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pointnumbersixteen · 3 years

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How do you see The Captain's coming out, and growth in confidence and self acceptance thereafter taking place?

I like this question! …and I’m probably going to elaborate on it a bit more than many people will want to read (I noticed back when I was regularly writing essay length posts that they did not get a lot of love) and it’s probably going to get even more ramble-y than usual (brain has not been braining as cooperatively as it should recently and the decision to drink half a bottle of wine right before answering this- sorry- probably does not help), but here we are.

About coming out scenarios, none of mine are particularly elaborate. While I do think he needs to come out for his story line to progress, I can’t imagine him making a big thing out of it (long or elaborate announcements, heart-to-hearts, emotional displays of bearing his authentic self or any of the like), either with the group, or person-by-person, for several reasons:

First off, that sort of a coming-out to-do is a more modern notion, and I doubt he was a particularly modern person even when he was alive, seventy-five years ago. His notions of privacy and propriety are probably much more conservative than ours, and I feel like that makes it unlikely that he’d go into any sort of detail, at least at early in this process, about his feelings/emotions or the specificities of his attractions. We’re talking about a man who doesn’t even use his own name. It’s difficult to picture him going into depth about his desires and love life.

Secondly, he’s a bit of a social coward. (He’s not a physical coward, of course, he jumped on that bomb in the garden without hesitation, and acknowledged after the fact that he gotten caught up in the moment, and therefore hadn’t really thought about how a bomb couldn’t hurt him.) And I get it, I’m a bit of a social coward, too, so no judgement. He probably faced a lot of ridicule in his life. Being a social coward is totally fair. But he doesn’t put himself into situations that might involve awkward interpersonal interactions if he can help it, and legs it whenever interactions he’s already in become to awkward for him. I feel like he’s probably quite desperate (although he’d never admit to it) to save face and protect what bits of his ego remain unscathed.

Think about it: he could have spoken to Fanny on his own about her nightly screaming disturbing him in s1e1, they have a clear association established at the outset of the show, they leave Heather’s room together at the end of the very first scene, but he doesn’t do so until he has the weight of the whole group to back him up about the screaming at their meeting. He had to buck up his courage and give himself his little ‘over the top we go’ pep talk before going to speak to Alison in Gorilla War. Also, if there was actually something wrong with his soldiers’ horseplay after hours in Reddy Weddy- if it was breaking regulations or even his own orders for quiet hours- and he heard it, he could have gone down directly when he heard it, confronted whoever was involved and order them to stop or put them on report. But no, instead he addressed the entire group of soldiers in a sixteen point morning brief. He even dispatched Pat to confront Alison about the party in s2e2, instead doing it himself… and spit out his apology/reconciliation with Pat at the end as fast as possible. And as for legging it when things get awkward, see his retreats following the group confronting him in Getting Out and after Alison telling him he wasn’t needed in the Grey Lady- and on a more figurative than literal level, but most relevantly, his quick turn from ‘I’ll miss you’ to ‘we’ll miss you’ with Havers in Reddy Weddy.

This is not a man who wants to be in awkward or embarrassing situations. And I think that coming out, at least at first, will probably be a bit embarrassing for him- it was scandalous in his time, and I think it will take him longer to get over that feeling and come to terms with himself than it will to finally acknowledge that he’s gay. So I doubt he’d make more of it than he utterly feels he has to, at least at first. And of course, he’d have to be a bit afraid that people would judge him or stop associating with him over it, as sadly, in his own time many people would have done, and most of the ghosts are from even earlier times than he was. So that might add more hesitation…

And thirdly, he doesn’t like and/or respect many of his house mates. The other twentieth century ghosts are the only ones he spends much time with. I doubt he’d go out of his way to communicate much of anything to the rest if it wasn’t “mission related” much less discuss his sexuality with them. He mostly disregards Humphrey. See his, “Oh, it’s you.” Mary obviously doesn’t like him and he only associates with her when it might be useful for his ‘missions.’ He clearly doesn’t think much of Thomas and doesn’t really even bother including him in his plans. These aren’t people he’s going to have heart-to-hearts with.

With those constraints in place, here’s a non-exhaustive list of possibilities by which I might see his coming out finally happening. They’re really just scenarios I made for myself on how I might see him coming out and I like to keep my options open (the first three are strategies he might go for, the last is an alternate scenario, presented in decreasing levels of directness on his part):

1) The ‘pull the bandage off quickly and hope it doesn’t sting too much’ strategy.

The Captain waits for the end of one of their various group activities or meetings, where all announcements seem to be made, gets up, clears his throat, stammers a bit, announces it tersely, using the most proper popular word for homosexuality that existed in his time (think: “Heh-hem. Er. Um. Well. It has recently come to my attention that I am- er- well- as it happens- gay. I, uh, thought it should be noted. That is all.”), and then beats a hasty retreat, so he doesn’t have to try to cope with the potentially negative aftermath. Of course, there isn’t a negative aftermath, because many of the ghosts already have guessed and the rest don’t really care. Someone, probably Pat, because he does the bulk of the emotional labor in the group, and more importantly, he’s Cap’s closest friend, would have to go after him. He would of course be initially defensive, and Pat would have to sooth his feathers a bit- or maybe just spit it out over his defensiveness- that he guessed a long time ago and so had plenty of other people, and they were just waiting for him to be ready, and really, it’s fine, and no one’s going to disown him for it.

2) The ‘well maybe I should tell my friends with the hope they support me’ strategy.

He gets together with a small group, the people whose company he actually values, definitely Fanny and Pat, maybe Julian, probably Alison either at the same time or after he finishes with his ghosts pals, and says it in much the same way as the previous scenario, but waiting for their reactions rather than retreating straight away. Pat and Alison, I expect, would answer with something like ‘yeah, we figured that one out a long time ago, actually, and it’s completely fine’ and Julian’s reaction would probably be something like, ‘well, obviously.’ Fanny’s had a lot of character growth since season one, when I expect her reaction would have been very shrill and judgmental, probably still would be a touch less warm and/or nonchalant, but I picture it as something like a sigh, followed by a pat on the arm and something like, ‘well, I still like you better than everyone else here, anyway.’ Word would eventually trickle to everyone else by way of social osmosis. Or not. No one seems to care if Humphrey or the plague ghosts are well informed.

3) The ‘I’m not brave enough to actually go through the process of actually telling anyone anything about me so let’s just drop hints and hope everyone figures it out without making a big deal about it’ strategy.

The indirect approach (I’m rather fond of this one, but mostly because it was my own primary coming out approach)… he first sends out feelers to certain people on the topic of homosexuality, probably Alison, since she’s modern, hosted a lesbian wedding, and very much implied that she’d be ready to keep scandalous secrets for him in Reddy Weddy, and possibly maybe also Julian, as he’s the most sexually experienced/knowledgeable, and after Alison spent a while inundating him with ‘it’s okay to be gay’ messages (along with a sudden and entirely unexplained influx of LGBT media) as she’s socially clever enough to see that’s what he’s looking for and after Julian spent a while telling him probably far more than he ever actually wanted to know about the potentialities of gay sex, that might boost the Captain’s confidence enough to let him start dropping hints to people, instead of telling them outright (consciously commenting on the attractiveness of men they see rather than occasionally accidentally blurting it out- see ‘the handsome one’- occasionally putting forth an opinion or stance on the LGBT world ‘it would have been nice if gay marriage was acceptable when I was alive,’ maybe occasionally mentioning how certain men would make cute couple), expecting them to meet him in the middle and figure out the point on their own… of course, many of them have already realized, so this isn’t a problem. It’s entirely possible, though, that Mary (world view not terribly grounded in reality) and Kitty (lack of life experience and/or instruction about life, see the how are babies made subplot) never pick up the hints on their own and someone else eventually has to tell them.

4) The ‘someone puts him out of his misery’ scenario.

Cap acknowledges to himself that he’s gay first and then, wishing to avoid embarrassment or lack of acceptance, obviously, awkwardly, painfully tries to disguise it and in doing so draws attention to it, until a third party decides to put him out of his misery and tell him that many of them figured it out ages ago and that everyone is fine with it. Maybe Pat. Maybe Alison. I kind of like the idea of it being Fanny (with her lovely character growth and her couple of suspicious glances his way in the Perfect Day), actually, by way of something like ‘You know, I was entirely prepared to continue on living with my husband, George, keeping his secrets, about the, uh, sort of person he was, and you’re at least one better than him, given that you at least never murdered me- or, for that matter, never married some poor woman you had no interest in to shield yourself from scrutiny… and so, what I’m saying is, I wouldn’t turn my back on you for being the, uh, sort of person you are, either, and maybe things have progressed enough that you don’t actually have to keep secrets at all.’ Cap would take all of this in with a mixture of mortification and relief. I’m rather fond of this scenario, too.

As for the second bit of the question, once his sexuality is out there, though, and no one judges him or hates him for it- and some are quite supportive- I do see him becoming more self-accepting. If no one’s judging him, does he need to judge himself so harshly? And also more confident. Because some of those things that he’s always felt different about and in the past has probably been ridiculed about in the past (even if he’s in denial about being gay, he and quite a few other people had to at the very least note that he’s not particularly interested in women), are, apparently just fine now. So he’s a bit more just fine now himself. And that weight of always trying to be someone else, someone who’s just right, can lift and he can relax a bit more. And that would probably help him a lot, too. I see it as a slow sort of thawing process. No matter what way he comes out, I still see Alison as very helpfully providing a variety of LGBT media to help this process along. And maybe he’d eventually get to the point where he processed enough and warmed up enough to be able to talk more in depth, at least with his friends, about what it was like being him in repressed pre-war Britain, and what sort of men he’s attracted to (I enjoy the idea of him and Fanny- gradually overcoming her own repression- scoping out hot men together). Maybe he’ll even luck out one of his male housemates will decide (or has already decided) that bisexuality is a valid option and he’ll get a date (insert whichever ghost y’all ship him with here). I bet Alison would totally help him set up a nice date, too, with her convenient still-functional-in-the-mortal-realm hands. And it would be nice to maybe see him get a taste of actual happiness.

#bbc ghosts #the captain #coming out #sorry for the giant block of text friends #i find it difficult to help myself

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bedlamsbard · 3 years

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Part two of the reluctant roommates AU concept! A reminder that my concept writing is deliberately not titled, chaptered, or betaed and is generally low pressure writing. (I think to some extent I burned myself out on the titled stuff, but that’s for another post.)

Previous: Part 1

About 8.2K below the break.

Please note that while I don’t generally do content advisories, this contains discussion of fairly severe (unnamed) depression and anxiety, as well as physical abuse (about the same as other Inquisitor!Kanan concepts).

Agent Syndulla’s fear made Kanan’s back teeth ache, leeching into his dreams and giving him a flurry of nightmares that he knew had to come from her, not from within himself. He woke with a start and lay in the unfamiliar bunk with one arm thrown up over his eyes, feeling like a voyeur despite the fact that he hadn’t done it on purpose. Dreams weren’t a reflection of reality by any means, but they often had more to do with it than most people wanted to believe. From what he had seen in Agent Syndulla’s dreams, most of them had been drawn from her memory. He wished he didn’t know that.

At least it made a change of pace from his usual nightmares.

Eventually he made himself get up, wincing as his recently broken ribs twinged with the movement. They were mostly healed now, but were still fragile and painful, liable to get broken again if he wasn’t careful for the next week or so. With any luck, this particular assignment wouldn’t involve getting shot or stabbed or thrown off in any cliffs, though given the way the past decade had gone Kanan wasn’t sure he really believed in luck anymore. He still felt as though he had used up whatever he had remaining to him getting away from the Hunter for however long that lasted.

He dressed slowly, careful of the ribs as well as the rest of his assortment of healing bruises, cuts, and other miscellaneous injuries. Some were from the assignment where he had gotten his broken; some were the Hunter’s parting gift, since his master had been extremely displeased by the order that split them up for the foreseeable future and Kanan had taken the brunt of his ire. He touched his tongue to what he thought was a loose tooth and winced at the confirmation, feeding the Force through it to reseat it in the gum.

He could sense the Agent Syndulla was awake now, her attention focused on something other than her fear. Kanan delayed leaving his cabin again as long as he could, not wanting to disturb her, but eventually had to answer the call of the refresher. He was washing his hands when he sensed her sudden realization that he was awake and the spike of terror that followed, and winced. He was used to people being afraid of Inquisitors, but usually his master got the bulk of that kind of attention; when it was aimed at Kanan it tended to be mixed with an odd kind of pity and relief. People in the Imperial service expected nonhuman Inquisitors; they didn’t expect human Inquisitors, especially one with the right accent and one who was so obviously subordinate – as well as other things – to a Pau’an. Service members looked at the Hunter and felt fear; they looked at Kanan and thought, thank the gods that isn’t me. It shouldn’t have surprised him that a nonhuman officer would feel differently.

He splashed water on his face, running a finger along the line of his jaw and the new growth of beard there; he eyed it in the mirror and decided to leave it for now. It was something he hadn’t had at the Crucible, anyway, and at the moment he felt rather desperate for anything to remind him he wasn’t just the Hunter’s Hound.

He ran his damp fingers through his hair, finger-combing it, then drew it back into a short tail at the back of his skull. When he couldn’t think of anything else he could do to delay, he went back out into the corridor, and then up to the cockpit where he could sense her presence.

She jumped as the door slid open, having obviously not heard his approach, and Kanan flinched back, startled by her reaction. They stared at each other for a few moments as her astromech grumbled threateningly at him, then Agent Syndulla dropped her gaze back to the datapad she was holding.

She was a beautiful woman, the kind of woman he would have tried to seduce back before the Hunter had dragged him to the Crucible and beaten the spirit out of him, and he thought he probably could have succeeded, too. He was hardly about to try now; for one thing, she was clearly terrified of him, and for another, the idea of letting anyone else touch him after the past few years was agonizing. Even a pretty girl.

He said, “Can I get you some caf, while I’m up?”

She gave him a wary look, then said hesitantly, “All right.”

“How do you take it?”

“Milk and sugar,” she said after a moment. “A lot of both.”

Kanan nodded to her in what he hoped was a friendly fashion – he wasn’t sure he knew how to do that anymore – and let the door slide shut between them as he stepped back. He took his time making the caf, pouring equal amounts of milk and sugar into her cup, and enough sugar into his that the spoon nearly stood up. He had started drinking caf while he was in the field with the Grand Army of the Republic a decade ago, and after the first time he had spat out his mouthful – to the uproarious laughter of Styles and Gray and Depa Billaba’s barely concealed amusement – any clone who had made it for him had sweetened it enough to be tolerable for his palate. He’d never lost the taste for it that way.

He took both mugs back to the cockpit. Agent Syndulla didn’t jump when he came in this time, but she had clearly been braced for his return. She took the mug from him with polite murmured thanks but didn’t sit back in her chair, sitting with the balls of her feet pressed against the deck, as if bracing herself against the need to suddenly flee. Kanan prudently took the seat furthest from her and only belatedly realized it was the one nearest both exits. He could tell from her fast, sideways glance towards the door to the living quarters and the hatch to the hold that she knew it too. The droid grumbled again, rolling so that he was placed defiantly between the two of them, then swiveled his dome to glare at Kanan.

Agent Syndulla took a sip of her caf, looking a little wary at first, then surprised. “I didn’t know it could taste like this,” she blurted out.

“I worked in a tapcaf once,” Kanan offered. “Some of it stuck.”

She looked badly startled by that response.

He could have told her that he hadn’t always been an Inquisitor, but he wasn’t in the mood for the kinds of questions that might inspire. He sat back and drank his own caf instead; neither the caffeine nor the sugar would do much for him, since Force-users processed most kinds of stimulants too fast for them to have any meaningful effect, but the taste helped wake him up.

They sat in silence for a few minutes, drinking their caf, until Agent Syndulla finally settled herself, as if bracing for a fight, and said, “I’ve been looking at the files you sent me.”

Kanan raised his gaze to her. She was, if nothing else, lovely to look at, but she wouldn’t have made it to the ISB or lasted this long if she was just a pretty face. She clearly didn’t enjoy being under his scrutiny, though – most people weren’t when it came to Inquisitors – so after a moment he flicked his gaze slightly away from her.

“There’s an auction the day after we’re scheduled to arrive,” she went on, after a moment’s brief hesitation. “We could call in the local Imperial garrison for backup, but if the regulars could deal with this, then they would have done so by now.”

“This isn’t the sort of thing they’re really equipped to handle,” Kanan said. If it had been, no one would have bothered to send an Inquisitor and an ISB agent to deal with it. Though he had his suspicions about why the Whip had assigned it to him as his first solo assignment. He was less certain about what it had to do with Agent Syndulla and didn’t have enough of an idea about the ISB’s internal politics to even begin to guess.

She nodded in response to his comment. “Depending what the situation is like, we might want them later, but Barzhun doesn’t have a large Imperial presence. As far off the beaten path as it is, it’s not impossible that the local garrison has some sort of relationship with the black market there. It isn’t unheard of.”

And was usually the job of the ISB to deal with, though on occasion the Inquisition dealt with corrupt officials instead. Kanan nodded. “What do you want to do?”

She looked a little surprised that he hadn’t just tried to give her an order. Kanan said in explanation, “Most of my assignments have either interfaced directly with the local garrisons or been – ah, more direct. And my ma – I wasn’t the one who did any of the planning.”

He saw her lekku twitch slightly at the slip, but she didn’t ask about it. Instead she braced her shoulders again and said, “Can you pass as a civilian?”

Kanan glanced down, giving the question due consideration because it had been a long time since he had been in a position where that was even an option and he wasn’t immediately certain of the answer. “Yes,” he said eventually, “but I don’t have any civilian clothes.”

When she looked a little worried, he added, “I’ve got clothes that don’t have the Imperial seal on them.” And there were plenty of civilians who only wore black or gray. “You’ll have to lend me a blaster, though.”

She met his gaze for an instant. “Can you use one?”

“I wasn’t always an Inquisitor.” He looked her over, this time with a more a critical eye than he had done before; past her prettiness she was muscled under her gray ISB field uniform, her holstered blaster a natural extension of both uniform and self. He had also noticed earlier that her lekku signals were erratic, not quite explicable to anyone familiar with Twi’leks “Can you pass as a civilian?”

“I’ve done it before.” She glanced down, clearly uncomfortable under his inspection. “Chopper too.”

“That I can believe,” Kanan said.

That startled something that was nearly a smile out of her, a quick flash of amusement that warmed the Force for no more than an instant as the astromech grumbled at them both. Then she dropped her gaze again. “The HoloNet posting on the darknet said that there would be a reception the night before the auction for potential bidders to review the items up for auction. I assume that you’ll recognize what we’re looking for?”

Kanan nodded. “I’ll know.” And a Twi’lek and a human together wouldn’t make anyone look twice at them, no matter how they played it. Both were common species and common in company with each other.

Agent Syndulla looked at the chrono, then said, “We should be making planetfall in two hours and the reception is in six.”

“All right.” He started to stand up, putting his hand out for her empty caf cup.

She handed it to him once she realized what the gesture meant, then hesitated, looking up at him. Kanan stopped rather than leave the way he had intended to. “What is it?”

“I can’t call you ‘Inquisitor’ in the field,” she said, sounding uncomfortable. “Do you – do you have a name? That I can use, I mean?”

