, yet an additional 3 percent cost was considered unacceptable. Pelosi also declined to add “automatic stabilizers” that would maintain expanded benefits until economic stress dissipated, blaming a Congressional Budget Office scoring quirk that made the cost appear artificially larger.

So with over 30 million out of work, the important thing to Pelosi was that her pie-in-the-sky, going-nowhere bill was "reasonable,” based on some ineffable standard of reason. It matches the worldview of a Democratic leader who, just two years ago, made a lugubrious elegy on the House floor after the death of Pete Peterson, who bankrolled the deficit hysteria industry for decades and relentlessly targeted Social Security for cuts. ([Author] Ball does reveal that Pelosi told Obama during his “grand bargain” talks that she would support his aims, “even if it meant agreeing to entitlement cuts.”)

Devotion to deficit hawkery in normal times is unwise policy. It’s downright fatal during an economic crisis, where relief could be yanked away from needy families prematurely simply because of an unwillingness to challenge the CBO’s scoring model. But here we finally see the contours of Pelosi’s governing framework, not just on the budget, but on everything.

Pelosi believes that the nation’s resources are scarce, and what sadly passes for the modern welfare state must be protected at all costs, rather than raised to greater heights. The goal is, at best, a less bad world than Republicans want. It’s a defensive crouch dating back to Pelosi’s initial entry into Congress under President Reagan, and it has dominated her thinking ever since.

Progressives who dream too big are to be sat in a corner, and anti-government conservatives are to be bargained with and mollified. Official Washington’s approval is craved. Pelosi hosts an annual ideas conference at her own vineyard for a group of elite donors. That’s who gets to scale the fortress she has built around her desiccated ambitions. Her thoughts today on activism date back to something she said during her first campaign: “Someday they will realize just how insignificant they are.”

Pelosi demands total control; you can argue that she never groomed a successor for this purpose, to keep everyone reliant on her. She finds this to be the best method to gain leverage over the legislative process. But to what end is this leverage employed? Pelosi fights intensely to obtain power, but she seems toconsider power so fragile and fleeting that it shouldn’t be used for very much.

Democrats captured the House in the 2018 midterms on a promise to counter Trump’s lawlessness and corruption. Yet today we have an unchecked kleptocracy, with very little sustained oversight coming from the House. Trump’s wars were not discontinued and his border camps were not shut down; even his border wall, which caused a prolonged government shutdown in 2019, was still funded through repurposing military money, something the House has never attempted to reverse.

Now, we have a crisis recovery limited to the wealthy and connected, threatening economic disaster for ordinary people. Leverage for a better solution was squandered. John Boehner was an incompetent leader, but even in divided government, he succeeded in his caucus’s primary aim of cutting spending. During his tenure, public investment fell to its lowest portion of GDP since Eisenhower. Pelosi is clever and sharp, yet astonishingly little has changed.

Pelosi’s deal to gain the Speaker’s gavel a second time requires her to step down after 2022. If Joe Biden wins the election, and Democrats gain a governing trifecta, she’ll have one final chance to write her legacy. The circumstances dictate a far different course than she appears capable of steering. The past 40 years have seen endless stagnant wages, sinking economic mobility, collapsing trade unionism, and soaring income and wealth inequality, to say nothing of even more enduring structural racism and the persistent black-white wealth gap.

David Dayen:  A Leader Without Leading

The American Prospect  |   July 2020

[sunshineweb]

20 Lessons on Starting Up

This is not a post on investing or human behaviour.

It’s on starting up, which has helped me become a better behaved investor.

I recently shared on Twitter a few lessons on starting up from my personal experience of the last ten years. Here is a slightly detailed version of the same –

When you start up, say yes to everything that comes your way. Opening your doors means the world will come to you. Over time, you will get to choose which door you enter, so you then need to learn to say no. When I started in 2011 as a content writer, I said yes to writing stuff that I did not like and that paid peanuts. But that helped me run my house partly, while I was building something I could be proud of (Safal Niveshak). Over time, I learned to say no to a lot of things that could have helped me earned more money but would have led me to the slippery slope of unhappiness.  

Try as much NOT to have a Plan B that you can go to if Plan A fails. With no Plan B to fall back upon, I had just one path to walk upon, and I am still walking on that very path. All you need to not have a Plan B is a Plan A that you believe in completely. It’s like your backbone. You’re willing to fight for it.  

Sometimes you might have a solution that people want, but you need to stick it out long enough so that people come to trust you. So, once you have taken the plunge, DO NOT give up. Things get scary at times but persist for the time you’ve pre-decided upon. And it should not be a few weeks or months. I gave myself two years’ time to see the fruits of my work show up. Good things take time. But if you keep working on things that you believe in, and what many people will pay you for, keep at it. It took me more than 15 months to move up from the bottom of the curve, but it was worth the wait.  

Even when you have decided to persist, set a timeline to accept that things may not work out the way you expected. Try multiple ideas, and learn from what did not work for you and what did. Kill what doesn’t work, and get better at what does. Writing for others didn’t keep me happy for long. Writing for myself did. And that’s what I worked on, and on, and on.  

Start small. People try to build their new business into a massive launch, but this is a mistake. Start as small as possible, giving a minimum viable product to a few friends, and let them test it out. Better, take a leaf out of Seth Godin’s book, The Purple Cow, and build a ‘minimum remarkable product’. I started very small in 2011, with just one idea, a blog, and have remained small ever since. To my distracted mind, that gives the ability to focus hard on what matters. Being small hasn’t just been a stepping stone for me, it’s been my journey, my destination, everything.  

You would be more than lucky to execute on just one simple idea or revenue stream, let alone three or four. So, focus on just one idea to start, and give your heart and soul to it. Like Charlie Munger said, “Take a simple idea and take it seriously.”  

Experiment as much as you want, just ensure that none of the experiments must burn you out or kill you financially. No one knows you at the start, so experimenting and then failing should not worry you anyways. Despite no steady revenue stream, and uncertainty about the future, my first revenue generating model of conducting workshops was open-priced. People could pay anything, whatever they wanted to pay after the workshop. Some paid nothing, some paid next to nothing, but thanks to a few kind souls, I always covered my expenses and kept some tiny amount back. I did that for almost two years, and that’s the most memorable model I’ve worked upon since then.  

Aim to be truly loved by a few you serve than be liked by thousands. True love is rare, so even if you can find just people 100 people who love your work so they will talk about it with their friends, you’ve hit the ball out of the park. This is also what I learned from my father. He always said that the best life one could live was not one in which a person did big, great things that influenced the lives of millions, but one in which you made a difference in the part of the world you touched, no matter how small. He said that a life in which you helped only one person because that was the only opportunity you had to help someone else was just as great a life as that of someone who changed the lives of millions. Safal Niveshak had very few readers by the end of six months, the first of them being my father. But I wrote almost daily. And he loved what I wrote. And so I tried to write more and better for him, and he became that person whom I had in my mind whenever I sat down to write my posts. He’s no more, but that’s the plan I still follow.  

Don’t spend on SEO or social media marketing. These are bottomless money pits, and don’t add any value for your customers. Let your work – your blog, product, service – speak for you and bring in people. I’ve done basic SEO work on my site, and on my own, and that has worked well so far for 10 years. By the way, as I type this, there are 1,774,777,646 websites online right now in the world, many vying for the same audience. That’s the competition and everyone wants to be ranked #1. No SEO can take you there. Only your work can. Like if you search for “value investing course”, Safal Niveshak is the first non-advertised website on Google. For “value investing”, Safal Niveshak is on page one. All this without spending a single rupee on SEO or online marketing over the past ten years. By the way, these ranks mean nothing to me, but I just shared to show why your work matters more than any marketing.  

While you don’t need to spend money on marketing, you must still learn to sell, that is to positively convince, influence, inspire people to buy what you are building. If you can build but cannot sell, you won’t get much done. Your work should be your best salesperson. All I have done over the past 10 years is work (write). No advertising, no networking, nothing. Just plain simple work. And it seems to have paid fine. By the way, one of the best ways to sell well is to write well, clearly and simply…as if you’re talking to your friend. Clear writing also helps in clarifying the thought process. So, learn to write.  

Do your best work, and forget about numbers, especially targets like page views, subscribers, revenues, etc. Those are meaningless, especially when you are starting out. Instead, worry about how much you’re helping people. You can’t put numbers on those things. All I have tried to do all these years at Safal Niveshak is create an abundance of confidence by giving away a large amount of value for free so people trust me in return. And, in my work, there is nothing more precious to me that that trust. I hold as tight to it as I do to my integrity and reputation.  

Get ready to be alone and lose friends. While family and close friends will always be supportive, most others may not understand the work it takes to build something from scratch. I lived such a life after starting up. Looking back, I do not regret any moment of it.  

Practice lean living at least a year before you start out. Instant compromises are heart breaking! Save money to use as initial capital, and keep expenses low. Bootstrap as much as possible. Don’t borrow money till you aren’t generating cash. Try not to borrow at all. Spending other people’s money may sound great, but there’s a noose attached. You give up control. When you turn to outsiders for funding, you have to answer to them too. That’s fine at first, when everyone agrees. But what happens down the road? Well, often, it’s not a happy question to answer. Also, not having enough money of your own is a way of not having a Plan B, because that will lead you to work harder on building something so great that people will pay for it in advance, that they’ll eagerly sign up to use what you’re making.  

If you believe in your work and the ways of doing it, ignore the critics, keep your head down, and quietly do your work. People ready to pull you down are everywhere. Remember Theodore Roosevelt’s famous ‘The Man in the Arena’ talk wherein he said – “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.” This talk has been one of my saviors all these years.  

Don’t believe people who tell you – “How I started up on my own, doubled my income and cut my hours in half”…or something like this. They will not help you if you reach a point of no return. Learn from others, but believe in just yourself and your work.  

