#back to abstain and homework only

[ryllen]

Macbeth poster

⚔️👑

[dragondusst]

Another Bloody Tragedy

Admittedly this is just writing practice since this is my first time writing for fandom in 10+ years.

This is just a slight change/recontextualization of the chapter in Lucas's route another bloody tragedy from his POV. This is me being somewhat skeptical of his lines that he never intended to tell Ceres he was Bourreau. He jumped out a window and ripped someones heart out right in front of her, are you sure??? Not even a little bit??

He didn’t usually abstain on divine judgment. 

He had to be quick in his work after all. The quicker he purified the demons meant the sooner he could pray to God to grant Nadia a miracle and keep her alive once again.

Tonight was a little different. 

This house had a second story window with a perfect view of the street where he could watch people pass by without attracting attention. He waited a long time in that room, watching out of the corner until he caught sight of golden hair and pulled himself away, back against the wall.

“Haah..” he exhaled, steadying his breathing, paying no attention to the cries and weeping from the demon strapped to the chair that had been with him this whole time. 

He’d sent Ceres on that errand to give Mathis his homework, that part had been genuine. He didn’t want to see the poor boy wither away in his room. But the task also had a second reason, which was giving Ceres a predictable route she would come back from while he was here.

 He still didn’t feel quite ready. He felt lightheaded, his heart beat rapidly in his chest with a giddy nervousness to his hands that now clasped the cold heavy halberd. It was unbefitting of an executioner.  

…He was doing this because he needed to throw suspicion off him again, he reminded himself.

It took only one swing. The shriek of terror abruptly cut off as the window splattered with blood, staining it with a screen of red, and he unceremoniously kicked the top half of the remains through the window to crash down below. Dropping the halbred he leapt outside and landed on his feet with the grace of a cat.

He couldn’t see in his peripheral with his hood up, but he heard the sweet gasp of his angel. She was surely alarmed by his sudden appearance, but his angel didn’t have to worry about him hurting her. What would his angel think, knowing the same man exorcising demons was also her teacher? The same man that had been grading papers with her the night before? He had to hide his smile and slid a lock of hair back from under his hood, his nervous habit betraying him.

“Bourreau…?!” 

Lucas’s thoughts screeched to a halt. He didn’t expect a second voice. Frowning he turned to fully stare at them from under the darkness of his hood. He hadn’t anticipated Mathis following her back. The shy boy was cowering just a few steps from Ceres. He always seemed to find a way to squirm into situations when Bourreau was involved.

Lucas pouted, feeling some of his anticipation fizzle out. 

…No matter. He was here to fulfill the purification ritual first. 

Lucas pushed his gloved hand into the body cavity with sickening ease, the flesh parting more like dense liquid than solid matter, and pulled the heart out in one smooth movement that only came from experience. He’d long stopped caring when blood splattered his clothes and hardly noticed it drench the others. Why would it matter, when relievers weren’t truly people to begin with? It wasn’t human blood.

His own heart filled with glee as he put the organ away and thrust the dagger in the empty hole. Lucas clasped his hands together in prayer at his offering up to the heavens, praying to God Nadia would continue to survive, as his devotion granted her a miracle. Another demon purified meant another morning for her to wake up to. Another day they could be together until his death.

The smile on his face grew unusually wide tonight feeling his heart flutter knowing his angel was watching him complete the ritual for the first time. Even as she screamed in terror, all he could feel was elation. 

He wanted her to witness him. It was a selfish desire. He never wanted Ceres to fully know the truth, but he’d found the temptation harder and harder to resist to give her a glimpse behind the curtain. A small part of him that she wouldn’t otherwise know. That he had more sides than just her teacher. He wanted her to know Bourreau wouldn’t hurt his angel. Never her. 

He wanted to convey that, but Mathis’s pale terrified eyes halted him. Having a second witness made things more difficult with how far he could risk exposing himself, and he hesitated. If Mathis found out who he was, he wouldn’t let him get away and Lucas could only see it ending with them fighting. Mathis wasn’t a reliever after all, and he didn’t want to end up harming a human. 

Caution won out and he paused too long, by the time he took a step forward his angel had already got her wits about her and grabbed Mathis by the arm as she led them down an alley. 

Lucas stood there, his feelings sinking down in disappointment as he put a hand to his neck. He shouldn’t be, not really, when things had gone as expected. 

Capucine had agreed to set up a double to throw off suspicion of him again.  He felt it would be necessary,  since the killings would naturally be where he and Ceres were traveling at the time. Lucas frowned deeper, Capucine wouldn’t be gracious enough to set this up a third time. His chance was gone, and any wish he might have secretly harbored vanished with it. 

Why did it disappoint him so much, that Ceres should only know the image of her teacher? 

He had no time to puzzle it over, he had a second part to do. 

Changing his appearance quickly was a skill he’d mastered to keep his identity secret, but he was still lucky to make it in time to save them. Ceres and Mathis were frozen in the alleyway as ‘Bourreau’ blocked their way. 

The fake Bourreau was doing a good job of mimicking him, but he could tell the halberd was deliberately slow to strike. Lucas reassured himself the fake was just scaring them, but the fear this person may just injure his angel sent a flash of fear through him. With his earlier chance failing it made him more determined to fulfill his role to protect her as her teacher now. 

Rushing past the other two he struck out to push the attacker back. Lucas kicked the fake, and immediately knew he’d broken a rib. The strength of the blow knocked the imposter back into the wall and to Lucas’s surprise cracked it on impact. 

Their teacher looked back to his students with concern. “Are you alright!?” He hid his nervousness behind the rush of his words, he’d been clumsy again. He certainly hadn’t intended to destroy the wall. 

“Why are you-“ Ceres looked confused at his sudden appearance, and he took advantage of it. 

“I’ll explain later. First, we need to escape and-” 

The other Bourreau groaned from the pain, and Lucas feigned a nervous look as they got back on their feet. It was a standoff now, and Lucas stood calm and resolute in the face of danger. 

“I may not be much of a threat, but if you dare harm them, I will fight with all my might.” He subtly shifted his body to the side as he readied himself.  

The fake didn’t move, and he could hear Ceres and Mathis stop breathing as they waited frozen in fear. They must be terrified seeing their teacher stand up to who they thought was Bourreau, because even trained fighters like Adolphe and Yves hadn’t stood a match for him, so why should Lucas? 

The fake moved in, and Lucas almost wondered if they’d really attempt to try and attack him when the wall behind them crumbled. They stopped, seeming to second guess their actions, and quickly retreated into the darkness. 

Whatever strength was holding Ceres and Mathis up left them and they dropped to their knees. 

He softly sighed in relief. Things had gone according to plan. Now he could just take care of his students. They’d done so well. 

Lucas smiled above them softly. “You did well to protect each other.” He praised kindly,  “You’ve done…No…you must have been scared.” he corrected himself. He gently knelt down with them and embraced them together. They were bloodied, shaking, and terrified, and his hands gently rested on their shoulders with gentle reassurance. 

“But it’s all right now.” 

They were safe, no one knew the truth, that was all that mattered. It was a necessary evil. He’d be sure to make it up to them as much as he could. 

He locked away those dangerous feelings that could have gotten him exposed, and he wondered why he’d craved it so much in the first place. As he hugged them tighter he could still faintly smell the lingering scent of blood on his skin. An angel didn’t need to know the sins staining his hands. 

[halothenthehorns]

TLTNL- THE LION AND THE SERPENT

Lily wished she had a whistle herself to get the boys attention sometimes, but finally she'd wrangled them all around one table which did nothing to cease their desire to talk about that room.

She even engaged in a few of their more reasonable questions, like speculation of what would happen if more than one person asked for different things of the room for something at the same time. Harry and his friends were all asking for a similar request, but would the room have two doors appear, combine the two requests as it did for the trio, or remain empty until one more solid thing was asked of. While no one had an actual answer for any of this, it was still fun to speculate. When the meal was over Lily happily nursed baby Harry and laid him down for a proper nap, and when she finally settled down to continue it took the boys a moment to realize she was reading without their even paying attention. It took James pleading with her to start over so they could all hear.

Harry felt as though he were carrying some kind of talisman inside his chest over the following two weeks.

"A worthy secret then," Sirius grinned for his old memories of feeling the same.

A secret that kept him smiling through Umbridge's useless lessons as he easily met her bulging eyes.

"A miracle I'm not sure I could share," Remus crinkled his nose.

The DA's magical ability only grew from their first meeting, Harry often reflecting on their progress while pretending to read the assigned text for his Defence class.

Lily was watching Harry preen with more pride than she'd yet seen, and it was for others accomplishments. She'd loved her son the moment he was born, and seeing him glow with pride at seeing others accomplishments after just a little bit of help from himself truly made her realize he may have found his own calling in this field.

  It became nearly impossible for their group to have a fixed schedule what with accompanying three separate Quidditch team practices and the paralleling weather, but this Harry supposed as a good thing. If anyone was watching them, it would be impossible to pin down a non existent schedule for their meetings.

"Indeed, unpredictability is always better," Sirius agreed enthusiastically.

Hermione even came up with a better method of communicating when these would occur by handing out fake Galleons at the end of their third meeting, causing Ron some excitement at first.

"Did he think she'd come into inheritance and was being generous, donating to a worthy cause?" James chuckled.

Lily shushed him and kept going curiously how a coin helped with this.

Hermione explained to the whole group about the numbers around the edge, normally just a serial number, but she'd designed them to all be exactly the same. When Harry changed his numbers, that would be the corresponding date of the next meeting, and the Protean charm she'd placed on them would make all of them change with his.

Lily finished with utter exasperation at herself for still being so impressed with Hermione. Doing a sixth year potion in her second year had been impressive enough, now Hermione was showing how advanced she was in Charms as well, was there any subject, anything she couldn't do without putting her mind to it?

The Marauders were just as impressed. They'd never thought they'd find anything more impressive than fifth years being able to pull off becoming animagus', but it was clear enough to them Hermione would have already been able to do this as well if she'd set her mind to it, and that meant far more to them than any grade she'd ever get.

Hermione was met with stunned silence from the DA, Terry Boot from Ravenclaw demanding how she could perform a Protean Charm, that was NEWT level magic, how come she wasn't in his house.

"We've all been wondering that since her first year," Remus rolled his eye.

"I suppose she asked the hat for Gryffindor, or Ravenclaw and got Gryffindor anyways?" Harry recalled a previous conversation about how the Marauders guessed people got put into houses.

"That would be our guess," Sirius agreed. "As far as I can tell, even after everything we've seen of her, she still seems to value intelligence over, well everything."

Harry said back in defense of his friend, "After the rules she's broken? The laws? I know Hermione puts much more value into our friendship than her grades ever could."

"That's not just a Gryffindor trait though, Ravenclaw's have strong bonds of friendship as well," Remus shrugged. "It's what the hat perceives as the way you'd learn best, and being brave enough to put up your opinion put her in with her lot."

James and Sirius exchanged an amused look but stopped arguing the point. Lily had kept her mouth shut because she'd never liked the idea of sorting at all. One particular Gryffindor coming to mind who most anyone would have called a Slytherin if they knew what he'd done, Lockhart was a blithering idiot, Zacharias Smith had already proven to be an arrogant little thing from the humble house, and her favorite teacher in school had been all the qualities Slytherin house prided itself on without turning into a Death Eater. She would never think of anyone as something just because of what house they were in.

Hermione agreed the Sorting Hat had seriously considered putting her into Ravenclaw,

"Why would she call me the Sorting Hat?" Sirius asked while ducking on instinct, though Remus only rolled his eyes that time.

but obviously she'd been put in Gryffindor instead. Then she kept focus, asking if everyone agreed on using the coins. There was no argument, and as they each took one and Harry examined his own, he told Hermione these reminded him of the Death Eater's marks, how Voldemort touched one and they all reacted.

"Maybe the Order should invest in something like this," James said as he thought it through. "These really can come in handy, so long as you don't lose them."

"Or accidentally sell them," Sirius chuckled.

"How do you know about meetings now?" Harry asked.

"Fawkes appears to us when we're alone with a note," Remus grinned. "How he always knows when to appear away from everyone I've only been able to guess at."

Hermione agreed she'd gotten the idea from that, but she'd seen this better than branding members.

"So much more deniability if you get caught with it," Lily said grimly.

Harry agreed he liked this better, only danger in these was a chance of spending them.

Ron said sullenly he wasn't worried about that, he didn't have another one to mix it up with.

They all winced hard for that line, wishing there was something they could say, knowing there wasn't.

DA meetings were put on hold two weeks before the first match as Angelina was demanding nightly practices. Tension between Gryffindor and Slytherin was always high, but was now turning into daily scuffles as well between the two houses. The teachers were trying to show they weren't taking sides, but Harry realized how much McGonagall cared about this game when she abstained from giving them homework in the week leading up to the match.

Sirius and James whooped with laughter at Harry's face as he got to partake in their old head of house's favor for her Quidditch team. Both of them were giddy with such excitement for finally getting another game they'd yet to complain about the fact they hadn't gotten this chapter.

When this announcement was met with stunned faces in class, she turned grim eyes to Harry and Ron and told them to use this extra time to train hard, she'd grown too accustomed to seeing the Cup in her office.

The other three joined in the laughter as well, all imagining how many times McGonagall had looked to that Cup and smirked.

Snape was no less obviously partisan;

"But that part's not unusual," James grumbled less harsh than normal because he was still grinning for his own head of house.

he had booked the Quidditch pitch for Slytherin practice so often that the Gryffindor's had difficulty getting on it to play.

"Wait, I thought you said the staff couldn't book the pitch for the team!" Harry yelped furiously.

"I, thought they couldn't," James's euphoria was instantly wiped clean in frustration. "At least, they used to not be able to, I can't imagine why Madam Hooch is letting him."

"I wouldn't even be that surprised if he was doing it around her noticing," Sirius grumbled in disgust.

He was also the worst in pretending no such fights ever took place, such as when Alicia Spinnet got put in the hospital wing because her hair was growing so thick and fast it was obscuring her eyes and mouth. Snape refused to punish the Slytherin who'd done it, despite the fourteen witnesses saying Bletchley had. He instead insisted the girl must have put a hair-thickening charm on herself and messed up.

Harry scowled in agitation that McGonagall hadn't been able to do anything either because the complaint had been set to Snape, though he didn't know why Alicia had done such a thing.

Lily saw red for a moment, hating this vile creature who continued to act like the very thing he'd hated as a child.

Harry still felt optimistic about their chances, as he'd never lost to Malfoy. Ron still wasn't up to Wood's old standards, but he performed very well when not under pressure. The problem turning out to be when he blundered once, he was far more likely to continue doing so.

"That is a really, really bad start," James muttered, bouncing in place as he tried to work on some advice in his head he'd offer Ron for that.

When he was on point though, Ron had shown off some spectacular saves, such as one memorable practice where he'd swung free from his broom and kicked the Quaffle so far away it went into the other team's hoop instead.

"Wow, sounds like Ron pulled off a Starfish and Stick," Sirius grinned for the talent.

The whole team had praised this, comparing it to the Irish International Keeper who'd performed this move. Fred and George had been so proud, they'd even seriously considered admitting Ron was related to them,

"I would never deny my relation to the Weasley's, it's one I'm actually proud of," Sirius grinned.

something they assured him they had been trying to deny for four years.

Lily tisked while the boys chuckled at the jab.

The closer the game approached though, the worse Ron continued to get. As Harry had been on the team for years now, he was well used to the buildup and resulting snide comments in the corridors, such as Pansy's whispered threat that Warrington was promising to knock Potter clear from his broom. Harry responded by laughing that Warrington's aim was so bad, he'd be more worried for the person next to him.

Harry grinned as it caused those around him to laugh as well, nothing pleased him more than watching them laugh, at least when he was in on the joke.

Ron however had yet to respond in kind, instead turning green at every insult, or else shaking so bad he'd likely drop whatever he was holding.

"And here I thought Ron always wanted attention," Remus sighed.

"Clearly not this kind," Sirius rolled his eyes.

"Well then this is a good lesson for him to learn, you don't just get one kind of attention," James said a little sourly.

The morning of the match dawned bright and cold.

James and Sirius groaned in unison they'd missed out on a Quidditch chapter, but both kept their mouths silent from complaint, for now.

Harry awoke to find Ron in bed, knees pressed to his chest, his eyes gazing at nothing. Harry insisted he'd loosen up as soon as he ate some breakfast.

"Food does seem to make him feel better usually," Remus agreed.

The Great Hall seemed noisier than usual with so many talking excitedly about one thing. As they passed the Slytherin table, they all jeered as usual, but many of them waved at Ron while pointing at tiny little silver crown badges they were wearing and then laughing.

"More scare tactics," James scoffed.

Harry could tell there was something written on the badges, but was walking too fast to get Ron away from them to read what.

"Maybe Umbridge approved some new club," Lily said without much care, though she'd already rather hear about that than spend another chapter on a game where her son was likely to be injured, so she supposed she should enjoy the boredom while it lasted.

They received a much more welcoming arrival by fellow Gryffindor's, but if possible Ron found the cheer more depressing as he sank into his seat as if it were his last meal.

"And all he's going to get is cereal, what a disappointment," Sirius chuckled.

Whispering hoarsely to Harry he'd been mental to think he could do this.

"He's being too hard on himself, the first game is always the hardest," James said with honest sympathy this time.

Harry said he'd be great, it was normal to be nervous, and reminded him of his brilliant save even Fred and George had admired.

"The highest praise that can be offered," Sirius grinned.

Ron turned miserable eyes on his best mate as he admitted that had been an accident, he'd almost fallen off and hadn't even realized the Quaffle had been coming towards him.

Remus couldn't help snorting in surprise even while the other three boys huffed in disappointment, James and Sirius at least thinking they never would have admitted that and instead Ron should have learned how he'd done that and practiced more.

Harry had to scramble a moment to recover from shock before saying a few more accidents like that and the game was made.

Remus and Lily started giggling this time while the old players chose to ignore them.

Ginny and Hermione arrived as Harry finished his own bowl of cereal, Ron watching the dregs as if seriously considering drowning himself in them.

"I've never considered drowning myself in milk," Sirius said with his head cocked to the side, this time ignoring altogether as Remus smacked him upside the head as he continued, "but that one's original at least."

They asked how he was doing, and when he didn't answer, Harry assured he was just nervous. Hermione said that was normal, she was always anxious before exams.

"Because bringing up homework right now is really the way to make him feel better," James scoffed.

They were called from behind, and turned to see Luna smiling at them with a peculiar item on her head, a life size lion's head hat.

Lily paused for a moment to take that one in while Sirius immediately clapped his hand to his forehead and cried, "how could I never have thought of that?!"

"Because you were on the team with me," James was grinning even as he rolled his eyes at Sirius, "why would you ever think to make something like that?"

"Because it's brilliant!" Sirius' grin kept stretching wider by the second the more he thought about this, before swatting Remus on the arm and demanding, "Moony, why didn't you ever think of this?!"

"I apologize," Remus said, and Harry couldn't tell how much sarcasm was in that.

She gestured to the hat as if they'd missed it while informing them she was supporting Gryffindor for this match.

"You think she has one for Ravenclaw?" James chuckled.

"I think Harry would have noticed before now if he'd ever played against Ravenclaw and a student was wearing an eagle on their head," Lily smiled.

She'd even magicked it to roar like a lion, demonstrating as much when she tapped her wand against it and the whole hall jumped from the noise.*

Sirius gave an exaggerated yawn at the idea as he watched Lily's cat lick itself, he'd never been afraid of a cat in his life. The lion head had been a cool idea to support his team, but the sound effect would have just made him laugh.

Luna asked if they liked it.

"Yes," Remus agreed at once. "I'm curious what she made it out of."

"I'm sorry I didn't ask," Harry said honestly.

Then continued on saying she'd wanted to recreate a serpent tail being eaten to represent Slytherin, but she hadn't the time.

"Now there's an excellent use of crafts!" James beamed, "I think I finally see why some kids wanted an art class."

"Well when Harry beats Slytherin and they have a slight chance at a rematch, Luna can put it on in the meantime," Sirius chuckled, both boys missing the pained look Harry got for imagining himself in the next game...

Then she gave Ron a good luck wave as she walked off.

The three Chasers came over to collect the boys, but Harry assured they'd be down soon, he still wanted Ron to have some breakfast.

"Remember your first match and how you were too nervous to eat," Lily reminded him, "I don't think it's going to work dear."

"Well we finally found the way to make Ron not want food," Remus muttered to Sirius.

After ten more minutes though, it was clear Ron wasn't having it, so Harry moved to get him out of the Great Hall. Hermione gave him a hurried whisper before he left not to let Ron see those Slytherin badges.

"Why?" All five muttered to themselves, trying to figure out what that had to do with anything.

Then she wished both boys good luck, before standing on tiptoe and giving Ron a kiss on the cheek. Ron now looked more bewildered than ever as he touched the place as they left the Great Hall.

"Oh, so she didn't kiss you on the cheek as well?" Sirius switched to snickering about this now.

"Here's hoping that puts Ron in a better mood," Remus said cheerfully.

"Or it might just distract him," James scolded much to his friends amusement, now remembering how he'd reacted when Lily kissed him before his last game.

He was now so distracted Harry had the chance to read a badge as he passed the table even while getting Ron outside quickly as possible, and saw the tiny words Weasley is our King.

"I'm confused," Sirius said slowly, knowing he was supposed to be angry but not sure at what yet.

Lily however kept reading while beaming, and it took the boys a minute to guess what she thought those were. Lily was probably hoping some of the Slytherin's were finally starting to show some equal support for both houses, and none of them were going to be the one to burst her bubble, though they were all thinking if it was anything like that Hermione wouldn't have told Harry not to let Ron see them. Lily was probably just discounting what Hermione thought they were though like she was to them.

Harry at once knew they weren't anything good as he led Ron outside. The frost covered grass crunched under their feet, the weak sun above making all visible without being cumbersome, and there was no wind.

"Sounds like perfect conditions," James said wistfully, he really was looking forward to a game soon that he could play in again.

Even when Harry pointed all these things out, Ron still seemed more distracted than anything, and this kept up even as they went into the locker rooms to change and Ron tried to put his uniform on backwards for several minutes before Alicia took pity on him.

"I don't see why they couldn't have been left like that," Remus couldn't help but poke fun just as he always did to his friends when they needed it whether Ron was here or not.

The crowd outside was already thundering into the stadiums as Angelina began telling them she'd only just gotten the final line-up for the Slytherin team.

"Typical of any team to hand that over last minute," James rolled his eyes.

Last year's Beaters had graduated, but the two new guys didn't look much different than the old gorillas, named Crabbe and Goyle.

"Wow, wondering if Malfoy got them the latest Nimbus models again to let his friends on the team," Sirius scoffed.

Harry said he knew them well enough, and they were of the same mold as the old dunces.

Angelina nodded, and then called them all to line up to head outside, wishing them all one last good luck.

"It sounds like they're going to need it," Remus couldn't help mutter.

A roar of noise greeted them from the cheering and booing of both sides, also what sounded oddly like singing.

James was starting to get a nervous feeling about that song the more it was mentioned, if it had anything to do with the Slytherin's he just couldn't hold out hope it would be a good thing.

The Slytherin's were lined up and waiting, Malfoy at once catching sight of Ron and tapping his badge while smirking.

Lily sighed deeply, any hope for her idea gone already if Malfoy was wearing one. Now she read on grimly, somehow looking forward to getting through this less every line.

Hooch instructed both captains to shake hands, and if Montague's tense frame was any indication, he was trying to crush Angelina's fingers, who never winced.

"Tough girl, it's not hard to see why Fred likes her," Sirius grinned. "Hey Harry, did her and Fred keep together after the Yule Ball?"

