#closest to his heart like a true american patriot

[dragonroilz]

[loveablehands]

RED GUARDIAN. absence makes the heart grow fonder.

there’s a reason why natasha & yelena knew where alexei was being kept: and it’s not just bc they’re spies and/or because it’s easily accesible information.

alexei genuinely tried contacting them multiple times. to the point of excess. and he succeeded, multiple times, enough to get the information to them about where he is, where they could find him, in a top secret government prison.

did he love them, as children? a good question, as he was not supposed to, was never supposed to. they were girls---and their organization treats girls, especially young girls, as trash that is made useful by becoming objectified murder dolls.

and alexei... he is, at his core, a self-centered, selfish and vain kind of man that often times feeds into the misogyny despite or maybe because of his tankie status. he was born for violence, he was born for great feats of heroism and patriotism and, while he believes in an end to capitalism and that the west is altogether evil---he is prone to chauvinism and violence & wanting glory above justice, action above kindness, immediate satisfaction and validation over true relationships.

melina and him were never more intimate than they needed to be, and he never wanted to adopt children in the fist place---always thought that if he was able to have children (as he too was sterilized by the serum) he would want little alexeis running around with his face & blood, and most of the time he spent with his ‘family’ were literal outings where they would PRETEND to be a middle class american family, doing things he hated at malls and museums and top secret photo studios in yelena’s most treasured memories, but doing much, much less intimate and vulnerable and fun things than that on average.

natasha & melina talk about how the photographs of their holidays in their scrapbook were all fake and there weren’t even any presents in the boxes, and yet natasha still experienced joy at this memory (likely bc while they had little in common and were very little like areal family---melina & alexei’s great senses of humor shined right through and made it fun for their children, and yelena’s childlike joy was infectious, but still). likewise, for the less than three years they were together---every outing and time spent together for milestones and major events was meant to be as empty and american as possible, even if it didn’t feel that way bc they tried to make it seem real and fun for the girls. even when alexei says goodbye to his girls---it is not with his real, true voice, his real, true accent. he is pantomiming an american father. he is not permitted even to tell yelena where she comes from, much less any stories about his own father, his own family, his own pride.

still, alexei and melina were mostly all alone in ohio, in a time before the internet and iphones so readily connected people across countries and borders. they would both spend a lot of time waiting for orders in discrete locations---wanting to hear from the people who raised them---who FELT like family, who FELT like friends. there were other families just like theirs---but spread so far apart, they felt completely alone sometimes, and trapped with each other, trapped with two little girls who they were not TAUGHT to love, who they were not taught to raise. they were forced to deal with the day-to-day aspect of raising them AND training them regardless. and in these moments, melina and alexei and natasha and yelena all found a strange kind of love, a dysfunctional kind of love, a camp kind of love where alexei and melina used their sense of humor to cope with this leave it to beaver lifestyle and made something special and warm about it.

because at his core, alexei has always had the wry, silly dad kind of humor. the kind of dad that sticks his tongue out at babies and infants and makes them laugh like no one else can, especially after an argument. who is thoughtful while still being rude, who is gentle while still being moody.

alexei doesn’t know if he loved his girls while they were truly his girls. not enough to count. not enough to save them from himself and every other man in russia.

but after the events of the opening---he was basically thrown in prison almost immediately after. and he went from having the world at his beck and call, to having only three people to care about and who cared about him---to having no one, no one at all, being a total joke in the prison.

and he just. kept checking up on all of them as much as he could. he would reach out to them almost constantly. mostly melina---to see if she could get him out of there. but as natasha and yelena grew in notoriety----well, he started asking them for favors too, interspersed between telling them how proud he is of them. AND HE GENUINELY IS PROUD of the great things they’ve done for the country, and how those have become his achievements when he COULD NOT make his own achievements. his girls, his achievements. their trauma, his pride.

getting in contact with them honestly isn’t easy--and it hurts, when he hears nothing back, but he shakes it off and keeps trying, keeps listening to tales of their latest exploits, and then, embellishing on them in his own stories. they’re giants in his head, heroes, the avenger and the greatest child soldier ever.

when he says they came! he’s not honestly surprised. he’s surprised they didn’t come SOONER. he never gave up hope, not truly.

bc in his head---they ARE his girls. he’s spent so much time alone, so much time talking about them. he’s grown quite fond of them and the fantasy of a family he has in his head of them, just like the fantasy in his head of beating captain america, of being the red guardian. he has a dream they will become a real superhero family team like the incredibles or something. he’s happy to see them. not sure why they’re not happy to see him.

he’s developed a relationship with them in his head that does not exist, and is too stubborn and willfully delusional to pretend to be normal---pretend that he ACTUALLY thinks he could have POSSIBLY hurt them, pretend that he actually thinks he wasn’t the best thing that could have happened to them. until the end.

they are a real family to him, now. the closest thing he’s ever had to one, and in his head and his heart, he spent every moment with them, slinging around tall tales to his fellow inmates in between tattoos to the point they might as well be real.

and, like a true, real dark bad dad humor fashion, every trauma he’s inflicted on them wasn’t that bad even if it IS his fault, and is, in his version of the truth, actually quite funny! something to drink and laugh about! you’re old enough to drink and laugh now, aren’t you, girls? lets drink and laugh then. you know this reminds me of a time when my father---

(he might not apologize that well for everything, but he’s at least willing to go against the people who put him in prison that he’s devoted his life to, and that’s something, right?)

[carewyncromwell]

Where has that old friend gone, lost in a February song? Tell him it won't be long 'til he opens his eyes... Opens his eyes... Where is that simple day before colors broke into shades, And how did I ever fade into this life... Into this life...?

~“𝔉𝔢𝔟𝔯𝔲𝔞𝔯𝔶 𝔖𝔬𝔫𝔤,” 𝔟𝔶 𝔍𝔬𝔰𝔥 𝔊𝔯𝔬𝔟𝔞𝔫

x~x~x

“Mr. Varney, this form you take…it’s not truly your body, is it?”

“...No. It’s not.”