Build your work around the life you want to have. Avoid being a workaholic and make time for family, leisure, and self-care. Don’t forgo sleep. It’s easy to get caught up in the challenges of starting up. But it’s also easy to fall into the habit of making it your only priority.  

Celebrate little wins. I clapped for myself every time someone subscribed to my free newsletter in those early days. And mostly one person subscribed on most days. Initially, the wins are slow and infrequent. But celebrating in your own little ways will keep you charged up.  

Never compromise on what you set out to do, and the way you set out to do it. Never walk the path that may lead you to regrets. Hold tight on integrity. Avoid short cuts. Say no to what would not let you sleep peacefully at night, even if that seems lucrative financially.  

Learn to be okay with NOT knowing. You will not know what will happen with your business. World is changing. Your business will change. You will change. You don’t know anything, really, and that’s fine. Just keep working on what keeps you happy when you wake up everyday.  

Enjoy the journey, with all its speed breakers and potholes. Avoid getting caught up in the black and white of success and failure. Don’t forget to enjoy what you are doing. Forget about success and failure. They are just two imposters. Stay the course. Enjoy the scenery.

That’s all I have to share as of now.

Mark Twain is quoted as saying – “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”

If you have been waiting to start out for long, know that there will never be a perfect time to do anything. Do something and stick to it. And yes, you don’t have to quit your day job to start something, just as you don’t have to drop out of college to do so. You have weekends and evenings and all that time you’re online.

A Few Resources on Starting Up:

Seth Godin’s Blog

How to Get Rich: Naval Ravikant

Paul Graham’s Essays

Rework by Jason Fried

The Lean Startup by Eric Ries

Zero to One by Peter Thiel

The $100 Startup by Chris Guillebeau

Business Model Generation by Alexander Osterwalder

Tools of Titans by Tim Ferriss

The Hard Thing about Hard Thing by Ben Horowitz

Talk to business owners who have survived 10+ years

* * * That’s about it from me for today.

If you liked this post, please share with others on WhatsApp, Twitter, LinkedIn, or just email them the link to this post.

Stay safe.

With respect, — Vishal

The post 20 Lessons on Starting Up appeared first on Safal Niveshak.

20 Lessons on Starting Up published first on https://mbploans.tumblr.com/

[anime-scarves]

tagged by @akise for one of those tag things. I don’t usually tag people so do one if you want, and tag me if you feel like it. Or something, don’t let me tell you what to do. 

Under a read more because it got kind of long with formatting and what not. Or really lack of formatting. 

5 things you can find on my blog:

1. Not scarves because it’s the summer.

2. Cute anime girls.

3. Fate Grand Order shit posts.

4. Occasionally reviews of shows, manga, LNs, or whatever really.

5. The occasional meme.

5 things you’ll find in my bag:

My backpack is my bag so..

1. My tablet.

2. Currently a folder with resumes and also my character sheet from DnD. Probably should put those in different places so I don’t accidentally hand someone interviewing me my character sheet. 

3. Chargers for my phone and tablet.

4. A tiny toothbrush, toothpaste, and floss.

5. An entire packet of mechanical pencils because I also lose them and need more.

5 things you can find in my bedroom:

1. My computer and assorted peripherals.

2. Lots of books.

3. Unlimited pillow works (I currently have 8 pillows).

4. An entire drawer in my dresser devoted to socks. I don’t think a single one has as match.

5. A framed shirt signed by Day[9] and some SC2 pros from when I went to a tournament quite some time ago. 

5 things I always wanted to do:

1. Cosplay. I have the free time to actually put one together now etc. so I think I should.

2. Learn how to draw. There are a million free tutorials and all that jazz, I’ve just never sat down and done it. It seems so very daunting and isn’t something that you just learn right away. But I think I’d really enjoy it after I put in the time and effort to learn it. It’s just that initial effort that keeps me from actually doing it. 

3. Learn Approaching Champion Cynthia on the piano. I have the sheets for it, but man it’s a chore. I think I’ve played more difficult songs in the past, but it’s fast and my left hand does not like doing those runs up and down octaves. It’s doable though. 

4. Visit Japan. This is partially weeb goals, but as I’ve learned more about Japan there are all sorts of different things that I’d want to visit and experience.

5. Play DnD (though I actually did that today for the first time. Was super fun and we got to fight magical cows. DnD is wild. This had been a goal for a long time so I’ll still include it even though I checked it off today).

5 things that make me happy:

1. Delicious food.

2. Sharing a meal I cooked with friends and family.

3. Playing games. Any games really, table top, board game, video game, sports (though it helps to be in shape for that). I’m a competitive person by nature and I love a good game. 

4. Reading way too late into the night. 

5. Music.

5 things I’m currently into:

1. Fate franchise as a whole. Grand Order got me into it and I’ve read most of FSN and so on. 

2. Cooking. Though I’ve been into that for awhile now, but I’m still into it so it counts. 

3. The Monogatari series. I just read Hitagi Crab in the LN for bake and it was fantastic. I’m excited to read the rest of the first book and then the other two parts of bakemonogatari. 

4. Avoiding responsibilities and putting things off for far too long. 

5. Boku no Hero Academia. It’s really growing on me as it airs and I think I’ll end up reading the manga when it’s done. 

5 things on my to do list:

1. Somehow clean/sort through all the stuff that I took home from my dorm and figure out where to put it. It’s just kind of in a pile in my brother’s room for now.

2. Find a job. This is more of a long term goal, but it’s on the to do list. 

3. Read through the stack of books I’ve accumulated over the past couple of years. I’ve gone through one and a half this week so far, so it’s looking good. 

4. Clean off the workbench in the garage. It’s been a mess for years now and I honestly don’t know where a lot of our tools are.

5. Learn how to use a straight razor. 

5 things you might not know about me:

1. I’ve lived on three different continents. 

2. I’ve won a state tournament in archery.

3. In DPP I bred over 500 swinubs until I got one with the correct nature and skill. I didn’t even know how to breed for IVs then. I shudder to think how long it would have taken to get perfect IVs too. This was some extreme bad luck in taking that long. 

4. I’ve played the piano for 17 years, though the past 5 or so have been spotty since I’ve been in university and haven’t had a piano to practice with regularly. I should pick it back up now that I’m at home for awhile. 

5.  I’ve fractured both my arms, and my skull. Though not all at once. That would have been wild. 

[qqueenofhades]

Hilaryyyyy, the world is on fire and everything is terrible. Can I ask for hacktivist Sam/Miranda? Pretty please?

feel better, darling; i love you. tagging @prairiepirate as well, for reasons.

Miranda Hamilton lives in a birdcage.

It is a lovely birdcage, it always has been. Dressagelessons, private school at St. George’s Ascot and university at Oxford, handed£500 every weekend by her father (or rather, left in an envelope, as he wasn’tusually there) and told to buy herself a little treat. Etiquette and finishingat Debrett’s, summers in Saint-Tropez, winters in Saint Moretz. She was alreadyfantastically privileged when she (she was Miranda Barlow then) met, fell inlove with, and married Thomas Hamilton, an idealistic young politician – froman old titled family himself, father sat in the House of Lords, mingled withthe same serried jetset crowd, but who, like her, has managed to avoidletting it completely turn his head. No, Thomas cares. For someone who was born with a silver spoon in his mouth, he’s taken it out, passed it around, asked why he had it and everyone else didn’t. She can’t think of anyone else who would.

After an impressive career – MP for Windsor, Shadow and thenactual Home Secretary, an ambassadorship here, an embassy position there –Thomas is now Foreign Secretary, and they live in London. He has been tipped tobe PM one day, but he, for reasons of his own, has chosen not to pursue party leadership. He travels a great deal. Miranda’s job, in their partnership, is tohold down the home front. Talk to the always-a-jolly-good-time British press.Pay a visit, shake a hand, pose for a photo. Write an op-ed in the Times. Be subject to endless scrutiny ofwhat she wore at the gala and how much it cost, and of course, all the heat shetakes when Thomas proposes anything too fundamentally decent for the British Empire (they may have changed the name, butdon’t let that fool you) to swallow at face value. Why, they all wonder, havethey appointed a foreign secretary who actually seems to like foreigners?

Miranda cannot complain. She knows that she has a lifematerially more comfortable than 99.9% of the world, has never wanted foranything. And she and Thomas do good in the world, a great deal of it,especially through their new philanthropic organization, the Thomas and MirandaHamilton Foundation. There is a certain amount of affection for them among themasses, to be sure. They have appeared on Buzzfeed as “couple goals.” Mirandahas fronted Vogue, Elle, and others,and been a guest critic for the New YorkTimes Book Review. Thomas loves her, she loves him, and if that’s not quitehow she originally thought, well… it’s still them. It’s going to be.

Especially after James.

Miranda tries not to think of how he moved to the Bahamas afew years ago, about how he loved them but couldn’t stand their world anymore,how she and Thomas were too beholden to leave, and cannot help but feel thatthis birdcage takes as much as it gives.

—————–

“My dear,” Thomas says, stirring his tea. “I have someone Iwant you to meet.”

“Oh?” Miranda stirs her own tea, blows on it, and takes asmall sip. It’s early morning, and they’re sitting in the glassed-over sunroom(in England, always more of a hopeful ideal than an actual reality) overlookingtheir back garden, and the Kensington traffic rumbles distantly. He just got inlast night from New Delhi, bags not yet unpacked, still smelling of curry andsunshine and smog when she hugged him, and she supposes this is someone he wasintroduced to on the trip and wants her to vet. He rarely partners withsomeone, or hires them, or does anything else, without running them past herfirst. He trusts her judgment, follows her lead, and Miranda smiles at herhusband with deep affection. “Who? One of the Indian Young Achiever scholarshipcandidates?”

“What? No, there’s still one more round of selection to goon that, but I hope we can arrange a lunch for the finalists. No, this issomeone else. I’m thinking of commissioning him to do some advising and policyproposals for the foundation. I imagine you’ve heard of him. Sam Bellamy.”