"I never asked them," Harry shrugged, "but I had seen George hanging around with Lee once or twice without Fred around, so maybe."

The fourteen players mounted their brooms, and the game began. Harry and Malfoy at once streaking to opposite ends of the field to find the lone gold snitch.

"Is he not going to try following you around with lame insults anymore?" James chuckled.

Commentation at once began with Johnson with the Quaffle,

"Honestly Lily, how can you read that sounding so bored," Sirius groaned as she read out for the commentator as if reading the morning paper.

Lily simply shrugged, but Remus suddenly wished Sirius hadn't said anything, as Lily continued if possible in an even more flat voice, much to both his friends annoyance.

he'd been saying for years how good she was and she should go out with him-

"Maybe I was wrong about Angelina and Fred though," Harry said good naturedly.

"Or the friends messing with one of the twins," Sirius brushed off, still glaring at Lily more every second as she tried to make her voice as monotone as possible.

but McGonagall finally cut in on Jordan and told him to focus. Lee agreed at once and went back to more details on the game, the Quaffle passing between Montague, then hit with a Bludger by a Weasley twin, then to Katie, Alicia and she was off for the Slytherin post-

"Alright, that's it," James made a lunge for the book, which Lily neatly dodged and kept the book close to her chest, now full blown grinning at her husband.

"What, I'm not allowed to have a bit of fun?"

"This is the opposite of fun woman!" Sirius groaned. "I've never heard someone be so dull about a sport in my life."

Lily's giggling increased while James kept muttering at her side and eyeing the book with longing, he'd clearly  been out of practice to long, but when she kept going it was clearly getting harder by the moment to hold a blank face as her own amusement kept rising.

Harry was listening intently to Lee's commentary as he continued his own search, only hearing about Alicia avoiding a Bludger and Warrington, but pausing in confusion when he heard singing.

While Harry had been enjoying the show, both his mum messing with the two and his old Quidditch memories, he could already feel a stirring of unease for whatever was fixing to come. Lily clearly felt it as well as she couldn't quite keep up a bored tone anymore, wondering at who could be singing during the game.

Lee paused so that the lyrics could ring out, insert Slytherin version of Weasley is our King.

Lily had blanched in shock upon the first line, but she'd managed to stutter the whole thing out in the thick, heavy silence before coming to a screeching halt when she'd finally run out of insults.

"I-that is the lowest-" Remus looked too disgusted for words at what they were doing to Ron.

"Wow, I have seen a lot of backhanded things to mess with a player, but never a song dedicated to them," James's face was scrunched up with derision even as a very tiny part of him vaguely admired the dedication that went into something so elaborate.

"Really makes you wonder what Malfoy does with the rest of his free time, sings ballads to Hermione's parents, or poems to Harry's fame." Sirius snapped, his face twisted with dislike as he knew he'd have cursed Malfoy out of the air if he'd been there.

There was no longer any fun in Lily continuing with much less enthusiasm than anyone else, they all would have felt the same forcing themselves to read this bit no matter their love of the sport.

The moment Lee had realized what was being sung he'd tried to launch back into even louder and more detailed comments, but Alicia had passed to Angelina, who'd missed, making the ball Slytherin's as the song erupted again louder than ever.

James was practically vibrating in place, wanting to snap on a burst of speed and deck Malfoy where he flew, wanting to say something that would make Ron put that stupid song out of his head, but both were lost to him.

Warrington was heading back up the pitch with the Quaffle, finally putting a test to the new Keeper blood Ron Weasley, brother to Beaters Fred and George.

"The twins friend is doing a terrible job of helping them deny relation," Remus randomly muttered as anything else to think about, fighting back the impulse to press his hands to his ears in worry for this to come.

Even as Lee cheered on Ron, his wild dive saved nothing, it was ten zero to Slytherin.

All five of them cursed in sync for this misfortune, Lily denying doing any such thing by reading on loudly so as not to let the boys miserate for too long.

The singing burst through even louder, more people seeming to join in with every rendition.

"That can not be allowed!" Harry finally burst with frustration. "Can you put a whole house in detention! McGonagall, or someone shouldn't be letting them say that about him!"

The others remained completely silent with frustration, no one wanted to be the one to tell Harry what he already knew, there was nothing that could be done, it would be impossible to halt the whole game and kick those singing out of the stands.

Gryffindor continued the game with the ball in hand, as Harry continued more desperately now for the search of the Snitch, the chorus still thundering through the stadium.

Lily was forcing herself to keep reading this in a flat rage now, what she wouldn't give to put silencing charms on the lot of them for ever turning someone's life into such a cruel joke of a song.

The pattern continued as the ball continued passing hands, even out of the immediate action the song still being belted in the background.

Remus was twitching with unease in the tense room, wishing he could go back to laughing along with his friends about something as fun as a Quidditch game, why couldn't they ever go one of these without something terrible happening every time.

Harry refused to watch the actual action as he passed by the Slytherin Keeper, who was singing along with the lyrics.

"I'm going to imagine for a moment they skipped on some practices to all memorize this rubbish," James hissed under his breath.

Soon enough though, Ron was once again at bat, and the groan from his side of the crowd below was all Harry needed as answer. Still, twenty-nil was nothing, a few goals and they'd be back on even.

Sirius gave Harry an absent pat on the shoulder, absolutely agreeing with him this could all turn around any moment. The score wouldn't even feel as bad as it did if that wretched song would quit being passed around, but though Lily looked like she was considering skipping any more lines of it, that wasn't making it vanish.

After two more goals got through though, Harry really felt the beginnings of panic. He needed to finish the game quickly, and then no one would remember the rest of this mess. Angelina gave the Gryffindor's below something to cheer on soon, making the score forty-ten to Slytherin. Harry was ducking a Bludger sent his way

"Hooch didn't call that?" James snapped. "Could have used that penalty, Harry wasn't showing any signs of having seen the Snitch!"

"That's such an arguable call hardly anyone goes for it," Remus disagreed, James opening his mouth to argue the point but Lily ignored them both.

and keeping an eye on Malfoy as the game continued around them with those lines still being shouted.

Finally Harry saw the Snitch at the bottom of the Slytherin's goal posts, he dived, and in seconds Malfoy was on his tail, the two neck in neck,

Had Lily's joke at the start of this game not been interrupted she still wouldn't have had it in her to mime carelessness now, even with that horrid song echoing in the back of her mind she was edging in her seat with excitement.

It was over in one breathless swipe, Harry's fingers encasing the struggling, minute ball as Malfoy's fingers scrabbled at the back of his hand, and Harry stopped short to wave to the roaring approval of the Gryffindor crowd.

"YES!"

The echoing cheer of excitement could have woken neighbors. This was exactly what they needed to shove in those stupid Slytherin faces just how useless they were, how some hateful song wouldn't be enough to stop such a magnificent team!

Harry glowed for a moment in their praise, but the smile never quite reached his eyes as he watched them bounce with excitement for him. He wasn't sure he wanted to understand this feeling of dread, of something heavy just waiting to pounce on him for this win. Was it to do with Ron? Surely no one was really going to hold that against him, it was his first game after all...

WHAM.

Harry felt a Bludger punch the small of his back, flinging him off his broom.

Lily jerked in surprise as she read that, whatever victory she'd been holding before in that small moment blown away as effectively as a cannonball. The game was over, and Lily was hoping Ron got his revenge by clocking whichever Beater that was for pulling that stunt.

Harry was still only five feet off the ground, so the tumble forward merely winded him. Hooch at once flew up to begin shouting at the Slytherin Beater while Angelina landed near him, asking if he was alright.

Harry said of course he was while getting to his feet.**

"Oh yes, just a solid metal ball slamming into your spine, walk it off," Lily grumbled under her breath as she eyed her child, then turned sharp eyes on her husband who looked no more pleased but certainly not worried about injury.

Angelina explained it was Crabbe who'd done it. Then she began cheering they'd won!

A derisive snort from behind showed that Malfoy had not landed far away, now furiously telling Harry it was a miracle he'd saved Weasley's neck, but of course he'd be rubbish, he was born in a bin, then asked Harry if he liked the lyrics, he'd done them himself.

"He's wasting his talents as a slimeball," Sirius snarled, "he needs to pass on already and become a poltergeist."

"So long as he doesn't haunt Hogwarts," James agreed.

Harry refused to answer, turning away as the rest of the team landed around him except Ron, who landed over by his goals and was walking towards the changing room alone.

"I hope you go after him Harry," Lily couldn't help but urge, "you're only giving Malfoy what he wants by hanging back and listening to him."

Harry didn't answer, his face growing tighter by the minute as that feeling of anger continued to pound through him.

Malfoy kept going, pretending he had an audience as he explained he'd wanted to add some more in about being fat and ugly, for the Weasley's mother of course,

Harry's eyes flashed, he tensed and would have shot a curse at nothing if Sirius hadn't laid a restraining hand on his shoulder and whispered a calm reminder there was nothing for it now. It didn't make anyone feel any better, even though some of them held a dislike for Molly now they could never condone saying such a thing about her.

as well as loser for his father.

Lily was trying to read this quickly, so as to get the feel of sandpaper off her tongue from pure frustration. It never angered her any less when Malfoy continued using the same insults.

Fred and George tensed as they watched Malfoy with disgust, but even as Malfoy began backing away he was still talking about why this wouldn't bother Potter of course, the stank of the blood-traitors house must be similar to the Muggles who'd dragged him up.

No one ever appreciated any reminder of the Dursley's, but putting them in any kind of comparison which was the safe house of the Burrow like that truly was the most insulting thing they'd yet heard.

Harry grabbed hold of George to stop him doing anything, while the three Chasers were doing the same to Fred.

"I don't know why they're bothering," Sirius articulated through gritted teeth, "Malfoy's gone past where a detention would be worth it."

Malfoy clearly didn't care as he kept going, saying Potter must remember the stench from his own mother's house, she'd been even worse off being a-

James moved so fast Lily didn't realize the book had been wrenched away until she was staring at her empty hands, a slight burn in her palms from how tight she'd been holding the cover the only imprint of it. Maybe he'd just been going easy on her before then.

 She turned to snap at him, but he was too busy jabbing his wand at the offending page. "James!" She protested, trying to push her hand in the way to stop him before he did permanent damage.

"I am sick of that little scumbag insulting everyone, especially you," he said in a scary calm voice.

"Well doing whatever you're trying to do to that won't fix anything," she snapped as she pulled it back to her.

He gave in with a hateful scowl still in place, and Lily turned back to see the spell he'd managed to put in place, where Malfoy's name had been replaced with, well a colorful swear word Lily wasn't going to be saying. She fixed it and then kept going while James grumbled that hadn't been nearly enough payback.

Harry had no memory of releasing George, the two running side by side on their path to Malfoy, nor the shouts from his fellow teammates telling them to stop. All he knew was the fist drawn back, punching at Malfoy as hard as he could.

Lily stopped for a moment to look at her son, nibbling softly on her lip, but not a word could she find to speak against this. She couldn't claim to be much better if someone had been speaking of her mother.

The two only stopped when they fall off after the shout of the Impedimenta curse.

"I don't see why that was a reason to stop," Remus said quietly, "now's the time to go for the wand when the Muggle way stops working."

Sirius nodded in absolute agreement, his hand had long since been on his wand, just aching for something to curse.

Madam Hooch was in a towering temper above them, her wand out meaning she'd performed the jinx. Malfoy was still curled up in the grass, whimpering and nose bleeding.

"Clearly you didn't bash it into his skull, so I don't know what he's crying about," James snarled.

Hooch demanded the two go to McGonagall's office at once. They stormed off, Fred still being pinned beneath the Chasers and immune to anything else around them. It was only when they got to the office door did Harry start to feel something, and he glanced at his hand in surprise to see the one he'd been punching Malfoy with had still been holding the Snitch.

James struggled for a moment, but the compulsion to share his life with his son won out after his anger as he burst into speech, "I convinced our Seeker, Shilling, to keep the Snitch after every match and she passed it along to me. One of my favorite past times when I was bored was to pull it out and keep my reflexes up. Even I never thought of that though!"

"One of your very many annoying habits," Lily sniffed, her old angry bleeding tone giving James even more flashbacks. "You looked like such a show off."

"I was showing off," James agreed without remorse.

Harry couldn't marshal up much of a smile for the two, there was something about this day that promised to get even worse for him, and he had a feeling it wasn't about detention. There was also something else, a smaller memory that didn't align with this day, but promised he somehow had a first hand account of knowing those things his parents had just said, but that was ridiculous of course, how could he have known that?

They only stood there for a second when McGonagall came marching into view wearing a red and gold scarf, which she at once tore off as she pointed into the room looking livid.

"Damn, and I always loved it when she showed our house colors," Sirius winced.

"We're past flattery to make this better Padfoot," Remus rolled his eyes.

"Never stopped me from trying," Sirius shrugged.

She threw the scarf to the ground as she rounded the desk and on them.

"Now that was just uncalled for violence," James grumbled.

She demanded an explanation, and Harry quickly said they'd been provoked, which McGonagall did not find excusable as she pounded her fist on the desk, knocking over her tray of Ginger Newts.

"I think she needs to have one of her own biscuits and breathe for a moment," Lily said grimly, knowing Harry would get a chance to explain, but also knowing as well as anyone it wouldn't get him out of trouble no matter how much Malfoy had deserved it.

She snapped of course he had, he'd just lost, but nothing he could have said should have justified the two-

George cut in to say the insults, but McGonagall still said they should have gone to Hooch instead of displaying Muggle dueling.

"A very educational performance with splendid end results, really they should be getting thanks at least from Burbag," Sirius said flatly.

"There's that extra week we always got," Remus muttered.

Nothing further could be said before a hem, hem, entered the room.

"No!" Lily groaned as she gazed at that stupid little noise. "No, no, no-"

"Oh Lily, please tell me you're doing a terrible impression of a joke," James groaned into his fingers, he couldn't even look to her face for confirmation.

"What on earth is that roadkill doing there!" Sirius all but exploded. "She's nothing to do with any of this!"

Harry's horrible impression was growing more sickly by the moment. Somehow, this was all about to get terribly worse.

Harry and George turned in surprise to see Umbridge in the doorway wearing a green cloak, only further enhancing her resemblance to a toad as her pudgy eyes gleamed with a sickly ominous way Harry had come to associate with imminent misery.

"A face only my mother would love," Sirius groaned, digging his heels into his eyes so that he wouldn't have to keep watching Lily's face turn red from frustration of having to read about this woman in the same vicinity as her son again.

Umbridge offered McGonagall help in a poisonously sweet voice.

"You can help yourself off the astronomy tower," Remus snapped.

McGonagall actually grew more furious in the face of this, asking what help.

Umbridge insisted she'd thought McGonagall would be grateful for a little extra authority.

"I'd be more grateful if you dove headfirst into the black lake, meet the local population," Sirius promised.

Harry would not have been surprised to see sparks fly from Professor McGonagall's nostrils.

"Ah the twisted irony, Umbridge is actually doing more good than harm arriving then, because now McGonagall might go slightly easier on you in front of her," Lily sighed.

McGonagall snapped she'd thought wrong, trying to turn back to the two boys and giving them a week of detentions, but Umbridge would not be so easily deterred as she again made the hem, hem noise.

McGonagall closed her eyes as if praying for patience before slowly looking back to Umbridge.

"Merlin himself couldn't have offered any support for this except some toad-be-gone," James snipped.

Umbridge insisted she thought they deserved more than a detention for this display.

Harry was starting to twitch uncontrollably in his seat with unease, fighting the urge to either bury himself under the couch from a reaction he could sense coming, or tear the cushions in half from his own mounting anger. It helped nothing his family might just join in with McGonagall breathing fire soon, they all knew what Umbridge meant about her 'detentions.'

McGonagall's eyes flashed with outrage as she snapped that as these two were in her house, it was only her decision that mattered.

Umbridge oh so politely corrected that her decision did matter more while reaching for something.

"No..." Remus trailed off, too appalled to manage anything else in fear of where this was headed.

She pulled out something Cornelius had sent her, before correcting herself the Minister of course,

Lily only absently noted the lack and then use of the title as Umbridge's own self-importance in thinking she could be so informal, she was far more keyed into the new level of horror of where this could be going.

and unfurled a paper declaring it as Educational Decree Number Twenty-five-

though McGonagall interrupted in exasperation not another one!

"My sentiments exactly," James snarled.

Umbridge looked to her in surprise, saying McGonagall had given her the inspiration for this one as she'd overstepped and had Dumbledore intervene about putting the Gryffindor team back in play. Umbridge couldn't have that.

"No good deed goes unpunished," Remus said faintly, his two friends going bone white as they suddenly feared why this was being brought up again. Surely, no it wasn't possible, Umbridge couldn't have found a way to force the team to disband again, could she?!

Umbridge had contacted the Minister after this of course, the High Inquisitor couldn't be superseded like that or she'd have no more power than a common teacher.

"You shouldn't have any more authority than a sack of dung!" Lily screeched. She didn't want to keep going, was almost tempted to hand the book back over to James just so she wouldn't have to be the one to find out what this monster was going to do to her son next.

Then she went back to reading the amendment, that the High Inquisitor would henceforth have supreme authority over all punishments in school.

Lily had found it hard to believe the audacity of those first few amendments, and they somehow got worse every single time. This woman was creating these as she went along, and no one was stopping her!

She folded it back and put it away, before turning to the two boys and decided a life long ban on Quidditch for these two seemed sufficient enough punishment.

Harry's mind went blank. He heard shouting, he saw something get tossed across the room, but it was impossible to understand details as he struggled to wrap his mind around what he'd just heard.

Lily watched as the book thunked onto the mantel above the fireplace without regret, her fingers still twitching to throw something much bigger. She wasn't even a fan of her son being on the team and that was too far! She only held herself back from saying this by watching her husband work himself into a rampage with the only background thought being she should find a way to record this moment, otherwise there would be no record of Umbridge left when James was threw with her.

"-youngest Seeker in a century, she can't do that to him!"

Then again, what did they need a record of her for except an example of a transfiguration spell gone terribly wrong.

Sirius was too busy running scenarios in his head about something far too violent to be put into words, he needed action to get this one out of his system. Remus couldn't get his mind to act much better, as affronted as his friends and more than willing to enact whatever revenge they came up with.

Lily watched the lot of them try to find some way to work off their temper without destroying the house in vain, she really couldn't see a way to call their attention back even if she'd wanted to. So it was to her surprise when James finally found something resembling his normal voice and forced himself not to shout at his wife, "Lily would you keep going please. I'd like to get to the end of this book and find out how she's leaving this school." Then he trailed off into more hateful mutters about how that wasn't going to happen fast enough, and he couldn't believe his son was missing this sport for a whole year until that walking wart left.

"If it isn't Remus tearing her head off to replace her than it's not going to be as satisfactory," Sirius said grimly.

Lily silently agreed as she summoned the book back and pressed on for more horror.

Harry went numb in shock as he gazed at Umbridge telling herself this was for the best, terrible tempers the both of them, and for good measure Fred Weasley should be taken off as well as surely he'd have joined in the malay if he hadn't been restrained. She also wanted their brooms in her office, to make sure her ban was being enforced.

"She's gone from crossing the line into a whole new abyss!" Sirius howled in frustration. "She's, that's not, there's no-"

"She can't do that," Lily said in opposition. Quietly, a dangerous predator about to strike. "That's his private property, it's not against school rules to have."

"Well don't tell her that, or she'll ban brooms from the school next," Remus threw his hands up in the air in exasperation.

Then she addressed McGonagall that she was not being unreasonable,

"You are something that I have only called one person, and you deserve the term far more than them," Remus growled.

she would allow the other members to continue playing, while McGonagall gazed at her as if carved from ice.

"I need McGonagall to understand that her life purpose now needs to be revenge for this," James pleaded with the universe. "Someone in that castle must understand this!"

"I'm worried there will be someone who does," Remus suddenly said with a touch of worry, looking to a still fuming Sirius. If he heard about Umbridge doing this, he may come up to the school and give her what he'd promised Harry Prongs and Padfoot would do in their own time.

With a look of satisfaction, Umbridge left the horrified room with silence in her wake.

Angelina was beside herself with anger when she heard there were no more Beaters or a Seeker on her team. Harry looked around the rest of the morose common room, it was as if they hadn't won at all.

"This woman is the physical embodiment of a mood killer," Lily groaned.

"I honestly believe she's a demon sent from hell at this point," Remus agreed.

Angelina was the only one with energy, shouting about the injustice of this. Fred didn't even deserve it, he hadn't done anything!

Fred snapped back in anger that was only because he was being held back from punching that scumbag to a pulp.

"Hey, the twins," Sirius suddenly snapped his fingers, giving Remus a pleased enough smirk. "Stop your worrying about me Moony, I can guarantee the twins won't be taking this one lying down."

Remus nodded grudgingly. It didn't make anyone's anger disappear by one level, but it did ease the misery of watching Harry's face as he relieved this moment.

Harry could only gaze out the dark window where snow was falling again. The Snitch had made its way back to the common room with him and was now flitting about chairs with Crookshanks chasing it.

James sighed as he imagined the old grin he could put on people's faces as he did this same thing nights in a row, of the party that should be going on, of simpler and fun times in his school, was it truly impossible for his son to enjoy that?

Angelina finally slumped off to bed, wishing this was all a bad dream and they hadn't even played yet.

"I don't ever want to relive this day, considering I'm struggling to come up with a worse outcome than this," Sirius huffed.

Remus gave a commiserating nod of agreement, Lily frowning pityingly at all of the boys in the room, but even she couldn't imagine how this could have gone a better way, the end results seemed inevitable by this point.

The common room slowly dispersed as well, only Harry and Hermione lingering because Ron had yet to make an appearance. When he finally did come edging in, he was covered in snow and just as pale as it.

Hermione quickly ushered him to the fireplace, asking where he'd been.

Ron just said on a walk, then told Harry he was going to resign first thing in the morning.

Lily truly pitied him, but couldn't help wondering if that wasn't for the best. Just because you were good at something didn't mean you could do it in front of a crowd, and that's clearly where Ron was sitting. She'd hate to see him ever feel so low again.

James absolutely disagreed, setting his shoulders and wishing he could drag Ron onto the pitch right now, already an idea forming in his head of how he'd help him to work through this. First he'd put one person in the stands until Ron could easily ignore that no matter what was said, and then keep adding people until Ron could block them all out. He didn't care how long it took, he'd find a way so that Ron would never let someone get the better of him like this. There was no such thing as quitting with dignity as far as he was concerned.

Harry snapped at him if he did that then there'd only be three players left. Ron looked at him in confusion,

"He hadn't heard of this!?" Remus said in surprise.

"I was wondering why he didn't question why the common room wasn't in party mode," Sirius grumbled, "clearly he hasn't heard much of anything."

before Hermione explained what had happened.

Ron looked even more anguished as he said this was all his fault.

"Oh it's nothing of the sort," Lily snapped, wondering if Hermione would whack Ron upside the head for his thinking something so stupid.

Harry said it was nothing of the sort, while Ron returned if he hadn't been so bad at Quidditch,

"Malfoy would have caused all this no matter how Ron played," Sirius snapped.

the two going back and forth like this until Harry burst loudest of all for Ron to stop blaming himself for everything.

Remus winced for Ron, sympathizing with him more than anyone else as he could really see why Ron did. People telling you you were something long enough tended to leave a mark.

Ron remained in a silent misery for a moment longer before saying this was the worst he'd ever felt in his life.

Remus had watched the exaggerations of his friends all his life long enough to know better than to pick on Ron for that statement. Though he was hard pressed to really not ask if this was worse than thinking his sister was dead.

Harry snapped he could join the club.

Hermione had gotten to her feet to stare at something out the window before telling them she'd found something to cheer them both up.

