#delicate british sensibilities he said

[homunculus-argument]

I think it would be funny to take two distinctly different book genres that happen to be set at the same time and just have them both happen in the same story. Hell, make them antagonistic to each other, you've got one set of protagonists over here and another set there, whatever happens on their turf works by their genre logic, and vice versa.

Like imagine you're reading a Jane Austen style sensibility realism about the british landowning gentry who are very delicate and polite with each other but consider abject poverty to mean only having two maids and one horse carriage. The protagonist is pleading her father to please reconsider his oath to never forgive some duke over an imagined slight in a starkly worded letter, before he brings ruin to the entire family over his own stubborn pride. If her brother won't come back from his service in the navy, the duke is their only hope. Her father insists that he will, his son is his the favourite child and if anything ever happened to him, then he would simply die from grief on the spot because he would no longer have anything worth living for. The protagonist is unsure whether it didn't cross her father's mind that by saying this he would imply that she is worth nothing to him, or whether he said that intentionally and simply does not care that it hurt her. She does not ask, and instead goes to her room to write a 15-page letter to her closest most beloved bosom friend.

Then it cuts to halfway across the world right into a rowdy romantic pirate adventure, right in the middle of a swashbuckling battle at sea. This time there's no time for long introductions of family backgrounds and scenic high detail descriptions of their respective estates, one of the ships is on fire and whichever side manages to get control of the other ship will live. Battle for survival alone at this point. Shit's pure tits up chaos. The other protagonist, a pirate, shows up on the scene, and in their introductory sentence stabs the aforementioned brother through the throat.

[amphibious-thing]

This is maybe a dumb question, but looking at the portraits of Hervey, I have a hard time noticing anything about how he's dressing that seems out of the ordinary or especially more 'feminine' for the time period (barring that one where he just has his coat buttoned super low and his whole shirt out?). Am I missing some obvious detail (material they were made out of maybe?) or was the his effeminacy/the perception of him as effeminate just more based on behavior than 'presentation'?

Not a dumb question at all. It was combination of his sexuality, his diet, his androgyny as well as his clothes & makeup. While Hervey's femininity was almost certainly exaggerated in satire written by his enemies there was some basis to this satire.

Sexuality

In the 18th century there was an association between effeminacy and sodomy. I don't think we can discount the role the rumours surrounding Hervey's sexuality played in the public's perception of him. William Pulteney's 1731 pamphlet A Proper Reply to a Late Scurrilous Libel satirises Hervey as Mr. Fainlove. Pulteney describes Fainlove as a "delicate Hermophrodite", a "pretty, little, Master-Miss" and insinuates that he's a pathick who "enjoys every Moment and Fruits of his Guilt". The 1739 pamphlet The State of Rome, Under Nero and Domitian satirises Hervey as Sporus (an allusion to Pope's satire of Hervey) describing him as a "Male-female Thing," who is "Fit only for the Pathicks loathsome Trade".

Pope's choice to satirise Hervey as Sporus in An Epistle from Mr. Pope, to Dr. Arbuthnot (1735) was itself a comment on Hervey's sexuality. Sporus being the boy that Nero is said to have castrated and taken as a wife.

Diet

Hervey was epileptic and suffered from a chronic colic. He details his medical history in An Account of My Own Constitution and Illness. At the recommendation of his doctor's George Cheyne he adopted a milk and vegetable diet. Cheyne believed that such a diet was "absolutely necessary for the total Cure of the Epilepsy” and also prescribed milk and vegetable diets in cases of “extreme Nervous Cholicts”. (The English Malady, p167 & 254) Hervey ate no meet for three years before reintroducing white meet. This diet was seen as effeminate by his contemporaries. Lady Louisa Stuart cites his refusal to eat beef as an example of the “extreme to which Lord Hervey carried his effeminate nicety”. (Stuart wrote this anonymously in the introductory anecdotes included in the 1837 edition of The Letters and Works of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu.)

Hervey also drank "ass’s milk with powder of crab’s eyes and oyster-shells" for his heath. This is mocked in the poem The Lord H-r--y's First Speech in the House of Lords (1733-4) that calls him "a perfect curd of ass's milk." Alexander Pope included a similar line in An Epistle from Mr. Pope, to Dr. Arbuthnot (1735) describing him as a "mere white Curd of Ass's milk".

[Certain City Macaronies drinking Asses Milk, print, c.1772, via The British Museum.]

The association between effeminacy and asses milk features in the satirical dialogue The City Macaronies drinking Asses-milk, at the Lacteum, in St. George's-fields published in the November 1772 edition of the Oxford Magazine which was accompanied by the above illustration. The dialogue mocks macaroni for drinking asses-milk as a treatment for "nervous cases" and "hysterics" claiming that it's "delicate men" such as the macaroni "whose fine feelings are sensible of the slightest pressure, that are acquainted with hysterics". The son of the milk woman wonders aloud whether the macaroni are men or women. His mother tells him "they're neither, they are a kind of half and half breed."

Androgyny

With his slim figure and a bit of a baby-face Hervey was considered to be naturally androgynous. When Lady Deloraine said to him and Miss Fitzwilliams that "in her opinion a woman could never look too much like a woman, nor a man too much like a man" Hervey admitted that "considering the two people she said this to, it was certainly well said; and I can forgive her having bragged of it to every creature she has seen since" (Hervey to Stephen Fox, 18 September 1731)

Satirical descriptions of Hervey liken him to a cherub or a fairy describing him as pretty, little, soft, dainty, delicate.

In A Proper Reply to a Late Scurrilous Libel (1731) Pulteney satirises Hervey as "pretty Mr. Fainlove" who he describes as a "delicate Hermophrodite", a "pretty, little, Master-Miss", a "pretty, little Scribbler", and comments that he shouldn't "sully those pretty Fingers with Ink" that "a Fan would become them much better than a Pen."

The Lord H-r--y's First Speech in the House of Lords (1733-4) describes him as "the softest, prettiest thing". In An Epistle from Mr. Pope, to Dr. Arbuthnot (1735) Pope describes him as having a "cherub's face". Tell-tale Cupids (1735) satirises him as the "pretty baby fac'd Lord Dapper".*

In A Fairy Tale (1743) by Horace Walpole depicts Hervey as a literal fairy describing him as a "Dainty little Figure", "most delicately Fair and light" who "would have been vastly Pretty if it’s cherry-lips had ‘nclos’d any Teeth".

*quoted in Lord Hervey: Eighteenth-Century Courtier by Robert Halsband

Clothes & Makeup

Pope didn't describe Sporus as a "bug with gilded wings" and a "Fop at the toilet" because of Hervey's natural androgyny, clothing & makeup absolutely played a role in the public perception of him.

The Duchess of Marlborough described Hervey as a having "a painted face, and not a tooth in his head". Pope described him as "painted Child of Dirt that stinks and stings". And the The Court Garland refers to him as "Thou powder-puff, thou painted toy". (see The Opinions of Sarah Duchess-Dowager of Marlborough p42, An Epistle from Mr. Pope, to Dr. Arbuthnot & Lord Hervey: Eighteenth-Century Courtier by Robert Halsband p138)

The fashionable look of the period required pale clear skin, flushed red cheeks and dark eyebrows. While washes and creams were used to achieve clear pale skin, white cosmetic paint could also be used to lighten and smooth the skin. Rouge was used to give colour to the cheeks. Burnt cloves could be used to darken the eyebrows. While some of these cosmetics contained lead or mercury not all of them did.

[Lord John Hervey, oil on canvas, c.1741–1742, by Jean-Baptiste van Loo, via Art UK.]

It's hard to know how reliable the accounts of Hervey's makeup use are however his portraits do depict him with this fashionable look (in particular the rosy cheeks of the Jean-Baptiste van Loo portraits and the Enoch Seeman portrait). While modern depictions of 18th century fops will sometimes exaggerate makeup depicting men with pure white faces and almost perfectly round red circles on their cheeks, Hervey's portraits are more accurate to the look these cosmetics were trying to achieve.

The use of cosmetics are highlighted in satirical depictions of effeminate men throughout the 18th century century. As early as 1691 Mundus Foppensis: or, the Fop Display’d was mocking men for the "wanton use" of "Spanish Red, and white Ceruse". In 1773 The Old Beau in an Extasy depicts a "Fop at Sixty two" who uses "Chinese Paint for Artificial Bloom". In 1812 Regency A la Mode depicts the Prince Regent applying rouge to his cheeks while he gets laced into stays. The Court Garland's satire of Hervey is just another example of a satirical depiction of a fop in makeup:

Thou powder-puff, thou painted toy, Thou talking trifle, H----y; Thou doubtful he, she, je ne sçai quoy, By G-d, the K--g shall starve ye.

[Left: The Old Beau in an Extasy, print, c.1773, by John Dixon, via Lewis Walpole Library.

Right: 1812, or, Regency A la Mode, print, c.1812, by William Heath, via Lewis Walpole Library]

As for clothing I have to admit I'm better at late-18th century menswear. That being said material and colour seem to have played a role in what was considered effeminate.

A letter to the Read's Weekly Journal or British Gazetteer published on the 8th of May 1731 complains; "Rich and coloured Silks are in themselves effeminate, and unbecoming a Man; as are in short, all Things that discover Dress to have been his Study- 'Tis in vain for a Fop of Quality, to think his Title will protect him." In particular the article criticises poke sleeves and green waistcoats. While poke sleeves are absent from Hervey's portraits the Seeman portrait depicts him wearing a green waistcoat.

Green waistcoats are also mentioned in a story published in the Universal Spectator and Weekly Journal on the 18th of October 1729 describing and effeminate man's clothing as follows:

He had a flower’d pink-colour Silk Coat, with a Green-Sattin Waistcoat lac’d with Silver. Velvet Breeches, Clock’d Stockings the Colour of his Coat, Red-heel’d Pumps, a Blue Ribbon at the Collar of his Shirt, and his Sword-Hilt he embrac’d under the Elbow of his Left Arm,

This green waistcoat is laced with silver. In the Jean-Baptiste van Loo portraits you can see a embroidered silver waistcoat peeking out from beneath Hervey's coat.

[Left: Lord John Hervey, oil on canvas, c.1737, by John Fayram, via Art UK.

Right: Lord John Hervey, oil on canvas, by Enoch Seeman, via The Collected Verse of John, Lord Hervey]

While the quality of the photo leaves much to be desired I wonder if the coat from the Seeman portrait is supposed to be silver. The coat he wears in the The Hervey Conversation Piece could also be silver but it might simply be grey. Sarah Osborn thought that silver coats looked effeminate. She wrote to Robert Byng on the 2nd of June 1722:

I believe the gentlemen will wear petticoats very soon, for many of their coats were like our mantuas. Lord Essex had a silver tissue coat, and pink color lutestring waistcoat, and several had pink color and pale blue paduasoy coats, which looked prodigiously effeminate.

Hervey wears a "prodigiously effeminate" pale blue, possibly paduasoy, coat (possibly a long sleeved waistcoat?) in the Fayram portrait.

The low buttoned waistcoat is somewhat interesting and consistent throughout his portraits, buttoned particularly low in the Fayram portrait. The effeminate Captain Whiffle from The Adventures of Roderick Random (1748) is described wearing his waistcoat "unbuttoned at the upper part to display a brooch set with garnets" but Hervey is broochless and looking at other portraits from this period the low buttoning doesn't seem to be unusual.

[Left: Detail of The Hervey Conversation Piece, oil on canvas, c.1738-40, by William Hogarth, via Fairfax House.

Right: Lord John Hervey, oil on canvas, c.1741, by Jean-Baptiste van Loo, via Art UK.]

Fur-lined suits like that worn by Hervey in the Jean-Baptiste van Loo portraits were imported from France or Italy and could be very costly. Mary Delany describes Lord Baltimore wearing "light brown and silver, his coat lined quite throughout with ermine" at a ball where "finery was so common it was hardly distinguished". (Mary Delany to Ann Granville, 22 Jan, 1739/40)

Fur-lined suits were somewhat of novelty in England and would become a feature in Grand Tour portraits. Peter McNeil explains in Pretty Gentleman (p123):

The novelty and glamour of new fashion goods generated excited responses to Lyons silk waistcoats, Italian velvets and fur-lined suits. There was a well-established tradition of wealthy men acquiring clothing on the continent and then having themselves painted in them, either in Italy or back in England.

(see Benjamin Lethieullier 1752, Lord Archibald Hamilton 1755-56 & John Scott 1774 all by Pompeo Batoni an artist well know for his Grand Tour portraits)

Hervey's buckles in the Jean-Baptiste van Loo portraits look to be set with paste (glass) or gems (buckles could even be set with diamonds). While it's impossible to tell what Hervey's buckles are set with these buckles could get very expensive. Later in the century macaroni were mocked for their expensive taste in similar buckles. (see McNeil p90)

[Left: Shoe buckle, metal & paste, 18th century, British via The MET (83.1.103).

Right: Detail of Lord John Hervey, oil on canvas, c.1741, by Jean-Baptiste van Loo, via Art UK.]

While Hervey was certainly a fashionably dressed man he doesn't take it to the extent you might imagine of the archetypal fop. Satire exaggerates. Hervey's enemies chose their words deliberately to humiliate him. The amphibious thing of Pope's poetry was in reality a chronically ill queer man with a taste for fashion.

[grumpygreenwitch]

The Witches And Wizards Job 29-30

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TWENTY NINE

"Hardison has the most dangerous entrance," Ford had explained to them all. "He goes in first. I want you all watching to make sure he gets in OK."

Lucille 2.O and the U-haul van were parked side by side on the visitor's lot of the apartment complex that abutted the back wall of the gracious Roughan manor grounds. Nate stayed with Lucille; Eliot and Dresden walked sedately away from the U-haul van along the street, nearly invisible in the dark except when a pair of headlights passed over them as a car came to, and occasionally went from, the party.

Ahead of them, down an elegantly curved driveway and up a stately set of steps with wrought iron railings, Hardison was offering his invitation to a very large woman in a well-fitted tux. "You'll not find it under my name. I'm the replacement for Bartholomew Harrington." His voice was low, pleasant, elegantly British as he offered a business card that read "Alexander Worthington the Third' and 'Christie's of London - Acquisitions.'

The woman examined both card and invitation. "Where's the other man?" she asked.

"Where his delicate sensibilities won't get in the way of keeping the Sokolov portrait from being lost," Mister Worthington (the Third), replied with the most pointed disapproval in his cultured voice, pushing up his glasses with fastidious precision. Mister Harrington was actually sleeping off a hefty dose of sedatives in his hotel room. "I'm sure there's someone you can call to confirm my credentials," he suggested politely.

The woman gestured for him to wait and took a step back, speaking into her own earbud.

A call was made.

Nate picked it up in Lucille, where Hardison had already rerouted most of the normal phones belonging to the security team. Overkill, but a necessity, since he had to be feet on the ground for the job. "Lawrence Billings." His British accent wasn't nearly as elegant, but the burr on it was on purpose. No one liked speaking for long to someone they could barely understand. He listened to what was asked of him. "Well, I'm not about to tell you what our man is there for, obviously. But yes, he's a trusted agent of our organization."

Mister Worthington (the Third) was waved on.

"Don't lie," Dresden had told them all. "Dance around the truth, give it halfway. Omit. Hide. But don't outright lie unless you know for sure you're talking to a human."

Eliot and Harry moved up the steps. The hitter could feel the wizard all but vibrating, so tense was he. "Harry, are you alright to do this?," he murmured.

"Not even a little bit," Harry admitted. He was gritting his teeth so hard a muscle along his cheek had started twitching and wouldn't stop. His eyes kept losing track of where they were and what they were doing.

The wizard was elsewhere, Eliot realized, and whatever he was seeing, it was his own personal hell. "Do you want to call it off?"

"No. I'll be fine once I start talking to people." The wizard stared at his feet. "Once I can focus on what's going on here."

Eliot stared a little longer at the man. He knew what it was like, when the dragons of your past rose up and waited for you in the present. "Alright," he said mildly. "You know, you may not have a lot of sense, but you're all heart, wizard."

Dresden lifted his bandaged hand and grinned humorlessly. "Dangerous thing to be."

"Worth it?"