“Sam Bellamy?” Miranda’svoice rises in startlement. This is assuredly not going to help Thomas’ 24%approval rating among Brexit voters, not that they were terribly fond of himbefore. “That’s the one – Black Sam, isn’t he? Darling, are you sure – ”

“James knows him,” Thomas says quietly. “He thinks we’ll getalong.”

Miranda feels her throat close briefly. “So,” she says, tryingto sound normal. “You – you’ve spoken to James recently, then?”

“He emailed about a week ago.” Thomas looked into thegarden, as if neither of them can admit how much they miss James Flint (as he’sknown to the rest of the world, but James McGraw to them) without wondering ifthey made the greatest mistake of their lives in letting him go. “I was askingif he could think of potential consultants, and he suggested – ” He waves ahand. “Anyway, you know Bellamy’s work. He is the sort of man I want to speakto, if I want to claim that I care about the state of the world at all.”

“Indeed,” Miranda murmurs. She can’t help but wonder if evenher bleeding-heart liberal husband has gone one bridge too far. Sam Bellamy, orBlack Sam as he’s indeed more generally known (@BlackSamBellamy to his 1.2million followers on Twitter), is a blogger, political activist, skilledtechnological saboteur, and notoriously and fearlessly outspoken Pain in theArse to the establishment’s – well, the establishment’s everything. He’soriginally from a small village in Devonshire, grew up dirt poor in ruralEngland, has lived in both the UK and the US, and made himself distinctlyinconvenient to both governments (they tend to pass him like a hot potato,shipping him off to the other when he’s poked too many bears) with exploitsthat skirt the very bounds and greyest areas of legality. He’s been arrested atleast a dozen times (he’s a hero to the Anonymous-type underground vigilantecrowd, and the darling of the left-wing internet) but they can’t quite get anycharges to stick, especially since Miranda gets the sense that they’re a littleafraid of him. Sam Bellamy is never violent, never cruel, never openlyvindictive. He’s handsome and charming and empathetic and eloquent, has a devotedfollowing that retweets all his devastatingly on-point political one-liners,has published books and done TV appearances, and otherwise is not yourno-account Manning or Snowden that can be bundled into some undisclosed federalhellhole, driven to Russia, or otherwise made to disappear. He’s a cultcelebrity and he is very good at his job, and Miranda has to admit, he’s likelyto have good advice on where to direct the foundation’s outreach efforts.Still. The Sun and the Daily Mail are absolutely going to shitthemselves.

“Well,” Miranda says wryly. “Do we meet him here, or at thesafe house?”

“I invited him for coffee this afternoon. I thought it wasbest to start off informally.” Thomas butters his crumpet. “I do realize it’srather short notice for you, but – ”

If Miranda was a different sort of woman, she might beangered by this presumption, by Thomas’ belief that she’ll just smilegraciously and play the cultured hostess to whatever scabrous renegade he wantsto drag into their house. But she has lived with him too long, and known himtoo well, to do that. She will, if nothing else, give Sam Bellamy a fairhearing-out – and after all, if she does not like him, Thomas is unlikely toproceed with the arrangement. She shares her husband so much with the world, inall his selflessness, and it’s one of the things she loves about him. And yet,sometimes in the darkness, she cannot help but wish there was part of him thatbelonged, only and intimately, to her.

“Coffee,” Miranda says briskly. “Three this afternoon?”

Thomas raises his teacup in toast. “My dear, as ever, youare impeccable.”

—————–

Miranda is not sure what she expected, exactly. Someunwashed beatnik reeking of patchouli and pot, or a too-polished salesman whoembraces the comforts of the system he rails against, or just another of thoseyoung, well-meaning people who want to change the world but clearly have noidea how it actually works. To say the least, she’s met all these sorts andthen some, and while she trusts James’ judgment, there’s also the fact thatJames himself is not far right of Che Guevara on the political scale, either inviews or in methods. Part of the reason for his expatriation to the Bahamas wasto dodge the fact that he’d probably bring down Thomas’ career and all the workof the TMHF if he stayed. He didn’t want to do that to them, and so he left.What message he might be sending with Sam, Miranda doesn’t know.

At three that afternoon, however, she finds out. There’s aknock on the door, Miranda’s assistant Abigail (the daughter of Peter Ashe, theCommons chief whip) gets it, and Sam Bellamy strides in, still tucking hisOyster card into his jeans pocket; he clearly came on the Underground and thebus. The first thing Miranda notices is that he’s tall: six feet and then some.He has a long black ponytail, artful stubble, small silver hoops in both ears,a dash of eyeliner, a leather jacket, and a shirt not quite buttoned up all theway. He looks like a glamorously grungy rock star, or as if he got lost on hisway to a GQ photoshoot, and she’s moving “pretentious douche” further up thelist of possibilities, even as she smiles politely and offers her hand. “Mr.Bellamy. So good to meet you.”

“Lady Hamilton.” He smiles at her, warmly and delightedlyand with no pretention at all, and kisses her hand instead of shaking it.Miranda is completely taken aback – yes, Thomas got a knighthood in the Queen’sBirthday Honours a few years ago, for all his political and philanthropic work,technically speaking she is LadyHamilton – but nobody except the stuffiest and most hidebound of placesactually use it. It’s what would be printed on her place card for a statedinner at Buckingham Palace, but certainly not in casual conversation, and shealmost thinks that Sam, who makes his living fighting the entire world shelives in, is mocking her. But his smile is too sincere for that, his eyesgently teasing, and he even manages the hand kiss without it being instantlycreepy, which is a further feat. Miranda is a beautiful mid-forties brunettewho has taken good care of herself and her appearance (and knows she’ll becrucified in the press if she doesn’t); she’s been shamelessly hit on before.This, though. It’s different.

Off guard, but trying not to showit, she invites him out to the porch. A little sun is peering through the glassnow, and Sam shucks his jacket and sits down at her gesture. Abigail goes toassemble the coffee tray, and Miranda expects Sam to fiddle with hissmartphone, fire off a few more witty tweets before the meeting starts, but hedoesn’t. His attention and regard is completely on her, genuinely curious andopen. He hasn’t yelled, “Capitalist pig!” or started flinging poo yet, not atall. What does she look like to him, in her silk blouse, her matching pearlset, her Chanel No. 5, her flawless makeup? A person, or a lovely porcelaindoll?

They make light conversation asthey wait. Sam knows that Miranda graduated with a 1:1 in English literaturefrom Christ Church, Oxford, and has apparently read her book reviews for the NYT. He has intelligent things to sayabout all of them, and Miranda doesn’t even notice for several minutes thatAbigail has brought out the coffee and biscuits. Flustered, she pours two cups,hands one to Sam (he takes his black, makes a joke about it), brushes his handmomentarily, and doesn’t know why it makes something constrict in her chest.Yes, well, he’s as charming and engaging as advertised. As of yet, that couldstill only be the surface.

They talk for almost three hoursstraight. The coffee gets cold, the biscuits only half eaten. Miranda has neverknown anyone as easy to talk to. Thomas, of course, but it’s not quite likethis even with him. James, bless his heart, is entirely a man of action – hetalks when he has to, but it’s secondary. Sam, on the other hand, is finishingher sentences forty-five minutes into their first acquaintance. He knows shelives in a posh, privileged bubble – though she knows more about what is outside it than some –but he never once belittles or mocks her for it. He’s like Thomas. He cares. Injustice is a deeply personal,driving affront to him. He just cannot stand the way the world is now, if hecan do something about it, and he spends every day doing just that. He hasn’tbeen to university; he left state school at sixteen with his GCSEs. He is justtwenty-eight years old.

The patio has gotten dark, the sunset, by the time they finally wake from their reverie. Miranda stands upreluctantly; it’s past six, the Underground will be commuter crush if Samleaves now, and Thomas will be at Downing Street until at least nine, as he hassome subcommittee or other to chair. “Do you want to stay – stay for dinner?”

“I couldn’t possibly impose,” Samsays.

“Oh, no. It’s no trouble at all.”

Thus assured, he graciouslyagreed, and they head into the expansive kitchen. Abigail has gone home, sheonly stays until five, and it’s just them as Miranda tries to think what shecan whip up – she does like to cook, doesn’t want to be that rich woman whocan’t boil an egg for herself. Sam leans on the island as she makes casserole,and it feels so completely, impossibly familiar that Miranda almost wants topinch herself. A Caesar salad and two glasses of red wine later, supper isready, they sit at the smaller dinette instead of the formal dining room, andshe cannot help but be too aware of Sam sitting across from her. She glances –unobtrusively, she hopes – at his left hand. There’s no wedding ring there,though he has others. “So,” she says, as lightly as she can. “How do you knowJames?”

“Ah, well.” Sam takes a sip of hiswine, slightly sheepish but completely unabashed. “To be honest, we slepttogether.”

Miranda has been wondering if thatplayed into it somewhere. “Oh?”

“And we work on similar causes, sothere’s that.” Sam eyes her curiously. “He talks about you a lot, you know. Youand Thomas.”

“Does he?” Miranda’s voice is notquite so steady this time.

Sam’s dark gaze is a little toounderstanding. Quietly he says, “He misses you a great deal.”

The casserole sticks in Miranda’sthroat, and she has to swallow it down hard. Not looking up, she says, “I misshim too.”

Sam reaches unexpectedly acrossthe table and puts his hand on hers. Startled, she meets his eyes, and in thatmoment, the question she was trying to find a remotely tactful and subtle wayto ask – if it’s only gentlemen that are his preference, or there is room forappreciation of the ladies as well – has an answer. She was fairly sure fromearlier, but now it’s definite. Sam Bellamy talked about women endlesslyearlier, about his four sisters, about his female colleagues, about theiraccomplishments, their interests, the respect he has for them, his sheerdelight in their existence in a way that goes far, far beyond what men usually,superficially, value in them. Just then, Miranda is seized by the unshakeableconviction that if she leaned over and kissed him right now, it would taste andfeel more like home than anything shehas ever known.

