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ash818 · 8 years

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Anon asked:

Love hearing stuff from Tish's POV & despite how greedy it is there's (at least) three scenes I'd love to see from her POV if you ever got round to them: when Jon woke up after she & he had been held by Risdon and she'd found out he was the Arrow; the night of the riots when she first thought of kissing him(per previous drabble from her Pov); when he came to see her in the hospital after her poisoning.

Here is the second of those scenes, set during chapter ten of The Man Under the Hood.

“Hey, have you seen Jonny?”

“Not for an hour at least.”

Abby glances around the room fretfully, and her knuckles whiten on the doorframe.

Tish sits up, frowning at her. “I promise he’s not hiding in the closet.”

“Right.” Abby shakes her head, shifting anxiously from foot to foot. “Sorry, I’ve just run out of places he could be, and he’s not answering his phone.”

Mayor-Elect Queen has already been summoned to the protest lines, and the news alerts popping up on Tish’s phone have progressed from Unrest at Bioethics Conference to Duwamish Blocked Off and finally to Fires Set in Nuxalk Corridor. She is fairly certain she knows where Jon has gone, but she offers up a perfectly reasonable alternative: “Perhaps he just needed a little time to himself.”

“Then he should have told someone,” Abby grumbles, pulling her phone from her pocket for a quick check. “This is not a good time to disappear. I promise you, if Uncle Roy were here, he’d be pissed.”

Tish hardly knew the man, but his name gives her a twinge anyway. You can’t spend days with a family, immersed in their grief, and not feel some of it yourself.

The afternoon she first sat down in Roy Harper’s office at Panoptic, he wore a stylish side part, a reassuring smile, and the grace of a man very much at ease in his good suit. You’d never guess that the Glades raised him, or that he didn’t learn to knot a tie properly until his thirties.

“Mr. Harper,” she said, “I didn’t feel unsafe until men with earpieces started following me around everywhere.”

He came around his desk to lean against the front of it. “Look, chances are nothing happens. I’ve read a lot of hate mail, and what your dad’s been getting? Ten to one it’s all bullshit.” The word sounded strange coming from just above that beautiful necktie. Apparently the Glades still shone through sometimes.

“So I should only be a little bit worried.”

He shook his head. “Nah. We’re going to do the worrying.” Then he smiled at her, and oh, he might have been a married man thirty years her senior, but that smile could give anyone a little flutter. “We’re not going to let anything happen to you, Miss Cuvier.”

When Jon told her, with a shoddy attempt at secrecy and discretion, that some of his “colleagues” would be watching over her while she met with a mob captain, she was grateful that one of them would be Mr. Harper.

They buried him this morning. For a data library full of bleeding edge medical research, the Black Hand was willing to torture and murder. Papa was willing to let her die. And Roy Harper stood up straight and took a bullet through the neck.

Tish is in so far over her head, she doesn’t even know which way to kick for the surface. She is in a house full of strange and extraordinary people with more money than God, more tragic backstory than a Bronte novel, and far more hugging than she is accustomed to. They discuss painful, wrenching family matters in front of her, and they scoff every time she offers them their privacy. In their home she feels snug and safe in the depths of an exotic foreign country, comfortable and uncomfortable by turns.

Now Jonathan has disappeared, while somewhere out there in the dark, a sociopath is running loose, and he knows the Arrow’s name.

One problem at a time.

Tish and Abby make another pass through the house, which is littered with empty glasses and leftover trays from the funeral reception. They find Mrs. Queen at the kitchen table, talking very quietly to her sister-in-law, who hardly seems to register a word.

Mrs. Queen frowns at Abby. “He wasn’t upstairs?” Her frown deepens at the answering head shake.

Thea Queen leans her elbows on the table and rubs her temples. Weariness is the first human emotion Tish has seen her express all day, aside from anger. A missing nephew is one more complication than she is equipped to handle tonight.

Mrs. Queen presses her lips together, and she gives her ponytail an irritable little toss. “Baby gates. I swear, we’re going to go back to leashes and baby gates.” She lays her hand over Thea’s - they all touch each other so casually - and says, “I’m sorry to run out on you, but - “

“Go,” Thea says, waving her off. “Go on.”