The wizard chewed long and hard on the question. "Yeah. It was." They climbed up the stairs and three very large people in suits immediately blocked their path.

"I think they know who we are," Eliot commented mildly.

"I think they think they know who we are," Harry replied just as casually.

"You were not invited, wizard," the woman told him stonily.

"And yet here I am," Dresden replied cheerfully, offering an invitation. "Harry Dresden, Professional Wizard. And my, uh, my bodyguard. On behalf of the Lord of Weekend Deliveries."

The woman glowered at him, eyed the invitation with utmost jaundice, examined the both of them and the piece of vellum closely. "Get Letty," she told one of the men with her, who was only slightly shorter, and somewhat broader across the shoulders.

Letty, it turned out, was a twitchy little man with very short, clumpy red hair, dressed in the most ill-fitted attempt at a bouncer's suit. It looked like he'd been chewing at the sleeves, and he was missing one shoe. His socks were slowly rotating around his feet, too big to stay in place. He squinted blindly at Harry with mismatched eyes, one brown, one yellow, the one larger than the other. "Wizard," he rasped at the woman, scrabbling at her arm with plucking, long, bony fingers.

She shoved him, caught the back of his neck and held him in place. "Tell him again," she instructed Harry.

He gave her a deeply bored look, then stared at Letty until he looked down with a little whine. "Harry Dresden, Professional Wizard. On behalf of the Lord of Weekend Deliveries. And my bodyguard, Eliot Spencer."

Every bouncer there took a long step back.

"He speaks truth, fairy truth," Letty rasped.

The woman struggled to peel her eyes off Eliot. It took a solid effort, but she managed to face Harry once again. "You packing?"

"Yes. And I'm gonna continue packing unless you tell me you went in there and defanged Ying Ying and put thumb-knots on the Blackbird."

She scowled at him, but stepped back and out of his way with ill grace. "I'll be watching, wizard. Give me a ghost of a reason."

"Oh, I'm sure I'll think of something," Harry declared jauntily. He was a study in contradictions, in elegant dress pants and fine black shoes, wearing a high-necked shirt stitched with rims of black feathers along the wrists and chest, and an elegantly embroidered black vest, all of it tucked under his battered leather duster. Eliot at least looked like he belonged, in a fine indigo tux, hair caught back in a half pony-tail. "And we're in," the hitter murmured as they both moved up to the door. "I thought you said we couldn't lie to them."

"You can't."

"Then who the hell's the Lord of Weekend Deliveries?"

An honest, sheepish little grin twitched at the corners of Harry's mouth. "The official title is Pizza-Lord. And I am."

A silver Rolls Royce purred up the driveway and to the bottom of the stairs. From the shotgun door, Nick managed to squeeze himself out. He had on a plain white suit and looked very put together, and generally amused at the universe in general and particular. From the opposite side of the car, Vanya Fedorov slipped out. The Russian enforcer was very much the dapper creature in darkest charcoal gray and deep green, his eyes ever watchful. He came around the car, opened the door, and offered a hand to his companion.

Ekaterina Yegorov took the offered hand and stepped out into the night.

Eliot heard Harry choke on a breath, and smiled. He had to, because for a moment he'd forgotten to breathe as well.

Miss Yegorov was a jewel, wrapped in frothy layers of seven different shades of indigo; the changes in hue were so subtle it was impossible to tell where they ended or began. The silk gown both hugged her body and hid it, promising everything and nothing, revealing all treasures and taking them all away with her merest motion. Her black hair cascaded down one side, pinned back on the other with an elegant clip done in platinum and black diamonds. The Rosalind diamond sat over her collarbones nestled on a double chain, the first loop tight around her neck, the other much longer. She carried a small black purse that probably fit one credit card and the hopes and dreams of most men and a few of the women watching her.

"Breathe, Harry," Eliot murmured.

"Yeah, that's me," the wizard mumbled.

Fedorov leaned close, whispered something, and Ekaterina laughed. They went up the stairs; the bouncers barely even checked the invitation, all smiles and bows, even after Fedorov pointed out his bodyguard was also coming with him. He even, all courtesy, pulled his jacket away to show the gun there in its underarm holster. He was troubled over none of it.

The trio didn't even look at Eliot or Harry as they swept by and into the manor.

"Sophie and Nick are in," Eliot murmured.

The little shard of the enchanted mirror pinning his tie in place carried the message to the shard Nate had on a platinum ear-clip.

"Here we go, then," the mastermind declared mildly. He checked on the bud tucked into the other ear. "Parker, you in place?"

Parker was sliding gracefully along a vertical stone shaft. "So this was for bringing food up and down?"

"Uh, a dumbwaiter, yes."

"Why'd they stop building houses with them?"

"Because of thieves."

"But they're so convenient!"

Nate, who knew to a nicety the humongous extra fee that a house incurred in insurance premiums when it had a working dumbwaiter, could only reply, "Yes, for thieves. Have you found the portrait yet?"

"Not yet." Parker looked at her wrist. She had a toy compass attached to it, the sort you could find in a cereal box, or buy for fifty cents. The needle on it danced uncertainly between two very specific points. "I think there's one of those tracking foil things on it. I'm not close enough for Harry's compass to beat it completely."

"Alright. Parker can't find the portrait," he relayed, "so it's up to you guys, then."

"Oh, this is something else," Sophie's voice murmured into the linked mirror shards. Her own were tiny, secured to the hair clip among the black diamonds, and to the decorative clasp on the chain holding the Rosalind diamond.

"What, what is it?"

Eliot, who'd just stepped into the main hall of the manor with Harry, gritted his teeth. "It's a Mona Lisa," he growled low. "I count three portraits in this room alone."

"There's two in this one," Sophie added, turning slightly, her arm tucked around Vanya's. They'd made it all the way to a dining room, where a slim buffet and a vast bar were set up. Nick made a little plaintive sound, and a smile ghosted over the Russian enforcer's features before he nodded minutely. His so-called bodyguard immediately made a beeline for the food.

"One more upstairs," Hardison informed them.

"There's duplicates of everything, even the ugly flute thing, there's three of those in this room alone," Sophie protested.

"It's a test," Harry murmured. "By magic or skill, the buyer's going to have to be able to tell the real one from the copies. It's not the seller's fault if they can't."

"Dresden," Nate asked. "Were the copies made by magic?"

Harry hesitated with a startled look. Yet again, Nate had caught him by surprise in throwing the word out so readily. He rallied, walking up to one of the items in display at the room, a flute carved out of a long, blackened bone larger than a femur, but thinner. He ran a hand over it, not quite touching, murmuring under his breath.

A little breeze made the flute hum mournfully, barely audible.

"No. Unless I found the one real one among all the copies, they're real, inasmuch as they can be. Magic won't tell you which ones are fake."

"Please don't touch the cursed artifacts," a woman's voice said from behind Eliot and Harry with a touch of dark humor and a very slight accent. "No one here needs another mad wizard situation."

Harry threw the hitter a warning look, and they both turned slowly.

Ying Ying Amarin was a beautiful, fragile-seeming creature, with a mantle of black hair and skin so fair it could have passed for eggshell porcelain. Her eyes were almond-shaped and the sweetest chocolate brown, and her mouth was a delicate pink blossom. She was wearing a very elegant black dress and a long string of blood-red pearls with matching earrings. "Wizard Dresden," she greeted, her voice pleasant. "Much is said of you among the circles I frequent."

"Miss Amarin. All of it bad, I'm sure."

She gave him a half-smile. "Most of it. Tell me, how does a wizard secure the services of Eliot Spencer as a bodyguard? I understood you barely keep the lights on in your home."

"Even the most careful man can end up owing favors where he doesn't want to," Eliot said mildly, belying the sudden, inexplicable and altogether terrifying hunger that had slammed into him at the sight of the woman.

"The flute, is it yours?" Harry asked.

"Interesting. The flute? No. We are not selling, merely buying. There is a Bag of Winds somewhere around here that my Hong Kong associates would like me to acquire for them. I hope we will not be competitors?"

Harry shook his head readily. "I'm only interested in one thing, so far."

The wizard didn't notice, but the hitter did. Ying Ying's shoulders shifted minutely, the corners of her mouth eased. She blinked twice. She smiled.

She'd been worried. About Harry.

"That's good to know." Then her attention came to rest fully on Eliot. He felt her power slam into him like an avalanche, calling out to the most primal parts of him in a scream that begged to be answered. It roared hunger, for food, for blood, for flesh, for breath, for anything and everything. "Perhaps later mister Spencer will tell me all about this… favor?"

The hitter tucked a hand into his jacket and closed it around one of the pins in it. The metal went immediately soft, blisteringly hot. "Perhaps," he replied, smiling automatically. He saw smug triumph and a hint of appreciation on those pink, perfect lips and walked away powered strictly by pain and self-control, Harry by his side.

"Shake it off," the wizard told him once they were far enough away. "Breathe. You did fine. It's gonna linger, but you did fine."

"That is some kind of…" Eliot didn't even have the words. "She's a vampire?!"

"Yes, of a sort. Not all of them feed on blood. She's Jade Court, so I have no idea what she actually eats."

The hitter brought out the misshapen pin. "We only have so many between Hardison and me, Harry."

"Why do you think I'm staying up here, away from everyone?" the hacker pointed out. His listening shard was hiding on the leg of his glasses. The speaking shard was pinned to his ascot.

"Vanya's uncle's here," Sophie suddenly said, and everyone quieted.

"Vanya!" Fedorov's uncle rushed up to him. He was dressed just as sharply as his nephew, and he looked vaguely flustered. He took one look at Ekaterina and he ended up completely flustered, mouth working emptily for a long moment before he switched to Russian altogether. "I didn't think you were coming."

"Your advice has never steered me wrong," the Russian mobster said. "If you believe meeting these people is important -"

"No, you don't understand, Vanya!" His uncle interrupted him urgently. "I didn't think you were coming at all, someone had to represent the family's interests -"

"Yes. You, then?"

"No. Me." A man, taller and leaner than Mikhail Sagorov but carved along much the same hard, unforgiving lines, stepped around Fedorov's uncle and spoke in English.

Ekaterina felt the man next to her go rigid, the fingers of his free hand twitching. "Father."

"Vanya."

All six members of the team immediately focused on that one discordant exchange.

Fedorov, who apparently was as shaken as everyone else, turned to automatic courtesy. "Allow me to introduce miss Ekaterina Yegorov," he said, freeing his arm from her grip and sliding his hand to hers. "An art expert, among many other things. My father, Ivan Sagorov."

Ekaterina smiled. A shard of light caught the diamond she wore as she stepped forward. Both older men stepped instinctively back, but she merely offered her hand. "It is always a pleasure to meet men who know not just how to build their power, but to hang onto it."

Ivan Sagorov looked at her with infinite wariness. He eventually relented to take her hand in his, but rather than shake it, he kissed her fingers lightly. "One finds the definition of power very subjective in this place and among these people. Miss Yegorov flatters me."

Ekaterina chuckled richly. "I do not. Perhaps there are many here that discount the power mortals have. I am not one."

Ivan grinned minutely at that, but then turned a hard look on his brother, and an even stonier glare on his son. "I did not realize I was my brother's second choice of representative at this gathering."

"You should have guessed," Mikhail replied tersely. "We both know what you think of these sort of people."

"I think they are no one's future, least of all ours." He shot Ekaterina a brief, apologetic glance. "No offense meant."

"None taken," she replied graciously.

"But it is good to know what the heir apparent believes," he added with icy sarcasm and bitter, controlled fury, "of such alliances."

A muscle showed along the line of Vanya's neck. "A wise leader considers all the tools at his disposal."

"Don't shoot my words back at me like you ever cared about them," Ivan snarled quietly in Russian. "No one here's a tool unless it's you."

Fedorov surged forward. Ekaterina caught his arm. "Vanya."

"Do you know what they are? What your uncle brings you in the guise of a gift?" The leader of the Eastern Seaboard Russian mafia stepped forward until he could just hiss at his head enforcer. "They're a noose around our neck. If it weren't because I know they'd take us all down with you, I'd wish them the joy of you."

"The sort of man who'd give his own son to the wolves is not the man I'd trust to have anyone's best interests at heart except his own," Vanya gritted out. "In the end greed always wins out with him."

The conversation might have escalated to parts both bloody and violent, but another voice joined the conversation. "Please, please!" The avuncular, condescending tone was full of cheer. "Why such long faces, this is a party, please. Drinks! Food! Bring some of those delightful little toast things for my friends here. Mikhail, please, introduce me, shan't you?"

"I find I am not hungry," Ivan ground out, stepping back. "I thank you for your hospitality, Koshan, but I think my mood and my patience are worn too thin for companionship."

Koschei gestured grandly with his glass, the brandy in it darkest gold, and stepped back, clearing the way. "Please. It was a pleasure to see you even this brief while, Ivan Sagorov Barevich. Do give my regards to Minke, won't you?"

The elder Sagorov lowered his head like a bull considering a charge, his expression gone black and implacable at those seemingly harmless words. He finally breathed out slowly through his teeth and stalked away.

THIRTY

"Goodness, what a temper," Koschei commented casually. He was wearing much the same outfit he'd worn for his portrait: fine, blousy riding pants tucked into pointed embroidered boots, the complex designs worn in silver. He wore a black shirt with the neckline decorated with tiny emerald chips, a silver sash and a long, heavy coat stitched with black ravens and white wolves. "That man needs a therapist," he said the last word in English, jarring among the fluent Russian.

"My father needs many things," Vanya noted calmly, switching seamlessly to the new language. "He cares to acquire none of them."

Koschei whipped around. "Ah, you must be Vanya. Your uncle has spoken glowingly of you." He offered his hand.

Fedorov managed a smile, just barely, and shook the offered hand. "The gentleman has me at a disadvantage."

"Koschei. Immortal, wizard, your humblest servant." The man bowed. When Vanya merely cocked a brow at him in disbelief, Koschei laughed. "Is it so hard to believe, considering those all around us? Or the company you are currently keeping?" He gave Ekaterina a pointed look, one black brow going up.

Ekaterina's smile was even thinner than Vanya's when she offered her hand. "Ekaterina," she said simply.

Everyone within sight of her held their breaths.

Koschei took that hand and lingered over the kiss. The diamond glittered. Ekaterina took her hand back, since the wizard seemed rudely unwilling to let go.

"Enchanting," he purred. "It's not often my curiosity is piqued."

"Ekaterina is here to help with our exchange. That is, if my bid is amenable," Vanya wrapped a possessive arm around Ekaterina's waist.

Koschei's smile grew. "Of course. That is only sensible. As for your offer, mm, well, it buys you the same as it does for everyone here. A chance to pick up one of the portraits. Whether it is the real one or not, I suppose only an expert could tell."

Upstairs, Hardison put a hand over his ascot pin. "Nate, I do not like this. We don't know how long he's had to make the copies. For all we know he got Sokolov himself to make them."

Back in Lucille 2.0, Nate winced. The earbuds were holding - at least the ones not close to Dresden. But Hardison was surrounded by just enough magic that there was some unpleasant feedback whistling through his line. If not for the shards of the enchanted mirror, more than half the team would have been flying blind. "It's Sophie's call and Sophie's show. Keep an eye on her."

Ekaterina glanced around her diffidently. "Well, we'd have to find the room with the real one first, I suppose," she pointed out archly.

Koschei laughed in delight. "Just so. Are you, ah, permanently attached to Vanya's office, Ekaterina?"

"My services are his tonight," she replied delicately. "They happen to include my company… and my protection."

The wizard examined her closely, but she knew better than to look into those poison-green eyes. "Just so. Very important, to be protected when purchasing such powerful artifacts from such powerful people. But perhaps I could borrow him for a little while to introduce him to a few friends of mine? They would be delighted to make his acquaintance, to watch him rise in power and esteem. That is, after all, what every man desires, no?"

"My desires and my goals are two very different things," the Russian replied mildly. "Unlike most men, I have no problem keeping them separate."

"As one should!" Koschei agreed enthusiastically, then gestured to the room at large. "May I?"

"Kate, see if you can find the real portrait. She has, of course, freedom to roam the premises?" Fedorov asked.

"Of course. The bidders and their agents may go wherever there are more copies to be examined."