~Adelia Selwyn and Bartholomew “Bat” Varney

~~~

In the 18th century, there once was a young wizard named Robert Harker. Although he was born to a poor Muggle family in Sheffield, he thrived at the infamous school for magic called Hogwarts, earning a lot of esteem from his wizard-born classmates and leading Ravenclaw to many Quidditch victories as their team’s captain and star Chaser. He also was blessed enough to make the two best friends a man could have -- the Hufflepuff Prefect and soft-hearted class beauty, Cecelia Crouch, and the awkward, but heroic young Gryffindor who would eventually become Head Boy, Bartholomew Varney.

Upon graduation, Robert set about making a life for his new Muggle wife Loretta and himself. Because he could not tell his wife about his magic under the Statute of Secrecy, he didn’t dare take a job in the Wizarding World until after any children they had came of age and were accepted to Hogwarts -- and so, both out of a desire to support his family and to serve his country like his father once had, Robert enlisted in the British army heading for the American colonies to deal with the uprising there. What Robert had not expected was his best friend “Barty” nobly and selflessly deciding to enlist himself -- for they and Cecelia had made a promise long ago to fight for both the World they lived in and the World Robert had come from together. And because Cecelia, as a woman, would not be allowed to join the Muggle British army, Bartholomew felt all the more confident that he wanted to be there for Robert, for himself as well as for his new wife. The two men went off to war as if they were Muggles themselves, much to the horror and bewilderment of the Wizarding World and much to the anxiety of Cecelia. Before they left, Cecelia insisted on preparing Robert a Pepper-up Potion to help with a cold he’d been suffering from. It was only much later that Robert suspected that there was anything “off” about the potion his old friend had given him.

As the months wore on, the two men’s patriotism and idealism wore thin and they grew more and more jaded with the path they had taken -- and yet Robert and Bartholomew endured, for they still had each other to lean on. They had been like brothers before the War of American Independence, but despite all of the pain they suffered and the longing they had to return to their wives and young children, their friendship was reforged in fire, stronger than ever before.

Then came the Battle of Yorktown, and the horrible siege that came with it. The two wizards had managed to survive battle after battle, but at the very, very end of the War, both of them ended up on the front lines -- and although both men were initially about to ward off some cannonballs with Shield Charms, they were soon overwhelmed by the assault. Robert lost his wand arm to a cannon ball, and when Bartholomew tried desperately to save his friend’s life, they were both overwhelmed by a flurry of gunfire.

It was that night, as the bodies of about a hundred soldiers lay on the battlefield, that the ritual was completed far across the Atlantic. The soul of the man called Robert Harker, which had left his body and was set to pass on, was suddenly chained back down to Earth by force. Tragically, that soul -- as what often happens in such a corrupt, Dark ritual that subverts Death itself -- could not be returned to its original body, which was too mangled beyond repair...and so, instead, it took the next closest body, which was in much better shape. That body was instantly drained of all blood, spasming horribly as it was possessed by this soul that no longer belonged to this world...and for an entire night, all this new, demented creature could do was feed on every drop of blood it could drain from the corpses scattered around it with its sharp, deadly white fangs. It was only when morning came and the creature escaped into the woods, attacking and draining several more wild animals of their blood while hidden in the shadow of the trees, that the new vampire finally got his head back enough to remember where he was and what had happened. And yet...when he looked over his own hands...when he stumbled over his longer legs and felt his face and hair...he could tell something was wrong. And when he stumbled back into camp the following night, he realized why. All of the people there -- the walking bags of flesh and blood that he felt the terrible urge to eat alive -- called him “Varney.”

Robert Harker’s soul was now trapped in the reanimated corpse of his best friend.

Somehow, amazingly, he managed to get back to England, after draining the blood of an entire ship’s worth of Muggles. His very first stop was to his old friend and Bartholomew’s wife, Cecelia -- the only person with magic who he thought he could trust. At the sight of what looked like her husband with pale skin, fangs, and scarlet eyes, Cecelia immediately recoiled in terror -- but when it came out that it was truly Robert, that terror turned to horror. For it turned out that she had predicted that Robert wouldn’t return alive, and had taken drastic measures to ensure that he would return to life, were he ever to die, so that he could come home.

Robert was furious and grief-stricken. He demanded to know why Cecelia didn’t do the same for Bartholomew -- why she didn’t try to protect him too -- and although Cecelia insisted that she’d only predicted Robert’s death, not Bartholomew’s, it soon became very clear that she truly had only been focused on Robert, at her husband’s expense. Cecelia broke down, admitting that she’d always loved Robert, even despite her and Barty’s arranged marriage by their parents, and that she wouldn’t have been able to bear losing him. Robert was beside himself, torn apart by the betrayal, and unable to suffocate the throbbing pain of his organs in response to how his heart raced without any blood to sustain it. Cecelia desperately offered her own blood to Robert to help him with the pain, and Robert very reluctantly and resentfully agreed purely out of desperation, only to lose control and nearly suck her dry of blood from her arm, shoulder, and neck. He smacked Cecelia across the room, half because of his revulsion at how much Cecelia seemed to enjoy their contact and his horror at himself for going too far, and disappeared into the night.

In the meantime, however, Robert -- now being called “Bartholomew Varney” by everyone, since he wore his friend’s face -- was unable to return to his family. His wife Loretta, being a Muggle, was still not allowed to know about the Wizarding World and, by extension, his magic or about vampires...and even if he waited until their daughter Irene was accepted to Hogwarts and Loretta was given that knowledge, his blood lust was still too strong for him to live alongside people. Even being in Cecelia’s company alone had proved too difficult when they were in close proximity: being in such a crowded town as London was out of the question. And so -- broken-hearted -- the vampire called Bartholomew Varney had to let “Robert Harker,” and all hope for a future with his wife and daughter, die forever.

Within ten years, Varney finally felt strong enough to pay Cecelia another short visit. The poor witch was now a shadow of her former self -- destroyed by the guilt and shame she felt for what she’d done to her husband and the man she’d loved. Varney regarded her with a lot of resentment, but nonetheless wanted the full story of what she’d done to him, in case there was any way it could be reversed and he could be allowed to rest in peace. Unfortunately there was no way Cecelia knew of to let Varney rest except for him either staking himself through the heart and beheading himself or by someone else doing it for him...and as much as Varney wasn’t keen on the half-life he had, the thought of killing his best friend’s body was too much for him to bear, and so too it was for Cecelia. At one point in the conversation, the older woman tentatively tried to persuade Varney to stay -- to let her help him with his condition, to let her take care of him and provide for him as best she could. After all...to the Wizarding World, Bartholomew and Cecelia Varney were still seen as husband and wife...even if “Bartholomew” was actually Robert. Thoroughly revolted by the suggestion, Varney left the estate. He never saw Cecelia again.

Over the next hundred years, the vampire who would come to be known as “Bat Varney” by the residents of Hogsmeade and the students of Hogwarts came to grips with his tragic existence. He found ways around his blood lust, hypersensitivity to light, strong smells, and loud noises, and intimidating appearance, and he detached himself from the world enough to sample in its pleasures of learning, traveling, and socializing without investing himself in anyone that was bound to outlive him. He found a niche for himself where he could answer people’s questions and solve their problems -- something that could give some focus to the prolonged “half-life” he’d been resigned to. And so he’s able to enjoy the shadow of other people’s happiness, even if he’s unable to experience true joy for himself.

But must Bat Varney truly be consigned to mere shadows of happiness for the remainder of his time on Earth?

[apparitionism]

Hark

A merry early Gift Exchange to @kla1991​, whose not-so-secret Santa I am this year. This is the first part of a story set somewhat in-universe: there’s no season 5 (what could that even be?), and only the first ep of season 4—basically, time wound back to right before the Warehouse exploded in Stand, which aired on Oct. 3, so the Christmas during which this story is set is happening less than three months after that momentous occurrence. I’m postulating that Helena became an agent again, and there was no Artie/Father Data business. (Oh, and Steve didn’t die, so no metronome. I refuse to force Helena through witnessing anyone being brought back non-nefariously from the dead.) I’ll do my best to post the concluding part(s) by New Year’s Day—no promises on that, but I’ll finish as soon as apparitionally possible. Anyway, happy holidays to everyone. Continuing to participate with you all in this wondrous exercise in fandom is a blessing in every tradition, and I’m profoundly grateful.

Hark

“Your upstart nation stole ‘God Save the Queen’!” Helena seethed at Myka.

For whom “upstart nation” was really too much. “Nobody owns that melody!” she fumed, reciprocally, at Helena. “You can’t steal something nobody owns, our version is perfectly valid, and anyway I’m pretty sure other countries stole it too. Look it up!”

“I’m not in other countries. You look it up.”

“I’m driving! Since when are you such a fan of the monarchy anyway?”

“Stop questioning my patriotism!”

“I couldn’t care less about your patriotism!”

“You brought up citizenship!”

“Because you don’t have any!” Myka had genuinely thought they would be having an intellectual conversation, one about documentation and—

“I did at birth!” Helena raged, and then she scowl-sang, “God save our gra-cious Queen.”

This gave Myka pause. She reflected that she had actually never heard Helena sing before. She then concluded that she never wanted to hear Helena sing again... because Helena could not sing.

However: “My country ’tis of thee,” Myka sang back, frustrated. It was the only reason she herself would ever have sung, because—

“You can’t sing,” Helena informed her, in the tone of a doctor trying to conceal joy at having to report that the patient would not recover.

“Neither can you,” Myka informed back, aiming for straightforward “snide.”

“And I never want to hear you sing again,” Helena continued.

All Myka could come up with in response to that was an inadequate “Ditto.”

Helena sniffed. “You just wanted the last word.”

Myka pointedly let Helena have that last word. To make her stew in it. In the ensuing silence, she continued to drive. On this last leg home from a retrieval, late on Christmas Eve—their very first Christmas Eve—the air between them was frostier than the South Dakota winter outside the car could ever dream of matching.

She was under no illusion that Helena cared at all about anybody saving the Queen, and she herself, while reasonably patriotic on the American side of things, hadn’t sung her way through that song since her childhood. She knew this dispute was ridiculous, and she suspected Helena knew it too. She suspected also that they both understood they were developing a pattern: A period of calm—a deepening of accord—that would sooner or later, particularly in the adrenalin-ebb aftermath of a dangerous retrieval, dissipate into some minimally motivated squabble, the respective sides of which they entrenched themselves into with such commitment that it seemed there could never be an unentrenching.

*

An early instance: Myka had threatened to storm out of their shared hotel room because Helena had mulishly refused to concede that it had been foolish to open a bottle of mini-bar water for which they would be charged five dollars.

“Go right ahead,” Helena had “suggested,” so Myka did.

In the lobby, she’d run into Pete, who wasn’t storming anywhere, just looking for free snacks. “See?” Myka demanded of him. “Like a normal person.”

“If you were normal, you wouldn’t be out here with me. ’Cause you’ve got a hot girl in a hotel room, and I know things got a little uh-oh chasing that guy today, but you’re both still in one piece.”

“Maybe not for long.”

“You volunteered for this.”

“No I didn’t. Artie said ‘Pete, Myka, Helena, get on a plane for Montgomery, Alabama,’ and so we—”

“You know that isn’t the ‘this’ I meant.”

Myka did. But she hadn’t volunteered for that “this” either. Nothing about her response to Helena was voluntary. Nothing about it had ever been voluntary.

“Fights and all,” Pete added. “After the thing”—he always called the barely averted explosion of the Warehouse “the thing,” and so did Claudia—“you could’ve let her leave. You could’ve made her leave. She would have done anything you said.”

“Not anything,” Myka said, to be contrary.

“Maybe you don’t remember how she’d hardly even sit in a chair without your say-so. Oh, but wait, I think I know somebody who remembers everything, some tall lady with a lot of hair, name rhymes with Opelika... hey, that’s you!”

“Shut up. It wasn’t... that simple.”

“It is now.”

She crossed her arms at him.

He sighed. “Lemme show you: ‘Sorry, baby,’” he said in his “Myka” voice, which was terrible. “Me too, darling,” he then said in his “Helena” voice, which was even worse. As himself, he finished, “It’s like you’ve never been in a relationship.”

In a conversation in which Pete had said several annoyingly true things, that one was the most annoyingly true. But: “It’s like,” she conceded, and he slapped the side of her head, very gently.

“Hot girl hotel room,” he said.

When Myka went back to that hotel room, the hot girl said, “I’m sorry,” as if she’d received the same instructions from Pete. “I was precipitately thirsty.”

“I’m sorry too,” Myka told her. “I was precipitately miserly.”

Myka kissed the hot girl, the hot girl kissed back, and they fumbled their way to fine.

Until the next trivial-yet-entrenched tiff... because apparently, peace was for normal people.

*

Normal people. When Myka and Helena finally made it back to the B&B, Leena, Claudia, and Steve were doing reasonably convincing “normal” impressions: drinking hot chocolate, eating cookies, and playing board games. They seemed to be playing all the board games; Leena was replacing the lid on Monopoly, which she set aside, reaching for the next box in a towering stack. “Chef’s-kiss timing,” Claudia told them. “I just bankrupted these two pathetic poser slumlords, and we’re about to start Sorry. It’s funner with four, so siddown, and you two can be a team.”

“Or not,” Myka said, glancing at Helena, who glanced back and gave a definitely not yet inhale-exhale. “Why isn’t Pete playing?”

“We’re supposed to tell you it’s because he’s doing some last-minute Christmas shopping,” Steve said.

Myka was about to ask, “This late at night?” but Claudia supplied, “Except it’s really that he goofed off today and didn’t finish inventory and thought he’d get away with it but then Artie called and yelled at him.”

“And you left him alone to keep working on it? It’s the night before Christmas, and—”

Claudia waved her hands. “And all through the Warehouse, not a creature was stirring, I swear.”

“Besides,” Leena added, “he’s a grown man.”

“Who always ruins Christmas!” said Myka.

“Always almost ruins Christmas,” Claudia corrected.

Myka demanded, “Is there anything about me that says ‘I like a close call’?”

All eyes turned to Helena, then back to Myka.

*

Of course Helena had been part of the closest of calls, and Myka hadn’t liked it at all: nothing but the outcome. The Warehouse, the saving of it, yes, the thing—but the real outcome had been the aftermath at the B&B.

That outcome was real, but it was also a dream, one that Myka had dreamed more often than she would ever have confessed to pondering in her heart, this dream of being alone with a present Helena, no disastrous endpoint looming. The dream-logic of it: I can touch her? And Myka put a hand to Helena’s elbow. Reached and did that. Helena looked at the hand, the elbow. She looked in Myka’s eyes then and said, “Don’t spare my feelings.”

Feelings? Are you really you in your skin, Myka wanted to ask. Is this your elbow. Instead, because she needed to know, she murmured, “What do you want.”

Helena didn’t say words, but she made a noise that evolution had found fit to preserve from a deep, animal past, a guttural push of sound through the throat-column: it told Myka everything. Told Myka: “Everything.”

No speaking then but by bodies, a language of desperation and culmination. Helena had a mouth that could be met by Myka’s own, clothes that could be removed to reveal a palpable body, with every response of that body real under Myka’s hands. Myka held her eyes closed for much of that night, lest sight confuse her about presence and its proof, lest she fail to attend to what her eyes could never offer: The fleshy heaviness of a tongue in response to her own. The soft give of a thigh interior under her insistent thumb. The steady pressure of a body that pushed back. No empty air, no absence; only presence.

No question marks intruded on their immediate intimacy, their immeasurable, embodied relief. Two days prior, Helena had been a sacrificeable hologram, but all at once she was Myka’s living, breathing, at-last lover. All destined... like meeting at gunpoint.