Mrs. Queen gathers her coat and purse, hugs her daughter, and heads for the door.

After it closes behind her, Abby sinks into her vacated chair and casts an anxious, sideways glance at her aunt. “We’re assuming he snuck out,” she says, hunching her shoulders and hugging herself. “Remember that time Mom disappeared out of our backyard while three hundred people and a whole team of bodyguards were here?”

Thea reaches out and squeezes Abby’s shoulder. “He snuck out, baby. It’s all right.”

Tish starts gathering plates, and Thea and Abby only surface from their separate reveries at the sound of running water. “Don’t wash dishes,” they tell her, but what else is there to do? Stare into space or compulsively refresh the newsfeed.

Fifteen minutes later, a text burbles up on Abby’s phone.

“Found him,” she reads aloud. “He decided to pick up an evening shift.”

“So he’s fine,” Thea says wearily. “Taking care of business.”

Abby turns to her in startled indignation. “His arm was in a sling this morning.”

“If he’d asked my permission, I wouldn’t have given him the go-ahead.” Thea heaves a sigh and slumps lower in her wheelchair. “But he didn’t.”

Tish has already made bets with herself as to which of Jon’s various mentors wore the hood before him, and she revises the odds on Roy Harper drastically upwards. To his wife, these are old, familiar fears.

Not so for Abby. “He just took off,” she fumes. “Didn’t bother to tell anyone where.”

Eyes closed, Thea nods. “Yeah, hooding up with no one on Watchtower is a dumb risk.”

Surprise flickers in Abby’s face; clearly she hadn’t thought of the extra risk. She turns a shade paler and says, “It’s just, I thought the top secret classified confidential sneaking around was over.”

With the city on fire, she’s angry about being excluded. Sweet as she is, the girl is fifteen and very much the baby of her family.

“He’s got backup now, and there’s nothing we can do to help from here,” Thea says, forcing herself a little more upright and gripping the handrims of her wheelchair. “I’m going to bed. Wake me up if something happens.”

“We’ll let you know,” Tish says quietly. She does not have Thea’s nerves of steel, and she knows better than to believe there is any chance of sleep tonight.

Thea spins on the spot and heads for the doorway, where she pauses and glances over her shoulder. “Scratch that. Wake me up if you need me.”

Tish takes one more look at her drawn face and defeated posture, and she resolves only to wake her in the event of disaster, death, or dismemberment.

At the last second, Abby hurries to catch up and hug her aunt. Tish hears a muffled murmur.

“Love you too, junebug,” says Thea, and kisses her head. “Thanks for everything you did today.”

When she’s gone, Abby gives Tish an embarrassed little shrug and says, “I didn’t really do anything.”

Yes, she did. Tish watched her do it all day, hovering near whichever family member needed her most. It was not always the person whom Tish judged closest to crying. In fact, most often it was stoic Mr. Queen whose arm Abby linked hers through at the funeral or whose shoulder she headbutted at the reception.

Abby projects the evening news on the kitchen wall, and Tish puts the kettle on. If they plan to hold a vigil, they’ll need tea.

The helicopter cam pans over a burning police car, trash cans blazing in the streets, and shattered glass glittering in the reddish light. Chanting devolves to shouting then somehow resolves to chanting again. Reporters stand in front of destruction, describe the obvious, and portentously enumerate the things “we do not know at this time.”

No one set a single fire until they found out about Papa. Tish turns away and starts hunting for Earl Grey.

“Dad’s somewhere out there,” Abby says, eyes peeled for him. “I don’t know what he thinks he’s going to do in that crowd. Who could even hear him?”

The kettle whistles. Just as Tish takes it off the heat, the news anchor fills the screen with solemn urgency. “Breaking news. Just a few moments ago, an unknown gunman opened fire on City Hall. Three shots were fired, and Mayor Lee has sustained at least one gunshot wound. He is currently being rushed to medical help. The severity of his condition is unclear at this time, but - ”

“They’re shooting mayors now?” Abby sucks in a deep breath. “That’s on the table?”