Ekaterina smiled.

"Good. Nick!" The bodyguard left the buffet table and sedately made his way over, still looking like the world was a grand joke for him to enjoy. "You're with me."

Nick smiled broadly. It was deeply, deeply unsettling, and wholly aimed at Koschei, but the wizard rallied swiftly and led Vanya away.

"There goes a brave man," Ekaterina murmured.

"I did not realize he already had friends among you people," Mikhail said. "I would not have risked this invitation if I did."

"Do you not want him to make alliances here?" She asked, arching a brow up.

Mikhail was already walking away, visibly struggling with himself.

"Nate," Sophie murmured. "This isn't right. This isn't just an auction of magical artifacts. Sagorov knows something."

"Eliot."

The hitter threw the wizard a questioning glance. Harry nodded. "I'm fine, go."

"Um, Nate?" Parker said into the earbud line.

"Yes, Parker, did you find something?"

"Yes." Parker had found the space between the walls where the old pipes had run, and she'd wormed her way even further into the house, until she was flush with the floor of a large, lavish and very modern bedroom, looking out through an HVAC vent. "I found the old lady."

"You found Grandmother?" That carried to both lines of communication, since Nate was connected to both.

"Yes. And there's a bunch of those rabbit-people watching her." Parker shifted to get a better look past the grate. "They've got guns."

"Armed leshy?" Hardison, also privy to both sides of the conversation, frowned. "Why would they need weapons, so far the only ones to use them have been the humans with them."

"It would make no sense anyway," Harry pointed out, quickly piecing together what bits of the situation he was hearing. "Leshy are thugs. They are nowhere near her power level, she should be able to waltz right past them, guns or not."

"Probably. Unless hearts aren't the only thing you can cut out of people." Nate was thinking very fast, the gleaming fractal trees in his mind coming together faster and faster, facts and suspicions, knowledge old and new, weaving together into a cohesive whole -

"You'd be surprised how many things out there think we're just convenient little walking snacks."

Then there was the night the alkonost had shown up -

"There was a trap in the heart, a means for him to steal her power, if she had agreed."

- and the morning of Dresden's arrival -

"He cut out his own heart and hid it - he hid it so well that no one can find it, not even death."

It all came together with the memory of the Russian enforcer at the loft, comfortably slouched on a couch they'd purchased just so everyone could sit comfortably while they spoke to the wizard, holding onto an oddly shaped, oddly carved wooden cup, drinking vodka and telling them all ancient Russian fairy-tales - not the modern, sanitized versions but the old kind, full of blood and casual violence, where victory was measured by how badly your enemies died.

"Sophie, is Koschei gone?"

"He's introducing Fedorov around. You'd think he was the star of this show."

"Dresden?"

"I'm fine. I think no one wants to be seen with me."

"Eliot?"

Eliot had trailed Sagorov to a small sunroom. "He's on the phone yelling at someone." The hitter kept back, to the shadows just outside the solarium's door, and stiffened when he realized what he was hearing. "It's him. This isn't just an auction of artifacts, Sagorov's selling Fedorov to settle a debt of some sort. Nate, he's selling future control of the entire Eastern Seaboard chapter to one of these things!"

"Of course he is," the mastermind whispered, another section of the puzzle coming together at last. "Sophie, are Nick and Fedorov still with Koschei?"

"Yes," Sophie confirmed as Ekaterina examined idly some of the items displayed, aloof and graceful, speaking occasionally to those she found nearby. "He's just been introduced to the toad-person."

"Dresden, where are you?"

"At the bar, like you told me to be?"

"Nate." Eliot's voice sounded exceedingly tense. "Problem."

"What is it?"

Faced with two incoming bouncers, the hitter had detoured into what seemed to be a combination conservatory and library, a room of dark, rich, velvety tones. It was closed to the general public, and the only artwork present seemed to be reassuringly normal. There were no lights, which made the door off to one side, past the shelves, painfully obvious. And one quick peek had Eliot trying not to swear at the fact that, magic or not, everything was still conspiring to throw the job off the rails. "I found another Grandmother."

The team reeled to a halt, wherever they were. Back in Lucille, Nate pinched the bridge of his nose wearily. "Of course you did."

"Um." Hardison sounded deeply hesitant. "Not to rain on anyone's parade, but I just found another Grandmother upstairs." The hacker was peeking around a corner and down a long hallway into a private office. He could just glimpse the old woman past the two armed guards at the door, left open to allow a young woman in the severe uniform of the staff to bring in a tray of tea.

"What? No! I found her, she's right here!" Parker, able to hear that bit through the earbuds, protested in an irate hiss.

Sophie paused. "Nate," she breathed as she realized what was happening.

"Yup." The mastermind sighed. "She's part of the auction, too."

"Now what, Nate?" Eliot demanded. "How can we get her out if we can't find the real one?"

"Nothing has changed." Nate clipped out. "Sophie, find the original portrait. Dresden, is there any way to tell which is the real Grandmother?"

"Uh, um…" The wizard rubbed his forehead. "Her shadow. Look at her shadow."

"Parker, check her shadow," Nate relayed.

She wriggled behind the vent. "It's an old lady shadow."

"Then that's not her," Harry replied when Nate repeated that.

"Hardison? Eliot?"

"Normal, uh, old lady shadow here," the hitter reported hesitantly.

"I'm not close enough to see," Hardison warned them. "Do you want me to risk it, Nate?"

"Not yet. Dresden, go pick a fight with Sophie."

"Wh- Me? I thought you wanted me to keep a low profile as long as I could!"

"Hold that thought," Sophie breathed. Ekaterina, having wandered further away, into an elegant breakfast solarium, could feel a gaze burning a hole between her shoulderblades.

"Spider silk, right?" A rough voice asked behind her.

Ekaterina turned. "Isvinee?"

There were two men and one woman behind her. All of them were short and wiry, and they all wore matching gray suits with red ties. Their hair was cut razor-short, the scalp showing pink through for the youngest of the two men, who was very blond. The older man, flanked by the other too, was slouching easily, hands in his pockets. "The duds," he said. "Spider silk, innit?"

"Oh, trial by fire of the Veil," Harry whispered so the words were barely audible; the shards, while serving the same purpose as the earbuds, were nowhere near as quiet. "Conversation's about to get crude, Sophie, this isn't an insult, it's how it translates for them."

"It is, yes." Ekaterina replied simply.

"Well, you look fuckin' gorgeous, gal. Even if it ain't yours." He tapped two clawed fingers to his mouth and blew her a kiss.

Ekaterina smiled. "Spaseeba. Thank you. You would not believe what it cost, and you are the first to say anything, nearly an hour after I come through the door."

"No shit?" The man frowned. "Now there's a fuckin' crime." He looked at both his colleagues, who nodded stoutly. He was perhaps in his late thirties, with sharp gray eyes under heavy brows, stubble on his angular cheekbones, and uneven teeth. He smelled strongly of expensive, pine-based soap, and managed to look both profoundly at ease with his surroundings and incredibly uncomfortable in his clothing. He offered his hand after a moment's thought. "I'm Classy."

Ekaterina took and shook it without hesitation. "An unexpected pleasure to meet you and your companions," she purred. "You can call me Ekaterina, or Kate. I hope we are not to be competitors?"

Classy looked utterly surprised at her casual friendliness. His grip was dry, warm and strong, matching Ekaterina's but mindful not to overpower or hurt her. His nails were short, sharp, curving gray claws and he was very careful not to hurt her, his palms heavily calloused. "Oh, no, no. We're sellin' most of this crap, gal. You, uh, buyin' anything?" He reached for his pocket, but the woman elbowed him mildly and he sighed in exasperation.

Ekaterina gestured to one of the vast glass doors leading to the grounds outside, and began to walk. "My employer is only interested in one item."

"Yeah, everyone's here for that fuckin' painting." As soon as they stepped outside the man lit up a cigarette. "Had to jump through the Blackbird's fuckin' hoops, when this was our to-do first."

"Well, that is, uh, what is the word. Bullcrap."

"Innit?" Classy looked terribly pleased at her empathy. "We don't give a shite over all this, the copies, right?" He waved his hand vaguely at the house. "Who the hell cares. Buy the thing, get out. Eh." He sighed. "Bloody won't give our rightful property back, either."

"I am sorry, did I hear right," Ekaterina put a light hand on Classy's shoulder. "Did the Blackbird steal from you?"

"Not yet he ain't. And he won't if he knows what's fuckin' good for him," Classy declared. He'd started minutely at the touch, but he didn't look insulted or wary, merely pleased. "Look, gal. Between you and me?" He leaned close. "The portrait's not here."

"It is not?"

"Nah." He threw the butt of his cigarette down and crushed it underfoot. "He don't trust nobody. I wouldn't, neither." Wordlessly he moved to stand by her side and dipped his head toward the sound of the surf and the elegant boat-house a stone's throw from the mansion itself. "He'll be bringin' it in at some point, I suppose." He gave her a wicked grin. "'less someone calls 'im out on it."

She grinned back at him and bumped him lightly. "Excuse me," she purred, walking back into the house.

"Nice gal," the woman said as all three watched her go.

"She was," Classy agreed. "So nice. Didn't expect that."

"What is she?" the young man asked.

"I dunno," Classy admitted readily. "Smells scary, though. Let's go find our fuckin' property."

Sophie stalked through the breakfast solarium. "Nate, did you get that?"

"I did. Did everyone else?"

"I didn't!" Parker hissed; Sophie couldn't have an earbud active while carrying the diamond.

"The portrait's not in the house," the mastermind summed up. "It's out in the boat-house."

"Oh." The thief paused. "I'll go get it, then."

"No. No, Parker, n-" Nate sighed. "We need the portrait to disappear in front of everyone. For that, it has to be in the house."

"Well, why can't we put one of the fake portraits in place of the real portrait and then have the man in black bring in a fake portrait instead, wouldn't that be even more embarrassing?"

The most profound silence welcomed that impatient question.

"Dresden."

"Yeah?"

"Go pick that fight."

"Ah, Hell's Bells," the wizard sighed resignedly.

[norcumii]

...oh thanks, Tumblr, it wasn’t like I was trying to answer that ask or anything. -_-

OHKAY. Take two! For this trope mashup meme, @dogmatix asked:

Rex/Obi or pairing/characters of choice - Apocalyse AU / Mermaid/Siren AU / Aroused by their voice

This modern!AU got a liiiiiittle bit more absurdist than planned, but NO REGRETS. Assistance was provided by @dharmaavocado and @deadcatwithaflamethrower -- THANK YOU BOTH!

*****

There was a lovely breeze coming in across the ocean, the sky had just enough puffy white clouds to keep things interesting, and Rex was taking a maintenance day. The last family group of tourists to charter a day trip had included several children that were at least two parts sticky and three parts grime. His poor Vigilance needed a serious scrub down, and Rex was not looking forward to restocking. Small Grubby Fiend 1 had stumbled – supposedly due to a sudden swell, but more likely because Small Grubby Fiends 2 and 3 hadn’t stopped ‘not kicking’ each other for way too long. Not being an entire idiot, Rex has gone right for the band-aids with cartoon characters, but since it wasn’t a cartoon Small Grubby Fiend 1 liked, that meant another – until all three Small Grubby Fiends had been plastered with far more of his first aid kit than was good for anyone.

It had been a long day.

So there he was, untangling life-vests that hadn’t even been used, while singing along with whatever music was playing from the boat’s speakers. Rex wasn’t sure if the music was pop, rock, or some other unholy category he’d never heard of, but thankfully it didn’t matter. He liked it, and could figure out which of Tup’s mix tapes it was on, which was the important thing.

Tup always made hilarious offended noises when Rex called them mix tapes, which was a significant reason why he did so. They were music folders, sensibly labeled by mood, because his little brother had realized at some point that was the only way to keep Rex up to date on anything past the 90’s grunge music.

Tup’s accusation, not his. Rex damn well knew how to use a radio – several kinds of radio, thank you very much.

He was several songs into mind-numbing chores when he spotted a flash of red streaking under the dock, and Rex ducked his head to hide a grin. He’d started spotting movement like that a couple of weeks ago, around the time the neighbors descended on their beach house. There were several ginger teenagers, so he figured one of them was a hell of a water rat who had damn odd taste in music.

To be fair, so did he.

It’d been weird at first, realizing he had an audience that disappeared the moment he acknowledged their existence. But the most he heard or saw out of them beyond the momentary glimpse was a bit of percussion, someone drumming in time against the water – and once, the dock itself – so Rex had shrugged and accepted their presence. It was kinda nice, actually, just to have someone around. He lived a ways off the end of a long, sparsely populated road, and while he didn’t mind the solitude, sometimes you just wanted another–

Rex’s train of thought went off the rails with a loud yelp as he discovered something slimy stuck to the back of a life-vest. It might have been edible once – it was a shade of radioactive green he didn’t associate with anything other than candy or video games, at least, so that was his best guess. Much as he wanted to blame the Small Grubby Fiends, he hadn’t done more than a spot check of these vests for awhile – could’ve been anyone.

Ugh. At least unlike some clients he could name, Rex’s eavesdropper wasn’t vandalizing anything. Wasn’t about to begrudge that.

Rex had managed to get most of the neon green grossness cleared when the rumble of an approaching car caught his attention. He wasn’t expecting visitors, not that that had ever stopped any of his brothers. Lost delivery drivers usually turned around before hitting up the driveway, which was long enough and had enough private property signs to keep out idiots looking for easy water access.

“Who the hell is this?” he muttered, setting the vest aside. He didn’t recognize the little black car, or the burly guy stepping out of the passenger’s side, but the guy waved and casually started towards Rex as if he knew who the hell he was.

Not reassuring, especially since the stranger rapped the car’s roof, and it headed back up the driveway.

“You seem lost,” Rex said, standing up and trying to look just the right level of intimidating.

“Nope,” the guy said back, still heading towards him. “Need your boat.”

“That’s work related – you need to wait till I’m back at the marina tomorrow. I’m at home, it’s my day off.”

Burly guy finally stopped, planting his hands on his hips – a move which just happened to part the jacket of his cheap suit enough that Rex could see the gun he carried. “I don’t think you understand, Mr. Fett. I don't want any trouble – I just want you to head inside, and take that day off while I borrow your boat.”

Oh, FUCK. Nobody really talked about how the mob owned most of the marinas in Tatooine Bay, but you didn’t need to declare water was wet to get drenched in the rain. It just wasn’t something that ever happened to someone you knew, just friends of friends or something.

“And if I don’t agree?” he couldn’t keep from asking.

Burly Guy had a surprisingly expressive shrug. “Most people don’t enjoy pushing their luck that far.”

To his credit, it was a remarkably polite threat. “I’m surprised anyone ever does.”

“Eh, every now and then there’s some freaky masochist looking for cheap thrills, but it ain’t my kink. Don’t think it’s yours, either, so if you’d just head inside, that’d be appreciated.”

The smart move was probably to comply. Rex wasn’t inclined to cooperate anyways. He was saved from making either bad decision by...sound.

It didn’t register as singing – there was something too off about it, a combination that wasn’t quite autotune, or that polyphonic singing Echo had gotten into when Fives got obsessed with the guitar. It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t right in a way that was madly distracting.

The...singing? – pulled both Rex and the goon around towards the end of the dock, and if Rex hadn’t been so muzzy-headed from that sound he would have been gaping much more blatantly.

There was someone slipping out from under the dock, and it was most definitely not one of the neighbors.

It was a trim, shirtless figure in the water – ginger indeed, short red hair just dry enough to be messy spikes. Pale skin was freckled in scales of shimmering reds, protective lines over what would be vulnerable areas on a human. It swam close enough to the surface that Rex could see the sleek fins and tail, and part of his brain kept screaming ‘mermaid!’ while the rest took in the long, sharp claws on webbed hands and whispered ‘predator.’ Its singing showed sharply pointed teeth, and it should not have been nearly that gorgeous.

The mermaid glanced over at him, eyes a deep blue-on-blue that could never masquerade as human, flicking a look up and down him that could have been flattering or terrifying – it all depended on if that was measuring him for a meal euphemistically or not.