Kanan bit his lip. She didn’t know how loaded that question was, and he wasn’t about to answer her with “the Hound.” Still, it took him a surprising amount of effort to say, “It’s Kanan.”

No one had called him that in almost four years. Sometimes he was surprised that he could remember it at all.

Something about either his face or his voice must have made her realize the gravity of the confession. She said, her voice suddenly very shy, “Thank you.” She hesitated, then said, “My name is Hera.”

He hadn’t been expecting that, and the surprise must have showed on his face. She shifted uneasily in her seat, then looked away, embarrassed. “I’ve sent you the ISB files on the local garrison and government,” she said. “I wasn’t sure if you had them.”

“I don’t. Thank you.” He looked back at her for a moment, putting personal name and surname together, and blurted out, “Syndulla is a clan name.”

Her eyes went wide. He felt her low-grade anxiety snap into sudden fear, jolted from its previous course onto a new path. “Yes,” she said eventually, small-voiced, and then, with a defensive edge, “There are thousands of Syndullas.”

“I’m sorry,” Kanan said; he could tell he had said something that he should have avoided.

She dropped her gaze, but it didn’t do anything to hide the unease juddering along the Force.

“I’m sorry,” Kanan said again, then fled before he said anything else stupid.

Hera knew from personal experience that she mostly just looked uncomfortable in civilian clothes, which wasn’t exactly something she could do anything about. She suspected that if she had been human she could have attended the black market auction in an Imperial uniform, if not an ISB one, and not had anyone look twice at her, but a Twi’lek in uniform always got attention. At the moment she felt even more obvious in her plain dark spacer’s trousers and jacket, as if she was wearing a beacon or a sign that said “I’m an Imperial agent, ask me how.”

She snuck a sideways look at the Inquisitor, who was slouching in the co-pilot’s chair next to her. Hera didn’t like having him that close, but since they were working together she couldn’t exactly justify not letting him be there as long as he didn’t touch anything. She supposed that he had to be able to fly, though she doubted he had ever flown a freighter like the Ghost before. Basic piloting was required for officer candidates at the Imperial academy, but unless you were tapped for pilot training, the Naval Academy, or the ISB Academy, most officers never actually had to fly anything larger than a landspeeder or anything faster than a speeder bike. She had no idea what Inquisitors learned or how they were trained.

Without his armor or his lightsaber he looked less like an Inquisitor than she had been worried about – less so than she still felt she looked like an Imperial agent, even dressed in all black. He wore the DL-18 blaster pistol she had found for him – its grip was too big to be comfortable in her own hand, so she had thought it might work for him – and somehow managed to look as if he had been carrying a blaster for most of his life, not a lightsaber.

He straightened up as they entered atmosphere and entered one of the flight lanes on approach to the planet’s capital city. If any of the other ships in the flight lane happened to glance into the Ghost’s cockpit, they would see a pilot and a copilot both apparently doing their jobs, though Hera hoped the Inquisitor didn’t actually touch anything.

“You can fly, can’t you?” she asked him reluctantly.

He flicked a glance at her. “Yes.”

“Freighters or just starfighters?”

“I’ve flown freighters,” he said after a moment. “Not recently, but I’ve done it. Cargo freighters, mostly, short-haul – longer haul sometimes, but not as a regular thing.”

Hera turned to look at him in surprise, trusting Chopper not to let the Ghost veer off course. The Inquisitor was stubbornly not looking at her, his gaze fixed on the viewport in front of him. I wasn’t always an Inquisitor, he had said a few hours ago. She had assumed that that meant he had been elsewhere in the Imperial service before he had been recruited by the Inquisition, though he wasn’t that much older than she was. Well, people came to the Academy from all walks of life, especially those recruited by the flight academies, who could sometimes skip normal Academy training. Presumably the Inquisition operated similarly.

She didn’t have anything to say in response to him and he didn’t seem to expect one, so she turned her attention back to their flight path. She set down in one of the spaceports in Kethun City, the planet’s capital, and had the Inquisitor transmit the docking fee while she and Chopper shut down the ship’s engines.

Hera eyed him again once they were outside the ship, standing in the small docking bay and trying not to frown at the drift of wind-blown dirt and yellowish pollen that coated the floor. She sneezed involuntarily, her eyes watering, and dug into her pocket for the allergy tablets she had grabbed when she realized what season it was here. She dry-swallowed them and hoped that on this occasion they wouldn’t make her sleepy, which they seemed to do at entirely random intervals rather than consistently.

In the thin light of the overcast sky that filtered down through the open hatch doors above them, the Inquisitor’s dark garments looked pale, nearly washed out. Black didn’t suit him, especially in daylight. Hera looked at him, sneezed again, then wiped at her streaming eyes and said, “We should probably get you more clothes.”

He flicked a wary glance at her, then relaxed slightly at whatever he saw on her face. “Is it that bad?”

“If we’re going to several days of receptions and auctions,” Hera said. On some of her ops he would be unremarkable, but he would stand out amongst the kind of people who attended black market auctions, and not in a good way.

“All right,” he said, sounding more weary than anything else. “Let’s go find the market.”

Hera was startled at how much the addition of colors to his garments changed the Inquisitor’s appearance. He looked deeply uncomfortable, as though he knew he wasn’t supposed to be wearing anything other than black and gray, but his green shirt brought out color in his face and pale eyes and eased some of the hollows in his scarred cheeks. Hera thought that he wouldn’t raise eyebrows or twitch tentacles in company now, or at least not for the reasons he would have done before. He also looked younger, more vulnerable, less dangerous; she wasn’t sure whether or not that was a good thing, but there was nothing she could do about it.

Hera hated paying any attention to her appearance other than making sure that her uniform was neat and that none of her caste markings were showing, but for this particular occasion she made sure that she was wearing something that at least suggested she had more money than the average spacer. She didn’t even own any clothes that could pass muster as something a high-caste Twi’lek would wear, not that that was a distinction that would make much sense off Ryloth or outside the enclaves. Maybe not even the enclaves, but Hera avoided them whenever possible and had no idea what went on there. Being among other Twi’leks made her so nervous that it was often debilitating; she had almost failed her ISB Academy field trials for just that reason.

She left Chopper with the Ghost; even though this wasn’t her usual kind of op, she knew that in this setting an astromech droid might stand out – Chopper certainly had no talent for being unobtrusive. She and the Inquisitor got their cloaks and the speeder bikes from the Ghost’s hold – while the city was small enough they could have walked, there was always the chance that they would need to make a quick getaway. Hera felt a little better with the handles under her hands, anyway.

She watched the Inquisitor out of the corner of her eye as they sped down the road towards the site of the reception. He handled his speeder with a light, delicate touch, less heavy-handed than a scout trooper – more like a starfighter pilot than anything else, but not a TIE pilot, she decided after a few minutes of silent observation. That puzzled her, since privately owned starfighters were illegal except under very rare circumstances – not that you couldn’t make those circumstances come about with enough credits – and the vast majority of those available were TIE-variants. He must have learned on one of the others, since she knew Inquisitors flew TIEs. If he was aware of her attention, he didn’t show it.

They pulled up in front of a neon-lit nightclub, where they handed their speeder bikes over to a parking droid and received a claim token in exchange. Hera tucked it away, bemused, and fell into step with the Inquisitor as they made their way to join the queue at the door. The sound of pounding music from inside made her wince; she hated clubs and crowds alike.

The bouncer let both of them in after relieving them of their blasters, for which they both received claim tokens. If the Inquisitor had his lightsaber on him, the scanner didn’t turn it up; Hera wasn’t certain whether he had brought it or not, and hadn’t been about to ask. Hopefully he wasn’t so trigger-happy as to pull it out without absolute necessity, but having never seen him in action Hera had absolutely no idea.

Once they were inside and past the initial crush of people at the door, Hera surveyed the wide dark room beyond with distaste; it was full of beings of various species dancing, drinking, and eating, with a stage set up at the far end and a band playing something that she supposed technically counted as music, assuming you had no taste.

She glanced at the Inquisitor to make sure he followed her, then edged around the dance floor, past several shadowed – and definitely occupied – nooks. Hera fixed the instructions from the darknet posting in the front of her mind and hoped that the Inquisitor remembered them too.

After several minutes and a handful of propositions – to both of them, not just her, which was a refreshing change – they made it to the back of the club. A back hallway led to the kitchens and some refreshers that Hera suspected were intended for the staff rather than the patrons, as well as a door with a keypad on the control next to it. Hera punched in the code from the darknet, holding her breath until the door slid open, revealing descending stairs. It slid shut again as the Inquisitor stepped in after her and the pounding music from the club vanished as cleanly as if it had been cut by a knife. Hera let out her breath in relief.

She went down the stairs with the Inquisitor at her back and emerged into another room. It was a little smaller than the dancefloor above them, but more brightly lit and with far fewer people. There were still a good number of beings, but they were older than the club-goers and mostly more finely dressed. A pair of Togruta lounge singers draped themselves over the top of some kind of big instrument being played by a Nautolan who struck keys with a number of small hammers held expertly between his fingers.

A serving droid came up to Hera and offered a tray with a selection of stemmed and un-stemmed glasses holding a variety of colored liquid. “Drinks, madam, sir? I have alcoholic or non-alcoholic as you prefer –”

“Non-alcoholic,” Hera said; she could tell she was in the mood where alcohol would make her paranoid and angry, even if she drank on the job, which she didn’t unless there was no choice.

“The same.” The Inquisitor’s voice was soft.

The droid obligingly rotated the tray for Hera. “I have fruit juices, carbonated beverages, flavored waters from a variety of worlds –”

Hera accepted a glass of what she hoped was meiloorun juice – it was about the right color – and was gratified to find she was right when she tasted it. The Inquisitor chose a glass apparently at random and took a perfunctory sip; she suspected he had taken it mostly to have something to do with his hands.

Once the droid had gone, she sipped her drink and looked around the room. Another look revealed that there were a number of tall display cases placed at regular intervals; the beings gathered around them had obscured them from Hera’s initial observation. She flicked a look at the Inquisitor to make sure that he had seen them too, then moved towards the nearest one.

The beings already there – a trio of Rodian males, an Ithorian couple, and a human of indeterminate gender – all glanced up at their approach, briefly registered their appearance, then went back to their conversation. The male Ithorian moved aside so that Hera and the Inquisitor had a better look at the contents of the display case.

She heard the Inquisitor hiss softly through clenched teeth. The sound made the Rodians twitch, looking over at him before apparently deciding it was an expression of interest rather than – whatever it was. Hera glanced up at him worriedly, decided it was unlikely that he was going to snap and go on a murder spree – at least not in the next thirty seconds – and looked back at the case.

The contents were unremarkable, at least to her eyes – a set of four small sculptures of various near-human beings in long robes holding upraised lightsabers in different poses. They were made of some pale gray stone she didn’t recognize.

Hera was trying to figure out a discreet way to ask if this was what they were looking for when she realized that under the current circumstances, there was no real point in being discreet. She looked at the Inquisitor and said, “Is that it?”

He nodded without saying anything, his expression grim.

They moved onto the next display case, which held more statues and a stained glass window propped up with a light behind it. Hera glanced at the Inquisitor again and saw the tightness in his jaw; she didn’t bother asking this time, since his face was answer enough.

They rotated through several more display cases, all of which got the Inquisitor’s nod. Now and then someone new would come down the stairs, but by and large the occupants ignored each other, except for a handful who all obviously knew and liked each other well enough to speak to one another. Hera supposed that there weren’t too many people in the galaxy who traded in Jedi relics and most of them were probably in this room with her; she wished she had dared come down with a recording device so that the ISB could match known names to faces.

The serving droid came up to them again to take their empty glasses – well, to take Hera’s empty glass; the Inquisitor had barely touched his, but handed it over anyway. Hera accepted another glass of fruit juice and drifted over to the nearest case that they hadn’t inspected yet.

She felt the air change as the Inquisitor went absolutely still beside her.

Because she knew what he was, she looked at him first, not the contents of the case; some of the other occupants of the room had felt the shift as well and were looking around warily at each other or at the cases.

He was shaking so badly that she could hear his teeth chattering together, his stillness transmuted into fury that she could feel like a weight in the air. Hera shot a look at the case to see what it was that had upset him so badly and saw a collection of innocuous-looking thin braids and strings of mismatched beads; they struck something in her memory, but she couldn’t remember what at the moment. She set that aside to worry about later, hesitated for an instant, and grabbed the Inquisitor’s arm.

He flinched violently at her touch, his eyes gone suddenly wild with shock. She could feel muscle beneath her palm, stiff as steel cording; as much as she wanted to she didn’t release him. “Calm down,” she said to him, pitching her voice low but not whispering. “Do you need some air?”

He didn’t look around, but she saw awareness bleed into his panicked eyes. He shook his head slightly and Hera felt the pressure in the air lifting as he forced himself to something resembling calm, pulling his furious response back inside his own skin. She could still feel him trembling beneath her hand.

She pushed her half-full glass of fruit juice into his other hand. “Drink that,” she said.

He hesitated, and she snapped, furious and embarrassed, “It’s not tainted just because a tailhead drank from it.”

He shot her a startled look and said, sounding genuinely baffled, “Why would you think I thought that?”

Hera stared back at him, so surprised by that reaction that she briefly forgot why she had handed him her drink. “Humans –” she started to say, then shook her head. “Just drink it.”

He drank it.

She kept her hand on his arm until he had stopped shaking, then released him, tucking her hands awkwardly into her pockets to have something to do with them. When he had finished the glass, he stared at the display case again, then dragged his gaze away and went off to the next one, handing the empty glass off to the serving droid as he did. Hera followed, hoping her fury wasn’t plain on her face. The other guests veered away from him, though something about the way they did so made Hera think they didn’t know or understand why they were doing it.

The next case only held more art, to Hera’s relief. The Inquisitor stared blankly at the delicately figured tiles as if he didn’t really see them, though Hera suspected he knew exactly what was on them and – going by his reactions so far – what they meant.

“I suppose some of these still have some juice in them,” a passing Quarren woman said in her watery voice, and laughed. Hera saw the Inquisitor’s shoulders tense in response.

She stepped tentatively up beside him. “We’ve seen most of it,” she said. “We’ll be back for the auction tomorrow.”

He shook his head. “I need to see all of it.” He shut his eyes tightly, clearly trying to calm himself down even though he was still badly upset.

Hera eyed him doubtfully. Looking at him now, it was hard to remember that he was in all likelihood one of the most dangerous beings Hera had ever met; all of that coiled threat that had been there only a few moments before was gone, replaced by real distress.

She recognized the expression abruptly. She had seen it in the mirror, on one of the occasions when she had been back at the Academy and invited to some event or another at the home of a local potentate on Naboo. He had been a collector – “of everything,” he had said while showing cadets around his estate. He had looked at Hera as if he was considering collecting her too, but she had managed to avoid being in any proximity to him for most of the evening, and once the other cadets began drinking heavily she had made her excuses and left early, for which rudeness she had been roundly rebuked the next day. She had been looking at his displays – arranged in order of what he thought was most attractive, not in anything that made sense – when she had turned a corner and found herself looking at a kalikori.

It wasn’t a Syndulla one, not her family’s and not from any of the patrician Syndulla families; she had known that immediately. She hadn’t recognized the clan, but kalikori were intimately personal to each family; no one would ever let it pass out of a family line except through marriage or adoption. But there had been a lot of looting done during the Clone Wars, and more during the Imperial occupation.

Searching further through the collection and trying not to make it look as though she was doing so, Hera had found a lararium, the household shrine each family kept, and the little figures that represented the protective spirits of a Twi’lek family, the ancestral genius and the patron lares, both separated from the lararium and the kalikori alike and jumbled together on a shelf of other small statues that Hera hadn’t recognized. She hadn’t thought, at that point, that she had much Twi’lek feeling left after four years in the Academy. Apparently she had been wrong about that.

It was the same expression on the Inquisitor’s face now.

She raised her gaze to the Inquisitor again, keeping her voice low as she said, “Those braids in that case – they aren’t from the High Republic, are they?”

He shook his head a little, his face a mask of grief and fury fighting for calm. Then he looked at her sharply, some of that starting to bleed into alarm. Hera could guess why; she didn’t know much about Jedi, but she had known enough to ask. She met his pale gaze, resisting the urge to look away; she hated making eye contact with other people and there was something disorienting about him.

It was the Inquisitor who looked away. He swallowed, his throat working, and looked back at the tiles in the case in front of him. “I’m sorry,” he said eventually, then swallowed again. “I need to see the rest of the items up for auction.”

Hera bit her lip. “I want to get a feel for the crowd,” she said to him. “Will you be all right on your own for a few minutes? I don’t think we need to stay long.”

“I’ll be fine,” he said a little distantly. “I was surprised. It won’t happen again.”

“All right,” Hera said. She stepped away from him, hoping that he actually could behave himself if left to his own devices. It was balanced against her own nervousness about interacting with other people; she wasn’t particularly worried about being recognized as an Imperial agent, since in her experience no one ever looked at a young Twi’lek woman and came to the conclusion she was an ISB officer, usually including other members of the service, often including times when she was in uniform. Hera was a decent field agent, but she knew that she hadn’t exactly lived up to Agent Beneke’s desires for her, which was how she had gotten this assignment with the Inquisitor in the first place.

She got another drink from the serving droid, this one a fermented fruit juice with some bubbles in it that looked alcoholic at a glance but wasn’t, and settled her shoulders before she went back to the case with the figurines in it, which had a small group of people gathered around it. She lingered on the edge of the group, drinking her juice and listening in on the conversation – a trio of scholars debating the authenticity of the figurines, apparently. After a few minutes of that she drifted away to another case, which held what looked like ornaments. She glanced up to track the Inquisitor’s location in the room and saw him steadily working his way through the remaining cases, his mood like a thundercloud keeping people away from him.

“Lovely, aren’t they?”

Hera turned, pasting a polite smile on her lips, and saw a thin, white-bearded Pantoran male standing beside her. “It’s very intricate work,” she said.

He smiled with as much appreciation as if he had been the creator rather than some long-dead Jedi. “Mirialan,” he said, indicating a pair of round belt buckles propped up on display. “Do you see the floral work around the rims and the eclipsed suns at the centers? Variations on those themes have recurred amongst Mirialan Jedi for centuries – millennia, perhaps, though the older examples are disputed. They stem from an old Force cult on Mirial, one that hasn’t been active since before Mirial joined the Republic. We know nothing about that cult, not even its name; it no longer has any worshipers on Mirial, but until a decade ago there were still elements of it amongst the Jedi.”

He gestured to a collection of small coppery rings, each about the length of a knuckle and inscribed with knot-like decorations. “Weequay hair ornaments – for their braids, yes? You still see some Weequay wearing them today, but if you ever have the occasion to examine them closely, you’ll see that the finework is all different. That’s because Weequay Jedi had their own patterns that were used back on Sriluur before the Hutts conquered the world more than eight thousand years ago. Another Force cult, perhaps. When Weequay were first recruited into the Jedi Order, they took the symbols with them; you won’t see them on Sriluur or the other Weequay worlds today.”

“Eight thousand years is a long time,” Hera said, since she couldn’t think of anything else to say and it seemed like the point in which he expected a response.

“Perhaps longer. The Hutts – especially in the days of the old Hutt Empire – prefer to destroy the records of their conquered worlds, so that those worlds might seem to begin with their coming. It’s hard on historians.” He sighed wistfully, then looked at her more closely.

