#VERY proud of the various refrains of 'I want you so badly but you could be anyone' haha

[splickedylit]

i saw you were reposting some of the SU videos you had made and i was wondering if you could repost the Sky Full Of Song one? it was one of my favorite edits ever and i had been wondering what had happened to it/if it had been copyright claimed

Sky Full of Diamond Song

You heard something--from the sky, a sound… a song?

man, I didn't even know this one had gotten blocked, haha. QuQ Here you go, anon!

[ridiasfangirlings]

Ridia, do u remember the Drabble I ask on twitter? The one with Mikorei play "gay chicken" for 14 years, and the adopted cat saru ?

Mikorei crack? Mikorei crack.

Totsuka-kun calls it 'gay chicken.'

Munakata has never heard of such a game, and indeed he isn't certain what a gay chicken has to do with the way he and Suoh remain constantly at odds. Being the student council president, it is simply Munakata's job to keep an eye on those wayward youth who require more guidance in life.

Suoh in particular has clearly from the start required more guidance than most. Munakata has caught him twice now smoking behind the school during lunch break in just this week, and it's only Wednesday. There was also the matter of sleeping during homeroom, getting into various fights with other delinquents and the issue of his hair color, which Munakata suspects is not quite as natural as Suoh wishes everyone to think it is.

It is for this reason, and this reason only, that their paths cross more often than not. Naturally if he had his way Munakata would see no reason to spend time with such an incorrigible person. Munakata has far better things to do than pin Suoh to a locker and lecture him on the proper way to wear a school uniform (it was Suoh's friend Totsuka Tatara who also described Munakata's actions as 'pinning him up against a locker.' For his part, Munakata was simply trying to make certain that his words were being properly heeded, and he's always thought it best to maintain close and consistent eye contact when trying to make one's point in a clear and concise manner).

Totsuka has been giggling about it for nearly two weeks for some reason. In fact, it occurs to Munakata that there has been some school gossip in general about his relationship with Suoh – why they need to 'get a room,' and what exactly they are supposed to do there, he's not entirely certain. Somehow Munakata suspects that everyone's gotten their 'relationship' – if that's even the best term for it, and he doesn't believe it is – entirely wrong.

“'Gay chicken,' Totsuka-kun?” Munakata attempts to slide the lunch tray under Suoh's arms, Suoh having rested his head on the cafeteria table in an apparent attempt to sleep through lunch, utterly ignoring the importance of proper nutrition and its relationship to school performance.

“It's a new game, Munakata-san!” Totsuka nods his head emphatically. On his opposite side Suoh's other friend Kusanagi Izumo groans and puts a hand to his head. Suoh doesn't even so much as grunt, and Munakata considers 'accidentally' hitting him in the head with the tray. “No one's sure who's winning yet, you or King.”

“I was unaware we were playing a game.” Suoh snores, and Munakata's elbow just somehow manages to find the back of his neck. Suoh doesn't even blink, much less wake up.

“That's the fun part.” Totsuka's eyes are shining and Kusanagi's very deliberately not looking at any of them. “You see, Munakata-san...” He leans over to whisper the rules in Munakata's ear.

“I see.” Munakata considers. He hadn't expected Suoh to play this kind of game, but then again Suoh's thought process is as always entirely opposite of what Munakata would assume any normal person's should be. That he's possibly being toyed with and hasn't noticed until now is perhaps a bit irritating, as Munakata has always been quite proud of his observation skills. That he might be losing is even more bothersome.

Not that Munakata would care about such things. Munakata has had his entire career path complete with schooling and eventual government position mapped out since he was five, and so far his plan has been proceeding just as he'd hoped. Something as trivial as this...'gay chicken,' being played by a layabout with no ambition at all like Suoh, that is not and has never been in his calculations.

Suoh snorts and Munakata looks down, just in time to meet his gaze. Despite having presumably slept through the entire conversation Suoh is smirking, and Munakata's eyes narrow in displeasure.

Munakata decides that he will not be losing to such a person, not even in the most trivial of ways, and that is the absolute and only reason that he grabs Suoh by the collar and hauls him up so that they are face to face before promptly and purposefully pinning him to the lunch table with a kiss.

Munakata is still unsure as to precisely what kind of game gay chicken is supposed to be, but either way he intends to be the winner.

–

“Suoh, please refrain from snoring during the movie.”

Mikoto looks at him sidelong, eyelids heavy over piercing eyes, not so much sitting in his seat as draping himself over it like some manner of large sleepy cat. Munakata suggested the movie, a fascinating true crime documentary that he's been wanting to see for weeks. Suoh agreed, presumably in order to keep from losing the game too badly.

(They have been playing gay chicken for three months. So far, they have been on five dates, three of which were initiated by Munakata. Mikoto has gained a brief lead by being the first to kiss with tongue. Munakata is determined to regain his advantage and assumed that making out in a movie theater would at least give him enough points to draw even, if Suoh could stay awake long enough for Munakata to initiate the kissing.)

“ 'S boring.” Mikoto yawns, head thrown back, hair tousled. One leg is propped up on the armrest between them, and Munakata irritably shoves it back down. Mikoto grins in response, that absolutely infuriating – (intoxicating) – grin of his, and Munakata is not amused.

“My apologies. Perhaps a children's movie would have been more to your taste.”

“Not my fault you suck at picking out dates, Munakata.” Mikoto reaches over and grabs a fistful of popcorn out of the bag propped on Munakata's lap, tossing it into his mouth. Bits of it stick to his hands and he wipes them on his pants, even though Munakata brought plenty of napkins for just this reason.

“I have not been impressed with your abilities in that department either, thus far. Please use a napkin like a civilized person.” Munakata holds one out and Mikoto very deliberately wipes a hand on his pants again, still smirking.

He is honestly the most irritating man Munakata has ever met. Munakata has no idea why anyone would willingly subject themselves to spending time with such an insufferable person – the wild red hair, the slow rumbling voice that drawls out nothing but nonsense, those golden eyes that look like they belong to some beast from the savannah. A person with no plans and no ambition, who had looked at Munakata's carefully laid future path and rolled his eyes, wondering why Munakata willingly chose to put himself in society's cage.

“Being this close to you absolutely disgusts me,” Munakata says, taking one of Mikoto's hands and very slowly putting his mouth around one of the fingers.

Within five minutes Suoh has his back against the flat of the chair with Munakata leaning over him and Munakata's certain they both hate it, breathing each other's air, and as soon as he stops kissing Mikoto's lips he intends to say as much.

–

Munakata is fully aware that Suoh is entirely unequipped to handle a proper wedding, which is why when the time comes he takes matters into his own hands.

Certainly he'd been surprised, when Suoh had decided to escalate things by proposing. Until that moment Munakata had assumed that his lead was secure, having initiated physical relations months ago. Surely there was no way Suoh could top that (well, topping had been another issue entirely, which Munakata had intended to thoroughly discuss if Suoh hadn't told him to shut up and take his clothes off). Suoh had responded by stopping by the small government office where Munakata was currently working as an intern and all but tossing a ring at him.

“Oya? Such an unexpected gift. I was unaware that you were fond of fine jewelry, Suoh.” Munakata had put the ring on his finger, admiring the perfect fit while Mikoto just shrugged.

“Figured a frilly guy like you would expect a fancy engagement ring.”

(Suoh works as a bouncer and Munakata doubts that it pays much, so he made certain later to thank Kusanagi Izumo for the ring.)

Proposal being now off the table, Munakata knows there is only one way to maintain his lead in gay chicken. He knows that Suoh will be working in Kusanagi's bar in the afternoon, so he makes certain to stop by and drop the paper off in Mikoto's hands.

“What's this?” Mikoto unrolled it, leaning against the bar and letting his cigarette get irresponsibly close to the paper in his other hand.

“A marriage certificate. Please be assured that I have made certain everything was executed according to law. If you would sign here please.”

There's a slightly bemused look on Mikoto's face as he grabs a pen from the bar counter and signs his name before handing the certificate back to Munakata. Munakata feels the pleasant flush of victory as he places the paper back inside his jacket pocket.