That night precipitated a fast fall into full couplehood, with seemingly little conscious choice on either of their parts. As inevitable as the gunpoint meetings, the wrenching betrayals, even the miraculous redemption.

But nothing good can possibly be so simple, Myka told herself. Or so inevitable.

“Is that what you believe?” Myka imagined Helena asking this, Socratically. She’d had so many internal conversations with Helena that she found the habit—probably a bad one—difficult to break.

“I’m tired of belief,” Myka told her beautiful, imaginary Socrates. “Sometimes I want to go back to my regular non-Warehouse life, where belief didn’t matter.”

Helena said, still in Myka’s head, still Socratic, “Or did you merely act as if it didn’t matter? Artifacts were born. Religions carried on as they do. Your ignoring belief had no effect on any of it.”

“My not ignoring it has no effect on any of it.”

“So you yourself, regardless of attitude adopted, cannot affect belief.” Socrates paused. Smiled. “Or that which is inevitable.”

Myka did, in such moments, briefly wonder why she needed the real Helena around, if the one in her head was such a reasonable facsimile. A hologram could have done that job just as well.

But the answers, the “here’s why,” came fast and thick, and Myka rejoiced that they could. The real Helena could make Myka laugh an easy laugh, because circumstances were not as they had been with that hologram, when laughter was an impossibility. The real Helena could touch Myka’s neck—not wonderingly, as Myka had known that elbow—but instead quick and hot, in that way that said “we have been intimate recently and will soon again be.” The real Helena could fall asleep and in relaxation display a face so devastating in its symmetry that Myka was inclined to regret not being Michelangelo, so as to recreate it in appropriately tributary marble.

Strange, though, or probably just ridiculous, to feel that your romantic relationship had made more sense when one of you was a hologram.

Myka should have expected Christmas, also a fraught inevitability, to loom as an existential test—yet another existential test—of that relationship.

She should have expected also that when this new existential test was administered, Pete would be the one helping to shove answer sheets and no. 2 pencils into their hands.

*

“Might be a close call or two in Sorry. Sorry!” Claudia cackled. “Anyway, go put your stuff away so we can get our Sorry on. Also our merry. We might even sing.”

“Or not,” Myka said again, and this time she got an eyeroll in response rather than meaningful breathing. An improvement? Hard to tell.

“Nobody’s required to sing anyth—” Leena began, but then she sat up very straight and cocked her head. “Do you hear that sound? Or I guess I mean, do you feel that sound? It’s not singing.”

Helena moved her head too, and not in a way Myka recognized. “I do feel that sound. In fact I believe I know that sound.”

“I do too,” Leena said.

Steve squinted. “Feels like... a weird earthquake? Is it happening all over Univille?”

Claudia said, “This is the kind of thing they blame on us even when it isn’t us. It’s why they look at us weird at the supermarket.”

“I can’t feel anything,” Myka said. “What is it?” She looked first to Helena, who was shaking her head—not at Myka, not with anger, but as if she might be able to find the right shake to rid her ears of the sound, or the feeling, or whatever it was.

“Agitated artifacts,” Leena said, performing a very similar shake. “They... rumble.”

“Agitated artifacts,” Myka repeated. “Pete’s alone at the Warehouse, it’s Christmas, and artifacts are agitated. Okay.”

Naturally, Pete chose that moment to march in, proclaiming, “I hope everybody’s ready to apologize to me.”

Steve asked, “Why should we apologize?” Now he was shaking his head too.

“Because everybody always says I ruin Christmas.”

Helena said, “As I understand the situation, the salient fact is not that they say you ruin Christmas. The salient fact is that you do ruin Christmas.”

“Almost,” Claudia corrected again. She canted her head, righted it. Canted it again.

“But this time I saved it.”

“By agitating artifacts?” Myka said, but of course he would think that. Probably encouraged them to have a party...

“More so by the minute, from the sound of things,” Leena told him.

“What? No! That isn’t what I did!”

“The artifacts are telling a different story,” Helena noted.

Claudia offered, “It’s more that they’re humming it real low. Like some geologic event that worked its way into a Björk track. Or vice versa.”

Myka—very calmly, she believed, under the circumstances—said, “What. Did. You. Touch.”

“Nothing, Mom,” he said, and his tone caused Myka to spare some sympathy for Jane Lattimer. He then said, as if it were some magnanimous confession, “Okay. Fine. I did, but I gloved up.”

“What did you touch after you gloved up?” Leena asked. “And why?”

“It was like it tapped me on the shoulder...” he began.

Still canting her head, Claudia muttered, “Sallah flashback, Sallah flashback...”

“And said ‘hey big guy’...”

Steve said, “This is already a longer story than I feel like it should be.”

“And told me it had to go the Christmas aisle...”

Myka had had enough. “If you don’t spit it out right now, I personally will Heimlich it out of you. Joyfully. WHAT had to go to the Christmas aisle?”

He turned to her and gave a palms-up shrug. “You know I don’t know anything about classical music.”

She reached to the table for the nearest board game, to throw it at him, but Helena preempted that move by saying, “Judging from Myka’s face, now is not the time for non sequiturs.”

She probably couldn’t have done much damage with a travel-size Aggravation anyway, but travel and aggravation made her think, in Helena’s direction, Oh, now you can read my face. An hour ago in the car, not so much. Then she sighed internally. Or maybe, an hour ago in the car, too well.

Pete was continuing, “But the Messiah had strong feelings.”

“Oh no,” Leena said, and Myka knew that Leena saying “oh no” in that particular way meant she knew something, and the something she knew wasn’t good, but Pete kept on, still enthusiastically proud of himself: “So I gloved up, took it where it wanted to be, and then came home. Because it isn’t Christmas till I’ve won the Trivial Pursuit Star Wars Classic Trilogy Collectors’ Edition!”

“Do I seriously have to remind you I’m the reigning champ?” Claudia demanded. “What you’re saying is, it’s never gonna be Christmas.”

“Not for a while yet,” Leena said, “because we’re going back to the Warehouse. Because I’m pretty sure I know what’s happening.”

“Why do I have to go if I can’t hear whatever it is?” Pete whined.

Myka told him, “I can’t hear it either, and it’s your fault.”

“Your ears are your own problem.”

“I might Heimlich you just for the fun of it.”

Steve said, with concern, “I’ve heard that ribs tend to break.”

Myka nodded. “Exactly.”

“Santa would not approve of that attitude, young lady,” Pete chided.

“All I do is lug around stockings full of coal,” she said. “Do your worst, Santa.”

She made the mistake of glancing at Helena, whose face betrayed a responsive ripple of disquiet. Exactly the wrong sentiment for ending a fight, even a foolish one, Myka realized: imply that nothing you carry with you is what you want. “I didn’t mean...” she began, but Claudia was demanding of Leena, “How do you know what’s happening? And what is happening?”

“He put the Messiah sheet music in the Christmas aisle,” Leena said, with what Myka considered enviable patience.

“You say that like it means something!”

“It does mean something,” Leena said. “You’ll see. More importantly, you’ll hear.”

*

At the Warehouse, when they reached the floor, they were greeted by... “Curtains?” Steve tried, because that was what they were. Tall, cream-colored damask curtains with a green floral pattern. Freestanding, blocking their path. Insistently blocking their path.

“For all of us!” Pete tried back. “Dun-dun-DUN!”

“No...” Leena said. She regarded the curtains. “I know who you are,” she said, and Myka found herself unsurprised to see the curtains rustle at that, as if in appreciation. Leena then said, “And now I know exactly what’s happening.”

“A play is beginning?” Helena suggested.

“Not quite, but you’re in the neighborhood. Surely somebody other than me knows who these curtains are really for.”

Pete leaned close to the curtains, then jumped back like they’d bit him. “Oh my god. Now that I look close—the von Trapp kids!”

“Good boy,” Leena said.

“I thought we were calling him a grown man,” groused Myka.

“Leena is providing positive reinforcement,” Helena said. Pedantic, as if Myka had never heard of such a thing.

“I know she’s providing—” But she shut herself up, sighed in frustration instead.

Leena made sure everyone was wearing gloves, then said, “Claudia, keep your goo gun in your pocket; we might find more of them taking their frustrations for a walk.”

“So do we just put things back where they belong?” Steve asked. “And they calm down and the rumble-chatter stops?”

“Any that got themselves where they aren’t supposed to be, we take them back. But here’s what else we have to do.” She paused. “Sing.”

“No,” Myka said, and “no,” she repeated. She chanced a glance at Helena, but she had closed her eyes and seemed to be pre-massaging a headache out of her temples.

Leena appeared not to have heard Myka, for she went on, “We’ll deal with the curtains first. Next, the Messiah goes back where it’s supposed to be—because that’s what started it all. After that, I think Claudia should tell us what we need to do.”

“Oh god,” Claudia said, sounding just about as dread-filled as Myka felt. “This is Caretaker practice, isn’t it?”

“What if it is?” Leena asked.

“Ugh. Thanks, Pete.”

He said, “Maybe it tapped my shoulder because it thought you needed Caretaker practice.”

Myka snorted. “Maybe it tapped your shoulder because it could tell you’re an easy mark.”

“Hey!” he protested.

“Particularly at Christmas.”

“Hey!”

Leena said, “I think the Messiah might have sensed you’d be an easy mark... mostly because you want to make everybody happy. Particularly at Christmas.”

“See? Leena understands,” he taunted Myka.

Myka once again considered the Heimlich.

They escorted the curtains back to the musicals section, passing by Ginger Rogers’s dancing shoes, and Myka was unnervingly tempted to put them on and bleed her way backwards and in high heels out of the entire situation as Leena explained, “People repurpose ‘My Favorite Things’ as a Christmas song. The curtains find that... troubling.”

Pete scratched his head. “I guess I don’t really get that. Isn’t it kinda great?”

“Wait,” Claudia said, “and this might not even be practice: I think I do get it. How they feel. So let’s say you’re you.”

“I’m me,” he said. “Gotcha. Awesome. Wouldn’t have it any other way.”

“Exactly. But what if some holiday thingy came along and made like it was changing you into something else? They’re afraid we’ll put ’em in the Christmas aisle, and they don’t want to be there. Unlike the Messiah, I guess. Am I wrong, Leena?”

“You’re not wrong,” Leena told her, smiling.

“I feel that too,” Steve agreed. “They’re... afraid? Afraid it’ll diminish them. They’ll be about Christmas and that’s all. That’s why they’re so agitated.”

And so the curtains were serenaded with words about raindrops, kittens, kettles, mittens, and all the rest.

“Are they happier now?” Pete asked. “Do they not feel so bad?”

Leena, Claudia, Steve, and Helena all nodded, if not entirely vigorously. Helena said, “Marginally happier. Not knowing the song, I of course couldn’t participate. I hope they aren’t offended.”

But she hadn’t seemed apologetic at all while the singing took place. In fact she’d smirked. So Myka murmured, “Thrilled, more likely.”

Helena pretended to ignore her but also bared her teeth, minimally, in Myka’s direction, as she said, “Popular culture, alas, remains a largely undiscovered country.”

“It’s just one song,” Claudia said. “You’re getting your head around more stuff all the time! Take the Muppets.”

“Last week’s Christmas special,” Helena said, and Claudia nodded. Myka knew they’d been going one per week, because that was as much as Helena could take, whereas Claudia would have set up a holly-jolly IV drip if she could. Helena continued, “The one you called a ‘crash course’ in several shows’ worth of puppets?”

Claudia nodded again, even more enthusiastically. “Muppet Family Christmas! And now you’re up to speed, so for example when I say ‘Oscar,’ you say...”

“I still fail to understand how the large bird, which seems more accurately a costume than a puppet, qualifies.”

“The answer we were looking for was ‘the Grouch,’ so maybe we’re not quite as far along as I thought. I’m not going to bother with when I say ‘Fraggle,’ you say.”

“Consumer of the structures built by the devoted little workers who wear hats.”

“Aaaand that’s why not. Although your essay answer isn’t wrong.”

“Thank you,” Helena said, performing her funny little bow that struck Myka anew, each time she saw it, as a Victorian tell.

*

In fact, Myka had come home from the Warehouse just as that “crash course” was ending: Helena, as always after such a lesson, looked bemused but relieved, while Claudia was fidgeting with post-lecture satisfaction and, most likely, disappointment that she’d have to wait an entire week till the next one. Myka had asked, “Why does Helena need to know about the Muppets?”

Claudia responded with a puzzled, “Why doesn’t she?”

“Bert, Ernie, and the distinctions therebetween,” Helena said to Myka. “Would that I were you and could retain it all.” She smiled a small “but here we are” smile, and Myka leaned over the back of the sofa and kissed that smile. Because she wanted to; because she could. The smile then widened, and Myka tried not to make the mistake of wondering why every moment wasn’t like this one.

“You two can be pretty soft when you want to be,” Claudia remarked.

Myka had thought, No, we’re not this way when we want to be. It was when they weren’t actively wanting it—or needing it—that this ease stole upon them. But here it was... so Myka kissed Helena again, then asked, “What’s for dinner?”

The asking of that question, in the softness of that moment, had seemed an ideal step forward, one not about destiny or fraught inevitability, but balance and consistency. And then Myka did make the mistake: Why couldn’t every moment be like that? What was it that disturbed all the other moments?

*

Now, as they all headed for the Christmas aisle, Pete pulled on Myka’s arm and held her back a bit from the rest. “You mouthed the words,” he accused, very quietly.

“So what if I did? You know I can’t sing.”

“Maybe it makes a difference. H.G. said the drapes were only marginally better.”

“She didn’t sing either, by the way,” Myka pointed out.

Apparently her feelings about that were clear, for Pete said, “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine.”

“I meant you and H.G. Incidentally, you walk a little bit like Big Bird.”

“We’re fine. Incidentally, if you got a chicken bone stuck in your throat I wouldn’t be at all upset about what could happen while I was saving your stupid life.”

“I sort of feel like if she choked on a chicken bone, right now, you wouldn’t want to let anybody else do the rib-breaking.”

Myka almost said a dark “you bet I wouldn’t,” but then she realized: “I think that’s always going to be true.”

Pete nodded. “Kiss her, kill her. I get it.”

Unless he was talking about vibes, he didn’t get it, not fully—Myka herself didn’t get it fully, and in everybody’s defense there was a lot to be got—but it was Christmas-sweet that he got as much as he did. She said a mollified, “Look, just don’t make me sing, okay?” Because if there was anything Myka was sure she and Helena definitely did not need right now, it was a replay of “you can’t sing” and “neither can you.”

“No promises, partner. When Leena says ‘jump’ I say ‘my knees are shot.’ You, on the other hand, when she says ‘sing’? Better say ‘how high.’”

“This is kind of a ‘my knees are shot’ situation,” Myka observed.

“What’s the matter with your knees?”

“Never mind.”

And then they reached the Christmas aisle. About which Myka felt, and felt she had a right to feel, a certain amount of post-traumatic stress.

“If you touch anything,” she told Pete, “I will turn your ribs into chicken bones.”

“That makes no sense.”

“And yet you understand me perfectly.”

He took a step away from her. “In a very mobbed-up way, yes I do.”

Helena, Claudia, Leena, and Steve had ringed themselves around a shelf, and Myka peeked over Helena’s shoulder. Only in the Warehouse, she figured, could a piece of music manage to project the idea that it was pleased with itself.

“It’s gloating at me,” Pete complained.

“It did make you do what it wanted,” Steve pointed out.

Claudia said, “It’s like it knew we’d show up right at this moment.”

“I’m pretty sure it did,” Leena said.

Myka, still at Helena’s shoulder, felt a tension in the body that was not quite touching hers. She felt a tension, too, in words that were not quite meant for her to hear as Helena murmured at the music, “What else do you know...”

TBC

[ericsonclan]

A Father’s Day Gift

Written for @stop-breaking-my-heart-telltale ‘s one shot monthly challenge. Glad I was able to achieve all the points again and still make it sound natural XD

Summary: Willy learns from A.J. that it's Father's Day and wants to celebrate, but who can he give a Father's Day card?

Read on A03:

“Hey, AJ, whatcha doing?” Willy hopped over to the picnic table, watching his friend busily coloring away at a folded sheet of paper. For a second there, he’d reminded Willy of Tenn.

AJ looked up from his work. “Making a Father’s Day card,”

Willy’s nose wrinkled in confusion. “What’s that?”

“Aasim was talking with Omar about how it’s today. He said it’s important for us to remember all the old holidays and keep celebrating them to remember our history. It made me think about last year when Louis and I got those flowers for Clem on Mother’s Day. So this time I’m making something for Louis,”

Willy looked down at the card. It read “To: Louis” then below, “HAPPY FATHERS DAY”. Underneath was a drawing of a stick figure with squiggly noodle hair Willy figured was Louis then AJ with his afro and Clementine with her bun on either side of him. It looked nice. “I want to make one too!”