The singing changed as the creature turned its attention back to the goon, and the magnetic pull on Rex lessened. He staggered back a step, not too surprised to find he was halfway down the dock without noticing. The hazy feeling in his brain stopped, or at least dropped down to levels that were close enough to normal, so he got a clear view as the goon started walking into the water, oblivious to everything except the mer-siren-thing he was shambling towards.

The siren moved when the goon was almost waist deep in the water, flowing forward to delicately place a hand at the goon’s throat. The singing continued, but now there was a new undertone, soft and somehow questioning. Rex couldn’t tell if there were words to it or not – maybe a whole other language for all he knew – but the goon responded, voice soft enough that he couldn’t make out what was said.

Whatever he said, it didn’t please the siren. It kept singing, but it snarled, showing more of those pointed teeth, then it twisted and dove, hauling the unresisting goon under the water.

A terrifying few moments more, and the last hums of the song seemed to stop vibrating through the water.

“What the absolute fuck?” Rex said numbly. Thank everything, no one answered.

A smart man would’ve hidden inside, or driven off to a movie theater or something – inland and away. Rex wasn’t sure why he stayed: curiosity – morbid or otherwise – shock, or a healthy disbelief in the whole debacle. He was maybe a bit too numb to not have some kind of shock, but –

He felt like he maybe deserved it. “Yeah, I can have a bit of shock,” Rex muttered to himself. “As a treat.”

Okay, he might have more than a bit. But by the time the siren poked his head out of the water again – politely out of arms’ reach – Rex had calmed down a decent degree. They just looked at each other for a bit, then the siren gave him a polite nod.

“Hello there,” he said in a pleasant, deep voice with a hell of an accent.

Rex held up a hand, needing a moment. Of fucking course the British even colonized under the goddamned sea. “Hi. You speak English.” It wasn’t quite the most inane thing he could’ve said, but his brain hadn’t managed to catch up yet.

He was talking to a goddamned mermaid who had just kidnapped and possibly eaten some mob thug who’d been trying to take Rex’s boat. It had been a day.

“You’re not the first land-dweller I’ve made the acquaintance of.”

Rex absolutely refused to make any kind of a crack about being charmed. There was too much hysteria lurking in there. “Speaking of acquaintances, you didn’t, ah, kill that guy, did you?”

The siren’s lips pulled back from his teeth a little. “I still haven’t decided what to do with him, so right now he’s out of the way.” He must’ve seen something impressive in Rex’s expression, because the angry disdain smoothed over to something more neutral. “He’s stashed in a cave I know. Enough air to breathe, but the only entrance is underwater and too far for most humans to swim without assistance.”

That was...a lot. “Thanks for the help.”

The siren smiled, an oddly sweet, bashful expression. “I’d be a very poor guest if I didn’t assist.” He cleared his throat, his expression going awkward. “Though I...suppose ‘guest’ is a bit presumptive.”

Rex grinned. “No, I spotted you a couple weeks ago – ah, I mean, sort of.” Before he could make more a hash of that, he cleared his throat. “The name’s Rex.”

The siren folded his hands together and did a little bow thing. “Obi-Wan. Pleasure to meet you.”

He wasn’t blushing. He absolutely was not blushing. “So...you in town for long?” Ok, now he was blushing, that was worst subject change ever meeting worst fishing attempt – meeting worst and wildly inappropriate pun.

Obi-Wan’s expression fell, sorrow way too visible in those non-human eyes. “I suppose you could say that. I...no longer have a home to return to.”

Definitely not a topic to change to. Right. Rex cleared his throat and shifted. “Well. You’re welcome anytime, for what that’s worth.”

The slow-growing smile didn’t remove that sorrow, but it did kindle something warm inside. This was at least three different kinds of trouble, but Rex didn’t think he’d regret any of it.

~end

[sebastianshaw]

@sammysdewysensitiveeyes So, you asked me not long ago, how I’d feel about Haven as a mutant on Krakoa. As it happens, I’m on an RP Discord where I write her as such, since they allow characters there to be mutants who aren’t mutants in canon, in order to join the RP, since it’s set on Krakoa. I made her a healer, able to heal herself and others. Super on the nose, but it’s what she would want, and it also fulfills *my* desire for her not to be hurt anymore (I mean, she still can be, she’ll just recover) Anyway, in March I wrote this for her in that setting. Featuring Shaw as usual since he’s one of my other muses there and, well, you know I love writing my faves together and their conversations because self-indulgence. No obligation to read, just I remembered I had written it and was like “Oh that’s like what Sammy asked about”

Shaw’s latest job was to spread the Krakoan medicine throughout the country of India. A considerable task; India was made up of no less than 28 states and 8 union territories, with an immense and diverse population. There were the dilapidated slums and rural villages that Westerners most often imagined, but there were also bustling cosmopolitan cities, centers of business and technology and commerce to rival New York, and it was in the biggest of these that Shaw was starting---

Mumbai.

Accompanying him on the recommendation of Charles Xavier was Radha Dastoor---Haven of the healing gardens, whom he had previously met when she had helped with his back. At first Shaw had thought this was a bit racist of Charles, but it turned out not only was Haven from Mumbai specifically herself, she had wonderful connections for the tasks. Her philanthropy had connected her with doctors, hospitals, shelters, and its hidden communities of those suffering afflictions such as the oft-claimed-eradicated leprosy. But, Shaw could have done most of that himself, aside from the hidden colonies. No, where Haven came in most handy was, shockingly, her knowledge of Mumbai’s criminal underworld. Not because she had ever been involved with it, but because she had done so much work getting people out of it---the women and children she had worked to get out of human trafficking rings, the survival sex workers rescued from abusive pimps, the children enticed away from little “found families” of criminals who used them for their dirty work.  . .the list went on. And of course she hadn’t been able to do all that alone, she had been funding an entire network of people to get this done, to keep the rescued parties safe and help them in getting to a new life, to block off or arrest those who tried to take them back or attack the rescuers themselves (Haven had been a target MANY times, but those had been in the days when she’d been kept safe by The Adversary’s powers. . . ) and thus she had an abundance of detectives and double agents on the inside. And because they were on the inside, they could bring in the medicine. . . and bring out the mutants being sold, enslaved, and Heaven wept at what else. Mutants that, for the moment, were staying with them in The Rajmani. Haven’s wealth was originally inherited, but she’d kept it coming---so that she could keep giving it away---through The Rajmani, a luxury heritage hotel on par with the likes of New York’s Ritz or Plaza. In income, anyway. In beauty, it surpassed them both. Well, perhaps that was subjective, but it was built within a restored Mughal Palace, and Shaw had to admit he was impressed with the great domes and slender minarets, the  massive vaulted gateways and delicate ornamentation, the elegant water gardens and charbagh walkways through the carefully cultivated yet lush tropical greenery. Most of all, though, he liked learning the fact that the woman earned at least a little of her own money in some kind of sense, even if by her own admission she only owned it, not managed it. Shaw looked down on those who only inherited wealth, just as they had often looked down on him for earning his. Haven, though, did not seem to look down on him. She didn’t seem to have the proverbial stones to look down on anybody, and she certainly was around people who actually deserved it. She seemed to love being around that type, in fact, went out of her way to benefit them, centered her entire life around it. Some people, Shaw had found, were just mad like that. He suspected that it had something to do with growing up with money, taking it front granted and thus not comprehending its worse. But at least she didn’t dare think she was better than him, so she was that sensible at least. Although it was the last word he’d describe her with. No, if he were to describe Radha “Haven” Dastoor, he’d probably start with insipid, senseless, and downright delusional. But she was also. .  .not an unengaging conversationalist. The reverse, actually. “The Mughals were constantly trying to invade Mumbai,” Haven explained, while Shaw nodded along. He was interested in architecture, and in martial history. “But as much of India as they had conquered, the native Marathis were just as constantly pushing them back. It was touch and go for decades. It surprises me that a Mughal structure remained without being torn down, though it was taken over.” “The native Marathis, you say---are Mughals not native? Or merely from another part of India?” “Well, that’s a complicated question, and the answer is a controversial one, so I till try to explain it as neutrally as I can,” Haven replied, and she indeed sounded neutral. They were standing together on the jharoka, an elaborately carved balcony with a roof, each with a glass of nimbu pani, though Shaw would have preferred a good Scotch. “The Mughal Empire in South Asia was begun by Babur, who came from Central Asia, specifically what is today Uzbekistan. His tribe was of Mongol origin, and the word Mughal is itself derived from “Mongol”. He actually came to South Asia to escape his fellow Uzbeks---it’s a very long story--but instead of being a refugee, he became a conqueror, starting by burning Lahore for two days and killing the last Sultan of the Lodi dynasty in Delhi, and the Lodi dynasty itself was not Indian, but Afghan. India was colonized by the Middle East long before Europe decided to try its hand. But to answer your question. . .they did not begin as Indian, no, but they were a part of our country for two hundred years and left a deep mark in our culture---clothing, food, language, art, and, of course, the buildings. But, the same could also be said of the British, and you would be hard-pressed to find anyone, including myself, who considers the British Raj to have been “Indian” simply because they were there for a long time and forced their ways upon us. At the same time, my mother is a Parsi, a people who originate from Iran, thousands of years ago---Parsi comes from “Persian”. And how can one tell me my mother, who was born and raised here, whose mother’s mothers and father’s fathers were born and raised here, that she was not Indian? And though Babur came from elsewhere, his sons and successors were born and raised here, and often to Indian mothers, and their descendants dwell here still, with no other homeland, so are they not Indian? Because if they were not, then perhaps I am not either, at least by half. Ultimately. . . it depends which Mughals, at what time period, and whom you ask, I suppose.” “And I suppose there’s also a difference between ethnicity and nationality to be considered,” Shaw said, though Haven was now losing his interest with this topic. He’d been more interest in the invasions and warring. “Ethnically, one can be anything, and still nationally be American if you were born there or otherwise have citizenship. But, I suppose you need not contemplate such matters anymore--” He cracked a wry smile as she, with a questioning look, awaited the rest of his sentence. “---after all, we are all Krakoan now, are we not? We’re all mutants, and that’s the only thing that matters.” Haven smiled back, not wryly but sincerely, “Oh, I am now, yes. But I am also still everything I was before. I have been balancing multiple identities my entire life Mr. Shaw, I believe I shall be able to continue to do so. But I must confess--” A moment of hesitation. “--I do not truly think of myself as a mutant yet.” She was not sure what reaction that she had expected to this confession, but it was not what Shaw said next. “I don’t either, Ms. Dastoor.” She looked at him in surprise. “Or rather,” he elaborated, “I do not consider myself a mutant in any sense other than in the way I consider myself to have black hair. It’s a physical fact, but nothing else. It is not a “culture” or “identity” to me, and in truth I find such attitudes to be foolish and even dangerous, not to mention a sign that an individual lacks their own personality and convictions and thus must merely default to group identity politics. Being a mutant tells you nothing about me, Ms. Dastoor, and so if I were to talk about who I am, that’s not something I’d include any more than my eye color.” “That’s an especially interesting perspective from someone on Krakoa’s Council,” said Haven, sounding very curious, “Could I ask you---” But her voice was cut off by the unmistakable sound of gunshots---and from INSIDE the building. “The children!” Haven exclaimed. It was not just her and Shaw that were lodged at The Rajmani tonight; it was where the mutants they had rescued were staying before the journey to the nearest portal tomorrow. And most were, indeed, children. As quickly as she spoke, she was moving back inside from the jharoka, but Shaw grabbed her by the elbow, easily holding her back despite her not being a small or weak woman despite her gentle demeanor. Haven was large, and could carry a grown man. But Shaw didn’t even need to be rough to halt her. “You stay put,” he said sternly, “The guards will handle this.” “Mr. Shaw---” “They are better equipped than you, Ms. Dastoor, you will only interfere--” Shaw and Haven had, of course, not come alone. Shaw had brought several trained mutants on his own payroll---not everyone needed to be one of the X-Men to be capable of handling a few humans and their toys--and they had been tasked with keeping watch over, as Shaw had earlier referred to them as, the latest flock of Krakoa’s little sheep. A statement Haven had also wondered about, though it was far from her mind now. Haven might have been about to argue with him. She might have been about to admit he was right, and she should hang back. But as with her question, she was cut off by a gunshot as she turned her face back to him and started to speak. A gunshot, and bullet through the back of her head. It exited through her right eye, and bounced off Shaw’s face and fell to the floor. She would have as well, had he not caught her as she crumpled. When her healing factor had repaired her enough that she regained consciousness, she was on Krakoa again, as were all the refugees, safe and sound. And so was Shaw. “Well, Ms. Dastoor,” he said, “You’ve been murdered---or rather, nearly so--by perfect strangers for a quirk of your genetics. Nothing can make you more of a mutant than that, wouldn’t you agree?” Haven smiled slightly, “I feel as much a mutant as perhaps a Mughal might feel Indian, Mr. Shaw. Take that as you will.” He took it ambiguously. Which was indeed how she had meant it. == END==

[fatalezr]

Secret State - Part 6

"A new strategic partnership?"

Kate read the screen out loud over Rebecca's shoulder, startling her. She did not realise that her colleague was behind her.

"Sorry, just reading something" Rebecca replied, broken from her thoughts.

"All good," Kate said, "fancy some lunch?"

'Sure" Rebecca said, minimising the Financial Times website she had been looking at, "let me go to the loo first". She took her time walking to the toilet and thinking about the article. The Financial Times had a small article that caught her eye that morning about a senior member of the Cabinet proposing a new strategic alliance between Britain and Russia, to "further and build on the arrangements agreed in last week's energy summit". Details were sketchy but it looked like Russia was asking the UK to withdraw from NATO and sign a comprehensive trade deal that would make it replace the EU and USA as the most important of British allies. Rebecca couldn't quite believe it - was this the end game? Was this what all this was about?

The paper had shown the most senior members of the Government together, the rotund Prime Minister with a blonde mop of hair and a seemingly-clueless look on his face in the centre, flanked by the Chancellor, a tall Asian man, smartly dressed and his foreign secretary, a blonde woman on his right. On his left stood the Home Secretary, a few inches shorter than the Prime Minister and sporting slicked back greying hair with his arm around him, reminiscent of their much publicised childhood together at Eton. The PM had subsequently beaten the Home Secretary in a leadership contest many years later but the two had apparently repaired their relationship. To his left stood the International Trade Minister, a short Asian woman with an apparently fiery temper but who was getting credit for bringing the Russians to the table. Was one of these members involved? These were all questions she needed to ask George, but a break with Kate first would be welcomed.

There was something different about Kate today she noticed, and she saw her colleague had makeup on, including a dark red lipstick. "Is it date night?" she asked her.

"Bec, whenever I go out, it's always date night" Kate replied, winking at her.

Rebecca's interest was piqued. "So who's the lucky guy?"

"Who said it was a guy?" Kate said, before chuckling to herself, "someone new, I'll let you know how it goes".

Rebecca sighed and shook her head. They ate a sandwich and joked together and Rebecca started to relax, the upcoming evening's activities far from her mind. There was some awkwardness as Kate asked about Marcus. Rebecca smiled and said all was well but that the incident at London Bridge had naturally led to a lot of overtime being called on patrols to make sure it did not happen again.

"I found another unexplained body," Kate said, finishing her drink. "Another national security thing, outside that Passion nightclub in Vauxhall" Rebecca's ears pricked - this was another one of hers, the bodyguard of Colonel Umarov. "I asked the Superintendent if we can look into them but I think he's got a new case coming up for us".

"What's it going to be?" Rebecca enquired. She was intrigued to move on from the Mulvaney case and be launched into a new investigation.

"From what I've heard, maybe something to do with corruption," Kate said, "could be an interesting one. I reckon we're finding out about it later". DSI Sullivan had scheduled a meeting for 3pm that afternoon in the conference room with his Detectives - Rebecca suspected this would be the subject.

"They're not turning us into AC-12?" Rebecca joked.

"I doubt it will be that exciting - we leave all the intrigue and shooting to our personal investigations" Kate responded, winking back at her.

------

"As you can see, this is a delicate situation".

Detective Superintendent Sullivan was surveying the stunned looks on the faces of his detectives, Rebecca saw. They all looked lost in thought in their own ways. Kate had her face screwed up and was looking off to the side, Oli Afidi was stroking his newly-grown goatee and Tim Warren sat with his arms folded. Rebecca looked perturbed too, but she suspected in a slightly different way to the others.