They will shoot at teenage girls, or they will break their arms to make their fathers talk. They will pay each other in people, and they will kill for secrets pried out of tortured bodies. Everyone you know wears a mask, and sometimes when they take it off, they only become more strange to you.

Everything is on the table.

Onscreen, the anchors exchange worried platitudes, and the crawl at the bottom of the screen announces street closures. “We have word from the convention center that this news is being badly received by the gathered protesters. We are hoping to get some clarification on - ”

Then, a sudden cut to -

“ - and I’m not going anywhere.”

It’s a familiar voice, booming across Duwamish Square from a source Tish can’t pin down. The GNN camera drone swoops across the convention center and zooms in on the Arrow, who casts an imposing silhouette on the concrete facade behind him. He is lit up bright and larger than life, and his face is half shadow.

“When this is over, the conference speakers and half of these protesters are going home. Those of us who have to stay and pick up the pieces - what kind of city do you want?”

Tish’s brain stalls out momentarily. “What is he…”

“Talking the crowd down from something stupid,” Abby supplies.

He has no real power here, Tish does not say. All they have to do is ignore him.

But they don’t. He makes a surprisingly punchy speech, and with thirty years of history giving his words weight… Starling listens. And then, with a parting one-liner in which Tish recognizes Jon Queen for a moment, the Arrow disappears again.

Abby seems totally unsurprised that he pulled it off, but the news anchors are, by the standards of a stoic profession, absolutely over the moon.

“The Arrow hasn’t addressed the city like this in over thirty years,” they say, and old footage flares to life onscreen. The man standing atop the car in the wreckage of the Nuxalk corridor, yelling across the crowd, looks like he could be Jon, brought there by a time machine.

But it isn’t over.

Brawls have broken out in the streets, and masked vigilantes are out in force. Abby cheers at a glimpse of the Canary, and a cameraman onsite audibly gasps when he catches a few frames of the Batman.

The original Batman was active long before Tish was born, and his successor only appeared in her senior year of high school. Gotham was abuzz with the news, and Papa, who liked to hold forth at the dinner table, vocally disapproved. After the fourth or fifth boring tirade on the subject, Tish developed a vague affection for the Batman out of silent spite.

Now she listens to the reports of him breaking up street fights, and she feels a surge of pride.

GNN locates the Arrow again quickly, and they cut to a drone feed in the Central Business District, where an office building is burning. Fire hoses sweep the ravaged top floors above the flashing lights and sirens and ladders. “A pipe bomb was detonated on the fifteenth floor,” says the anchor. “And a moment ago, the Arrow was spotted touching down on the roof.”

“I don’t see him,” Abby says anxiously.

“There.”

He rappels down from the roof, quick and confident, and on the third floor from the top he shoves powerfully off the wall and then cannonballs feet-first into a window. Cracks shoot through it to the frame. He shoves off again, and this time - smash. He tumbles into the smoke and disappears.

“The vigilante has entered the building!” the reporter repeats several times, and they replay the footage in fuzzy closeup. “The Arrow is inside!”

Tish only realizes she’s holding her breath when Abby releases hers.

“Did he just break into a burning building?” Abby whispers in abject horror.

“It’ll be all right,” Tish says, wrapping an arm around her again. “You saw how he climbed in, like he’s practiced a hundred times. He knows what he’s doing.”

“What he’s doing is stupid!”

On the right-hand side of the building, a dark shape swings down from above and clings to the ornate facade. The Batman looks shadowy and dramatic by the light of a burning office building, and he skitters a few meters sideways as easy as walking on flat ground. He finds a window already busted in by the initial explosion, and he slips inside.

“There,” Tish says, with forced optimism. “Jon’s got backup.”

Abby only shrinks deeper into herself. She cannot have failed to notice that the Bat and Terry McGinnis showed up in town at the same time, or that one is watching the Arrow’s back as closely as the other watches Jon’s. It feels like bad manners to discuss it out loud, so Tish only squeezes Abby tighter.

“I can’t see them,” Abby says.

“Give them a moment.”

Abby takes a deep, purposeful breath, and for a few seconds she manages to keep still. The onsite reporter provides useless, repetitive narration while they watch and wait.

And wait.