"Umbridge's tombstone," James snapped.

"His Firebolt back," Sirius sighed.

Harry asked what that could be skeptically, and Hermione said with a brilliant smile that Hagrid was back.

"He what?" Harry demanded, jumping to his feet in joy as Lily eagerly pressed the book into James' hands now so he could read more about that!

HPHPHPHPHP

The Lily reads a Quidditch game in a monotone voice idea was offered by, DjuulLOVEhp!

*Fun fact, most lion roars in movies are actually done by tigers. Ever heard a lion roar? You should, it sounds like their hacking up a hairball, not exactly intimidating to watch on a computer screen, more funny than anything, but I'm sure it's plenty scary in the wild. Now tigers, those guys will make you piss yourself through an enclosure.

** Reports say a Bludger weighs 149 pounds! I don't need to be a scientist to know that is more than enough to not only break a spine but go right through the human body if dropped on someone, let alone hit with force from a distance. In second year one of these was enough to break his elbow at a glancing blow! I'm not sure whether to call bull on inconsistency, or wonder if Harry died in this moment and the rest is all some twisted version of hell.

[greekletters]

it’s that time again..

Here’s the next one shot! Also posted to AO3 and FF.net for those who follow there. 

Prompt: Stop trying to cheer me up. 

It’s monos, as always.  ---------------------------

It had been nearly a week. The entire team had been walking on eggshells. All because of this stupid Dust Theory exam.

The exam that Weiss Schnee failed.

But it hadn't been one of those nearly there failures where you scored ten percent or less from a passing grade. No, it was one of the ones where your first answer determined whether you got the rest of the questions right. And Weiss got the first question wrong. So she ended up getting all the questions wrong.

After Goodwitch had returned the exams back to you, there was that moment of initial shock. The 'how could Ruby AND Yang score higher than Weiss?' kind of shock. You know, the one that no one has ever experienced before and probably will never again.

Once that had settled down, Weiss seemingly entered into some really odd form of a grieving process. What was she grieving for exactly? Who knows, at this point it might as well be your sanity. Because it was all downhill from there.

Of course there had been the obvious denial that she got the question wrong, that the exam was flawed. That somehow all of you but her managed to get the same answer, but hers was actually the correct one.

There were also some short lived attempts at trying to bargain with Goodwitch. All of which were futile. "The results are final, Miss Schnee." That was the response when she asked to retake the exam. Or when she offered to correct the exam and hand it back in for partial credit. "The results are final, Miss Schnee." Every. Single. Time.

And you had done your best to try and help her work through this. But she wanted no assistance getting over her loss.

"It's just one exam Weiss. It's not the end of the world. We have four more exams left in the semester. You have plenty of time to boost your grade."

"Blake, you have no idea what this does to my average! It will literally destroy my untarnished record."

"How terrible that must be." You cared that she was upset. You just thought her reasoning was a little ridiculous.

Striving for and expecting to achieve academic perfection was a little unreasonable of a goal to have. No one was perfect. Not even Weiss Schnee, although you would fight anyone that attempted to suggest otherwise.

"Do you understand how this looks?"

"Like you made one mistake, just like any of us could have just as easily made?"

"Not just that! I am a Schnee. I failed a Dust Theory exam. My family IS Dust Theory."

"So, you basically failed yourself twice?"

That was the absolute worst thing you could've possibly said. Because the onslaught of tears and boisterous sobbing that followed was heart wrenching.

From there, Weiss sank down into the gutter of depression. She barely ate anything. She slept all day when you all weren't in class. She didn't talk to any of you unless it was some mumble of yes, no, thank you or no thank you.

And you had to give Ruby and Yang credit. At first they respected her space. Ruby brought Weiss coffee every morning. Sometimes she drank it, sometimes not. She reminded Weiss to shower and take care of herself.

And Gods bless Yang. It took all she had to just be quiet. And she did it for a solid four days. She didn't bother Weiss at all. No puns. No shoulder bumps. No outrageous gestures of any kind.

And you, you just gave her space. Any attempt to ask if she was alright or needed anything was always met with a hushed "no" or "I'm fine."

But silence is temporary. Very temporary if Yang Xiao Long is nearby. So when the three of you are sitting at the lunch table together on the fifth day of The Silent Schnee, Yang finally breaks.

"I can't do it anymore."

"No one is making you eat vegetable soup. There were plenty of other options." You gesture towards the food line with your spoon before dipping it back into your own soup.

"I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about Weiss."

"I agree." Ruby's participation pulls your attention from your soup and up to the table in front of you. "It's unnatural for me to have to remind Weiss to study and do her homework. It needs to stop. We have to do something."

"See? Helping Weiss wins, two to one. You're outvoted, Blake."

"I never voted. I'm abstaining. You two can do whatever you like. Just don't come crying to me when she freezes you to a wall, or sets your hair on fire." You grab your tray from the table and start to make your way to the trash to clean up after yourself.

"Oh come on Blake, you aren't going to help us at all?"

"Ruby is Weiss' partner. She should be able to handle it. And you, well, just good luck."

"I know I'm her teammate and combat partner but you're her…"

"Her what?" You look at Ruby, unamused by her not so subtle suggestion.

"What Ruby is trying to say is, you are Weiss' non combat partner."

"Ha. Well, since I'm non combative, I'll be in the library."

The days that followed were filled with over the top gestures of kindness, jokes, puns, tons of junk food and overall loudness. All of which seemed to do nothing but agitate a stoic and ever silent Weiss.

Honestly, it was annoying you. So you could only imagine what it was doing to Weiss. She had repeatedly asked that Yang lay off. And insisted that Ruby not bother. Then finally, one day when you were returning from the library late one evening, you hear it. The moment you knew would happen.

"Quit it Yang! Enough is enough." You can hear Weiss' voice echo down the entire hallway. "Let me go!"

"Nope. Sometimes you just need someone to hug you when you're sad! I'm not gonna let go until you say you aren't sad."

"I'm not sad, I'm FURIOUS!"

Ruby's voice cautiously fills the air.

"Maybe, Yang maybe you should just let her go?"

You can see the eyes of Nora and Jaune peeking through a sliver of a crack in the doorway of the room across the hall from your own. And you can hear what you are fairly sure is Pyrrha trying to pull them away, insisting they not be so nosy.

You roll your eyes to yourself as you slowly open the door to your room, trying to balance the books you have in your other arm as you push the door open.

When you step into the room you see what looks like the aftermath of a war. Stuff is everywhere, books on the floor, the curtains and corners of the bedposts look like they've briefly caught fire at some point, and there's coffee spilled all over the desk. You remain in the door way because you aren't really sure where to go.

"Stop trying to cheer me up!" Weiss yells as she squirms to get out of Yang's grasp.

"If I let you go, will you stop setting stuff on fire?"

"Fine!"

Any other time, you would've believed Weiss would honor her word. But as soon as Yang releases her from her bear hug, all you see are shards of ice heading directly for you from out of clouds of dust.

Without thinking, you use your semblance and end up landing halfway on a pile of books. Next thing you know, you scream out as you slip and fall to the ground. Reaching out for anything that can break your fall. Only finding the edge of an open dresser drawer, which follows you down to the ground. Which is where you lay, groaning in pain with multiple books underneath you, the ones you were carrying are now covering your body and the drawer you dislodged lays beside you, broken into three pieces.

"Oh Gods! Blake!" You hear Weiss call out as you close your eyes.

"Good job Snowflake! You killed my best friend."

"Are you okay, Blake?" Ruby calls out to you. And all you can do is give her a small thumbs up, not even bothering to open your eyes.

When you finally do open your eyes, you see Weiss kneeling down beside you, with Ruby and Yang standing over you, behind Weiss. There is a look of concern on the sisters' faces. But Weiss has her lips pursed together like she's, wait, is she laughing?

She grabs onto your hand and pulls it to her chest, leaning her head back as she continues laughing. Yang exchanges a worried glance with Ruby.

"I think you broke her, Blake."

"I think the only thing I broke is my back. Maybe my ribs. I can't tell. It all hurts." Weiss begins to pull the books off of you as she continues to giggle. Once you can sit upright, she stands up and offers you her hand and helps pull you from the floor to your feet. "I'm glad my clumsiness has provided the necessary humor to knock you out of your funk, but can you please help me get to the nurse's office?"

"Of course." She says, sliding her hand around to the other side of your waist to help support your weight.

"Do you want me to help? I can carry you."

"I think you've done more than enough helping today, Yang. You and Ruby have Grimm Studies homework that's due tomorrow and I know for a fact that neither of you have even started."

"Old Weiss has returned." Ruby says, throwing her fist into the air in victory.

"And the two of you can clean this mess up while we are gone too."

"Oh yeah, Weiss is definitely back to her old self. No fun." Yang mumbles as the two of you make your way down the hall towards the nurse's office.

"You don't have to help me walk, I'm fine."

"Are you sure? That fall was pretty bad."

You take an agile jump forward. Completely unharmed by your fall. The benefits of Aura.

"Blake Belladonna," she fakes a gasp, "were you faking it?"

"Maybe?" You give her a smirk. "But I got you to hold my hand."

"Look at you, ever so sneaky."

"I also have some good news for you." Your smirk turns into a full blown smile.

"And what would that be?"

"I talked Goodwitch into dropping our lowest test grade of the semester." You nudge your shoulder against hers.

"Are you serious? How?"

"It took me a while to convince her. I prepared a speech and demonstrated the benefits and how the alleviation of stress helps students perform better over the duration of the semester and some other stuff that I found while I researched in the library."

"You did research for me? How sweet."

"Well, you are Ruby's combat partner. But as Yang likes to say, you are my non combat partner."

"That's quite suggestive, though not inaccurate."

"I'm sorry that I said you failed yourself. It was thoughtless and I didn't intend to upset you."

"Thank you. Although I must admit, your apology is mostly unnecessary. If only for the fact that I grossly overreacted the past week. Being overdramatic doesn't suit me. Far too much work."

"So you think we can stop by the cafeteria on the way to the library, or is that far too much work too?"

"Absolutely not, I'm starving."

"I'm not really hungry, but I'd love something to drink."

"Coffee?" You roll your eyes, knowing she's just teasing.

"Tea."

[anthrofreshtodeath]

Pyrite Ch. 18 Alternate

I found this early version of the 18th chapter of Pyrite while cleaning up my computer today. I thought it would be cool to share. :)

“Wow, holding hands,” whistled Dr. Bradley as he watched Jane and Maura stroll into his office. 

“Something new we thought we’d try,” Offered Jane, who waited for Maura to sit before taking her own place. 

“You two have made some progress, then?” he asked as they all settled in, straightening the neck tie of yet another dapper ensemble. He crossed his legs and readied his notes.

“I think you could say that,” said Maura. 

“It’s been two weeks. The homework I gave you must really be helping,” he commented, impressed. 

Jane gulped and looked to the ground. “We’ve uh, we’ve been talking a lot, that’s for sure.”

“I take that to mean you weren’t successful in abstaining.”

“Not quite,” Maura answered.

“Well, this is new, and of course, no one is perfect. But have you at least seen a difference? How many times have you had sex since our last meeting?”

Jane coughed some indiscernible number. 

What was that?”

“Eight.” she clarified, her face hot.

“Oh. I see,” Dr. Bradley said, trying not to laugh. “Did you even attempt to resist?”

“Define attempt,” said Jane.

Maura rolled her eyes. “She likes to deflect. We were successful three times. But, for the sake of clarity, I must say that there were… extraordinary circumstances that arose right after we saw you last, Dr. Bradley.”

“And what were those circumstances?” he asked, leaning forward.

“Well, Jane… Jane performed surveillance on a murder suspect that week, and it turned into a shots fired situation. She was alone.”

“And you were angry with her?”

“No. It was the opposite, in fact. I was very pleased with her.”

“That is definitely interesting. Why?”

“Because she asked for help, both from her brother and on the radio.”

“And this is new?”

“She never does this. Not when it’s just her. It was… the sign that I was looking for. The sign that she had changed enough, that she had taken me seriously, that I could trust her to do what was necessary for her family.”

“This is… very good,” Dr. Bradley said, “and very lucky, Maura. Usually, people don’t get the external ‘signs’ they seek in order to propel them into action. I’m glad to hear that you got what you were looking for. Jane, did you get what you were looking for?”

“I was… am, looking to get my family back. I think we’re on the way there,” Jane answered.

“Hmm. Now, at our last session, visits with Elena were a sore spot. Are you allowed to see her unsupervised now?”

“Sometimes.”

“I still have some discomfort with that,” Maura cut in. “She is allowed to see her on the weekends, take her to practices and meetings, but I am hesitant to let her pick up Elena from school alone.”

“And this is because picking Elena up from school is what started this whole thing,” Dr. Bradley said. 

“Yeah,” Jane responded. “But it’s been two weeks. I don’t expect her to just be comfortable overnight.”

“Speaking of, are you staying overnight?” he asked Jane, seemingly out of left field. 

“I’m sorry?”

“At night. Are the two of you sleeping in the same bed?”

“We… have a few times,” Maura answered honestly. 

“I’m just asking for clarification. I assume this means that the two of you have made a decision about the future of your relationship.”

“We have,” said Maura. She and Jane shared a perplexed look. 

“We would like to get back together,” Jane shrugged. “Sooner rather than later.”

“And how has Elena taken that?” At that question, they shared a mortified one.

***

“He’s right. She deserves to know,” Maura said as she was guided up to the front door with a hand at the small of her back.

“But now?” Jane nearly whined as she fished for her keys.

“Yes. I think it’s best. We’ve known for a week and a half now. It’s not fair to keep it from her when it involves her, you know?”

“I know.” The key turned in the lock, and the two of them walked in to Angela and Elena drawing at the kitchen table. “Hey Ma.”

“Hey, baby. How was your day?” Angela asked, smiling, but not getting up from her seat. Elena, deep in concentration, did not look toward her parents.

“It was good. Thanks for watching Elena while we were out, huh?”

“Of course, you know it’s the highlight of my week.”

“Yeah,” smiled Jane. “Could you uh, give us a second to talk to her?”

Immediately Angela scanned their faces for tears, for the remnants of an argument, for tragedy. She saw none of it, but still nodded cautiously. “Sure. You have a good night, ok?” she said as she kissed Elena’s head, and waved to Jane and Maura as she walked out.

Jane’s mention of a private conversation was enough to pull the girl from her pencil and paper. She sweated as Jane and Maura took seats at her sides, shook her leg in a nervous habit until she could contain it no longer. “Are you getting divorced?” she asked, the last of it coming out more like a wail than a question.

Maura grabbed her hand. “What? No! Why would you think that?”

“Well, my friend at school said that when his parents got divorced, his mom stopped wearing a ring and his Dad made him have a serious talk at the table,” she sniffled, glad to hear that she was wrong, but still on edge.

Jane pinched the bridge of her own nose. “Jesus,” she cursed, taking in a calming breath before speaking to her daughter. “We’re not getting a divorce, kid. We were separated for a little while, but that’s what we wanted to talk to you about.” She looked to Maura, who often claimed to have no skills in social situations, but also proved a way better Elena Giuliana Rizzoli tamer than herself.

Maura turned Elena’s chin towards her and smiled. “My love. Your Mamma and I, well, we have decided not to fight anymore. We’ve decided that it’s time to move on. So, that means that she would eventually be moving back in here with you and I. We want to know your thoughts - as a part of this family, your opinion matters. What do you think about that? Would you like it if she came back to live with us?”

Elena answered only in quiet tears and a slump into Jane’s open arms.

***

“You know, I kind of miss outside lights and yard decorations for christmas,” said Nina, who sat next to Maura on the sofa with their feet curled up and mugs of cocoa in their hands. “I do not miss being the one to put them up, however.”

Maura laughed. “Why do you think I married into this family? They’re so competitive that I never have to call movers, or decorators, or plumbers…”

“Anything with their hands and they’re on it, aren’t they?” Nina asked, a salacious little wiggle of her eyebrows providing the punctuation to her question.

“They are certainly… gifted,” Maura agreed, hiding a blush behind the steam of her drink.

Nina leaned in and whispered, “Like… best you’ve ever had gifted? Because girl. I think it might be up there for me.”

“I’ve had a lot of experience,” Maura said, looking around for little ears before continuing, “but yes. My god, yes. Not even because she’s so athletic, but because she means it. Really, really means it. Every time.”

“Yes! That’s it. They’re so… passionate. I mean it can get annoying out and about in the real world,” Nina replied, and as though to prove her point, they heard a thump and a trail of Italian-American curses from both Jane and Frankie just outside the window. 

Maura motioned toward the back of the courtyard as though to say I see exactly what you mean. “Give me a moment, please.”

Nina nodded and bit her lip to stifle a chuckle.

“Hey!” Maura warned as she opened the door to the outside between the guest house and the main house. She saw Jane on a ladder, sucking on her thumb, Frankie standing by with a tangle of lights on his head, and Elena off to the side, laughing at their expense. “I appreciate that this is difficult, but can you watch your language around our child?”

“Oh c’mon Maura, I just stapled the sh…. living daylights out of my hand,” Jane whined. “And it’s not like she hasn’t heard me say bad words before.”

“Yes, I know,” Maura said, in a way that screamed I know all too well, “but don’t normalize the behavior for her.”

“a’right, a’right,” Jane grumbled. “hand me the lights, little brother.”

Frankie did as told, rubbing the welt forming near his hairline from where Jane had dropped the lights on his head, and then held the ladder steady for his sister. “We’re gonna need the current tap soon,” he said.

Jane stood on her tiptoes to reach a spot barely within her arm’s reach, and it exposed her lower belly. Maura licked her lips. “Elena, sweetheart, go into the garage and there should be one next to our stock of lightbulbs. It looks like an electrical outlet and has a pull chain on it,” she ordered gently. “Frankie, there should be another box of lights close by. Help her, would you?”

He nodded, and handed her the current strand. She stood under Jane.

“There a reason you sent all my help away?” Jane asked as she looked down at her wife.

“I’m more than enough help for right now,” asserted Maura with a simper. Jane hummed in agreement. “You know, I had forgotten how much more… charged things are between us when we live together,” she offered.

“An electricity pun right now, Maura? Really?” Jane’s teasing exasperation, mixed with the sharp pound of the staple gun, only served to stoke the fire.

“Not intentional,” she said. “but I do think we should send your brother and Nina on a movie date with our daughter tonight.”

“Oh yeah? Why’s that?” Jane asked, her coy tone traveling over icy air with ease.

“Because Christmas is in two weeks and your family is going to be around more than ever,” Maura said. “we need to take every chance to be alone that we can get.”

“I see your point and I appreciate it, trust me. But Frankie and I gotta take Elena to the cages today.”

“What? It’s the middle of winter, not to mention the holiday season!”

“Greatness doesn’t take days off, Maura.”

Maura rolled her eyes. “She’s six.”

“Exactly, and in a month, she’ll be seven. Just think of how good she’ll be at seventeen!” Jane exclaimed, stapling the last of Maura’s lights.

Maura simply pulled Jane down from her perch on the ladder, and then brought them flush against each other. “She should be spending time with her family, my love.”

“Then you and Nina come with us,” Jane offered. “There aren’t any rules saying you can’t.”

Maura pulled back to catch Jane’s face - see if she was serious. “Really?”

“Yeah. I never made you stay home, I just figured you did because you wanted to,” reasoned Jane.

“Then we’ll go together.”

“Great. Hey!” Jane called into the house with Maura still holding close to her, seeing Frankie and Elena walk through the door, and winking at Nina. “Change of plans. We’re having a family outing. Everyone grab a bat!”

Frankie and Nina looked mostly confused, but Elena did not need to be told twice. Jane watched her bound up the stairs and into the supply closet with amusement and more than a little pride.

You’re my Natural, Giuliana Ballgame.

[adamwatchesmovies]

Adam Watches the 92nd Academy Awards

The 92nd Academy Awards have come and gone. As always, there’s plenty to be happy about and plenty that’ll make you wonder what the heck the voters were thinking. I watched the ceremony and while I may say that I don’t care… I do. Those awards are a big deal. Legions of people who would’ve otherwise dismissed Parasite as some movie that requires them to read subtitles saw it because it was nominated. One of those golden statues can make a career and let’s face it, you like to hear your love for something validated by people who have even the semblance of authority on the subject.

But here’s what you may not know: most of the voters really don’t know what they’re doing. While cinematographers NOMINATE what films are up for that Best Cinematography Award, EVERYONE in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences gets to vote for the winner and there’s no guarantee they’ve actually seen every nominee, know what the technical terms mean or are voting because what they saw is what they actually believe was “the best”. Once you take into account the dollars required to produce a nomination campaign, the stigma many genre films face, the prejudices against certain types of roles and/or actors, and how popularity influences votes, a win hardly means more than a bunch of people you don’t know saying they liked a movie.

If you want a better idea of which of 2019’s films were “the best”, you’re better off asking someone you know and trust, someone who can prove they’ve done their homework and aren’t just voting for their friends, the one they’ve heard is good from their kid, or got a special gift basket from. I may not be a paid professional, but I have put in the time and effort to see EVERYTHING nominated (with a few exceptions I’ll detail below). Reviews for some of these (The Irishman, Judy) are coming to the blog in a couple of days. If it were up to me the list of nominees would be different but we’ll get to that later. Without further ado, here’s who SHOULD’VE won. 

Best Visual Effects

1917 – Guillaume Rocheron, Greg Butler, and Dominic Tuohy The best special effects are the kind you don’t even notice. I couldn’t tell you where the explosions, sets, and actors in 1917 begin, and where the computer-generated imagery takes over. It’s seamless.

Best Film Editing

Parasite – Yang Jin-mo Got to hand it to Parasite for its amazing use of montage and the way it stitched its footage together. Some shots I initially thought initially were one take I realized under carefully scrutiny - and by that I mean frame-by-frame examination - were actually two melded together. The scenes showing how the Kim family infiltrate the Park’s household should be shown in film class to demonstrate how the art of montage is at its best should be done to maximum effect.

Best Costume Design

Little Women – Jacqueline Durran Funny how every single film nominated at the 92nd Academy Awards was a period piece. My vote goes to Little Women not because it was necessarily the most accurate (I couldn’t tell you what people wore in 1868) but because of the way the costumes were used. You can tell a lot about the characters from the multiple outfits they wear throughout the film - check out that purple bonnet adorned by Aunt Marsh (Meryl Streep).

Best Makeup and Hairstyling

Bombshell – Kazu Hiro, Anne Morgan, and Vivian Baker I called it when I reviewed the film. The makeup used to transform John Lithgow was nothing short of incredible. It was an easy pick.

Best Cinematography

1917 – Roger Deakins I’m glad to see The Lighthouse on this list but I have to hand it to 1917. The one-shot motif adds so much to the story. Then, there are the individual shots I remember so vividly. The quiet meadow just outside of No Man’s Land, the raging inferno Schofield sees when he wakes up, the trench he must run in front of to reach the Colonel are all shots that permanently imprint themselves into your memory.

Best Production Design

1917 – Production Design: Dennis Gassner; Set Decoration: Lee Sandales Tempted to hand it to Parasite for the house they constructed for the movie but I’m give it to 1917. The trenches, the blasted landscape of No Man’s Land still haunt me. When you see the craters, it’s jarring. Then, as your eyes become adjusted, you notice the rats. Then, the chunks of bone and charred meat that have now become part of the landscape. It’s horrific.

Best Sound Mixing

Ford v Ferrari – Paul Massey, David Giammarco, and Steven A. Morrow What you remember most from Ford v Ferrari is that big race at the end. The climax wouldn’t have been the same without the sounds we heard. The roar of the engines, the clacking and grinding as the pedals are pushed and gears are switched… the air rushing by. Out of the nominees, it’s the one whose sounds I most remember.