"Any questions?" DSI Sullivan added.

DI Warren looked up. "Sir" he said, being respectful to his boss, "may I ask why this investigation is falling to us? Would it not normally be under the purview of the National Crime Agency or even dare I say, the Security Services?"

"It's a valid question" Sullivan responded, "my understanding is there is some concern about how impartial those agencies can be. We're seen as a more....neutral influence. None of us here was a political appointment, therefore we can investigate without prejudice".

Warren nodded and returned to his thoughts. Rebecca was lost in hers too. Sullivan had revealed that the Commissioner was asking them to look into the possibility of corruption within the most senior levels of government. It was a far cry from the criminal underworld they were used to investigating and all of them knew it could be a high-profile investigation with the possibility of great embarrassment if they made a wrong move. Sullivan said the request had come from the Commissioner - hadn't she gone to school with the Chancellor? And what evidence were they launching this based on? Sullivan had only said that serious allegations had been made but was unable to provide more detail. She decided to ask a question.

"Sir, are we expecting to find something? Couldn't this just be a big investigation into nothing at all?"

"I can't say, DC Davidson" Sullivan admitted, "but the Commissioner has asked us to investigate and look into government affairs and so that is what we shall do. We'll do a thorough look at financial records, business dealings and the like and if we find nothing, that's what we shall report".

Rebecca was satisfied by his answer - Sullivan was nothing but fair. However, the timing of it was suspicious given recent activities by the Russian state. She wondered if George knew of this all.

"DI Warren, DI Belmont, I'll let you start work on an investigative strategy" Sullivan said, "we'll reconvene on Friday to discuss".

They both acknowledged his request and he left the room. The team leaned back in their chairs for a few seconds until Tim Warren got up and straightened his suit jacket. "Right," he said, moving to a whiteboard and writing the names of the cabinet ministers across it, "let's begin, shall we..."

------

"Maybe I should leave the two of you in peace?"

Simon Selwick sounded a little unsure. He was not alone as he entered a dressing room in one of his private clubs in Soho that Rebecca was using to get changed. Rebecca checked that the satin robe she had been lent was covering her before looking at the guest who had entered with him.

"Good evening Miss Davidson" George said, "I hope I'm not intruding at an inopportune time".

Rebecca smiled. "It's all OK Simon" she assured the club owner, "I know him". Selwick bowed his head and shut the door while George hung up his coat on a chair and sat on it. Rebecca returned to look in the mirror and carefully styled her hair.

"You look beautiful," George told her.

"Just doing my job" Rebecca replied, trying to make light of the situation. In truth she felt nervous. Who knew what might unfold? She knew that she would be going with Arkady Romanov to Wembley and that at some point he was going to sneak away and she would have to follow him but the lack of detail to the plan made her uneasy. What if there was security? What if they found her spying? She tried to turn her mind away from it and on to other things. "Do you like football, George?"

He chuckled. "I'm a diehard fan of Hartlepool Town, Miss Davidson". He chuckled some more. "I must confess though, you're more likely to find me at the Henley Regatta than on the terraces".

Rebecca smiled. "We got put on a new investigation today" she told him.

"Really?" George sounded curious. "Do tell?"

"We're being asked to investigate the possibility of corruption within the Cabinet".

"You are?" George sounded surprised, "and why are you doing this?"

Rebecca shrugged. "Allegations were made, apparently. Direct orders from the Commissioner this time. You don't know anything about it?"

George frowned. "No, Miss Davidson. Unfortunately not. You say it was a direct order from the Commissioner?" Rebecca nodded and George stroked his chin, thinking hard.

"Did you see the story about the strategic partnership in the FT?" she asked him.

"Yes" he said, "most concerning. Dame Lucy's been trying to get a meeting with the PM but his private secretary doesn't want to take us. I sense they are worried we might go in and spoil the thing. Hear no evil, see no evil, of course".

"Do you think it's all connected?"

"That would be a sensible conclusion, but we must be careful Miss Davidson. I've no idea who might be involved. We must tread carefully at all times". He paused. "Are you going to be armed tonight?" Rebecca nodded. George bit his lip. "Tell me about the plan".

She ran him through the evening. Romanov would pick her up from Simon's club in 30 minutes and take her to Wembley to his own personal executive box. She would watch the game with him and if he moved off, make her excuses to join him. She could note anyone he met and report back at the end of the evening. She paused. How would the evening end? Would Romanov want her to go home with him, and if he did, how would she get her way out? She shrugged it off. She could find a way, she told herself. The main thing that worried her was having no phone with her, no means of communication to the outside world - it was one of Romanov's stipulations that Simon had told her about.

George listened politely. "OK" he said finally, "a good plan". He paused. "Rebecca....be careful, please". There was genuine concern in his voice that she did not recognise. She put down her eyeliner pencil and went over to him and hugged him. He embraced her back and Rebecca realised it was the first time they had ever done that. He broke off and smiled at her. "Remember, give England a cheer for us all, yes?"

"Of course," she said. He stood and put on his coat, giving her one final look before he left. Rebecca took off her robe and admired the new red bra, knickers, suspenders and some dark stockings. She put her gun, her suppressor and a spare magazine of ammunition into her suspenders before donning a black V-necked cocktail dress that fell to just above her knees. It sparkled in the lights from the mirror and gave a tantalising view of her neckline. She looked at the clock. Ten minutes to spare.

She passed the remaining time in silence, taking a final trip to the bathroom and then waiting patiently for the knock at the door from Simon Selwick. It arrived on time and he led her out of the club to a black Mercedes with blacked out windows. A driver opened the back door and she stepped in to see Arkady Romanov wearing a dark blue suit with a white shirt that was open all the way down to his chest. His hair was cut short and he had an untidy but short beard on his face. He smiled as he saw Rebecca, taking her hand to help her into the back seat and then kissing it.

He said some words in Russian to his driver and kept hold of Rebecca's hand as the car pulled away. Rebecca smiled back at him, pretending to enjoy the touch. He did not speak to her during the journey, preferring to spend most of his time looking out of the window and so Rebecca stayed silent too. It was not a quick journey from central London out to Wembley so she allowed herself a chance to let her mind wander and relax. She started to ease into the situation. The car was very comfortable and smooth, and she smiled as she saw the lights of the city all around her. She felt beautiful in her dress and could almost imagine she was on her way to a film premiere or fashion show rather than a football match.

"Is very pretty yes?" Romanov's deep voice cut through her dreams. He was pointing out the front window towards the Wembley arch that was now visible, lit up in brilliant white.

"Yes," Rebecca turned to him and smiled, "yes it is".

"Almost as pretty..as you" he said, finding the right words and she chuckled. She squeezed his hand a bit more and he smiled back at her. "We are close. Stay with me". He gave some more instructions in Russian to the driver. The car wound it's way closer to the stadium and Rebecca looked at the range of fans walking towards the ground, most wearing thick coats or hoodies but with an England jersey clearly visible over the top, some dressed in more neutral colours and even a couple of fans wearing full chain mail and dressed as St George. The car sped past them all and took a turn into an underground parking lot. They were flagged down by a couple of security guards but the driver spoke to them and the car was allowed to continue.

They parked and as they stepped out of the car Rebecca heard the sounds coming from the stadium that was almost on top of them. The music and announcements from the PA system echoed around the walls of the parking lot, as did the chanting of some fans who had arrived for the game. "Come" Romanov offered Rebecca his arm and she gladly accepted it, seeing the driver was staying with the car. Romanov walked her up a flight of stairs and she saw she was now right outside Wembley at a private entrance. She even thought she spied the English and Turkish team buses parked nearby. There was a flash to her side as a photographer took pictures and a young man with a notepad walked up behind the photographer.

"Mr Romanov!" he called, "Mr Romanov! Are you trying to sign Patelli? Is he heading to the Emirates?" He was evidently a journalist.

Romanov chuckled. "Come on England!" he said back to the journalist, raising his arm in a fist and ignoring the question. "Come on England!" he said, this time to Rebecca.

"Come on England!" she repeated and they both laughed. They continued past the journalist and into the stadium. The air outside was cold and Rebecca was grateful for the heat as they entered. They were in an atrium that was packed with smartly-dressed men and women. A waiter wearing white offered them both a glass of champagne and Romanov took two glasses, handing one to Rebecca. She held on to his arm as he walked through the crowd of people, stopping every now and again to shake the hand of someone he knew. Rebecca looked around the crowd - she recognised some people as famous heads of business, there were a couple of actors and a few former footballers in the room too. She kept a tight grip on Romanov as he stopped and said words with a few people in Russian before he laughed and slapped one on the back.

She looked up and saw Romanov nod discreetly to someone at the side of the room. She couldn't quite make out who it was but they were wearing a grey jacket and high-necked jumper underneath. The grey hair looked familiar and as the man moved around the room she caught another glimpse of his sharp face and recognised him - it was Colonel Umarov. Her mind raced. What was he doing here? Hadn't he gone back to Russia? If he was visiting again, it was certainly not on official business.

Romanov weaved through the crowd and to an area with some elevators. They took one up 3 floors and stepped out into a plush but thin corridor that looked more like it belonged in a theatre than a football stadium. The entrances to the executive boxes were every few yards along one side while on the other the windows were full length and glass, showing some of the skyline of London and the buildings around the stadium. Rebecca could hear the chanting from the terraces above and below them. There was movement all around, with guests entering their boxes, the sound of cheering and excitement within them and waitresses moving in and out of the boxes carrying trolleys with food that came from behind a set of double doors she presumed led to a kitchen.

Romanov's box was near the halfway line with a spectacular view of the pitch. There were seats outside for those who wanted to join the crowd but also black leather sofas and a small bar inside the box. As he entered, a group of men already within cheered. Rebecca recognised more faces - some of the young members of the Arsenal team were here, but there were also some older gentlemen she didn't realise who did not rush to greet him. Some of the players hugged him, others gave him a hand but Romanov spoke to them all, some in broken English. "Tony - look after self tonight" he told one boy. "Harry - score me many goal this weekend!" to another. He moved closer to two older men sitting in black suits and shirts and looking uncomfortable in their suits. He spoke softly in Russian to them. One shifted in his seat and as he did so, Rebecca spied a shoulder holster and gun underneath his suit. They were evidently security of some kind and with another older man with greying hair. Rebecca heard Romanov refer to him as Mikhail and the two shook hands warmly before he returned to Rebecca.

He led her to a sofa at the front of the box with a view of the pitch. "Stay here" he told her gently and he grabbed another glass of champagne to give to her. The stadium filled up as it got closer to kick off and the young boys from the box started to put on coats and head to the outside seats, presumably soaking up the atmosphere, most with dreams of playing there and winning trophies at the front of their mind. Romanov returned to her and sat next to her on the sofa, putting his arm around her shoulder. She leaned into his chest, trying to look and feel relaxed about the situation.

There was a large roar from the crowd as both England and Turkey's football teams stepped on to the pitch. Romanov applauded and shouted his approval and Rebecca sneaked a glance behind him to see the man named Mikhail and his security still in place, stony faced and unmoved by the match in front of them. Romanov hummed 'God save the Queen' but did not stand and so Rebecca did not either. She kept thinking about Umarov - it must surely be connected. It was no coincidence that he was here too. She thought about how she could follow Romanov when he excused himself to go to the meeting and wondered who else might be involved. Most likely the man called Mikhail at the back of the room, but what about others? Was Umarov in another box with more members?

The match began and she tried to appear attentive to the game. Romanov seemed invested - his love of football was genuine. He occasionally cried out when there was a chance and threw his arms up in disgust if he noticed a player missing an open pass to someone. He kept putting his arm around Rebecca and looking down at the cleavage she had created. The first half finished with the scores level at 0-0, both teams having largely cancelled one another out.

The younger men outside returned inside to continue laughing and drinking during the interval, some making polite conversation with Romanov as best as they could with them being unable to speak Russian and him not much English. Several gave glances towards Rebecca but she kept quiet and sat next to the man - it was clear to others that she was there with him and she sensed they knew that it meant she was off limits. Waiters came in serving canapes but Rebecca declined to eat - she knew that the meeting would have to take place in the second half and she had a knot in her stomach just thinking about it. She kept trying to glance at Mikhail and his security but they stuck to a fairly rigid position near the bar, the older gentleman occasionally sipping on a pint of beer.

Rebecca glanced at Romanov and saw him checking his watch. He seemed a little restless. She pulled on his arm and he turned to her. "Happy?" she asked him innocently.

"Very happy" he said, smiling back at her, "but must go - stay here".

"You don't want company?" Rebecca said. She subtly reached her free hand and rubbed it across the front of his crotch. She saw his face explode into some pleasure before he eased it away. He considered it for a few moments.

"Maybe walk with?" he suggested. Rebecca nodded. "OK. We walk" he said, standing and helping Rebecca up with him. She watched as he shot a glance in the direction of Mikhail. Romanov left the box with Rebecca as the teams re-emerged for the second half. He held her hand tightly and Rebecca sensed he had some nerves too. He led her back through the atrium area towards the double doors that led to a kitchen and as he did, Mikhail and his two security guards also emerged from the box.

"Arkady," she heard the older man say. His voice was gruff and damaged. Romanov did not hear him and pushed through the doors. It did lead to a stainless steel kitchen where staff in white uniforms were beginning to clean down for the evening. Romanov walked through to a set of doors at the other end. It led to a service corridor of some kind, decked in only concrete with stairs going up and down and a lift that could be used to bring supplies to the kitchen. "Arkady!" Mikhail's voice rang out again as Romanov and Rebecca reached the stairs. Mikhail began speaking in Russian but gesticulating at Rebecca and she guessed from his tone that he did not think it appropriate for her to be joining him.

Romanov replied in Russian, trying to calm Mikhail as they all climbed the stairs. They looped back around on themselves to lead to an upper floor with a couple of black doors on either side. Romanov turned to go through the one to the left but Mikhail put his hand on the door to stop it opening. He stuck his finger in Romanov's face and spoke sharply to him.

"Sorry - must go...alone" Romanov said, turning to her. "Downstair, wait. I come". He kissed her on the cheek before jerking upright to attention and saluting. Rebecca was taken aback but soon noticed why. From the other door emerged Colonel Umarov, flanked by an older man and older woman, all smartly dressed. Two younger male and one female wearing dark suits with white shirts were behind them, looking round and Rebecca noticed they had holsters with guns at the side of their trousers - evidently security for the individuals they were with. The female was particularly imposing at over 6 feet tall with short cropped blonde hair and a mean look in her eye. She kept a gloved hand on the butt of her gun at all times as if ready and expecting to pull it at any moment.

Umarov looked at the group in front of him and nodded. He stepped towards Romanov but then turned sharply to look at Rebecca. She felt herself cower as his bright blue eyes seemed to pierce her and look her up and down. He had an imposing presence and that long face seemed to constantly be in thought but showing no real emotion. Romanov offered him a handshake and some words and Umarov nodded some more. He carried on past the group and opened the door to the room. Rebecca chanced a glance inside and saw it led to a short corridor. Her mind whirred, wondering how to penetrate it. She tried to memorise every detail of Mikhail and the individuals with Umarov. He held the door open as the group filed in and Mikhail opened a purple curtain at the end of the corridor. Rebecca heard him say "Ah, hello sir, good evening" in his rough accent to a person inside. She frowned - why was he speaking in English? Who were they meeting?

She realised that Umarov was still staring at her and now it was his turn to frown. Rebecca wondered if he recognised her from the nightclub Passion. She was sure she looked different and he would only have glimpsed her face that night. She decided to go and started to walk down the stairs when she realised one of Mikhail's security men was walking with her. He had a round face and short hair in a military style. "Hello," she said, smiling at him.

"We go back down," the guard told her. Rebecca nodded. They walked back down the stairs through the kitchen and into the lobby that led to the boxes. Rebecca could hear more chanting from the stands - the game had evidently restarted. She didn't like the way the guard was staying so close to her, as if watching her every move. She spotted the toilets on her left.