“Very good. I will see you back tonight at our apartment for the wedding night.”

“Oi. Munakata.” Munakata stops at the sound of Suoh's voice and turns. Suoh has one hand resting on his chin, leg propped on a chair, a puff of cigarette smoke billowing in the air as he gives that smile Munakata has become all too accustomed to (the one that perhaps, if Munakata were in the business of giving up points, would make a pleasant twinge run down his spine).

“Yes, Suoh?”

“Hope you planned a good honeymoon.”

Munakata returns the smile with his own triumphant smirk. Naturally he already has the plane tickets ordered.

--

They've adopted a cat.

Munakata picked it up from some foster for troubled pets or something like that. Its name is Saruhiko and Mikoto's pretty sure the damn thing hates his guts. The stupid thing hisses whenever Mikoto walks by and it's already turned two of his pillowcases into fancy ribbons and stuffing. It spends half its time clawing up the sofa and the rest of the time outside baiting the neighbor's chihuahua

“Suoh. It is your turn to feed the cat.”

“Eh?” Mikoto opens his eyes and sees Munakata there staring down at him, standing beside the couch. There's already grooves in the cushions from how often Mikoto's slept there. It was his decision to buy it, since Munakata insisted on picking out the wallpaper and the flooring and every other bit of the apartment.

“I have fed Saruhiko already today, and I have work to finish. If you could feed our cat, please.”

Our. Mikoto snorts, not even bothering to get up.

“It's your stupid cat.”

“Our cat, Suoh.” Munakata leans down to pet the cat and Mikoto swears the little demon takes a swipe at him, which Munakata easily manages to avoid. “He is hungry. If you could feed him.”

Mikoto huffs but sits up, rubbing the back of his head as he swings his feet over onto the floor. Saruhiko promptly claws his ankles and Mikoto leans down to pick it up by the scruff of the neck.

“Adult cats are not meant to be carried that way.” Munakata's tone is filled with light admonishment and Mikoto sighs, putting the cat back on the floor. Saruhiko promptly hides under the couch, blue eyes glaring balefully out at him. “Remember to heat the food up before you give it to him. And do not use the old bag, he does not eat anything older than four days.”

Damn picky cat. Mikoto stretches, heading towards the kitchen.

“Suoh.” He glances back and Munakata smiles triumphantly, the ring on his finger reflecting gold off the rims of his glasses. “I believe I am winning.”

“...Right.” Mikoto disappears into the kitchen, looking for the cat food. He doesn't intend to let Munakata win forever, of course. The bastard's insufferable enough as it is.

Eventually Mikoto will probably tell him, that he stopped playing gay chicken years ago.

Eventually.

[caliphascheherazade]

“For years, I described myself as someone who wasn’t prone to anger. “I don’t get angry,” I said. “I get sad.” I believed this inclination was mainly about my personality — that sadness was a more natural emotion for me than anger, that I was somehow built this way. It’s easy to misunderstand the self as private, when it’s rarely private at all: It’s always a public artifact, never fixed, perpetually sculpted by social forces. In truth, I was proud to describe myself in terms of sadness rather than anger. Why? Sadness seemed more refined and also more selfless — as if you were holding the pain inside yourself, rather than making someone else deal with its blunt-force trauma.

But a few years ago, I started to get a knot in my gut at the canned cadences of my own refrain: I don’t get angry. I get sad. At the shrillest moments of our own self-declarations — I am X, I am not Y — we often hear in that tinny register another truth, lurking expectantly, and begin to realize there are things about ourselves we don’t yet know. By which I mean that at a certain point, I started to suspect I was angrier than I thought.

Of course it wasn’t anger when I was 4 years old and took a pair of scissors to my parents’ couch — wanting so badly to destroy something, whatever I could. Of course it wasn’t anger when I was 16 and my boyfriend broke up with me, and I cut up the inside of my own ankle — wanting so badly to destroy something, whatever I could. Of course it wasn’t anger when I was 34 and fighting with my husband, when I screamed into a pillow after he left the house so our daughter wouldn’t hear, then threw my cellphone across the room and spent the next 10 minutes searching for it under the bed, and finally found it in a small pile of cat vomit. Of course it wasn’t anger when, during a faculty meeting early in my teaching days, I distributed statistics about how many female students in our department had reported instances of sexual harassment the year before: more than half of them.

A faculty member grew indignant and insisted that most of those claims probably didn’t have any basis at all. I clenched my fists. I struggled to speak. It wasn’t that I could say for sure what had happened in each of those cases — of course I couldn’t, they were just anonymous numbers on the page — but their sheer volume seemed horrifying. It demanded attention. I honestly hadn’t expected that anyone would resist these numbers or force me to account for why it was important to look at them. The scrutiny of the room made me struggle for words just when I needed them most. It made me dig my nails into my palm. What was that emotion? It was not sadness. It was rage.

The phenomenon of female anger has often been turned against itself, the figure of the angry woman reframed as threat — not the one who has been harmed, but the one bent on harming. She conjures a lineage of threatening archetypes: the harpy and her talons, the witch and her spells, the medusa and her writhing locks. The notion that female anger is unnatural or destructive is learned young; children report perceiving displays of anger as more acceptable from boys than from girls. According to a review of studies of gender and anger written in 2000 by Ann M. Kring, a psychology professor at the University of California, Berkeley, men and women self-report “anger episodes” with comparable degrees of frequency, but women report experiencing more shame and embarrassment in their aftermath. People are more likely to use words like “bitchy” and “hostile” to describe female anger, while male anger is more likely to be described as “strong.” Kring reported that men are more likely to express their anger by physically assaulting objects or verbally attacking other people, while women are more likely to cry when they get angry, as if their bodies are forcibly returning them to the appearance of the emotion — sadness — with which they are most commonly associated.

A 2016 study found that it took longer for people to correctly identify the gender of female faces displaying an angry expression, as if the emotion had wandered out of its natural habitat by finding its way to their features. A 1990 study conducted by the psychologists Ulf Dimberg and L.O. Lundquist found that when female faces are recognized as angry, their expressions are rated as more hostile than comparable expressions on the faces of men — as if their violation of social expectations had already made their anger seem more extreme, increasing its volume beyond what could be tolerated.

In “What Happened,” her account of the 2016 presidential election, Hillary Clinton describes the pressure not to come across as angry during the course of her entire political career — “a lot of people recoil from an angry woman,” she writes — as well as her own desire not to be consumed by anger after she lost the race, “so that the rest of my life wouldn’t be spent like Miss Havisham from Charles Dickens’s ‘Great Expectations,’ rattling around my house obsessing over what might have been.” The specter of Dickens’s ranting spinster — spurned and embittered in her crumbling wedding dress, plotting her elaborate revenge — casts a long shadow over every woman who dares to get mad.

If an angry woman makes people uneasy, then her more palatable counterpart, the sad woman, summons sympathy more readily. She often looks beautiful in her suffering: ennobled, transfigured, elegant. Angry women are messier. Their pain threatens to cause more collateral damage. It’s as if the prospect of a woman’s anger harming other people threatens to rob her of the social capital she has gained by being wronged. We are most comfortable with female anger when it promises to regulate itself, to refrain from recklessness, to stay civilized.

Consider the red-carpet clip of Uma Thurman that went viral in November, during the initial swell of sexual-harassment accusations. The clip doesn’t actually show Thurman’s getting angry. It shows her very conspicuously refusing to get angry. After commending the Hollywood women who had spoken out about their experiences of sexual assault, she said that she was “waiting to feel less angry” before she spoke herself. It was curious that Thurman’s public declarations were lauded as a triumphant vision of female anger, because the clip offered precisely the version of female anger that we’ve long been socialized to produce and accept: not the spectacle of female anger unleashed, but the spectacle of female anger restrained, sharpened to a photogenic point. By withholding the specific story of whatever made her angry, Thurman made her anger itself the story — and the raw force of her struggle not to get angry on that red carpet summoned the force of her anger even more powerfully than its full explosion would have, just as the monster in a movie is most frightening when it only appears offscreen.