She is unsettled, to say theleast. She doesn’t kiss him.

The thought does not go away.

——————-

“So,” Thomas says, the nextmorning. “What do you think?”

Miranda, of course, does not needto ask what. Her hand trembles slightly as she lifts her cup. Thomas broughtback a particularly good Darjeeling, and she savors it for a few moments, asmuch to give herself time to think as in appreciation of the flavor. “He’s…very easy,” she says. “To like, to talk to, to be around. And very intelligent.We could do worse.”

Thomas gives her a gentle smile,as if reminding her that at this time yesterday, she had quite a differentopinion. “Achieved all that in one meeting, did you?”

“It was productive.” Mirandaraises an eyebrow. “I assume you’ve met him?”

“Yes. We had lunch together theother day. My impression was the same as yours, but I wanted to be sure.”Thomas is clearly off in transports of how much he can do and think of anddream with someone who can get the sorts of results Sam can. “So the next stepis – my dear, what?”

Miranda isn’t sure how to voicewhat’s on her mind. Doesn’t want to ask Thomas if he thinks James sent them Samas a sort of consolation prize, a parting gift, a pretty new toy. If they aredoing something wrong in letting him in so quickly, or if there’s some sort ofcatch. There generally is, after all. She doesn’t think James wouldintentionally set up a sting, or anything else ill-spirited, but just now,Miranda Barlow Hamilton is forced to face the secrets that lie at the center ofher world. The reason Thomas wants to be Prime Minister, has thought longinglyof all the more good he could do with such a position, but has chosen not tostand for party leadership. Because at some point, the details of their privatelife would be spilled, and his entire administration would be brought down bythe scandal, and they would never be free of the hounding. Because it would befoolish to try to create such a thing, knowing it would be destroyed. Nearly asintentional and malicious as murder, and far longer-lasting.

Miranda looks away, over thegarden. Thinks of afternoons with James in their bed, when it was sometimesjust him and her, sometimes just him and Thomas, sometimes the three of themalike. James was not the first man that she and Thomas have shared, but he wasthe first that both of them fell in love with, and whose absence stillresonates like an open wound. She knows as well that Thomas felt James was histruest love, his deepest soulmate, the person who gave him the parts ofthemselves that Miranda, through no fault of hers or Thomas’, cannot. She andThomas love each other dearly, and they have a physical relationship in otherways, but she has been married to a gay man for two decades, and as often asshe thinks she understands it now, she can entirely accept it, it turns, itchanges. That was what James was for. A man who could love both of them equallywell, bridge them, fit into that third piece of their shared souls. She doesnot want Sam to be only his pale shadow, his second-rate replacement. Does notwant Sam to think he comes second to anything.

(And what does it say, that she isalready thinking this, after only one day?)

Thomas is watching her worriedly.“My dear?”

“I’m fine.” Miranda looks up,smiles, shakes her head. “We should absolutely proceed.”

——————–

Sam continues to come by theirhouse, sometimes for meetings with both of them, sometimes just for Miranda. Healways has stacks of suggestions, of papers, sketches, ideas, as they sit inthe sunroom and sift them through. However long he stays, it never seems to beenough, and when he’s gone for a fortnight, Miranda tries not to pine. Shekeeps waiting for the moment when the mask slips, the curtain falls, when hebecomes as ugly and grubby and flawed a petty mortal as the rest of them, butit doesn’t. This is, apparently, who he actually is, and their connection onlydeepens. Miranda has spent so long making sacrifices, stepping aside, sharingThomas, sharing James, being the politician’s wife, giving more, giving up. Sheloves the people she’s given the most for, and knows they love her too, but Samis the first person who pours so generously into her soul with absolutely nopain or struggle in doing it. He loves because he breathes, does not give asingle shit what anyone thinks of him, cares for her, worships her in glancesand fleet touches and passing moments, makes her feel as if she’s standing inbrilliant sunlight, and he never asks for anything or expects it. Simplybecause she is, in herself, that much of a strange and tender miracle to him.It is unfathomable.

“You know,” Thomas says softly,about five months in. “Of course I would not mind if you and Mr. Bellamy wereto… see each other more often.”

Given that they already see eachother at least three times a week, Miranda knows that he is not referring toincreasing Sam’s workload for the TMHF. Her heart skips a beat, as if she’sboth wanted and feared that Thomas would say this. “O – oh?”

Thomas looks at her withconsummate tenderness. “You don’t need to ask my permission, Miranda.”

Her heart twists again. Of coursehe wouldn’t, of course he’d feel it foolish that the notion should cross hermind, that her husband might have an opinion on whether or not she slept withsomeone else. After all, it is easier to have an open marriage when you andyour spouse are sleeping with the same other person, and you all know abouteach other and are set up comfortably in a ménage a trois. She and Thomas havealways shared. They’ve never had a lover exclusive to only one of them, and itoccurs to Miranda that this is perhaps what Thomas is suggesting – that the twoof them become three again, and take up together with Sam. She isn’t sure howshe feels about that (and, quite obviously, how Sam feels about that). “Is this… Thomas, do you mean to suggestthat we – ”

Thomas holds up a hand. “I am certainlycapable of appreciating Mr. Bellamy’s charms,” he says dryly, “and flattermyself that he is not averse, at least in theory, to the idea of mine. But bothof us know it’s not like that, this time. That he could be – he should be – yours.”

Yours. Miranda turns away. The idea of having something forherself, someone – it is almostunspeakably odd, and yet something she wants so dearly she cannot breathe.Wishes, as much as she appreciates Thomas’ open and easy willingness to let herpursue the idea of something withSam, that he did want her to ask permission. That there could be that piecebetween them as well – true, they would never have had James in their lives, orat least not in the way they did, if they could complete each other on theirown accord. She and Thomas have built so much together, done so much, and theydon’t want to leave each other. They never have; on the contrary, theiraffairs, communal as they are, only bring them closer. But to propose that Sambe hers, just hers, and not theirs… that’sdifferent. That’s new, and strange, and challenging.

But God. How she wants to find outwhat that might look like.

Hesitantly, Miranda says, “Are yousure?”

Thomas reaches out and takes herhand, as their fingers lock. “I know what you’ve given up,” he says, almost ina whisper. “I don’t want it to be him too.”

——————–

Miranda is quite sure this is aterrible idea.

She’s changed out of all herdesigner clothes, let down her hair from its elegant updo, dressed in a simplejumper and jeans and trainers, looks like any other ordinary middle-aged womanon the District Line from Kensington out to Ealing. She clutches her bagtightly; it’s been years since she rode the Underground, she can’t help butfeeling like a creature pried out of its shell. Sam might not be home, or hemight have someone else over (she can’t help the twist of jealousy that writhesin her innards at the thought, to which she has no right) or she might havecatastrophically misread the entire situation, and he will be only pitying andbemused when his work colleague appears to NottingHill herself on his front step. Miranda isn’t sure what would be worse. Shealmost doesn’t get off the Tube at Ealing.

Shaky-legged, she taps out of theticket barrier and follows the directions on her phone. Sam lives a few minutesaway from the station, in one of the plain brick rowhouses. Miranda has neverbeen out here before, or at least not when viewing it from behind the window ofa car as she rolls on through. This is a neighborhood of ethnic grocers andcheap electronic repair shops, Nando’s and chain pubs and off-license conveniencestores, as far away from the glittering world of Kensington as can be imagined.She might have taken a wrong turn. No, this should be it.

She heads up the walk, has tobrace herself, closes her eyes, raises her hand, lowers it, raises it again. Thinksone more time that this might be a terrible mistake, then knocks.

There’s no answer at first, andshe considers just turning and leaving. But then she hears footsteps, thedeadbolt rattles, and Sam opens the door.

He’s shirtless and barefoot, onlywearing jeans, black hair loose on his shoulders and a towel draped around hisneck; it looks as if he just got out of the shower. To say the least, he issurprised to see her, and concerned. “Miranda? Is something wrong, are you allright?”

“I’m fine.” Her lips feel halfnumb. “I can come back later.”

“No, it’s fine.” He steps back,making an inviting gesture. “If you don’t mind – I mean, it’s not what you’reused to, it’s not very – ”

Miranda steps in against herbetter judgment, as if her legs have decided to carry her forward without hervolition, and he shuts the door. He doesn’t appear to have other company over,at any rate. It’s a small flat, crammed to every corner with books and papersand half-assembled bits of gadgets, his laptop and his other laptop and abattered stack of notebooks and all their files from the TMHF. There are a fewpotted plants, and a few empty food cartons, which he hastens to chuck away. “I’mnot the world’s greatest housekeeper, it – ”

“It’s wonderful,” Miranda says. “It’s.. . it’s you.”

Their eyes lock, and she feels itdown to her toes, to the back of her spine. She thought she was going to haveto say something, she thought this would be an utter ordeal, she thought, she thought – but in half a moment more,they cross the floor toward each other, they almost collide, her arms lockaround his neck as she strains on her tiptoes, and he’s kissing the breath andthe daylights and all remotely remaining sense out of her. He shoves her upagainst the door, her hands full of his damp hair and his face and the strengthand solidness and scent of him, as he lifts her effortlessly off her feet and shewraps her legs around his waist. They keep kissing as if they cannot getenough, they cannot stop, they’ve waited so long to begin and there is so muchtime to make up. She presses her nose against his, to his forehead, as theyshare breath and space and soul. “Miranda,” he murmurs. “God, love, God, I’vebeen… love, are you sure you…”

“Please,” Miranda whispers, andshe has never laid herself so raw and open to anyone as she does just then, asthe sheer need shivers gooseflesh down both of their spines. “Sam, please.”