A.J. looked confused. “Who will you make one for? Your dad’s dead,”

“So is yours!”

“Yeah, but now that Clem married Louis that makes him my dad. You don’t have a mom or a dad,”

Willy’s face fell at the statement. He looked round the front yard, thinking about all the others. Clem and Louis weren’t A.J.’s real parents, just the ones he chose, so Willy knew he could make up his own too. If anybody counted as his mom, it was probably Prisha. She always made sure he had enough to eat, made a big deal about telling him how smart he was whenever he showed her a new invention and hugged him a lot. But then who was his dad? Mitch came closest, but he lost him years ago. Plus, he’d been more like a big brother. And Willy was pretty sure parents didn’t let you play with bombs.

“Hey there, goofball,”

The boys looked up to see Clementine making her way over to them. She playfully ruffled A.J.’s hair, ignoring his attempts to wriggle out from under her grasp. “Hey, Willy. What are you boys up to?”

“Secret stuff,” A.J. declared, leaning over to cover his paper. Then his eyes lit up in excitement. “Oh, Clem, can we go down to fishing shack today?”

“That depends. What do you want to go there for?”

“I’m gonna break off the mirror on the old truck that’s by there and give it to Louis as a present. That way next time he gets something stuck in his teeth he can find it right away and won’t get so embarrassed,”

Clementine chuckled at the memory. “That’s a good idea, but why does it have to be today? You and I will have fishing duty together later this week,”

“It’s ‘cause today is Father’s Day!” Willy exclaimed.

A.J. glared daggers at Willy for revealing his true motives.

Clementine look surprised before her face softened into a tender smile. She looked down at A.J., a hand on his shoulder. “If you want, we can go right now. I just need to ask Aasim to cover my watch shift for me before we go,”

“OK!” A.J.’s anger immediately dissipated with the promise of an outing.

Clementine headed out to find Aasim.

The boys colored in silence for a few minutes before A.J. looked over at Willy’s drawing in curiosity. “So who are you making a card for?”

“I don’t know,” Willy shrugged. “I’m just gonna make it super awesome then figure out who to give it to later,” He’d already drawn a bunch of explosions on the inside of the card. Now he was drawing a detailed picture of his possum Garbage on the front. He still wasn’t sure who to give it to. He didn’t want to lay it on Mitch’s grave. That would just make him sad like it always did. Louis was already getting A.J.’s card so he didn’t want to copy. Omar was shorter than him now; it’d be weird to give him the card. That only left Aasim.

Willy thought more about Aasim as he continued to color in his card, adding cool gears and more explosions on the back. He knew Aasim had looked out for him ever since Mitch died all those years ago. When he was smaller, Willy thought he annoyed Aasim since the older boy always seemed to want to be alone writing in that journal of his. Over the years though, they’d seemed to come to an understanding of each other. Aasim would play games with Willy and listen to all his crazy ideas about new inventions to improve Ericson and Willy would help Aasim out where he could and sometimes even listen when he went on and on about historical stuff.

Aasim wasn’t really Willy’s father, but he was probably the closest thing he’d ever had. He made sure that Willy stayed safe when they were out hunting, taught Willy to read and write better even though Willy had the attention span of a fly, and always seemed proud when Willy accomplished something. Hesitantly, Willy scratched out a message on the card: “To Aasim, Happy Fater’s Day”. Realizing he’d forgot the h, Willy jammed it in super small right beside the t. He hoped Aasim wouldn’t be weirded out by getting this card. Even if it didn’t work out the way Willy wanted, he still wanted to try giving it to him.

---

Evening fell and Louis and Prisha returned from their hunting trip. A.J. immediately ran over to Louis with his card, the broken mirror from the truck tucked underneath his arm. Willy watched as A.J. said something to Louis, holding forth the card excitedly. Louis looked at it for a moment before the full impact of what was being given to him hit him. An exuberant smile crossed his face as he lifted A.J. up into his arms, spinning him around excitedly before placing him down for a hug. He then took the mirror A.J. offered him, laughing sheepishly as A.J. likely retold the story of the time he got that piece of rabbit stuck in his teeth.

Willy hoped things would go as well with Aasim. He wandered over to where Aasim now sat on the steps of the admin building, reading a book. Willy cleared his throat to signal his presence. “Hey, Aasim. What are you reading?”

Aasim looked up from the book. “It’s a series of speeches by George Washington. You want to hear a bit?”

Willy nodded.

Aasim looked for a good place to start. “Our conflict is not likely to cease so soon as every good man would wish. The measure of iniquity is not yet filled; and unless we can return a little more to first principles, and act a little more upon patriotic ground, I do not know when it will.”

Willy wasn’t sure what to make of any of that.

Aasim could tell that he was lost. “Washington lived during the founding of America as its own country. He fought in a lot of wars for Americans to get their freedom. Here he was saying that if Americans didn’t unite and figure out the reasons why they were fighting for freedom, he didn’t know when or how they could win. Of course now America’s not really a country anymore, just a series of scattered territories. Makes you wonder if all that bloodshed was worth it. Still, I figured it would be nice to read something by one of the Founding Fathers today.

There was that word. “It’s Father’s Day!” Willy exclaimed.

“You’re right. Did A.J. tell you? He seemed awfully excited when he heard me mention it to Omar,”

“I-I made something for you,” Willy thrust the card forward along with the rock from his personal collection he’d decided to throw in as a last second gift. “I know you’re not my real dad or anything, but I thought you’d like to get something for Father’s Day too,”

Aasim seemed touched by the gift. He turned the card over in his hands, looking at all the details. “You did a great job with it. The explosions look pretty realistic and Garbage is spot on,”

“I always know how to draw Garbage,” Willy smiled proudly, his gap teeth showing. He pointed to the rock in Aasim’s other hand. “I thought you’d think the rock is cool too. I found it in the river a while back. It looks like it has scars all over it,”

“They’re quartz,” Aasim said, holding up the rock so they both could see it better. The grey rock was covered with bright crystal stripes. “You know, the way quartz forms is pretty cool. It actually comes from magma deep underground,” He looked at Willy’s uncomprehending face. “Volcanoes,”

“Woah, that’s awesome!” Willy’s mouth gaped open, his eyes large. A couple months ago Prisha and Aasim had made paper volcanoes for everybody to see and had them erupt fake lava and everything. It had been one of the best days of Willy’s life.

Aasim smiled at his enthusiasm. “You’re a good student, Willy. It just takes a bit of work to figure out what you want to know,” He looked back down at the card in his hand. “Thank you for this. It… means a lot,” He paused for a moment before awkwardly pulling Willy into a hug. “Man, I can’t believe you’re already as tall as me. Any day now you’re gonna have me beat,” He was silent for a moment before pulling away to look Willy in the eyes. “I’m proud of you, Willy. You’ve really stepped up over the years to help protect the school and keep everyone safe,”

Willy shrugged. “Just doing my job. You’re the one who does the hard stuff: all the planning to make sure we’ll make it through each winter. You’ve always had my back. I just don’t want to let you down,”

Aasim placed a hand on Willy’s shoulder. “You never have,”

Willy grinned again. It felt good to know Aasim was proud of him. “I guess with the baby coming we’ll all be working a lot harder, huh?”

Aasim’s brow furrowed in confusion. “Baby? What baby?”

“You and Ruby’s. She had me help her sneak back into the old nursery a couple days ago to see if we could use any of the old cribs. Didn’t you know?”

“I…” Before Aasim could answer, Omar’s voice rang through the front yard.

“Dinner’s ready! Get it before it’s cold!”

“C’mon, Aasim! It’s dinner!” the accidental reveal had already disappeared from Willy’s mind as he ran toward the picnic tables.

Aasim stood there in shock, looking toward the greenhouse where he knew Ruby was still working. He was going to be a father. This was all so sudden, so new. His eyes dropped to the card and stone in his hands. In Willy’s eyes, he already was a father figure of sorts. Did that mean with his own child he could be the father they deserved? Aasim felt a spark of excitement lighting deep within him. He certainly hoped so.

[thefederalistfreestyle]

Hamilton: how Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical rewrote the story of America (New Statesman):

[. . .] Because of the success of Hamilton – it has been sold out on Broadway since August 2015, won 11 Tony Awards and the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and is on tour in Chicago and Los Angeles – there is now an industry devoted to uncovering and explaining its references. Yet the sheer ebullience of the soundscape is not enough to explain why it became a hit. To understand that, we need to understand the scope of its ambition, which is nothing less than giving America a new origin story. “Every generation rewrites the founders in their own image,” says Nancy Isenberg, a professor of history at Louisiana State University and the author of a biography of Aaron Burr. “He [Miranda] rewrote the founders in the image of Obama, for the age of Obama.”

In doing so, Miranda created a fan base that mirrors the “Obama coalition” of Democrat voters: college-educated coastal liberals and mid-to-low-income minorities. (When the musical first hit Broadway in 2015, some tickets went for thousands of dollars; others were sold cheaply in a daily street lottery or given away to local schoolchildren.) He also gave his audiences another gift. Just as Obama did in his 2008 campaign, Hamilton’s post-racial view of history offers Americans absolution from the original sin of their country’s birth – slavery. It rescues the idea of the US from its tainted origins.

[. . .]

There is, of course, a great theatrical tradition of “patriotic myth-making”, and it explains another adjective that is frequently applied to Hamilton: Shakespearean. England’s national playwright was instrumental in smearing Richard III as a hunchbacked child-killer, portraying the French as our natural enemies and turning the villainous Banquo of Holinshed’s Chronicles into the noble figure claimed as an ancestor by the Stuarts, and therefore Shakespeare’s patron James VI and I.

James Shapiro, a professor of English literature at Columbia University, New York, and the author of several books on Shakespeare, first saw the musical during its early off-Broadway run. “It was the closest I’ve ever felt to experiencing what I imagine it must have been like to have attended an early performance of, say, Richard III, on the Elizabethan stage,” he tells me. “But this time, it was my own nation’s troubled history that I was witnessing.”

Shapiro says that Shakespeare’s first set of history plays deals with the recent past, ending with Richard III; he then went back further to create an English origin story through Richard II and Henry V. “Lin-Manuel Miranda was trying to grasp the fundamental problems underlying contemporary American culture,” he adds. “He might, like Shakespeare, have gone back a century and explored the civil war. But I suspect that he saw that to get at the deeper roots of what united and divided Americans meant going back even further, to the revolution. No American playwright has ever managed to explain the present by reimagining so inventively that distant past.” And where Shakespeare had Holinshed’s Chronicles, Miranda had Ron Chernow.

There are Shakespearean references throughout his play. In “Take a Break”, Hamilton writes to his sister-in-law, Angelica:

They think me Macbeth and ambition is my folly. I’m a polymath, a pain in the ass, a massive pain. Madison is Banquo, Jefferson’s Macduff And Birnam Wood is Congress on its way to Dunsinane.

Shapiro says that these “casual echoes of famous lines” are less important than the lessons that Miranda has taken about how to write history. “Another way of putting it is that anyone can quote Shakespeare; very few can illuminate so brilliantly a nation’s past and, through that, its present.”

[. . .]

I love Hamilton – I think the level of my nerdery about it so far has probably made that clear – but I find it fascinating that its overtly political agenda has been so little discussed, beyond noting the radicalism of casting black actors as white founders. Surely this is the “Obama play”, in the way that David Hare’s Stuff Happens became the “Bush play” or The Crucible became the theatre’s response to McCarthyism. It’s just unusual, in that its response to the contemporary mood is a positive one, rather than sceptical or scathing. (And it has an extra resonance now that a white nationalist is in the White House. One of the first acts of dissent against the Trump regime was when his vice-president, Mike Pence, attended the musical in November 2016 and received a polite post-curtain speech from the cast about tolerance. “The cast and producers of Hamilton, which I hear is highly overrated, should immediately apologise to Mike Pence for their terrible behaviour,” tweeted Trump, inevitably.)

Hamilton tries to make its audience feel OK about patriotism and the idealism of early America. It has, as the British theatre director Robert Icke put it to me this summer, “a kind of moral evangelism” that is hard for British audiences to swallow. In order to achieve this, we are allowed to see Hamilton’s personal moral shortcomings, but the uglier aspects of the early days of America still have to be tidied away.

There’s a brief mention, for instance, of Jefferson’s relationship with his slave Sally Hemings – whom he systematically raped over many years. But the casting of black and Hispanic actors makes it hard for the musical to deal directly with slavery, and so the issue only drips into the narrative rather than being confronted. There’s a moment after the battle of Yorktown when “black and white soldiers wonder alike if this really means freedom – not yet”. Another sour note is struck in one of the cabinet rap battles between Hamilton and Jefferson, in which the former notes acidly, “Your debts are paid cos you don’t pay for labour.”

In early workshops, there was a third cabinet battle over slavery – and the song is available on The Hamilton Mixtape, a series of reworkings and offcuts from the musical. When a proposal is brought before Washington to abolish slavery, Hamilton tells the cabinet:

This is the stain on our soul and democracy A land of the free? No, it’s not. It’s hypocrisy To subjugate, dehumanise a race, call ’em property And say that we are powerless to stop it. Can you not foresee?

Ultimately, though, the song was cut. “No one knew what to do about it, and [the founding fathers] all kicked it down the field,” Miranda explained to Billboard in July 2015. “And while, yeah, Hamilton was anti-slavery and never owned slaves, between choosing his financial plan and going all in on opposition to slavery, he chose his financial plan. So it was tough to justify keeping that rap battle in the show, because none of them did enough.”

***

In March 2016, Lin-Manuel Miranda returned to the White House. This time, one of the numbers he performed was a duet from the musical called “One Last Time”, sung with the original cast member Christopher Jackson playing George Washington. After Alexander Hamilton tells the first US president that two of his cabinet have resigned to run against him, Washington announces that he will step down to leave the field open.

It is the political heart of the play’s myth-making, comparable to Nelson Mandela leaving Robben Island. The decorated Virginian veteran was the only man who could unite the fractious revolutionaries after they defeated the British. Washington could have become dictator for life; instead, he chose to create a true democracy. “If I say goodbye, the nation learns to move on./It outlives me when I’m gone.”

For a nation just beginning to think that Trump could really, actually become its president, seeing the incumbent acknowledge that his time was nearly over was a powerful moment. For Obama watching it in the audience, it must have felt like his narrative had come full circle.

Towards the end of the song, Hamilton begins to read out the words of the farewell address he has written, and Washington joins in, singing over the top of them. It was a technique cribbed from Will.i.am’s 2008 Obama campaign video, in which musicians and actors sing and speak along to the candidate’s “Yes, we can” speech.

In his memoir, Dreams from My Father, Obama had written, “I learnt to slip back and forth between my black and white worlds, understanding that each possessed its own language and customs and structures of meaning, convinced that with a bit of translation on my part the two worlds would eventually cohere.”

This was the promise of his presidency: that there was not a black America or a white America, a liberal America or a conservative America, but, as he said in his breakthrough speech at the 2004 Democratic convention, “a United States of America”. The man who followed him clearly thinks no such thing, but nonetheless the nation must learn to move on.

In his farewell address in January 2017, Obama returned to the “Yes, we can” speech, using its words as the final statement on his presidency:

I am asking you to hold fast to that faith written into our founding documents; that idea whispered by slaves and abolitionists; that spirit sung by immigrants and homesteaders and those who marched for justice; that creed reaffirmed by those who planted flags from foreign battlefields to the surface of the moon; a creed at the core of every American whose story is not yet written: yes, we can. Yes, we did.