This was a question I began to consider quite frequently as the slew of news stories accrued last fall: How much female anger has been lurking offscreen? How much anger has been biding its time and biting its tongue, wary of being pathologized as hysteria or dismissed as paranoia? And what of my own vexed feelings about all this female anger? Why were they even vexed? It seemed a failure of moral sentiment or a betrayal of feminism, as if I were somehow siding with the patriarchy, or had internalized it so thoroughly I couldn’t even spot the edges of its toxic residue. I intuitively embraced and supported other women’s anger but struggled to claim my own. Some of this had to do with the ways I’d been lucky — I had experienced all kinds of gendered aggression, but nothing equivalent to the horror stories so many other women have lived through. But it also had to do with an abiding aversion to anger that still festered like rot inside me. In what I had always understood as self-awareness — I don’t get angry. I get sad — I came to see my own complicity in the same logic that has trained women to bury their anger or perform its absence.

For a long time, I was drawn to “sad lady” icons: the scribes and bards of loneliness and melancholy. As a certain kind of slightly morbid, slightly depressive, slightly self-intoxicated, deeply predictable, pre-emptively apologetic literary fan-girl, I loved Sylvia Plath. I was obsessed with her own obsession with her own blood (“What a thrill ... that red plush”) and drawn to her suffering silhouette: a woman abandoned by her cheating husband and ensnared by the gendered double standards of domesticity. I attached myself to the mantra of her autobiographical avatar Esther Greenwood, who lies in a bathtub in “The Bell Jar,” bleeding during a rehearsal of a suicide attempt, and later stands at a funeral listening “to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am.” Her attachment to pain — her own and others’ — was also a declaration of identity. I wanted to get it tattooed on my arm.

Whenever I listened to my favorite female singers, it was easier for me to sing along to their sad lyrics than their angry ones. It was easier to play Ani DiFranco on repeat, crooning about heartbreak — “Did I ever tell you how I stopped eating/when you stopped calling me?” — than it was to hear her fury, and her irritation at the ones who stayed sad and quiet in her shadow: “Some chick says/Thank you for saying all the things I never do/I say, you know/The thanks I get is to take all the [expletive] for you.”

I kept returning to the early novels of Jean Rhys, whose wounded heroines flopped around dingy rented rooms in various European capitals, seeking solace from their heartbreak, staining cheap comforters with their wine. Sasha, the heroine of “Good Morning, Midnight” — the most famous of these early picaresques of pain — resolves to drink herself to death and manages, mainly, to cry her way across Paris. She cries at cafes, at bars, in her lousy hotel room. She cries at work. She cries in a fitting room. She cries on the street. She cries near the Seine. The closing scene of the novel is a scene of terrifying passivity: She lets a wraithlike man into her bed because she can’t summon the energy to stop him, as if she has finally lost touch with her willpower entirely. In life, Rhys was infamous for her sadness, what one friend called “her gramophone-needle-stuck-in-a-groove thing of going over and over miseries of one sort and another.” Even her biographer called her one of the greatest self-pity artists in the history of English fiction.

It took me years to understand how deeply I had misunderstood these women. I’d missed the rage that fueled Plath’s poetry like a ferocious gasoline, lifting her speakers (sometimes literally) into flight: “Now she is flying/More terrible than she ever was, red/Scar in the sky, red comet/Over the engine that killed her — the mausoleum, the wax house.” The speaker becomes a scar — this irrefutable evidence of her own pain — but this scar, in turn, becomes a comet: terrible and determined, soaring triumphant over the instruments of her own supposed destruction. I’d always been preoccupied with the pained disintegration of Plath’s speakers, but once I started looking, I saw the comet trails of their angry resurrections everywhere, delivering their unapologetic fantasies of retribution: “Out of the ash/I rise with my red hair/And I eat men like air.”

I’d loved Rhys for nearly a decade before I read her final novel, “Wide Sargasso Sea,” a reimagining of Charlotte Brontë’s “Jane Eyre” whose whole plot leads inexorably toward an act of destructive anger: The mad first wife of Mr. Rochester burns down the English country manor where she has been imprisoned in the attic for years. In this late masterpiece, the heroines of Rhys’s early novels — heartbroken, drunk, caught in complicated choreographies of passivity — are replaced by an angry woman with a torch, ready to use the master’s tools to destroy his house.

It wasn’t that these authors were writing exclusively about female anger rather than female sorrow; their writing holds both states of feeling. “Wide Sargasso Sea” excavates the deep veins of sadness running beneath an otherwise opaque act of angry destruction, and Plath’s poems are invested in articulating the complicated affective braids of bitterness, irony, anger, pride and sorrow that others often misread as monolithic sadness. “They explain people like that by saying that their minds are in watertight compartments, but it never seemed so to me,” Rhys herself once wrote. “It’s all washing about, like the bilge in the hold of a ship.”

It has always been easier to shunt female sadness and female anger into the “watertight compartments” of opposing archetypes, rather than acknowledging the ways they run together in the cargo hold of every female psyche. Near the end of the new biopic “I, Tonya,” Tonya Harding’s character explains: “America, they want someone to love, but they want someone to hate.” The timing of the film’s release, in late 2017, seemed cosmically apt. It resurrected a definitional prototype of female anger — at least for many women like me, who came of age during the 1990s — at the precise moment that so many women were starting to get publicly, explicitly, unapologetically angry.

Harding was an object of fascination not just because of the soap opera she dangled before the public gaze — supposedly conspiring with her ex-husband and an associate to plan an attack on her rival figure skater Nancy Kerrigan — but also because she and Kerrigan provided a yin and yang of primal female archetypes. As a vision of anger — uncouth and unrestrained, the woman everyone loved to hate, exploding at the judges when they didn’t give her the scores she felt she deserved — Harding was the perfect foil for the elegant suffering of Kerrigan, sobbing in her lacy white leotard. Together they were an impossible duo to turn away from: the sad girl and the mad girl. Wounded and wicked. Their binary segregated one vision of femininity we adored (rule-abiding, delicate, hurting) from another we despised (trashy, whiny, angry). Harding was strong; she was poor; she was pissed off; and eventually, in the narrative embraced by the public, she turned those feelings into violence. But “I, Tonya” illuminates what so little press coverage at the time paid attention to: the perfect storm of violence that produced Harding’s anger in the first place — her mother’s abuse and her husband’s. Which is to say: No woman’s anger is an island.

When the Harding and Kerrigan controversy swept the media, I was 10 years old. Their story was imprinted onto me as a series of reductive but indelible brush strokes: one woman shouting at the media, another woman weeping just beyond the ice rink. But after watching “I, Tonya” and realizing how much these two women had existed to me as ideas, rather than as women, I did what any reasonable person would do: I Googled “Tonya and Nancy” obsessively. I Googled: “Did Tonya ever apologize to Nancy?” I Googled: “Tonya Harding boxing career?” and discovered that it effectively began with her 2002 “Celebrity Boxing” match against Paula Jones — two women paid to perform the absurd caricatures of vengeful femininity the public had projected onto them, the woman who cried harassment versus the woman who bashed kneecaps.

In the documentaries I watched, I found Harding difficult to like. She comes off as a self-deluded liar with a robust victim complex, focused on her own misfortune to the exclusion of anyone else’s. But what does the fact that I found Harding “difficult to like” say about the kind of women I’m comfortable liking? Did I want the plotline in which the woman who has survived her own hard life — abusive mother, abusive husband, enduring poverty — also emerges with a “likable” personality: a plucky spirit, a determined work ethic and a graceful, self-effacing relationship to her own suffering?

The vision of Harding in “I, Tonya” is something close to the opposite of self-effacing. The film even includes a fantastical re-enactment of the crime, which became popularly known as the “whack heard round the world,” in which Harding stands over Kerrigan’s cowering body, baton raised high above her head, striking her bloody knee until Harding turns back toward the camera — her face defiant and splattered with Kerrigan’s blood. Even though the attack was actually carried out by a hired hit man, this imagined scene distills the version of the story that America became obsessed with, in which one woman’s anger leaves another woman traumatized.