Hera resisted the urge to double-check that her markings were covered, since he seemed like the sort of person who might know that caste markings were more than just decorative tattoos the way most non-Twi’leks thought.

When she didn’t say anything one way or another, he seemed to decide that she was interested and pointed at a quartet of ivory bangles inside the case. Each one was a double-curve, small enough to fit around a near-human’s wrist, and incised with intricate patterns, some of which had been filled in with black, red, or gold, others of which were bare. The ivory was yellowing with age. Something about them was familiar and Hera frowned, trying to place them.

The Pantoran saw her expression and smiled, open and pleased rather than malicious. “Ryloth river hog tusks,” he said. “I can’t pronounce the name in Twi’leki –”

“Ruti’ara,” Hera said after a moment of thought. “From a region in the equatorial jungle. They’re extinct now.” She didn’t say that there was a set of similar bangles in her mother’s jewelry case back on Ryloth, a gift from Cham’s grandmother – then the clan head – when they had married; they had been passed down among the women of the family for a thousand years.

She looked back at the bangles in the case, now seeing the pattern of half-familiar clan markings amongst the carvings. “Fenn,” she said slowly. When the Pantoran blinked, she said, “The geometric patterns, there – in black. Those are Fenn clan markings. They’re a curial clan on Ryloth –” And had been in vendettas with the Syndullas no less than three dozen times over the past thousand years, including after the Curia’s ban two centuries earlier (which everyone on Ryloth had just taken as a strong recommendation for the first few decades), but who was counting.

“The clan is still extant?” the Pantoran asked, sounding a little disappointed.

Hera fought back family feeling she didn’t know she still had and resisted the urge to reply unfortunately. Instead she said, “Last I heard, yes. There was some scandal a few years ago, but they’re still around.”

“There is a clan that has died out, though, yes?”

Hera bit her lip. “There are a few, mostly smaller patrician clans. You’re probably thinking about the Indahs. They were a curial clan like the Fenns and the Sy – the Securas. They were in a –” She had to search for the word in Basic before going on. “– a vendetta, a blood feud, with the Fortunas. That’s another curial clan. The Fortunas tricked the curial family – the Indah Hid Indah – into agreeing to peace talks. When the Indah Hid Indah and the heads of the patrician families in the clan were all at table for the banquet, the Fortunas slaughtered them. Then they hunted down all of the other Indah patricians and killed them too, not to mention most of the plebeians. When news got out, the Republic Senate wanted the Jedi to come in and arbitrate it, but the Curia – that’s the governing body on Ryloth – wouldn’t let their ships land. They sent the Fortuna – the clan head, I mean – into the Bright Lands and ostracized most of the patrician family heads, and banned the Fortunas from being able to vote in the Curia for twenty years. They also banned the vendetta, so there aren’t supposed to be blood feuds anymore. The only Indah patricians who survived were the ones who had married into other clans cum manu, and when you do that you give up your clan rights – they weren’t legally Indahs anymore, I mean, they were legally members of their spouse’s clans. I know at least one petitioned to revoke her marriage, but there weren’t enough Indahs left for there to still be a clan. And the Fortunas had destroyed their lararia and kalikori, burned the shrines. That’s supposed to destroy the clan’s connection to their ancestors and the genii – the – the earth-gods, I suppose is the closest thing you can say in Basic. Since the Indah Hid Indah were a curial clan, they traced their line in direct descent from one of the gods – I think it might have been the –” She fumbled for the Basic again, aware that her Ryloth accent was starting to come out very strongly, and if anyone knew enough to recognize it, that it was the purest high-caste Twi’leki. “The Son of Sands. There are other curial clans descended from the Son of Sands too but the Indah Hid Indah were very, very old, as old as – the Fenns.”

She had almost said “as old as the Syndulla Tann Syndulla.” One of the surviving Indahs had actually been married to the Syndulla prime heir at the time, and had almost succeeded in convincing her and her twin brother to declare vendetta against the Fortunas themselves before the Syndulla clan head had gotten wind of it and stopped them.

“This was a long time ago?” asked the Pantoran.

“Not really,” Hera admitted. “About two hundred years.” She tensed in expectation of a comment about how barbaric Twi’leks were, never mind that there were humans on plenty of worlds who still practiced various forms of blood feud, but none came.

“An old custom?” the Pantoran said instead.

“Um, yes,” Hera said. She was too embarrassed about having given a speech about the Hid Indah Massacre to offer up that the vendetta went back to the days of the gods, when the children of the Mother of Mountains had torn Ryloth apart in war with each other after the Son of Sands had murdered his sister’s lover. It was why so much of the planet was desert, except for the equatorial jungle; their oldest records showed that millennia earlier much more of the planet had been jungle and there had still been enough ocean to separate the continents. “What does that have to do with the ruti’ara tusks?”

“Ah. Nothing.” The Pantoran beamed at the case again.

Hera let out her breath through her teeth, annoyed. She could feel heat in her cheeks, traveling up to her ear-cones and the base of her lekku.

“The marvelous thing about the Jedi is that they were so very, very old and had members from all over the galaxy, all kinds of species, so customs, traditions, peoples – animals, even – were preserved within them like insects in amber, passed down from master to apprentice over so many generations few sentient minds can really comprehend them. They provide a window into a past where there are no other windows – no holograms, no texts, no oral memories. And yet that past was preserved amongst the Jedi – it was still a living thing. The Empire might have you believe that the Jedi stole children from thousands of worlds, stripped them of their identities, their cultures, their species, and made them all Jedi and nothing else, but if that was true, then how would there be any of this?” He swept an arm around at the room and its display cases. “When I was a very young, there were pirates preying on my family’s station, and a Jedi came to deal with them – a Togruta woman, very beautiful. She wore the akul teeth headdress of a Togruta warrior, an animal which those among the Togruta who wish to prove their strength hunt and kill. Why would she do that if she was not Togruta as much as Jedi?”

He looked back at the case and sighed. “Many of those here are here for the money, or are enthusiasts for the forbidden – some for the Jedi. Others enjoy beautiful things, the rarer the better.” He flicked a glance at the Quarren who had passed Hera earlier, his expression disapproving. “When they were destroyed, it was not merely the Jedi who were lost, but a thousand others who were preserved only amongst the Jedi.”

“Most of the people on those worlds pay attention to their own history,” Hera said hesitantly.

“Ah. Yes. Some do. Others would, but their histories were stripped from them – the Hutts, as I said. The Empire, more recently. Even the Republic, in its way, as you said yourself.”

Hera blinked. “Did I?”

“When you said that your people would not allow the Republic to take over the punishment of its wrongdoers,” the Pantoran explained patiently. “Others were not so stubborn; at other points, the Republic would not have cared about their wishes.”

“They’re not –” my people, she wanted to finish, but she couldn’t get the words out.

“But sometimes history is just lost,” he went on sadly. “Not maliciously or in war or natural disaster, it just…falls out of use, and then out of memory, and if there are traces at all, then they are traces we cannot recognize. By the time one realizes it is gone, it is just not there to find.”

Hera bit her lip.

“You make it sound as if the Jedi are only the composite of others, with nothing of o – of their own,” the Inquisitor said quietly from behind Hera.

She almost jumped out of her skin. She hadn’t heard him approach, and from the way the Pantoran flinched he hadn’t noted the Inquisitor’s arrival either.

“No – no, of course not,” he said, when he had gotten control of himself. “But my – my interests have always lain elsewhere. There are so many who are interested in the Jedi and only the Jedi for what they themselves are, and not all that they represent.”

“I see,” the Inquisitor said gravely. He sounded more amused than anything else, which Hera decided to cautiously take as a good sign.

Hera half turned so that she could watch him and the Pantoran at the same time. He was looking at the case, not at the Pantoran, his gaze moving over the beautiful objects inside. She realized abruptly that he had used the present tense, not the past. And that he had started to say “our,” not “their.”

“You are an enthusiast of the Jedi, perhaps?” the Pantoran said, recovering.

Hera tensed again, but the Inquisitor just raised an eyebrow. “I have an interest.”

The Pantoran turned to Hera again. “And you, you are a student of history, I see?”

The Imperial Academy’s version of history was “things were terrible until the Emperor took control” but she wasn’t about to tell him that. “Just a few things,” she said instead. “But I enjoyed our conversation,” she added, because she did know how to be polite; not something she had learned from the Empire. She took a chance and laid her hand on the Inquisitor’s arm, suspecting that he was probably aware of her brief hesitation before she made contact. “I think we’ve seen what we came here to see,” she told him.

He was tense under her palm, giving her the impression that he didn’t like to be touched any more than she did. None of it showed in his face as he glanced down towards her and nodded.

“I will see you tomorrow evening, perhaps,” the Pantoran said.

“Perhaps,” Hera agreed, and hoped a little vaguely that she wouldn’t have to arrest him.

She released the Inquisitor as soon as they turned to walk away. They were silent all the way up the stairs into the noisy, crowded club, as they retrieved their speeder bikes, and on the ride back to the Ghost, the wind from their passage whipping Hera’s lekku back behind her.

Hera was stowing her bike and trying to decide whether the appropriate thing to do in this situation would be to debrief the evening when the Inquisitor said, very tiredly, “I’ll see you in the morning,” and vanished up the ladder. A few moments later she heard his cabin door slide open and shut again.

“Well,” she said to Chopper, who had come down to make sure she was all right. “That was interesting.”

#cut scenes and concept writing #reluctant roommates au tag #as always comments are appreciated #I'm trying for a bit more plottiness with this concept

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i-did-not-mean-to · 3 years

Text

School AU - Chapter 2

So, just to be thoroughly done with this experiment, here's Bilbo's POV of the same scene.

There it is :D It was worth a celebratory little story...:)

Love you all <3

“Go to school”, they said, “It will be fun”, they said.

Bilbo rolled his eyes at his own naïveté. Of course, it would not be fun to change schools in the middle of the year.

The headmaster, a fearsome old man with a face like a death mask, waved him out of the office before he could even protest; they had decided to put him into a class with all the other “maladjusted” kids.

He was not maladjusted; he was merely new in this school.

“You will be fine.” The gentle old man, his headteacher as far as he had understood, promised him and the mere fact that this was the kind of thing he needed to be told, did nothing to ease his nervousness.

“They got a new teacher already today and now you, really, what an exciting day for the class.” The man went prattling on and on. Bilbo had no interest in being a novelty and he felt increasingly like he was a sacrifice or chum about to be thrown into the cold water, figuratively, physical education was not on the program for a few days at least.

Small mercies.

The headteacher rapped his knuckles against a closed door and then just shoved his head in without waiting for the teacher to accept his brusque announcement. He informed her, quite casually Bilbo found, of the fact that there was a new student and shoved him into the classroom before just leaving.

Bilbo looked at the woman in front of him; her eyes were dreamy as if she had been torn from a particularly pleasant reverie and her mouth curved into a warm smile almost immediately.

She made an off-hand comment about how all the students were new to her and Bilbo felt less alone instantaneously; he had been afraid to find himself confronted with a hermetic group of people who had all grown up together and who had no interest in getting to know a pudgy youngster who talked too much.

The headteacher had called her “Kira” and Bilbo had already noticed that they went by their first names here, so he greeted her as politely as he could and enquired if he had not missed too much of her class.

It would be hard enough to stitch together what he had seen in his last school and what was expected here, he didn’t want to start by lagging behind right away.

“I’ll fill you in.” A voice called out and he flinched. Again, Miss Kira’s presence was a comfort and a rock, for she twitched as well, but probably not for the same reasons. Except if she was a pervert; she didn’t look like one.

Turning his head ever so slowly, Bilbo searched for the face that went with the most beautiful voice he had ever heard: deep and slightly gruff, it had rippled down Bilbo’s spine like a current of silk and pure electricity.

Please, let him be ugly as sin, please, he begged his guiding stars. He did not want another debacle, not on the first day of school, not in a new environment.

Of course, that had been too much to ask and the face belonging to the voice turned out to be just as charming. Figures!

Bilbo had thought of himself as a rather lucky kid for the longest time, until he realised that it was voices and faces like the one just a mere stone’s throw away from him that set his insides on fire.

Another boy was sitting next to “the voice” and he was now ousted with a hearty shove while Bilbo tried to shuffle those feet he hadn’t quite grown into yet along the narrow empty space between the benches. It would just serve him right if he landed straight on his face in front of that…being.

He looked much more like a man already than a boy, a fact the parts of Bilbo he had definitely grown into already noticed with vivid interest. Feeling the treacherous heat crawl up his neck and into his face, Bilbo approached the bench, getting his feet tangled in his rucksack as he sat down on the now empty chair.

The chair was disgustingly warm, but he didn’t mind; he couldn’t even tell with certainty that his own body was not on fire in this very second and he was the one making the scratched plastic melt.

Oh Lord, his own ass was the last thing he wanted to think about now when that face was so close to him that he could smell the fresh, slightly zesty smell of the dark hair surrounding it. Good, he had been mocked mercilessly in his old school for the way he wore his own hair, but it was really nothing compared to those luscious, dark waves…

BILBO! He called himself to order. His polite instincts kicked in and he rearranged his slack jaw into what he hoped would be a pleasant smile.

The boy frowned at him, a mask of guarded suspicion, and Bilbo’s heart immediately mellowed. Here was someone who had known hardship, he knew instinctively, and it made him redouble the brightness of his smile. Had he ever seen eyes that blue? They were hard and glistening like shards of ice, but Bilbo felt that they might warm up to summer lakes in time.

Not on your first day of school, he tried to remind himself, but it was already too late; his mouth had run dry, and his stomach twitched with that all too familiar twinge of admiration. He was a boy who knew simple pleasures: a sunny meadow, a good meal…and a face like that.

Clearing his throat, the other boy shoved over a piece of paper, filled with chicken scratch writing. As soon as he pried his watering eyes off the boy’s face though to glance at it, he retracted it again, slamming a solid forearm down on the page. “Might have some spelling mistakes.” The boy mumbled. Ah, the idiot class, Bilbo remembered, more interested than ever.

“My name is Bilbo.” He spoke gently, putting one finger on the edge of the page and trying to pull it loose from under the massive bulk of the other one’s arm. “Thorin.” He rumbled, sighing a little. “Really.”

“Yes, why wouldn’t it be your name?” Bilbo chuckled. “Mistress Kira didn’t believe me.” He explained in a low voice, finally letting go of the sheet and allowing Bilbo to read through the notes.

There were indeed one or two hasty mistakes, but Bilbo was astonished to find that Thorin seemed to have chronicled the class faithfully. “If you don’t…if…” He stammered and Bilbo looked up, thankful for the quality of the notes because he knew that he was not processing any of the explanations Thorin was providing in that low voice.

He sounded like rough skin on silk sheets, Bilbo thought, another painfully inappropriate thought.

“Hmmm, thank you, Thorin. These are some good notes.” Bilbo mumbled hazily, his heart giving a sudden jerk when a tiny, thin-lipped, careful smile started tugging at the corners of Thorin’s mouth. Pride and awkwardness mingled on his face and Bilbo was quick to reactivate his sunniest smile in return.

Mistress Kira seemed to have given up on her teaching meanwhile; she was engaged in a low conversation with an awkward blonde boy who seemed to have been drained of all colour. The burly boy who had made room for Bilbo said in a challenging tone that nobody liked them, and Bilbo felt Thorin stiffen beside him.

As he looked over, he could see those beautiful eyes grow ever harder and colder in genuine fright and, when they snapped for a second into his direction, Bilbo felt a shiver of apprehension rustle through him like the North wind blew the leaves off the barren branches.

Looking up, Bilbo once again felt like Miss Kira was a godsend, for he could read the same horrified incomprehension in her eyes that he felt surging within his chest. She looked positively indignant when the class challenged her on not screaming at them, and Bilbo could see her hands clench and unclench rhythmically.

“How do you feel about dwarves?” Bilbo whispered to Thorin to distract the boy from the pain setting his gaze aflame.

“Dwarves? Yeah, they’re cool.” Thorin tried to hide his confusion, but failed miserably, which made Bilbo chuckle.

“Thorin and I will do a presentation about dwarves!” Bilbo announced to the teacher who nodded, slowly, her gaze heavy and warm on their faces. Bilbo knew that she had understood his meaning: I am here, and I am ready to roll up my sleeves and be a part of this.

Thorin’s head whipped around, his eyes huge now and, for a second, Bilbo could see behind the carefully closed-off façade of a slightly constipated and very ill-tempered young man; he saw the kind of desperate hopefulness that never failed to break hearts. Had Miss Kira seen that as well?

“Will we?” Thorin asked. “We shall, your notes tell me that you’re a smart fellow. You can come over to my house if you want to and we can work on it…or…we can go to the library.” Bilbo could have swallowed his own tongue in embarrassment; he had been overzealous once again.

“I’d invite you to mine, but…there’s a lot of people.” Thorin replied with a small chuckle that betrayed discomfiture but also a good deal of genuine humour. How interesting it would be to see more of that, Bilbo thought.

“Sure, as you wish.” Bilbo shrugged. He caught Miss Kira’s eyes and realised that he had stared at Thorin with maybe a tad too much intensity…somehow, he felt like Miss Kira saw everything. As it should be. She was a teacher after all.

She was not teaching though, she was observing the class with calm, interested eyes, trying to get a feeling for the children within it. Only, they were barely children, Bilbo was almost certain that he was one of the younger ones.

It was a small-town school, maybe they mixed different ages, he did not know, but it felt strange, nonetheless.

He was curious who that Mister Smaug had been and why he could sense a hint of pain in his classmates’ voices when they spoke about him. Miss Kira had picked up on that as well, he saw, as her own eyes darkened, and her lips quivered.

Healthy anger flashed in her eyes when she repeated that this man was gone. I am here, Bilbo heard between the lines. She was. And so was he.

Bilbo wracked his brains to find something witty and funny to say to that wondrous boy next to him who had relapsed into brooding silence, as if the mere mention of their former teacher was enough to ruin his mood.

“Did he really hate you?” Bilbo found himself asking and immediately, he was met with a withering stare.

“Yes…Things have happened and my family and I…we’re not the best regarded in this town.” Again, that flash of mortification that made his face look like it was carved from stone.

“Well, I am a newcomer and I’ll make up my own mind.” Bilbo said reassuringly. “And I don’t feel like Miss Kira hates you.” He added with a soft smile.

“Yet.” A resignation too old and deep in one so young hit Bilbo square in the chest and his heart gave another painful twitch; had he been less mindful of common rules of decency, he would have put his small, pudgy hand on top of the broad, callused one resting just a few inches away.

A knock interrupted their conversation and another teacher rushed in. He was impossibly tall and intimated that he had been worried that Miss Kira had been slaughtered by the class. Weird, Bilbo thought, as far as he had understood, it had been the class who had been subjected to the abuse of their former teacher and not the other way around.

He had been so focused on Thorin’s shy smiles and overwhelming beauty that he had only half-listened to accounts of a damaged car. What was a damaged car compared to a damaged soul?

Even though she was considerably shorter than her colleague, Miss Kira interposed herself between him and the class, shielding them with her own body and this instinct of a woman reminded Bilbo so much of his own brave mother that it made him miss her even more.

“Asshole.” Thorin muttered under his breath with barely held-back indignation.

“Miss Kira didn’t believe him. Listen, she volunteered to stay here.” Bilbo tried to assuage the flaming, helpless anger in the other boy’s face. “They’ll not keep her for long if she’s to be exposed to us all the time.” Thorin prophesied darkly.