For the playwright JT Rogers, this is the true triumph of Hamilton – giving today’s multiracial America a founding myth in which minorities have as much right to be there as Wasps. It is political “in the sense of reclaiming the polis” – the body of citizens who make up a country. “The little village we live in outside the city, everyone in the middle school knows the score verbatim,” Rogers adds. “They recite it endlessly and at length, like Homer.”

the full long-read here!

[brookeap3]

Post-its and Paperclips 4th of July

A/N: Also a tad late, but I hope it's worth it. This is a feelsy, flirty, fluff fest all around. Done for Prompt #11 Regina mothering Roland (it’d be awesome if Robin witnessed at least a part of the scene) of @oqpromptparty Enjoy :)

{ ffn } { ao3 }

The day is blistering hot, sun baking down on them, heat radiating from their pores, sweat pooling down their backs. But it doesn’t matter much. It’s a holiday. 4th of July. A day of independence and patriotism. Sunshine and beer. Friends and laughter. And that’s exactly what she has been blessed with this year.

John is hosting a backyard barbeque. Apparently, it’s been a tradition among Robin and his friends since they were in college. Robin tells her about the summers they’d gone to his friend’s family’s cabin for the holiday while they’re cuddled in bed one morning discussing possible plans. Days spent on the lake and shooting arrows in the woods. Until John had lost his parents and they’d had to sell the cabin. It’d been a hard time for all of them, but they’d gotten each other through it.

Despite that, they’ve managed to keep the tradition alive all these years, and Regina is thrilled to be included in the fun. She’s never really had this in her life. Not before she met Robin, before he’d welcomed her into his life with open arms.

Independence Day had always been a very proper affair for her growing up, sophisticated soirees at the club, surrounded by a hundred of her mother’s “closest friends”. Cold and detached. There’d been no laughter or joy as there should be on this holiday, an unfortunate fact that had continued into Regina’s adult life even after she’d gotten out from under her mother’s thumb. But all of that is changing now.

This year she’d gotten to sleep in, to take advantage of the rare occasion where Gold allows them a day away from the office in the name of history and celebration. Though, she wouldn’t be surprised to find at least a dozen emails from him if she or Robin were to check their email. Regina’s not going to think about work at all today, though. She woke to sunlight streaming in through the curtains and a post-it on the bedside lamp.

Took Roland to John’s to help set up. See you there, love. Don’t forget your bikini ;)

It had made her chuckle as Regina snuggled down into her pillow for another minute and grinned stupidly at the tiny little square of paper. The way her heart had  fluttered over a silly note, all of the silly notes Robin leaves her, had made her feel like a foolish school girl, but she wouldn’t change it for the world. It’s simply become what they do and it’s cute and adorable, just like the man she loves.

She’d gotten dressed quickly, settling on a pair of crisp white shorts and a red v-neck shirt, had slipped on her navy and white striped bikini beneath, just as Robin’d requested, and had smirked as she tied the knot around her neck. She may or may not get into the pool, but she can certainly torment him with the knowledge she’s wearing very little beneath her clothes.

Then she’d been off, heading down the block to where John’s house resides, and Regina can hear the dull hum of people chatting and laughing already as she slips through the side gate and rounds the house to the backyard.

Rather impressed, Regina takes in the way that they’ve transformed the usually lackluster view. There are red, white, and blue streamers strung all around, wrapped around the trees, through the railing of the deck. Tiny American flags line the edge of the backyard along the fence and they’ve set up a long, patriotic clad table as a sort of buffet for food and drink along one edge. The pool is bright and clear, a few of John’s friends splashing around with beers in their hands as they laugh and float in the water, along with the smattering of kids joining them in play.

She spots the man himself, standing around the currently empty fire pit, chatting with a woman Regina assumes is the one she’s heard he’s been seeing, but hasn’t yet met and smirks as her gaze wanders around, looking for her significant other and his little boy.

It’s no more than a minute later that a tiny ball of wild energy and bouncing brown curls dashes out of the screen door with a whoop, clad in only his Lightning McQueen swim trunks and his inflatable swimmies.

“Roland! No running by the pool!” Robin’s voice calls out in warning, causing the little boy to skid to a stop and turn around sheepishly, muttering a, Sorry, Daddy! before turning on his heel and quickly striding to the edge of the pool where he jumps straight in, kicking at the water until he reaches a boy with chestnut colored hair who looks to be about a year or two older than Roland.

Their little fish, Regina thinks to herself, grinning as she watches him flap about. They don’t have too much to be worried about, with his inflatable arm bands ensuring he can splash around to his heart’s content, but Robin still stands there and watches him with a cautious parental eye.

His attention shifts to her when he catches her moving toward him and a deep, dimpled grin breaks out over his face, the one that never fails to make Regina’s heart trip over in her chest. “Hello, milady.” Robin greets her, reaching out a hand to grip her hip and leaning down for a quick smooch.

“Hi,” she responds in kind, hooking an arm around the back of his waist. “Quite the shindig you’ve got going here. Is it always like this?”

Robin’s eyes scan around the crowded yard, notes Will in the corner of the deck, fiddling with the music coming from the speaker on the railing, Ana rearranging the ice in the cooler that houses their soda and beers for the day, while Tuck and his neighbor toss a rice filled sack back and forth on the corn hole boards. There are neighbors and friends scattered all around, and the grin on Robin’s face becomes even wider as he tells her, “Yeah. We like to go all out.”

“I can see that,” Regina responds in amusement.

Robin squeezes her to his body, thrilled that he gets to share this with her this year. Another holiday they get to spend together, as a couple, building a life together. They’re racking them up and he’s never been happier. “Come on,” he says, jerking his head in the direction of their host, “I’ll introduce you to John’s new girlfriend. He’s positively smitten.”

Following Robin across the swishing grass, hands joined together, Regina can’t help but chuckle quietly as she gets a better look at Robin’s best friend and the gorgeous woman with her arm threaded through his. She’s tall and slender, has lovely dark chocolate skin and pretty features that remind her a bit of a wood nymph.

“Regina! You made it!” John calls happily, goofy grin on his face as he waves his free hand widely in a gesture of greeting. He’s got a beer in his hand and she pauses briefly, wonders how many he’s had already, but says nothing as she laughs and steps in to give him a kiss on the cheek.

She and John have become friends of a sort over the last few months, her affection for the hulk of a man exceeding beyond his involvement in Robin and Roland’s life. They banter with one another and never pass up an opportunity to tease and embarrass the other if the occasion arises, but it’s all in good fun. Frankly, she kind of considers him to be a bit of an older brother. Yet another thing she’s never had in her life that she’s now been blessed with.

“I’d like you to meet Tiana,” he tells her proudly, face split into a huge smile as he beams down at the woman beside him. Next to John, she looks positively petite and adorable. A total contrast in her pretty blue sundress with bright red posies splashed across the material to John’s own plain white t-shirt, frayed along the edges, and dark jeans, but they look cute together.

Smiling, Regina offers her a hand, “Nice to meet you, I’m Regina.”

“Robin’s girlfriend,” Tiana supplies automatically, taking Regina’s offered hand and shaking it. “I’ve heard a lot about you. It’s nice to finally meet you.”

“Likewise,” Regina replies. Her eyes dart back and forth between the two of them and she asks, “Tell me how you two met again?”

“She makes the best damn beignets in the entire world.” John’s answer is immediate and Regina has to fight a snicker, sharing an amused look with Robin from the corner of her eye.

Luckily, Tiana expands upon that to explain, “I own a bakery not far from here. Specializes in cajun desserts. My mama and I used to live in New Orleans when I was younger, before we moved to Boston for her job. I haven’t been able to get the taste for southern cooking out of my system.”

Her stomach grumbles at the mere mention of it, and Regina suddenly becomes very aware of the fact she’s yet to eat anything today. Something she’ll have to rectify soon but keeps her attention on Tiana as she continues her story.

“This one,” she tips her face up to grin at John, “Used to come in every other day and sample half the menu. Plus a beignet. Sometimes two or three.” There’s a wealth of affection in the tone, and Regina’s taken at once with the enraptured expression on both their faces. He’s looking at her as if she were sunshine itself and it’s not something she’s seen before. Honestly, it’s rather adorable. “It took him over two months to finally ask me out.” Tiana finishes, glancing back to Regina and Robin.

Her response is quick and teasing as she comments, “Only that long? Must be true love,” and grins playfully at John.

He harrumphs, narrowing his eyes at her. “But she said yes at that point,” John jokes, his belly shaking as he grins down at his girlfriend and captures her mouth in a kiss, making her giggle.

“Alright, alright, I can’t take much more of this sickeningly sweet exchange.” Robin interjects, shaking his head, obviously teasing.

Smirking, John responds, “Takes one to know one, mate. Now you know what you looked like trailing after Regina with stars in your eyes for months after Christmas.”

His gaze shifts from the pair in front of him to the love of his life, catching the slight blush that rises up the back of her neck. Robin’s hand reaches for her own again and uses it to tug her body flush against his, wrapping his arms around her waist. “Yes, well, I’m clearly the luckiest man on the planet.” Bending his neck forward, Robin pecks a kiss to Regina’s mouth, enjoying the fruity flavor of her chap stick against his lips. Then he’s turning his attention back to John and Tiana and informing them, “Now if you’ll excuse us, I think it’s time we find ourselves some of those burgers and crisps.”

Then he’s dragging her toward the tantalizing scents of corn on the cob and patties frying from the grill, carefully manned by Tuck now that they’ve finished their game, and Regina’s mouth waters in gratitude.  

He stops a few yards away at the end of the long row of tables piled with food. “May I offer you some refreshments, milady?” Robin asks her with a flourish, popping open the cooler and waving his hand at the various bottles and cans nestled in among the pounds of ice. They’ve got pop and water, some lemonade for the kiddos and adults not partaking in alcoholic indulgences, and enough beer to last them through the next several hours.

Leaning in closer so he can whisper into her ear, enjoying the slight shiver that racks her body, Robin adds, “I heard talk of firing up the blender for margaritas as well, if you’d prefer.” Robin has a pretty good idea of what she’ll choose and isn’t disappointed when he sees Regina’s eyes light up as she requests, A margarita. Definitely.

Chuckling, Robin tells her he’ll be back in a moment, wanders inside and spies Ana at the kitchen counter measuring and blending ingredients. It isn’t long before he’s back out in the baking sun, offering Regina a festive, blue plastic glass they’d picked up at the party store for today.

“My savior,” Regina jokes, winking at him in that squinty way of hers that makes him want to kiss her because it’s so damn adorable. Always.

So he does just that. Angles his mouth over hers after she takes a sip and hums her delight with the drink. He can taste the salt on her lips, licks a few crystals off with the tip of his tongue, mixing with the sweetness of the alcohol and Regina. Robin’s hand slides smoothly up the back of her spine to the nape of her neck and he tugs lightly at the bikini tie peeking out over the collar of her shirt. “I see you took my suggestion.”

Regina smirks, that teasing look in her eye that Robin’s become accustomed to. “It seemed wise.” Her voice drops into a low, arousing timbre as she adds, “If for no other reason than to tease you all day.”

Images of her clad in the bikini she’d worn a few weeks ago when they’d come over for a lazy Sunday afternoon with Roland filter through Robin’s mind. Her wet and glistening from the pool, drying off with the sun reflecting off every inch of her perfect body. He’s been unable to get the vision from his mind since and he grins naughtily at her. “Now that’s just unfair. Torturing a man that way,” Robin groans.

Regina takes another long sip of her drink, tipping her head back slightly to do so and distracting him while he watches the muscles in her throat quiver as the cool liquid slides down it. As she licks her lips and takes a step closer to him, resting her hand just above his heart and scratching her nails over his cotton shirt, Robin struggles to focus on anything other than the way he wants her. Now is not the time.

It proves to be a difficult task as she replies tauntingly, “But it’s so much fun to torture you.”  

Robin shakes his head, hooks one of his fingers through the belt loop of her shorts and tugs her body the few scant inches between them until their torsos are touching. His mouth presses against her ear, muttering, “Minx,” into it before he sinks his teeth into the lobe and trails the tip of his tongue around the shell.

It’s not entirely appropriate for a backyard barbeque, but, well, he’s a weak man where Regina Mills is concerned and his willpower is lacking. But he’s so happy. It’s actually really rather ridiculous. That one could feel this content in his life. He has his son and loyal friends, the most incredible woman at his side, and Robin can’t think of a better way to celebrate the birth of the country he’s come to call his own than exactly what they’re doing.

Regina giggles, tilting her head back with a pointed look and a muttered, “Behave,” but she doesn’t shift away from him. Instead, she takes a large gulp from her glass, drinking up the rest of her margarita, catching up a bit with everyone else that had started before her. “And this is excellent,” she adds, lifting her now nearly empty glass in a salute.

“I’ll tell Ana you said so,” Robin grins. “Will’s been teaching her to bartend.”

“Well he’s doing a damn fine job of it. She might just give Ella a run for her money, and that’s saying something.”

Robin chuckles, “How about I go get you another one of those margaritas, it might warm you up to the idea of a dip in the water,” he adds, wiggling his eyebrows at her suggestively and making her laugh, “while you fill yourself a plate of some of this delicious smelling food?”

The corner of her mouth tips up, “I think that’s an excellent idea.” And Regina giggles silently as she watches Robin’s retreating back head into the house once again, turning toward the table clad with stars and stripes cookware and decorations, and laden with food.

“Hey, Regina,” Mulan greets her as she offers her a paper plate. “Happy Fourth!”

“You, too!” Regina replies, smiling happily as she and the brunette chat for a few minutes, catching up since the last time she’d seen her. She and Aurora have been busy moving into a new apartment and she’d just changed jobs a few weeks ago.

Then it happens.

It’s the worst sound she’s ever heard. The miserable wail of the little boy that’s stolen her heart out from under her without any conscious effort. Regina turns instantly from where she’s piling watermelon and potato chips on her plate to scan the backyard for Roland. She sees him over by the cement border surrounding the pool, clutching his knee to his chest, face scrunched up in pain as tears rain down his cheeks.

Her heart catches in her throat, stopping dead before picking up once more in a rapid staccato as she abandons the patriotic themed paper plate and dashes quickly across the yard to his side. “Roland, baby, what happened?” she questions immediately, crouching down beside him, drawing him into her lap as she sits on the burning concrete.

“I— I—waaas chasing— Michael and— I—  tri— tripped,” he just barely hiccups out, voice wobbly and thick as he buries his face into the crook of her neck. He’s all wet from the pool, dampening Regina’s shorts and shirt as she cradles him to her, Roland still holding his knee tightly to his chest, whimpering, and it breaks her heart.

“Oh, baby, it’s okay. It’s going to be alright. Why don’t you let me take a look?” When Roland only shakes his head and snuggles in closer to her side, Regina lets out a imperceptible sigh. Her hand rubs soothing passes up and down his back as she urges once more, “Come on, Roland. I promise I’ll be very gentle.” Her tone is soft and soothing, motherly.

Reluctantly, he relents, uncovers his wound to allow Regina to give it a once over. Once she has a clear view of the injury, the vice like grip around her heart loosens ever so slightly. It’s just a scratch. Not even that deep from what she can tell, but it’s bleeding pretty heavily and she’s certain it smarts for such a little boy. Tiny rivulets of blood slide down from his knee and over his shin, mixing with the chlorine droplets clinging to his skin.

Taking a deep breath, Regina smiles down at him lovingly, brushes his wet curls back from his face and assures him, “See, it’s not so bad. Just a little cut.”

“It— it hurts,” Roland whines and Regina’s heart clenches in her throat at his wobbly tone.

“I know it does, baby,” she tells him, her fingers resting gingerly just beside the wound on his knee. “How about we go and get this cleaned up, and I’ll kiss it better. Then we can get you a popsicle. Does that sound good?” Regina asks him, willing to do anything to ease his hurts.