But America’s obsession with these two women wasn’t that simple. There was another story that rose up in opposition. In this shadow story, Harding wasn’t a monster but a victim, an underdog unfairly vilified, and Kerrigan was a crybaby who made too much of her pain. In a 2014 Deadspin essay, “Confessions of a Tonya Harding Apologist,” Lucy Madison wrote: “She represented the fulfillment of an adolescent revenge fantasy — my adolescent revenge fantasy, the one where the girl who doesn’t quite fit in manages to soar over everyone’s [expletive] without giving up a fraction of her prerogative — and I could not have loved her more.” When Kerrigan crouched sobbing on the floor near the training rink, right after the attack (Newsweek described it as “the sound of one dream breaking”), she famously cried out: “Why? Why? Why?” But when Newsweek ran the story on its cover, it printed the quote as: “Why Me?” The single added word turned her shock into keening self-pity.

These two seemingly contradictory versions of Harding and Kerrigan — raging bitch and innocent victim, or bad-girl hero and whiny crybaby — offered the same cutout dolls dressed in different costumes. The entitled weeper was the unacceptable version of a stoic victim; the scrappy underdog was the acceptable version of a raging bitch. At first glance, they seemed like opposite stories, betraying our conflicted collective relationship to female anger — that it’s either heroic or uncontrollably destructive — and our love-hate relationship with victimhood itself: We love a victim to hurt for but grow irritated by one who hurts too much. Both stories, however, insisted upon the same segregation: A woman couldn’t hurt and be hurt at once. She could be either angry or sad. It was easier to outsource those emotions to the bodies of separate women than it was to acknowledge that they reside together in the body of every woman.

Ten years ago in Nicaragua, a man punched me in the face on a dark street. As I sat on a curb afterward — covered in my own blood, holding a cold bottle of beer against my broken nose — a cop asked me for a physical description of the man who had just mugged me. Maybe 20 minutes later, a police vehicle pulled up: a pickup truck outfitted with a barred cage in the back. There was a man in the cage.

“Is this him?” the cop asked. I shook my head, horrified, acutely aware of my own power — realizing, in that moment, that simply saying I was hurt could take away a stranger’s liberty. I was a white woman, a foreigner volunteering at a local school, and I felt ashamed of my own familiar silhouette: a vulnerable white woman crying danger at anonymous men lurking in the shadows. I felt scared and embarrassed to be scared. I felt embarrassed that everyone was making such a fuss. One thing I did not feel was anger.

That night, my sense of guilt — my shame at being someone deemed worthy of protection, and at the ways that protection might endanger others — effectively blocked my awareness of my own anger. It was as if my privilege outweighed my vulnerability, and that meant I wasn’t entitled to any anger at all. But if I struggled to feel entitled to anger that night in Nicaragua, I have since come to realize that the real entitlement has never been anger; it has always been its absence. The aversion to anger I had understood in terms of temperament or intention was, in all honesty, also a luxury. When the black feminist writer and activist Audre Lorde described her anger as a lifelong response to systemic racism, she insisted upon it as a product of the larger social landscape rather than private emotional ecology: “I have lived with that anger, on that anger, beneath that anger, on top of that anger ... for most of my life.”

After the Uma Thurman clip went viral, the Trinidadian journalist Stacy-Marie Ishmael tweeted: “*interesting* which kinds of women are praised for public anger. I’ve spent my whole career reassuring people this is just my face.” Michelle Obama was dogged by the label of “angry black woman” for the duration of her husband’s time in office. Scientific research has suggested that the experience of racism leads African-Americans to suffer from higher blood pressure than white Americans and has hypothesized that this disparity arises from the fact that they accordingly experience more anger and are simultaneously expected to suppress it. The tennis superstar Serena Williams was fined over $80,000 for an angry outburst against a lineswoman at the U.S. Open in 2009: “I swear to God, I’ll [expletive] take this ball and shove it down your [expletive] throat.” Gretchen Carlson, a Fox anchor at the time, called another one of Williams’s angry outbursts in 2011 a symbol of “what’s wrong with our society today.” Carlson, of course, has since come to embody a certain brand of female empowerment: One of the leading voices accusing the late Fox News chairman Roger Ailes of sexual harassment, she recently published a book called “Be Fierce: Stop Harassment and Take Your Power Back.” But the portrait on its cover — of a fair-skinned, blond-haired woman smiling slightly in a dark turtleneck — reminds us that fierceness has always been more palatable from some women than from others.

What good is anger, anyway? The philosopher Martha Nussbaum invokes Aristotle’s definition of anger as “a response to a significant damage” that “contains within itself a hope for payback” to argue that anger is not only “a stupid way to run one’s life” but also a corrosive public force, predicated on the false belief that payback can redress the wrongdoing that inspired it. She points out that women have often embraced the right to their own anger as a “vindication of equality,” part of a larger project of empowerment, but that its promise as a barometer of equality shouldn’t obscure our vision of its dangers. In this current moment of ascendant female anger, are we taking too much for granted about its value? What if we could make space for both anger and a reckoning with its price?

In her seminal 1981 essay, “The Uses of Anger,” Audre Lorde weighs the value of anger differently than Nussbaum: not in terms of retribution, but in terms of connection and survival. It’s not just a byproduct of systemic evils, she argues, but a catalyst for useful discomfort and clearer dialogue. “I have suckled the wolf’s lip of anger,” she writes, “and I have used it for illumination, laughter, protection, fire in places where there was no light, no food, no sisters, no quarter.” Anger isn’t just a blaze burning structures to the ground; it also casts a glow, generates heat and brings bodies into communion. “Every woman has a well-stocked arsenal of anger potentially useful against those oppressions,” Lorde writes, “which brought that anger into being.”

Confronting my own aversion to anger asked me to shift from seeing it simply as an emotion to be felt, and toward understanding it as a tool to be used: part of a well-stocked arsenal. When I walked in the Women’s March in Washington a year ago — one body among thousands — the act of marching didn’t just mean claiming the right to a voice; it meant publicly declaring my resolve to use it. I’ve come to think of anger in similar terms: not as a claiming of victimhood but as an owning of accountability. As I write this essay eight months pregnant, I don’t hope that my daughter never gets angry. I hope that she lives in a world that can recognize the ways anger and sadness live together, and the ways rage and responsibility, so often seen as natural enemies, can live together as well.

“Once upon a time/I had enough anger in me to crack crystal,” the poet Kiki Petrosino writes in her 2011 poem “At the Teahouse.” “I boiled up from bed/in my enormous nightdress, with my lungs full of burning/chrysanthemums.” This is a vision of anger as fuel and fire, as a powerful inoculation against passivity, as strange but holy milk suckled from the wolf. This anger is more like an itch than a wound. It demands that something happen. It’s my own rage at that faculty meeting, when the voices of students who had become statistics at our fingertips were being asked to hush up, to step back into their tidy columns. This anger isn’t about deserving. It’s about necessity: what needs to boil us out of bed and billow our dresses, what needs to burn in our voices, glowing and fearsome, fully aware of its own heat.”

— LESLIE JAMISON, “I USED TO INSISIT I DIDN’T GET ANGRY. NOT ANYMORE.”

[internutter]

You know, certain songs from Hamilton remind me of our Dear Ango, or well specific lines like " I am not throwing away my shot" or " him and Agatha with " Helpless" in a manner of speaking ( or I'm a hopeless romantic) I just wanted to know your thoughts on it all?

It is very, very easy to blend loves when you have multifandom obsessions. See: numerous crossovers.

When it comes to blending music and fiction, I’ve... always despised badly-written songfic. When I say “badly written”, I mean someone’s copy-pasta’d the lyrics into a document and added what amounts to their stage directions for their fave characters with little in the way of flavour or emotion. Therefore, I avoid that shit like the plague.

I can, have, and will use various fitting lyrics as a combo reference/goof, and do advise that practice for others. It’s fun. Especially when it’s spotted by others.

Music inspires. It helps some of us (points to self) focus. Sometimes it also distracts (points to self). My ASD may be comorb’d with AD(H)D, I can’t tell for sure.