Bilbo had no idea what had happened here, but, hitherto, Miss Kira seemed perfectly fine. She was presently reading a book and chuckling to herself.

“Mistress Kira…” The shy blonde boy handed her a drawing he had made, and she gushed over it for a few minutes, slowly drawing out confessions from him: he was a good athlete, swift and enduring, but he was nowhere near Thorin’s or Dwalin’s level when it came to brute force.

Dwalin must be that other tall boy, Bilbo thought, eyeballing the dark-haired grump with interest.

“Do you not intend to give us something to do?” That very same person then asked the teacher gruffly.

“Can you not find something for yourself to do?” She gave back pleasantly and turned back to her book, but her fingers gripped the cover a little tighter than before.

“He didn’t mean no offense, Mistress. It’s just…Mister Smaug didn’t like to see us idle.” The smaller boy in the last row provided an explanation. Bilbo thought that he looked incredibly gentle and maybe just a little shy.

“I shall teach you during my teaching hours and I can teach you now if that is your desire. Nonetheless, I think we should go out into the courtyard and get some fresh air. As we’re all bound to be here, we might as well have some fun.” Miss Kira closed her book and shoved it back into her satchel before getting up.

“You want to take us out?” The blonde boy, Legolas, seemed thunderstruck.

“You’re almost grown-ups, are you a flight risk?” Miss Kira cocked one eyebrow and pointed at the door.

“Bilbo and me, we’ll see how we fare with you lot, won’t we?” She turned to him, and Bilbo blushed again, hadn’t that been his exact thought?

He nodded enthusiastically and sniggered when she gave him a discreet wink before tilting her head into Thorin’s direction. “Why don’t you all tell me something about you?” She asked.

Silence.

Bilbo was not about to tell her that he was an orphan and that he had changed schools after a deplorable incident with another boy at his last placement. Only a few months more and he’d be officially emancipated and grown-up.

Maybe, he’d leave school and everything behind and start a new life somewhere else…

“Why don’t you tell us how you ended up in this miserable place to try to teach those everyone has given up on?” Dwalin hissed with unveiled cockiness.

So, that was why he had been put in this class, Bilbo thought, the headmaster thought him damaged beyond repair.

The teacher seemed to hesitate, then she said quietly: “Things have happened…and it is true that I have not chosen you, but I’ll keep you.” She smiled. “If they offer you a normal class, you’ll say: Nay, I’ll stick with the dumbasses?”

Clearly, Dwalin was not about to believe her and again, Bilbo could feel Thorin tense up beside him as they stepped into the courtyard and moved towards a big tree in the middle.

“No, I will not say anything of that sort. I’ll say thank you very much, but no thank you.” Miss Kira’s voice was sharp-edged now. “And why is that?” The blustering air seemed to falter and Dwalin looked a little deflated now.

“Because I don’t hate you and no matter how much you try to get me to, Master Dwalin, I shan’t.” She shrugged and sat down against the tree, taking out her book again and continuing to read as if nothing had happened.

“She’s something.” Bilbo whipped around, had Thorin actually laughed? Yes, yes, he could clearly see a row of white teeth between the stretched lips that looked so sinfully inviting to him.

He also could see the rest of the boy now, even though looking at it was the single worst idea he had ever had in his whole life it seemed to him.

Thorin was tall, a good deal taller than himself and he looked as solid as the tree their teacher was leaning against now.

“All brawn, no brains.” Thorin muttered when he caught the appraising gaze of the new student.

“Yeah, that’s what you want people to believe so they’d feel less intimidated, huh?” Bilbo replied automatically before he could reign in his loose tongue. Thorin stiffened, rubbing the back of his neck absent-mindedly before admitting: “No, that’s what…”

“If you bring up that Smaug again.” Bilbo warned him and Thorin fell silent. Sitting down on the patch of lawn surrounding the tree, Bilbo patted the grass next to him and was pleasantly surprised when the other boy plopped down immediately, a little too close for comfort maybe.

“Miss Kira and me, we are thoroughly fed up with your former teacher already, aren’t we, Miss Kira?” Bilbo felt the need to make this clear and to stand up for his potential friend and definite crush.

“He sounds like a brute.” Miss Kira replied without looking up from her book, but Bilbo could see her mouth curl into a smile behind the pages.

“You know nothing about us.” Thorin mumbled under his breath, honest regret tinging his voice.

“Then tell me, what makes you all so terrible?” Bilbo gathered his courage and placed his open palm on the clenched fist of the boy sitting next to him. “I am just not nice. Blondie is shite at reading. Dwalin has brawls, quite a few of them. Bombur is just fat. Redhead is from the wrong side of the tracks.”

“You’re very nice.” Bilbo demurred, which got him a wide-eyed stare from Thorin. “You think so?”

Bilbo nodded. “Ah, we’re just the kind of people other self-respecting people don’t like to look at.” Dwalin interjected as he passed by with a wooden plank that had detached from one of the nearby benches.

“Look at?” Bilbo thought that maybe, they had switched codes and language somewhere in the middle of the conversation because he could not understand what was going on.

“We make people uncomfortable.” Thorin supplied softly, brushing his long hair out of his face and pressing his lips into a thin line. “Miss Kira, do you know what’s going on?” Bilbo asked helplessly, because yes, Thorin’s looks made him uncomfortable but certainly not in the way suggested here.

“No idea, never seen more handsome teenagers in my life.” Miss Kira replied disinterestedly, her eyes still glued to her book. “Ah, I am not alone then. Are we in an alternate universe?” Bilbo replied, happy to have at least one other person here who was not part of this grotesque play of innuendo and stubborn misbelief.

“Have you seen my father?” Legolas spluttered and then pointed miserably at his scrawny frame hanging from a tree branch. “I have, what does that matter?” Now, Miss Kira looked up, questioning.

“We’re just…” Ori sighed. “You’re “just” nothing at all; you are what you are and, as far as I am concerned, there’s nothing wrong with that.” Miss Kira said with an air of finality and returned her attention to her book.

When the bell rang, Thorin gathered up his things and made to leave.

Bilbo wondered if he should say something; sucking on his lip, he searched for the right combination of words that would sound casual but also express how grateful he was for the care the other boy had taken today.

“Do you want to walk with me?” Thorin asked a particularly nice pebble sitting right next to Bilbo’s right foot.

Bilbo waited for a few seconds to see if the pebble would reply, after all, in a world where people would NOT want to look at Thorin it was about as probable that pebbles were alive and capable of speech.

“Or not…see you tomorrow.” Thorin mumbled hastily and turned away.

“Wait, wait…” Bilbo called out, not taking the time to put on his rucksack which now slapped painfully against his legs as he hastened after the tall, retreating figure. “I do, I do.” He exclaimed breathlessly.

“There are not that many roads around here…so…” Thorin explained sheepishly as they walked along the main road.

“Hey, idiot!” A stunning girl caught up to them, slinging her arms around Thorin’s neck and planting a wet kiss on his cheek. “How was the new teacher?” She asked as he slung his arm under her behind and lifted her apparently effortlessly up.

Mortification and a fierce jealousy rose in Bilbo. Of course, what had he expected? A boy that gorgeous would obviously have a girlfriend just as beautiful and boy oh boy, she was a marvel if ever Bilbo had seen one. Her hair was luscious and intricately braided and the way she laughed expectantly up at Thorin put the very sun to shame.

“We have a new student.” Thorin grumbled, still carrying the girl in one arm as if she weighed nothing at all.

Her radiant face turned to him, then edged sideways in a slow, deliberate motion. “Oh, he’s cute.” She half-whispered.

“Dís…” Thorin hissed warningly, and she lifted both her hands. “I’m just saying…Such a cute little nose and those warm, greenish eyes…” She purred into his ear.

Bilbo was scandalised to see Thorin pinch the girl in the thigh rather unceremoniously.

“Hi, I’m Dís.” She extended her hand to Bilbo over Thorin’s shoulder. Annoyance washed through Bilbo’s befuddled mind, not only was she stunning, no, she had to be nice and charming as well. So much for being a lucky boy.

“Bilbo…” He said, mustering up his polite smile that was just a tiny bit wobbly around the edges.

When he saw his street coming up, he muttered: “This is me. I’ll leave you with your girlfriend then, see you tomorrow.”

“Funny, I was about to say the same thing.” The girl grinned and plopped heavily onto the pavement when Thorin just let go of her. “Ouch, you idiotic moron of a…” She hissed and brought her fist down on his upper arm, which had next to no effect at all on the sturdy limb.

“That piece of wood remotely resembling a human is my brother.” She explained to Bilbo, and he could not suppress the sudden relief that, no doubt, showed on his face if her broad smile was anything to go by.

“He certainly looks sculpted.” Bilbo sighed and then, realising that he had said that out loud, he hurried towards his street. To his utter dismay, other footfalls seemed to follow his hasty retreat.

Damn!

“Hey, new boy, Bilbo, wait…” The girl, Bilbo realised, her voice a song and her steps a flurry of featherlight touches on the stony ground. “Wait, wait…So, you think my grumpy brother is cute, yeah?”

Her arm snaked into the crook of his as she sauntered alongside him, grinning up at him as if they had been friends forever. “He’s not really very dumb, he just likes to pretend he is, so people leave him alone.” She chattered on.

“I had figured as much, yeah.” Bilbo murmured, overwhelmed by the intrusive curiosity of the young girl.

“Leave him alone, Dís.” Thorin barked from behind, that note of utter mortification and humiliation making his voice sound even rougher and deeper than before. “You think he’s cute?” The girl whispered confidingly now.

“He’s…yeah, he’s cute.” Bilbo stammered under his breath, unable to withstand the onslaught of her good-humoured questioning. Did it even matter? It was obvious, everyone could see how fucking gorgeous that boy was.

“Want to go have an ice-cream with me and that cute brother of mine?” She invited him.

Bilbo looked at the house where his elderly cousin was certainly already waiting for him and then back at that glorious new classmate who just stood a few paces away, shuffling his feet awkwardly and skewering his bouncing sister with glares. It was good to make new friends, Bilbo told himself, it was what his cousin had encouraged him to do and if those friends turned out to be the most contrarily grumpy, awkwardly shy and blindingly handsome boy and his sister, who would fault poor Bilbo for it?

“Yeah sure, let me just…” Bilbo just threw his rucksack into the front yard and let Dís lead him back up the road.

@lordoftherazzles So, there's the second chapter with a bit more hurt than anticipated and a tiny bit of pining...If you're looking for me, I'm buried alive somewhere in the forest :S

#fanfiction #thorin oakenshield #bilbo baggins #AU #school AU #i have no idea what I'm doing #but I needed to get all of it out #I'll stick to RPF #Byyyyye!

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sineala · 4 years

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The Old Guard

This post comes to you courtesy of the generous support of one of my Patreon patrons, who wanted to know what I thought of The Old Guard. This post contains some spoilers for both the movie and the comics.

So, a few days after it came out, my wife and I watched The Old Guard on Netflix. Tumblr had said a bunch of good things about it, and both of us basically cut our fannish teeth on Highlander fandom so we already had an automatic buy-in for a story about immortals. I knew it was based on a comic by Greg Rucka, but I had not, at the time, read the comic, although I am now reading it in order to write this post.

The premise of the film is as follows: a four-person team of immortals (Andy, Joe, Nicky, and Booker) makes a living hiring themselves out as mercenaries, fighting for causes that they believe are right. They are successful at this basically because their grasp of tactics appears to be (1) die, followed by (2) come back to life and (3) murder your attackers who are no longer paying attention to you because they think you're dead. Honestly, at this point, you wouldn't really need to be very good at the actual fighting part, I would think, but the film establishes that all of them are -- especially Charlize Theron as Andy -- because presumably it wants you to watch action sequences of everyone being badass, which they are. So, yeah. They take all the good-guy mercenary jobs that no one else can do because it would kill them, which is not a problem for them!

Anyway! The group's routine is interrupted by two major events: the discovery of Nile Freeman, a new immortal, who is a Marine serving in Afghanistan who survives getting murdered; and also the fact that one of their employers, Copley (played by Chiwetel Eijofor, whom you may remember as Mordo in Doctor Strange) has sold them out to the movie's Actual Villain, a Big Pharma CEO named Merrick (played by the guy who played Dudley in the Harry Potter series), who has (as far as I can tell) been given instructions to play this role just like he's Martin Shkreli, who is interested in finding the secret of their immortality, and whom you can tell is evil because he has his name in giant letters on the side of his building.

ME: Look, it's the villain! I've found the villain! MY WIFE: Other than Tony Stark, who actually puts their names on buildings like that except villains? It's just villains, right? ME: Uh. The president? The president definitely does that. (We make horrified faces at each other.)

Because we are Extremely Pedantic, we also spent a lot of time picking at how the characters' names and language abilities match up to their stated background. They all know a lot of languages, as you might expect, and the movie was determined to get through them without subtitles, which is an interesting choice but also kind of left some linguistic plot holes.

For example, Joe and Nicky claim to have met each other in the Crusades, with Nicky as (presumably) a Crusader and Joe as (presumably) a Muslim occupant of the area, although the movie doesn't specify this; Wikipedia gives Joe's name as Yusuf Al-Kaysani, which would at least fit that. Nicky is clearly Italian (as is Luca Marinelli, the actor who portrays him) and when he speaks Italian to the rest of the group we see that he definitely speaks modern Italian as spoken in Rome... which is absolutely, definitely not the language he grew up speaking, given that, among other things, Wiki lists the character's full name as Nicolò di Genova. I don't know if the writer of the screenplay (who I see now is also Greg Rucka) didn't know how much Italian dialects had changed in the last thousand years, if he thought that was good enough to be a nod to the character, or if there's some kind of backstory that didn't make it in where every so often Nicky decides to learn a modern dialect and keep his hand in, and also decides that that's the language he wants to use among his friends who would presumably understand several different dialects.

Also, the reveal that Andy's real name was in fact "Andromache of Scythia" was indeed badass but was slightly undercut by my wife yelling BUT THE SCYTHIANS DIDN'T SPEAK GREEK at the television.

Additionally, I feel like the movie could perhaps have been aware of the ways it chose to label on-screen locations, in which the countries were spelled out in large fonts with the cities above them. Places like LONDON, ENGLAND got their entire names spelled out, as did small French villages whose names I can no longer remember, but I guess AFGHANISTAN and MOROCCO and SOUTH SUDAN have zero cities, huh? However, the end of the movie did take place in PARIS which I guess unlike London is its own country now.

So the actual plot features the group of immortals trying to explain this whole immortality thing to Nile while being on the run from the people who are trying to turn them into Big Pharma, who wants to capture them and exploit the secret of their immortality. This is where it falls down a little for me, because the worldbuilding... gets a little shaky. They dream about each other when they're apart. Okay. Why? Sometimes they just stop being immortal and lose the capacity to heal and are dead in their next battle. Why? Why do they even exist? I just... wanted more answers than the movie gave me, and the pacing where I kept expecting there to be explanations wasn't there. There were a couple of scenes where Nile sat there in silence contemplating the fact that she would outlive her loved ones and my brain kept trying to insert Queen's "Who Wants to Live Forever?" Granted, the Highlander canon explanation for immortality is deeply, deeply weird, but at least it tried. No, I can't believe I'm defending Highlander II either.

The characters, too, could have been more fleshed out. The bulk of the character development is given to Andy and Nile, and I'm not complaining about that -- they were great -- but Joe and Nicky and Booker only got maybe a few lines each. They would have felt so much more real if they'd just had a little bit more to them. Also I didn't understand Copley's arc at all, but saying more about that would be spoilery. I do like that they have definitely set themselves up for a sequel.

But even with what we got, there's a lot to love about the characters. If you're here for canonically queer characters, you will enjoy Nicky and Joe, who have been in a relationship for probably about a thousand years. They are minor characters as far as the overall plot goes, but what they do have is lovely, and there is a romantic declaration between them at one point that is absolutely beautiful and possibly the most fervent love declaration I can remember seeing in a movie since maybe... ever. If you also like your queerness more subtextual, though Andy is never portrayed as explicitly queer, her past friendship with a fellow immortal Quynh was shown as very intense, as is the role she takes here mentoring Nile into the world of immortality. Also she has a double-bladed axe (yes, we kept yelling BRING ME MY MAN-KILLING AXE at the television) and as we all know, the double-bladed labrys has in modern times become a symbol for lesbians. So there's that.

In addition to the characters of color who play important roles here -- Nile was my personal favorite, but there's also Joe and Copley and (in flashback) Quynh -- there's a lot of diversity behind the cameras as well, or so the internet informs me. The director (Gina Prince-Bythewood) is the first Black woman to direct a superhero movie, and the same is true of her editor (Terilyn Shropshire). And, furthermore, apparently 85% of the post-production crew were women. They didn't have to do that, and yet they did. It was nice.

I don't watch a whole lot of action movies these days because I usually find R-rated violence too... violent, but I found myself really liking almost all of the action sequences here. None of them felt gratuitous, and a lot of them really focused on the physicality of the immortals fighting in a way I liked, because I feel like people are probably going to fight differently if they know they can survive every single hit, and I think the movie portrayed that in a way that a lot of superhero comics and movies don't. My favorite fight scene is definitely the one between Nile and Andy at the beginning, when Andy has trapped her on a plane and it's extremely close-quarters fighting and also extremely brutal. They don't stop basically until Nile breaks enough bones that she can't get up anymore, because until then she's going to keep trying, which is both kind of horrifying and a great character note. And they didn't film it like it was a Sexy Catfight! It was so good.

Also, the soundtrack is really good, and I've found myself streaming it on Spotify all week. I didn't know any of the songs in the movie, but there's a lot of hip-hop and -- okay, I don't even know if this is a genre? -- specifically a lot of hip-hop with an electronic/industrial sort of beat, which I thought was really great and livened up the fight scenes even more; "Going Down Fighting" did a really good job getting me in the mood for the final confrontation with the villain, and... yeah, it's all good. Someone made a playlist on Spotify that will come up if you search for it.

So, yeah. It's on Netflix. It's not without flaws (mostly, explaining how the hell immortality works, and a couple of pacing issues), but it's a really satisfying superhero movie.

That's the movie. Onto the comic, which I am just now starting to read as I write these words. Whee!

So The Old Guard: Opening Fire is a 2017 five-issue Image Comics series written by Greg Rucka, with art by Leandro Fernández, and there's also a 2019 sequel, The Old Guard: Force Multiplied, by the same creative team, also with five issues. I have not actually read any of Rucka's work before now because he is mostly famous for his DC work, but I have heard good things about it, especially his Wonder Woman run.

Anyway. The art is very stylized, with a minimal color palette, and it's very pretty but I honestly found it hard to parse sometimes. Many of the characters have very weird noses. Yes, noses. It's basically mostly in Andy's and Nile's POVs, like the movie, and as far I can tell Andy is explicitly queer, because unless I am entirely misreading this panel in issue #1, here she is in bed with a woman in one panel. Whee. Also there are some nice epigraphs at the beginning of each issue.