Best Sound Editing

Ford v Ferrari – Donald Sylvester This year, the Best Sound Editing award goes hand-in-hand with the sound mixing. Obviously, the actors were never moving at the kind of speeds depicted in Ford v Ferrari but you wouldn’t be able to tell because of the foley and sound design.

Best Original Song

Stand Up from Harriet – Music and Lyrics by Joshuah Brian Campbell and Cynthia Erivo Stand Up plays during the end credits of Harriet and it perfectly caps the film. Whenever I hear its lyrics, I’m transported back to that moment. It’s the most memorable and emotional song on this list.

Best Original Score

Joker – Hildur Guðnadóttir I chose the best song for its ability to stand out. In this category, Joker wins because its music doesn’t stand out… at least not at first. While you’re watching, those notes don’t draw attention to themselves. They subconsciously build the mood, augmenting the performance by Joaquin Phoenix, the visuals, and the story. You don’t notice how much of an effect it has on you until you see isolated clips. When you do, it’s shocking.

Best Animated Short Film

Abstaining (I’ve only seen Hair Love)

Best Live Action Short Film

Abstaining

Best Documentary Short Subject

Abstaining

Best Documentary Feature

Abstaining

Best International Feature Film

Abstaining, as I’ve only seen 2 films (Pain and Glory and Parasite)

Best Animated Feature Film

I Lost My Body – Jérémy Clapin and Marc du Pontavice I Lost My Body is the most audacious and inspired of the animated films nominated. The only movie among these to be aimed at adults, it often tells its story through visuals alone but when you get to the end, you realize it’s about more than just what was on-screen.

Best Adapted Screenplay

Little Women – Greta Gerwig based on the novel by Louisa May Alcott Greta Gerwig does more than merely adapt the classic novel, she breathes new life into it, makes it her own, makes it feel wholly new and modern. This version of the film surpasses all others we’ve seen before because of the changes she’s made to the story’s structure. 

Best Original Screenplay

Knives Out – Rian Johnson What a ride Knives Out was. It’s got so many twists and turns, so many delightful characters you want to re-watch it the second it’s over so that you are no longer distracted by its central mystery and can simply step back and admire the handiwork by Rian Johnson. A sequel’s been announced and I can’t wait to see it.

Best Supporting Actress

Laura Dern – Marriage Story as Nora Fanshaw Laura Dern was also in Little Women and her two roles couldn’t be more different. Here, she’s loathsome and captivating. As soon as I saw Nora take off her shoes before she kneeled down on the couch to console Nicole, I knew there was a whole lot more to her character than what we were told. The more you see her, the more you want.

Best Supporting Actor

Al Pacino – The Irishman as Jimmy Hoffa Al Pacino has the advantage of getting A LOT of screen time as Jimmy Hoffa. The Irishman clocks in at over 3,5 hours and he isn’t in the whole movie but when he is, the seasoned performer gives us so much. At different periods of the story, you’ll feel differently about him. There’s no point comparing him to the real-life person. He takes the meaty role and makes it his own. His voice, his mannerisms, I can’t think of anyone who could’ve done it better.

Best Actress

Renée Zellweger – Judy as Judy Garland Judy was the very last movie on my list to watch, having missed it when it came to theatres. When I think back to Zellweger’s performance, I don’t see her. All I see is her character, a rich, complex person you sometimes hate, sometimes love and feel sorry for. The movie is not going to be on my “Best of” list but she is.

Best Actor

Joaquin Phoenix – Joker as Arthur Fleck / Joker To me, there was no question Joaquin Phoenix would take this one. I saw Joker three times and each time, I found something new in his performance.

Best Director

Sam Mendes – 1917 With this award, I’m awarding Sam Mendes for the craft he displayed in 1917. It’s such a visceral experience that when people asked me how it compared to Dunkirk, it felt weird to lump both together. This is coming from someone who gave both pictures a 5-star review, who put both on their respective “best of the year” lists. It’s a movie I’m going to go back to and wondering “how did they do that?!

Best Picture

Little Women – Amy Pascal It’s a tough call for me this year, partially because I loved Parasite, 1917, Joker, and others so much. I’m planning on adding those three films to my collection so I can pop them into my Blu-ray player any times I feel like it. That said, I would’ve given the Best Picture Award to Little Women. You’re so emotionally invested in this little story that telling you why with merely words is impossible. You fall in love over and over. It made me cry and every time I think back to that scene at Christmas, I tear up again. I’m choosing it because of all the things it does differently from the other films. At the end of the day, it isn’t a big story. It isn’t about people with guns, corruption, war, a turning point in history or even necessarily the biggest event in the lives of the characters but it feels like it is. That’s exactly why it’s so good. 

Disagree with my choices? I don’t blame you. What kind of idiot finds a way to leave out Marriage Story from their list? You let me know where it should’ve gone. Hopefully, commenting keep you warm until MY Best of 2019 list gets posted in the next few days.

[quakerjoe]

What a spineless cunt looks like: Say hello to @keviwz...

This feckless twat, @kevwiz​ , is barely a step above an anon. He had the decency to not DO an anon, but he blocked me immediately so I couldn’t respond. What a coward.

So, I’ll post this and leave it for all to see... @kevwiz​ FUCK YOURSELF RIGHT BACK, you GOP bot, chickenshit coward.

Allow me to be CRYSTAL, motherfuckin’ clear, you children out there without a clue.

There’s NO WAY I support trump. Period. End of story.

Using false equivalencies because I won’t vote for Biden is a typical GOP tactic, adopted via the Soviet Union’s “What If” technique, so seriously, I invite you to literally go and fuck yourself if you think I in any way support trump.

Funny, I thought it was only “Bernie bros” who sent such adolescent, abusive messages on the internet. Time to coin the phrase “Biden Bros” now.

Biden is a right-wing cunt who isn’t exactly pro-ANYTHING progressive and at this stage of his life, it’s not gaffs anymore, he sounds like an addle-brained fuckwit, only not as sharp as trump. If he’s the front-runner, you just handed 2020 to trump, and that’s on you, you stupid, easily-fooled taint-barnacles and twatwaffles. 

If you want to cheaply throw away your vote on Biden and literally tell the Dems that you’re fine with whatever sized or shaped political strap on they cram up your ass without a grease-up or a kiss first and with no guarantee of a reach-around, that’s on you. 

I do NOT support trump.

I will NOT support Biden. He’s as bad if not worse and you’d know this if you did your goddamn homework, you lazy shit-sticks.

I will abstain, not attach my name to this shit-show, and tell the Dems, at last: NO MORE. If you can’t grow some cajoles and are wiling to get pegged by the DNC, that’s on you, fuck-face.

[petersmparker]

Congrats on 100 followers❤️ Would it be okay to do a Peter x Reader with these: G – “God, you really are a terrible liar.” L – “Let’s just pretend that this didn’t happen.” W – “Would you believe me if I said that I have feelings for you?”

Thanks Ciara!!! At first I wasn’t sure how to do all three but now it’s 1500 words 😂

Thank you for requesting (and for your patience)!! I hope you like it!

You and Peter have always been pretty touchy compared to most friends. To some that probably seems a bit weird, but to you it’s what comes naturally. You’ve always been compelled to show physical affection to others limitlessly, but there are few who you believe will respond comfortably to it. MJ is content to allow you to hold her hand, Betty thinks a hello kiss on the cheek is cute, Ned will respond to a hug with great enthusiasm. It’s nice to be able to show your friends that you love them in such simple, easy ways. 

Peter is the easiest of all to dole your affection out to. You learned early in your friendship that he’s responsive. He adapts easily to what’s around him. Any attempt at affection you ever gave to him was met with a willingness to add it to the itinerary. He’s just that kind of person- good at interacting with people in a way that suits them.

That was something you always appreciated that about him, even before you were close friends. A trait you loved before you began to realize that maybe you had started to view Peter as someone a bit more special than a friend.

To your great misfortune, that only made it hurt more when you noticed that Peter had been drifting away from you recently. He begins to let go of your hand quicker when you hold it. Starts to sit on the other end of the couch when he comes over to watch movies. Transitions into giving you awkward nods before you can even try to give him a hug to say hello. Stops asking you for adjust his collar for him when you tell him it’s messed up.

It feels like Peter’s gotten sick of you after several years of nothing but positive responses, and it hurts. You let him pull away, though. What other choice is there? You hate the idea of forcing your physical affection onto him when he no longer wants it, and you’d been worrying for a while now that with your steadily growing feelings that you were taking advantage of him, somehow by maintaining the old behaviors. Maybe this was just the world giving you an out before the concern could overwhelm you.

Peter receives the space that he clearly wants. You’re sad for a while, but know that it’s best if you learn to adjust to the new dynamic. It’s hard to have to remind yourself not to reach for his hand when you’re walking to the train or fix his hair when he comes out of gym class with it falling into his eyes, but you do it.

This continues for a month before it’s unexpectedly interrupted. It’s a friday night following a downright excessively crime-filled week. Peter had been out much later than usual four nights in a row. Today he ends up at your place just before midnight, exhausted and overwhelmed, and asks to copy your Spanish homework.

“I know how to do it,” he promises, pulling out his worksheets, “I honestly just don’t have the time or the capacity to do it right now.”

You don’t mind, even offer up your history assignment too, and his tired eyes brighten. He looks like a mess. It’s been a while since you’ve seen him so disheveled- dark circles, healing cuts, and messy hair all prominent to you in the lamplight while you watch him work. You’re tempted to reach over push the curls away from his forehead, but abstain.

“Oh, come on,” he groans when he goes to put his work back in his bag, “I forgot about physics.”

You aren’t in the same class and therefore can’t help him, but Peter sticks around until he’s finished the assignment anyway. He finishes about an hour and a half after he’d arrived, seeming even more exhausted than when he arrived. The three page physics assignment had truly done him in. He looks like he’s barely awake by the time his bag is packed. You’re quick to let him know that he’s free to stay the night, since tomorrow is a Saturday, but he waves away your offer.

“I’ll probably be fine,” he reasons, shouldering his bag as he enters the hall of your apartment building.

You aren’t prepared for him to lean in to kiss your cheek when he does, and by the look on his face when he pulls back, apparently neither was he. Like he’d done it without thinking in his sleep-deprived state. It’s something you used to do to him on occasion. One of the only things he hadn’t attempted to do back.

“Uh. Sorry,” he blurts, eyes wide, “I just-”

“It’s fine,” you quickly say, heat rising to your cheeks terrifyingly fast.

“Yeah. Let’s just pretend that this didn’t happen.” He suggests, “I’ll, uh, I’ll see you on monday.”

His words bring a bitter taste to your mouth, but you let him go. Pretend it didn’t happen? What the hell? After a month of him pushing you away he kisses you and wants to move on like it didn’t happen? It’s hard not to be a bit frustrated at all the conflicting messages he’s sending. Sure, he was tired, but it’s not like kissing you had been a habit for him. Not like it had been one for you. There’s no way that could have been just muscle memory.

You’re bothered and confused all weekend, Peter too occupied with his Spider-Man duties to see you. Monday comes with a newfound resolve to ask what exactly happened both friday and in the last month, and that’s exactly what you do when you meet him at the train station in the morning.

He’s looking a bit more well-rested, a bit cheerier, and when he turns to say hello you feel kind of bad about planning to throw a wrench in it all.

“Are we going to talk about friday?” You ask, giving him the opportunity to own up and diffuse at least some of your anger right off that bat by admitting that the kiss happened.

He reaches up to rub the back of his neck, looking apologetic. “Yeah,” he says.

Peter is an intelligent boy.

“I’m sorry,” he continues after a beat, “That shouldn’t have happened.”

“No, it shouldn’t have,” you agree, folding your arms, “Not after all this time I’ve been trying to teach myself how to be less affectionate with you. It’s not fair to me, Peter. And what is even up with that? Why did you suddenly decide to change?”

Maybe it’s not fair to put him on the spot, but you’ve been wondering nonstop for a month and you’re at the end of your rope. He looks ashamed when you’ve finished speaking, head dipped down to stare at his shoes. The sight of it brings you a bit of guilt, but you maintain your stance, trying hard not to crumble. You’d like an explanation.

“Would you believe me if I said I had feelings for you?”

The bitterness returns to your tongue as soon as the sentence leaves his mouth. Part of you wants to turn around and go home, rather than get on a train with Peter and spend the next thirty minutes pretending he didn’t use such an untrue excuse. Why would he want to pull away from you the way he did if that were true?

“God, you really are a terrible liar,” you state, shaking your head in disbelief, “If you got sick of me, just say so. It really sucks, but I’m a big girl. I can take it.”

Peter steps forward, eyebrows knitted together. “Y/N, what?” He sputters, “I’m not messing around!”

You’re unconvinced and hurt by his decision to persist. Against your wishes, your eyes start to burn and water. You wipe furiously at them when you say, “Cut it out, Peter-”

He surges forward, snatching your hand away from your face, and kisses you. Your eyes are blown wide in your surprise, frozen still where you stand. Peter’s hand is warm against your skin as he continues to hold it out of the way, and his lips are even warmer. Your face heats faster than metal in a fire. He pulls away after another month has passed by you, face resolute.

“Oh,” you yelp, and immediately feel your face get even hotter. How lame.

“Is that okay with you?” He asks, fingers loosening their hold on your hand, “If not, I’m sorry for that, too.”

You shake your head, a little too urgent. “No! No, that’s- that’s great. I’m happy.”

“Oh, thank god,” he laughs, upper body sagging in relief, “It occurred to me halfway through that you might have to slap me.”

It’s very difficult not to laugh at his response. He brings a hand to his face like he’s embarrassed when he adds, “I was just worried that if I kept being touchy while I had this big crush on you it would be creepy. It didn’t occur to me that you might like me back.“

You giggle along with him, bitterness melted out of you. All this time, he’d had the same concern. He’d just acted on it first. How ridiculous. 

From behind, your train screeches to a stop as it reaches the platform. Peter dips forward once more to peck you on the cheek. "Ready to go?” He asks.

“Yeah,” you sigh, feeling lighter than you have in a while, and take his hand. “Let’s go.”

permanent tag list

@undiadeestos @moonstruckholland

[ariadnelives]

Chapter 13 -- The Perfectly Good Explanation

[Missed earlier chapters? Go catch up here! Otherwise, welcome back! Oh, and make sure to join our discord server! Chapter can also be found @ ao3”]

“She's coming back,” Sasha said.

“I want to think so too,” Backflip sounded a lot more worried, “but—”

“I don't think she's coming back,” Sasha demanded, “I know it for a fact.”

“Deathsbane,” Backflip lowered her voice so the police officers outside the cell couldn't hear, “she took our guns and a backpack with 500,000 credits and ran away to save her own skin.”

“Nope,” Sasha insisted, “we're not seeing the whole picture.”

Backflip whispered harshly, “she ditched us and let us get caught so she could get away!”

“There's got to be something we're missing.” Sasha shook her head. “She wouldn't just leave me like this. I can't believe that. I won't.”

“You're in denial.” Backflip sighed.

“You know, you can be a real child sometimes,” Sasha snapped.

Backflip looked hurt.

“I'm sorry,” Sasha said halfheartedly.

“It's whatever,” Backflip crossed her arms and looked to the side. Sasha was right, technically speaking Backflip was only fourteen years old and was, by most definitions of the word, a child. However, Sasha was not being technical, she was being intentionally hurtful, and it wasn't, as Backflip claimed, “whatever.”

“No, I'm actually sorry,” Sasha said, this time sincerely, and moved over next to Backflip. “We've both had a pretty bad day, and I shouldn't have snapped at you like that.”

Backflip grunted to indicate that the apology was accepted, but since she was actually a child in exactly the way Sasha meant, she still continued to maintain an air of grouchiness despite not officially being upset anymore.

“Plus, it's my fault you're in here anyway,” Sasha continued.

“How do you figure?” Backflip asked, “You're not the one who called the cops on us, or the one who ditched us.”

“I tricked you into coming on this stupid mission because I was feeling cooped up,” Sasha shrugged.

“I knew the risks when I thought I was leaving with Spacebreather,” Backflip shrugged back.

“You've got to understand, Sweettalk might not be concerned with rules, but she wouldn't throw us under the bus. I'm sure there's a perfectly good explanation for what she did.”

“I'd love to hear it,” Backflip rolled her eyes, “I think I saw someone who could explain that booking it down an alley with all our guns and money.”

“I know it,” Ghostrunner said from the opposite corner without looking up from the stars she was drawing on her arm with a semi-permanent marker. She had been so quiet that Backflip and Sasha both jumped when she spoke, having almost forgotten she was there.

“Well, lay it on us,” Sasha said, “Not like we've got somewhere else to be.”

Ghostrunner continued to draw stars on her arm as she began to explain the story. Backflip and Deathsbane were both enthralled, they'd never heard Ghostrunner talk for this long before, and they allowed her to tell Sweettalk's entire life story without interrupting.

A lot of the story was stuff they already knew. Sweettalk's birth name was Mingxia Huang, and she was born in Xiagu, the sole colony of Saturn's cold moon, Enceladus. The moon was too rocky and full of canyons to build a standard bio-dome on level ground, but when a team of engineers is faced with a problem, it's a safe bet they'll come up with a solution far more ridiculous than simply abstaining from attempting to colonize a completely inhospitable moon.

Instead of a normal hemispheric bio-dome, the top of a canyon was sealed off with an advanced glasslike material thick enough to stop a nuclear bomb. The steep, flat walls of the canyon were outfitted with artificial gravity to allow the inhabitants of Xiagu to walk up and down them, heating elements to keep them from freezing to death, and specially engineered gardens to keep the atmosphere breathable in the airtight canyon.

Xiagu was a quiet, very insular community, more suburb than city. The children went to school during the day, did their homework in the evening, and for recreation, there were weekend games of a team sport that involved groups of players standing on one side of the canyon and throwing a ball high enough that it would get caught in the opposite wall's gravity and fall to the other side, where the opposing team would attempt to volley it back. On paper, it was an incredibly boring sport that amounted to little more than volleyball with more complex physics, but the whole community usually came out to watch, and getting lost in the cheers and enthusiasm actually made it pretty fun to watch.

The adults all had jobs and, for the most part, nobody was poor. Their food was all produced in gardens at the base of the gulch, there were small businesses that offered just about anything you might need at a reasonable price. There wasn't much crime, except for the occasional smuggler bringing contraband food or imported clothes in, but this was usually harmless. It was a nice, if incredibly dull, place to live.

The one thing about it that was, from the inside, extraordinary to a young Mingxia Huang was that she could always look to the mouth of the canyon and see Saturn, glorious, golden, and ringed, hanging in the sky. She used to watch it as she fell asleep and dream of places far more exciting than her home.

Her parents were good people. They weren't too strict, but they also weren't so permissive that Mingxia felt the need to act out for attention. They had steady, boring jobs tending to the climate control systems that made sure the colony stayed habitable. They loved their daughter, and she loved them. She hoped that when she grew up and got to live her exciting, glamorous life in the big city, she'd be able to provide for her parents in their old age.

Unfortunately, however, her parents never reached old age. They were two among the first wave of casualties in an outbreak that would claim the lives of every single resident of Xiagu, with two exceptions.

The viral cause of the plague would have been detected and eradicated quickly in the larger cities of Mars and the Jovian moons, and was little more than a minor annoyance in the mining communities of the Kupier belt where it originated. It was, technically speaking, alien life, but it was nothing as exciting as the Divoratori, it was just a few microbes and viruses that had been frozen in some of the larger asteroids, left over from some chunk of rock that had drifted into our system when the planets were young and never found its way back out. It caused sniffles and mild disorientation at first, and was just severe enough to affect productivity the slightest bit. The mining company added supplements to the company store that altered workers' DNA to compensate for the symptoms, and slowly but surely, the community built up an immunity. Within a few generations, every single miner in the belt had the virus in their system, but they were completely asymptomatic.

Every couple of years, the virus would mutate and the sniffles and disorientation would return, and the mining company would have the supplements adjusted to address the new mutations. What they hadn't accounted for was the cumulative effect of their continuous cycle. The virus had been incubating for hundreds of years in a community of people whose immune system had been genetically engineered scores of times to be resistant to its effects.

After generations of mutation and compensation, what had once been nothing but inconvenient sniffles and disorientation to the miners would, in the system of a person whose genetic code had not been radically altered to resist the virus, be a respiratory arrest and complete shutdown of the central nervous system within 18 hours of exposure. Under normal circumstances, the minerals would be disinfected and made sterile before anyone outside the community could touch them, and anyone who risked contact with the virus would be given a viral inhibitor that would prevent them from becoming infected.

This was, unfortunately, through legal channels. Smugglers, however, aren't usually known for being sticklers for the rules. One young smuggler, a teenager from Xiagu, had gotten his hands on a sealed case of Platinum ore and a single dose of the antiviral supplement from a disgruntled miner who wanted to make a quick buck on the side and didn't think to first disinfect the payload. The young smuggler then used the platinum ore as a bribe to convince a customs agent to look the other way while he brought his exotic fruits and designer jewelry into the bio-dome.

The customs agent would become patient zero fifteen hours after opening the case to inspect it. In those fifteen hours, he managed to interact with seventy-eight other people, sixty-two of whom were infected with the virus. Mingxia's parents would become the seventh and eighth casualties, respectively. The victims were quarantined as soon as the threat was identified, but it was far too late. The virus was spreading too quickly to treat, and the community was far too small to sustain losses this heavy.

Mingxia was not able to say goodbye to her parents. They died while she was in school when she was twelve years old. She refused to believe they were really gone at first, and she screamed at her principal that he was lying, and demanded he bring her to them. It wasn't until she arrived back home and saw the town pastor there to prepare her dinner and tuck her into bed that her heart properly sank.

She did not eat the dinner the pastor had prepared. She did not sleep that night. Her eyes remained fixed on the sky outside her window, on Saturn, as she wondered how this could be allowed to happen to people as good as her parents.

The next day the pastor drove her to the church and told her she'd be staying there for a while. It would be difficult to find her a new caretaker, half the town was in quarantine and the church was serving as a sanctuary for those who were uninfected and preferred to remain that way.

It was here that Mingxia met a young altar boy by the name of Prescott Cain. He, like her, was an orphan (although she almost struck him when he used the word “orphan” to describe her) who dreamed of one day going out into the stars and living a glamorous life in the big city of Xijing, on Callisto. She liked to hear about Prescott's big dreams, even if they seemed unrealistic. He'd lost his parents years earlier, and she liked the idea that he was doing so well and still had hope even though he'd lost so much.

After a few hours of him regaling her with tales of escapades he hadn’t been on yet, he decided to confide his deepest secret with her: he left the village all the time. He'd go out on adventures, hunting treasure and seeing strange new places, but he always had to come back quickly or else the pastor would get wise.

“But if I had a partner,” he told her, “maybe I could start adventuring in the big city full-time!”

Mingxia was too young to realize she was being conned. She hadn't put together that his “adventures” were actually petty crime, and she had absolutely no way of knowing the consequences of the crimes he’d committed. He wouldn’t even piece it together until years later, so how could she have known?

The next night, in total spite of how terrible an idea it is to run off with strangers even when one is emotionally stable, let alone in a state of grief, Mingxia and Prescott boarded a small shuttle and, taking advantage of the confusion the outbreak had caused, managed to escape their hometown. Mingxia and Prescott were lucky enough to evacuate before she could become infected, so they both assumed that the quarantine had worked and that life in Xiagu continued as usual without the two orphans who left in the night.

The next six months were spent on Callisto, in a shack that Prescott's current gang had set him up with. Their days were spent running cons on the streets of Xijing. They started out small, with games of Three-Card Monte. Prescott would play the dealer, showing the crowd three cards (both black jacks and the queen of hearts) and laying them facedown on a table. Players would place a bet on whether or not they could identify the queen after the cards were quickly shuffled and rearranged, and if they were successful, they'd win back double their bet.