Back to the point...

There’s large swathes of Helpless that just don’t fit. As far as I’ve written, Agatha doesn’t have a sister or siblings [like Agatha Heterodyne, who she’s named after - see what I mean about blending loves?] so the bit about the sister won’t mesh.

Choruses and refrains, though? Look into your eyes and I’m drowning in ‘em... is a definite win. 10/10, would use that lyric five-ever.

Judiciously sampling the right lyrics is always win. I mean, I’m the goober who wrote Unexpectedly Deadly just so I could have that Mr Brightside goof in there. Also as a PSA to fucking vaccinate everyone who actually can be vaccinated, please and thank.

And in closing - if a set of lyrics gives you a rampant rabid fic idea, then write that mofo. Do not let yourself be embarrassed about the quality or lack thereof. Be proud that you made a thing. Then make a better thing on the next round and be proud of that.

I’ve been writing weird stories since -yeesh- age five to six. I’m forty-six now. Everyone has to start somewhere and maybe this is your call.

In brief: (One of us-style chant) Do the thing! Do the thing! Goople gobble, goople gobble. Do the thing!

[okimargarvez]

I HAVE TO GO

Original title: Ora devo andare.

Prompt: go away.

Warning: sequel of Imperfect .

Genre: romantic, drama, angst, friendship.

Characters: Penelope Garcia, Luke Alvez, JJ, Emily, BAU team.

Pairing: Garvez.

Note: oneshot 26 in Garvez collection.

Legend: 🔦.

Song mentioned: Per un po’ sparirò, Tiziano Ferro.

MY OTHER GARVEZ STORIES

This story is dedicated to my Peruvian friend and fellow in night chatter @thinitta

I HAVE TO GO

For those who believed that love was take and run away, for those who will still believe in it from now on...

Obviously is raining. And she can't say that this displeased to her, the time is perfectly matched with her internal mood. She could even almost manage to convince herself that she was the actress of some film noir.

Penelope hugs her suitcase, sheltered under a colorful umbrella. Or in Singing in the rain. She begins to hum the melody in a low voice. Headlights illuminate the street strangely little traffic. She looks her reflected in a puddle. She sighs and moves forward, without looking over her shoulder, towards her apartment.

The taxi stops in front of her gate. A 60 ages old man comes down and, after kindly greeting her, loads the only baggage behind it, then opens the door for her. She closes the umbrella and shakes off a few drops of rain. Inside there is a nice warmth, but it’s not powerful enough. It can’t contrast with the frost that pervades her.

The driver was tired to hear the complaints of people on who knows what various topics (Reid had mentioned a study about it, which showed that people open up mostly with hairdressers, taxi drivers and some other category that he couldn’t remember) he became a bit of a psychologist: he realized that the blonde woman didn’t want to talk and left her lost in her own thoughts. Probably he also notices that in the middle she begins a silent cry, but something in her bearing, in her look, in her eyes, suggests him that it’s a serious matter, yes, there is something extremely proud in her tears.

I don’t have to think about it, but now what is the use of censoring me, forcing me not to do it? He'll never know it. So, I ask myself: what is Luke doing right now? He will be with her, probably. They'll be... She bites her lips, closes her eyes and forces herself to say it. They'll making love, surely. After spending a quiet evening watching some stupid TV program. His arm around Lisa's shoulders, she with her head resting on his chest, every now and then she’ll have raised her chin to look for his lips ... and then they will have laughed, he’ll have bent his mouth in that strange way, so sexy and mischievous and he’ll have proposed turning off the TV to move on to something more interesting. And then they may fall asleep together, legs intertwined, his arm on her stomach and this morning he’ll bring her the breakfast to bed and...

She believed she was strong, that she would be able to pretend that everything was going well, that nothing had changed. This was until Lisa had appeared from O'Keef, shattering the barrier between work and private life. She couldn’t hide what she felt, could no longer joke with herself and settle for that little, now that Luke had a girlfriend, especially if she was there, present.

And realizing how much their behavior together was natural, this had finally killed her. It wasn’t the adventure of a night, or a "phase". Surely Luke would have married Lisa, just as Derek had ended up doing the same with Savannah. It wasn’t about seeing the overlaps where there weren't: they were both female doctors, beautiful women and good people.

May you be happy, Luke. I wish you only this.

But she wouldn’t stay there to see it.

 For those who believed that giving oneself means being strong, I say no, nothing at all ...

He awakens hearing a sound that he is get attached now, but when he opens his eyes to read the content of the message, he is surprised to see who the sender is. It's Prentiss, a new case has arrived. He rubs his eyes and yawns. Needless to lie to himself, he is sad that it’s not Garcia, it was usually she to throw him out of bed with that sentence, combined with a joke every time different. In fact, Lisa had never appreciated this either (that another woman snatched him from her arms), but before tonight (last night, now) he hadn’t noticed.

He dresses without turning on the light, he doesn’t need it, because enough of it enters from the window. It is six o'clock in the morning. He can’t wait to get there, to see her. Of course, he can‘t speak already now, because they have to concentrate on the case, but later, in short, when this case too will be archived, perhaps...

Roxy barks, distracting him from his ruminations. -I'm sorry, girl, no walk today.- he gives her a caress. -Jenny will arrive soon.- without Lisa’ stuff his house doesn’t seem so different. He can’t help but imagine unicorns, octopus-shaped cups, strange-colored curtains. If there was Penelope in her place, yes, he would feel the difference.

He shakes his head and climbs into the van.

Because those who flee will not be a real winner at all, only those who don’t hide will win...

Finally, he sees the outline of the very high building, he parks and rushes to the elevator. In that narrow space he fries with anxiety. He just needs to see her, just a second... the doors open, and he go down. He heads to his desk. -Hey, good morning!- he is excited, anyone could understand it. He greets Spencer and Matt, who reciprocate him. He notices that Rossi is talking on the balcony with Emily. He turns to JJ, who is intent on working on some documents, very focused. -Hey!- he says, but the blonde doesn’t seem to have heard him, because she doesn’t answer anything. But she seems to notice that he is staring at her, because she slams the papers on her desk and sighs, as if she were trying to control her anger. Maybe she fights with Will? He sees no other solution to her behavior. -JJ?- he asks, uncertain. She turns to him and glares at him, one of those looks that are very close to those that usually gave him Penelope. Luke stands up in front of the woman. -Hey, are you okay?- JJ also stands up, pushing the chair badly, but instead of answering, she heads towards the round table room. -What's wrong with her?- he asks the other two men. Simmons shrugs, dr. Reid seems to know more, but also, it's not willing to telling him anything. After not even a second the chief appears on the balcony. -Guys…- 

Camouflaging your love can only hurt you, so it should never be done...

As soon as he comes in, Luke notices that someone is missing. There is an empty chair and the remote-control rests abandoned on the table. However, he doesn’t have time to ask for anything (because in the euphoric state he is in, he probably would have been able to do it), since a man who he has never seen, makes his entrance.

-Good morning, sorry for the delay.- and the man grabs that remote control. Luke must refrain from taking it before him, as if he wanted to protect an object he deems worthy only of the undisputed goddess of the BAU, one of the many nicknames he had discovered had been created by Morgan specifically for her.

He immediately starts talking about the case, but Luke can’t concentrate. He stares at him as if he were a usurper. He has gray hair, wears a pair of glasses with banal frames and has a voice that he finds annoying immediately. And he is clearly an IT. Kevin Lynch, is written on the name tag hangs on a shirt in bad taste.

Who is this man and where is Penelope?

Luke doesn’t participate in the debate, he doesn’t give any contribution. He wakes up only when Emily utters the mantra. -Wheels up in 20.- then he watches JJ approach the man and whisper quietly. She definitely knows him, and Prentiss too, it's obvious from their attitude. Then the blonde goes out and her place is taken by the last woman left in the room.

-I'm Dr. Tara Lewis, nice to meet you.- Lynch smiles, but this doesn’t make him more nice. Matt also shows up and so he realizes that he is forced to do the same, or he’ll seem to have something against this stranger. And even if it's really like that, it's not good for others to know it. Not immediately, at least.