Okay, so, the plot here is basically the plot of the movie. There is still no explanation of why immortality exists. But even so, there are some fun character moments that didn't make it into the movie -- for example, Andy saying smartphones are too hard to use and she liked the old ones better, only for the rest of her team to say that she couldn't use those either. I think you get a better sense of Andy's world-weariness in the comic. There are also other, now-dead Immortals mentioned, like Noriko, who "went overboard off the Horn." Quynh is not one of them; Quynh basically is Noriko, which is because they cast a Vietnamese actress who asked if her character could be Vietnamese too, which seems perfectly reasonable to me. But anyway, in the comics, she's Noriko. Weirdly, Andy's full name, as she tells Nile when they meet, is Andronika ("man-victory") rather than Andromache ("man-battle," in case you were wondering); I think the movie made a better choice because Ἀνδρονίκα has exactly two attestations in the Lexicon of Greek Personal Names, whereas Ἀνδρομάχη has all that shiny name recognition of being shared by the wife of Hector and also the queen of the Amazons and will ping viewers as a Greek name, and therefore ancient, even if it can't be the name she was born with. (There are five for "Andronike" and four more for "Andromacha" so they actually have about the same number of total attestations, as far as I can tell, when you consider the alpha/eta alternation in how various Greek dialects mark feminine nouns.)

(Yes, you totally wanted a review by someone who looks up character names in the LGPN. Don't lie.)

Plotwise, Andy gets all of the initial exposition in for Nile before they get to the safehouse, which Copley has already gotten to before they get back, so Booker is bleeding on the floor and Nile doesn't get to meet Joe or Nicky at this time, and I am also glad they changed that for the movie. But, don't worry, Joe and Nicky's romantic declaration is still in here. We also get Andy pondering the last time she was in love, with a human who grew old.

Oh, and we get Andy's age: 6,732. And by issue #5 her name has changed to Andromache, because what even is continuity? I guess Andromache is her name now.

So Nile finally meets Joe and Nicky when she rescues them and also, uh, that plot point where Andy might die? Totally not a thing here. Nope. And no "surprise! even more immortals!" end-credits moments either.

Basically, I feel like every change they made to the script for the movie really strengthened the story, and even though I thought the movie could have used more character moments, it's way better than how the characters are separated for even longer in the comic. Nile rescuing the team means a lot more when she has met them before, you know?

So Force Multiplied starts us off with Andy, Joe, Nicky, and Nile, because Booker is still on time-out. They are in the middle of a car chase, and Booker's off getting himself kidnapped by someone who wants to know where the others are. The villain of the piece turns out to be Noriko, who is still alive, whom Booker had never had a chance to meet and apparently had never heard of. So, basically, a lot like the Quynh plot that the movie is teasing.

Overall it's a little less action-filled than the first one, which had multiple splash pages of nothing but violence; this one is a little more character-driven and explores the relationship, such as it is, between Andy and Noriko, as well as Nile coming to terms with her immortality, as well as with what everyone else has done over the years. It does have a bunch of violence at the end, though.

I don't want to spoil the ending, but I definitely wasn't expecting where that was heading. There's apparently going to be a third volume, and I am looking forward to it, whenever it exists.

(Although, now that I think about it, the ending is a lot like a fan-favorite moment of Highlander: The Series, but I think if I said which episode you would know exactly what the ending was.)

So, yeah! The Old Guard! I can't say as I feel particularly fannish about it -- there's nothing that makes me yearn to fill in the gaps in canon -- but the movie was really good and you should see it. And you should read the comics if you're into that.

#posts i actually wrote

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ryqoshay · 3 years

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Tri-Arame: Feelings Astray

Primary Pairing Trio: YuuAyuSetsu Words: ~1.5k Rating: G Time Frame: Something like their 4th or 5th week of college Story Arc: Stand Alone

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Author’s Note: Some practice drama as well as setup for future stuff.

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“Ne, Ayumu, Setsuna-chan.” Yuu said, turning around on her piano bench. “Would you mind listening to this for me?”

“Of course.” Ayumu and Setsuna replied, practically in unison.

Yuu smiled, stood, and walked over to Ayumu to hand her a set of headphones before giving a set to Setsuna and returning to the keyboard.

The three girls had spent the bulk of the afternoon in Yuu’s room, a bit of a change from their established habit of gathering in Ayumu’s room. This was actually their third day here, as Yuu was working on composing a new piece and needed to use her keyboard. There wasn’t space to move the device to Ayumu’s room so Ayumu and Setsuna mutually decided to keep her company. As Yuu lacked a kotatsu for her guests to gather around, she let Setsuna use her desk to study and Ayumu was sitting on the couch taking a break from her own studies to play a game with Rina on her phone.

Ayumu sent a message to her gaming companion and closed the app before donning the headset. She nodded to Yuu to indicate that she was ready. The twintailed girl smiled again and turned on her bench.

After a deep breath, Yuu positioned her fingers above the keys and began to play. Music poured out of the tiny speakers into Ayumu’s ears as she leaned back and let the experience wash over her. By the gods, she loved listening to Yuu play. Ever since her childhood friend had changed her class course to music back in high school, getting to be part of the audience for small, private concerts had become one of Ayumu’s favorite pastimes. Even if the song was still a work in progress, like today.

Movement off to Yuu’s side caught Ayumu’s attention. Setsuna had sat up straighter, closed her eyes and lifted her chin. Was she…? Ayumu slid one side of her headphones off. Yes, Setsuna was indeed humming along, adding a melody atop Yuu’s piece. Did she already know the tune?

“La la la… Lalala laaa~…” Setsuna apparently was not content to merely hum and began vocalizing instead. No actual lyrics, just the sound of her voice.

And it was beautiful. The harmony was perfect. Ayumu wanted to simply sit and bear witness, but she found herself wondering if Yuu could hear Setsuna as well. She was about to stand and either try to get Yuu’s attention or discreetly move one side of her headphones off like she had done herself. But then Yuu’s hand shot up and quickly did exactly that, barely missing a note. Oh, good. Ayumu relaxed and continued to enjoy the performance.

Then, all too soon, it came to an end.

Setsuna opened her eyes as though coming out of a trance. She blinked and stiffened as she noticed that Yuu’s headphones were half off and it was obvious she had heard her. Pink began to dust her cheeks.

“I’m sorry, Yuu-san!” Setsuna blurted out. “I didn’t mean to interfere! I just couldn’t help…”

“That was amazing, Setsuna-chan!” Yuu interrupted excitedly.

“Eh?”

“I hadn’t even considered adding another melody like that, but it was perfect!”

“It really was amazing.” Ayumu agreed, earning a toothy grin from Yuu and a more bashful smile from Setsuna.

“Do you think maybe you could write lyrics to this?” Yuu continued.

“Me? Lyrics?” Setsuna asked.

“Well you just came up with that lovely melody. Surely you could put some words to it, right?”

“Maybe.”

“Obviously I would be happy to help. But, hey, if we do that, maybe you could even use it as a single!”

“Oh, uhm…” Setsuna’s blush deepened. “I wouldn’t want to interfere with your schoolwork.”

“It’s fine.” Yuu assured. “The assignment is just to compose an original work, there’s nothing against turning around and letting a professional idol add lyrics and use it herself.”

“You’d really be alright with that?”

“Of course!” Yuu was practically bouncing in her seat. “It’d be like old times back in the idol club, except now Setsuna-chan is a professional idol.”

Like old times…

“I’d like that.” Setsuna’s smile became more natural as her blush began to fade. “It really is a wonderful work and it would be an honor to sing to it. Thank you, Yuu-san.”

As the two started talking about potential themes for the lyrics, Ayumu found her own thoughts drifting.

There was no doubt in Ayumu’s mind as to Setsuna’s musical prowess, specifically when it came to utilizing her voice. But still, to predict and adjust on the fly like she had just done also implied an implicit trust in Yuu and incredible knowledge about her style of composition. And that was a bond Ayumu simply did not share with Yuu. Or Setsuna for that matter.

Sure, back in high school, Ayumu had done well enough as a school idol, when it came to performing. But she was nowhere near as active as either Yuu or Setsuna when it came the creation of the songs they would sing or the choreography they would use.

Ayumu’s contributions to the club were more of general support. She helped the costume club occasionally with outfit design and creation. She often helped the baking club make snacks for the other idols. And of course, she very much enjoyed being the go-to individual for help with styling her friends’ hair before Live performances or photoshoots, particularly for those with longer hair, like Kanata, Shizuku and Setsuna.

But that often meant that she was doing something for the club other than either Yuu or Setsuna. And they were often doing something together, like when they were spearheading the efforts to organize the School Idol Festival. So, of course they would develop that sort of bond.

And nowadays, they had bonded over many other things as well. They geeked out over idols and anime, often to the point of seeming to forget Ayumu’s presence; not unlike right now. And sure, Yuu had taken to snuggling into Ayumu in bed, but Setsuna seemed to cling to Yuu with a desperation that neither did with her. Even their morning meeting on the balcony, they were more often next to one another. Who knows, the next thing they’ll bond over might end up being cooking.

Was Ayumu getting in their way?

No. That couldn’t be the case.

Both actively sought her out for drying their hair whenever they washed it. Yuu was very open about that fact that she had no desire to go to any hairstylist other than her, for cuts, dyeing or anything else. And while Setsuna hadn’t said as such out loud, her actions seemed to imply that she felt similar.

Both girls were also vocal in their gratitude for all of the cooking Ayumu did for them. And knowing how much they enjoyed her food was something in which Ayumu did take some pride. Not too much, as she knew there were far better cooks than her out in the world. But if the two people she loved most were happy with it, then that was enough to make her happy.

And then there was the fact that Yuu was quite insistent on walking to class with Ayumu, despite having a later schedule. And Setsuna always greeted her enthusiastically when she arrived home. Although she greeted Yuu the same way. And Yuu greeted Setsuna the same way as well… Perhaps that wasn’t the best example.

Even the private piano performances had started out only being for Ayumu. But then Setsuna started to join in regularly. And while Ayumu was certainly happy when the three of them were together, there started to be more and more times like now. More and more times that the other two seemed to forget Ayumu was present.

Maybe I should just move out and let them be a happy cou…

Wait, where did that thought come from?

Ayumu physically shook her head as though it might help rid herself of that thought.

“Ayumu?”

“Mm?” Ayumu blinked to find Yuu had turned her attention to her.

“You alright?”

“I’m fine. I just…”

Ayumu was interrupted by the sound of Setsuna’s stomach growling. Loudly. Yuu immediately started laughing while Setsuna’s face flushed adorably.

Ayumu held back a laugh of her own. “I suppose it is about that time.” She said, checking her phone. “I’ll go make dinner.”

“I’ll come with.” Yuu said, bouncing up from her bench.

“Oh, I’ll be fine.” Ayumu assured. “Please continue to work here if you want.”

“I’m good here for now.” Yuu shook her head. “And I need to do a few things on my laptop anyway.”

Ayumu noticed Setsuna close her own laptop and stand as well. “I’ll come as well.” The raven-haired girl said with a smile.

“Mm.” Ayumu agreed with a nod and headed for the door.

So, Ayumu and Setsuna had decided to keep Yuu company in her room. And now Yuu and Setsuna wanted to keep Ayumu company in hers. That meant they all wanted to stay together, right?

Yes. That had to be the case.

Ayumu thought to herself as she led the way back to her room. It was fine. That strange thought from before should just be forgotten.

Everything was fine.

Right…?

----------

Author’s Note Continued in Followup Post

#YuuAyuSetsu #Takasaki Yuu #Yuki Setsuna #Uehara Ayumu #Tri-Arame #Love Live Nijigasaki #fanfic

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red-radish14 · 3 years

Text

How To Get Away With Murder

Authors Note:

No real-life acts were committed to persuading me to write this story, it is all fictional and written off the top of my head, no mental or physical attributes were caused to have premeditated planning on this, this felt like a very interesting story to write, there is graphic detail in this story if sensitive please do not read.

If you or someone you know is/are thinking about committing an act of violence upon you or others please call 911 and get help immediately!! They will be able to find the right resources and betterments for you!!

Thanks and reviews are always appreciated!! :)

Word Count: 2.2k

Average Life for an average girl:

December 31st, 1979

7:01pm

Hi, I'm Blaire, Blaire Helms, thinking that no one is going to read any of this I have made a resolution to start journaling my life. Even if no one ever saw this, it would be nice to look back and read what I had in mind for the years to come. Let me start out with who I am. I'm a 17-year-old girl from Topeka Kansas, I live with my mother and twin brothers in an apartment downtown. My brothers, Jack and Elliot, are star players on the high school football team. And well, my mother, she is a waiter at the cafe on the main street. We don't have much here at home, and having to scrounge for money to buy a $15 journal had been a struggle for the past few weeks. Me on the other hand, I'm 5'6" with long brown hair and big green eyes. School before winter break was tough, I get bullied a lot, and making friends is a bit of a challenge for me. My brothers don't make it any easier for me either, they sometimes even send random classmates to come to bully me in the smoking pit. Yeah yeah, I know, before you get all Nabby about me smoking I know that it's bad for you, but, I'm 17 how bad could it get. Being a junior in high school isn't all that rough though. I'm an average C student with average teen life. To end on a good note, I finally had enough money saved for the dance on the 13th. Well, it is a welcome back dance for all the kids who passed 1st semester. I just hope no trouble endured like last year, having my head dumped into the punch bowl was not pleasant. Expect more from me in the future. Until then.

-Blaire Helm

7:56pm

Smoking Pit Disaster:

January 7th, 1980

5:23pm

Today was hell, when I woke up my brother Elliot had clogged the toilet and flooded the whole bathroom, and just left it there, I was always the last one to leave the house and there was no time to clean it up. I had to get ready at school, about 15 minutes later and once I had left the restroom it was straight to the smoking pit to skip 1st period. There were always a few girls down there and they weren't very talkative, they always just sat and smoked for the whole hour, no breaks in between. As I was smoking you literally won't believe who came down to bother me, Mason Palmer. Mason was the hottest guy in school, he was also the biggest jerk of the school. He was famously popular among anyone in the city and always had a few remarks in his sleeve. after a few minutes of smoking and getting paper balls profusely thrown at me, Mason had jumped down into the pit and proceeded to taunt me. After the taunting, he had kicked my side causing me to drop my cigarette onto my leg. He then left laughing at his buddies. About 30 minutes after the beating I had left to go to 2nd period. Walking through the hallway trying to cover the burn hole in my jeans, I ran into Mason. He had grabbed my backpack and threw it at one of his buddies that had taken off with the bag. He then pushed me down and walked away, leaving me with no supplies, and I had returned to the smoking pit for the remainder of the day. Hopefully, this week would get better before the dance on the 13th. If it doesn't, I'll just have to stay home. But, until next time.

6:17pm

- Blaire Helm

Sam's Club Shopping Spree:

January 11th, 1980

9:12pm

Today I had to go shopping for bulk food supplies at Sam's Club. It was the cheapest place where we could go to buy a lot of items for less money. It was only the 2nd time I had to go shopping there and I was bored out of my mind. As I was shopping today I picked up the usual items we needed. Macaroni, ramen, chips and lots more. In the back of my mind somewhere I needed to get some cleaning supplies, I don't know why but I bought some anyway. a 4 pack of bleach bottles, 16-pack sponges, 2 3-gallon mop buckets, 8 pack of paper towels, and some sterile gloves. I felt like I needed to clean the whole house. After I was done shopping I decided to stop by Walgreens to pick up some pain killers for my back, it's been so horrible lately, they'll knock me out in a second if I'm not careful. Once I got home, I left the cleaning supplies in my car until I needed them and brought the other groceries inside. Being usual teenage boys my brothers decided to help none and pretend to be each other for a day, I guess it's a normal thing identical twins decide to do. Oh, and about Mason, he hasn't shown up to school for the past 2 days because he's been too busy suit shopping for the dance. This isn't prom, I guess he's wanting to fuck some chick in the back while everyone else is sipping on watered-down punch. Well, I'll let you guys know how the dance goes, all I'm wearing is a hand-me-down loose tee with some black jeans. Wish me luck.

10:02pm

- Blaire Helm

Till Death Do Us Part:

January 13th, 1980

5:43 am

Guys, I'm in the middle of fucking nowhere right now. Why is this happening, this can't be happening? It started with the stupid fucking dance. I walked into the gym, grabbed my punch, and boom Mason was right there, he had poured his punch all over me and pushed me causing me to slip and fall hitting my head. I had gotten up asking him what he wanted from me. Suddenly he grabbed my wrist and pulled me to the side of the bleachers. He had pinned me against the wall and told me I had to do whatever he wanted me to do. I had agreed and asked him if I could run out to my car to get dried, he agreed and after some time I was back into the gym. Mason had gotten a new cup of punch and came over to dance. I had played around and danced along with him. Mason left to go pee after some dancing and asked me to hold his cup. While Mason was gone, I had grabbed some of those painkillers from the car and slipped some into his drink. Mason had returned and started drinking his punch, fast, like he was dying of dehydration. He started falling asleep so, I asked him if he wanted to go to the storage closet to have some fun. He had followed me in there, pinned me down, and I stabbed him. I had must've stabbed him 100 times, blood was everywhere. I panicked, I had shut off the lights and locked the door. It must've been hours but no one looked for us, once the last person left the school I knew what I needed to do with Mason. I had dragged his body out to my car and laid him in the backseat on top of my wet clothes, all of his blood had drained out onto the floor of the gym. I had grabbed the cleaning supplies I bought from Costco earlier and cleaned. it must've taken me an hour. I had grabbed all the trash and stuffed it into the back of my car. The closet was as clean as it was before the murder. And now I'm out here in the middle of fucking Kansas, 125 miles from where I live. Now, what do I fucking do?

7:24 am

- Blaire Helm

Pitched Out:

January 14th, 1980

3:36 pm

I had decided I needed to do something with this body or it was going to rot in my car minute by minute. I had stopped at a gas station to pick up 30 lbs of raw meat and some new clothes without being questioned and afterward, I had gone a bit off-roading miles away from the road and found a place to park and deal with it. My mother loved to Garden and so happens the day before she had left most of her gardening stuff in the car, so I got to digging. I had created dirt stairs and dug 12ft down. I had stripped Mason down to his skin and set his clothes aside. I had placed him into the hole. I covered him up with about 6 ft of dirt, and placed the raw rotting meat above, covering it with the remaining dirt, patted it out, and made it look natural. I had found some school papers from my car and tumbleweeds laying around to create a fire. I stripped down to my skin and proceeded to throw everything I had used to kill Mason into the fire, letting it burn. After the fire was done burning I picked up the ashes and brought them with me back to a small pond a few miles down the road. I had thrown the ashes into the pond, watching them disintegrate, and jumped in the pond myself to wash up all the blood. While I was in the pond I had realized what I've done. While drying off I burst into tears and begged God for forgiveness. Afterward, I had set myself on home, sitting here now at a gas station, only 25 miles away from my house.

4:17 pm

- Blaire Helm

The Party:

January 17th, 1980

8:57 pm

A watch party had started for Mason and I had joined along with them in search for him. I knew what I did, and I knew nobody was going to ever find him. I know that because it's a fact. The rotting meat will attract the dogs, the police dig it up and realize it's just some animal remains, and continue searching. There are no fingerprints or clothes to find because they are burnt. The ashes are dissolved into nothingness. And it's in the middle of Kansas in a desert, anyone could've done it. The school gym is cleaned like brand new, it's all planned. After the search party, I had stopped by Mason's house to see how his parents were doing. His mother and father could not stop crying. Soon I was "crying" and told them I needed to leave to get home to do some homework. I had gotten home and lost my mind, I was upset that I did such a thing. I had started laughing when realizing that I had gotten away, a murder undetected, a master plan successfully accomplished. But for how long.