"Bathroom?" she said. The guard looked displeased but nodded. Rebecca went into the ladies and shut herself into a cubicle. She needed time to think. She needed to get upstairs again and find a way to either get in the room or find out who was in it. She heard some noises outside the bathroom. There were shouts in Russian. She listened intently. She heard the voice of the guard who had escorted her and another male voice, who sounded like he had been running. Whilst they spoke quickly, Rebecca heard the running one say something that made her heart almost stop beating.

"MI5". It was unmistakable. How did they know?

"MI5?" the guard who had accompanied her said.

"Da" came the reply. Rebecca swore in her head. She was trapped in the bathroom. There was no way out other than the door she came in. She quickly raised her dress and grabbed her Walther P99 and suppressor from the red suspender belt she was wearing. She assembled it as quickly as possible, then took off her shoes, dropped low and crawled out of the cubicle she was in. She disappeared around a corner in the bathroom just as she heard the main door opening.

She heard two sets of footsteps as the guards came in. She chanced a look. They both had guns raised at the cubicle door, long suppressors attached to the end. "Come out - now" one shouted. There was a pause as nothing happened.

Pfft-pfft-pfft, pfft-pfft-pfft. She heard their guns softly fire at the door and a pinging sound as their empty casings hit the tiled floor. They were trying to kill her, she realised, either knowing she was a spy or not caring who she was. She steeled her nerves and swung round the corner from her hiding spot.

Both men were still looking at the cubicle door with it's holes, guns raised. She was behind them both and her gun found the back of the one who had accompanied her. Pfft-pfft. She fired twice into his back and immediately turned to the right to the new guard who had joined him. Pfft-pfft. Both men cried out and slumped to the floor. Rebecca did not hesitate and fired pfft, pfft, into both of their heads before they could react further. There was an "oooh" sound from the terraces and she suspected someone had just come close to scoring.

Rebecca listened intently at the bathroom door to see if anyone was around. She heard nothing and tucked her gun back into the front of her suspender belt, the suppressor warm against her skin. It looked bulky and out of place but she knew it was better than keeping it in her hand. There was an 'out of order' cleaning sign that she spied just inside the door and she left it outside of the bathroom as she exited to the atrium again. She hoped that no-one would need to find them there before she could reach George but Selwick had specifically told her that Romanov never wanted his girls to have a phone with them. She would need to find another way to get a signal to him.

She took a glance towards the lifts. She could probably escape now, she knew. She could get free of the stadium and away before anyone discovered the bodies in the ladies toilets but something made her stop. The mystery of the man that the Russian cabal was meeting was too great to resist. 'What would Kate do?' she asked herself and remembered how her colleague had intentionally got herself kidnapped by Mulvaney's gang earlier that summer. She looked above her and tried to imagine the layout above. The ceiling above her was high - much higher than she had climbed on the stairs. Above the kitchen it was presumably lower as the doors were in a solid wall. She walked into the kitchen. Staff were still cleaning it down. She noticed a food serving hatch to the right of her and followed the path of it up. It seemed to go up - maybe to the room they were meeting in?

"Excuse me" she said to a young woman her own age, "could you tell me where this hatch leads?"

"Oh this" the woman said. She had a thick Cockney accent. "We 'ardly ever use tha', think it goes to some private room that never got finished".

Rebecca nodded. "Does it still work?"

"Don' see why not?" the woman answered, "why you asking?"

"Would you mind sending me up?" The young woman looked at Rebecca like she was crazy. "I'm meant to be giving a surprise entrance," she said. She hitched up her dress a little to show the top of her stockings and leave the woman in no doubt about what kind of surprise she would deliver.

The young woman looked round. A chef in the kitchen nodded. "C'est bon" he said. "We keep ze customer 'appy". Rebecca took care to make sure her dress covered her gun as she got into the hatch. It was a tight squeeze, and she was almost having to curl up in a ball.

"'Ere goes then" said the young woman. She shut the serving hatch and Rebecca was plunged into darkness. She tried to stay calm and breathe. She was not claustrophobic but the tiny space and darkness created a horrible sensation around her. There was a jolt and she felt the hatch move upwards, rattling a little but supporting her weight up. 'This was a really stupid idea' she thought as the hatch clanked. Where would she even find herself?

After what seemed an age but was probably 30 seconds at most the hatch shuddered to a stop. Rebecca breathed deep and listened. She could hear no noise. Her hands eased the hatch open and she welcomed the light and fresher air in with her. She looked out of the hatch. She was in a small empty room for a kitchen that appeared to not be finished, with nothing except some silver work surfaces around her. She slowly maneuvered her way out, her bare feet finding the tiled floor cold. She crept to the door and listened - there was no noise. She eased it open as quietly as possible - the corridor was empty. There were faint sounds from behind the curtain and she tiptoed towards them on the now-carpeted floor, hardly daring to make any noise. She retrieved her gun from her suspenders and gripped it for security. She checked behind herself regularly, certain that security would be on the other side of the door.

As she edged to the door, the voices became louder. She recognised Mikhail's gruff voice. "I'm not sure I can be ready with contracts" he said in English, albeit a thick accented English.

"What's holding them up?" a posh male English voice responded. Rebecca paused - she'd heard that voice before. Where was it from?

"Council - local council" Mikhail said. He sat nearer to her position, Rebecca could tell.

"Leave that to me, I can pull a couple of strings" the English voice responded. "My timeline is set in motion. I've got the support in the party. Just give the word to accelerate and we can do this Igor, let's not delay".

There was a pause before the quiet voice of Colonel Umarov answered. "And your security services?" he said quietly.

"Not an issue" the English voice answered.

"Not even the spy tonight?"

There was a murmuring in the room. "Spy?" Romanov’s voice was recognisable.

“The woman you brought Arkady” Colonel Umarov said coldly and Rebecca felt a pit in her stomach. “Do not worry, I have dealt with this but it raises concerns, Mr Home Secretary”. The penny dropped for Rebecca as to where she knew the voice. The Home Secretary was a regular fixture in parliament and on the television and here he was, behind the curtain, plotting with the Russians.

“I assure you Colonel” the Home Secretary replied calmly, “there is no investigation by MI5 on records currently and if there is a rogue element, it will be stamped out immediately. Gentlemen, my lady” he said, raising his voice, “I will be the future Prime Minister of this country and when I am we shall forge a new European alliance together and rewrite the rules of democracy. Proceed with your plans, Igor. I’ll play my part”.

It sounded like he was leaving and so Rebecca darted quickly and yet softly on the floor back to the abandoned kitchen she had arrived in. She half-closed the door and waited. Sure enough, the slicked back grey hair of the Home Secretary walked past, humming a tune. Rebecca felt a fury and an anger - she gripped her gun tightly and wanted to finish him there and then just as she had to Assistant Commissioner Locke but she stopped herself. Killing an Assistant Commissioner had been one thing, killing the third most powerful member of the government was something else entirely. She thought of a better target - Umarov. It was clear he was orchestrating the plan. Without him it would fail. She could chop the head off the snake, just as her and Kate had done when they killed Kieran Mulvaney.

There were voices from down the corridor in Russian and Rebecca slinked back into the abandoned kitchen. Slowly the members of the cabal filed past the door, with Umarov the last to pass. Rebecca took a deep breath - this was her chance. She eased the door open and stepped into the corridor, gun raised.

“Hey!” A cry came from behind Rebecca and she instinctively fell to her knees and turned around as pfft-pfft, two suppressed shots were fired above her head from a guard emerging from behind the curtain. She turned and fired wildly in his direction pfft-pfft-pfft-pfft. She saw the shots stagger him and he dropped his gun. She took careful aim down the barrel and fired -pfft- into his neck. Rebecca wheeled around but only saw Umarov and the others running, some shouting.

She picked herself off the floor and tried to aim but the door was slammed shut. She raced to it and opened. Pfft-pfft. She fired more in hope than expectation but Umarov was already running up the stairs and her shots missed his back. She started after him but heard footsteps coming the other way and a guard in a suit burst through the door opposite her own. Pfft-pfft-pfft. Her shots downed him but there was another guard behind him. Rebecca aimed and pulled the trigger -click-. The gun magazine was empty.

“Oh fuck” she said and dived for the staircase to her right just as three bullets were sent in her direction. She fell down the first two concrete stairs but used the momentum to push herself up and she ran down them as fast as her bare feet could move, leaping down the stairs. She rounded the corner to the floor where the original kitchen was but kept turning and heading down. Escape was the only thing on her mind. The pain in her feet from the impact of her running was being numbed by the adrenaline. She was literally running for her life. ‘Keep going’ she thought as she rounded on the next floor down. ‘There will be a door at the bottom - keep going!’. She prayed there was a fire escape.

She rounded the next floor down, not stopping as Russian voices shouted from above her, their heavy footsteps falling on the concrete stairs too. The shouts of the crowd watching the game grew louder. There was a stir, then a huge eruption and a cheer that seemed to shake the foundations they were running down. Rebecca was deaf to it. She spotted a ‘1’ written on the wall of the next floor she rounded on. ‘One more!’ she told herself, forcing herself around the corner to the final set of concrete stairs. As it turned, she saw a sign indicating a fire exit. ‘You can do it’ she told herself, wondering if the crowd's shouts and exhilaration was for her own efforts. She leapt the final two steps and looked for the fire exit.

Crack! As she turned Rebecca saw a flash of black and then felt a searing pain. She crashed to the concrete floor, her head throbbing. She looked up to see the blonde security guard from earlier standing over her, gun in hand. She had evidently hidden round the corner and smashed Rebecca with the butt as she arrived. She tried to stand, to do anything to get away but the woman kicked her hard in the stomach. “Aaah!” Rebecca felt herself cry in pain and the air was knocked from her diaphragm. She tried to crawl but her hands could not support her. She looked up at the woman, who pointed her gun at Rebecca, and saw there was no escape.

Rebecca sat up and slowly raised her hands. She got on to her knees and felt fearful. “Ok, ok, I surrender” she said to the woman. The two men who had been chasing her arrived at the bottom of the stairs, panting and cursing. They raised their suppressed weapons at Rebecca. “I surrender” she repeated, keeping her hands high.

The female security guard chuckled. Rebecca watched as she reached into her jacket pocket and brought out a long and menacing suppressor that she screwed on to her own gun. “No surrender” she said to Rebecca calmly.

Rebecca looked to the guards around her and accepted her fate. She was going to die. Images flashed before her. George, Kate, her parents, her brother and her niece, Marcus. She felt a wave of sadness as she thought of them and tried to reassure herself. ‘I’ll see them again’ she told herself, ‘not for a long while though’. The female in front of her had finished attaching her suppressor and aimed it at her. Rebecca summoned all the courage she could. She would not slouch. She rested her hands on her head and kept a good posture. She would die well, she decided. She shut her eyes and waited for the end.

Pfft-pfft.

[maximumninjavoid]

Hey look! Its part eight of the new fic.

I bet you thought I forgot all about it... Well, I didn't.

Ms Valenko had done it again, and my voice mail on the sat phone could barely contain her glee. I could almost see her, at her minimalist desk, expansive, pristine, legs crossed and visible from practically anywhere in her office, improbably high heels, a well turned ankle and shapely calves encased in seven denier stockings, one foot lazily swinging back and forth, rather pendulum like. She had her elegant well manicured hands steepled in front of her, one eyebrow impossibly raised, higher than her hairline you imagined, and that made you laugh.

"Barbara Broccoli will in fact be delighted to have dinner with you. I'm not sure if its your substance abuse work or your money that fascinated her, but nonetheless, dinner it is. I'm certain someone will deserve a bonus, of course, I'll see to that in your name. You have two weeks. When the ship docks at Dubai, you're on." And that smile. That wicked smile. God, I loved that woman. If she didn't already have a partner, and if I wasn't certain she could kill me while I slept, I'd have tried very hard to seduce Ms. Valenko.

Two weeks. I made some notes. There were things I was going to require. Perhaps some things my partner in mischief might need.

Security.

A wardrobe adjustment or three.

Some restaurant recommendations, or a private chef I could borrow.

Fuck. Transportation. At least I had my pitch down.

Too young, you said, now he's too famous? Too committed? My God, he's perfect. He's British. There is no-one smoother, he's quite the rake. Women love him and men want to be him. He's suave, sophisticated, and believable as an action hero. He even does his own stunts.

It matters not how you costume him, in that paper sack of a suit he set the screen on fire as August Walker, and in a regency period suit, the ladies fairly swooned. What were the numbers for Enola Holmes, again? Surely you didn't think that was all the #Stranger Things crowd? The unique impressions, individual views for Sandcastle. Those numbers are impressive. Especially for a film that was released how long ago?

Vix had a few stellar points of his own. "Why, he's everything Bond should be. If you go back to the Fleming Source materials, its Cavill. The hair, the eyes, that physique. He's suave, or can act that way. I have heard he's a bit of a dork, but frankly, that's endearing. There are people who would pay JUST to see the scene where he flirts with Moneypenny. Hell, I'd give an internal organ, of your choice I might add, to write that scene. "

Vix had just gotten started. "He's the optimum choice. He's dangerous AND handsome. Men want to be him, women want to be with him, and there's even more people that would like both. Straight men have gone ON RECORD saying Henry Cavill makes them question their heterosexuality. He appeals to a much larger swath of the gender continuum. " Honestly, Vix was on a roll.

"Ok, we have two weeks. How do we find out what her favorite cuisine is, and then how do we find someone who can cook that? In Dubai?"

" Deep internet searches are my specialty " said Vix, cracking his knuckles and firing up his laptop.

" Well, then maybe you can look up how to produce a film...."

"What did you just say?"

"Well it can't be that fecking hard. Look at the crap that gets greenlighted. Maybe we just make our own movie."

For the next forty eight hours, I only left the suite to smoke. I think the butler may have had a bit of a breakdown, between the flurry of activity, the constant requests for more beverages, and my cursing. I may have offended his delicate sensibilities. If the meeting didn't go well, we had a solid plan b.

[thezodiaczone]

Aries Compatibility

ARIES + ARIES (MARCH 21 - APRIL 19) You're two high-strung, passionate Fire signs who both like to be the Alpha dominant. As such, you'll need to toss the hot potato back and forth, submitting to the other's rule—at times through gritted teeth. Acquiescence may not come naturally, but it builds a necessary trust. Aries is a paradox: you're the zodiac's infant (its first sign) and its gallant hero (you're ruled by warrior Mars). You want to save the world and be saved at the same time. You'll need to occasionally allow yourself to play wounded knight or damsel in distress, and let your mate charge to your rescue. However, don't spiral into neurotic helplessness or analysis paralysis. Nobody can beat a topic to death quite like you can—but that's what therapists are for, Aries. Neither one of you can be saddled with the emotional care and feeding of an adult baby. You're too independent for that. When your problems gain too much mental gravitas, it's time to move—literally. Disperse your Martian angst and anger with lots of physical exertion. As fellow adventurers, you travel well together. Try snowboarding, exotic bike tours, Costa Rican rainforest expeditions. Passionate sex is another antidote to prickly feelings for your high-touch sign. Like Aries Hugh Hefner, you have a champion libido (and an awesome sense of entitlement). Some Aries couples may mutually agree to flex the terms of your monogamy, although the jealousy it stirs might not be worth the trouble.

ARIES + TAURUS (APRIL 20 - MAY 20) The stubborn Bull locks horns with the willful Ram, nostrils flaring, heads bowed in determination. So begins a fierce but fiery courtship, as splashy and menacing as a Pamplona stampede. Aggression, however uncivilized, is part our Darwinian natures. It certainly is for your signs—who possess an arsenal of steamrolling tactics, from doe-eyed charm to old-fashioned philistine strong-arming. No weak-willed mate will survive your natural selection process. Nor should he. Neither one of you feels safe in the arms of a mate who can't protect you. Thus, your initial faceoff is simply a warning shot: Show me your strength so I can trust you. Once the fanfare is over, you make a great team—like British pop royalty Victoria (Aries) and David (Taurus) Beckham.