When the suspense starts to fray her nerves, Tish closes her eyes and asks for a little courage. Lord, you are my refuge and strength, an ever-present help in times of trouble. Watch over them and -

“They should have come out by now,” Abby says, and she writhes out of Tish’s grip as if she cannot stand the inside of her own skin.

“I have no idea how long these things are supposed to take. Just give them time.”

An almighty crash sends dust and flames blooming from the windows, up at the rightmost corner of the building. Metal shrieks, bricks crumble from the facade.

Tish jumps in her seat, and a horrible nauseous flutter goes through her whole body. Next to her, Abby sucks in a high-pitched gasp that sounds almost painful.

The reporter onsite startles too, then puts his fingers to his ear. “The fourteenth floor has partially collapsed.” He pauses, listens. Continues: “It has already been cleared. I repeat, the collapsed floor was cleared. No evacuees or first responders remain on that level.”

But Abby doesn’t seem to hear him. She has frozen like a prey animal, white and wide-eyed. Tish has seen her this way once before, and she tries to stop the anxiety attack before it can escalate.

“No one was on that floor,” she says, putting her arm around Abby again and holding her firmly. “Jon wasn’t on that floor.” She isn’t certain that’s true, because it’s unlikely the fire department can precisely track the Batman or the Arrow’s whereabouts. But there was no reason for them to be on that floor if no one else was. “It’s all right.” Breathe in, breathe out. Big and dramatic enough for Abby to feel it and fall into rhythm. “It’s all right, he knows what he’s doing.”

“I hate this,” Abby whispers after a few moments, and if she can talk, Tish counts that as success. “I really hate this.”

Tish reaches for the remote. “We don’t have to watch.”

Abby twists around to look her in the eyes. “It’s Jonny.”

So it is.

Twelve days ago, he and Tish nearly died together. For the rest of her life, however she may feel about him, she will never be indifferent to Jonathan Queen. She can’t look away any more than Abby can.

It is probably all right to say this out loud: “Lord, please watch over them and keep them from harm.”

Abby turns to her in surprise, but then she nods, leans into Tish’ side, and says, “And maybe send us some chill, if you’ve got extra.”

Twenty seconds grind by like twenty minutes. Finally, the reporter announces, “The vigilantes have just exited the building on the south side! They have a survivor with them.”

Coverage flips to a drone cam swinging around the corner, and through the smoke a green hood and a black cowl come into view down on the sidewalk. The Batman and the Arrow are each supporting one end of a makeshift stretcher. The woman strapped to it is holding tightly to the Arrow’s wrist.

Abby’s breath leaves her all in a rush, and the first thing she says is, “Is that a coffee table they put her on?”

Faintly, Tish nods. “I think so. With the legs snapped off.”

First responders rush to take the coffee table off the vigilantes’ hands, and on the sofa the girls relax against each other.

Then the Batman and the Arrow turn right back around and run into the smoke.

Abby lets out a disbelieving noise.

“Oh,” Tish says quietly.

“Damn it, Jonny.”

It’s a very long night.

For hours they track the news coverage, straining for a glimpse or a mention of anyone they know. Six times over, they watch the same clip of the Black Canary ending a street brawl with two swipes of her staff. They watch shaky cell phone footage of the Batman scaling a fire escape to fall on a cornered cop before he can pull his gun, and the surrounding masked men scatter.

“That’s right,” Tish says with a smile. “Give them a little Gotham.”

Mr. Queen appears periodically, often standing outside one of SCPD’s mobile units, deep in conference with Detective Hall. A few times, he gives a terse update to the cameras. Yes, this fire has been doused. No, we have no further information on Mayor Lee’s condition. Please, for your safety, we ask that you avoid the following streets.

He does not have the flashy presence of the Arrow, standing on high with hundreds of watts of spotlight making him larger than life. But he commands attention as though it were his due, and he gives orders in the comfortable expectation that they will be obeyed. Tish wonders if he learned that in a board room.

It would be impolite to ask Abby where else he might have learned it, especially if she has no such suspicions herself.

They go through two pots of tea and one of coffee, and they watch the flames burn themselves out. An hour after the city has fallen quiet, both girls are still too wired and wrung out to sleep.