Roland bites his lower lip, fat tears resting on his eyelashes, and looks just like Robin as he does so, but he answers softly, “Okay, R’gina.” She lets out a breath of relief and moves to stand with him still in her arms, done with a level of skill far too natural for someone that’s not technically his mother, and turns toward the house.

That’s when she spots Robin just coming out of the backdoor, stilled where he stands, her fresh margarita glass in hand, watching them with a mixture of concern and adoration in his eyes. But she doesn’t stop long enough to consider it beyond a passing thought, simply asks him as they meet, “Will you grab the first aid kit?”

He nods, cupping the back of Roland’s head for a moment and asking, “Did we take a tumble, my boy?” Roland nods from where he has his head tucked against her neck, body curled into hers. “Well, it’s lucky we have Regina here to take care of you, isn’t it?” He mumbles a tiny, mmhmm, as an answer and a small smile tips up the corners of her mouth.

Once they’re inside, Regina settles Roland onto the toilet seat in the bathroom, kneeling down so she’s at eye level with him and can tap an index finger beneath his chin. “Let’s get you all patched up, sir.” It makes Roland giggle a little and Regina smiles as she tears off a few squares of toilet paper and dabs lightly over his broken skin, cleaning away the blood that’s already started to clot and slow. “You know you’re not supposed to be running around the pool, Roland. It’s wet and slick and that’s how we fall and get hurt.” Regina scolds him softly.

Pouting, Roland sniffles and answers, “I know. I’m sorry, R’gina. Michael and I were playing tag and I wanted to catch him.”

She sighs, “That’s fine, but you could have gotten really hurt, Roland, and I don’t want that. So no more running by the pool, is that clear?”

Roland nods solemnly, his gradually drying curls bouncing against his face just as Robin clears his throat from the doorway, holding out the white first aid kit. Regina reaches for it, muttering a quiet thanks as he looks down on them. There’s something in his expression, the way he’s looking at the two of them still that makes her blood pound quicker through her veins. But she ignores it for a moment, focused on Roland as she takes an alcohol wipe and a waterproof band aid from the kit and gets to work.

When his cut is all clean and she’s blown softly on the wound to soothe the stinging and fresh bout of tears that well in Roland’s eyes from the antiseptic, Regina smears a bit of neosporin over it and covers it with the band aid, leaning down and pressing a light kiss to his knee while grinning up at him. “There. All better.”

Roland smiles, his tiny dimples little pin points in his cheeks, and exclaims, “Thanks, R’gina,” bouncing up and tossing his arms around her neck for a hug. All the pain and tears forgotten with the resiliency of a child as he asks if he can have his popsicle now.

“Why don’t you go on back outside and see if Ana will get you one?” Regina chuckles, standing and ignoring the creaky ache of her own joints after being crouched for so long. He starts to dart out of the bathroom and Regina’s voice warns sharply, “Walk, Roland.”

Then it’s just her and Robin. No longer distracted by Roland’s injury, she can fully focus her attention on him and Regina blushes slightly at the worshipful glint in his eyes. He reaches out a hand for hers, Regina placing her own in his palm, and pulls her flush against his body in a practiced move, leaning down to rest his forehead against hers. “You’re wonderful with him.” Robin exhales, his warm breath ghosting over her lips, making Regina shiver.

She jerks her shoulder in a little shrug, replying, “He makes it easy.”

Drawing back enough so that he can meet her eyes, Robin shakes his head. “No, you’re just so natural with him. He’s never really had a motherly figure in his life and was so young when Marian passed…” Robin pauses, as if gathering his thoughts before he continues. “I’m just so grateful he has you now.”

It nearly makes Regina cry, her eyes watering precariously as she tries to control the fierce tide of emotions that suddenly swamp her. She’d never really thought of herself as mother material before, not until Roland had snuck into her world and captured her heart with post-its and paperclips and insistent holiday traditions. They’ve come a long way in the last six months, have become closer than she ever thought possible and there’s no denying what she feels.

“I love him so much,” she chokes out wetly, heart squeezing inside her chest.

Robin’s fingers thread through her hair, cupping her cheek as he tells her, “He loves you. I love you,” before lowering his mouth to hers in a sweet, gentle kiss. It’s nothing passionate, just a soft press of his lips to hers. Firm and slow. But it’s everything.

“I love you, too,” Regina replies, voice thick with emotion when they pull away.

Nuzzling his nose against hers for another minute, Robin strokes his hands down her arms before saying, “We should probably get back to the party.” His voice drops, taking on that tone that always has her body quivering in anticipation. “Even if I would rather sneak off with you to one of the guest rooms upstairs.”

He wiggles his eyebrows at her suggestively and Regina laughs. “Tempting as that is, I think it might be best we go supervise your son.”

Robin chuckles in response, but bows his head in concession, gesturing for her to lead the way even as the word ours echos through his mind.

. . .

The dusky darkness of twilight settles around them. It's getting closer and closer to ten o’clock, when the city fireworks are scheduled to start going off. Luckily, John’s house is positioned perfectly to witness the show without them having to deal with the hassle of shuffling an entire party of people out of the house to the park, finding parking, and navigating their way through the crowd. This is much better and decidedly more intimate.

Regina’s curled up on Robin’s lap in one of the chairs around the fire pit, the flames crackling and giving off just enough of a heat to kiss along her skin in the chilly summer evening. Her head rests on his shoulder, fingers stroking absently up and down his forearm that rests over her thighs as his hand mirrors her movements up and down her spine.

It’s been a lovely day, perfect.

As much as Regina wishes it wasn’t coming to an end, she’s sleepy. Is ready to tuck Roland in for the night and then curl up in Robin’s bed with him and drift off to dreamland. They’re watching him play with a few of the other kids, his new best friend, Michael, among them, tossing firecrackers against the cement and shrieking when they pop and echo in the night. John and Tiana are lighting sparklers and letting the kids play with them until they fizzle out.

That hand that had been rubbing up and down her back, tangles in the edges of her hair as Robin presses a kiss to the crown of her head and asks quietly, “You gonna make it to the fireworks, love?”

He can feel the weight of her limbs atop his, relaxed and content. Just as he is. It’s been an exhausting day, between the heat and overstimulation, not to mention Roland’s little mishap earlier, but Robin isn’t quite ready for it to be over so soon.

Just a little while longer to hold onto the magic of the holiday. That’s all he wants.

Regina’s sleepy response, a mumbled, mmhmm, makes him grin, placing another light kiss to her brow and tightening his arms around her. For the next ten minutes they stay just as they are, eyes closed and breathing in time with one another as they listen to the sounds of the party winding down around them.

The fireworks will start any minute now, after which, he and Regina will gather Roland up, dragging him away from his new friends, and will spend the following half hour getting him ready for bed. Robin supervising the brushing of his teeth as Regina pulls out his pajamas, the both of them listening intently as he repeats every second of his day, even though they’d been there for all of it. Gradually getting him to settle down so he can sleep.

Despite her exhaustion, Robin knows Regina will climb into Roland’s tiny toddler bed with him and weave a tale of magic and mischief until his eyelids droop and his breathing evens out. Just as she’s done with him nearly every night for the past two months. Hardly ever misses it.

Except on the now rare occasion she ends up sleeping at her own house rather than theirs, that is.

The thought makes Robin frown slightly. Granted, over the last several months they’ve been spending less and less nights apart. More out of habit than conscious thought, really.

But now that he's thinking about it, half of his closet holds her clothes, their shirts mingled together and two of his dresser drawers serve as a home to her things. Her essentials are scattered over his bathroom. The cream she slathers on her face every night and tubes and brushes of this and that for her to get ready in the morning. The fancy water she prefers stocked next to Roland’s juice boxes in the fridge. She’s practically living there.

Robin’s eyes open, glancing down at Regina where her head is tucked against the curve of his neck and shoulder, breathing evenly. Snippets of their day flutter through his memory, the sense of absolute rightness he'd felt as he'd watched Regina kiss away Roland's hurts, the ease with which she'd mingled with his friends, knowing they'd end up just as they are now. How his heart had swelled with love as he'd kissed her brow and left her sleeping soundly in his bed this morning.

It hits him suddenly, a culmination of all the little moments that have become second nature in the last six months, that that's exactly what he wants for their future. Waking up together, their possessions finding homes beside one another, Roland knowing the woman he worships will be there to pick him up whenever he falls.

Robin’s head over heels in love with her, and there's absolutely no reason that they shouldn't go for it. Shouldn't make that leap.

“Regina,” he murmurs, nudging her slightly and brushing a few errant strands of hair from her face as she stirs and looks up at him from beneath her lashes.

“Hmmm?”

He grins at the sleepy tone, fingertips dancing along her bicep. “I want to ask you something, love.”

That makes her sit up a little bit straighter in his lap, meeting his gaze as she nods, curious expression on her face, a little scrunch to her nose and that crinkle between her brows he finds adorable. “What is it?” Her gaze flickers around her, blinking the sleep from her eyes from the little catnap she'd been taking against him.

Inhaling sharply, Robin asks, “Would you consider moving in with me? And Roland. Full time. No more occasional nights apart.” He smiles at her, fingers playing with the tips of her hair just brushing the tops of her shoulders. “I want us to start a life together, officially.”

He’s babbling, his voice a bit sheepish, nerves unexpectedly bouncing around in his stomach. It’s silly. It’s not like he’s proposing marriage, not yet anyway (though the thought has crossed his mind a time or two). Besides, she’s practically living with them already, his question is really just a formality. Surely, she'll agree. Still, his stomach gurgles and swoops in his gut as he waits for her answer.

For a moment, she looks stunned, taken aback, and Robin worries that perhaps he's overstepped some boundary. That she might not be quite as ready to fully and completely share her life and space with he and his son as he thought.

Then the most stunning smile he's ever seen grace her features erupts and she's laughing, winding her arms around his neck and looking at him like he's said the most foolish thing in the world, but she answers immediately. “Yes,” shaking her head at him, Regina leans in and kisses him hard, fusing their lips together for a solid minute before pulling away. “Yes, I would love to move in with you and Roland. Though you might regret that when you see the entirety of my shoe collection,” she jokes.

“Never,” Robin replies without hesitation, heart swelling as he laughs and swoops in to take her mouth with his again.

The loud and earth shattering boom of the first fireworks explode in the night sky above them at precisely that moment. Bursts of colors and sparks flying and dissolving into nothing but smoke wafting through the atmosphere.

Regina and Robin chuckle against each other’s mouths, tipping their foreheads against one another as Roland’s shout of excitement sounds from across the yard, and he runs over to where they’re seated. He climbs into Regina’s lap immediately, no regard for how she’s perched on Robin’s at all, and she and Robin grin at each other.

Wrapping his arms around the both of them, Robin sighs contentedly as the three of them watch the fireworks light up the starlit sky together.

Their own cozy little family that grows stronger and closer every day.

[lunapaper]

Album Review: ‘ Norman Fucking Rockwell!’ - Lana Del Rey

There couldn’t be a better choice of inspiration for Lana Del Rey’s latest album than Norman fucking Rockwell.

Like the 20th Century era author and illustrator, the singer has always viewed the American dream with a rose-coloured lens, a naïve sentimentality that’s almost cloying at times with its hand-on-heart patriotism, its old-fashioned romance and beatific smiles.

Yet beneath those smiles, there’s always something cold, unsettling… something off.

Unlike Rockwell, there’s always been a crack in Del Rey’s own rose-coloured lens, one she’s happy to acknowledge, sometimes outright. Beneath the American Dream, there’s always lurked something dark and unseemly, now more noticeable than ever.

Of course, Del Rey’s latest American elegy retains all her usual leitmotifs: the colour blue, raging machismo, ride-or-die love, tragic beauty, retro fetishism, and pop culture references aplenty. But this time, she leaves behind the starry-eyed bohemia of 2017’s Lust For Life to retreat to the murky shores of California as ‘a modern woman with a weak constitution.’ 

The title track delivers quite a punch as she states: ‘You fucked me so good that I almost said "I love you,’ dedicated to a ‘goddamn manchild’ and ‘self-loathing poet, resident Laurel Canyon know-it-all’ – obvious Del Rey kryptonite - as her world is bathed in blue and a fluttering orchestral swoon.

She also reinvents herself as the ‘Venice Bitch’ with an almost 10-minute opus, emerging from the smoky haze with yet another self-defeating prophecy: ‘Fear fun, fear love/Fresh out of fucks forever.’ Evoking Leonard Cohen, The Shondells, Robert Frost, Hallmark and Rockwell again, Del Rey’s summer love is fleeting, desperately trying to cling on to whatever domestic bliss she can. But she concedes early: ‘Nothing gold can stay,’ echoed by an untamed psychedelic outro.

The 50s prom night waltz of ‘How To Disappear’ has Del Rey recall with a certain jadedness ‘John met me down on the boulevard/Cried on his shoulder 'cause life is hard/The waves came in over my head/What you been up to, my baby?,’ a long-lost memory wrapped up in picket-fence nostalgia, longing for working class masculinity to prick that upper-middle class bubble, while ‘Fuck It I Love You’ watches the world burn in its currently volatile state, retreating even deeper into nostalgia with a twilit acoustic glow.

‘Doin’ Time’ proves an inspired choice of cover as the singer gives the 1996 Sublime hit a dusky twist with love ‘on lockdown like a penitentiary.’ Highlight ‘Cinnamon Girl’ is simply a perfect mix of all Del Rey eras thus far: the sultry hip hop bravado of Born To Die, the hazy psychedelia of Lust For Life, the lush string arrangements of 2015’s Honeymoon, not to mention how the singer’s delicate, heartbreaking falsetto fills the atmosphere.

‘The Greatest,’ however, is the closest Del Rey comes to truly yearning for the American Dream in all its carefree nature and innocence (‘I miss New York and I miss the music/Me and my friends‚ we miss rock 'n' roll/I want shit to feel just like it used to/When‚ baby, I was doing nothin' the most of all’), a weathered torch song that name-checks David Bowie’s ‘Life On Mars,’ the late Dennis Wilson of The Beach Boys and the present-day downfall of Kanye West.

‘hope is a dangerous thing for a woman like me to have – but I have it,’ meanwhile, has the singer channel her inner Sylvia Plath 24/7 ‘tearing around in my fucking nightgown,’ letting her jumbled thoughts loose atop a lone, stark piano melody, rejecting the mould of a perfect debutante ‘Smiling for miles in pink dresses and high heels on white yachts’ (Though arguably, she cultivated that image all herself early on in her career…)

The true crux of the record, however, lies with ‘Mariners Apartment Complex,’ which makes sly reference to her now infamous 2014 Guardian interview (‘You took my sadness out of context/At the Mariners Apartment Complex/I ain't no candle in the wind’). Delivering a blunt assessment of her sad aesthetic, her feminist stance and a reversal of relationship roles, it’s Del Rey at her most defiant  - ‘They mistook my kindness for weakness/I fucked up, I know that, but Jesus/Can't a girl just do the best she can?’ – and actually feels quite refreshing to see her break character, to actually give her writing some bite. 

Though not all tracks on Norman Fucking Rockwell! prove quite as memorable.

‘Love Song,’ though pleasant, is a pretty weak retread of Del Rey’s breakout hit ‘Video Games,’ and its schmaltzy tone just doesn’t fit with the record’s overall darkness. This all gets recycled once more on the dour ‘California,’ which is too obvious just by the title alone. ‘The Next Best American Record,’ on the other hand, feels like a parody of what detractors think goes into a Lana Del Rey track, right down to the laughable ‘cool as heck’ line.

Much like the American landscape, some things change but others stay the same. Sure, Del Rey rolls through the same old leitmotifs, a fog of nihilism always hovering over her, but it’s an art she’s beautifully perfected. With tongue firmly in cheek, Norman Fucking Rockwell! views America as a state of mind, a caricature, a dying love affair, an America the singer is apparently still looking for…