He answers her with another kiss,carrying her down the hall to his room, kicking the door open and backing in. Heclearly wants to clean up a bit here as well, not expecting to have companytonight, but Miranda doesn’t want to let go of him long enough, and she doesn’tcare anyway. They sink onto his bed, his hands tugging at her jumper anddrawing it over her head, as she unbuttons her shirt and he unclasps her braand then they are clawing into each other’s arms again. Her hair falls in athick brown curtain around her face and his, his hand on the back of her head,mouths open, turning and gulping and devouring. He tastes of more than home. Hetastes of flesh and soul and sinew, and stars.

He feels like the world insideher. He feels like everything, as Miranda gasps and lifts her knees and ridesjust as hard back against him, the muscles of his back straining, the onlysound their gasping and muffled swearing. As they roll over and over, and shetakes him deeper, and deeper still, and his mouth is a burning brand on herbreast, moves up her throat, kissing and licking and biting. It’s too much, it’stoo much, she is only a mortal creature and she will wither to ash in suchblinding sunlight. Such prayers are too secret to be spoken aloud.

Afterward, they lie still, herhead on his chest, her hand resting low on his stomach, as the headlights ofpassing cars cartwheel on the ceiling. It’s started to rain; she can hear thedistant sigh and hiss on the roof. Sam’s arm rests around her shoulder, pullingher close, until tears prickle in her throat for no reason she can name. Hold onto me, never let me go.

Miranda Hamilton lives in abirdcage, yes. That does not change now. She still does.

And yet she thinks – she hopes –she might have turned the key.

[smutmylifeup]

Out Of The Office Drama: Not A Little Boy Anymore.

This chapter takes place before @whatdoyouexpectthistime‘s latest chapter. Which you can find here. 

Rose sat impatiently in her studio. It was half past twelve and Ryosuke would be coming over in about half an hour.

She was really grateful despite the beers that piled up at Miho’s sleepover the night before hadn’t left her with a hangover. This day wouldn’t be nearly as enjoyable if she had to contend with a headache.

She’d tidied up as much as she could in her studio – canvas’s, paints and brushes all pushed to one side. Her futon bare for them to use as seating.

Everything was clean enough for when he arrived.

Although, she wasn’t entirely sure why it mattered what state he saw her place in. After all, he saw how messy her room was when he was a kid.

With one glance over her appearance in the mirror, she began to prepare bowls of snacks. After all knowing them they’d end up playing for hours due to their competitiveness. And she’d be an awful hostess if she didn’t feed her guest.

But she still wasn’t sure why she was so giddy and going to efforts she didn’t normally make for anyone, for Ryosuke.

Ding-dong.

Rose glanced at her watch and then looked up. 12:42, he was early. With a quick glance at her appearance in her wall mirror, Rose scuttled and buzzed him up without checking it was him.

She shifted on her feet in front of the door and watched it open like it was slow motion.

“Aw, look at you being a good Pommy and waiting by the door for your master.”

The disappointment on her face was evident. And Minato scowled in response.

“Alright, I get it. The pommy jokes are getting old.”

Rose sighed, letting the disappointment wash out of her system and going with that she was actually annoyed with his dog related jokes.

“Thought you were coming over tomorrow?”

Rose queried, walking back to continue what she was doing. Minato followed her.

“I am, I just couldn’t find my cufflink. This is the only place it could be, since you didn’t allow me to get changed from work before I came here.”

Rose didn’t need to see it to know he was smirking.

After their first roll in the hay, they’d met several times after for no strings attached fun. He was the opposite of Kyobashi and it was a nice change of pace. But she wasn’t sure she liked this impromptu visit. He could of text her in advance.  

“I tidied earlier. If it’s here, it’ll be in that bowl by the futon.”

Rose said motioning with her chin to the ‘living’ area but not making any attempt to find it for him. While they were only fuck buddies, they had a connection – of twisted and lonely hearts, and they trusted each other more than they’d probably care to admit but they both knew it since being ‘fuck buddies’ meant trusting another person.

Minato followed Rose’s instruction and searched in the little bowl of odd titbits she’d find on her floor when she’d actually decide to clean.

“Since when did you tidy?”

Minato called to her.

“I do tidy from time to time. I’m just too busy to do it every day.”

Minato found his cufflink the bowl and then returned to Rose.

“Well whatever. Fancy messing it up again before I head back to the office?”

Minato wrapped his arms around Rose from behind and kissed her neck. And while Rose was never one to turn down an offer of getting her fill of the good stuff. And Minato knew how to fill her with the good stuff.

She wasn’t after that today and it was the furthest thing from her mind, for once.

“Tempting, but I have a friend coming over in about,” Rose checked her watch. “Shit, any moment now.”

Rose wiggled out of Minato’s hold and put the bowls of snacks on the table by the futon.

“You have friends?” Minato said.

“Har Har. Yes I have friends.”

After placing the bowls down, Rose spun around directly into Minato. She looked up at him and he was slightly pouting and that made her chuckle.

“Not the kind of friends we are, you don’t have to get jealous.”

Rose tiptoed and placed a kiss on his cheek as if to appease his possessive side. Not that she had to explain or apologise for anything. They were only fuck buddies after all.

“I’m not, I’m just surprised a Pommy like you has friends.”

Looks like the kiss didn’t appease much because he was still grumpy. And Rose rolled her eyes in response and ushered him to the door.

“You can have me all you want tomorrow.”

“Ugh, you are making me not want to leave.”

Minato responded and dug his heels in as he reached the door.

“You’re coming tomorrow?” Rose asked double checking that just in case he left more hickeys on her she could prepare to hide them from Miho in advance.

“We both will be.”

Minato smirked before planting a quick kiss on Rose’s lips as if to seal his promise and he left as quickly as he showed up.

Rose sighed and was about the shut the door when a familiar and timid copper haired man entered her field of vision.

Man.

It was weird to call him that, but he definitely was not a boy anymore.

“Ryo!” Rose exclaimed.

Her almost exasperated expression quickly turning into one of delight and opening the door as wide as possible to invite him in.

Ryosuke was almost sheepish as he entered Rose’s place. Tiptoeing his way in and looking around like a nervous little puppy.

“Something up?”

Rose asked when his usual happy smile didn’t light up his face when she greeted him.

“Oh! Um, your neighbour was leaving as I arrived and let me up, so I thought I’d surprise you. But, I um, I, I saw that guy leave and thought maybe you were busy.”

He sounded awfully sad. And that made Rose’s heart sting a little.

“Is he your boyfriend?”

Ryo spat out, his eyes looking everywhere but Rose’s as if he didn’t want to hear the answer.

“Er, he’s not.”

Rose said, cocking her own head trying to read the sudden almost shoujo manga style reactions.

“He-He isn’t?”

Ryosuke’s eyes flew open and his mouth hung open a little as he stared at Rose.

“No. The only guy I stand for longer than five minutes is you.”

Rose said matter of factly. And to her answer, Ryosuke blushed about fifty shades of red but he giggled shyly.

“Don’t stand there, come in.” Rose said.

Ryosuke followed, his eyes wide and childlike as he looked around her studio. She gave him a short tour, since there wasn’t much to show him. He sat on Rose’s futon but only after she instructed him to. And Rose sat beside him.    

“I always loved your art. But you’ve gotten so much better. Even better than Mr. Kisaki!”

Ryosuke said proudly as he looked over at the array of canvases leaned up against the wall to the side of him.

“Thanks, I might tell him you said that.”

Rose smirked and waited for-

“No! Please don’t, he’ll make my life a living hell. Even Mr. Oh wouldn’t be able to protect me from his teasing!”

Rose laughed, just as expected. He hadn’t changed a single bit.

“Don’t worry, if he does anything to you, I’ll kick his ass.”

Rose ruffled Ryosuke’s hair but her touch lingered a bit longer than a friendly touch. His hair was so soft, he’d obviously taken good care of it over the years.

“No! I’m not a little boy anymore, I can fight my own battles!”

Ryosuke almost shouted and Rose let her hand naturally fall away from his head. She was a little taken aback by his tone but he was right, she couldn’t keep treating him like the child he used to be.

“Okay, sorry,” Rose said, giving a little chuckle. “You’re important to me though, I can’t help wanting to protect you. Especially since I’ve finally found you again.”

Rose shifted her position on the sofa and leant her head on his shoulder. Why was she being so affectionate? It was like she couldn’t handle not touching him in some way.

She couldn’t see his face but she felt his body tense and relax after a few deep breaths.

“F-Finally?”

Ryosuke said his voice a little flustered.

“Mm, after we moved away – probably about three or fourth months later I ran away from home.”

Rose hadn’t told this story to anyone but Ryosuke needed to hear it. After all he needed to know that she never forgot about him.

“Right back to my old house. It was a bitch of a bus journey and I used all of my allowance to get back to there. When I got to your house I knocked on the door and a strange old lady answered.”

Rose closed her eyes. This memory was still so vivid, like it happened yesterday.

“I thought maybe she was your grandma, so I asked if you were home but she had no idea who you were and shut the door on me. I remember being really pissed off and knocked again but she shouted for me to go away through the door.”

Ryosuke shifted next to her but Rose continued.

“So I went to your neighbour on the other side. And she told me that you didn’t live there anymore and I should go home. I didn’t understand, I ended up sitting outside your house for nearly three hours waiting for you before my parents showed up and took me home. They helped me in my search for you, but we couldn’t find anything. You were gone without a trace.”

Rose paused, it sounded like she gave up.

“But something in my heart told me I’d find you and I never gave up hope. We always said we were connected by the red string of fate.”

She never gave up.  

“I’m sorry you had to go through all that.”

Rose lifted her head. That was so like him to apologise for something that wasn’t even his fault.

“I guess you never found out what happened?”

There was a sadness in his eyes that made Rose gulp as she waited for him to continue.