Besides, they’re waiting on someone.

At sunup, Jon eases through the back door, moving stiffly and holding his injured arm close to his body.

Tish has been watching him all night, and that feels strange. All she wants now is to mother him, and that is strange too. She wants to sit him down, administer bruise cream, and feed him soup and ibuprofen. He looks like one good hug would turn him to complete marshmallow - perhaps the kind of hug he gave her the night Risdon came to Papa’s house, right after she watched enviously as Abby walked into Mr. Queen’s arms. She isn’t sure she has the right, and besides, someone else has precedence. She looks to Abby.

Who promptly snaps, “Don’t ever do that again.”

Jon tips his head back, and his hooded eyes would look insolent if you didn’t know how many consecutive hours he’d been awake. “Do what?”

“Disappear.”

Tish presses her lips together while Abby fusses at him. Had anyone else greeted him with a lecture, they would have been getting off easy with a sarcastic dismissal. But for Abby he stands there and takes it. In fact, he takes it very much to heart.

Funny how everything he says sounds more sincere when he’s saying it to her.

Finally, curt with exhaustion, Abby says good night and goes upstairs. She leaves her dirty dishes on the counter, as her brother and her aunt often do. Mr. and Mrs. Queen will be annoyed if they come home to sticky plates and mugs. Automatically Tish gathers them up.

“Hey, um.” Jon gives one last guilty glance to the doorway she disappeared through. “How bad?”

It’s difficult to explain how intensely Abby seems to feel everything - as if her nerves have been stripped bare, and there is no layer of protection between herself and the world. It is not Jon’s fault, and Tish doesn’t want him looking so miserable over it. Gently, she says, “She was pretty upset.”

“Like, piano lid upset?”

She is tempted to lie, but finds that she can’t when he is looking directly at her. “I was worried for a minute, but no.”

He collapses onto a stool at the kitchen counter. “God damn it.”

There is only one thing to do now, which is the same thing Mama used to do when someone was at her kitchen table in need of comfort. This will require a whisk, a saucepan, and the high quality milk and cream in the fridge. The rest depends on whatever is hiding in the spice cabinet.

Tish pulls down vanilla and honey, and with her back to Jon, she says, “We watched you on the news.” Then, because someone ought to tell him: “You did some really incredible things last night, you know that?”

He only grunts in reply. Then he deflates, his head falls onto his arms, and he makes more discontented noises while she searches for whole nutmeg and a little grinder.

The ritual of lait chaud a la cannelle is soothing in itself, and by the time Tish has frothed up two mugs of it, she is feeling warm and a little drowsy. She sets one down next to him. “Here.”

He gives her a look. “Stop being nice to me.”

It is what she has been feeling since the night the Queens took her in. She still cannot fathom why they have decided to make her safety their responsibility, and every day she wants to tell them, Thank you, but that’s enough. Don’t pour on more kindness I’ll never be able to repay.

So she answers Jon just as they have, with the same heedless good humor. “Nope.” And she dares to pet him a little bit, the way his mother or his sister or his aunt probably would, if any of them were here.

He sighs deeply, his shoulders unknit, and he drinks what she made for him. It’s an odd thing to take pride in, but she does.

Then, almost casually, he leans his head against her arm. She blinks in surprise and holds perfectly still, as if a wild bird were eating from her palm. His cheek is cool against her upper arm, and she can feel his breath on her skin.

It would be easy to lean down and kiss him, if she wanted to.

Before another thought can follow that one, she whispers, “Go get some sleep.”

Wordlessly he heads upstairs, and she clears away the dishes.

#legacy verse #offscreen in legacy verse #the man under the hood #laetitia cuvier #jon and tish #arrow next gen

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msclaritea · 8 years

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~By the Pricking of my Thumbs~

...Something Wicked This Way Comes...

(apologies for the length. There was a lot to share)

“There was only one thing sure. Two lines of Shakespeare said it. He should write them in the middle of the clock of books, to fix the heart of his apprehension:

So vague, yet so immense.

He did not want to live with it.

Yet he knew that, during this night, unless he lived with it very well, he might have to live with it all the rest of his life.

Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962)

The youthful experiences that made Bradbury into a writer preoccupied him throughout his life. Bradbury’s much-beloved novel Dandelion Wine is a thinly veiled fictionalization of many of his sweeter reminiscences — but even these could take an odd turn. “I loved to watch my grandmother eviscerate the turkey,” he once said, a memory that sums up his most characteristic literary trait: taking homey Americana and bending it in a violent or grotesque direction. His most seminal stories wrung terror out of common occurrences, such as going into a ravine that ran through the residential section of his native Waukegan, Illinois at nighttime. In the story “The Night,” an eight-year-old boy — the author’s alter-ego — simply scares himself. There is no ghost or criminal lurking, only the panic that wells up in all of us when we get lost in a dark, damp place and know we are alone in the universe, in the “vast swelling loneliness,” feeling the presence of “an ogre called Death.”

“Ray Bradbury spent his childhood goosing his imagination with the outlandish. Whenever mundane Waukegan was visited by the strange or the offbeat, young Ray was on hand...He read heavily in Charles Dickens, George Bernard Shaw, Edgar Allan Poe, H. G. Wells, Arthur Conan Doyle, L. Frank Baum, and Edgar Rice Burroughs; the latter’s inspirational and romantic children’s adventure tales earned him Bradbury’s hyperbolic designation as “probably the most influential writer in the entire history of the world.” Bradbury...loved carnivals, magicians, mind readers, and skeletons.

“First of all, it was October, a rare month for boys.” This was the quote given by Mark Gatiss upon the death of Ray Bradbury. That comes from Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962). “Much of the novel centers on a carousel that changes the rider’s age, giving youth to the old and age to the young. At best, those who take the ride end up miserable outcasts. At worst, they become soulless monsters. If eternal youth is no blessing, neither is a return to what has been outgrown, or an impatient leap to what has not yet been grown into. Time is precious. Mr. Halloway is the person through which Bradbury expresses his philosophy concerning good and evil. The theme that emerges in this novel, as well as in several of Bradbury's other works, is that light is good and dark is evil. Bradbury's carnival is the epitome of this darkness. It is the "something wicked" that "this way comes. Cooger & Dark's Pandemonium Shadow Show.”

William "Will" Halloway, born one minute before midnight, October 30. Will is described as having done "only six years of staring." (He is described as having white-blonde hair with eyes "as clear as summer rain".) Will is naturally obedient and wary of getting involved in difficult situations; nonetheless, he takes on an active role in fighting the carnival's evil power. James "Jim" Nightshade, born one minute after midnight on October 31. Jim is brooding and brash, acting as a foil for Will's cautiousness and practicality. (He is described as having wild and tangled chestnut brown hair and eyes the color of green grass.) Jim yearns to become older, which makes him vulnerable to the carnival's temptations, but he is ultimately saved by his friendship with Will. Jim represents good that is always on the verge of giving into temptation, while Will, though he has crises and doubts, is the part of us that resists giving in.

Charles Halloway, the father, is older and filled with regrets, spending all of his time in the library, where he is cornered by Mr. Dark, throwing around his lightening, and taking his life, page by page.

“I know who you are,” Holloway challenges. “You are the Autumn People. Where do you come from? The dust. Where do you go? The grave.”

MORIARTY Did you know that dust is largely composed of human skin? Doesn’t taste the same, though. You want your skin fresh .. ... just a little crispy. That’s all people really are, you know: dust waiting to be distributed. And it gets everywhere ... in every breath you take, dancing in every sunbeam, all used-up people.

“Yes, we are the Hungry Ones,” Dark concurs. “Your torment calls us like dogs in the night. ...(Redbeard?)

And we do feed and feed well. To stuff yourselves on other people's nightmares. And butter our plain bread with delicious pain

Funerals, bad marriages. lost loves, lonely beds. That is our diet. We suck that misery and find it sweet. We search for more, always.

“But no man's a hero to himself.” Charles Holloway

They set their clocks by deathwatch beetles, and thrive the centuries.