As tight as two mafiosos, you like to dress up and flaunt your natural superiority over the rest of the animal kingdom. The deal is sweet for both of you. Taurus gets an attractive show pony and a lusty mate to satisfy his Earthy libido. Aries has a lifelong provider and benefactor to supply creative freedom and endless playtime. Issues can arise if Taurus grows too possessive or tries to tame independent Aries. Indulgent Taurus will need to remain active to keep pace with the energetic Ram (read: lay off the nightly steak frites and vino). You both crave attention, but don't go looking for it outside the relationship, unless you want a real showdown. Like two tots in a nursery, you share a favorite word: Mine!

ARIES + GEMINI (MAY 21 - JUNE 20) ♥♥♥♥ You're the best of friends, so why not throw in some benefits? You certainly can…but not so fast. Your common traits are exactly what can snuff the spark before it combusts. Namely: impetuous, reckless, unstoppable drive for instant gratification. You want what you want, and you want it NOW. Sure, the adrenaline you evoke from trading edgy banter, bungee jumping, or playing footsie under the conference table might convince you that you're soulmates. However, this attitude will lead to an inchoate relationship, with the two of you skydiving into City Hall before you even know each other's middle names. It doesn't all come out in the wash, so check that laissez-faire attitude when you're ring shopping on the second date. That said, you do have the makings of a great match that's rooted in true friendship, intellectual chemistry and fun. The key is to pace yourselves and to continuously bring new adventures to the table. Boredom is the enemy; it leads to cat-and-mouse games and mental chess matches with each other. Remain active: get involved in a political campaign, build houses for the poor, take an eco-tour or scuba lessons. Host and attend lots of parties with your mutual friends, and busy yourselves with projects that satisfy your short attention spans. Above all, don't turn to each other for advice, unless you like impatient, tough-love coaching and draining circular conversations. Not exactly the soothsaying your sweetie needs in a rare vulnerable moment.

ARIES + CANCER (JUNE 21 - JULY 22) Aries is the zodiac's baby (its first sign); Cancer is its matriarch, ruling the fourth house of motherhood, home and family. Is this relationship doomed to be an Oedipal cliche? Not if you temper these traits through steady, conscious self-development. Otherwise, you easily lapse into automatic roles that polarize you into a parent-child (or master-and-servant) dynamic. Aries can be selfish—not maliciously, but in a crude, clueless style that leaves Cancer resentful and dismayed at the Ram's lack of nuance. Cancer knows how to play the nurturing giver, but this delicate sign needs room to be vulnerable, too. Aries loves to be coddled, but Cancer's maternal indulgences will create a spoiled brat or a demanding diva. Besides, while the Crab may have a tough outer shell, the true warrior is Aries, ruled by aggressive Mars. Your differences are many: Aries is a diehard independent and Cancer is a family guy; Aries needs freedom, the Crab's possessive grip clings tight. You'll need to compromise, or else the relationship can turn into a competitive, jealous hotbed. You can both brood with the best of them, and your dark days eclipse even the tiniest sliver of hope. Talk about depressing. Swear off the silent treatment and learn to communicate as two adult equals.

ARIES + LEO (JULY 23 - AUGUST 22) Aries and Leo are Fire signs who love drama, passion and extreme adventure. You're a flashy, outspoken duo that plays by your own bold agenda. Restless souls, you need lots of physical and intellectual stimulation—politics, inspiring conversations, startup businesses—you'll juggle them all, making it look so easy. Of course, your emotional meltdowns require a team of therapists and devoted friends to fix, and you should keep those folks on speed dial. Adrenaline is your favorite drug; no surprise Aries Jennifer Garner and Leo Ben Affleck fell in love while co-starring in the action flick Daredevil. Like this Hollywood pair, who refuses to walk the red carpet together on principle, you respect each other's autonomy. Fire signs are by nature independent. You both need to make your own mark on the world, and you don't like anyone stealing your shine. In fact, trouble starts when one of you eclipses the other's big moment or makes the other look foolish in public. Rule number one: don't compete. With your rash tempers, it won't end well. Instead, be each other's biggest fans and champions. As the relationship progresses, put more effort into dressing up, especially if you become parents. Because you're so comfortable together, you could end up bumming around in burp cloths and track suits, dulling the sexy edge that attracted you in the first place.

ARIES + VIRGO (AUGUST 23 - SEPTEMBER 22) The razor's edge between love and hate lives in this common but contradictory coupling. Your attraction feels so fated, it's impossible to resist. Fire-sign Aries loves freedom and risk, but helplessly falls for prudent, parental Virgo, an Earth sign landlocked by practicality and protocol. The tips of Virgo's gossamer wings are singed by Aries' flame—yet, into the fire the Virgin flutters. Both signs have a hero complex, and this relationship centers around fixing each other, or exposing the other to new ways of life. For the first six to twelve months, it's exhilarating. Arduous Aries hand-delivers Virgo's sexual awakening with passion that's tender and all-consuming. Cautious Virgo teaches the impetuous Ram how to slow down, prepare and look both ways before crossing. New facets of your personalities unearth themselves—how lovely! Once the hormone flood is no longer at high tide, however, there are glaring differences to negotiate. Virgo's well-intentioned criticisms feel like a character assault to Aries ("who cares how I fold my T-shirts? I'm still a good person!"). Aries' myopic selfishness makes Virgo feel resentful and unappreciated—especially after hours of listening to the Ram's diatribes with the patience of a paid analyst. At this point, you realize that you've spent way too much time together, and you've lost touch with the outside world. Roll out of bed and reconnect with your individual friends, hobbies and interests. Trust that the other one will be there when you return.

ARIES + LIBRA (SEPTEMBER 23 - OCTOBER 22) ♥♥♥♥ You're opposite signs who can match up well, but you sometimes baffle one another, too. Aries rules the self and Libra rules relationships. Libra is a lover; Aries is a fighter. Your polar extremes can be a great complement if you borrow what the other does best. Rash, temperamental Aries could stand to give others the benefit of the doubt, to look before leaping—something the wise Judge does well. Languid, overly accommodating Libra can learn to speak up, say no, and take action instead of pondering the possible consequences for a year. Although your differences can be irritating, they also make you a well-rounded couple if you play them right. When Aries needs to rant, patient Libra offers uninterrupted listening, capped with sage, sensible feedback. In return, Aries helps Libra overcome a mortal fear of conflict, teaching this sign how to stand up for his rights. As parents, or even business partners, you play the good cop/bad cop routine like seasoned pros. Just be willing to adjust your internal thermostats as needed. Hotheaded Aries will need to dial down the anger, lest all that concentrated emotion throw Libra's scales off balance. Erudite Libra will need to descend from that lofty, cultured perch and take a bold risk. (No, Aries does NOT consider ten years a reasonable time to wait for an engagement ring—and never will.) Compromise is essential for you to find a rhythm.

ARIES + SCORPIO (OCTOBER 23 - NOVEMBER 21) Aries' ruler, passionate Mars, also wields minor command over Scorpio (whose main overlord is Pluto). Fierce physical attraction draws your signs together, but it's a game of sexual gunpowder and erotic explosives. Not that either of you is afraid of such things. No sign is as darkly intense as watery Scorpio. When mixed with Aries' concentrated fire-power, you stir up quite the hydroelectric charge. However, this match can only last if Scorpio has evolved from a ground-dwelling, vengeful scorpion into an elevated "eagle" state. Here's the fundamental challenge: Aries takes; withholding Scorpio takes away. When Aries reaches out his grasping hand, Scorpio's first instinct is to jump back, which wounds the sensitive Ram. Aries energy is consuming, which leaves Scorpio weak-kneed but scared. Aries will need to temper the raw desire, or at least mask it to avoid overwhelming Scorpio. Jealous Scorpio will need to stop Google-stalking Aries and hiring private detectives whenever the independent Ram goes out for a beer with friends. One way in which you're alike? You're both hyper-sensitized to abandonment, and may even shun each other in a self-protection paradox: "Go away before you leave me." (This tactic only guarantees another hot reunion tryst.) Selfishness can also be this couple's downfall. Scorpio is the sign that rules other people's resources—his karmic job is to create wealth from another man's pocket. Aries is simply born entitled. In a sense, you both live by the credo "What's mine is mine; what's yours is mine." Who will refill the coffers once you empty them?

ARIES + SAGITTARIUS (NOVEMBER 22 - DECEMBER 21) ♥♥♥♥ Chemistry and simpatico build fast between these two Fire signs, and you find a twin soul in each other. You're both independent explorers, driven by lust, joie de vive and a breathtaking moxie that others mistake for arrogance. That brio and derring-do is the badge of your spiritual kinship—a primal mating call that draws you together. You share a blunt sense of humor, and naturally understand the other's need for space and autonomy (at least at first). Thrilling conversations traipse expansive terrain: philosophy, art, human nature, science, spirituality, dreams. Together, the impossible feels probable, and your natural confidence soars higher. Caution: the view from your rosy lenses can be a bit myopic. Sagittarius is a gambler and Aries is a charging knight—neither thinks far ahead. You'll need crash insurance for the times that your grand schemes don't reach your projections. At moments, you both lapse into overthinking, which can kill the celebratory vibe. Aries also has a greater need to for coddling and personal attention. At times, the Ram may resent competing with Sagittarius' busy career, social schedule and hobbies—and Sagittarius gets impatient with Aries' needy spells. When angered, your burning tempers can raze a national forest to ash. Be careful not to unleash a spiteful spark, for that's all it takes to destroy this treasured landscape.

ARIES + CAPRICORN (DECEMBER 22 - JANUARY 19) Aries is the Alpha in most relationships, but here the Ram meets his match. In the Goat, Aries finds a more seasoned pack leader, and backs into a rare state of obedience. This weighty respect comes from Capricorn's ruler, wise old Saturn, the planet of maturity, authority and command. Capricorn is the zodiac's father sign; Aries is its firstborn child. It's the difference between a king and a knight, a queen and a duchess. Both are noble, but one is clearly the elder. This can be a dealbreaker for Aries in some cases, as too much paternalism makes this independent sign run for freedom. However, it usually works. Although Aries can be a hellish brat, Capricorn is unruffled and even amused by the tantrums, giving Aries space to act out. If you accept your cosmic roles, you can make excellent partners in both love and business. Aries is ruled by warrior Mars, and Capricorn is a four-star general by nature. You both see life as a battlefield to conquer, and with Aries' grit and Cap's determination, there's no goal you can't achieve. Earthy Capricorn excels at structure and planning, and is the terra firm beneath the Ram's restless hooves. Fiery Aries is a daring playmate who amuses, excites and entertains the sober Goat, especially in the bedroom (where Capricorn has a lesser-known lusty side). Aries is a flirt, and this can spark jealousy in traditional Capricorn. Over time, trust and mutual respect abolish the Goat's fears, and you make supportive lifelong partners.

ARIES + AQUARIUS (JANUARY 20 - FEBRUARY 18) ♥♥♥♥ You're laugh-a-minute friends who make a fine comedic duo, but the romance isn't as hearty as your side-splitting guffaws. You're amazed by how quickly the other delivers a hilarious comeback or a clever opinion, and it turns you on. Banter leads you to the bedroom fast, where the sex is playful and experimental (though not heavy on the emotional connection). It's as though you've met your twin; and alas, you may soon feel more like siblings than lovers. After a couple weeks, the Bickersons sideshow routine gets old, especially for Aries, and you run out of things to talk about. While casual Aquarius likes to keep the conversation light, Aries has intense, brooding spells that demand way too much emotional attention. For Aquarius, problems are solved with steely logic or left alone, but Aries is unable to curb obsessive thinking, which drives Aquarius mad. Your styles of affection are different, too. Cool Aquarius gets overwhelmed by the Ram's passion and physicality—there's way too much touching, grabbing and kissing for the airy Aquarian temperament. If you're determined to be together, push yourselves to go beyond platonic borders by traveling, taking classes, even performing on stage together. Closeness breeds more ennui than affection. Cultivate mystery through time apart. Your independent signs need to develop your own lives, then reunite with thrilling tales from the road.

ARIES + PISCES (FEBRUARY 19 - MARCH 20) Aries is the zodiac's first sign, Pisces its last. You're the Alpha and the Omega, the dawn and the sunset. You're as far apart and as close together as two signs can get. Although your differences are vast, you also have a broad expanse of material from which to fashion your relationship. Your polar positions can actually make you a great match. Aries loves to be adored and spoiled, and generous Pisces will give everything in the name of love. In Pisces' worshipful gaze, Aries feels brilliant and boundless, and his insecurities melt away. This is important for the sensitive Ram, whose "wounded soldier" archetype is healed by the Pisces nurse. In this relationship, Aries is free to follow his natural hunting instincts; Pisces prepares a banquet from his conquests. The danger: You both have vivid imaginations, but with two dreamers at the helm of this romance, the ship can veer off course. Aries is a take-charge leader, but needs a strong second mate. Bravado and confidence don't come easy to insecure Pisces, who falls into feigned helplessness under duress. Moody spells are common for your signs, and digging yourselves out of emotional ditches can be a challenge. You'll need a council of advisors to help you manage aspects of daily life—accountants, lawyers, coaches, therapists. Aries can be naturally aggressive, where Pisces is passive or passive-aggressive. You'll need to adapt your communication styles in order to be heard.

[jovialyouthmusic]

Past Times

A Period Drama loosely based on TRR

As above, this story is VERY loosely based on TRR and is a fantasy acted out in Bastien’s head - or is it Sophia’s fevered dream?

Word Count 1359

A/N This is a change for me, though as I’m English and grew up steeped in works by the Brontes and Jane Austen, the dialogue comes easily to me. I’d be grateful for any feedback...

Prologue

The day after Valentine’s day, Bastien rose early and went off for his final meeting with Mark Potter, his counterpart at Holyrood house in Edinburgh, seat of the British Monarch Queen Elizabeth. Sophia had to amuse herself for the morning, as Drake and Riley had a flight to New York to catch, but Bastien had promised to be back for lunch and the rest of their day would be theirs. The following day the royal jet would take them home to Cordonia.

Sophia returned to the hotel at lunchtime and they had their meal in the lounge of their suite, looking over to the Castle at the top of the Royal Mile.

‘What did you do this morning?’ Bastien asked ‘I’d like to visit the Modern Art Gallery this afternoon’

‘I visited the Georgian house museum’ Sophia said ‘They laid the house out as it was in the 18th century in Regency times. All the time I worked here, I never went to see round it’

‘It sounds intriguing’ Bastien replied ‘What was it like?’

‘Life was very different then’ she smiled ‘The original owner lived there with his wife and two daughters. There was a film showing with a historical depiction of the time when the older daughter was ready to marry. Apparently she was paired off with an English sea captain, and I wondered what that might have been like. It was quite vivid’

‘Tell me more, theá mou’ Bastien smiled ‘I could imagine myself a making a bid for the hand of a young noblewoman in marriage’

------

‘So now we are husband and wife’ Captain Lykel said ‘I know you turned down many other suitors before me, so I am grateful to have passed your rigorous standards’ Elizabeth  smiled. Hr new husband was some six years her senior, but that was not unusual in Regency Scotland. Matches were generally made with respectable men of sufficient wealth to keep up the reputation of the young women of polite society.

‘I believe you are the better choice than the young man who courted me only a year ago’ she said ‘When I overheard him saying he wanted a biddable wife who would submit to him in all ways, all thoughts of romance fled from my mind’ Her thoughts went back to the evening she had hidden behind the curtains in her father’s library in order to surprise the young man who wooed her and had asked her father for her hand in marriage at the serviceable age of seventeen.

Her plan started to look foolish, as first one of the other guests entered – Captain Lykel, a few years her senior and a childless widower. He had married young and his wife had died when he was away at sea, fighting the French navy. She had drawn back into the shadows as he began to peruse the shelves for an unknown work when her beau and his friends entered, laughing and joking.

‘So, Duncan , you’ll be a married man by the end of the year. That will put paid to your visits to Mistress Reed’s establishment and the delights of the young doxies there’ one of them said loudly. Elizabeth  blanched at the revelation that her prospective husband visited women of ill repute, and shrank further into the window seat. She was suddenly horribly aware that Captain Lykel had seen the movement, and looked in her direction to gain eye contact with her for a split second before clearing his throat to announce his presence to the other men.