Of course, Three-Card Monte is a fairly well-known con, so it's hard to get people to actually play. This is where Mingxia, the shill, comes in. She'd pose as a player, and when passers-by saw this little girl betting her allowance on the game and winning, they'd think maybe this game wasn't rigged for once. It helped that Prescott was scarcely older than her, so most players actually thought they were taking advantage of him.

When this proved to be a somewhat slow way to make money, they started to up the ante. For a while, Mingxia would be sent into a bodega, one with no more than a single cash register, and wait for Prescott to make a purchase. When the register opened, Mingxia would have to break a bottle in the back and start crying loudly, causing the lone attendant to rush back to check on the ruckus. Approximately half the time, they'd forget to close the register all the way, and while the store owner was helping Mingxia clean up shards of broken glass, Prescott would empty out the cash drawer. If they failed, they'd have lost the cost of the candy bar Prescott bought, since store owners rarely charged the crying, unattended little girl for the bottle of iced tea she broke. If they succeeded, they'd walk away with several hundred dollars.

Across Xijing, Prescott pulled just about every scam and grift in the book with Mingxia as his shill. With varying degrees of success, they pulled slip-and-falls, fiddle games, melon drops, and for two shocking months, purchased dirt-cheap mushrooms from a local deli and passed them off as illegal hallucinogens to unsuspecting high school students at a vastly inflated price, knowing they couldn't be reported for this without their customers admitting they'd attempted to purchase illegal narcotics.

Mingxia was never happy during this time, but she participated after Prescott told her she had to choose between taking the moral high ground and eating. She knew what she was doing was wrong, especially when the scams took advantage of others' generosity. She felt lied to. She'd been promised a glamorous lifetime of adventure, not a hungry ten months ripping off shopkeepers and broke kids who were too dumb to know any better. When she raised this objection, Prescott would invariably ask, “how exactly is this different from what I promised?”

Mingxia became very good at persuasion. She lived with Prescott for a little under a year, and by the end of it, she could sell any lie with very little effort. She could, and often did, convince grown adults to part with hundreds of credits on the pretense that she needed to buy a three-credit bus fare. She hated herself almost as much as she hated Prescott.

Near the end of their time together, she couldn't take the guilt anymore and threatened to roll over on him if he didn't take her back to Xiagu. She figured the pastor could find her a caretaker, or she'd become a ward of the church, or they'd go to jail and end up in a state-run children's home, and either way she'd be going legit and getting more food and a warmer bed. Prescott whipped up a batch of crocodile tears and claimed to agree with her. He told her, of course he'd take her back to Xiagu, but that he'd spent their last few dollars on packets of mushrooms, and that they'd have to sell this one last batch in order to buy passage.

They split the packets down the middle, agreed to run their usual routine on a high school where their stock hadn't been discovered as fakes yet, and rendezvous back at their shack with whatever money they'd made.

Mingxia got within two blocks the school's grounds before a police officer stopped her, announced that they'd received a tip about a young girl matching her description selling narcotics outside a high school. They searched her bag and found several packets of mushrooms inside. The police claimed the tip was anonymous, but she knew Prescott had sold her down the river to protect his own skin.

They took her into custody and, eventually, determined that the packets in her bag were full of perfectly legal, non-hallucinogenic mushrooms. As far as they could prove, she'd committed no crime and would have to be released into her parents' custody. She told them she had no parents. They asked if she had a legal guardian. She gave them the name and address of the pastor in Xiagu, hoping they'd send her home.

It was at this point that Mingxia found out there was no more Xiagu to go back to. The entire population was dead less than a week after she left. She and Prescott were the only two survivors, and he was probably halfway across the system by this point.

The officers were left with no other option than to send her to a nearby home for orphaned children. This is where Ghostrunner first encountered Sweettalk, and where she'd learned of these events. Ghostrunner was the only person she'd ever confided this story in, and she'd made her promise to keep it a secret.

“Who would I tell?” Ghostrunner asked her, “I don't talk to anyone.”

Ghostrunner confessed to feeling incredibly guilty for sharing this story with them, even though Sweettalk had apparently betrayed them, but reasoned that she would probably be okay with it if it made them blame her less for bolting.

Conditions at the orphanage were subpar, to say the least. There were only five residents, and they were given only enough food to keep them alive. For recreation, they had three moth-eaten books, a broken stationary bicycle, and each other's company. They slept in sleeping bags on the floor instead of beds. Mingxia missed being able to look up at Saturn as she fell asleep terribly; the water damage on the ceiling of their windowless bedroom couldn’t hold a candle to that view.

The children at the orphanage had assumed there was just no funding whatsoever. The caretakers seemed nice enough, and were always very apologetic about being unable to provide filling portions or new clothes for the children. It wasn't until after their rescue that they found out the caretakers were receiving thousands of credits in state funding and had keeping fake budgetary books that showed razor-thin margins. In reality, they spent the bare minimum on the children's care and pocketed the rest for themselves.

An elderly neighbor named La Pesadilla eventually discovered the conditions the children were forced to live in, and, in a rare moment of conscience, she alerted an associate named Pilar Aguilar, who she knew operated a much better home for children with her young girlfriend.

The next day, the caretakers told the girls they'd all been adopted by a wealthy benefactor who'd offered to buy out the orphanage for an exorbitant price. The girls were surprised to see that their savior was such a beautiful young girl, hardly older than them, and covered in tattoos from the neck down. She ushered them into her shuttle and brought them to their new life on Ship Trap.

Later that day, Law Enforcement received an anonymous tip that included all the evidence necessary to put them in jail for the remainder of their lives. When the police got to them, the caretakers were found savagely beaten and tied to a post in the run-down orphanage, restrained in the childrens' sleeping bags. They gave a full confession and offered no explanation of who had assaulted them. It was clear they'd rather live out their lives in prison than invoke that person's wrath again.

Mingxia was initially resistant to the community on Ship Trap Island. She didn't see how it was different than what Prescott did. It wasn't until she found out that those living there were fed and sheltered even if they refused to participate, and that they exclusively took from those who had too much to feed those who didn't have enough, that she was okay with it.

She eventually became a willing participant in the pirates' adventures, and that's when she really knew that this was different than what she'd been through with Prescott.

This time, she didn't feel like she was taking advantage of innocent people, she didn't feel like she was being taken advantage of, and she felt like her partners in crime viewed her as family, not as a tool. Her charisma made her rather popular with the crew, and the criminal skills she'd developed under Prescott became invaluable now that she was putting them to good use.

She was on the scene when a young Pilar Aguilar survived exposure to the void of space and became Pilar Spacebreather, and first took notice of Sasha Aguilar as she worked almost supernaturally hard to save her sister's life. It would be a little while before she worked up the nerve to talk to her, but when she did, she laid on the charm like she never had before.

It wasn't long before she earned her own new name, by—

“Well,” Ghostrunner said, “you know that part. She got Ariadne away from the police by posing as her lawyer, even though she was only fifteen years old. Stole a pantsuit from a department store and used talcum powder to put streaks of gray in her hair.”

“Jeez Louise,” Backflip sighed, “no wonder she ditched out. Last time Prescott sold her down the river, she ended up in that horrible orphanage. I'd have run too, if it was me.”

“That's not a story about why she ran,” Sasha insisted, “my takeaway from all that is that she always has a plan.”

“Mine is that her plan is to get as far away from the police station as possible,” Backflip shrugged.

“Sasha's got it right,” Ghostrunner said, “Look.”

Backflip and Deathsbane turned around to see the entrance to the holding cell, where a tired-looking officer was playing a card game by himself on a tablet.

Standing in front of the desk was Mingxia Sweettalk, dressed in high heels, a pencil skirt, horn-rimmed glasses and a navy blue blazer, carrying a tablet of her own and attempting to look as grown as possible.

“Excuse me, officer,” she said firmly, “I believe you've been holding my clients illegally.”

[artofaboythatoncewas]

Teachers

Aries: Football (unamerican) coach. I feel as though Betty Crocker's employees have been studying my movements in anticipation for something. Everyone I meet I assume is working for her, and that's not my paranoia acting up. Recently, factory locations have been springing up all over this country, and here I was thinking the hag would just stay in America where she belonged, but no. I was struck terrifyingly curious about this, so I looked on her website <excusing the modem's start-up process>, and look! It says here that she, herself, has ninety-plus different reasons as to why we still love chicken breasts. God, there's no way a human could write that much about chicken breasts; I'm terrified of each and every one of them if I'm quaint. This is a disturbing sight, but I'll abstain from doing something now until it really starts to become a problem… I fear I'm falling into old pits though. […] I hopped on the 'net today and I saw something only describable as vile. Fuck Betty Crocker and her offensive Kiss Me, I'm Irish cookies. Crocker, you liar and probably not even human; you are neither Irish nor worthy of a kiss. She's done it now, she's cross the line and struck me straight in the soul with everything she has: This witch wanted to infest my land with her polluted factories, steal my press with her spam articles, and now steal my culture too! [,,,] I know what I must do now; can anyone drive me to their headquarters? The new one they just built here, the one that's already polluting our water supply with chicken broth. God, I'm so furious, so vengeful, and so willing to vanquish this evil that I! That I… that. Wait, what do you mean we can't use Betty Crocker for this one? Some other epic internet-based literature uses this as a canonical joke? For fuck's sake, just use the Quaker Oats dude instead; we'll take the words we had already and change them to be about Quaker Oats and his offense towards Irish people. <Redmond starts to drive 'til their ride runs out of gas halfway through> For fuck's sake! GIVE ME THE QUAKER OATS MAN, I'M BEING PAID BY THE HOUR HERE!

Gemini: Sociology teacher. I can feel James Rolfe writing a letter that details all the offense that I caused him right now, and I'll be sure to refute his every claim like he refuted all my feedback. Just for reiteration: I will not apologize to him for those honest criticisms I made of his newer video-reviews, specifically of the 2006 Sonic the Hedgehog game and Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing. If he's been going at his online profession for ten-plus years now, then he can handle a fair bit of digital criticism. [,,,] I told him that I'd prefer if he'd respect my position more after a paragraph-long explanation as to what my position was. Frankly, I thought Rolfe would be a more understanding and self-aware person to recognize that my life as a national mailperson whose work spans across the entire Indonesian archipelago. Clearly, my goal was that he'd attempt to sympathize with my working-class struggles as he'd do with any American mailman whom he is familiar with, but I didn't get any of the respect I was expecting. Not even I was spared for the decency of verbal abuse, because I was given something worse: The unrelenting silence of zero responses towards my effortful comment. That told me that Rolfe is a man who doesn't care about the issues of working-class folks like me. I'm hesitant to state, and possibly slander Rolfe, for the likelihood that he has a strong prejudice against Indonesian and Papuan peoples by refusing to acknowledge my criticism and my simultaneous first and third-world perspective. […] I just don't know what his issue with me is; after all, I've read every one of his love letters to me and I managed to enjoy them despite how sloppy his nerdy, rage-filled writing was. I think I made out his name the best of all and the thanks he granted me for sending him all of the games nobody else here wanted. «Truce, thanks for supporting my quest to protect the world from shitty-ass games. From: The fucking nerd.»

Scorpio: Public skills teacher. "Mexican-South Korean relations, from Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. Mexico-South Korea relations refers to the bilateral relations between Mexico and South Korea. There are an estimated 15,000 Koreans and Mexicans of Korean descent living in Mexico. Both nations are members of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation, G-20 major economies, Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, and the United Nations." [,,,] Yeah, so I pulled out a random book from the library for my book report assignment (I'm still surprised they gave me the freedom to do this), and I got a book about Mexican-Korean relations. I'm also surprised by how they can create such a thick book on a topic with little-to-no history, so I naturally assumed it was some sorta fictionalized history. As you could tell, I opened up the first page to find out that the first quarter of the book was a copy-paste job from the Wikipedia article with most of the citational numbers removed. The font was also in a very large size, presumably to fill space and not be readable for readers with impaired vision. [,,,] I tried opening the pages beyond to the rest of the book's contents, but they seemed glued shut, and the more I attempted to pull them open was I expected them to rip, but they just stayed firm to the bookcase. A closer inspection revealed that it was actually a container welded to the bookcase, and that it there was something inside of it. It wasn't alive, but it could jingle alright. [,,,] I decided to pry that sucker open and I found a mysterious note, but I was scared 'cause it addressed me directly! All it told me was that I should be in bed by 9 pm; I was so scared, but I knew the note told what's best for me, and I obeyed it. The moral of this story is that you should do your homework and follow your bedtime schedule! […] «Dear Dad, stop writing in my diaries, thanks.»

Capricorn: History teacher. You can tell the people who go to this place are from the '70s. After hauling an artificial Christmas tree into a lady's car, she gave me two quarters and said, "it's not much, but get yourself a cold drink." I felt so vintage at that moment: I felt like I was consumed with vintage appeal. My worker overalls were put onto me in that moment and I was ready to work the rest of my life in a windowless retail store. But it was before they sold all of the cool shit they have now like E-cigarettes, so they just sold regular cigarettes to teenagers who had predominant facial hair. […] Right then, wouldn’t anyone be compelled to by the working-class American luxury that is a cold soda: Preferably, whatever they sold at Becker’s? Yeah right, I used to do the same thing everyone else did except I looked aged enough to not even rely on facial hair to get one of those… cold sodas. Isn’t it so vintage that we live in a polity completely built around the idea of infinite room for exploitation resulting from the false belief that there’ll always be new lands to exploit? Isn’t it so vintage that the complete destruction of two entire continents was all done in the name of securing the existing powers in Europe at the height of the 15th century when they were beginning to crumble due to their unsustainability? Isn’t it so vintage that countless cultures, peoples, and languages were… Heh, let’s not let the blade in our mouths become too sharp and let’s get back to that vintage ‘70s lifestyle. Let’s gather me and the boys to stop by Becker’s and get some nice, cold sodas… and be called a savage by the racist clerk who made sure to call the police on me if I ever walked into that place again. Motherfucker should know his goddamn place telling me that I can’t be in the store that he built on land that isn’t his. I was a 27-year-old man and that’s how I was treated… back in sunny Halifax! Ha, I still have the fake pine on all over my hands: My bloody, beaten hands.

[nanowrimo]

Camp Pep: How Much is Your Story Worth to You?

Camp NaNoWriMo is nothing without you, our incredible participants. Today, YWP writer Elysia Lopez offers you a boost in your third week of Camp to help you reach your writing goals:

It was the middle of NaNoWriMo, and I was 20,000 words behind in my novel. I didn’t know what happened to the time. I’d kept telling myself that I would catch up on my word count tomorrow, but too many tomorrows had passed, and here I was, a 20K-large void in my word count.

I realized that at this point, my overall goal of 50,000 words was simply unrealistic. I had homework. I had robotics competitions. I didn’t have time to write a novel.

Both Camp NaNoWriMo and the Young Writers Program allow you to change your word goal whenever you want during the month, and I’ve taken advantage of that feature. My goal dropped from 50,000 to 30,000. 30k words, which still allowed for a good chunk of my novel, so I was content. But it made me realize something:

Don’t just be content with your novel — consider what your novel means to you and what it can be.

We participate in NaNoWriMo to motivate ourselves to finally write our stories. Remember that. Our ultimate goal is to write the story, not reach an arbitrary word count.

It’s very easy to take this in the wrong direction. Since the word count doesn’t matter in the end, should we really worry about how many words we write per day, as long as we’re adding words? 

What still matters that you write as much as you can. In Logic class, I learned that if someone has the power, opportunity, and desire to do something, they will likely do it. This applies to writing. Let’s break that down:

Power: Writing in itself is a very low-maintenance task. We all have the power to do it. We have laptops with Scrivener and Google Docs that enhance our writing experience, but at the very least we only need a pencil and paper. J.K. Rowling wrote her initial Harry Potter ideas on a napkin.

Opportunity: Even though it may often seem otherwise, we all have opportunities throughout the day to write. The car ride to and from school. The wait in line at the grocery store. These opportunities exist in small pockets of time, we just have to grab them.

Desire: The desire to write is often where most of us fall short. This is the reason the story never gets written, which is why I would like to focus on this point more. I think I can safely assume that we all want to write our story. Sometimes we get inspiration bursts and find ourselves writing our stories at the speed of light. But what about the times when we don’t exactly feel like writing?

Everyone falls into a writing slump now and then, but the ways we respond to writing slumps can make or break our stories. It’s so, so easy to get sidetracked because we don’t feel like writing, and we open up Netflix or Instagram and suddenly time slips out of our hands. And it’s so, so easy to lose sight of our ultimate goal of writing the story.

But next time you’re in a writing slump, ask yourself: How much is this story worth to you? Or, in other words, what would you do to get your story written? NaNoWriMo is a time for big projects, and if your story is really, really worth it (hint: it is!), sometimes those big projects take big sacrifices, like abstaining from social media and television.

You might know this feeling: it’s a Sunday night, and you haven’t finished your homework yet, so you have to stay up past the wee hours of the night, and you spent the entire time wishing your past self had been more productive.

That’s the feeling of regret, and it isn’t pleasant. Guilt hangs over your head like the sword of Damocles and you just wish that you hadn’t been so careless with your time. From my experience, the bigger the project I’m neglecting, the worse the regret, and as previously said, we work on big projects during NaNoWriMo. I don’t want to end the month with biting regret. I want to make sure that I work as hard as I can, because this is my story and I owe it to myself to write it. At the end of the month, I want to feel proud and satisfied, like the burn that singes your muscles after a workout.

Let’s circle back: after my stressful NaNoWriMo experience of catching up from 20k words, I’d realized that my novel meant too much for me to put to the side. After reading many pep talks and watching videos of NaNoWriMo participants who successfully reached a goal they’d thought was impossible, I realized I wanted that experience too. 

By lowering my word count goal, I felt like I was downgrading my story’s importance. But that wasn’t right—lowering your writing goal is by no means failure. But later on, I returned my word count goal to 50k and stepped up my writing game, constantly reminding myself that this story was worth it, that it was important to me that this story was written. And on November 30, 2017, I reached my goal of 50,000 words.

So keep on writing that story. At times it may be arduous, and you may be tempted to get sidetracked, but keep your eyes on the prize: your story. Don’t end the month feeling regretful. Remind yourself exactly how much this story is worth to you, and the story will eventually get written. I’ll be rooting for you as you pull through these last stretches of Camp NaNoWriMo.

Elysia Lopez is an 8th grader and lives in the ever-sunny state of California. She enjoys reading fantasy and dystopian novels, and her favorite authors include Neal Shusterman, Cassandra Clare, Rick Yancey, and Cinda Williams Chima. Besides writing, she also enjoys building robots and programming video games. One day Elysia hopes to work as both a software engineer and a writer.

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translation of English sentences into Urdu: 300 most important one

Translation Of English Sentences Into Urdu

The best way to learn English is to know English sentences, not individual words. Therefore, the English learning students must focus on the most common daily use sentences. For this purpose, a translation of 300 crucial English to Urdu sentences is given below.