-Luke Alvez.- no kind formula, it would feel hypocritical. The IT has a firmer hold than he would have imagined. In hearing his name seems to light up.

-Alvez, of course! Plum juice told me about you. Don’t worry, I’ll not call you newbie.- he doesn’t know which of the thousand things implied by this sentence should upset him more. Plum juice . It is clearly a nickname related to Garcia and is almost as odious as Derek Morgan's baby girl. Plum j... Penelope, in short, told Lynch about him. And finally... this guy thinks he can make fun of him. No one else in the world can call him that way, except JJ, every now and then...

JJ. He has to talk to her, she surely know something more about him.

-Okay... now, I’m sorry, the jet is about to leave and I wouldn’t want to stay here...- he takes leave with one of the worst excuses that have ever occurred to him. He basically runs to get on board as soon as possible. Just outside he almost crashes against JJ. -Hey, I was looking for you...- but the blonde doesn’t seem to have changed mood.

-Alvez, be more careful. Try to focus on the case, rather than on your girlfriend.- a cold, pungent tone that makes feel Penelope absence even more. JJ had never called him by surname, they were good friends, they often went out in pairs during the missions. -What do you want?- she stands in front of him with folded arms.

- I... nothing, do you know where Garcia is? Is she fine?- Finally, he is forced to ask directly what he really wants to know. The woman bursts into a sour laugh. But she decides to be generous and gives him at least one of the answers.

-She had to leave for personal reasons.- totally aseptic. -Why are you interested in knowing, Alvez?- she approaches him, this time smiling smugly. -Then? Did someone cut your tongue?- Luke shakes his head and almost manages to move her, but then she remembers that at that moment her best friend is about to take a plane and fly away, far away, all alone and the fault is of this wretch she has before her.

He sighs, closes his eyes and when he opens them he stares at her with such intensity that he upsets her. -Because I love her, JJ.- she sees a few tears in the corners of his eyes and realizes it must be something serious.

-Well, you don't show it very well.- she moves away a little. -Anyway, she told me to tell you to look in the first drawer of your desk. And move, Luke, the jet doesn’t wait for anyone.- some shade of sweetness more than the last time. The man opens it without knowing what to expect, but definitely not that.

A black and white puppet in the shape of a cat. And there's a note underneath, he recognizing the convoluted computer technician’ writing, in green. I'm sorry.

 What is fashionable, now, I don’t know, until yesterday the instinct was followed... what will remain of us, now I don’t know, I only know that for you, I will not be the same more...

Penelope opens the umbrella and pulls the suitcase up to the airport entrance. It is still raining. She can’t help wondering what is happening in Quantico in the meantime. Has a case arrived? How's Kevin doing? But she must not reflect on these things, otherwise it will change her mind.

She walks through the crowd, trying to go unnoticed. Her heels are not so tall, nor the colorful dress like so many others she had wear previously. But the suitcase is bright pink and the raincoat far too dated. In no way she couldn’t be noticed. Too bad the right person hadn't notice her, not in the way she wanted, at least.

Of course, she made him laugh with her jokes and keeping him at a distance, but... nothing more.

She lines up behind a couple of elderly gentlemen. She observes the way in which both try not to weigh on each other, but at the same time they manage to support each other. The man gives a caress to his wife, who snorts, complaining that her legs hurt. Penelope sighs, takes another step and before she realizes it, she is a few steps from the ticket office. She turns to look back, almost hoping to see Luke appear, running towards her, begging her not to leave him.

Obviously, there is nobody.

-Miss, how can I help you? -

 Maybe yes, maybe not, very careful and distracted, you've ever wondered, why it happens that... getting hurt is easier than giving a kiss, for what reason I don’t know, and I... for a while I'll disappear... for a while I'll disappear...

The screen turns on and a man with glasses begins to speak, drawing up a list of the last places visited by the victim. But Luke can’t concentrate. For a moment he had hoped to see her, inside that little box, be able to hear her voice as she said it was all a joke, that she hadn’t left. He had deluded himself so much, how could he?

-Rossi, you and Reid will go to the coroner. Tara, JJ, you talk to Felicia Miller's parents. Simmons, Alvez, you with me from the Wikins.- not even the voice of Emily seems to be able to bring him back to reality. -Luke, are you there?- the man nods. He must strive to be professional, can’t allow other girls to be murdered just because he is stupidly in love and can’t manage his feelings. As soon this case will be solved, the sooner he’ll be able to think about his business. Penelope could never love such a selfish person. He must become the man she deserves to have close.

 The previous evening

For those who had fun in a group and shouted at me “you disgusted me” and now I think, that they no longer laughs... for those who believe to be strong because they can hurt, I say no, nothing at all...

-Penelope, are you absolutely sure that this is what you want? That there is no other solution?- she sees that her best friend is trying hard not to cry and not showing weakness, to not force her to stay if it’s not what she really wants.

-Yes, JJ. I'm sure. I'm sorry, I'd like to be strong enough, be able to pretend it's nothing, but I can’t do it, I'm sorry, really. I know it's selfish, leaving you this way, abandoning you with all the cases... but I've talked to Kevin, he is willing to take care of some cases and if...- JJ interrupts her.

-Don't say that, even in fun! You are the least selfish person in the world! It's just... I'll miss you.- now the eyes of both are limpid. -But we'll do it, you don’t have to worry, just think about recover. Ok?- Penelope doesn’t even try to show herself stronger than she is. She pulls her in a hug.

-I’ll miss you too, my friend. And the others too, to die for, you know. But I need some time to reflect, to understand how to overcome this situation... and I can’t do it here, seeing him every day. I can’t treat him like before, every time I see him I feel like crying and when he smiles I just think it's another, the one that makes him feel so good and... and I should be happy for him, but I can’t. I can’t, JJ, that's not me. I've even been able to forgive Battle and mourn Baylor's death, why it's so hard to accept that...- she swallows but forces herself to say that name. -...that Luke is busy with another woman?- she is crying openly, now, without breaking away from the other blonde.

-At seven o'clock.- Penelope wipes her face with a tissue. -Now it's better if... if I go home, I still have things to do... could you... could you put this in Luke's drawer?- JJ looks at the intrigued puppet. -It's... an antistress kitten that he gave me... after the case in Vermont, that of the boy who was also killing while he was sleepwalker... I know it's a stupid and theatrical thing, but...- the other blonde makes a sign that she understood.

-Ok I will. But you call me when you land, it doesn’t matter what time it is. Okay?- Penelope sighs.

-All right. Bye, JJ. Take care of yourself and... of Will, the guys...- it sounds awfully like a goodbye.

 For those who continue to hurt themselves, not loving enough, like you, but perhaps also like me... I look into the eyes of my worst enemy and I don’t let guide from my grudge...

They are walking along the road facing the house of the last victim. Luke seems to have returned to himself and his insights turned out to be correct: Patricia Wilkins had a lover, like the first murdered girl. This doesn’t mean, however, that he has stopped thinking of Penelope, at all. Only she has become a fairly small dot that steadily occupies a corner of his brain, instead of shining in the center and dazzling it.

There is an awkward silence. He decides that to ask a few questions will not be so terrible. He glances at Matt and then at his boss. -Prentiss?- the woman turns immediately to him. Of course, she spoke to JJ, both before and after this case arrived, both later, when they were about to land. But unlike the blonde she wasn’t surprised, the first time Luke introduced himself to O'Keef with another woman. That Lisa didn’t even look bad, her only real flaw was... not being Garcia. Not realizing that Alvez's heart (and mind) were already busy, but... at least someone else had to be notice of it during that evening. Penelope couldn’t take her eyes away from the couple and finally ran into the bathroom, to re-emerge only half an hour later and... without makeup. Definitely shocking.

The whole universe had realized that IT had a serious crush on the Newbie and that the latter was even worse... except those directly involved, of course. Yet, she couldn’t see only in negative the fact that Luke was going out with another. What really mattered here was that he had started going out again, that he was ready to get back on the market... to hang out with someone. Of course he couldn’t go directly to the subject of his desires, the "true goal", as they would say if it were an unsub, but he had to look around, start with something simpler, less intense and busy... and Emily had even hoped that this could help Garcia herself to unblock herself, to understand the depth of her feelings and take a minimum step, because she could also lose him...