“Today we honor the deathwatch beetle that is the doom of our society and—in time, one feels certain—our entire species. But, anyway, let’s talk about John.”SH

They whispered to Caesar that he was mortal, then sold daggers at half-price in the grand March sale. Some must have been lazing clowns, foot props for emperors, princes, and epileptic popes. Then out on the road, Gypsies in time, their populations grew as the world grew, spread, and there was more delicious variety of pain to thrive on. The train put wheels under them and here they run down the log road out of the Gothic and baroque; look at their wagons and coaches, the carving like medieval shrines, all of it stuff once drawn by horses, mules, or, maybe, men.”SW

“The roads we walk have demons beneath, and yours have been waiting for a very long time.”

“You dream with your eyes open. God, if you had strength to rouse up, you'd slaughter your half-dreams with buckshot!” SW

“God, how we get our fingers in each other's clay. That's friendship, each playing the potter to see what shapes we can make of each other.”SW

“A stranger is shot in the street, you hardly move to help. But if, half an hour before, you spent just ten minutes with the fellow and knew a little about him and his family, you might just jump in front of his killer and try to stop it. Really knowing is good. Not knowing, or refusing to know is bad, or amoral, at least. You can’t act if you don’t know.” SW

John: Why did they try and kill me? IF they knew you were on to them, why go after me? Put me in the bonfire?

Sherlock: I don’t know. I don’t like not knowing.

Pam Grier, playing the Dust Witch, A blind soothsayer, usually in her Black tweeds, at one point changes into a ghost Bride( Salome) to tempt a man. However, her increased sensitivity to the presence and emotions of other people makes her vulnerable to positive feelings.The Dust Witch even comes in her balloon to find Jim and Will, but they outsmart her.

Then we come to the Mirror Maze.

This Mirror Maze is one of the major temptations that the carnival offers its customers since it capitalizes on an almost universal weakness, man's dissatisfaction with himself. Bradbury describes the experience inside this particular Mirror Maze through the use of water imagery. When someone enters the maze, he experiences an "ocean" of mirrors silently rushing in upon him. These mirror oceans can be quite dangerous. Will characterizes this danger by saying that someone can never tell just what might be swimming in the water, and there is even the possibility that a person might find himself in a watery, bottomless sea.

Dark kidnaps the children, taking them to the Mirror Maze. Charles Halloway must overcome his fears to get them out. Laughter proves to be a powerful weapon against the inherent wickedness of the Carnival. At the sound of Mr. Halloway's laughter, the freaks outside freeze from fear and the Mirror Maze crashes to the ground "in domino fashion."

So...Love & Courage. The themes are woven throughout all of Sherlock and especially the new episodes. It’s been called Amo, it’s at the 20 Minutes mark of every episode. it’s through Thomas Gray "where ignorance is bliss, 'tis folly to be wise.”Gray is not promoting ignorance, but is reflecting with nostalgia on a time when he was allowed to be ignorant, his youth...all of the mirrors found surrounding Sherlock are increasing x. Even Beethoven's Symphony No. 9, played in The Lying Detective, is about brotherhood & unity. From through-a-glass-darkly:

"Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. …And now these three remain: Faith, Hope, and Love. But the greatest of these is Love."

Something Wicked This Way Comes has served as a direct influence on several fantasy and horror authors, including Neil Gaiman and Stephen King. Gaiman paid tribute to Bradbury's influence on him and many of his peers in a 2012 The Guardian article following Bradbury's death and here. British TV comedy series The League of Gentlemen features the Pandemonium Carnival of Papa Lazarou. The Man Who Forgot Ray Bradbury

he who grew up reading sherlock holmes by harlan ellison

@gosherlocked @may-shepard @tjlcisthenewsexy @isitandwonder @multivariate-madness @delurkingdetective @skulls-and-tea @dmellieon @yan-yae @sherlocks-dimples @zadiest @longsnowsmoon5 @shag-me-senseless-watson @1895-doyle-and-bronte-obsessed @ebaeschnbliah

Hey @johnlocklover221 Just saw your vid. Awesome. Thought you might enjoy this.

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#Something Wicked This Way Comes #Ray Bradbury #bbc sherlock #literary legacies #Mark Gatiss #neil gaiman #steve king

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