“I still don’t know the full details but this is what I found out when I got older. One night, probably about a month after you moved. My, my parents were on their way home from work and they were ambushed by a group of men who intended to rob them using a knife as a threat. My dad tried to protect my mum and he ended up getting stabbed. And since my mum was a witness, they stabbed her too.”

Rose’s heart shattered into a million pieces. She knew his parents well, they were wonderful people. So devoted to each other and their son.

Before she knew what she was doing, she’d thrown herself into his lap and was hugging him as tightly as she could without restricting his breathing.

“I, I had no idea,” Rose didn’t even know it, but she was crying and her words were coming out in muffled sobs against his shoulder. “I’m so sorry.”

“F-for someone who didn’t like hugs, you’re sure hugging me a lot!”

Ryosuke chuckled through his own sobs, his own arms rapping around her without hesitation. Rose had no idea what to say, she’d never dealt with death before. Nor someone dealing with a loss so great. He must have been hurt so much and she wasn’t there to protect him in the most vulnerable moments of his life.

She knew it wasn’t anyone’s fault except the bastards who took two innocent lives. And ruined a child’s life in the process.

“Are-are they?”

Rose said. Already knowing the answer.

“Yeah, they both died at the scene. The paramedics had no chance of saving them.”

It scared her how cold his voice sounded – so unfamiliar, but she couldn’t imagine it sounding any other way. She hugged him tighter his own hold on her tightening too.

He nudged her head out of his shoulder so he could look at her.

“Don’t be sad for me, my parents wouldn’t want that.”

He smiled, with tears streaming down his face. And it was genuine - Rose knew the difference between his fake and genuine smile after all.

“They taught me a lot and I was grateful for how much the loved and cherished me despite our circumstance. After their deaths, I was put in an orphanage since I had no living blood relatives. And I was on the streets a lot and I didn’t go to school much. I’d lost my best friend and parents – I was in such a dark place and some days I didn’t care whether I lived or died. And that’s how I met Mr. Oh he saved me from a gang of men who tried to beat me up.”

He smiled fondly at that memory.

“He was so strong and fierce. He took them all on by himself and only ended up with a cut on his lip.”

Rose would forever be indebted to Mr. Oh.

“He actually reminded me of you,” He said and Rose arched and eyebrow. “No, I didn’t mean I thought of you as a man!”

He quickly defended himself, although Rose didn’t think that at all.

“He had that sense of justice in his eyes and the compassion and warmth that was always around you.”

Rose smiled sadly.

“He took me in and I’ve been with him ever since!”

He beamed, despite what had happened to him. He still remained innocent, grateful and happy.

“He sounds like a good man.”

“He is! He’s the greatest. I hope you can get to know him like I do. Most people don’t look past his scary face.”

Ryosuke’s brow furrowed.

“I’d like that. You’ll have to introduce us properly next time, so I can thank him.”

Rose was torn in half but she took the lead from Ryosuke’s acceptance of what happened.

“I will! You’d really like him, Akane. And I know he’d like you too! I mean he was pretty impressed how you floored Mr. Kisaki. He told Mr Baba and Mr Ichinomiya about it, they teased Mr. Kisaki mercilessly. I tried so hard not to laugh. He was already soooo angry with me.”

Ryosuke chuckled softly, the tears and heartache drifting away into the past to the sound of his laughter.

“It wasn’t hard.”

Rose shrugged as she wiggled into a more comfortable position in his lap. She rested her head against his shoulder and they talked about the years they’d missed out on. Reminisced about old times and Rose teased him like crazy, enjoying his shrill cries of denial and embarrassment.

“So, do you have a girlfriend?”

Rose asked abruptly. And it dawned on her if he did, she probably shouldn’t be sitting in his lap like this but there were no ‘sexual’ undertones so it was okay, right?

“What?! Why do you ask that?”

He screeched in her ear.

“Why not?”

Ryosuke fidgeted under Rose and she chuckled at his reaction. Still so innocent, so the answer was probably-

“I, I don’t. I’ve never had a, a girlfriend.”

His words were quiet and if Rose wasn’t resting her head so close to his mouth she wouldn’t have heard him.

For some reason, that made her a little bit happy.

Perhaps because she wasn’t ready to share him since they’d just been reunited. Yeah that was it.

“Do-Do you have a boyfriend?”

Ryosuke blurted out.

“I don’t. Didn’t I tell you that earlier?”

“N-No! You just said that guy wasn’t your boyfriend! Who was he anyway? Ah! You don’t need to tell me if you don’t want to!”

Ryosuke asked and flustered. Rose laughed. He still asked so many questions. But her brow quickly furrowed as she tried to find a way to describe this without making him think any less of her.

“A business associate.”

That wasn’t a lie really, after all she met him through MJS.

“What kind of business are you working in?”

Now that was a harder question. She didn’t want to lie to him but she also wasn’t allowed to divulge the protocols and confidentiality agreements that she signed when she joined MJS not matter how much she trusted him.

Best to be ‘vague’.

“Matchmaking and wedding planning agency.”

Ryosuke laughed and Rose lifted her head to look at him.

“What’s so funny?”

“You! I can’t picture you helping people fall in love. You hate people.”

Rose wanted to tell him off but the sound of his laughter was too adorable to be mad at.

“I guess, but I don’t have to deal with too many people. And the people I work with are great. The women I was with at the art gallery works there – her name is Jazz and she’s as feisty as they come. I’ll have to take you to meet Miho, although she’d tease you senseless.”

Rose said thinking that maybe her boss would have a field day with how puppy-like Ryosuke was.

“Wh-What?!”

He exclaimed but Rose continued.

“You’d like H. She’s real sweet and friendly.”

Ryosuke watched Rose smile and smiled along with her. He never imagined the loner she used to be would grow up to be a little social butterfly.

“Maybe I can bring you by the office sometime. I’ll ask Miho when I’m next there.”

Rose said to herself more than Ryosuke. It was only the sound of him yawning that drew her attention away from her plans of her childhood friend meeting her work family.

She lifted her watch towards her eyes and notice the time 7:29pm.

Shit. They’d been talking for nearly eight hours. It was amazing how much catching up they had done and there was still so much more they hadn’t said.

“Are you tired?”

Ryosuke shook his head but yawned again. Much like a child trying to stay awake past their curfew.

“Well you gave yourself away there,” Rose sighed and pushed herself up ready to get a blanket so he could nap. “Do you want to take a nap?”

Rose was pulled back into his chest in his sleepy state.

“Nooo! Don’t move, you’re warm!”

His hold on her grew tighter as he wailed his displeasure of Rose trying to move.

“You’ll get neck ache if you sleep like that.”

Rose chuckled, she couldn’t help it. He was so cute.

“Shhh. Sleeping.”

He nuzzled his face against her hair and then his movements stilled and his breathing got heavier.

“Fall asleep really fast still? Jeez.”

While Rose was complaining, she didn’t mean a single word of it. She was just happy to be sitting here with him. She took a deep breath through her nose and caught a wiff of his cologne. It was manly, oaky with a twist of something fruity. Nothing like the sweet and candy like smell she remembered him smelling of as a child.

Rose smiled at the memory as she closed her eyes and nuzzled into his arms.

She always wanted to be the one to protect him, even if he grew bigger and stronger than her – which he had. The tense of his biceps against her back were a clear indicator despite his gentle touch. However, sitting in his arms like this, she felt so safe, secure and protected.

She didn’t see him as a little boy anymore.

That was her last thought as she began to fall asleep.

She awoke to the sound of cheerful humming. The desire to roll over and get away from the noise since she was so cosy and warm was restricted by a firm hold.

Lazily, her eyes opened. The darkness that was around told her that is was the middle of the night and the desire to return to sleep grew greater. However the humming reverberated against the chest she was snuggled against and made it difficult for sleep to come to her again.

“Why are you so happy?”

Rose said, her voice coming out as dull and as sleepy as she felt.

“Wah! You’re awake?!”

Ryosuke shouted in response, his body becoming stiff and less comfortable.

“Hard not to be when you’re humming in my ear. And don’t answer my question with a question.”

While her words were lacklustre, she smiled at his reaction.

“I’m sorry, I, I didn’t mean to wake you. Ah, I just woke up and you, you were still sleeping in my arms and I didn’t want to wake you. You looked so peaceful and cute – Ah I didn’t mean cute.”

Rose chuckled as he continued to fumble over his own words.

“So I’m not cute?”

Rose lifted her head enough to look at his face and thanks to the city lights sparkling through her window, she could see the blush all over his cheeks. And his eyes widened after Rose asked her oh so innocent question.

“Um, no! I mean yes, you are cute. But Ah.”

Rose leant her head back against his shoulder and sighed contently. One of her favourite past times was teasing this little bundle of cuteness but that wasn’t why she was happy. No one had ever called her cute before and it made her happy – not that she’d tell anyone that. Miho would have a riot teasing the ever stone faced Rose about being ‘cute’.

She could feel him fidgeting under her and decided while she was probably insanely comfortable and could stay in this position forever, he probably had pins and needles in every part of his body.

Getting up and out of his lap she stood and stretched. Her relaxed muscles reluctantly coming back to life.

“Are, are you mad?”

Ryosuke stuttered from his sitting position. And Rose turned towards him mid-stretch. Her heart swelled when she caught a glimpse of his crestfallen face.

“No.”

She said genuinely and thankfully Ryosuke beamed back at her. Only to be interrupted by the alien gurgling in her belly.

“We should probably eat though.” Rose chuckled.

The snacks she had prepared earlier weren’t going to sufficient enough to sustain both of them until breakfast. So she whipped up two simple rice dishes she’d learnt to make as a kid when her parents weren’t around.

“I should probably get going soon.”

Ryosuke said scratching the back of his neck like he didn’t really want to leave.

Rose scowled and looked at her watch. It was just after midnight and with all the recent going on’s at MJS, the idea of him not staying the night hadn’t entered her head.