This was until her doorbell rang at eleven o'clock in the evening and a Penelope with the smudged makeup had not put a ball of black fur in her arms. Only asking her excuse and giving her shortly after a letter, on rosy paper, but no less official.

A temporary leave? Yet, there was just written like that.

-Why you're interested, Luke?– she chooses to prolong the agony a little bit. She also wants to see how far he is willing to push himself for know. How far he is willing to expose himself, to make others understand what he feels, to feed his jealousy. He looks her in the eye and doesn’t look away. A lot, I'd say.

-Well, he called her...- she sees the man's Adam's apple going up and down as he strives to pronounce that nickname. -... plum juice and he told me that Garcia spoke to him about me. I just assumed that.- she can’t be so bad, he deserves to know the truth.

-Yes, Kevin and Garcia have been together almost for four years.- the eyes of the Latin agent are wide open beyond measure, eyebrows raised in the most sincere and surprise expression she has ever seen. A little like when he found out that a wretch had shot her, after a date. -They've been on-again, off-again for the past few years. And the last time... it happened because she didn’t agree to marry him.- well, this she shouldn’t have said it, but how could she resist to not have the satisfaction? Alvez must have known that there was a man out there who wished to make their computer' technician as his wife, who had loved her so much. Because yes, it's clear that Luke also loves Penelope, but... but he must never forget the luck he would get if she allowed him to love her. She is one of her best friends, a person too important, strong, but also terribly fragile and it’s her duty to protect her. Also, she is co-mom of her cat.

The man's legs refuse to move when he hears that word. Marry. The image of Penelope in a white dress flashes him. Her smooth, blond hair around her face, making her look even more like an angel. The frame of the clear, almost transparent glasses and the light makeup, because she doesn’t need it, to be beautiful. And shoes, shoes high, but not in an exaggerated way, on the other hand exalting terribly the neck of her foot. Nothing else, no other frills. The only accessory she would wear is her smile.

-Hey, Alvez, are you there, are you okay?- maybe she has a little exaggerated.

 One, I always look forward and I don’t give up; two, if I tell you you're the top, I'm lying...

She sits down at the spot marked on her note, next to a decidedly handsome man, with dark hair, slightly curls. If it were not for a pair of blue glasses, he could almost be mistaken for Luke. Damn it, why she can’t stop thinking about him? What's the point to fly miles away from him, if her heart has remained in Quantico?

He had find it, the kitten? If she closes her eyes, she can vividly relive the moment when he gave it to her... the way he had smiled at her, the nuances of his voice... what he had told her. Everything had led her to believe that... he was not just a slightly too careful colleague. And how had she reciprocated him? Reminding him that she wouldn’t stop tormenting him, even if he had shown careful about her, taking care of Reid.

How stupid!

-Attention, we are about to start the take-off phase. Please turn off your electronic devices and fasten your seat belts until the plane will reached a steady position.- Penelope hurries to execute and while she sends her cell phone to sleep, she is disappointed to see that there aren't messages from him. But why does she still hope to receive a signal?

-First time you flies?- she jumps, hearing her neighbor's voice. He is smiling at her and seems very kind.

-No, but I can’t get used to it.- she replies, trying to force the heart to regain a regular heartbeat. The stranger's eyes are brown, but slightly clearer than Luke's. Luke. All roads lead to him.

 Maybe yes, maybe not, very careful and distracted, you've ever wondered, why it happens that... getting hurt is easier than giving a kiss, for what reason I don’t know, and I... for a while I'll disappear... for a while I'll disappear...

Luke can’t conceive how much he misses her. It’s not just the need to hear some joke, stupid or joyful, but always apt, or about jealousy, challenge, sense of revenge. No, it’s only about love, the word that have always scared him. He had always tried to avoid it, but he wasn't able to stop himself from falling in love with her. She managed to penetrate his skin, to change everything, every attitude, every thought. If he hadn’t met her in that elevator, cold and willing to convince him of the talents of her Canadian boyfriend, would he accept Hotch's proposal to join the BAU? He doubts it, and so much. Surely when he met her he was already doing a little thought about it, even if to Rossi he had said the opposite. But she, Penelope, had been decisive.

They all get on the jet. They go back home. But it's not home, if she's not there to wait for them, with some drink or big proclamations, and O'Keef without her laughter... it's just another place to feel alone. That's why he makes the decision to talk to JJ and understand why she has problem with him. It’s certain that it concerns Garcia, so he has twice reasons for doing so.

-Hey, JJ, can we talk for a moment?- the blonde looks up at him and then moves to Prentiss. She nods and follows him in the drinks area. She puts her arms folded and stares at him, waiting. -Would you tell me what I did to you? You've been strange since before we left, and I have a theory. Do you want to hear it?- she doesn’t answer. -I think it's about Garcia and, also the reason she left the team overnight. And I think that Emily also knows it, but she has an opinion different from yours, because she didn’t treat me like you...- the blonde explodes.

-Ok, what the hell! You're right, it's Garcia!- she pushes him away. -It's your fault, Alvez and I'm not like her, I'm not understanding and sweet like Penelope, so I'll never stop hating you for having hurt her.- her eyes are bright, but out of anger, not for the pain.

-I... I would never have…- she doesn’t let him finish talking, of course. Their screams are heard in the armchairs, but Emily signals the others to take no notice.

-Maybe not consciously, but you did it anyway, the result doesn’t change.- he realizes that she is trying to calm down. -With all those looks, those smiles, those attentions that you have dedicated her... do you think I’m an idiot, Luke? Do you really think I didn’t notice anything? Why grab her remote-control and play with it before leaving it to her, why smiling sly when she called you newbie, why help her get off the sidewalk, console her for Reid, give her that damn kitten... take her to your friend with that pet...- while she talks, he blushes. But JJ doesn’t seem to be left in the slightest move. -I wonder, in fact, I ask you... why do all these things and then go out with another woman? Engage with another but don’t stop flirting with Garcia? And then, the worst crime: bringing her to O'Keef. Will never comes with us. That's our space, Luke, ours, only BAU, do you understand?- she runs a hand across her face.-Yes, I understand...- but the blonde shakes her head.

-No, you didn’t, otherwise you wouldn’t have brought Lisa. What did you think, Alvez, when you were with her? Why make fun of two women? I know you now, and you're not like that, you're not that kind of man... So? Why tease Garcia, deceive her that way and then find another one? Answer me, for the love of heaven!- Luke tries to stem her outburst by taking her by the shoulders.

-I don’t know, JJ, I swear. I didn’t even want to go out with Lisa, it was Phil who has organized everything and forced me. I... I didn’t do it on purpose, nothing. Until... until Lisa told me that Garcia had staring at me all the time and that it was perfectly clear that she was in love with me... I swear, I didn’t realize it, neither about what I felt, nor about that what she felt. I'm... I was so blind and stupid, but I never wanted to hurt her, never, never. She is a miracle on earth and I would be ecstatic if only I could hear her voice one more time, even if she told me I'm an asshole.- JJ yields and hugs him, but also gives him some pat on the back.

-I don’t know if I can forgive you anyway, for making her feel bad, whether you were conscious of it or not. You said it, she's a miracle and deserves someone who is aware of it and that treat her like a queen.- they break away and Luke looks down, obviously not feeling up to that task. -And you're, for the hell, that person. So, find her, please, and bring her back to us. It's an order.-

 And if the pain prevails, it will make more sense... this will disappear, it’s what I think, what it means, what it means, that I have suffocated... only the need of who, has not forgotten you, and I... for a while, I will disappear...

The heart is about to come out of her chest. She doesn’t care that others understand. She shows too much apprehension to be just a colleague, who for the most part has never given a single sign of having accepted him in the team. Nothing counts, at this moment, except know, checking with her own eyes that he is fine. She doesn’t greet them almost and rushes to the room where they told her she will find him. She opens the door with a click, because otherwise she would remain on the threshold indefinitely, without finding the courage to take that step.