9:10 pm

- Blaire Helm

Dumped Down:

April 18th, 1980

1:02 pm

It's been 3 months since I've killed Mason, the parties are over, and everyone is moving on like he was still out there missing. I knew what had happened, I've visited where I had buried him a few times since that night, It upsets me. A lot is going through my head lately. One of these days or years they are going to find him and I will be fucked, I can't live knowing I had killed a man. So sitting here in my bedroom I've come up with a plan, We are going to paint the walls, to have a fresh new start. I will load up the paintbrush and get to painting. The room is going to have small specks of red, it suits me best. But I've got to admit that I lived my life up to its fullest. Lighting up a cigarette and placed the paintbrush in the palm of my hand. I'm gonna set it down and I'll let you know how the room turns out tomorrow. I had left a note on the counter for my mother and my brothers, it's basically telling them to not come in until the paint dries, well I'll write later, Goodbye.

3:46 pm

- Blaire Helm

Roses:

Blaire Helm

Sex: F

DOB: 08/23/1963 (17)

Hgt: 5'6"

Eyes: Green

Cause of death: Suicide

DOD: 04/18/1980

We had responded to a report of a teenage suicide yesterday night, a distraught mother had dialed 911 crying about her daughter being dead. When police arrived at the scene it was in fact Blaire Helms in her small apartment bedroom. She was lying on her left side with a gunshot wound to her right side of her face, the shotgun laying behind her back and the walls dusted in blood. No one knows why Blaire had committed suicide, people usually called her sweet and caring. No suicide note was found and police are still investigating the scene of the crime.

Drug reports:

Cotinine: 45mg

Alcohol: 1.4oz

Adderall: 75mg

Tylenol: 1200mg

Subject transferred to autopsy room for opening, nothing found within the patient, the mother will soon arrive to finish the paperwork.

- M.D Green

Another Author's Note:

I really hope you guys enjoyed this story, I spent only a few hours on it so it's not professionally done, again pls call 911 if you or someone you think might consider suicide or committing a crime. Thanks again, take care

- L.L

#tw suicice #depressing post #murder #story time #like wtf

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bleachbigbang · 4 years

Text

Bleach Big Bang 2021 Fic Summaries!

Writing samples for each fic attached.

Fic #01 || Sample

Rating: Explicit

Content Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply

Main Characters: Kurosaki Ichigo, Urahara Kisuke, Aizen Sousuke

Main Pairings: Urahara Kisuke/Kurosaki Ichigo || Aizen Sousuke/Kurosaki Ichigo

Additional Warnings: BDSM, suicidal thoughts, probably bad self-care, dark thoughts, bad BDSM etiquette, Dom/sub

No matter which mastermind stood behind the plan, when Lady Fate is a bitch who doesn't like to follow what others say.

They planned to go back and change the past, to have a better future.

They planned everything carefully, three masterminds, and a brute force.

They planned but everything went wrong.

Only one person arrived back in time in another timeline. He was alone, without his soul mate, without any help from the masterminds. Will he be able to change the future alone? Will Lady Bitch Fate let him? But wait... Why is that thing there? That shouldn't be possible!

The beginning already changed, why is it there? Why does it still happen?

“Foolish Mortal, there are things that will remain the same, no matter what you do. Can you change the future without knowing what are the invariable happenings in time? Will you be able to find your happiness, while you keep helping others to find theirs? I am curious about it, but Mortal, I’m Lady Fucking Fate, I love chaos.”

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Fic #02 || Sample

Rating: Teen

Content Warnings: Major Character Death

Main Characters: Ichigo Kurosaki, Ogichi Shirosaki (Hollow Ichigo), Grimmjow Jeagerjaques

Main Pairings: Ichigo Kurosaki/Ogichi Shirosaki

Additional Warnings: Reincarnation. Major character death might happen more than once. Heavy cultural reference and possible historical manipulation, mesoamerican focused. ((AKA: if you're racist/have trouble with inaccuracies, think twice))

He doesn't know why was he born into this world. His life has been nothing but pain, always feeling out of place and never in sync with his people and "friends", and once he became an exile, he really felt like there was nothing left for him in this life. That was until he met the God that would give meaning to his existence, and become his reason to fight. "Shiro", now Ichtalcoatl's warrior, feels like everything he has endured was for this moment, and he wouldn't exchange it for anything.

Except, all evil happens for a reason, and there are many truths to be uncovered from Shiro's past, giving meaning to this eternal karma and the never-ending cycle of pain. This is the tale of the final trial Shiro must endure to be worthy of the Sun itself.

Gods/Demigods AU, ft. Quetzalcoatl Ichigo.

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Fic #03 || Sample

Rating: Teen

Content Warnings: Graphic Depictions of Violence

Main Characters: Ichigo Kurosaki, Rukia Kuchiki, Renji Abarai, Byakuya Kuchiki, Kenpachi Zaraki, Visored, Grimmjow Jeagerjaques, Ulquiorra Cifer, Aizen Sousuke, Other Bleach characters

Main Pairings: None / Undecided

Additional Warnings: Swearing, Mild Violence, Mild Gore, Canon Divergence

Ichigo is special, he's always been. From the moment he managed to become a Soul reaper, to when he obtained unlikely powers and achieved inhuman deeds, he's always had that natural talent to go beyond the limits. However, his true strength lies not in his latent abilities, but in the charm he wasn't even aware he had. His ultimate power was not his bankai, nor his hollowfication; it was his power to move people's hearts, sway them towards him, and somehow make those who wanted to kill him become his most loyal allies. Or, instead of merely befriending everyone he fought, Ichigo unknowingly builds an army of people who will die for him and change destiny itself in order to protect their one, true king.

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Fic #04 || Sample

Rating: Teen

Content Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply

Main Characters: Kurosaki Ichigo, Kisuke Urahara, Yasutora Sado

Main Pairings: None / Undecided

Additional Warnings: Teacher AU, DID, Alternating POVs, Supernatural Elements, No Shinigami AU

Ichigo moves to Karakura after an abrupt shift in career. There, he meets faces both familiar (his friend Chad is teaching music) and not (he doesn’t know what’s up with that Urahara guy but for a maths teacher he's not that bad). As the newest teacher in the school, and the least experienced at it, Ichigo decides not to make waves and to let himself fade into the background. Unfortunately, his friendship with the maths teacher seems to drag him into plots that are far outside of anything he’s ever known.

NOTE: I'm really flexible as far as the plot goes and willing to work with the artist if there are any particular elements they'd like to incorporate

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Fic #05 || Sample

Rating: Teen

Content Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply

Main Characters: Kisuke Urahara, Rukia Kuchiki, Tessai Tsukabishi, Yoruichi Shihōin, Ichigo Kurosaki

Main Pairings: No romantic relationships; Pre-UraYoruTess;

Kisuke has feelings for both Tessai and Yoruichi but that won't develop into anything during this fic though I have plans for UraYoruTess & TatsuHime in a sequel.

Additional Warnings: N/A

There was a soul reaper who was assigned to Karakura town. There was a human who could see ghosts. There was a hollow who wanted to eat. Thus, the sword of fate fell, But the sword did not hit the ground when the soul reaper transferred her powers to the human. For there was a shopkeeper who still had a decision to make Kisuke decides to tell Rukia about the hogyoku and Aizen. They start working together to take down Aizen.

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Fic #06 || Sample

Rating: Teen

Content Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply

Main Characters: Urahara Kisuke, Kurosaki Ichigo, Hirako Shinji

Main Pairings: Shinji Hirako/Urahara Kisuke, Urahara Kisuke/Kurosaki Ichigo

Additional Warnings: N/A

After the Visored were changed, Kisuke had a multitude of theories. One of those was that they might still be contagious. A slip during training proves that theory, and now he has to get his own hollow side under control with the help of his friends. As always, that's easier said than done, given that Kisuke's hollow is as odd as he is.

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Fic #07 || Sample

Rating: Mature

Content Warnings: Graphic Depictions of Violence, Major Character Death

Main Characters: Ichigo Kurosaki, Hollow Ichigo

Main Pairings: Past Hollow Ichigo/Kurosaki Ichigo

Additional Warnings: Flashbacks, Heavy Betrayal, Psychological Trauma, PTSD, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Toxic Relationship

Ichigo -- or what he assumes his name is -- doesn't expect to wake up to the poverty-stricken Rukongai. Without a clue as to where he is or how he ended up there, he meets another amnesiac lost soul, who calls himself Shiro (name pending tbh). However, lurking beneath the two of them is a storm of betrayal waiting to be unleashed.

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Fic #08 || Sample

Rating: Teen

Content Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply

Main Characters: Ichigo Kurosaki, Hollow Ichigo

Main Pairings: Hollow Ichigo/Kurosaki Ichigo

Additional Warnings: Very fluff, much cute

“We've been childhood friends all this time. I think I would know when you aren't enjoying yourself with someone,” Shiro stated, tilting his head further into his palm to assess Ichigo's reaction.

“It's ... It's not going to be like that, okay? Maybe he'll turn out better than you think,” He countered, causing Shiro to sigh under his breath. While Ichigo hesitantly stuffed the thoughtless gift from his new boyfriend in his bag, Shiro could only watch. He couldn't help but wonder when it'd be his turn to make him happy.

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Fic #09 || Sample

Rating: Explicit

Content Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply

Main Characters: Momo Hinamori

Main Pairings: Momo Hinamori/Izuru Kira/Shuuhei Hisagi/Renji Abarai

Additional Warnings: Alcoholism, Past Abusive Relationships.

Continuation of All that draws us together (AO3)

Momo knows all the ups and downs of life and love, yet she rides it again and again. Sometime after the battle against Wandenreich, Momo invites Izuru out.

From there begins a maelstrom of confusion hurt, and eventually, the loving partnership of her, Izuru, Renji, and Shuuhei.

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Fic #10 || Sample

Rating: Mature

Content Warnings: Graphic Depictions of Violence

Main Characters: Grimmjow Jaegerjaquez, Ichigo Kurosaki

Main Pairings: Grimmjow Jaegerjaquez/Kurosaki Ichigo

Additional Warnings: Body Horror, Body Dysmorphia

Ichigo is the most advanced CyberLife Android to date. A prototype. A test model. Incomplete. Grimmjow smiles, and it's not biting. It's more. Painful. There is nothing physically wrong with Ichigo, and yet his chest aches at the sight. "You're my partner, Ichigo. A whole person. You always have been."

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Fic #11 || Sample

Rating: Teen

Content Warnings: Major Character Death, Graphic Depictions of Violence

Main Characters: Kurosaki Ichigo, Gotei Captains, Kamado Tanjirou (KnY)

Main Pairings: None (Gen)

Additional Warnings: Suicidal Ideation

Bleach x Kimetsu no Yaiba crossover. In which all their deaths were in vain, and Muzan lived, and the Gotei are the Demon Slayer Corps in the modern world.

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Fic #12 || Sample

Rating: Mature

Content Warnings: Graphic Depictions of Violence, Underage

Main Characters: Ichigo Kurosaki, Shinji Hirako, Kisuke Urahara, minor appearances by Rukia and Co.

Main Pairings: Shinji Hirako/Ichigo Kurosaki

Additional Warnings: Ambiguous Morality, Dark Ichigo, Ichigo Eats Souls, Hurt/Comfort

[some tags might be added, but these are the bulk of the story]

Ichigo’s excuse of a broken soul is not enough to keep him going, and an assassination attempt brings to light just how deep the problem goes.

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Fic #13 || Sample

Rating: Teen

Content Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply

Main Characters: Grimmjow Jaegerjaquez, Rukia Kuchiki

Main Pairings: Grimmjow Jaegerjaquez/Rukia Kuchiki

Additional Warnings: N/A

Grimmjow doesn't think he's coming out of this alive.

A drabble fic.

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Fic #14 || Sample

Rating: Mature

Content Warnings: No Archive Warning Apply

Main Characters: Ichigo Kurosaki, Yasutora “Chad” Sado, Orihime Inoue, Uryuu Ishida, Rukia Kuchiki, Keigo Asano, Mizuiro Kojima, Tatsuki Arisawa, Renji Abarai, Grimmjow Jaegerjaquez

Main Pairings: Grimmjow Jaegerjaquez/Kurosaki Ichigo

Additional Warnings: N/A

The group had settled on blankets by the bay as the fireworks went off in the distance, the booms, cracks, and sparkles of them could be heard clearly. As they all watched, they got close to each other and kept warm on their shared blankets, friends, or couples, they didn’t care. Grimmjow and Ichigo, Chad and Orihime, Renji and Rukia, Mizuiro and Keigo shared their blankets as pairs, but Uryuu and Tatsuki had their own little spots on their blankets.

They had traveled to America for the school year as transfer students in South Texas and this was the first time that they had seen fireworks like this outside of the tv, and they were the best experience that they have had since being there, thus far. Grimmjow, Keigo, Rukia, and Renji were off in the distance cheering while their partners and friends smiled and watched them as the finale of the fireworks were going off on the boardwalk.

After the fireworks ended, they all picked up their blankets and bags of used small sparklers and party poppers that they had bought beforehand from the Kroger that was close to their host parents’ houses the day before.

#bleach #Bleach Big Bang #bleachbigbang #bleachbigbang2021 #fic #fanfiction #fanfic #ao3

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horrorlad · 3 years

Text

Horrorlad Reviews: The Dentist (1996)

Or at least, like, talks about it a bunch.

Boy was I overthinking my first real Horror Lad post! It was going to be Grave Encounters, but that will have to wait, because I got insomnia and decided to rewatch a movie I hadn’t seen seen since I was 14, which wound up being the perfect opportunity to write out a post!

Let’s talk about The Dentist!

So, The Dentist is a 1996 movie starring Corbin Bernsen. It was directed by Brian Yuzna (one of the producers of Re-Animator, he also directed the 1989 body horror film Society which I haven’t seen, though a cursory image search tells me I need to add to my watch list immediately).

Anyway, The Dentist is about a teethsman who catches his wife giving some other guy a BJ and gets so grossed out about it that he has a nervous breakdown about, uh, how dirty mouths are, I guess? He loses his absolute shit (though he didn’t seem to have it all that together to begin with; this guy’s Jack Torrance is way more Kubrick than King), and we the audience get to tag along for all the wacky fun.

Full disclosure: I can’t give an unbiased review of this movie. I watched it several times in high school, then completely forgot about it for ten years, until tonight. There’s too much nostalgia wrapped up in it.

That said, upon rewatching it, I am in LOVE with the structure of it as a film. You know how, some movies, you can tell that the people behind the scenes are having a blast? This is one of those movies. The structure of the shots vary wildly, and I suspect that there was not one tripod or stabilizer on that set. The makeup and effects are fun, every actor has an opportunity to shine at least once, and the pacing is totally bonkers. I will note, however, that for a slasher movie the confirmed death count is pretty low, AND most of the murders are less dentistry-related than you might expect. Still, it’s a good time, and right now it’s available to watch for free (with commercials) on Tubi, which is pretty sweet!

Read on for the content warnings and spoilers. In the meantime, I give The Dentist 3.5 tanks of nitrous oxide (use with caution).

Content warnings and plot synopsis below the cut.

Content Warnings

Also, I don’t really know what to classify this one as, but there is a lot of “ick” factor to this movie — rotting teeth, sludge, etc. If you’re easily squicked out by that sort of stuff, I’d proceed with caution.

Dental torture (and how!) – it’s basically the whole movie, folks.

Sexual assault – multiple instances, including a character having their head forced down while giving oral sex (in a daydream), and another character being assaulted while on nitrous oxide.

Spousal abuse (physical and emotional) – again, there’s a lot of this.

Child abuse – A young child has their gums stabbed by the dentist.

Animal abuse – a dog is shot offscreen.

--------------------------------------

Okay, spoiler time!

Whoo boy, here we go!

I have no idea why I watched this movie so much as a teen. Probably because it was free on FearNet (remember FearNet?) and I would watch just about anything.

Watching it as an adult, my first thought is… man this is weirdly paced. My second thought is that there’s a lot more non-dental-related murders than I would have expected, but we’ll come back to that.

So, our hero(?) is a dentist, and we meet him at the beginning of a framing device, miming dentistry and offering to tell us about his story. The bulk of the movie is then a flashback about how he got to where he is, interspersed with his monologuing or whatever. We meet him and his wife (who are a straight couple in a movie and thus required to completely hate one another) on their anniversary, a fact which becomes clear while he’s in the middle of throwing a fit about his laundry.

Pictured: a totally hinged man. Nothing unhinged going on here, no sir.

At any rate, he gets all suspicious after an interaction with the pool guy, and catches his wife having an affair with the guy. He continues framing-device-monologuing about decay and the world being filthy and all that, daydreams about assaulting his wife and murdering the pool boy, etc. He follows the pool guy to the neighbor’s house, acts all weird, shoots a dog — your basic Tuesday.

Eventually, he winds up at the office, starts hallucinating, assaults a couple of patients, and finally calls an early end to the day (self care is important). We get this delightful (in a heavy-handed sort of way) scene that keeps cutting back and forth between him setting out spooky dental tools and his wife getting dressed for the big anniversary surprise he’s has planned, and that’s when things really start to go haywire.

Okay.

So like.

I get that he’s a dentist.

I get that he’s a dentist whose whole shtick is having the themed exam rooms (though why we have aaaalll these rooms for a bunch of hygienists and one dentist is a little beyond me).

But you mean to tell me that this dude’s special anniversary surprise for his wife was to show her his new, opera-themed dental exam room?

“Oh, honey… you really, really shouldn’t have…”

Like, I know he’s settled on a revenge plot by this point, but I still definitely believe that this guy was legitimately planning the entire time to show his wife his fancy new dental suite as an anniversary surprise. Not to be that guy, but no wonder she was having an affair.

Honestly though, I love this scene. I love the camera PoV shots as he shows off the dental suite, I love the excessive gesturing with his left hand. I love how the scene starts off with his point-of-view of her, and then transitions into her point-of-view of him, cut with those big beautiful teeth-yanking shots. It’s ridiculous.

And then, they get home, he has some monologuing about the pool, etc.

Next scene, it’s the next day, some cops come to ask questions about the murdered dog, his wife is out back on a pool chair with her giant sunhat covering her face (the way normal, totally-not-drugged people hang out by the pool) while the pool guy does his pool guy stuff. Eventually the cops leave, yadda yadda yadda, the pool guy scoops the wife’s tongue out of the pool, he sees how fucked up she is, the dentist murders the shit out of him. It’s beautiful.

Don’t you love it when you finish your to-do list first thing in the morning?

The end.

Wait, no, that’s not right.

Somehow, there’s still almost half a movie left.

This movie starts with this dude fighting with his wife, catching his wife cheating with the pool guy, hallucinating his wife’s nasty mouth on everyone, etc. You’d think that, with his wife tortured all to shit and the pool guy dead, the movie would have wrapped up.

I mentioned before that the pacing of the movie is weird, which it is. I mean, he has his “oop guess I’m evil now” scene on his way to work the next day, which basically means that just over half of this movie is the origin story. It could be longer, with the big climactic nonsense taking up the last quarter or so. It could be shorter, with him freaking out about his wife, losing his shit, and having a proper dental rampage. Instead, The Dentist flies in the face of conventional story structure.

But this man is a busy man. He’s a dentist, damn it.

He has to get back to work!

Things are happening fast now, let’s get condensed.