After the subtle optimism of Lust For Life, Norman Fucking Rockwell! can feel like a bit of a step down, a balmy, languorous sprawl that Del Rey both revels and deeply wallows in, though co-producer Jack Antonoff does keep true to her hazy, drugged-out noir pop.

So it’s rather unfortunate Del Rey was so defensive when it came to Ann Powers’ incredible dissection of Norman Fucking Rockwell! on NPR (Via Twitter: ‘Here’s a little sidenote on your piece – I don’t even relate to one observation you made about the music. There’s nothing uncooked about me. To write about me is nothing like it is to be with me. Never had a persona. Never needed one. Never will’). No matter how badly she feels she’s been treated, it’s still rather petty and childish of the singer to clap back at someone else’s interpretation of your work. I mean, how many times do I need to say it already:  That’s what you get when you release your work into the public domain. Criticism comes with the territory, and if you don’t like it then this is not the business for you.

And some nerve to deny you never had a persona, Lana. We know you have one, your fans know you’ve always had one, just fucking own it already. Don’t make excuses that you were ‘forced’ into it…

Even worse was the gross reaction from Del Rey stans, who told Powers to ‘retire please,’ referred to her a ‘rat,’ told her ‘delete it fat,’ ‘Just retire you old hag,’ ‘You need to buy some conditioner,’ ‘you had to be white’ (LANA IS WHITE TOO YOU FOOL) as well as called her a ‘fat whore.’ Remember, these are the same fans that claim the singer’s detractors are nothing but misogynists. ‘Cos apparently beggars can dish it out when it comes to other people’s looks and age. That’ll definitely get Powers to changer her mind, for sure. 

As good as might be to just ‘Catch a wave and take in the sweetness’ while listening to Norman Fucking Rockwell may be, it’s still prone to Del Rey’s usual flaws. It’s over-indulgent and sags in places, while some of the lyrics can be downright banal. I can’t totally buy into the hype. But at least she’s giving the stans exactly what they want…

- Bianca B.

[everythingislegalinsantafe]

Planned & Unplanned (H.Mull x Reader)

a/n: i decided to steer away from a happy ending on this one #oopsies

request: I would KILL for an imagine with Hercules x fem!disguised!soldier. I know that there were a few women who passed off as men during the war so they could fight, thought it might be an interesting idea!

word count: 1,886 words

Ever since you were younger, you wanted to do something more than just marry a rich man and live the rest of your life as a house wife.

Your parents knew this but didn't know it would lead you into sneaking into the war effort disguised as a man.

"God this was such a bad idea." You say as you tried to make your binded chest less uncomfortable.

You've been fighting the war for the past 8 months and you couldn't feel more alive. You were a spy with Hercules Mulligan to steal plans from the British and return them back to your commanding officers.

After spying with Hercules for the past couple months, you couldn't help but develop feelings for the man. He always cared for you and made sure you were comfortable which sometimes causes problems with you as you had to hide your blush in these occasions. Although he was your closest friend, you couldn't allow anyone to know your true identity.

Every mission you went on Hercules was a successful one since the two of you were so close and worked together well. However, a mission went wrong when General Washington commanded you two to bring an extra solider along.

"I don't know, Herc. I think Benedict will just mess up the mission." You say to your partner in crime as you packed up your supplies.

Hercules sighed, "He's fine, (L/N). We're the best spies of the revolutionaries and Washington letting him come with us shows he'll be fine."

"I know, but I get a bad feeling about him." You shook your head.

Hercules sighed again but just replied to hurry up and the three of you were leaving at dawn.

The mission was simple enough. Go into British territory, find out there plans for the next battle, and get out.

This was an easy mission and you and Hercules have been through harder missions, so it didn't worry you too much about bringing Benedict.

~

After many hours walking, you finally reached the outskirts of the British camp, so the three of you changed into red coats in switch of your normal blue ones. Although the plan was meant for you to be kept out of sight, the disguises were just for precaution if something went wrong.

The three of you snuck into the camp, inching closer and closer to the commanding officer's tent which sat right in the middle. You were silent, afraid if you made a sound it would wake up the entire English army.

Successfully, without any intrusion, you made it to the tent.

"Alright (L/N)," Hercules whispered. "You and Benedict go in and grab the plans. I'll stay here and keep watch."

You nodded and the two of you quietly snuck in the tent. You checked your surroundings to see the snoring British commander and on his side were the plans you needed. You stealthily walked around the sleeping commander and was about to grab the plans from him when the man's head suddenly snapped up.

You almost screamed but Benedict grabbed hold of your waist tightly and wrapped a hand around your mouth. You started thrashing your body to get out of his grasp but you efforts were futile.

"Well well well, guess we finally caught one of the infamous spies from the patriots," The man spoke to you as he stalked around the room. "And it's all thanks to Benedict for leading you right to us."

Your eyes widened, you knew that Benedict was not who he said he was. You tried to break from his hold but it was no use. He led you outside of the tent and into the forest nearby to tie you tightly to a tree. You tried to break out of the roped but they didn't budge.

The British officer was starting at you with such lifeless, cold eyes that you were shaking in Benedict's hold. The man walked toward you and grabbed your face to take a look at you. He stared for a long time before finally walked away with a "tsk", almost dissatisfied at your appearance.

"Y'know," He said as he stalked around you before he finally grabbed something out of his coat. "There's a rumor about you, Mr. (L/N)."

You saw that he took out a gun and examined it as if it was nothing more than a pen. You tried to back away, but you were completely immobile.

"Or should I say, Miss (L/N)." The man said with a smirk on his face.

Your heart dropped at this. How did he know? You made sure to be careful of your identity and you told no one about it, even your closest friends you fought side by side with.

It didn't matter how he found out as Benedict ripped your cap off letting your hair fall which furthered proved your femininity.

"Hm," The man said after he gave you a good look. "It's such a shame we have to kill you. You're such a pretty little face" And he aimed the gun at you.

You panicked and tried to think of ways to stall him. Maybe Hercules heard what happened and will try to save you. It was far fetched, but you had to do something.

"Yo-you don't want to know if I have any information?" You asked.

Benedict rolled his eyes, "We know you'd rather die than give away information. So we're just going to cut to the chase and kill you now. We can't let anymore secrets fall into American hands."

"Enough talking," the officer spoke harshly as he loaded and pointed the gun to you. "Let's just get this over with."

You took a shaky breath and stood tall, determined to die with dignity. You heart started pounding and you felt your palms sweat. You were going to close your eyes but decided against it as you wanted the man to see your eyes before he shot you.

He was about to the pull the trigger when Hercules bursted through the trees with a gun in his hand.

"Shoot her and I shoot you." He growled and cocked the gun.

The officer looked unamused as he was held to gunpoint. He lowered his gun and cocked an eyebrow, "Go ahead then, shoot. You don't have the plans for the next battle, so do it."

Hercules hesitated, but as soon as he was off guard the man lifted the gun to shoot and you closed your eyes.

You heard gunshots pierce through the air and you flinched. Benedict and the British officer fell to the ground lifelessly. You sighed as you realized you were safe. Your heart was still pounding and you could still feel the adrenaline rushing through your veins.

"(L/N)?" Herc asked terrified as he untied your binds. "Are you alright? Or should I call you something else? What's your first name?"

You smiled at Herc's questions, "My real name is (Y/N) and yes, I'm f-"

You doubled over in pain and fell into Hercules's arms. You groaned and reached down to your stomach and felt a warm liquid oozing from it. You were shot, you were bleeding out, you were dying.

"Oh shit, (Y/N). C'mon let's get you back to camp and y-you'll be fine."

He was trying to comfort you from not panicking but it sounded more like he was doing it to himself. He laid you on the ground and ripped off your red coat as he searched for your wound. He got to the last layer of your clothing and he looked up to you for permission. You rolled your eyes and nodded. This wasn't a time for modesty since you were bleeding out.

Hercules ripped off a piece of his shirt to clean your wound, but the white cotton immediately turned into a crimson. He tried to not stare at your binded chest while he worked on disinfecting your wound but it was unsuccessful.

"Wow Herc, I'm dying here and you can't help but stare at my chest. What a gentleman." You said sarcastically.

You both laughed, but you started coughing up blood which led Hercules to panic more. He started lifting you up and muttering that you needed to get back to camp and how the nurses will fix you up. You knew, however, that from the amount of blood leaving your side indicates that there is nothing either of you can do about it. You vision started to go a bit fuzzy and your body started to shake.

"Herc," You muttered to him. "Herc, I'm not gonna make it."

He shook his head and you saw their were tears in his eyes, "You have to, (Y/N). You just have to."

You smiled weakly at him, "Herc can you lay me down?"

He gently put you on the ground like earlier and took off his coat for a makeshift pillow for you.

"I know I don't have much time," You say softly. "But I have some things to tell you."

Hercules sat next you and grabbed your hand, rubbing his thumb over yours to comfort you.

"I-I'm sorry for not telling you that I'm a girl, but I had to protect myself. I wanted to tell you so so badly." You coughed.

Hercules shushed you, "I understand, (Y/N). I'm not mad..."

You smiled weakly at him, "There's one more thing I need to tell you before I die."

"You're not going to die!" He cried. "You're gonna be fine, sweetheart, I swear."

You couldn't tell if your breathing picked up because of the pain in your side or the fact he called you 'sweetheart'. With this you decided to just tell him the truth.

"Hercules, I love you."

With Herc's gasp you closed your eyes since you didn't want to see his reaction. You know he doesn't like you and only thinks of you like a brother or in this case a sister. Your battered self couldn't handle another blow.

It was silent for a long time before you felt him cup your cheeks and press his lips to yours. This time you were the one that gasped and weakly wrapped your arms around his neck as best you could to deepen the kiss. You pulled back after a while since you felt yourself drifting off.

"Where'd they go? I can't see a trail anymore." Hercules head snapped up as he heard British soldiers make their way through the forest in search of the two of you.

"Herc, you have to leave me behind."

"No! I love you too and I will not leave you alone here to die!" He tried to quietly whispered.

As Hercules was looking around in search of an escape, you reached into your pocket to grab the plans you snatched from the commander's office and put it into Hercules's hand. You squeezed and he looked down at you with tears in his eyes when he realized he had no choice but to go on without you.

"Go, Herc. I'll be fine. Give the plans to Washington. Win the war." You weakly demanded.

He kissed you once last time and stood up when he heard the soldiers coming closer. He slowly backed away, staring at you as he tried to memorize your face before he finally took a deep breath and turned around. You smiled and your last sight before you finally closed your eyes was Hercules running safely off into the forest.

[inb4vaughn]

A Super Golf Course Showdown

As a certain Big Game dominates the American sporting world when the New England Patriots and Los Angeles Rams take the field at glitzy Mercedez-Benz Stadium in Atlanta, it seems the perfect time to shift their epic gridiron battle onto another green expanse — the golf course. Not team against team, but region vs. region. Which wins the golf course showdown?

For fun, let’s line up two equally strong “front fours” of courses from both New England and Southern California, and let you decide.

WHERE PATRIOTS FANS PLAY

Not (too) long after the game’s final whistle echoes into history, spring and summer come into view on the Patriots’ home turf, and that means golf — lots and lots of pent-up golf. Tom Brady himself is an avid player; he’s been known to head for Pebble Beach just after Super Bowl week to tee it up with Tour pros and fellow celebs in the AT&T National Pro-Am, but come summer you just might find him where so many Northeasterners tread: Cape Cod. Here’s a “front four” of favorites on the cape itself, and in the historic gateway city of Plymouth.

Ocean Edge

Cape Cod is such a hotbed of great summer golf that it’s tough to pick a true must-play out of the bunch, but Ocean Edge gets the nod. Located almost halfway out on the cape, not far from the north shore, it’s a semi-private delight from the well-traveled mind of Jack Nicklaus, with conditioning that mirrors one of his favorite haunts, namely Augusta National. Its final stretch is unforgettable. Stay right there and savor it all.

Cranberry Valley

Few public courses out on Cape Cod can match Cranberry Valley. It features a superb practice facility, a stimulating design, pristine conditions and a layout that winds through scenic cranberry bogs. The three finishing holes stand up with any on the Cape. Here’s the finish you’ll face when you step to the 16th tee: A monster par 4 of 445 yards that plays uphill, usually into the wind; a 205-yard par 3 that is all carry to an elevated green; and a horseshoe-shaped, double dogleg par 5 that requires enough power to clear the corner and enough finesse to place your second shot onto a narrow landing area. No two holes are alike at Cranberry. There are stimulating short 4-pars (the 10th is a bear) and demanding 3-pars. You’ll find plenty of sand and parking-lot size greens. Accuracy off the tee is critical.

Highland Links

You could be in Scotland in the 18th century, facing howling winds, playing on un-groomed, rock-hard fairways and hitting to postage-stamp greens. Built in 1892, Highland Links is Cape Cod’s oldest course. Not much has changed in 120 years. Don’t come to this nine-hole course seeking luxury. You won’t find a fancy clubhouse or oak-lined grille room. No driving range, either. Just a modest snack bar-pro shop to send you to the first tee. From there you’ll embark on a journey once made by Francis Ouimet. It includes heather, fescue, wildflowers, scrubby pine, deep bunkers and stunning views from windswept bluffs overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. Alistair Cooke once called Highland Links the closest you will come in America to a genuine Scottish links. The ninth hole, at 136 yards to a severely sloped two-tier green, has been named in national magazines as one of the world’s greatest 3-pars.

Pinehills

The stated goal at Pinehills, located just south of Plymouth, is to provide a private club feel at a public course. From the drive down the winding entrance road that stops in front of an elegant clubhouse — where employees retrieve your clubs and place them onto a cart that will be waiting for you at the practice range — you’re greeted like a well-heeled member. The Jones Course, designed by Rees Jones, opened in 2000, followed by a Jack Nicklaus Design layout one year later. Set among woodlands, kettle ponds and cranberry bogs, both courses feature steep elevation changes and dramatic scenery. Most holes are framed by tall pines and are isolated, creating a serene atmosphere that makes it seem like no one else is on the grounds. The Jones course has a classic design, rolling gently through the woods in a series of doglegs, valleys and swales. Most greens are clearly visible from the tee. The Nicklaus course demands approach shots over ravines to elevated greens. Many of the putting surfaces are bordered by low-cut collection areas that provide the option of pitching or putting to save par.

WHERE RAMS FANS PLAY

Southern California encompasses such a vast area of geographical variety — coastline, mountains, valleys, desert — that it’s virtually impossible to put its golf personality into one descriptive box. While many casual golf fans know SoCal mostly for its famed private layouts such as Riviera, Los Angeles Country Club and Bel-Air, the region excels in incredible resort golf, with some standout public and munis also in the sunny mix. Just make sure you’ve got a full tank of gas because you’ll do some serious driving (this is La-La Land, after all). While it’s all but futile to narrow the area’s bounty to a formidable foursome of must-plays, we’ll give it a shot.

Griffith Park

This city-owned complex just off Interstate 5, a few miles from the downtown L.A. core, is the ultimate SoCal muni experience, going back 100 years. Both the Harding and Wilson courses have their adherents, with sometimes tight eucalyptus-lined fairways, smallish greens and enough tee-to-green challenge to merit many a city championship — and, in the Wilson course’s case, the PGA Tour’s Los Angeles Open back in the day. As with Bethpage Black on Long Island you’ve got to plan ahead to secure a tee time, but locals know it’s worth the effort.

PGA West