He is covered up to his armpits by a white sheet and looks terribly thin, small and fragile, as she had ever seen him. And his skin is so strange. The arms abandoned along the body, motionless. And closed eyelids.

-Luke.- she moans, taking his hand and intertwining their fingers. It's cold, of course. The memory of that nickname snatches a smile from her. -I can’t leave you alone one day, see what you do without me.- with the other, she touches his hair. So many time she wanted to sink her fingers and now she can do it... -Please, Luke, lift those eyelids and show me your beautiful dark eyes...- no change. If there wasn’t that machine that continues to beep, she would doubt that she is still alive. The chest lifts so slowly... -It was my fault, I know, I should not have left, but I needed it, I don’t know if you'll be able ever to understand or forgive me, but I couldn’t stay and see you... happy with another woman. I love you too much, yes, exactly, too much. Not like I love others, not even Derek. I'm... I'm jealous of you, although... even if the most important thing is that you feel good, because you deserve it, you are such a good boy and I... I tried to deny it with all of myself, and it has nothing to do with the fact that you have taken the Morgan's place. It has to do with that I can’t afford to be in love with you, and I was right... you found a wonderful person, both outside and inside and...- now she is openly crying, tears running down, crossing her cheeks and a go directly on the inert hand of man. But without making any sound, only from time to time she is forced to stop because the lump in her throat becomes too tight. -But now if you open your eyes and... you insult me or give any sign of life, I promise I’ll return to work for the BAU and I’ll stay close to you, for what I can, even if I have to see you marry Lisa...- she lets go his hand and bends over to place a kiss on his forehead. Another tear falls from the female face on the male one and ends on his lips. She doesn’t even try to capture it, if anything like this would happens... she doesn’t want their first kiss will be like that.

Then she hears like a whisper. She notices that it comes from Luke. Both the lips and the eyelids are pulsing, then the eyes open wide, but he doesn’t seem to be able to focus on her. He coughes a little.

-Luke! You woke up, I knew you would not have left us.- she jumps and screams. She would like to throw her arms around his neck, but in his condition, she understands that this is not the case. She is forced to stop because he keeps trying to say something. She places her ear close to his mouth to hear better.

-Pe... Pen... Penelope...- she warns other tears ready to be poured. He is saying her name! She moves away and smiles at him. Even the man's lips bend in a slight smile.

-Yes, it's me, I'm here, everything's ok! Now I'm going to call a nurse, somebody, so everything will be all right, okay?- she turns and starts to move away, but a slight squeeze on her wrist forces her to turn back.

-No... please... don’t... go...- she turns to him and nods. She doesn’t have time to do anything else, because the door opens, and a brunette woman enters, who rushes towards Luke, almost crashing Penelope. Lisa.

-Oh, love, you woke up, I was so worried!- she throws herself on him and starts kissing him, but the man doesn’t seem particularly happy. He doesn’t close his eyes, on the contrary, he continues to look at his colleague. He almost seems to ask for help. Then, finally she separates and seems to realize that they aren’t alone. -Hey, Penelope, why don’t you go call someone? I stay with my boyfriend.- there is something bad, however, in the tone of the brunette. And as she continues to stare at her, her face is deformed, her mouth widening like that of Pennywise in IT. Sharp teeth and long fingernails like claws.

Penelope remains paralyzed and can’t even scream.

 But in the real world it succeeds. And so, doing wake up her travel companion and not just him. It takes some time to reassure everyone. She looks out the window, they are so high up that the cities below them look like a myriad of glowing dots. A perverse thought comes to her mind. Luke would never come back for me, to save me, he would never do miles and miles just to see me and make sure I'm fine. But she would do it. Love, sometimes, is just disgusting.

The anxiety is such that as soon as she lands she does exactly what JJ had asked her, calls her, to make sure everything is going well and that the dream was only that: a fantasy elaborated by her mind. After breathing a sigh of relief, she walks along the streets of the city where she grew up, before her parents died, that she was adopted. San Francisco.

Every street, every signboard brings back memories, even if many things have changed, so many shops have closed, and new ones have appeared. She doesn’t even know why she chose this place. There's nothing left and no one for her here.

She looks at the sign with a cross on it and sighs.

She comes in, her feet direct her to the right place, even though there has been so few times. Too few. She kneels, leaving herself almost to fall on the ground and caresses the headstone, the gold writing and the photographs. -Mom, dad, I'm home.-

 Maybe yes, maybe not, very careful and distracted, you've ever wondered, why it happens that... getting hurt is easier than giving a kiss, for what reason I don’t know, and I... for a while I'll disappear... for a while I'll disappear...

A race against time. His life after they land at Quantico becomes exactly this. Rushing at the airport, boarding the plane and counting the minutes that are missing at the landing. But San Francisco isn’t around the corner and therefore he is forced to yield. Falls asleep. And he has a strange dream, where he is in a coma-like state, even though he has never experienced such a sensation. He senses everything around him, he even sees it, but his eyes are tight. He notices when Penelope enters his room, when she takes his hand and starts to explain to him that he must wake up, because she loves him even if he is with Lisa, even if she is not the one he wants close to him. He tries with all his strength to open his eyes, but he can’t, some strange force prevents him. And then she starts crying and to be not able to console her is too much. A tear ends up on his eyelids and as if by magic he finally manages to raise them. And she smiles at him, she's so beautiful... he would like to tell her, along with many other things, but then enters Lisa, even if she looks more like a witch and she hugs him, hurting him and then kisses him and sends Penelope away and he doesn’t want to but can’t stop her and then...

Black. Someone shaking his shoulder. A hostess. They have landed. He has arrived.

And then the race begins again. Where will she be? The irony of the situation is that the data that are in his possession there were come out right from Kevin. By now the man has resigned himself to have losing Garcia (if he ever really had had her) and it seems that he is about to getting married to a certain Gina. However, this isn’t what interests him. No close relatives of Penelope reside in San Francisco. So, there is only one place where she may have felt the need to go.

He knew it well before he landed. Without knowing a rational reason. Instinct or maybe something else. He walks hurriedly, without running. He makes the sign of the cross, then wanders among the tombs for a while, before finding a custodian. Explain that he is looking for a friend's parents, who should be buried here. Unfortunately, he doesn’t know their real surname, because Kevin couldn’t find this information. Probably Penelope has found a way to censor and block some parts of her personal file. The same succeeds in obtaining the desired result. The caretaker remembers her. She was such a sweet and pretty girl, how could anyone forget her?

His eyes are throbbing, as he turns the corner, ready to face her, even if she’ll decide to insult him, if she’ll tell him it's too late, it's out of time, that she can never forgive him... he's prepared for everything. He is also ready to make the most of the sacrifices: leave the BAU, where he has found a family, his own place, in order to make return her to Quantico. It must not be her, the one who leaves.

He is prepared for everything... but not for the possibility of not finding her. He looks the smiling faces of Penelope's parents. From her mother she took those big eyes, from dad instead her blond hair. His lips fold in a sweet smile. He reads the written sentence under the date of death.

From my rotting body, flowers shall grow and I am in them and that is eternity. [Edvard Munch]

Definitely Garcia sack flour. Then notice something resting on the marble. A photo. It rained, before he arrived, and also very strong. In fact, it is faded, swollen with water and also quite crumpled. But he recognizes it instantly. It portrays a brown-haired man, a blonde woman and a shepherd dog. He doesn’t look towards the goal but towards her, as if she were a divine apparition. And her eyes are low, on the animal. Nor did she notice it. They aren’t perfectly in the picture because he has never been able to do these things. But he had so insisted that she finally gave in. And after seeing the photo on the computer, she had asked (kindly) to make two copies. One for her. But just because it portrays me and Roxy, don’t get your head up.

The other copy is on his desk. Next to the statuette of a dog and a black and white rubber cat.

He shakes his head and giggles, hearing again that phrase with her tone and even the punch on the arm she had given him. Penelope isn’t here, but she has been there.

Now he has just to find her.

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