We go back to work, he pulls some malpractice shit on that lady whose dog he shot yesterday, then strangles Jessica-the-hygienist (I think that’s her job) when she calls him on it. Later, a man from the IRS comes in and uses the dentist’s shady tax junk to get free dental work which is, uh, inadvisable. IRS man, Marvin Goldblum, starts talking about our dentist’s wife (and about how unhinged shiksas are in bed, in case we somehow we didn’t piece together that he’s an awful Jewish caricature), and I’m sure the rest of his appointment goes totally normally.

Get a guy who looks at you like this.

Meanwhile, the cops are definitely onto him regarding the murder of that dog (after all, murdering dogs is THEIR turf). They go to his house, where he left the body of the pool guy he murdered just laying around outside for anyone to find (which they do). Then they go upstairs and find his wife, who is alive but so fucked up.

Back at the office, Karen-the-other-hygienist, looking for her coworker who got murdered earlier, stumbles upon the very fucked up IRS dude. We get to listen to the dentist give a little monologue about how grossed out he is that his wife put some dude’s “dirty, rotten… in her mouth!” before he injects air into a vein in Karen-the-other-hygienist’s neck to kill her.

Next up, this girl who has been waiting for two days to get her braces off gets called back. She’s adorable and chipper, so this, of course, can only go well. When’s the last time you had your dentist pull a gun on you?

Our scrappy youngster runs off, and he gives chase (we find that Mr. Goldblum’s jaw elongation procedure is going well by the way), before eventually letting her go after she promises to take very, very good care of her teeth.

After all, he’s got his next job to get to.

Let’s go teach dental students the importance of pulling out everyone’s teeth!

Yeeep, he’s a teacher! And after he shoots one of his students while hallucinating, the cops show up, resulting in the slowest chase scene any movie has ever had (I mean the dude is literally just briskly walking down the hall and he still gets away from them). Anyway, the dentist winds up in an auditorium where a woman is practicing her opera singing. The dentist is entranced by this (we know he loves opera from that scene with his wife earlier) and reaches out to the singer, but he hallucinates his wife’s hecked up face on her and drops to his knees, presumably to have the rest of his nervous breakdown. The cops… uh… well, they just kinda stand around looking disapprovingly at him while he sits on the floor. And that’s… that’s it, I guess?

“Nah, let him rest, he’s had a big day.”

In our final scene, we have some orderlies at his new mental institution drag him down for his regular appointment, where his wife (who I guess is a dentist now) starts drilling at his teeth. This may or may not be a hallucination. It probably doesn’t matter.

Wow. That certainly was a film.

Alright, so, I’ve been typing up my thoughts as I watch, and I think I’ve figured out what I like about this movie, that had me coming back to it over and over as a youngster. There are some movies that just look fun to film, and this is one of them. A number of the shots are really charming, for lack of a better word. There’s the anniversary scene with his wife I mentioned before, but so many others — this movie plays around with point of view, extreme close-ups, some very fun effects used to indicate the hallucinations… there’s even a sideways shot of one of the cops coming down the stairs. I seem to have a real fondness for that sort-of manic, anything-goes approach to filming. Related side note: is there a single steady shot on this whole film? I’m beginning to doubt it.

Corbin Bernsen does a great job. I mean, all the actors do, really, but he is something else. Like, I can’t think offhand of many actors who could successfully take the character “dentist in bad marriage has a nervous breakdown because his wife gives someone else a blow job and it grosses him out; goes on torturemurder spree” without overacting to the point of distraction. “What are you talking about, this dude’s hammier than Easter dinner,” you say. Now, I get the urge here, but I have to disagree; Bernsen plays a fantastic Emasculated White Guy Throwing A Fit.

That picture I posted up there, after the bit about the laundry argument? A dude who makes that face over the idea of wearing the wrong cuff links to work is at most twelve seconds away from completely losing his shit at any given moment. And the dude’s anniversary surprise for his wife was to show off his new, opera-themed dental exam room; none of this behavior seems too off the wall for that character. Granted, I haven’t seen the sequel yet, and the image searches do suggest that our dear dentist is about to use his well-cared-for teeth to chew the hell out of some scenery in The Dentist 2, but in this movie? I’m just saying it’s not an unbelievable portrayal.

Disgruntled white dudes aside, the rest of the cast seems to have a fun time too. Shout out to the receptionist literally sobbing over what a great dentist this guy is (stunning work). If nothing else, stop by for wee baby Mark Ruffalo before he was famous. It’s adorable.

LOOK AT HIM.

ALL THAT SAID, I have to state again how surprised I am by the sheer number of not-dental-related murders! Like, by my count, this guy commits a hefty amount of malpractice, but for a guy on a torturemurder spree, he sure does seem to keep his torture and his murder fairly separate. Let’s tally it:

I’m tired, let’s wrap this up. The Dentist is a fun movie about a dude who loses his shit, does some dental torture, does some murder, does ZERO dental torturemurders, and then just kinda tuckers himself out and sits down. It’s a big silly mess, and I love it.

Tortures: six

The kid at the beginning, the lady he sexually assaults (it counts), his wife (not dead), that lady whose dog he shot, Marvin the IRS guy (alive when last we see him), and the person at the dental school near the end.

Murders: three people, one dog.

The dog (shot), the pool guy (knifed), Jessica-the-hygienist (strangled), Karen-the-other-hygienist (air injected into artery), and that’s… it..? He does shoot that person at the dental school, but it doesn’t appear to be a fatal wound, and Marvin the IRS guy was alive when we saw him last.

Torturemurders: HECKIN’ ZERO.

Zero! None of the tortures are murdered, and nobody he murders is tortured! What the heck kind of slasher dentist doesn’t even kill people via dentistry? No wonder everyone looks down on him at the end.

Alright, first post written. I’m going to bed.

#horrorlad original #the dentist #the dentist (1996)#corbin bernsen #brian yuzna #horror #movie #horror movie #horror movies #movies #review #film review #movie review

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docholligay · 4 years

Note

What hobbies or activities would your OW crew each try and pick up during corona quarantine?

Tracer

Lena is going to try and learn a second language. She took French in school, didn’t she? And didn’t she graduate school? Right! So this should be an absolute walk in the park. French it is. Her first choice was Arabic, as it was, in fact, the prospect of Amari drama that made her embrace the wisdom of being a polyglot in the first place, but Mercy’s gentle suggestion that she start with something a bit closer to home base made her try for French. Arabic could be her third language.

And it isn’t that Tracer is stupid, so much as she has the full confidence that she can try hard and find success. This has been true so many times in her life, that she was simply the one most dedicated to the outcome, and so she managed to wrench it from the hands of fate. She is quick, and clever, and capable! What’s FRENCH got that she can’t handle.

Lena, five minutes in: Oh, right, I hated school.

She tries, god love her, but it just doesn’t hold her attention. She’s trying so hard to write verb forms and study and study, but she doesn’t honestly care much to KNOW French. It reminds her of Amelie, for starters, and that always gives her a little bit of a pit in her stomach, and without Amelie, there seems very little reason to know it. Only one in the house who speaks it is Mercy, really.

So she takes account of the languages her team knows.

Hana...Korean, of course, and at least some Japanese, mostly for promotional reasons. Lena takes one look at the Japanese rules of politeness and deference and gently sets the language to the side. She thinks about Korean--Korea’s been so much help since the omnic crisis, and it’s a good thing to converse with your allies--but the daunting aspect of having to ask Hana, who seems not even to know herself whether she likes everyone in the house or not, overcomes her.

Fareeha, well, that’d be Arabic, and that’s it, so far as Lena knows, and Ang’s already warned her off of that one. Fareeha’s feeling a it pricky about the whole Arabic situation since her mother’s come back, anyhow, and all her workout music has turned to English, and Lena’s not certain why she seems to be blaming the entire Arab world for Ana, but then again, Lena doesn’t understand Fareeha in the best of times.

Winston, he’d of course help her, but a lot of his knowledge is tied up in Latin and Scholarly Greek, and she’s not sure why anyone would take all the effort when you couldn’t even properly go on holiday. He does know a fair amount of German, she figures, but if she’s going to do that, she may as well go to Ang, and besides all that, Winston dos so much for her. No need to throw in another thing.

Ana: No.

Jack: No, but a bit softer.

Angela seems the natural choice, as she knows so many languages, comparatively. Her father was a linguist of sorts, to hear Ang talk around the edge of it, and so German, French, Italian, Latin, Hebrew, at the least, all come to her quickly and easily. It’s English she likes the least, and she’s better at it than she gives herself credit for, near perfect but for a few stange tenses. It really only Ang who notices. But Angela is, well, Ang, and with all the troubles of the world, she’s lost her mind, a bit.

So there’s no real help to be had, and Lena buys a few Muzzy tapes in French and learns how to say “I am a young girl” and “I like apples” before deciding that her quarantine time is better spent ensuring that she can actually climb the drain to the roof, jump from the roof into the pool, and other extremely valuable information. No one was hiring her for the language department anyhow.

Winston

WInston is more used to solitude than the rest of them, and as far as he’s concerned, it’s not really loneliness if Tracer is with him. THough he feels bad for her, and how stir crazy she’s getting. It makes him sad to see her so bored and glum, though she is trying to make cheer of it.

And so Winston has a genius idea. Tracer LOVES gymnastics, and Winston loves a project. So the idea for the super bounce trampoline is born.

You cannot tell Winston this is a bad idea. You cannot tell Winston this is a bad idea, because, on some level, he already knows. He knows, but he sees Tracer doing her little cartwheels in the yard, running laps, trying to create little games for herself where she creates time trials around the house, trying to improve on each activity lap. At the time where she breaks three plates trying to see if she can beat her time for table service, it even starts to sound like a GOOD idea.

He’s fine making little picnic lunches together and watching TV and having her ‘help’ in the lab, but she is becoming despondent with the boredom of it all. It has been ten days.

And so, he looks at the metals he’s engineered for use in his prosthetic limbs. Couldn’t they also be used to create a spring that would double your strength and energy return of a normal spring? Than Lena could do all kinds of maneuvers on the trampoline, and besides, it’s always important to know the limits of engineering.

Angela tries to remind him hospitals are full.

Dva

The first day of quarantine, Hana Song pops a soda in her pj shorts and says, “It’s a pandemic! Why do we have to improve ourselves? God, isn’t it enough to be alive?” She takes a deep sip. “I’ll do some charity streams, okay?”

As she’s walking away Tracer asks her if she’ll help paint the upstairs den. Tracer is making little physical projects for herself in varying levels of horror, sometimes while watching the Muzzy tapes to convince herself she hasn’t given up on the bilingual dream. Painting seems tame. Hana stops for a moment, then agrees.

She is the only reasonable person in this house.

Mercy

Angela is in a panic. The entire world seems to be crumbling at her feet, and though she is no epidemiologist, she knows that none of this is good. She wants to go. Pharah begs her to stay. She is afraid for Angela. To put her in some ICU where she could get the illness, where it could be, as such, that Fareeha would not be able to come to her. She understands Angela’s need to help, but also, she says, what if something happened to you? You are the only doctor with any real knowledge of Tracer. What would be come of her.

Angela only looks at her for a moment before her face darkens, and Fareeha shakes her head, ashamed. “I was using Tracer to excuse my own fears. I am selfish. You should go.”

And in that moment, Angela does not leave not because she is the only physician who can properly work with Tracer’s condition, but for the great love of Fareeha Amari, who for the first time since Angela has known her, is truly afraid.

The days pass with difficulty. She is writing guidelines and ideas to anyone she can, coordinating donations and writing out thank yous and pleas, sitting in the bay window of their bedroom as the sleeting snow and rain fall against the window one bleak afternoon. The sun and storm come in patches, she’s noticed, but the grey seems to speak to her most all.

Fareeha comes to her one day. She has a mug filled with hot chocolate and whipped cream and brandy and love. She gently places her hand on Angela’s knee.

“I hear you crying in the night,” she says, though she cannot look to Angela’s face, “You should go. You must go.”

She loves Fareeha so very much.

She goes.

Pharah

Which immediately drives the sort of disconnected and floating morass of ennui that is the Overwatch household into Von Trapp style whistle blowing order.

Pharah’s project, you see, is everyone else.

Fareeha is a lovely person in most respects, all of them would say in one way or another, but she has certain control issues, and these never become more pronounced than when her life seems, well, out of control.

No more laying about. There is a kitchen to be reorganized, there are drills to be done, when was the last time you lifted? There is a color coded schedule posted in the kitchen and we should all take note of the way Fareeha has scheduled our time. Tracer balks, of course, that she’s the leader as well, and Fareeha has a terrible habit of assuming that it’s her who’s the leader entire and complete, and you know what else--

Winston pulls them apart. Neither of them, he tries to say, are actually angry with each other. He shakes when he says it.

And so Pharah tries. God love her, she tries SO HARD. She improves herself, and tries to let others be. She reorganizes the entire kitchen. She labels every bulk container, She scrubs every floor in the house to a gleaming shine. Her clothes, and Angela’s all washed and organized by sshade and season.

One night Lena comes downstairs and sees her looking out the window, drinking a Labatt, rubbing at her wedding ring. Lena wouldn’t embarrass her by asking, but her eyes seem to beglistening, jsut a bit.

The next morning, all three of the rest of the OVerwatch team are lined up, at the bottom of the stairs, at 6 am sharp.

It’s true that Fareeha takes herself on three hour runs across the prairie in all weathers to give everyone some down time where they don’t have to be doing anything, but they broker a sort of peace wherein they spend a certain amount of time doing Fareeha Amari’s Twelve Point Improvement Plan every day, and time doing their own thing, and Fareeha seems genuinely cheered to be plotting out their workout and meal plans, their online seminars to listen to. She and Lena even watch a few Muzzy tapes together.

She even forgives Tracer when the first test of Winston’s trampoline finds Lena sailing through Pharah’s (Thankfully open) bedroom window.

Ana and Jack:

They spend all of quarantine watching 90 Day Fiancee and eating TV dinners.

#creative ask day #moonlight1130

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niomemizune · 5 years

Text

Niome Mizune LFRP

→ Basics

Name: Tsukimi “Niome” Mizune Age: 26 Birthday: 15th of the Second Astral Moon (3/15) Race: Au Ra - Raen Gender: Female Sexuality: Bisexual (male preference) / Demisexual Marital Status: Single (monogamous) Nicknames: Nio

→ Physical Appearance Hair: Short and Dark Brown, but she has started to grow it out. Eyes: Dark brown with purple limbic rings Height: 4 foot 10 inches (roughly) Build: Curvy - Plus-sized Distinguishing Marks: Small various scars along her arms and hands, small-sized gunshot wound on her stomach Common Accessories: Kitchen knives, Carbuncle headpiece

→ Personal Profession: Owner of Carbuncle Cafe in Shirogane (formerly worker at The Bismarck in Limsa, formerly ninja in Doman rebellion) Hobbies: Sewing, Painting (occasionally), Botany (occasionally), Singing (occasionally) Languages: Spoken only: Common, Doman, Hingan Residence: Apartment in Mist, Carbuncle Cafe in Shirogane Birthplace: Sui no Sato, Ruby Sea Religion: Newly converted follower of Menphina Fears: Abandonment, Lack of Acceptance, Heights

→ Relationships Spouse: None Children: None Parents: Mika Mizune - mother, Mizuki Mizune - father Siblings: Mitsuki Mizune - little sister Other Relatives: Hazuki Mizune - grandmother Pets: Peridot Carbuncle, various mammets, a chocobo named Tsukimi

→ Traits * Bold your character’s answer.

Extroverted / In Between / Introverted Disorganized / In Between / Organized Close Minded / In Between / Open Minded Calm / In Between / Anxious Disagreeable / In Between / Agreeable Cautious / In Between / Reckless Patient / In Between / Inpatient Outspoken / In Between / Reserved Leader / In Between / Follower Empathetic / In Between / Apathetic Optimistic / In Between / Pessimistic Traditional / In Between / Modern Hard-working / In Between / Lazy Cultured / In Between / Uncultured Loyal / In Between / Disloyal Faithful / In Between / Unfaithful

→ Additional information Smoking Habit: Never Drugs: Never Alcohol: Rarely Theme (changes): Ikanaide, Deep Sea Girl, Reset Faceclaim: None

→ RP Hooks

Carbuncle Cafe - Niome’s newest adventure! Niome decided to open a Carbuncle-themed cafe on a whim. Kinda. She knew she wanted to branch out and own her own place, and she loves pastries and sweets, so it was always in the back of her mind. That being said, owning a new business is tough and Nio needs all the help she can get! Merchants, customers, etc are all welcome additions!

Kugane Regular - Niome has started to spend more of her time in the Far East. She tends to hang around Kugane when she’s not working. You’ll spot her easily in her work uniform - a Carbuncle-themed outfit! But she does love the culture of Kugane, so you might see her taking in a sip of tea or trying on the latest fashions. She also does a lot of trading with local merchants.

The Bismarck - Niome spent the majority of her time at work… cooking up delicious treats in Limsa Lominsa! She might not be the best chef The Bismarck has ever had, but she works hard and is constantly improving and her knifework is something to write home about! She worked as a cook, so you won’t see her bussing tables, but maybe you’ll catch a glimpse of her in the kitchen.

Limsa Lominsa Regular - Niome spent the bulk of her free time wandering around Limsa Lominsa. She has tried just about everything that the city has to offer. Arcane magics? Her summons never listen to her, but she can at least summon them. Fighting with an axe? Not as smooth as she is with a knife, but she can at least do a little damage. Blacksmithing, Armor-making, and Fishing? She’s dipped her toes into each specialty.

Ninja Past - Niome was a ninja in her past, fighting for the Doman rebellion. This probably has earned her a few enemies, especially considering she abandoned the rebellion shortly after the Calamity and made her way to Eorzea. Have a Garlean with a disdain for rebels? Want your Doman citizen to recognize Niome for who she is?

Noble Birth - Niome was born into a relatively prestigious family in Sui no Sato. The Mizune clan were well known for their tact and grace. However, Niome wanted to see the world when she was younger and find her own love, something that her parents were strictly against. This made her run away from home. While she is back in good graces with her grandmother and will occasionally spend time with her new little sister, Mitsuki, she still doesn’t seem to see eye-to-eye with her parents.

→ OOC Notes

NO ONE KNOWS NIOME’S REAL NAME - Niome’s real name of Tsukimi is unknown to EVERYONE, as she has gone by Niome ever since leaving Sui no Sato as a child. If you come up to her calling her Tsukimi she will probably attempt to kill you, so DON’T DO IT.

Mun is 18+ - That does NOT mean it is a free invite to erp. Niome is a shy bean, and while she can fall fast and hard, she is largely inexperienced in a lot of those things.That being said, violent themes and the like are welcome as long as they make sense.

Preferred RP - Niome is mostly looking for connections, friends, possibly a lover down the road. My preferred genres are slice-of-life, adventure, and possibly romance. While I tend to avoid darker themes on Nio, they are certainly a possibility as long as we talk about them beforehand.

→ Contact Information Tumblr: @niomemizune

Twitter: @/NiomeNinja

Carrd: https://niomemizune.carrd.co/#

In-game: Niome Mizune on Zalera

Discord: Ask please :)

@mooglemeet @crystalxivrp

#lfrp #updated #Niome Mizune #let's do this again!#boost plz

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darkzeruda1214 · 5 years

Text

Kairi deserved better.

Oh, boy this is going to spark up some debates.

Now I want to CLARIFY before I start.