A pilgrimage to the Palm Springs-Palm Desert-La Quinta area, some 100 miles east of downtown L.A., is a must for golfers, and PGA West is the top of most gotta-do-it-lists. There are six courses at PGA West — four public, two private — but everyone wants to play Pete Dye’s Stadium Resort Course above them all, for good reason. Like its Florida counterpart at TPC Sawgrass, it’s got all the sneaky Pete quirks and character traits, right down to the island green at, you guessed it, No. 17. The deep greenside bunker on No. 16 is another conversation piece. Put your peg down here on a sweet February afternoon and savor desert golf at its best.

Pelican Hill

Among the many SoCal courses boasting Pacific Ocean views, the two Tom Fazio beauties at Pelican Hill, a high-end resort in Newport Beach might offer the most inspiring of all. The South Course is a big tighter off the tee than the North, and comes right up to the Orange County beach (crossing bustling Pacific Coast Highway as it does so), but the North, being situated higher on the bluff, affords sweeping vistas of the sea, and Catalina Island some 30 miles distant, from almost every hole. There are ravines to cross, sidehill lies to negotiate and big, rangy greens to conquer — resort-style fun spiked with ample challenge. And a round at either course ain’t cheap, but if you’re gonna splurge, this is the place to do it.

Oak Quarry

Let’s blow an hour or so northeast, into the heart of Riverside County, for a round at one of the Southland’s most unique layouts. Literally built through and around the former Jensen Quarry and voted 2013 National Golf Couse of the Year by the National Golf Course Owners Association, Oak Quarry swoops, soars, dives, and rumbles over sometimes sere, rocky terrain, with few trees and only one main water feature — a deep lake at the center of the quarry that captures many a hooked tee shot on the stunning par-3 14th hole. San Gabriel Mountain views abound, and even though the place is tucked between two mega-busy freeways, it’s like another world. Bring your A game, and if you score well you’ll feel like you’ve won your own personal Super Bowl.

The post A Super Golf Course Showdown appeared first on Golf Tips Magazine.

from Golf Tips Magazine http://bit.ly/2MID3zc

[consciousowl]

Would You Die For Me?

I’m not your lover

I’m not your friend

I am something that you’ll never comprehend

No need to worry

No need to cry

I’m your messiah and you’re the reason why

‘Cause you, I would die for you, yea

Darling if you want me to

Prince, “I Would Die 4 U”

Have you ever fallen so totally in love with someone that to be without her is death, and to be with her life eternal? You cherish the ground she walks upon. Night and day, you think only of her. You would do anything for her… you would even die for her!

This is what every woman wants to hear from her man, like Juliet for her Romeo. Yes, you would truly die for her, but what about the world?​

How Prince Electrified the World

In 1984, Prince Roger Nelson stunned America as he introduced a breathtaking new form of fusion. The son of two jazz musicians out of Minneapolis, Prince captured our imagination with his movie and soundtrack, “Purple Rain.” It broke all records, selling 13 million albums, with the film grossing $68 million. At one time, Prince had America’s No. 1 single, No. 1 album and No. 1 film.

Prince was already a master musician, playing dozens of instruments. His passion outshone both Michael Jackson and Madonna, his principal rivals. He threatened to relegate them to the sidelines. Prince radiated intense sex appeal and an indefinable spirituality at one and the same time. He introduced the Gospel in an idiom to which people of any persuasion could profoundly resonate.​

While Prince initially flaunted his sexuality, he spoke at a much deeper, archetypal level. The year 1984 was the height of the Cold War, and it didn’t look like we would make it. Even the very year “1984” was ominous, as the title of George Orwell’s dystopian novel. Prince chanted “1999,” affirming he would celebrate in the face of devastation and ruin. He pointed to a self-sacrificing love. He would, like the Messiah, “Die for you.”

How could I possibly die for someone else? Prince forced us to ask that question.​

The Lifeboat Exercise

You may remember back in school taking a humanities class dealing with values clarification. If so, you very likely got to play the most intriguing forced-choice quiz you are ever likely to encounter. Let’s say you have just bailed out from the Titanic, and there are 11 people in your boat, with only room for 10. Which one shall the group throw overboard to sink into the oceanic abyss?

This exercise can inspire the most vigorous discussions, especially when it dawns upon the participants that they have no choice. One of them has to go.

Should we save a Nobel Prize recipient and humanitarian, like Muhammad Yunus? A gorgeous, accomplished starlet, like Jennifer Lawrence? A young and promising world leader, such as France’s President Emmanuel Macron? Or a freaky but brilliant Terrence McKenna?

With any hope, the lifeboat game forces you to the realization that every human life is precious, if not sacred.

What Would Make You Actually Die for Someone Else?

Many people feel that they have only one life, and that they should give it all they’ve got. Why throw it away for anyone else, husband, wife, lover, mother or father? Just think of Uncle Sam in stripes pointing, “I want you!” In the Vietnam era, the preferred response was, “Hell no! We won’t go!”

However, there may be at least one person, and possibly more than one, who, were they gone, you would feel life wasn’t worth living. Perhaps you are supremely grateful to him or her, mother or father. Perhaps your man is the only person in the world who truly understands you. Perhaps your woman is the only person who could possibly make you happy.​

Mothers and fathers would feel this way toward a son or daughter who loves them, depends upon them and has a full life ahead. You can already see it: he has built into him everything you dreamed for yourself. You’ve lived a full life up to this point, “Sure, I’ll give my life for my kids.”

Are You Ready to Meet Your Maker?

The great 20th Century evangelist, Billy Graham, used to ask his audiences before the alter call, “Are you ready to meet God?” Billy started out with fire and brimstone, but in his later years chose to emphasize an eternity without Christ, the very man who died for them. Dozens of people with tears in their eyes would make their way to the center of the stadium.

Billy had a point. Most of us in America feel that there is something after this life, whether in a vague spirit world, a glorious eternity in heaven (which has been suggested by such skeptics-turned-believers as Dr. Eben Alexander), or, God forbid, endless suffering for making other lives miserable.

It is interesting to observe people, either during the holiday season, or after a major disaster, such as an 8.6 earthquake. People are much nicer, more human and compassionate than you ever imagined. You might say that they are on their best behavior for Christmas. I choose to believe that they are in touch with what truly matters, and their have-it-together attitude is just a facade.​

A Salute to the Men and Women in Uniform

Think of the millions of men and women around the globe under every possible flag, serving in the armed forces, as well as in the police or fire departments. These people routinely place themselves in the line of fire. No matter what your political convictions, or your sentiments about wars and military actions that are so often unwarranted and even pointless; we must deeply admire their courage.

These people are willing to die, not only for their loved ones, but also for a much larger sphere of concern. They are willing to risk their lives to protect you. Should they die in the process, as did many of the firemen in the Twin Towers, their widows and children might be left to fend for themselves, on the edge of poverty.​

Many of these men and women, beyond the elusive glory of patriotism, find a profound sense of fulfillment in serving their country, protecting what they believe in and giving back all that has been given to them. As Jesus Christ put it, “He that seeks to save his life shall lose it, and he that loses his life for My sake shall save it.” We can’t be fulfilled on the highest level until we live for something much greater than ourselves.

Die for You? YES. Kill for You? NO.

Since the 2000’s, Americans have been acutely aware of the Islamic doctrine of “Jihad,” which actually means struggle, not murder. Mohammad counseled the early Muslims that the “Greater Jihad” is an internal battle with one’s own darker impulses. War and violence, for Mohammad, were the “Lesser Jihad.” Nothing to brag about. However, a few Islamic countries, have recently appropriated Jihad to justify all kinds of questionable, and downward dastardly acts.

When I was in high school, I had a brilliant Jewish-Christian history teacher who kept asking his students, “Is violence ever justified?” That was in an era when America was fighting a futile war that lost the confidence of its youth. I have given much thought to this. If one were to take the teachings of the Sermon on the Mount to heart, we never have a license to kill. After seeing Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi, I actually saw how we need not resort to violence.

We are now at a turning point where can choose NOT to kill, no matter what societal influences are brought to bear. True, you could face punishment for not bearing arms. It is also true that if whole groups of people, such as the nation of Costa Rico, which has no standing army, renounce standard notions of defense, the price might be great. They will certainly have it no easier than did Gandhi, and perhaps much harder.​

Would You Die for Even Your Enemy?

Supreme love is to, not only forgive your enemies and refuse to defend yourself against them, but to actually die for them, to wake them up, if you will. This was, of course, perfectly illustrated by Jesus of Nazareth on the cross when the Pharisees mocked him, and Christ prayed, “Father forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

Some time ago, on the island of Hawaii, a despairing teenager went up to its highest peak, and was about to jump beyond the guardrail. A couple of cops following him, slammed on the brakes. One of them ran from the car and grabbed the boy’s legs as he took the plunge. His partner grabbed him, as the cop himself was clearly about to go with the boy off the cliff. This created quite a sensation and was written up in the local papers. The cop was interviewed as to why he held on to the boy, when he was about to lose everything. He said, “If I had let go of that boy, I couldn’t have lived with myself another day.”

The great mythologist, Joseph Campbell, who recounted this story, related the insight of the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. When we give our lives for someone else, maybe someone we don’t even know, we do so because we realize in a metaphysical burst of insight that we and that other person are ONE.​

I Would LIVE for You!

Today, most of us are not called to DIE for someone else. However, we are most definitely called to LIVE for other people, to be the light of the world, to reduce their suffering and give them joy. In an ironic sort of way, it easier to die for your wife and children than to live for them. One glorious act of selflessness and you are done. To live for your family and friends requires moment-by-moment giving.

While Prince died alone in an elevator in Paisley Park, he left behind millions whose lives he touched. Right to the end, he pushed himself with a broken hip taking constant medication. Prince entertained people while being sober himself. He kept living in the moment, opening up the envelope in musical and artistic innovation. As an ultracool Jehovah’s Witness, Prince had total confidence he would be well-taken-care-of at the other end.

We can choose to live, not only for those closest to us, but also for our Mother, Planet Earth. We can choose to look into the eyes of everyone we meet and see a uniquely precious soul. Living this way is as great as dying that way. If we love enough people with that kind of love, we may succeed in saving this Planet, as well ourselves.​

Would You Die For Me? appeared first on http://consciousowl.com.

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If Donald Trump is innocent of collusion with Russia, how come he keeps acting so guilty?

Donald Trump; Donald Trump Jr. (Credit: AP/Susan Walsh/Matt York/Salon)

Several weeks ago, Donald Trump Jr. publicly released emails that revealed his enthusiastic interest in receiving information from Russian sources that would be harmful to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. This information was part of an ongoing effort by Russia to undermine the American electoral system, with the apparent goal of installing Donald Trump as president.

As is standard operating procedure for the Trump administration, its officials repeatedly lied, dissembled and changed the story about Trump Jr.’s meeting with Russian representatives — at least one of whom previously worked as a spy for Russia’s intelligence agencies. The Washington Post is now reporting that the president himself was actively involved in explaining away his son’s meeting with Russian operatives. If this is true, Trump engaged in a coverup regarding his campaign’s collusion with Russia.

These newest revelations are part of a larger pattern.

Some of Trump’s closest political advisers and allies are under investigation by the FBI and the Department of Justice for inappropriate and quite likely illegal connections with Russia. One of Trump’s most senior confidants, the now-disgraced former national security adviser Michael Flynn, appears to have been compromised by Russian agents.

Trump fired FBI Director James Comey in May, by the president’s own admission to stop the latter’s investigation into the Russia scandal. Trump apparently attempted to pressure senior members of the American intelligence community to shut down Comey’s investigation as well. They refused.

Trump has publicly chastised Attorney General Jeff Sessions for recusing himself from the Russia investigation, rather than intervening on the president’s behalf.

Trump has also threatened to stop special counsel Robert Mueller’s independent investigation into the Russia scandal if Mueller dares to investigate the Trump family’s finances.

It has been reported that Trump and his attorneys have actively explored whether the president can legally pardon himself, along with other members of his administration, if — or when, as seems increasingly likely — it is discovered that they colluded with Russia during the 2016 presidential campaign.

Trump and his representatives have of course denied any wrongdoing. Which leaves us with a question.

Why would innocent people act so guilty?

There are two immediate possibilities.

Trump and his closest advisers are bungling fools. This is the preferred narrative of a Republican Party and its mouthpieces, who desperately want to claim that Trump’s only “crime” is that he and his cadre are inexperienced novices in the realm of hardball politics, or are “too disorganized” to have colluded with Russia. Alternatively, in the worst-case scenario, Trump is simply unhinged or “out of his gourd,” somewhat akin to the Mafia don who walks around his neighborhood at all hours of the day wearing a bathrobe and blabbering to himself.

Or as the Guardian pithily observed last weekend:

Like some kind of Shakespearean villain-clown, Trump plays not to the gallery but to the pit. He is a Falstaff without the humour or the self-awareness, a cowardly, bullying Richard III without a clue. Late-night US satirists find in this an unending source of high comedy. If they did not laugh, they would cry. The world is witnessing the dramatic unfolding of a tragedy whose main victims are a seemingly helpless American audience, America’s system of balanced governance and its global reputation as a leading democratic light.

The second answer, however, is more probable. Trump and his inner circle of family members and political operatives likely colluded with Russia to undermine American democracy. Trump, his allies and the Republican Party benefited personally and politically from this collusion, which is why they are so desperate to stop any investigation into such matters.

What would it take for Republicans to turn on Trump?

Everything and nothing. A video of Trump on his knees before a bare-chested Vladimir Putin, pledging fealty and being given a bag of gold for his loyalty, would not sway them. “Fake news!”

To wit: Seventy-seven percent of Trump’s voters would still support him even in the face of clear evidence that he colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 presidential election. Gallup’s most recent poll shows that 82 percent of Republicans continue to support Mr. Trump.

Republican elites still view Trump as a useful idiot — a vessel through which they can advance a right-wing agenda that will destroy the social safety net, transfer more money from the working class and poor to the rich, reverse the civil rights gains of people of color as well as gays and lesbians, destroy the Constitution’s wall separating church and state, end women’s reproductive rights, gut public education, demolish environmental protections, and allow the commons to be raped by gangster capitalists.

But as conservative columnist Michael Gerson warned several months ago in the Washington Post, this bargain has come at a cost:

The conservative mind, in some very visible cases, has become diseased. The movement has been seized by a kind of discrediting madness, in which conspiracy delusions figure prominently. Institutions and individuals that once served an important ideological role, providing a balance to media bias, are discrediting themselves in crucial ways. With the blessings of a president, they have abandoned the normal constraints of reason and compassion. They have allowed political polarization to reach their hearts, and harden them. They have allowed polarization to dominate their minds, and empty them.

Ultimately, only Republicans can end the madness of King Trump. It is their responsibility. To this point, alas, they lack the courage, patriotism, wisdom and moral clarity necessary to do so.

Source: If Donald Trump is innocent of collusion with Russia, how come he keeps acting so guilty? Source: If Donald Trump is innocent of collusion with Russia, how come he keeps acting so guilty?