“No.”

She said simply, clearing away the dinner plates.

“No?”

Ryosuke repeated.

Rose wasn’t facing him and she was glad – she was sure the worry on her face was probably evident. But she couldn’t tell him about the dangers her job had put on one of her co-workers recently. That was a breach not only of the MJS protocol but Police protocol too.

She wasn’t worried for herself, she didn’t want anything to happen to him. No matter how much he’d grown up, how much stronger he had gotten, he was still so very precious to her. No one at this point knew what this weird creeper wanted or was after. He had only targeted Miho so far but that didn’t mean he wasn’t watching all of them. And if she was the reason for him getting in danger – she would never be able to forgive herself.

But it wasn’t just that. She didn’t want him to leave, not just because of the creeper.

“We haven’t played a single game of Mario Kart.”

She shrugged, hoping her voice hid the truth from him.

“You’re right! I haven’t shown you just how good I’ve gotten!”

Rose sighed in relief.

“Mhm, I wanna see this so called improvement.”

Rose had put the dishes on the counter and returned to Ryosuke who was still sat at the small dining table. She took his hand without a second thought and let their hands mould into one before pulling him back towards the sofa.

It was simple and innocent but it was something Rose wouldn’t dream of doing with anyone other than him. It made her heart palpitate and made her skin tingle to touch him. What that meant, Rose sure as hell wouldn’t be able to explain.

As experienced and attune to people and their emotions and feelings – she could not understand her own. Instead she chose to ignore them for the moment. So much had gone on recently – she’d attribute it to that. Even if it didn’t make sense.

For now it seemed easier to brush off the complexity of the emotions she felt and focus on the positives. She was just pleased to be sitting next to Ryosuke and still whooping his ass at Mario Kart until the early hours of the morning. Until they both fell asleep – laying down side by side this time, curled up in each other’s arms. Nothing like how they’d fall asleep next to each other when they were kids.  

MJS - @whatdoyouexpectthistime @smile-smile-ichthys @hifftn @nitelotus

[ladystylestores]

Mexico’s Leftist Leader Rejects Big Spending to Ease Virus’s Sting

MEXICO CITY — For the second time in a month, top business leaders sat down with Mexico’s president to implore him to do more to save the economy.

People were losing jobs by the tens of thousands, they warned. Small and medium-size companies, which employ more than 70 percent of the Mexican work force, were running out of cash. The government needed to intervene, they argued. The data was irrefutable.

“I have other data,” shrugged the president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, according to two businesspeople with direct knowledge of that conversation in April. “You do whatever you think you need to do, and I’ll do what I need to do.”

Across the globe, governments have rushed to pump cash into flailing economies, hoping to stave off the pandemic’s worst financial fallout.

They have mustered trillions of dollars for stimulus measures to keep companies afloat and employees on the payroll. The logic: When the pandemic finally passes, economies will not have to start from scratch to bounce back.

In Mexico, no such rescue effort has come. The pandemic could lead to an economic reckoning worse than anything Mexico has seen in perhaps a century. More jobs were lost in April than were created in all of 2019. A recent report by a government agency said as many as 10 million people could fall into poverty this year.

Yet most economists estimate that Mexico will increase spending only slightly — by less than 1 percent of its economy — a small amount compared with many large nations.

The reason? Critics and supporters agree: Mr. López Obrador.

Hostile toward bailouts, loath to take on public debt and deeply mistrustful of most business leaders, Mexico’s president has opted largely to sit tight despite what is expected to be widespread pain up and down the economic ladder.

“The government should help the private sector as much as it can, otherwise our gross domestic product could drop as much as 10 percent, which would be a disaster,” said Carlos M. Urzúa, a former minister of finance under Mr. López Obrador.

“It can be done,” Mr. Urzúa continued, noting the relatively low public debt levels in Mexico. But “López Obrador really has no clue of the storm that is coming.”

In a time of utter polarization in Mexico, when reactions to Mr. López Obrador vacillate between complete devotion from supporters and vitriolic anger from detractors, the need to mount an economic response has offered a rare glimmer of unity.

Still, Mr. López Obrador, a populist leftist, has resisted the pressure to do more, wary of taking on public debt and saddling the country with bills it may struggle to pay down the road.

Some of the pressure on Mr. López Obrador has come from predictable places: opposition politicians, pro-market economists and the wealthy business community, groups that tend to find wrong in nearly every step he takes.

But members of the president’s own cabinet have also urged him to take action, arguing that failing to do so could cripple the nation, government officials say. So, too, have federal bank officials and a range of economists sympathetic to his politics.

“Every day counts,” said Santiago Levy, an economist who was offered the role of finance minister in Mr. López Obrador’s government shortly after his election in 2018. “A recession was inevitable, but the cost of not doing more is going to be a much longer and deeper recession.”

A group of state governors, including one from Mr. López Obrador’s own party, has formed a coalition to demand that he do more to help them financially. Some have even threatened the equivalent of financial secession.

“We need a strategy of unity, and instead we have received absolutely nothing,” said Martín Orozco Sandoval, the governor of Aguascalientes in central Mexico.

The government says it will take a cautious approach to bailouts and heavy spending.

Graciela Márquez, the secretary of the economy, challenged assertions that Mexico could easily increase debt to spend more. The cost would be prohibitive, she said, and taking on debt liberally could ultimately be more problematic than beneficial.

“If at a certain point we need to raise more debt, we will,” said Mrs. Márquez, a Harvard-trained economist. “It’s not a closed-off road.”

For now, the government is spending more, she said, including by issuing micro-credits and other payments to the most vulnerable people.

As for whether that additional spending is sufficient, she noted that even the $2 trillion stimulus package in the United States has not been enough.

“What is sufficient under these conditions?” she asked. “It must be done responsibly, without generating more problems than the ones it is trying to resolve.”

Economic damage from the pandemic is a given. But the difference between a long, protracted crisis and a meaningful recovery, in the eyes of many economists, depends on a government’s ability to help companies and workers stay afloat until the worst is over.

European nations have spent trillions to counter the financial devastation and are considering raising more than $800 billion in collective debt to stave off economic collapse.

Some of Mexico’s Latin American neighbors have acted decisively: Chile, Peru and Brazil have all passed packages valued at 8 percent to 12 percent of their economies.

But in Mexico — between tiny business loans and spending for cash-transfer programs for the poor, the young and the elderly — additional government spending is less than 1 percent of the economy, most economists calculate.

Even before the coronavirus hit, Mexico was in recession. But the government agency that measures poverty recently said that 6.1 million to 10.7 million Mexicans could be cast into poverty by the end of the year. The president rejected that assessment and placed the number of formal jobs lost at around one million.

The actions taken so far include a series of microloans of about $1,000 to tiny businesses in both the informal and formal sectors. Experts say the two million loans available will barely scratch the surface of the informal market, where some 30 million people work.

And the money is not a grant; it is a loan that struggling mom-and-pop stores will need to start repaying in a few months.

“Mexico is way below the world’s average in terms of the amount of resources being channeled to help the economy,” said Oberto Vélez Grajales, an economist at Centro de Estudios Espinoza Yglesias, a left-leaning research group.

The president’s resistance, according to those who know him, is based on his interpretation of Mexico’s troubled financial history.

Having lived through numerous financial crises, including sharp devaluations of the currency and defaults on debt, he believes that bailouts and rescues simply do not work, they say.

He even wrote a book about the government bailout of the financial sector after the 1994 economic collapse known as the Tequila Crisis. Many viewed that aid as a poorly managed effort that lined the pockets of the wealthy.

Many economists and analysts say Mexico can afford to increase debt to help weather the crisis. But from the moment he took office, Mr. López Obrador, while calling himself a leftist, has won praise from analysts and economists for being a fiscal conservative.

To pay for the ambitious infrastructure projects and poverty programs central to his vision, the president has cut federal programs and his own ministries, unlike his predecessor, who ran a budget deficit.

But with the coronavirus lashing small, medium and large businesses, clinging to a more traditional vision of debt and bailouts has come under fire. So have the president’s pet projects, which he views as essential for the country.

Mr. López Obrador has dubbed his efforts the “fourth transformation,” seeking to imbue his tenure with the historical brio of Mexico’s independence from Spain and its revolution.

As part of that, he has promised large-scale infrastructure projects, including a $8 billion oil refinery and a tourist train to circumnavigate the Mayan region of southeastern Mexico.

Even as oil prices have plunged and experts have questioned the utility of the oil refinery, the president has held fast to his commitment to construct one.

In fact, he says, none of his marquis projects, including the multibillion-dollar train, will be sacrificed to the virus.

“This is typical AMLO, and yet it still surprises me,” said Carlos Elizondo, a former Mexican ambassador to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, using the president’s nickname. “No other country in the world, amid a world pandemic and an emergency like this, continues on the same track.”

The president’s persistence has worked for him in the past. He lost two elections for the presidency but maintained his message against corruption and for benefits for the poor.

In 2018, Mexicans tired of rampant graft and inequality brought Mr. López Obrador to power with the most resounding victory the country had seen in decades.

“AMLO’s great strength was his stubbornness,” Mr. Elizondo continued. “Now, Mexico’s great weakness at a time when the world has changed is having a president that refuses to adapt to a new reality.”

Those close to the president say he believes that the coronavirus, while serious, is transitory and that his mark on his nation’s history, punctuated by the symbols of large, state-led projects, will outlast the current headwinds.

He says that having a clean conscience fights the virus. “No lying, no stealing, no betraying, that helps a lot to not get coronavirus,” he told reporters.

While critics demand that he shutter his infrastructure projects and channel the money into a rescue package, some economists say it would not be enough, anyway.

“At the end of the day, the amount of money being spent on infrastructure projects in 2020 is not that important,” said Mr. Levy, the economist. “The political significance is way beyond economic significance. It’s a little bit like Trump’s wall.”