Translation Of English Sentences Into Urdu from 01 to 100 S NoTranslation Of English Sentences In Urdu   1Are you Feeling Dizzy? کیا آپ چکر محسوس کر رہے ہو؟ 2Some people prefer Quack over doctor. کچھ لوگ حکیم کو ڈاکٹر پر ترجیح دیتے ہیں۔ 3A Skint man has nothing to lose. کنگلے آدمی کے پاس کھونے کے لیے کچھ نہیں ہوتا۔ 4Imran khan is an Outspoken man. عمران خان ایک صاف گو شحض ہے۔ 5Aqib is no 1 Easy-going man. عاقب ایک نمبر کام چور آدمی ہے۔ 6Nafeesa lives in a world of Fantasy. نفیسہ خیالی دنیا میں رہتی ہے۔ 7Ishtiaq is Zany. . اشتیاق بیوقوف ہے۔ 8Ali is celebrating the Gala of his success . علی اپنی کامیابی کا جشن منا رہا ہے۔ 9Salman Pledges that he won't repeat this. سلمان پکا وعدہ کرتا ہے کہ وہ دوبارہ ایسا نہیں کرے گا۔ 10Corruption prevailed in the country. بدعنوانی ملک میں چھائی ہوئی ہے۔ 11Rightful should be given his right. خقدار کو اسکا خق ملنا چاہیے۔ 12White papers were Scatterd on the table . سفید کاغذ میز پر بکھرے پڑے تھے۔ 13This Riddle is challenging to solve . پہیلی حل کرنا انتہائی مشکل ہے۔ 14Never Miss apply your power. اپنے اختیارات کا ناجائز استعمال مت کرو۔ 15We used to Sneak from school in childhood. ہم بچپن میں سکول سے بھاگ جایا کرتے تھے۔ 16Ali hustled me, and I fell. علی نے مجھے دکھا دیا اور میں گر گیا۔ 17Zahid is Humpback. زاہد کبڑا (کمر جھکی ہوئی) ہے۔ 18Ayesha Pesters me. عائشہ مجھے تنگ کرتی ہے۔ 19Gloomy face doesn't suit you. افسردہ چہرہ آپ پہ نہیں ججتا۔ 20Ahmed will also Plead my opinion. احمد بھی میری رائے کی تائید کرے گا۔ 21After Panama, the Dignity of Imran Khan has increased tremendously. پانامہ کے بعد عمران خان کی عزت میں خیرت انگیز اضافہ ہوا ہے۔ 22His new business proved Gainful for him. اسکا نیا کاروبار اسکے لئے سود مند ثابت ہوا۔ 23Intended to be the best in my chosen field. میں نے ارادہ کیا تھا کہ میں اپنے منتخب کردہ میدان میں سب سے بہتر ہونگا۔ 24You should get your Dicky car washed. آپ کو اپنی گندی کار دھونی چاہیے۔ 25Someone Choked Ali's wife's throat last night. کسی نے کل رات علی کی بیوی کا گلہ دبایا۔ 26The offender was Lashed in front of all. مجرم پرسب کے سامنے کوڑے برسائے گئے۔ 27Your abusive words have begun to Erode our friendship. آپکی گالم گلوج والی زبان نے ہماری دوستی میں دراڑ ڈال دی ہے۔ 28Engineers Erected mobile towers safely . انجینئرز نے موبائل انٹینا باحفاظت کھڑا کر دیا۔ 29Uzair is an Errant boy. عزیر ایک آوارہ گرد لڑکا ہے۔ 30The thieves deprived her of gold ring. چوروں نے اسے سونے کی انگوٹی سے محروم کر دیا۔ 31Male child is unique Bounty of Allah. نرینہ اولاد خدا کی خاص نعمت ہے۔ 32Hassan is Chatterbox. حسن بہت باتونی ہے۔ 33He is characterless and Bilks everyone. ۔وہ بدکردار ہے اور لوگوں کو گمراہ کرتا ہے 34Becalm yourself. اپنے آپ کو پرسکون رکھو۔ 35Abscess on my foot is bleeding. میرے پاؤں کے چھالے سے خون بہہ رہا ہے۔ 36The lovers Absconded in the dark of night. پریمی جوڑا رات کی تاریکی میں فرار ہو گیا۔ 37The accused was Absolved due to insufficient proof. ملزم کو عدم ثبوت کی بناء پر بری کر دیا گیا۔ 38My son doesn't Abstain from mischief. میرا بچہ شرارت سے باز نہیں آتا۔ 39Keep this case Abstract from other issues. یہ والا کیس باقی کیسوں سے علیحدہ رکھو۔ 40He uses Absurd language. وہ بیہودہ باتیں کرتا ہے۔ 41Excessive rainfall caused Abyss in the road. ذیادہ بارش کی وجہ سے سڑک میں کھڈا پڑ گیا۔ 42I like American Accent. مجھے امریکی لہجہ پسند ہے۔ 43I have no access to the principal room. میری رسائی پرنسپل آفس تک نہیں ہے۔ 44We should Abide by our parents. ہمیں اپنے والدین کی بات ماننی چاہیے۔ 45Hajatmin is an Abject man. حاجت مین ایک ذلیل آدمی ہے۔ 46Ali Abraded the old paint from the walls. علی نے پرانا پینٹ دیوار سے کھرچ ڈالا۔ 47They were all in accord with one another. انکا آپس میں باہمی اتفاق رائے تھا۔ 48Sawara Accosted me politely. سویرا نے مجھے نرمی سے مخاطب کیا۔ 49I have Accomplishedmy homework. میں نے اپنا ہوم ورک مکمل کر لیا ہے۔ 50Naeema Accredited to me on her behalf. نعیمہ نے اپنی جگہ پر مجھے اختیار دیا۔ 51Ali Accumulated enough money to buy a car . علی نے کار خریدنے کیلئے کافی پیسے جمع کیے تھے۔ 52Accursed man gets abjection everywhere. لعنتی شحض ہر جگہ ذلیل وخوار ہوتا ہے۔ 53The Accused was released on bail. ملزم کو ضمانت پر رہا کر دیا گیا۔ 54I have Abandoned my job . میں نے اپنی نوکری چھوڑ دی ہے۔ 55Ali Abashed him for his misconduct. علی نے اسکی بد اخلاقی پر اس کو شرمسار کر دیا۔ 56Terrorists Abducted two Chinese engineers. دہشت گردوں نے دو چینی انجینئرز کو اغوا کر لیا۔ 57He did half of his work and Abated his burden. اس نے آدھا کام کرلیا اور اپنا بوجھ ہلکا کر دیا۔ 58I Abhor all those who tell a lie. آپ کا اندازہ اس پراجیکٹ کے بارے میں بالکل صحیح تھا۔ 59Shakir is going Abroad for higher studies. شاکر اعلی تعلیم کےلیے  باہر جا رہا ہے۔ 60Your estimate was entirely accurate about this project. اس پراجیکٹ کے بارے میں اپکا  اندازا بلکل درست تھا۔  61The accused is Acquitted respectfully . ملزم کو باعزت بری کر دیا گیا۔ 62The taste of bitter gourd is very Acrid. کریلے کا ذائقہ بہت کڑوا ہے۔ 63The pilot showed tremendous Acrobat in the air. پائلٹ نے  بہایت اعلیٰ قلا بازی پیش کی۔ 64He can't do so; he must be Actuated. وہ ایسا نہیں کر سکتا،اس لیے اسکو ترغیب دینا پڑی گی۔ 65I use fair & lovely to avoid Acne. میں کیل مہاسے دور کرنے کے لیے فیئر اینڈ لولی لگاتا ہوں۔ 66Rabia Acquaints me personally. رابعہ ذاتی طور پر مجھے جانتی ہے۔ 67I will Acquire my task within time. میں نے اپنا ٹاسک وقت پر حاصل کر لونگا۔ 68He must be praised for his Acuity. اسکی چستی کی تعریف کرنی چاہیے۔ 69Rustam is an Adamant boy. رستم ایک ضدی لڑکا ہے۔ 70Kareem is Irfan's adopted son. کریم ارفان کا لے پالک بیٹا ہے۔ 71Adjust your rifle and fire again. اپنی بندوق کو ترتیب دو اور گولی چلاؤ۔ 72Hard work is the only way to achieve success. سخت محنت ہی کامیابی کا واحد ذریعہ ہے۔ 73She feels Acidity in her stomach. وہ اپنے سینے میں جلن محسوس کرتی ہے۔ 74Ayyub is an Adroit worker. ایوب پھرتیلاورکر ہے۔ 75Raj Ali always Adulates his seniors. راج علی اپنے بڑوں کی چاپلوسی کرتا ہے۔ 76With the advent of the internet, our lifestyle changed. انٹرنیٹ کی ایجاد سے ہماری زندگی بدل گٰی ہے۔ 77Advert of different things on TV is the top trend nowadays ٓاج کل ٹی وی پرمختلف چیزوں کی مشہوری عروج پر ہے۔ 78True leader is required to Aegis the country. صحیح رہنما کو ملک کی قیادت کرنی چاہیے۔ 79Sanam baloch is Affable women. صنم بلوچ ایک ملنسار خاتون ہے۔ 80After Benazir's death, Ado started all over the country. بے نظیر کی موت کے بعد ملک میں افراتفری پھیل گئی۔ 81Adapt yourself according to the circumstances. اپنے آپ کو حالات کے مطابق ڈھالو۔ 82Rukhsana Adores her son. رخسانہ اپنے بچے کو بہت عزیز رکھتی ہے۔ 83The new bride was Adorned thoroughly. نئی دلہن کو زیورات سے سجایا گیا 84Don't poke your nose in my personal Affairs. 👃 میرے ذاتی معاملات میں اپنی ناک مت گھسیڑو۔ 85Wrongdoing will Affect your personality. غلط کام آپکی شخصیت پر اثر انداز ہوگی۔ 86Today, I Affirm that Nawaz is a thief. آج میں اعلان کرتا ہوں کہ نواز ایک چور ہے۔ 87younger should be given Affection. چھوٹوں پر شفقت کرنی چاہیے۔ 88Hard work is the Effective way to success. سخت مخنت  کامیابی کا ایک پراثر رستہ ہے۔ 89Saleem is seriously Ail. سلیم سخت بیمار ہے۔ 90Teacher Admired me for my great job. استاد نے میرے اچھے کام کی وجہ سے مری تعریف کی۔ 91Akram Admitted my efforts. اکرم نے میری کاوشوں کو تسلیم کیا۔ 92We Admix some fruits to make a fruit chart. ہم چاٹ بنانے کیلئے پھلوں کو آپس میں ملاتے ہیں۔ 93Boss Admonished her for unfinished work. باس نے اسکی کام مکمل نہ کرنے کی وجہ سے سرزنش کی۔ 94The Alias of Shaikh Rashid is Sheeda Talli. شیخ رشید کا تخلص شیدا ٹلی ہے۔ 95Who is that Alien? وہ خلائی مخلوق کون ہے۔؟ 96She Alighted from his BMW. وہ اسکی بی ایم ڈبلیو سے اتری۔ 97Some brothers have a similar shape. کچھ بھائیوں کی شکل ایک جیسی ہوتی ہے۔ 98Alas! he is dead. افسوس! وہ مرگیا ہے۔ 99Alleviate some load from the truck ٹرک سے کچھ وزن خالی کرو۔ 100This Alley is closed at the end. یہ گلی آگے سے بند ہے۔ Translation Of English Sentences Into Urdu From 101 To 200 S NoTranslation Of English Sentences In Urdu   101Bear this in mind. اس بات کو ذہن میں رکھو۔ 102Don't make a noise. شورمت کر۔ 103What is going on? کیا چل رہا ہے؟ 104Damn it. لعنت ہے۔ 105Leave me alone, please. برائے مہربانی مجھے اکیلا چھوڑ دو۔ 106Please stay away from me. برائے مہربانی مجھ سے دور رہو۔ 107I am fond of playing football ⚽. میں فٹبال کھیلنے کا شوقین ہوں۔ 108You deserve it. تم اسکے مستحق ہو۔ 109Please don't argue with me. برائے مہربانی میرے ساتھ بحث مت کرو۔ 110I don't mean it. میرا یہ مطلب نہیں ہے۔ 111Are you crazy? کیا تم پاگل ہو؟ 112What is the problem with you? اپ کیساتھ مسئلہ کیا ہے؟ 113I felt hurt. مجھے دکھ ہوا۔ 114Pass me the salt 🧂. ذرا نمک نزدیک کرنا۔ 115Are you bored 😴? کیا تم تنگ ہو؟ 116Make yourself at home. اپنا ہی گھر سمجھو۔ 117Please don't tease me. برائے مہربانی مجھے تنگ نہ کرو۔ 118Are you finished? کیا تم نے کام ختم کر لیا ہے؟ 119She is so mean. وہ بہت مطلبی ہے۔ 120Beware of pickpockets. چوروں سے ہوشیار رہیں۔ 121They are my colleagues. وہ میرے ساتھی ہیں۔ 122She is my fiancée. وہ میری منگیتر ہے۔ 123It doesn't matter. اس سے کوئی فرق نہیں پڑتا۔ 124She is so talkative. وہ بہت باتونی ہے۔ 125Give me a hand, please. برائے مہربانی میری مدد کریں۔ 126Don't 😢 cry, please. برائے مہربانی مت روئیں۔ 127I will be right 🔙 back. میں واپس آؤنگا۔ 128Are you kidding me? کیا تم میرے ساتھ مذاق کر رہے ہو۔؟ 129Was it my fault? کیا یہ میری غلطی تھی؟ 130You are mistaken. تمہیں غلط فہمی ہوئی ہے۔ 131Please don't take me wrong. برائے مہربانی مجھے غلط مت سمجھیں۔ 132What else do you need? تمہیں اور کیا چاہیے؟ 133What do you prefer? آپ کس چیز پر ترجیح دیتے ہو۔ 134She is a liar. وہ جھوٹی ہے۔ 135For God's sake, trust me. خدا کیلئے مجھ پر بھروسہ رکھیں۔ 136He is very greedy. وہ بہت لالچی ہے۔ 137I am not interested. مجھے اس میں کوئی دلچسپی نہیں ہے۔ 138What brought you here? آپ کو کیا چیز یہاں لے آئی؟ 139Don't you remember? کیا تمہیں یاد نہیں؟ 140I was not expecting this from you. میں آپ سے یہ توقع نہیں کر رہا تھا۔ 141Behave yourself. تمیز سے بات کرو۔    142It was nice meeting with you. آپ سے ملاقات خوشگوار رہی۔ 143We had a great time. ہم نے اچھا وقت گزارا۔ 144Remind me later. مجھے بعد میں یاد دلانا۔ 145You are stubborn. تم ضدی ہو۔ 146The teacher scolded him. استاد نے اس سے ڈانٹا۔ 147It was not a surprise for me. یہ میرے لیے خیرانگی کی بات نہیں تھی۔ 148Let me know when you are 🆓free. جب آپ کا کوئی کام نہ ہو تو مجھے بتا دینا۔ 149I am getting used to it. میں اسکا عادی ہو رہا ہوں۔ 150You are very generous. تم بہت سخی ہو۔ 151You made my day. تم نے میرا دن خوشگوار بنایا۔ 152You won my heart 💜. تم نے میرا دل 💓 جیتا۔ 153I will pay the 💵 bill. بل میں ادا کروں گا۔ 154Party 🎉 is on me. پارٹی میرے اوپر ہے۔ 155Shall we start? کیا ہم شروع کریں؟ 156Don't mention it. اسکا  تزکرہ  مت کرو۔ 157Fuck off. بھاڑ میں جاؤ۔ 158Turn the light off. بلب بند کرو۔ 159I watered the plants. میں نے پودوں کو پانی دیا۔ 160I am drowned in debts. میں قرض میں ڈوبا ہوا ہوں۔ 161I don't know what to say. مجھے نہیں پتہ کہ کیا کہوں۔ 162I am speechless 😶. میں بات کرنے کے قابل نہیں ہوں۔ 163Are you angry 😡 with me? کیا تم مجھ سے ناراض ہو؟ 164Don't be silly, please. برائے مہربانی بیوقوف مت بنو۔ 165Let's talk about something else. چلو کسی اور چیز کے بارے میں بات کریں۔ 166You made my mood off. آپ نے میرا مزاج خر��ب کر دیا۔ 167I was stuck in the traffic 🚦. میں ٹریفک میں پھنسا ہوا تھا۔ 168I had flat Tyre. میری گاڑی کا ٹائر پھٹ گیا تھا۔ 169She got an accident. اسکا ایکسیڈنٹ ہوا۔ 170What time does the bus 🚌 leave? بس کس وقت جاتی ہے؟ 171I want an aisle 💺 seat. مجھے کھڑکی والی سیٹ چاہیے۔ 172Have you known him? کیا تم اس سے جانتے ہو؟ 173It is an honor for me. یہ میرے لیے عزت کی بات ہے۔ 174He is a hypocrite. وہ منافق ہے۔ 175She is a backbiter. وہ چغل خور ہے۔ 176Salma is disloyal. سلمہ بے وفا ہے۔ 177Stop staring at me. مجھے گھورنا بند کرو۔ 178Go to hell. جہنم میں جاؤ۔ 179How dare you talk to me like that? تمہاری ہمت کیسے ہوئی میرے ساتھ اس طرح بات کرنے کی۔ 180Show him out. اس سے باہر کا راستہ دکھاؤ۔ 181How much I pay for this? میں اسکے لئے کتنا ادا کروں؟ 182Are you mad? کیا تم پاگل ہو؟ 183How do I make you understand? میں آپ کو کس طرح سمجھاؤں؟ 184Shame on you. شرم کرو۔ 185What the hell is this? یہ کیا مصیبت ہے؟ 186You can't hide. تم چھپ نہیں سکتے۔ 187Don't pluck the flower 🌹. پھول مت توڑو۔ 188Please, make my 🛏️ bed. برائے مہربانی میرے لیے بستر لگاؤ۔ 189What enmity do you have with me? آپ کو میرے ساتھ کیا دشمنی ہے؟ 190Are you jealous of me? کیا آپ کو میرے ساتھ حسد ہے؟ 191Hide your face from here. دفع ہو جاؤ ادھر سے۔ 192You could have said this to me politely. تم یہ بات آرام سے بھی کہہ سکتے تھے ۔ 193This is Insanity. یہ پاگل پن ہے۔ 194The boss fired him. مالک نے اس سے نوکری سے نکال دیا۔ 195Get out of my class. میری کلاس سے باہر نکلو۔ 196Get your haircut. اپنے بال بنوائیں۔ 197It is your turn now. اب تمہاری باری ہے۔ 198Who knocked at the door? کس نے دروازے پر دستک دی؟ 199It is cloudy today. آج بادل ☁️ ہے۔ 200It is scorching today. آج بہت سخت گرمی ہے۔ Translation Of English Sentences Into Urdu From 201 To 300 S NoTranslation Of English Sentences In Urdu   201It is windy 🌬️ outside. باہر تیز ہوا چل رہی ہے۔ 202It is raining cats and dogs. موسلادھار بارش ہو رہی ہے۔ 203It is drizzling. بوندا باندی ہو رہی ہے۔ 204Pour some tea ☕ into my cup, please. برائے مہربانی تھوڑی اور چائے میرے کپ میں ڈال دو۔ 205You are very naughty. تم شرارتی ہو۔ 206He is bald. وہ گنجا ہے۔ 207There is no accounting for the taste. شوق کا کوئی مول نہیں۔ 208My mom cooks a delicious meal. میری ماں نے مزیدار کھانا بنایا۔ 209What is wrong with it. اس میں کیا خرابی ہے؟ 210This house is to let. یہ مکان کرائے کیلئے خالی ہے۔ 211I beseeched him. میں نے اسکی منت سماجت کی۔ 212Ahmed is very lean. احمد بہت لاغر ہے۔ 213I saw him off. میں نے اس سے الوداع کیا۔214 Could you drop me off at the airport? کیا آپ مجھے ایئرپورٹ چھوڑ سکتے ہو؟ 215Make a single line. ایک قطار بنائیں۔ 216I was waiting in a queue. میں قطار میں انتظار کر رہا تھا۔ 217Don't be impatient. بے صبرے مت بنو۔ 218She is the hurdle of the way. 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[janeturenne]

So about that Leela post

Okay, so I see lots of excellent posts exploring the idea that Time Lords can be read as non-binary and/or asexual, but I’ve never seen anybody explore a related possibility that I love: that Leela’s choice to live among them may be influenced by the fact that she is both of those.

Leela is literally the only female member of the Sevateem we ever see during The Face of Evil.  Whatever the majority of Sevateem women do with the majority of their time, it doesn’t seem to be warrior’ing (or if it is, why the hell is Leela the only one off with the men?).  Despite this apparently super strict gender divide, nobody makes the least bit of a thing about Leela being a warrior--not even when she’s being tried and exiled.  

Now, I’m not saying this is conclusive proof of anything, but it’s certainly suggestive.  And one possible explanation, and one I like, is that by choosing to become a warrior, Leela ceased to be a woman in the eyes of her tribe, and laid claim to a third-gender role of a kind found in many cultures around the world.  Nobody says ‘oh what did you expect of a woman warrior’ when she’s being cast out because to them, she is not a woman.  She is a Warrior (contrasted from here on out from the lower-case variety).

So what if it goes a little something like this:

Young Leela, say somewhere around puberty, chooses the Warrior role for a lot of reasons.  Obviously she’s damn good at fighting and likes it, but there are other considerations too.  She’s getting old enough to realize that the idea of having babies is Not For Her.  It’s not that she doesn’t get crushes, on boys and girls both, and it’s not that she doesn’t like children, she just definitely doesn’t want to actually carry a child.  Becoming a Warrior neatly avoids that option.  If she’s a Warrior and chooses to marry, she’ll be expected to marry a woman, and if they have children, it’ll be her wife actually bearing them.  (I have not decided the exact mechanism on that one--perhaps it’s accepted that the wife of a Warrior may take male partners whose identities will stay secret, or perhaps it’s an honored role for a known friend of the family.)  

Whatever the finer points, as a Warrior, Leela would be free from societal pressure to have sex, and she’d be beginning at that age to realize that’s something she doesn’t want.  It’s hard to prove a negative and I’d imagine she spends a little while wondering whether she just hasn’t started feeling that way yet and will someday, but in any case, choosing to identify as a Warrior gives her the option on abstaining from sex without abandoning any hope of a romantic relationship or facing societal pressure to marry a man and bear children.  So it’s a relief in that regard, and suits her, and as she gets older and more sure that she’s ace it only becomes more of a relief.  Kissing Tomas is nice and all, but she doesn’t even have to make the point that they’re not going any further than that because she’s a Warrior of the Sevateem, this is understood.

But then the Doctor shows up and whisks Leela off to a bunch of worlds with different traditions, where ‘Warrior of the Sevateem’ doesn’t mean the same thing to the people listening.  Unfortunately, the Doctor himself is clueless and can’t really help her out in getting people to respect her boundaries.  

At first it’s kinda nice, being exposed to other perspectives.  Litefoot calls her “a lady of refinement,” and she’s delighted.  It’s never occurred to her that she can be a lady and a warrior both at once, that there are worlds where that is even an option.  She’s not really used to thinking of herself as a woman and that probably isn’t gonna change, but it’s nice to think that she could.  But the trouble is that other people think of her as a woman whether she wants them to or not, and they make all sorts of other assumptions as well.  Because of what she wears (and Leela is used to being the most dressed person around her, have you seen the men of the Sevateem), or maybe just because she’s a person in the world, people in her travels, especially men, seem to feel this automatic... ownership of her body.  And it’s gross.

There are comments.  And unwanted touches.  And propositions.  Even the people who are decent, the ones for whom she might feel romantic attraction under other circumstances--the ones with whom she tries to have romantic interludes, for however long she can steal the time in her whirlwind life on the TARDIS--want things from her that she doesn’t want to give.  She eventually figures out the right words to explain something that at home needed no explaining, but it’s exhausting, and most of her potential partners look at her differently, after, and she stops even trying after a while.

And then she gets to Gallifrey, and meets Andred.

She likes him.  A lot.  He reminds her of home in the ways she likes, and not in the ways she can do without.  He’s pretty and sweet, but a fighter too, and when she kisses him he kisses back, but lets them be just kisses, and doesn’t make her uncomfortable even a little.  And when their adventure is over, he steals a quiet moment, and nervously asks her something.

He wants her to stay here, with him.  But he’s nervous, because he’s done his Matrix homework.  He explains about looming.  He tells her that Time Lords as a species no longer need to reproduce sexually, that those desires just aren’t there for most Gallifreyans anymore, but he knows that the same isn’t true for humans, and he wonders... he wonders if that’s something she would miss.  If she could be satisfied with his admiration, with his hearts, with physical affection, if sex wasn’t a part of it.  She is the most incredible woman he has ever known, and he loves everything about her, and he wants her to have everything she wants.

...Not quite breathing, she asks him whether it would trouble him that ‘woman’ isn’t exactly the right word, and explains to him what ‘Warrior of the Sevateem’ actually means.  Not quite breathing either, he replies that it’d be awfully hypocritical of him, because his first regeneration looked an awful lot like her.  Gallifreyans may use ‘Time Lord’ and ‘Time Lady’, but gender is far from a binary concept for them either.

She proposes on the spot.

And it’s not that everything magically gets better, because even Gallifreyans, Leela learns to her disgust, make assumptions about her just by looking.  And sometimes it’s even more frustrating how completely the Time Lords deny her the right to belong even here.  But love, at least, is easier and better on this world than she ever knew it could be.

...and that is your far too many words of asexy nb Leela for the night.

[sirestoffels97]

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[rhetoricandlogic]

Second Person, Present Tense

— by DARYL GREGORY —

If you think, “I breathe,” the “I” is extra. There is no you to say “I.” What we call “I” is just a swinging door which moves when we inhale or when we exhale. —Shun Ryu Suzuki

I used to think the brain was the most important organ in the body, until I realized who was telling me that. —Emo Phillips

When I enter the office, Dr. S is leaning against the desk, talking earnestly to the dead girl’s parents. He isn’t happy, but when he looks up he puts on a smile for me. “And here she is,” he says, like a game show host revealing the grand prize. The people in the chairs turn, and Dr. Subramaniam gives me a private, encouraging wink.

The father stands first, a blotchy, square-faced man with a tight belly he carries like a basketball. As in our previous visits, he is almost frowning, struggling to match his face to his emotions. The mother, though, has already been crying, and her face is wide open: joy, fear, hope, relief. It’s way over the top.

“Oh, Therese,” she says. “Are you ready to come home?”

Their daughter was named Therese. She died of an overdose almost two years ago, and since then Mitch and Alice Klass have visited this hospital dozens of times, looking for her. They desperately want me to be their daughter, and so in their heads I already am.

My hand is still on the door handle. “Do I have a choice?” On paper I’m only seventeen years old. I have no money, no credit cards, no job, no car. I own only a handful of clothes. And Robierto, the burliest orderly on the ward, is in the hallway behind me, blocking my escape.

Therese’s mother seems to stop breathing for a moment. She’s a slim, narrow-boned woman who seems tall until she stands next to anyone. Mitch raises a hand to her shoulder, then drops it.

As usual whenever Alice and Mitch come to visit, I feel like I’ve walked into the middle of a soap opera and no one’s given me my lines. I look directly at Dr. S, and his face is frozen into that professional smile. Several times over the past year he’s convinced them to let me stay longer, but they’re not listening anymore. They’re my legal guardians, and they have Other Plans. Dr. S looks away from me, rubs the side of his nose.

“That’s what I thought,” I say.

The father scowls. The mother bursts into fresh tears, and she cries all the way out of the building. Dr. Subramaniam watches from the entrance as we drive away, his hands in his pockets. I’ve never been so angry with him in my life—all two years of it.

The name of the drug is Zen, or Zombie, or just Z. Thanks to Dr. S I have a pretty good idea of how it killed Therese.

“Flick your eyes to the left,” he told me one afternoon. “Now glance to the right. Did you see the room blur as your eyes moved?” He waited until I did it again. “No blur. No one sees it.”

This is the kind of thing that gets brain doctors hot and bothered. Not only could no one see the blur, their brains edited it out completely. Skipped over it—left view, then right view, with nothing between—then fiddled with the person’s time sense so that it didn’t even seem missing.