I DO NOT. Under any circumstance hate. Or dislike Kairi. Personally I think she was one of the few characters that actually have an interesting background and has a lot of potential as a character. And I really do like Kairi, but I think the rest of the fandom can agree with me.

She. Was. Done. Dirty.

Seriously. Does anyone in the development team even like or want her in the series?!

This girl deserves better. As well as give her some spotlight and some much needed personality!

*Canon Kairi is just really... unjust. The fandom does a much a better job portraying her character! (TAKE NOTES NOMURA Dangit! You could learn a few things from the fans!)

Anyways...

Time to get to the topic, (also thanks for my cousin for allowing me to use their exact words for this argument).

(SPOILERS FOR KH3)

So after finishing KH3 I was left unsatisfied and just plainly angry at the ending. And after what happened to Kairi, there’s nothing more than I want is for her to get some redemption because what happened to her is utter bullshit. One of the things that really pissed me off was how they handled her.

And yes, I’m talking about the final battle, but one thing I think many people tend to overlook is her treatment in the trailers.

Now I know some of you are confused by what I mean. But the trailers really deceived fans about what Kairi was going to offer. A lot of fans speculated, argued and theorized that Kairi was FINALLY bulk up and be ready to fight. She was finally going to be useful.

Now to be fair she isn’t and act totally useless. I mean she did save Sora during the Final World arc. (But you know, Square totally missed an opportunity that could have given Kairi more substance, but that’s for a totally separate debate for another time).

The trailers made it seem that Kairi was going to be part of the final battle. Now that part wasn’t a lie, but they clearly only gave her the spotlight for a couple of scenes, she’s a party member for the first part of the battle and then that’s it. We don’t even have her throughout the ENTIRE battle. She’s just cast away, because PLOT!

Utter. Bull.

But another thing that really degraded her character as a whole is the lack of personality.

Kairi used to be a snarky and sarcastic character in KH1. And I really enjoyed what kind of character she used to be during my second play through.

(Though I’m gonna be honest, I didn’t have any attachments to any of the character -not including Disney exclusive characters- in my first playthrough until later on in the story. Riku was the only one I was more intrigued about).

Back to Kairi, even with the few seconds she was in, she had something that made her feel like fleshed out character. Not by much, but there was something. And all of that was nearly taken away in KH2, now some of you are probably ready to argue that KH2 was her best version. I’m incline to disagree, now while Kairi was mostly asleep in KH1, she had more personality in the first game compared to the second. Because in the second game, she becomes less sarcastic and more bold when it came around action.

This is where I feel Kairi started to fall as a character and more as a plot device. Because as we all know it, she get’s captured. At least in the first game she had purpose and a reason to be there.

In KH2 she had absolutely no reason to be there.

As much as I hate to say this. Her character direction fails in the second installment, because the only time she’s relevant (not including Naminé) is the Roxas telepathy conversation and the bottle scene. After that, the only way to keep her in there is by having. Her. Get. Captured.

She’s ‘the fire’ that keeps Sora going. And at that point she’s only there as a plot device for Sora. Who he himself wouldn’t be relevant either had it not been for the Keyblade and for Roxas. But since he’s the playable character he’s obviously important. But… the same can’t be said for our Princess of Heart. While they managed to keep something in for Kairi in the second game, it was completely tossed out entirely in KH3. Honestly, the only thing I got from her is that she's heavily infatuated/in love with Sora (which isn't a bad thing, it's just that’s ALL her character had to offer in the third installment). And just in general I think her development went in the wrong way.

So we finally get to the title of the rant.

I know a lot of people are going to disagree with me and that's fine. Since we all have the right to our opinion, and to disagree and agree.

But I think she didn't need to have a Keyblade.

Or at least in the way how the writers decided to give it to her.

Reason I say that? She didn't even EARN her Keyblade. Yeah, I said it.

She didn’t earn it, Riku gave it to her like a gift card. Like: here, it's yours. (It’s pink. So I don’t want it. It matches your clothes though).

That’s it.

They just handed her a Keyblade. That it. She didn’t even have to WORK FOR IT. (Not even a joke since the franchise is handing those things like lollipops) Now. If they had allowed her to manifest it. I dunno, actually EARN it, like how Sora and Roxas did. (Heck, even Riku got it, off screen, but he still got his). And addressing the Wayfinder’s Keyblades, it’s pretty obvious since they were training to be masters at the time. And don’t even get me started on Union X and Ven.

But Kairi was just given the damn thing like a kid given candy. Not through some rigorous trial of heart, mind or soul. Not through battling. No. Just handed one.

I mean yeah sure you could argue her coming to another world could work for her favor, after all she traveled from one world to another. Being brave to help out Sora despite being in danger herself. But again, she’s just given the Keyblade by Riku. Not by her own power. She’s just gifted THE DAMN THING!!!!

I’m sorry. But I don’t think that’s how KEYBLADES WORK!

Look at Axel/Lea! He manifested the Keyblade in his hand! Sora’s appeared to him at first, but then he earned it after showing that his heart is strong and his power is through friendship.

Roxas earned Kingdom Key through Sora, but later he earned his own Keyblades after his strong promises and from battling. One from defeating Xion and the other from the sworn promises.

And it’s no doubt Riku got his from all the hard work of fighting the darkness and helping Sora in his journey.

But Kairi. Didn’t. This pisses me off.

Honestly... at this rate, I wouldn’t be surprised that the writers (actually I think I want to blame Nomura for this) don’t like Kairi. If they don’t even bother to put any effort in making Kairi a fighter. Why on earth did they have to give her a Keyblade?

Again. If they allowed her to manifest it, or let her go through a small trial of some sort like everyone else, or test the power of her heart then I wouldn’t be arguing this topic.

I’m not saying it’s intently bad that they gave her a key. I’m saying the way how they did is simply lazy writing and makes Kairi look useless.

Because of her Keyblade, I think that’s the reason why a lot of people wanted her to fight. And honestly, I feel that was the wrong direction to grow her character.

I can name a good number of cartoon, game and anime characters who don't have ANY fighting experience but are still amazing characters.

And I think that’s a problem in pop culture in general. What most fans of any series don't realize, is that well-written female characters aren't just those who kick butt and shoot stuff.

They don't have to be a badass to be a good character!

And I think that's what really screwed Kairi over in the end. (That and what Nomura did to her). But the moment they decided to give her a Keyblade to fight, it really tipped her off badly.

So going back to the trailers, since I clearly forgot to remind myself, the trailers really made it look like Kairi was finally going to be able to help in physical part of the battle.

They emphasizing so much on her training, that it made it seem like Kairi was going to be a stronger character "physically.” But… once the game was released, there wasn't anything to back it up all that “training.” In fact we didn‘t even get to see her and Axel train at all.

And to me that was a shallow move. The only thing the trailers served was a cheap extension to encourage people to buy the game. I think they tried really hard to sell the game by releasing too many trailers too early in the year that not only spoiled the story, but made fans wait even longer for a game that didn't even feel complete.

All that’s left is the Re:Mind trailer. (Edit ReMind fixed her character. About DAMN TIME!)

But that's just my opinion, if you don't agree with me, that's fine I respect your opinion. I don't mind at all Kairi having a Keyblade or learning how to fight. But I don't think that's what she needed in order to be a good character. She really needs a fleshed out personality and some interests/hobbies outside of simply being in love with Sora.

No hate to Sokai ship. It's a good couple, just... was poorly executed in cannon. Fandom works have better stories and delve into the relationship and characters (better than Nomura ever could write) I'm sorry. But I'm still bitter to what he thought would be a good thing to add in KH3 especially after how many years fans waited the game's release.

*I know there are other reasons as to why Kairi looks and is treated as a bad character. But her poor development discussion has been overdone so many times that it’s practically common knowledge for any Kingdom Hearts fan. But again that's me.

I really needed to get that out of my system.

#kingdom hearts #KH3 #Kairi #Kairi was done DIRTY!!!#lack of character development #she deserves better #keyblade #discussion #personal confessions #confess series #kairi deserved better

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vael · 4 years

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2019 Annual Review

Each year, I look back at the previous year’s annual review and note that things didn’t go as planned. For some reason I am always surprised, but this time it’s a little painful, too. From 2018′s Annual Review:

“2019 outlook? Sunny! I hope it will be my best year yet.“

Oh, Vael. You built your house, you moved to the promised land. But your year did not go as planned. You are not even close to the zen you craved.

It has been a wild year. This will run long. All I can do is stick to the format and hope my memory and average writing skill will do the year justice. So, as usual, we start with the positive.

What went well this year?

We like our house. We do. The builder was no good, resulting in some warped walls and a lot of headache getting them to finish everything properly, but the layout is very suitable for us. My office is exactly what I needed, our TV room has just the right space for us. We finally have a respectable kitchen. Since I’m living and working in the house 24 hours a day, it’s important to have a comfortable space.

Game development. For the past five years, I’ve put in some serious work. A lot of it was within my game engine, GAM3, and tinydark’s gaming network, The Orbium. While I put in a lot of work, not much came in the way of actual games produced. I finally rallied in 2018 and put out Bean Grower. It was designed to be a supplemental game, not a main driver, so it will not bring in sustainable income. I went on to think that I should open GAM3 up to other developers, license the engine out and collect a share of what they make.

I resolved to refactor GAM3: a word which means to rewrite and modernize many parts of it so that it’s easier to work in, and for it to present better. I would come to realize this desire to share GAM3 was due to a lack of confidence in myself to produce something great, and financially sustainable. Around the time I was realizing that multiplayer was the answer, I discovered Marosia.

Then we moved, I took on contract work, and things generally slowed for me for a few months, eking out what development I could. I played Marosia throughout and in August, it died. I wrote a teardown for it. The stars had aligned: though I had a lot of prelim work to be done, I would make a successor to Marosia. I managed to hype a few people in the community with a demo of GAM3 and I spent the next few months coding a chat prototype and generally organizing myself, and finally mid-November began the refactoring. It would end there, but just this morning (seriously) we learned Marosia was coming back. I had a momentary freakout but it’s ultimately a good thing for my own game.

I haven’t been more excited for a project in a long time. I never thought I’d be so excited to create a standard fantasy world, but it’s a ton of fun, with intricacies I never considered. The game’s design lends itself to a sustainable monetization model: I’m thinking $3/mo for quality-of-life upgrades, with a discount for buying in bulk. I would have paid double for Marosia, so I think this is fair. (6 months of die2nite is currently priced at $69, 6 months of Hattrick is $90!) And most important of all, I can do it ethically, with a game that truly means something to people.

Web development. I’ve learned quite a bit this year! I am so grateful for svelte. I liked but never loved React.js. It always felt ponderous to me. I have no doubt The Orbium’s refactoring would have taken me half the time it did if I were learning svelte vs. React, simply because React is so much more convoluted than svelte, and all in the name of uglier syntax. Svelte seamlessly integrates style and functionality into UI components, which means that if I’m working with a button that clicks to open a modal, everything I need for that button is in that one file.

Due to my contract work (with Harley Davidson, I can reveal) I also got some experience with Symfony and other modern development practices in PHP. PHP doesn’t really excite me these days, loathing having to produce views with it, but it is at least comfy.

My job. “Yeah, yeah.” I got a raise, most of which was contributed to getting Eve and my son onto my badass healthcare plan. We’re developing like it’s 2012, which is frustrating and makes even simple tasks take forever, but I can’t complain about the pay nor the stability of the company and my position there. I also work mostly remotely.

What didn’t go so well?

2019 was dominated by the bad. Eve’s not putting out an Annual Review, but our pain is shared.

The move. 11 months after the contract was signed, our builder was finally ready to let us move in. The house was not finished, just livable. So we rushed out of Rhode Island. We packed my car with everything we could fit, even removing the spare tire, but we got almost all of it. Me, Eve, our son, and our two cats.

At around 7:30 PM, we were driving on a dark highway when we were struck by a muffler that had fallen out from the truck in front of us. It destroyed the front-end, spilling radiator fluid onto the road. I had no idea what was going on, but it so happened that a mechanic had broken down right near us and was able to help. The engine barely carried us to the nearest motel, and I was in shock. I carried all our stuff to our second-floor room, it was even lightly raining. And I was defeated. Eve reports she had never seen me so bad. I had no idea how long we’d be in this ghetto-ass motel, what it would cost us during this time of great financial need, and mostly: I was just miserable. We could have died. If it had hit one of our tires, we could have spun out at 70+ MPH. All I wanted to do was get to our house the next day, and here we were.

I won’t detail the rest here, but I do want to thank my friends for their support and appreciate the good fortune that we got through this time.

We got to the house at 11PM on a Sunday; I still appreciate our builder taking the time to show us around so late. And... it was not at all what we were expecting. We had no driveway, and it had rained. We were tracking in some mud but that didn’t even matter because the entire house had to be cleaned. There was dirt all over the floors, they’d forgotten I didn’t want a chandelier over the dining room table, and the feeling was that we’d gone through Hell (and austure financial practices) to get here and this was it. So much wasn’t done. We knew that, but we didn’t think we’d be sweeping and wetting the floor with paper towel just to have a place to put our stuff. Shoutout to my friend Cody for setting us up with a supply drop.

We spent a lot of time buying furniture, aided by our rental SUV, all the while worrying about our newly purchased things sitting around the house without our protection as workers came in and out. I had to go back to Virginia to pick up the car and through exhaustion, caffeine, stupidity, and anxiety, managed to go 88 MPH and get myself a ticket: a misdemeanor, even. I spent the entire day picking up that damn car (5 hours up and down) and returned home in the worse state I’d ever felt. I was emotionally, mentally, and physically depleted.

But there was no stopping for me: I took on contract work and I had to get it done just to stay afloat. And then we got a fucking dog.

The dog. At some point in 2018 we determined that our son could use a companion and that a dog really completes the family. Leading up to the move, we put a down payment on a rough collie: the “Lassie” breed. They usually run around $800 and we got her for $500. I was a fan of the breed and Eve had done research that proves it’s a great breed. (it is) Even after the accident, we thought we should pay the rest for her and bring some joy into our life.

We named her Esme, and getting a dog was definitely one of the worst macro decisions I’ve made for the family yet. I couldn’t last more than a month with her. It was my decision to get rid of her, which made my wife and son sad but we were getting so little out of the experience. The cats beat her up, she was afraid of everything, and all she wanted to do was run around but we kept her cooped up in the house because we had no fence. I hated that there was still a dog smell, and I hated that it farted during Game of Thrones. It was over when we went grocery shopping and came back to a poop-filled crate, which the circumstances of the night dictated I must clean.

Young Living. Eve was supposed to sell essential oils for some side money. We knew it wasn’t going to be big money, unless she got lucky or turned out to be a natural-born saleswoman, but it was something to do and we believe in the products. I really trust in Young Living and I personally have seen the benefits of their oils and products.

So she went to the YL convention in Utah to learn to sell and, hey, have some fun. She returned feeling even less confident: they’d changed some numbers, and the truth that we always knew was that the market’s highly saturated. There are memes trivializing the effects of oils and there’s no denying the company’s an MLM. A lot of the big earners made their sales early on. Coinciding with the bad feels of Autumn, we decided to put the oil dream aside and focus on mental and physical health.

Eve mental/physical health. The muffler changed a lot for us. It morphed what should have been a very happy time in our lives into a very stressful one. Eve felt fatigued and broken down, and I wasn’t much better off. One day before her planned back-to-action, pick ourselves up and get ready to enjoy Summer, she sprained and tore a ligament in her ankle while coming down the stairs. We hoped it was just a sprain and did everything we could to avoid going to the doctor, but a week later she hadn’t gotten better and so began the PT and bullshit regimen. Our plans of hiking the blue ridge mountains were crushed.

But she recovered, and I shit you not, the very day before she planned to return to action, it was Father’s Day. She was making me my special breakfast and was using a hand-blender to blend pumpkin french toast mix when she went to clean some gunk out of the blender with her finger. It was a split-second decision to help make breakfast faster. Her finger twitched, caught the irresponsibly sensitive power button and tore her finger up. Immediately took her to Urgent Care and then the Emergency Room. $3,000 and some luck later, she kept her finger, but has permanently lost some feeling in it.

That was a bad time for us. I was overworked, she was miserable, and yet she still managed to get to Utah to learn how to sell. To salvage our year. In Autumn, all the anxiety, stress, and the damage from her upbringing finally culminated and she broke.

Her physical health tanked in tandem with her mental. She suffered frequent menstrual issues and her EDS (a joint disorder) flaring up. It is hard to detail all the pain and frustration, and it really is beyond the scope of what needs to be said. My wife is depressed, prone to feeling overwhelmed, and I’m happy to say that we are getting her professional help soon.

What’s remarkable is that I can’t recall a period of time that she didn’t try her best to recover. Every month, most weeks, she would constantly express that the next day or month was her time. She’s done it for this month and 2020 as well. And I don’t think she’s lazy or unmotivated. She is just defeated and I am a poor comforter. Honestly, I am just shit at helping people if the solution isn’t “well just force yourself to do the thing.” That’s how I get through my problems and it doesn’t work for everyone, not even always myself. Still she is strong. I think writing this out has helped me remember that.

Relationship with my son. I had hoped my increased efficiency and happiness would improve our relationship. I planned for more structure: things like “once we’re upstairs for bedtime rituals, no going back down.” Each night I make a point to spend a minimum of 30 focused minutes with him. But I have only succeeded in making our relationship worse. I don’t think he needs professional help, but there is something within him, from when he was three years old, that just prevents him from being a hard worker. Respect is important to me and I don’t respect him. He is a frustrated child, often not understanding the world, often forgetting things he was supposed to do. I’m not doing a good job of helping.

I think I could have done better, but there were simply too many fronts to fight.

Mental performance. I haven’t gotten any better from last year. I am still not as sharp as 2017-Vael. It is a matter of stress and lifestyle.

What did I learn?

How to be a homeowner! Generally how to manage a home. I got my tools, all cute with my little leaf blower.

SLOWWWW DOWWWWN. The outside of the house needs some work. We need to extend our driveway, clear an acre, and put up a fence. I could take a loan out to do this and be fine, but I could also just slow down. Take a deep breath. Enjoy what we have for the Summer. It sucks I won’t be able to use that acre for farming, but I think I have a good place to plant a single apple tree this year. And hey, less mowing.

A shit ton of web development.

Probably became more cynical. But I think The Good Place has helped remind me to be a good person.

To just accept Eve needs help. And that I really suck at helping her.

Future Outlook

All that bad stuff that happened? Pfft. Shitty year. 2020′s here, it’s a brand new decade. I’ve got a cool game I want to make, we’re gonna get Eve some help, and...

Get pregnant! Yeah! Right now we definitely aren’t ready for kids. We need to use our new health insurance to make a bunch of appointments, recover financially, mentally, physically. But we very badly want more children. I feel it all the time. I have begun to suspect that genetics do matter, and I wonder if Abel’s laziness mirrors his biological father’s laziness. My dad loved to work and I do too. It might be possible to pass these traits on.

Better office. I need to get some furniture and improve my work environment.

Vacation! We desperately need a vacation. We’re going to Disney this year, either May or June.

Zen Vael. I will attempt to be “the person I want to be” as detailed last year. My soft goal for this is March 15th, as I set last year. I will undoubtedly fail that date. There is no way I’m wrangling my sleep and attitude in the next two months, but surely by the end of the year?

Thanks for reading.

Vael

#annual review

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