“But you need to protect formal employment, and we need to do more to help informal workers,” he added.

Instead, state governors are vowing mutiny, and a tableau of economic disaster threatens the nation.

Tourism has all but dried up. Remittances from the United States are expected to plummet. And with oil prices flirting close to historical lows, Mexico’s economy has lost yet another engine.

“For all of them to take this hit at the same time is devastating,” said Roberta S. Jacobson, a former American ambassador to Mexico. “And meanwhile, the president appears to be only doubling down on policies he already had in place.”

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[chinesemyths-brandstory]

1001 Brand Story | Lotus Speech 莲花演说

writen by ZHOU Junjun

edictor XIANG Hongjin

//

第一个故事

男人拖着疲倦回到家，妻子问：“怎么这么晚回来？是不是外面有人了？”

男人忽然感到非常愤怒地对妻子说：“你怎么这么不理解我？”

第二天，他们去民政局换了一本证……

First story

The man dragged home tiredly, his wife asked, "Why are you back so late? Is there someone outside?"

The man suddenly felt very angry and said to his wife, "Why don't you understand me so much?"

The next day, they went to the Civil Affairs Bureau to exchange for a certificate ...

 第二个故事

课后，老师对学生说：“如果再是这个成绩，我会劝你转校了，跟上你会很吃力。”

回家，母亲拿着试卷恨铁不成钢地指责孩子说：“再过一年高考了，你看你该怎么办，你看考得上哪个学校，你看你将来该怎么办！怎么这么不争气呢。”

晚间补习，补习老师说：“怎么教了这么多遍，你就是做不对呢？”

当晚，学生从补习老师家一跃而下，当场死亡，他才十六岁……

Second story

After the class, the teacher said to the students, "If it is this grade again, I will advise you to transfer to school. It will be difficult to keep up with you."

Going home, the mother accused the child with a test paper hating iron and steel, saying, "After another year of college entrance examination, what do you think you should do, which school you can take, and what you will do in the future! Why not Fight for it. "

In the evening, the tutor said, "Why did you learn it so many times that you just didn't do it right?"

That night, the student jumped from the tutor's home and died on the spot. He was only 16 years old ...

 第三个故事

十年寒窗苦读，他是有名的学霸，名企招聘会上，面试官对他说：“介绍下你自己。”

他说：“啊……嗯……我……我叫……”

面试官说：“对不起，请下一位。”

走出门，他靠着墙蹲下，把简历撕得粉碎……

Third story

After ten years of hard study, he was a well-known school bull. At interviews with famous companies, the interviewer told him, "Introduce yourself."

He said, "Ah ... um ... I ... I'm ..."

The interviewer said, "I'm sorry, please next."

Stepping out of the door, he crouched against the wall, tearing his resume to pieces ...

 第四个故事

团队准备整整一月，精心编制各种节目，终于迎来了万众期待的年会。

董事长在员工热情的掌声中缓步走上讲台，举起话筒方才发觉演讲稿落在座位上，他望着台下黑压压的人群，一双双亮晶晶的眼睛，忽然觉得呼吸急促，头冒冷汗，双脚发抖……

他不禁往讲台中间挪了挪，这一挪，却不小心把话筒掉到了地上，台下一下子热闹起来，传来闷声的笑声。

他完全慌了神，已不记得演讲稿的内容，有些尴尬地弯下腰捡起话筒咳了两声说：“哈哈，大家，吃好，喝好！谢谢！”

然后像逃荒般地窜下台回到座位，连忙拿起纸巾擦拭满头汗水，剧烈的心跳声在耳畔久久不能散去……

Fourth story

The team prepared for a whole month, carefully compiled various programs, and finally ushered in the much-anticipated annual meeting.

The chairman slowly walked up to the podium with the warm applause of the employees, and raised the microphone before he realized that the speech fell on the seat. He looked at the crowd under the stage, his bright eyes, and suddenly felt shortness of breath and cold sweat on his head. Your feet are shaking ...

He couldn't help but move to the middle of the podium, but this accidentally dropped the microphone to the ground, and the audience burst into excitement and heard a muffled laughter.

He was completely panicked, and could not remember the contents of the speech. He bent down a bit awkwardly, picked up the microphone and coughed twice: "Haha, everyone, eat well, drink well! Thank you!"

Then fleeing from the stage like a flee, returning to the seat, quickly picking up a tissue and wiping sweat, the intense heartbeat can't disappear for a long time in my ears ...

 第五个故事

商业路演现场，他拿着一个团队整整一个月不眠不休做出的商业计划书，已经有20万高粘度粉丝，信心十足。

当话筒递到他手上，投资人说：“请用三句话说明你的项目。”

他说：“呃……我们做的是……是……”

投资人说：“谢谢，请下一位。”

他黯然坐下，合作伙伴们都黯然低下了头，拍了拍他的肩膀，起身离去……

Fifth story

At the commercial roadshow, he held a team of business plans that he had been working on for a whole month, and had 200,000 high-viscosity fans with confidence.

When the microphone was passed to him, the investor said, "Please explain your project in three sentences."

He said, "Uh ... what we do is ... yes ..."

The investor said, "Thank you, please next."

He sat down sadly, the partners all bowed their heads sadly, patted his shoulder, got up and left ...

 第六个故事

古有贾诩一句话引起百年战乱，亦有张仪三寸不烂之舌抵百万雄狮。

历史由人演绎，社会由人诠释，生活由人改变。

今天，当我们面对各种繁琐，各种误解，各种质疑，各种矛盾，各种委屈，我们都说，这是人造成的。

蓦然回首，三省吾身，这是——沟通——造成的！

Sixth story

In the ancient times, Jia Yi's words caused a hundred years of war, and Zhang Yi's three-inch non-rotten tongue arrived at a million male lions.

History is interpreted by people, society is interpreted by people, and life is changed by people.

Today, when we face all kinds of tedious, all kinds of misunderstandings, all kinds of doubts, all kinds of contradictions, all kinds of grievances, we all say that this is caused by people.

Suddenly looking back, the three provinces are my body, this is-communication-caused!

 第N个故事

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Nth story

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“莲花演说”源自“舌灿莲花，口吐莲花”，主要形容人口才好，口齿伶俐，能言善道，有如莲花般的美妙。莲花，也有纯洁，正直，吉祥之意。古月今心取“莲花演说”，意其一是人若有纯洁正直的心，逢人多说吉祥的话，这样人们便会心生欢喜，人事顺利，性格也就乐观包容，命运也就更加舒顺。意其二，公众演说，能够能言善道，犹如莲花般的美妙。

The "lotus speech" originates from "tongue lotus, spit lotus". It mainly describes the population, is articulate, can speak well, and is as beautiful as a lotus. Lotus also means purity, integrity, and auspiciousness. Gu Yuejin took the "lotus speech". One of the reasons is that if people have a pure and upright heart and say auspicious words every time, people will rejoice in their hearts, things will be smooth, their personality will be optimistic and tolerant, and their destiny will be even more. Shushun. Secondly, public speeches can speak kindly, just like a lotus flower.

 在这个科技日新月异的时代，移动互联网深入到我们生活的方方面面，改变了我们的社交方式，看似缩短了人与人之间的距离。恰恰相反的是，而今“人际交往”却成为大家津津乐道的话题，人们热衷学习“情商”，“智商”，“处理人际关系”。

In this rapidly changing age of technology, mobile Internet has penetrated into every aspect of our lives, changed the way we socialize, and seems to shorten the distance between people. On the contrary, "interpersonal communication" has become a topic that everyone talks about. People are keen to learn "EQ", "IQ", and "handling interpersonal relationships".

 古月今心说，从他帮助的几千位因公众演说有障碍的学员，他发现经常用正确的方式进行演说训练，不仅让更多的人成功的解决了公众演说障碍，还更加提高了沟通和谈判能力，连同日常人际关系也有积极改善。而今，古月今心已经帮助几千人因为沟通，因为演说问题而遇到困惑的人。而今，莲花演说遍布全国多个一线城市，成为中国极具影响力的互动演说训练机构，收获学员大量赞誉。

Gu Yuejinxin said that from the thousands of trainees who have difficulty with public speaking, he found that often speaking training in the right way not only allows more people to successfully solve public speaking obstacles, but also improves Communication and negotiation skills, along with daily interpersonal relationships, have also improved. Today, Gu Yuejin Xin has helped thousands of people who are confused because of communication and speech problems. Nowadays, Lotus speeches have spread across many first-tier cities across the country, and have become China's most influential interactive speech training institutions, receiving a lot of praise from students.

 古月今心过去十二年，把自己的全部心血和精力专注于沟通、演说事业，未来，他将一如既往……他只是希望能够帮更多人解决沟通问题，让他们不会再因为沟通问题失去家庭，不会因为沟通问题失去机会，不会因为沟通问题失去自信，不会因为沟通问题铸就大错后悔终生。

For the past twelve years, Gu Yuejinxin has devoted all his efforts and energy to the cause of communication and speaking. In the future, he will continue as always ... He just hopes to help more people solve communication problems so that they will not be affected by communication problems If you lose your family, you will not lose opportunities because of communication problems, you will not lose confidence because of communication problems, and you will not regret your life because of communication problems.

 沟通，让你学会怎么好好生活；沟通，让你学会怎么面对他人；沟通，让你学会怎么认识自己；沟通，让你学会怎样把握机会；沟通，改变命运，演讲，改变人生……古月今心说：人一生，学会好好说话，你会发现满是惊喜 。 提升演讲，做一个懂得一对多、一对一沟通的人。

Communication lets you learn how to live well; communication lets you learn how to face others; communication lets you learn how to know yourself; communication lets you learn how to grasp opportunities; communication, changes fate, lectures, changes life ... Gu Yue Jinxin said: In your life, learn to speak well, you will find it full of surprises. Improve the presentation and be a person who understands one-to-many and one-to-one communication.