The scientists figured out that the brain was editing out shit all the time. They wired up patients and told them to lift one of their fingers, move it any time they wanted. Each time, the brain started the signal traveling toward the finger up to 120 milliseconds before the patient consciously decided to move it. Dr. S said you could see the brain warming up right before the patient consciously thought, now.

This is weird, but it gets weirder the longer you think about it. And I’ve been thinking about this a lot.

The conscious mind—the “I” that’s thinking, hey, I’m thirsty, I’ll reach for that cold cup of water—hasn’t really decided anything. The signal to start moving your hand has already traveled halfway down your arm by the time you even realize you are thirsty. Thought is an afterthought. By the way, the brain says, we’ve decided to move your arm, so please have the thought to move it.

The gap is normally 120 milliseconds, max. Zen extends this minutes. Hours.

If you run into somebody who’s on Zen, you won’t notice much. The person’s brain is still making decisions, and the body still follows orders. You can talk to the them, and they can talk to you. You can tell each other jokes, go out for hamburgers, do homework, have sex.

But the person isn’t conscious. There is no “I” there. You might as well be talking to a computer. And two people on Zen—“you” and “I”—are just puppets talking to puppets.

It’s a little girl’s room strewn with teenager. Stuffed animals crowd the shelves and windowsills, shoulder to shoulder with stacks of Christian rock CDs and hairbrushes and bottles of nail polish. Pinups from Teen People are taped to the wall, next to a bulletin board dripping with soccer ribbons and rec league gymnastic medals going back to second grade. Above the desk, a plaque titled “I Promise . . . ” exhorting Christian youth to abstain from premarital sex. And everywhere taped and pinned to the walls, the photos: Therese at Bible camp, Therese on the balance beam, Therese with her arms around her youth group friends. Every morning she could open her eyes to a thousand reminders of who she was, who she’d been, who she was supposed to become.

I pick up the big stuffed panda that occupies the place of pride on the bed. It looks older than me, and the fur on the face is worn down to the batting. The button eyes hang by white thread—they’ve been re-sewn, maybe more than once.

Therese’s father sets down the pitifully small bag that contains everything I’ve taken from the hospital: toiletries, a couple changes of clothes, and five of Dr. S’s books. “I guess old Boo Bear was waiting for you,” he says.

“Boo W. Bear.”

“Yes, Boo W!” It pleases him that I know this. As if it proves anything. “You know, your mother dusted this room every week. She never doubted that you’d come back.”

I have never been here, and she is not coming back, but already I’m tired of correcting pronouns. “Well, that was nice,” I say.

“She’s had a tough time of it. She knew people were talking, probably holding her responsible—both of us, really. And she was worried about them saying things about you. She couldn’t stand them thinking that you were a wild girl.”

“Them?”

He blinks. “The Church.”

Ah. The Church. The term carried so many feelings and connotations for Therese that months ago I stopped trying to sort them out. The Church was the red-brick building of the Davenport Church of Christ, shafts of dusty light through rows of tall, glazed windows shaped like gravestones. The Church was God and the Holy Ghost (but not Jesus—he was personal, separate somehow). Mostly, though, it was the congregation, dozens and dozens of people who’d known her since before she was born. They loved her, they watched out for her, and they evaluated her every step. It was like having a hundred overprotective parents.

I almost laugh. “The Church thinks Therese was wild?”

He scowls, but whether because I’ve insulted the Church or because I keep referring to his daughter by name, I’m not sure. “Of course, not. It’s just that you caused a lot of worry.” His voice has assumed a sober tone that’s probably never failed to unnerve his daughter. “You know, the church prayed for you every week.”

“They did?” I do know Therese well enough to be sure this would have mortified her. She was a pray-er, not a pray-ee.

Therese’s father watches my face for the bloom of shame, maybe a few tears. From contrition it should have been one small step to confession. It’s hard for me to take any of this seriously.

I sit down on the bed and sink deep into the mattress. This is not going to work. The double bed takes up most of the room, with only a few feet of open space around it. Where am I going to meditate?

“Well,” Therese’s father says. His voice has softened. Maybe he thinks he’s won. “You probably want to get changed,” he says.

He goes to the door but doesn’t leave. I stand by the window, but I can feel him there, waiting. Finally the oddness of this makes me turn around.

He’s staring at the floor, a hand behind his neck. Therese might have been able to intuit his mood, but it’s beyond me.

“We want to help you, Therese. But there’s so many things we just don’t understand. Who gave you the drugs, why you went off with that boy, why you would—” His hand moves, a stifled gesture that could be anger, or just frustration. “It’s just . . . hard.”

“I know,” I say. “Me too.”

He shuts the door when he leaves, and I push the panda to the floor and flop onto my back in relief. Poor Mr. Klass. He just wants to know if his daughter fell from grace, or was pushed.

When I want to freak myself out, “I” think about “me” thinking about having an “I.” The only thing stupider than puppets talking to puppets is a puppet talking to itself.

Dr. S says that nobody knows what the mind is, or how the brain generates it, and nobody really knows about consciousness. We talked almost every day while I was in the hospital, and after he saw that I was interested in this stuff—how could I not be—he gave me books and we’d talk about brains and how they cook up thoughts and make decisions.

“How do I explain this,” he always starts. And then he tries out the metaphors he’s working on for his book. My favorite is the Parliament, the Page, and the Queen.

“The brain isn’t one thing, of course,” he told me. “It’s millions of firing cells, and those resolve into hundreds of active sites, and so it is with the mind. There are dozens of nodes in the mind, each one trying to out-shout the others. For any decision, the mind erupts with noise, and that triggers . . . how do I explain this . . . Have you ever seen the British Parliament on C-SPAN?” Of course I had: in a hospital TV is a constant companion. “These members of the mind’s parliament, they’re all shouting in chemicals and electrical charges, until enough of the voices are shouting in unison. Ding! That’s a ‘thought,’ a ‘decision.’ The Parliament immediately sends a signal to the body to act on the decision, and at the same time it tells the Page to take the news—”

“Wait, who’s the Page?”

He waves his hand. “That’s not important right now.” (Weeks later, in a different discussion, Dr. S will explain that the Page isn’t one thing, but a cascade of neural events in the temporal area of the limbic system that meshes the neural map of the new thought with the existing neural map—but by then I know that “neural map” is just another metaphor for another deeply complex thing or process, and that I’ll never get to the bottom of this. Dr. S said not to worry about it, that nobody gets to the bottom of it.) “The Page takes the news of the decision to the Queen.”

“All right then, who’s the Queen? Consciousness?”

“Exactly right! The self itself.”

He beamed at me, his attentive student. Talking about this stuff gets Dr. S going like nothing else, but he’s oblivious to the way I let the neck of my scrubs fall open when I stretch out on the couch. If only I could have tucked the two hemispheres of my brain into a lace bra.

“The Page,” he said, “delivers its message to Her Majesty, telling her what the Parliament has decided. The Queen doesn’t need to know about all the other arguments that went on, all the other possibilities that were thrown out. She simply needs to know what to announce to her subjects. The Queen tells the parts of the body to act on the decision.”

“Wait, I thought the Parliament had already sent out the signal. You said before that you can see the brain warming up before the self even knows about it.”

“That’s the joke. The Queen announces the decision, and she thinks that her subjects are obeying her commands, but in reality, they have already been told what to do. They’re already reaching for their glasses of water.”

I pad down to the kitchen in bare feet, wearing Therese’s sweatpants and a t-shirt. The shirt is a little tight; Therese, champion dieter and Olympic-level purger, was a bit smaller than me.

Alice is at the table, already dressed, a book open in front of her. “Well, you slept in this morning,” she says brightly. Her face is made up, her hair sprayed into place. The coffee cup next to the book is empty. She’s been waiting for hours.

I look around for a clock, and find one over the door. It’s only nine. At the hospital I slept in later than that all the time. “I’m starved,” I say. There’s a refrigerator, a stove, and dozens of cabinets.

I’ve never made my own breakfast. Or any lunch or dinner, for that matter. For my entire life, my meals have been served on cafeteria trays. “Do you have scrambled eggs?”

She blinks. “Eggs? You don’t—” She abruptly stands. “Sure. Sit down, Therese, and I’ll make you some.”

“Just call me ‘Terry,’ okay?”

Alice stops, thinks about saying something—I can almost hear the clank of cogs and ratchets—until she abruptly strides to the cabinet, crouches, and pulls out a non-stick pan.

I take a guess on which cabinet holds the coffee mugs, guess right, and take the last inch of coffee from the pot. “Don’t you have to go to work?” I say. Alice does something at a restaurant supply company; Therese has always been hazy on the details.

“I’ve taken a leave,” she says. She cracks an egg against the edge of the pan, does something subtle with the shells as the yolk squeezes out and plops into the pan, and folds the shell halves into each other. All with one hand.

“Why?”

She smiles tightly. “We couldn’t just abandon you after getting you home. I thought we might need some time together. During this adjustment period.”

“So when do I have to see this therapist? Whatsisname.” My executioner.

“Her. Dr. Mehldau’s in Baltimore, so we’ll drive there tomorrow.” This is their big plan. Dr. Subramaniam couldn’t bring back Therese, so they’re running to anyone who says they can. “You know, she’s had a lot of success with people in your situation. That’s her book.” She nods at the table.

“So? Dr. Subramaniam is writing one too.” I pick up the book. The Road Home: Finding the Lost Children of Zen. “What if I don’t go along with this?”

She says nothing, chopping at the eggs. I’ll be eighteen in four months. Dr. S said that it will become a lot harder for them to hold me then. This ticking clock sounds constantly in my head, and I’m sure it’s loud enough for Alice and Mitch to hear it too.

“Let’s just try Dr. Mehldau first.”

“First? What then?” She doesn’t answer. I flash on an image of me tied down to the bed, a priest making a cross over my twisting body. It’s a fantasy, not a Therese memory—I can tell the difference. Besides, if this had already happened to Therese, it wouldn’t have been a priest.

“Okay then,” I say. “What if I just run away?”

“If you turn into a fish,” she says lightly, “then I will turn into a fisherman and fish for you.”

“What?” I’m laughing. I haven’t heard Alice speak in anything but straightforward, earnest sentences.

Alice’s smile is sad. “You don’t remember?”

“Oh, yeah.” The memory clicks. “Runaway Bunny. Did she like that?”

Dr. S’s book is about me. Well, Zen OD-ers in general, but there are only a couple thousand of us. Z’s not a hugely popular drug, in the US or anywhere else. It’s not a hallucinogen. It’s not a euphoric or a depressant. You don’t speed, mellow out, or even get high in the normal sense. It’s hard to see what the attraction is. Frankly, I have trouble seeing it.

Dr. S says that most drugs aren’t about making you feel better, they’re about not feeling anything at all. They’re about numbness, escape. And Zen is a kind of arty, designer escape hatch. Zen disables the Page, locks him in his room, so that he can’t make his deliveries to the Queen. There’s no update to the neural map, and the Queen stops hearing what Parliament is up to. With no orders to bark, she goes silent. It’s that silence that people like Therese craved.

But the real attraction—again, for people like Therese—is the overdose. Swallow way too much Zen and the Page can’t get out for weeks. When he finally gets out, he can’t remember the way back to the Queen’s castle. The whole process of updating the self that’s been going on for years is suddenly derailed. The silent Queen can’t be found.

The Page, poor guy, does the only thing he can. He goes out and delivers the proclamations to the first girl he sees.

The Queen is dead. Long live the Queen.

“Hi, Terry. I’m Dr. Mehldau.” She’s a stubby woman with a pleasant round face, and short dark hair shot with gray. She offers me her hand. Her fingers are cool and thin.

“You called me Terry.”

“I was told that you prefer to go by that. Do you want me to call you something else?”

“No . . . I just expected you to make me say my name is ‘Therese’ over and over.”

She laughs and sits down in a red leather chair that looks soft but sturdy. “I don’t think that would be very helpful, do you? I can’t make you do anything you don’t want to do, Terry.”

“So I’m free to go.”

“Can’t stop you. But I do have to report back to your parents on how we’re doing.”

My parents.

She shrugs. “It’s my job. Why don’t you have a seat and we can talk about why you’re here.”

The chair opposite her is cloth, not leather, but it’s still nicer than anything in Dr. Subramaniam’s office. The entire office is nicer than Dr. S’s office. Daffodil walls in white trim, big windows glowing behind white cloth shades, tropically colored paintings.

I don’t sit down.

“Your job is to turn me into Mitch and Alice’s daughter. I’m not going to do that. So any time we spend talking is just bullshit.”

“Terry, no one can turn you into something you’re not.”

“Well then we’re done here.” I walk across the room—though “stroll” is what I’m shooting for—and pick up an African-looking wooden doll from the bookshelf. The shelves are decorated with enough books to look serious, but there are long open spaces for arty arrangements of candlesticks and Japanese fans and plaques that advertise awards and appreciations. Dr. S’s bookshelves are for holding books, and books stacked on books. Dr. Mehldau’s bookshelves are for selling the idea of Dr. Mehldau.

“So what are you, a psychiatrist or a psychologist or what?” I’ve met all kinds in the hospital. The psychiatrists are M.D.’s like Dr. S and can give you drugs. I haven’t figured out what the psychologists are good for.

“Neither,” she says. “I’m a counselor.”

“So what’s the ‘doctor’ for?”

“Education.” Her voice didn’t change, but I get the impression that the questions annoyed her. This makes me strangely happy.

“Okay, Dr. Counselor, what are you supposed to counsel me about? I’m not crazy. I know who Therese was, I know what she did, I know that she used to walk around in my body.” I put the doll back in its spot next to a glass cube that could be a paperweight. “But I’m not her. This is my body, and I’m not going to kill myself just so Alice and Mitch can have their baby girl back.”

“Terry, no one’s asking you to kill yourself. Nobody can even make you into who you were before.”

“Yeah? Then what are they paying you for, then?”

“Let me try to explain. Please, sit down. Please.”

I look around for a clock and finally spot one on a high shelf. I mentally set the timer to five minutes and sit opposite her, hands on my knees. “Shoot.”

“Your parents asked me to talk to you because I’ve helped other people in your situation, people who’ve overdosed on Z.”

“Help them what? Pretend to be something they’re not?”

“I help them take back what they are. Your experience of the world tells you that Therese was some other person. No one’s denying that. But you’re in a situation where biologically and legally, you’re Therese Klass. Do you have plans for dealing with that?”

As a matter of fact I do, and it involves getting the hell out as soon as possible. “I’ll deal with it,” I say.

“What about Alice and Mitch?”

I shrug. “What about them?”

“They’re still your parents, and you’re still their child. The overdose convinced you that you’re a new person, but that hasn’t changed who they are. They’re still responsible for you, and they still care for you.”

“Not much I can do about that.”

“You’re right. It’s a fact of your life. You have two people who love you, and you’re going to be with each other for the rest of your lives. You’re going to have to figure out how to relate to each other. Zen may have burned the bridge between you and your past life, but you can build that bridge again.”

“Doc, I don’t want to build that bridge. Look, Alice and Mitch seem like nice people, but if I was looking for parents, I’d pick someone else.”

Dr. Mehldau smiles. “None of us gets to choose our parents, Terry.”

I’m not in the mood to laugh. I nod toward the clock. “This is a waste of time.”

She leans forward. I think she’s going to try to touch me, but she doesn’t. “Terry, you’re not going to disappear if we talk about what happened to you. You’ll still be here. The only difference is that you’ll reclaim those memories as your own. You can get your old life back and choose your new life.”

Sure, it’s that easy. I get to sell my soul and keep it too.

I can’t remember my first weeks in the hospital, though Dr. S says I was awake. At some point I realized that time was passing, or rather, that there was a me who was passing through time. I had lasagna for dinner yesterday, I am having meat loaf today. I am this girl in a bed. I think I realized this and forgot it several times before I could hold onto it.

Every day was mentally exhausting, because everything was so relentlessly new. I stared at the TV remote for a half hour, the name for it on the tip of my tongue, and it wasn’t until the nurse picked it up and turned on the TV for me that I thought: Remote. And then sometimes, this was followed by a raft of other ideas: TV. Channel. Gameshow.

People were worse. They called me by a strange name, and they expected things of me. But to me, every visitor, from the night shift nurse to the janitor to Alice and Mitch Klass, seemed equally important—which is to say, not important at all.

Except for Dr. S. He was there from the beginning, and so he was familiar before I met him. He belonged to me like my own body.

But everything else about the world—the names, the details, the facts—had to be hauled into the sunlight, one by one. My brain was like an attic, chock full of old and interesting things jumbled together in no order at all.

I only gradually understood that somebody must have owned this house before me. And then I realized the house was haunted.

After the Sunday service, I’m caught in a stream of people. They lean across the pews to hug Alice and Mitch, then me. They pat my back, squeeze my arms, kiss my cheeks. I know from brief dips into Therese’s memories that many of these people are as emotionally close as aunts or uncles. And any of them, if Therese were ever in trouble, would take her in, feed her, and give her a bed to sleep in.

This is all very nice, but the constant petting has me ready to scream.

All I want to do is get back home and take off this dress. I had no choice but to wear one of Therese’s girly-girl extravaganzas. Her closet was full of them, and I finally found one that fit, if not comfortably. She loved these dresses, though. They were her floral print flak jackets. Who could doubt the purity of a girl in a high-necked Laura Ashley?

We gradually make our way to the vestibule, then to the sidewalk and the parking lot, under assault the entire way. I stop trying to match their faces to anything in Therese’s memories.

At our car a group of teenagers take turns on me, the girls hugging me tight, the boys leaning into me with half hugs: shoulders together, pelvises apart. One of the girls, freckled with soft red curls falling past her shoulders, hangs back for awhile, then abruptly clutches me and whispers into my ear, “I’m so glad you’re okay, Miss T.” Her tone is intense, like she’s passing a secret message.

A man moves through the crowd, arms open, smiling broadly. He’s in his late twenties or early thirties, his hair cut in a choppy gelled style that’s ten years too young for him. He’s wearing pressed khakis, a blue Oxford rolled up at the forearms, a checked tie loosened at the throat.

He smothers me in a hug, his cologne like another set of arms. He’s easy to find in Therese’s memories: This is Jared, the Youth Pastor. He was the most spiritually vibrant person Therese knew, and the object of her crush.

“It’s so good to have you back, Therese,” he says. His cheek is pressed to mine. We’ve missed you.”

A few months before her overdose, the youth group was coming back from a weekend-long retreat in the church’s converted school bus. Late into the trip, near midnight, Jared sat next to her, and she fell asleep leaning against him, inhaling that same cologne.

“I bet you have,” I say. “Watch the hands, Jared.”

His smile doesn’t waver, his hands are still on my shoulders. “I’m sorry?”

“Oh please, you heard me.”

He drops his hands, and looks questioningly at my father. He can do sincerity pretty well. “I don’t understand, Therese, but if—”

I give him a look that makes him back up a step. At some point later in the trip Therese awoke with Jared still next to her, slumped in the seat, eyes closed and mouth open. His arm was resting between her thighs, a thumb against her knee. She was wearing shorts, and his flesh on hers was hot. His forearm was inches from her warm crotch.

Therese believed that he was asleep.

She believed, too, that it was the rumbling of the school bus that shifted Jared’s arm into contact with the crease of her shorts. Therese froze, flushed with arousal and embarrassment.

“Try to work it out, Jared.” I get in the car.

The big question I can help answer, Dr. S said, is why there is consciousness. Or, going back to my favorite metaphor, if the Parliament is making all the decisions, why have a Queen at all?

He’s got theories, of course. He thinks the Queen is all about storytelling. The brain needs a story that gives all these decisions a sense of purpose, a sense of continuity, so it can remember them and use them in future decisions. The brain can’t keep track of the trillions of possible other decisions it could have made every moment; it needs one decision, and it needs a who, and a why. The brain lays down the memories, and the consciousness stamps them with identity: I did this, I did that. Those memories become the official record, the precedents that the Parliament uses to help make future decisions.

“The Queen, you see, is a figurehead,” Dr. S said. “She represents the kingdom, but she isn’t the kingdom itself, or even in control of it.”

“I don’t feel like a figurehead,” I said.

Dr. S laughed. “Me neither. Nobody does.”

Dr. Mehldau’s therapy involves occasional joint sessions with Alice and Mitch, reading aloud from Therese’s old diaries, and home movies. Today’s video features a pre-teen Therese dressed in sheets, surrounded by kids in bathrobes, staring fixedly at a doll in a manger.

Dr. Mehldau asks me what Therese was thinking then. Was she enjoying playing Mary? Did she like being on stage?

“How would I know?”

“Then imagine it. What do you think Therese is thinking here?”

She tells me to do that a lot. Imagine what she’s thinking. Just pretend. Put yourself in her shoes. In her book she calls this “reclaiming.” She makes up a lot of her own terms, then defines them however she wants, without research to back her up. Compared to the neurology texts Dr. S lent me, Dr. Mehldau’s little book is an Archie comic with footnotes.

“You know what, Therese was a good Christian girl, so she probably loved it.”

“Are you sure?”

The wise men come on stage, three younger boys. They plop down their gifts and their lines, and the look on Therese’s face is wary. Her line is coming up.

Therese was petrified of screwing up. Everybody would be staring at her. I can almost see the congregation in the dark behind the lights. Alice and Mitch are out there, and they’re waiting for every line. My chest tightens, and I realize I’m holding my breath.

Dr. Mehldau’s eyes on mine are studiously neutral.

“You know what?” I have no idea what I’m going to say next. I’m stalling for time. I shift my weight in the big beige chair and move a leg underneath me. “The thing I like about Buddhism is Buddhists understand that they’ve been screwed by a whole string of previous selves. I had nothing to do with the decisions Therese made, the good or bad karma she’d acquired.”

This is a riff I’ve been thinking about in Therese’s big girly bedroom. “See, Therese was a Christian, so she probably thought by overdosing that she’d be born again, all her sins forgiven. It’s the perfect drug for her: suicide without the corpse.”

“Was she thinking about suicide that night?”

“I don’t know. I could spend a couple weeks mining through Therese’s memories, but frankly, I’m not interested. Whatever she was thinking, she wasn’t born again. I’m here, and I’m still saddled with her baggage. I am Therese’s donkey. I’m a karma donkey.”

Dr. Mehldau nods. “Dr. Subramaniam is Buddhist, isn’t he?”

“Yeah, but what’s . . . ?” It clicks. I roll my eyes. Dr. S and I talked about transference, and I know that my crush on him was par for the course. And it’s true that I spend a lot of time—still—thinking about fucking the man. But that doesn’t mean I’m wrong. “This is not about that,” I say. “I’ve been thinking about this on my own.”

She doesn’t fight me on that. “Wouldn’t a Buddhist say that you and Therese share the same soul? Self’s an illusion. So there’s no rider in charge, no donkey. There’s just you.”

“Just forget it,” I say.

“Let’s follow this, Terry. Don’t you feel you have a responsibility to your old self? Your old self’s parents, your old friends? Maybe there’s karma you owe.”

“And who are you responsible to, Doctor? Who’s your patient? Therese, or me?”

She says nothing for a moment, then: “I’m responsible to you.”

You.

You swallow, surprised that the pills taste like cinnamon. The effect of the drug is intermittent at first. You realize that you’re in the back seat of a car, the cellphone in your hand, your friends laughing around you. You’re talking to your mother. If you concentrate, you can remember answering the phone, and telling her which friend’s house you’re staying at tonight. Before you can say goodbye, you’re stepping out of the car. The car is parked, your phone is away—and you remember saying goodnight to your mother and riding for a half hour before finding this parking garage. Joelly tosses her red curls and tugs you toward the stairwell: Come on, Miss T!

Then you look up and realize that you’re on the sidewalk outside an all-ages club, and you’re holding a ten dollar bill, ready to hand it to the bouncer. The music thunders every time the door swings open. You turn to Joelly and—

You’re in someone else’s car. On the Interstate. The driver is a boy you met hours ago, his name is Rush but you haven’t asked if that’s his first name or his last. In the club you leaned into each other and talked loud over the music about parents and food and the difference between the taste of a fresh cigarette in your mouth and the smell of stale smoke. But then you realize that there’s a cigarette in your mouth, you took it from Rush’s pack yourself, and you don’t like cigarettes. Do you like it now? You don’t know. Should you take it out, or keep smoking? You scour your memories, but can discover no reason why you decided to light the cigarette, no reason why you got into the car with this boy. You start to tell yourself a story: he must be a trustworthy person, or you wouldn’t have gotten into the car. You took that one cigarette because the boy’s feelings would have been hurt.

You’re not feeling like yourself tonight. And you like it. You take another drag off the cigarette. You think back over the past few hours, and marvel at everything you’ve done, all without that constant weight of self-reflection: worry, anticipation, instant regret. Without the inner voice constantly critiquing you.

Now the boy is wearing nothing but boxer shorts, and he’s reaching up to a shelf to get a box of cereal, and his back is beautiful. There is hazy light outside the small kitchen window. He pours Froot Loops into a bowl for you, and he laughs, though quietly because his mother is asleep in the next room. He looks at your face and frowns. He asks you what’s the matter. You look down, and you’re fully dressed. You think back, and realize that you’ve been in this boy’s apartment for hours. You made out in his bedroom, and the boy took off his clothes, and you kissed his chest and ran your hands along his legs. You let him put his hand under your shirt and cup your breasts, but you didn’t go any further. Why didn’t you have sex? Did he not interest you? No—you were wet. You were excited. Did you feel guilty? Did you feel ashamed?

What were you thinking?

When you get home there will be hell to pay. Your parents will be furious, and worse, they will pray for you. The entire church will pray for you. Everyone will know. And no one will ever look at you the same again.

Now there’s a cinnamon taste in your mouth, and you’re sitting in the boy’s car again, outside a convenience store. It’s afternoon. Your cell phone is ringing. You turn off the cell phone and put it back in your purse. You swallow, and your throat is dry. That boy—Rush—is buying you another bottle of water. What was it you swallowed? Oh, yes. You think back, and remember putting all those little pills in your mouth. Why did you take so many? Why did you take another one at all? Oh, yes.

Voices drift up from the kitchen. It’s before 6am, and I just want to pee and get back to sleep, but then I realize they’re talking about me.

“She doesn’t even walk the same. The way she holds herself, the way she talks . . . ”

“It’s all those books Dr. Subramaniam gave her. She’s up past one every night. Therese never read like that, not science.”

“No, it’s not just the words, it’s how she sounds. That low voice . . . ” She sobs. “Oh hon, I didn’t know it would be this way. It’s like she’s right, it’s like it isn’t her at all.”

He doesn’t say anything. Alice’s crying grows louder, subsides. The clink of dishes in the sink. I step back, and Mitch speaks again.

“Maybe we should try the camp,” he says.

“No, no, no! Not yet. Dr. Mehldau says she’s making progress. We’ve got to—”

“Of course she’s going to say that.”

“You said you’d try this, you said you’d give this a chance.” The anger cuts through the weeping, and Mitch mumbles something apologetic. I creep back to my bedroom, but I still have to pee, so I make a lot of noise going back out. Alice comes to the bottom of the stairs. “Are you all right, honey?”

I keep my face sleepy and walk into the bathroom. I shut the door and sit down on the toilet in the dark.

What fucking camp?

“Let’s try again,” Dr. Mehldau said. “Something pleasant and vivid.”

I’m having trouble concentrating. The brochure is like a bomb in my pocket. It wasn’t hard to find, once I decided to look for it. I want to ask Dr. Mehldau about the camp, but I know that once I bring it into the open, I’ll trigger a showdown between the doctor and the Klasses, with me in the middle.

“Keep your eyes closed,” she says. “Think about Therese’s tenth birthday. In her diary, she wrote that was the best birthday she’d ever had. Do you remember Sea World?”

“Vaguely.” I could see dolphins jumping—two at a time, three at a time. It had been sunny and hot. With every session it was getting easier for me to pop into Therese’s memories. Her life was on DVD, and I had the remote.

“Do you remember getting wet at the Namu and Shamu show?”

I laughed. “I think so.” I could see the metal benches, the glass wall just in front of me, the huge shapes in the blue-green water. “They had the whales flip their big tail fins. We got drenched.”

“Can you picture who was there with you? Where are your parents?”

There was a girl, my age, I can’t remember her name. The sheets of water were coming down on us and we were screaming and laughing. Afterward my parents toweled us off. They must have been sitting up high, out of the splash zone. Alice looked much younger: happier, and a little heavier. She was wider at the hips. This was before she started dieting and exercising, when she was Mom-sized.

My eyes pop open. “Oh God.”

“Are you okay?”

“I’m fine—it was just . . . like you said. Vivid.” That image of a younger Alice still burns. For the first time I realize how sad she is now.

“I’d like a joint session next time,” I say.

“Really? All right. I’ll talk to Alice and Mitch. Is there anything in particular you want to talk about?”

“Yeah. We need to talk about Therese.”

Dr. S says everybody wants to know if the original neural map, the old Queen, can come back. Once the map to the map is lost, can you find it again? And if you do, then what happens to the new neural map, the new Queen?

“Now, a good Buddhist would tell you that this question is unimportant. After all, the cycle of existence is not just between lives. Samsara is every moment. The self continuously dies and recreates itself.”

“Are you a good Buddhist?” I asked him.

He smiled. “Only on Sunday mornings.”

“You go to church?”

“I golf.”

There’s a knock and I open my eyes. Alice steps into my room, a stack of folded laundry in her arms. “Oh!”

I’ve rearranged the room, pushing the bed into the corner to give me a few square feet of free space the floor.

Her face goes through a few changes. “I don’t suppose you’re praying.”

“No.”

She sighs, but it’s a mock-sigh. “I didn’t think so.” She moves around me and sets the laundry on the bed. She picks up the book there, Entering the Stream. “Dr. Subramaniam gave you this?”

She’s looking at the passage I’ve highlighted. But loving kindness—maitri—toward ourselves doesn’t mean getting rid of anything. The point is not to try to change ourselves. Meditation practice isn’t about trying to throw ourselves away and become something better. It’s about befriending who we already are.

“Well.” She sets the book down, careful to leave it open to the same page. “That sounds a bit like Dr. Mehldau.”

I laugh. “Yeah, it does. Did she tell you I wanted you and Mitch to be at the next session?”

“We’ll be there.” She works around the room, picking up t-shirts and underwear. I stand up to get out of the way. Somehow she manages to straighten up as she moves—righting books that had fallen over, setting Boo W. Bear back to his place on the bed, sweeping an empty chip bag into the garbage can—so that as she collects my dirty laundry she’s cleaning the entire room, like the Cat in the Hat’s cleaner-upper machine.

“Alice, in the last session I remembered being at Sea World, but there was a girl next to me. Next to Therese.”

“Sea World? Oh, that was the Hammel girl, Marcy. They took you to Ohio with them on their vacation that year.”

“Who did?”

“The Hammels. You were gone all week. All you wanted for your birthday was spending money for the trip.”

“You weren’t there?”

She picks up the jeans I left at the foot of the bed. “We always meant to go to Sea World, but your father and I never got out there.”

“This is our last session,” I say.

Alice, Mitch, Dr. Mehldau: I have their complete attention.

The doctor, of course, is the first to recover. “It sounds like you’ve got something you want to tell us.”

“Oh yeah.”

Alice seems frozen, holding herself in check. Mitch rubs the back of his neck, suddenly intent on the carpet.

“I’m not going along with this anymore.” I make a vague gesture. “Everything: the memory exercises, all this imagining of what Therese felt. I finally figured it out. It doesn’t matter to you if I’m Therese or not. You just want me to think I’m her. I’m not going along with the manipulation anymore.”

Mitch shakes his head. “Honey, you took a drug.” He glances at me, looks back at his feet. “If you took LSD and saw God, that doesn’t mean you really saw God. Nobody’s trying to manipulate you, we’re trying to undo the manipulation.”

“That’s bullshit, Mitch. You all keep acting like I’m schizophrenic, that I don’t know what’s real or not. Well, part of the problem is that the longer I talk to Dr. Mehldau here, the more fucked up I am.”

Alice gasps.

Dr. Mehldau puts out a hand to soothe her, but her eyes are on me. “Terry, what your father’s trying to say is that even though you feel like a new person, there’s a you that existed before the drug. That exists now.”

“Yeah? You know all those OD-ers in your book who say they’ve ‘reclaimed’ themselves? Maybe they only feel like their old selves.”

“It’s possible,” she says. “But I don’t think they’re fooling themselves. They’ve come to accept the parts of themselves they’ve lost, the family members they’ve left behind. They’re people like you.” She regards me with that standard-issue look of concern that doctors pick up with their diplomas. “Do you really want to feel like an orphan the rest of your life?”

“What?” From out of nowhere, tears well in my eyes. I cough to clear my throat, and the tears keep coming, until I smear them off on my arm. I feel like I’ve been sucker punched. “Hey, look Alice, just like you,” I say.

“It’s normal,” Dr. Mehldau says. “When you woke up in the hospital, you felt completely alone. You felt like a brand new person, no family, no friends. And you’re still just starting down this road. In a lot of ways you’re not even two years old.”

“Damn you’re good,” I say. “I didn’t even see that one coming.”

“Please, don’t leave. Let’s—”

“Don’t worry, I’m not leaving yet.” I’m at the door, pulling my backpack from the peg by the door. I dig into the pocket, and pull out the brochure. “You know about this?”

Alice speaks for the first time. “Oh honey, no . . . ”

Dr. Mehldau takes it from me, frowning. On the front is a nicely posed picture of a smiling teenage boy hugging relieved parents. She looks at Alice and Mitch. “Are you considering this?”

“It’s their big stick, Dr. Mehldau. If you can’t come through for them, or I bail out, boom. You know what goes on there?”

She opens the pages, looking at pictures of the cabins, the obstacle course, the big lodge where kids just like me engage in “intense group sessions with trained counselors” where they can “recover their true identities.” She shakes her head. “Their approach is different than mine . . . ”

“I don’t know, doc. Their approach sounds an awful lot like ‘reclaiming.’ I got to hand it to you, you had me going for awhile. Those visualization exercises? I was getting so good that I could even visualize stuff that never happened. I bet you could visualize me right into Therese’s head.”

I turn to Alice and Mitch. “You’ve got a decision to make. Dr. Mehldau’s program is a bust. So are you sending me off to brainwashing camp or not?”

Mitch has his arm around his wife. Alice, amazingly, is dry-eyed. Her eyes are wide, and she’s staring at me like a stranger.

It rains the entire trip back from Baltimore, and it’s still raining when we pull up to the house. Alice and I run to the porch steps, illuminated by the glare of headlights. Mitch waits until Alice unlocks the door and we move inside, and then pulls away.

“Does he do that a lot?” I ask.

“He likes to drive when he’s upset.”

“Oh.” Alice goes through the house, turning on lights. I follow her into the kitchen.

“Don’t worry, he’ll be all right.” She opens the refrigerator door and crouches down. “He just doesn’t know what to do with you.”

“He wants to put me in the camp, then.”

“Oh, not that. He just never had a daughter who talked back to him before.” She carries a Tupperware cake holder to the table. “I made carrot cake. Can you get down the plates?”

She’s such a small woman. Face to face, she comes up only to my chin. The hair on the top of her head is thin, made thinner by the rain, and her scalp is pink.

“I’m not Therese. I never will be Therese.”

“Oh I know,” she says, half sighing. And she does know it; I can see it in her face. “It’s just that you look so much like her.”

I laugh. “I can dye my hair. Maybe get a nose job.”

“It wouldn’t work, I’d still recognize you.” She pops the lid and sets it aside. The cake is a wheel with icing that looks half an inch thick. Miniature candy carrots line the edge.

“Wow, you made that before we left? Why?”

Alice shrugs, and cuts into it. She turns the knife on its side and uses the blade to lever a huge triangular wedge onto my plate. “I thought we might need it, one way or another.”

She places the plate in front of me, and touches me lightly on the arm. “I know you want to move out. I know you may never want to come back.”

“It’s not that I—”

“We’re not going to stop you. But wherever you go, you’ll still be my daughter, whether you like it or not. You don’t get to decide who loves you.”

“Alice . . . ”

“Shssh. Eat your cake.”

[conflictedrabbit]

2* the AvPD

Conversation w/ my friend I mentioned earlier. With their name / identifying characteristics edited out and some chopping here and there. 

___: 

I made a post abt avod once tho and it got like A few rbs and I thought "if this isn't irony idk what is" Trje

66ccff: ekjal;kdjd;

___: 

me: why do, so many avoidants want to pay for being alive avpd Tumblr: hm . I relate

66ccff: ekleja;ejdl;k

___: me: I'm glad to know people relate but are we fucking ok

66ccff: 

LOL i mean mood tbh

___: HINESTLT like I noticed i do it cuz of you NFBNSBDKSBDKSS

66ccff: though do you mean pay as in like. pay the medical system or pay as in guilt

___: Guilt

66ccff: 

kejk;ldj;L yes ok that is definitely me me: i breathed 5 gallons of air within 3 hours i am so sorry world

___:

me: [realizes it's not entirely religious trauma and also probably just Guilt over taking up space and needing to help ppl otherwise Why Live?} 

Oh god me

66ccff: (this is not even ironic i get like this multiple times a week)

___: 

hdjhdjsd I've been having a bad ep lately actually and like I think I failed to look 5-6 people in the eyes today CUZ IM JUST [WALKS AROHND] WOW . TERRIBLE

66ccff: 

omg it's ok i nearly cried in class today b/c i didn't have a good eng translation for this jp sentence

i was like.... no.... don't....

i stabilized cuz the teacher went on a tangent for a second but like forcing myself to look in his eyes and act normal was so hard i looked away so many times i wa slike. oog my god. end m i love it when walking around where there's other people makes me really nervous and irritable agoraphobia is great!

___: 

GOD yea It's so awkward for me I'm fine if I have a safe person or I'm walking to class but like

66ccff: i came back from class today and took a 6 hr nap cuz of my shame and agoraphobia

___: 

Rip Wish I could do that...

66ccff: well i haven't done my homework so

___: 

I just. Cry a lot NDKSJDJDNSKDNS rip me: I'm strong Me: spent the last 5 days like crying over nothing

66ccff: 

dkjle;ajd i mean... i used to cry but then i got mad at myself for crying so now i just Repress (tm) and sleep and then. the joke is that sometimes it doesn't work self harms... oops... that didn't work either better nap again

___: 

zz Pillows keep u safe Idk what I've been doing lately but I thought I was getting better til I realized I was like Abstaining from feeding myself BFBJSBFSJJFD

66ccff: o h my god

___: 

And I was like "oh fuck I'm a terrible person bc someone told me I should eat and j Didn't Do It I Failed Them"

66ccff: 

ahahahahaahahaha i thought i was getting better too but it was actually because i was just forcing myself to study to give myself an illusion of doing my part and then i went to school and my actual performance is like bad b/c i avoid so many activities that would make me better and i just

___: samd

66ccff: 

Wow i want to die!

___: 

hdjsjdjs

I think I only managed to eat cuz my brother was expecting me to

66ccff: tavpdfw you want to be punished constantly so you don't have to have anxiety about existing

___: 

Cuz he bought me dinner like 6 hours ago but I didn't touch it til now BFJDJD MEEEEE

66ccff: dkja;eljd;

___: 

GOD me: ah I feel good today Me like 3 hours later: oh my God I shouldn't feel good abt myself that's so Selfish ? I am trash

66ccff: oh Mood

___: Avpd solidarity

66ccff: 

honestly i love my environmental soicology class but liek it talks about how we're all consuming and putting things back into the environment

___: Idk how I manage to have avpd and __pd but that's how it is on ths bitch of an earth

66ccff: and i was literally contemplating if death was the only way to take myself out from the cycle

___: 

Me Bhhjsfjd

66ccff: 

i was like holy shit. it's not just consumption i forgot i also put bad gases into the air with everything i breathe i am Bad

___: 

All day today I was hearing abt what happened in Vegas and we were like. Talking in my apologetics class abt the Nature of Evil

66ccff: the true environmentalist take is death

___: And I was just thinking "why must I, exist if all I am is bad"

66ccff: 

oh my god same! i looked over my abt page and i was like this looks fake tumblerina

___: 

apologetics: so mankind is basically evil Me: great! I'll die so there's less evil in the world

66ccff: 

me ME

MEMEMMEMEMEMMEMEMEMEME

___: HHDHSBDJSHD

66ccff: 

sometimes i have fantasies of like going backwards and apologizing to everyone i've ever talked to and to everyone who ever had to work to produce what i've consumed

___: 

M. E

m

66ccff: 

and then hoping that they forget about me and then like disappearing forever i jsut can't see how some people can be like oh yeah factories in china and mexico earn less than 2 dollars an hour to make our stuff and not jus twant to kill themselves

___: 

I'm just pathetic and compulsive if I feel bad about stuff I apologize til like 2 weeks after God. Yea

66ccff: 

the joke is that people hate if you overapologize so you jsut damned if you do damned if you dont :upside_down:

___:

me: uh sorry for being sad People: don't apologize for that Me: Avpd:.  They are mad that I am apologizing also that I am sad Hhhfjjejd

Me: 

ME WKJD;LKD "can you stop saying sorry" "sorry"

___: 

me: oh God I'm so miserable Someone: oh im sorry Me: I wish I could accept this but Pity is too much for a lowly worm like me

66ccff: "what did i just say"

___: MMSNDNBHHHHHHGGGGG

66ccff: 

:smile: :gun:

MOOD

___: avpd feel when you don't deserve to be pitied ?

66ccff: pity is too much kindness ___: 

God yea

LIKE probably just a conflicted feel but I prefer ppl being active than pitying me but then I'm like

"that's selfish I don't deserve that ?"

66ccff: 

someone tells you to watch where you're going feel like you're unable to go outside for the rest of the day

___: 

m. mebdbdhdhdjs

66ccff: oh yeah the joke is that i want people to like. be kind to me but also i don't

___: hell brain

66ccff: so i can't say what i want

___: GGG YEAH

66ccff: 

be kind to me except don't because i'll feel invalid either way so maybe just don't talk to me >feels worse anyway

___: 

Hhhhhhhhhhh me Me: talk to me ? But I don't know what to talk abt ? But I am also not good enough for pity you could just sit there maybe But then the presence of another person will overwhlem me and I'll go cry again/s

66ccff: feel free to entertain yourself, and forget about me, ___: 

Mebdndmdkskdjsja god [looks at all cluster c disorders] you are all bitches and I hate tou

66ccff: 

tavpdfw u gotta depersonalize to make it through the day of talking to other people and acting like ur a normal human bean MOOD

___: GOD yea

66ccff: 

i have a question though if im depersonalizing why do i still feel terrible even if i feel ilke im fake smh

___: God me

66ccff: 

me: i'm not real so heres me acting like i am chill and cool person that is interesting maybe or maybe not me, inside: this sucks and i hate this but im not real so it shouldnt affect me but damn i hate this when u feel separate from your auto-pilot but you still experience all the shame you would without it :thinking: avpd is stupid and contradictory and evolutionarily useless

___: 

__pd isnkind of the same but like if you manage it well you can get stuff done but you still breakdown over the TINIEST DETAIL I hate it And I waste more time thinking abt what I'm gonna do and not actully DOING MT SHIT

66ccff: cripes

___: LIKE A NORMAL PERSON

66ccff:

me in high school UGH i'm ahving that problem right now dude in high school i used to just waste my days reading manga and thnking i should do my homeworka

___: 

me: I'll spend this hour scheduling [2hours later] Me: [stressed nbdjdjjsjdjsjdks

66ccff: and then i'd like. start at 10pm and fuck myself over ___: rip 66ccff: have a crying session at 4am every time an essay is due the next day ___: I actually didn't do one of my assignments tonight 66ccff: bad coping habits ___: Rip me I got discouraged over something lame JFJSNFKSNFD 66ccff: oh mood

___:

relationship issues: occur Me: well, I can't, do anything ever again

66ccff: 

i shouldn't even be discouraged abt my classes bc i'm here to learn and i'm just like. i know nothing i deserve to die kejd;kakejd friend, disagrees with you on something you feel unsure about: WELL I GUESS I AM BAD AND THEY HATE ME NOW time to ghost them

___: 

me: [perceives someone not caring for me] me: and Now...what is Mine Purpose...what do I live for...my Friends....have all abandoned m MEEEEEE avpd sounds super dramatic when you separate it from yourself but like In the moment I'm always just [jdut starts Fucking Crying

66ccff: 

i just want to manage to some kind of social work, give my wealth to some impoverished family, and then kms before 30

yeah my therapists in the past are like why... so soon

___: Jfjdjfjdf 66ccff: and i'm just like "why not i need to minimize all my ills on the world and also on the emotions of my family" ___: That reminds me of like. One of my mutuals talking abt how early he sleeps and he was just 66ccff: this is the optimal time look my life plan

___: 

"why be awake longer than necessary"

Hdhdhfjsjfdjdjdband. I was just . Me

66ccff:

because you hate yourself too much sleep :^)

___: 

God yea That's true. Me rn

I should've been asleep like an hour ago but [plays secret of Mana and then mopes]

66ccff:

dude i used to have bouts of insomnia b4 i got drugs that knock me out (and help me w/ anxiety) like.... i would lay awake and every second of being awake was just making the situation worse

___: I feel like I should get meds to balance out my bipolar eps but

66ccff: but then i couldn't sleep anyway so it was a damned situation ___: my parents r so anti meds 66ccff: rrghbh

___: 

also like Internalized ableism That I don't Needthem and So Many people don't need them

66ccff: oh yeah, why do my essay when i can read an hour of garbage romo manga and feel slightly less bad during that time and then hate myself more

___: 

So I Can do it cuz I'm like Everyone Else and not like Those "crazy" people Rifp

66ccff: 

man i don't wanna encourage meds if your side effects r bad but honestly how did i get the fuck through high school other than triggering intense anxiety about all assignments

like... i was so nonfunctional i shouldn't have even been in school

.....

66ccff: 

all accessibility problems are solvable humans are so bad

___: caring ? About others ? What a concept 66ccff: except sometimes they are good but that is definitely not me

___: 

Me

Ok I try to overcompensate w good to make up for inherent badness THANKS RELIGION

66ccff: 

the US is like: here's a pricetag for your life pay up

___: AAAA

66ccff: 

yeah i can see how christainity wouldn't help there w/ the "original sin" and stuff that doesn't quite exist in other abrahamic religions iirc judaism doesn't even have hell

___:  it's really weird

66ccff: 

i'm guessing its bc of jesus like.... y'all binches killed him so now this is life - christainity

___: 

Like. Christianity makes the most sense to me probably cuz I grew up w it but fuck Man

66ccff:  o yeah i grew up w/ some christianity too ___: It's FUCKED!!!!!! 66ccff:  i actually have agoraphobia issues w/ going inside of churches ___: Oh same 66ccff:  :^) ___: I'm actually fairly anti-church just because the current state of them is very bsd 66ccff:  oh yeah

....

66ccff: 

how can someone like me, who is literally not deserving of life, raise someone else

scrumbles

___:

Me Hdjehdsk

66ccff:  ___ we are so fucked ___: 

It's true Life is fucked We, are fucked

66ccff: existence is violence