‘Ho, Captain Lykel, you have no wife, you should visit Mistress Reed’s house’ one of them laughed ‘It is a fine place, the ladies there are most accommodating’ Elizabeth could scarcely believe her ears – how could they speak so freely of women of easy virtue? The captain spoke up

‘You may excuse me, I indeed I am a widower and lack the comfort of female companionship, but you are yet to take a wife and should take care not to consort with women who are not welcome in polite society’ He replied, but Elizabeth ’s intended husband scoffed at him

‘I but practice with willing whores, Sir. My intended spouse is a delicate creature, and I doubt she will gain the skills that Mistress Reed’s practice. A wife is only good for bearing children and seeing to the running of one’s household.’

‘Surely you seek the companionship of an equal’ the Captain retorted ‘someone with whom you can converse on topics of interests and discuss the proper upbringing of your children?’ Duncan  had laughed, and his friends with him.

‘Surely you don’t think women are equal to men? For them to converse on an equal footing is the work of a deluded mind’ Elizabeth could scarcely believe to hear the true thoughts of the man who had made a bid for her hand in marriage. All her ideals and dreams were crumbling to dust at his crass utterances.

‘On the contrary, although women’s minds work differently, they complement ours. The companionship of an intelligent woman is something to be sought’ The Captain went on, and the group of young men laughed derisively

‘It is impossible for women to comprehend subjects of importance beyond childbearing and domestic matters’ Duncan  retorted ‘Someone of your age should surely have realised that by now – are you soft in the head? Perhaps your injury has addled your mind as well as slowed your gait’ He had gestured toward the older man, who Elizabeth realised walked with the aid of a cane. He inclined his head ruefully and she saw a scar on his cheek.

‘I was injured in the line of duty, defending my country and the life of my Captain. I assure you my injury has not affected the working of my mind’ he asserted ‘Perhaps were you to join the Navy and go to sea you might gain perspective on the nature of your existence’ he paused, then thoughtfully added ‘I am also a widower and know the nature of women far more than you.’ Duncan scowled and gestured to his friends.

‘I do not care to converse with one who is clearly not right in the head’ he said curtly ‘Come, let’s go back to the drawing room and join the other gentlemen. Sir James has good whiskey and cigars in plenty, as well as two eligible daughters. I look forward to calling this house my own once he has departed this world and left me his daughter and his fortune’ and with that, the young men departed. The Captain remained, and waited until the door had closed before standing by the curtain and speaking in a low voice.

‘I know you are there, Miss Elizabeth ’ he said ‘I am truly sorry you had to hear what has just been uttered by one who should have more respect for your delicate sensibilities. I will depart this room, have no fear that I will besmirch your reputation by remaining’

‘No please – stay a while’ she said softly ‘None will know we are alone together’

‘I fear we may be discovered, and for a young lady such as yourself, reputation is everything’ he replied.

‘Then at least do me the honour of conversing with me when the gentlemen rejoin the ladies’ she asked ‘I do not wish to talk with my intended. He has revealed his true nature, and I hope I may be able to turn down his offer of marriage.’ She indicated the book he had taken down from the shelf ‘I also see you appreciate the work of Burns. Please, bring the book with you. It is a favourite of mine and I may use it as an excuse to confer with you’ The Captain made a low bow

‘It will be my pleasure’ he said ‘You may guess that the comparison of mutual interests is something I seek most earnestly’ He turned and left the library, and Elizabeth waited for a little while before returning to the other ladies in preparation for the men coming back for the remainder of the evening of her father’s social gathering.

[wolfhuntsmoon]

Sarah Rogers and how Steve inherited ‘stubborn little shit’ from the womb

Okay, so I was noodling on Sarah after reading her Marvel wiki and some extraordinarily good posts about how EG Steve should have gone back to see his mum instead of Peggy etc and the timings of Steve’s early story struck me as... interesting.

Steve is born on 4th July 1918, before the end of WWI, meaning he would have been conceived in September or October of 1917 - that is, if he was born on time or only a few weeks premature. Which, given the tech and prognosis for preemies in the early 20th century, must have been the case because things were grim enough even if you weren’t born prematurely, for both baby and mother. If you were giving birth, you had a 6% chance of dying in Ireland in this period - roughly comparable with the rest of Europe but shockingly high by our standards. The odds were better if you were rich, but not by that much. Childbirth remained the leading cause of death for women worldwide until the late 1940s, remember. And kids fared no better. One in five children born in Dublin in this period died before their 5th birthday. Again, the figures would be better or worse depending on how well off you were, but even the richest still suffered appalling infant mortality rates.

Anyway, depressing history of women’s health aside, this means that Joseph Rogers, American solider, and her, must have been doing the do about then, and probably seeing each other on the regular before that, because believe you me, casual sex in the early 20th century was a big no no. Not to say it didn’t happen, but usually only via prostitution ESPECIALLY in Ireland, because the Catholic Church ruled supreme there even more than the British did and contact between the sexes was very restricted and frowned upon. Sex ed was nonexistent, and women knew that even a whiff of scandal about them was enough to ruin them, their entire family, and the rest of their life. It’s a hackneyed joke because it’s true: Ireland is small and everyone knows everyone. You would get found out and then suffer the consequences - sent to a mother and baby home if you were lucky, and those places were worse than prisons sometimes. That cultural context would carry over even if Sarah wasn’t actually in Ireland at the time.

So, likely they were married by then, because again: social ruin. The Marvel wiki says they were married, but not when. (I know nothing about the comics, I’m sorry) Soldiers and their sweethearts often married very quickly, and there are actually quite a few accounts of nurses falling in love and marrying the soldiers they tended. (More on this later) However, if she was widowed and could have the child respectably, why not return to Ireland? With, presumably, a support network that makes emigrating to America a worse, not better, prospect? This is the crux of my theory: Sarah Rogers was seen as an unmarried mother, and treated as such, because she married Joseph abroad, probably without permission, and when he died, had no social proof of the marriage. And in those days, unmarried mothers either: aborted in secret, had the baby concealed by the church where they were then taken and given up for adoption, or were cast out with nothing and ostracised if they decided to keep the baby. Sarah ending up in America strikes me as her taking the third option, and indeed the only option she could, to keep her baby.

But first: Joseph and Sarah need to meet in order to get down and dirty. How? He’s an American soldier who would never have set foot in Ireland in WWI - the British government kept their troops there, obviously, but the Americans were all put straight onto the continent or mainland Britain once they crossed the Atlantic from 1917 onwards (remember the US only joined in WWI in April 1917). In fact, the US wasn’t able to send significant numbers of troops to Europe until the following spring of 1918, because their army was so small and outmoded for trench warfare they basically had to send a lot of stuff over until they had enough trained bodies, which took about a year to organise. Based on this, if Joseph and Sarah were making baby Steve in September 1917, Joseph must have been in the regular US army before it entered the war, and likely in for quite a long time and experienced, to be sent over so soon. That experience would have been invaluable, meaning he never would have been assigned to stay in Ireland even if the US did send troops there. He would have been deployed straight onto the battlefield.

In which case, if Joseph never sets foot in Ireland, then how does he meet Sarah? Well, we’re told she’s a qualified nurse, and that was a solidly middle class job back then. You needed to have a good education, beyond primary level (which was all that was free for kids back then - you had to pay for secondary or tertiary level) and speak English well. In addition to that, your training to be a nurse took three years, and you weren’t paid or funded at all for those. So I don’t buy the theories that she emigrated to America only speaking Irish and totally penniless. Sarah most likely came from quite a well off family to become a nurse, although it’s not impossible she rose from much humbler circumstances as there were a number of scholarships and the like for the deserving poor set up by rich upper class ladies bored out of their minds drinking endless teas in salons who liked to do things like Help the Poor but only if they’re Pure and Mannerly. Qualified nurses were paid about £40/year in WWI by the British government, when your average domestic maid would have been earning about £20/year - quite a big difference.

Either way, Sarah, as a nurse, was exactly the kind of woman the British government was desperate to recruit by 1915-1916 when the true scale of modern attritional warfare became clear, and no longer pussyfooted around keeping women and their delicate sensibilities away from the battlefield. The Battle of the Somme between July-Nov 1916, for example, claimed the lives of over 20,000 British soldiers ON THE FIRST DAY. The British alone sustained over a million casualties (dead, missing or wounded) across the whole battle. They couldn’t afford to stay prudish. There were just too many casualties to deal with. They even opened up medical degrees to women without restrictions because they were so desperate! Which was a big part of the reason why Britiain introduced conscription for the first time in 1916, including in Ireland (which led to the Easter Rising and Irish War of Independence, hoo boy was that a mistake). Droves and droves of young women were recruited to fill all sorts of jobs while the men were away, but a large number also went overseas to the battlefields of Belgium and France. Sarah must have been one of them. If she was qualified beforehand, she would most likely have been sent to work in a field hospital abroad, because the voluntary members were mostly kept working as assistants on the British mainland. Lots of women joined these Voluntary Aid Detachments (VADs) at the start of the war to nurse wounded soldiers, but the military hated the idea of using them until they couldn’t cope in 1915. Even then, volunteers were only used for the more menial tasks. Professionals like Sarah were what was needed the most.

Now, I’ve said that she likely came from a middle class family, so money probably wasn’t a worry until after she got to America, later on. Why go, given the pay wasn’t significantly more than you’d earn as a nurse at home? Well, the rigid social hierarchy of the time broke down in some pretty major ways out there, and it was likely the only chance an unmarried woman would ever get to travel that wouldn’t immediately ruin her reputation. And if you accept more the idea she became a nurse via scholarship and was poor, the increase in pay working abroad would have been sorely appreciated. And we can also consider patriotism might play a role - not all Irish were rabidly anti-British before 1916. Indeed, many ordinary and middle class Irish only became ardently nationalist in the wake of the brutal repression following the 1916 Easter Rising. And more than that, many Irish, even if they disliked the British, disliked the idea of the Germans and Austrians-Hungarians winning the war even more. Personally, I think Sarah was an adventurer who seized her chance to escape the restrictive social confines of Ireland and didn’t once look back, even if her family disapproved.

I couldn’t find a birthdate for Sarah, or a maiden name to tell me where she might have hailed from (thanks, Marvel. Not.) But let’s say she was part of that first initial wave of volunteers who signed up in 1914 - because it was HUGE. It’s really difficult for us, so jaded now, to get into the mindset of people then, but they did sign up in huge numbers. Partly due to patriotism, partly because they thought the war would be over by Christmas, partly fear of being shamed for not ‘doing their bit’ - there were lots of reasons. But it’s very telling that the British government didn’t feel the need to introduce conscription for men until two years after the war broke out, and they never introduced a civilian equivalent. So Sarah would have been very familiar with the horrors of the battlefield and the war by the time fresh faced Joseph Rogers arrives on the scene in 1917.

How did they meet? Sarah would have most likely been working in a field hospital, overseeing a team of volunteers. Field hospitals were behind the front lines, but only by a few miles, and nurses were killed by enemy shelling and gas attacks. They were the first real point of medical care most soldiers would encounter after having bandages slapped on them at a dressing station in the trenches, before being carted off to the field hospital (if they survived the journey) by stretcher bearers, horses, or increasingly as the war continued, motorised ambulances. So Sarah and her ilk were lasses made of steel, honest to god. They were in the thick of the worst of it, men screaming and dying, and often afraid for their lives while they tried to care for them. A lot of those nurses developed PTSD (then called shell-shock) as a result. Jospeh is most likely to have met her if he was a wounded patient of hers brought in from the battlefield. But only lightly wounded - if he had been badly wounded he would have been shipped straight back to mainland Britain to convalesce as soon as he was stabilised, thwarting any budding romance.

We’re also told that Jospeh dies in a mustard gas attack. So this hospital trip must have been for something different - a broken bone perhaps, or a minor shrapnel wound that would see him off duty for a while but still stationed in the area and therefore able to court Sarah. Young people (Sarah must have been less than 28 because that was the cut off age for nurses to be recruited in 1915-1916) being young people, I imagine they fell in love, fell in to bed, and biology did its magic. The timescale on this is open to interpretation, because the ABSOLUTE earliest they could have met is May 1917 (travel time by ship from America to Europe took weeks during the war), and Steve must have been conceived by October, latest. Which is a pretty whirlwind romance, but not unusual for the time. The Germans first used mustard gas from July of 1917, but Joseph must survive up until September/October.

So, that cause of death as mustard gas? This is strange given how mustard gas was well known at the time to be the ‘best’ gas to have inflicted on you. It produced horrific blisters and burns, particularly on the inside of your throat and airways, but rarely killed. Chlorine and phosgene were MUCH deadlier. So Marvel saying this is more poor research, but let’s go with it - gas affecting you would make it that much more likely you’d be caught by machine gun or shellfire or any of the other myriad ways to die on a WWI battlefield. Here’s where things start to align quite nicely (well, badly for Sarah, but good for fic writers) as mustard gas was deployed by the Germans on a large scale between October 9th-12th to defend the Passchadaele Ridge from a joint British and French assault on the German defences. This was part of the second biggest battle of WWI, the Battle of Passchendaele, notorious for the seas of mud men had to slog through up to their waists, and one of the battles which, like the Somme, gave WWI generals such bad reputations. In three months the British lost 350,000 men and advanced just a few kilometres. They abandoned the battle on November 10th.

So, Joseph Rogers? Must have died between October 9-12th, well before Sarah realised she was pregnant even if Steve was conceived at the start of September. Likely he was caught in a mustard attack, started choking because he couldn’t get his gas mask on/hadn’t got it fitted properly, and then was killed by gun or shellfire after his initial injury. Mustard gas took time to affect the skin and membranes of the body, so if he fell while the gas was still around, it would have looked much worse by the time his body was identified and retrieved from the battlefield. The date, however, means Joseph died never knowing he was going to be a father (sad!), and Sarah, newly widowed, likely didn’t see any reason not to continue working as a distraction until she encountered the first signs of preganancy. The stiff upper lip thing was a real coping mechanism back then. She would have been kicked out as soon as anyone could tell, or she told them and got kicked out, because that was legal and expected then. Pregnant women were fired for being pregnant in any job, and the idea of a pregnant woman working in a theatre of war, as you can imagine, would have outraged everyone.

So, Sarah gets kicked out, has no job. She’s widowed and pregnant. But, the marriage would probably have taken place without her family’s permission (letters were pretty slow and heavily censored on the front lines, the timeframe likely wouldn’t allow for anything except a note telling them she married) and although she would have had a marriage certificate, turning up at home without a husband but with a baby from a military camp? Would have been a deep, deep scandal at the time. Particularly if Sarah came from a middle class family who would have been extremely conscious of their social position and the danger she and her baby posed to it. Catholic mores plus unsanctioned marriage plus Irish social structures equals daughter returning in disgrace to besmirch the family name in a way that is literally unthinkable at the time. Family therefore issues an ultimatum - come back and get rid of the baby and the marriage cert so you can be respectable, or don’t come back at all. I really cannot stress this enough - families would, and did, prefer to say the woman had died and never have any contact with them again, rather than accept an unmarried mother back into their house.

Sarah, being Sarah though, grits her teeth, spits in God’s eye, and packs her bags for the first steamship to New York. She was a lot better equipped than most to make the journey, with some savings from her salary and a profession she could rely on once she arrived. But it was still a recklessly brave thing to do because at this point in time the ENTIRE Atlantic was infested with German U-Boats who were doing their level best to sink any Allied or Allied associated ship they could get in their periscope sights. And they were terrifyingly effective in 1917, although by the end of the year when Sarah would have beeen sailing, countermeasures like the convoy system had greatly reduced this. But still scary as fuck, because by that point the German U-Boats were even sinking hospital ships - until then left alone by both sides.

She probably arrived in the US in January or February of 1918 - it would have taken time to arrange her travel and the journey itself took 3-4 weeks. Little Steven G Rogers came into the world on July 4th, 1918, without a clue as to the sacrifices his mother made to keep him and bring him to America, or the heartache she endured in the previous years. And that, my fellow nerds, is why Sarah Rogers is AWESOME and a sorely underused character and development point for Steve in the MCU. Because to do what she did, and to make it through took more than guts, it took sheer bloody-minded spite and stubbornness, and hey - who does that remind us of? Steve doesn’t grow up and get angry and fighty - no, he’s got that shit in his GENES from Sarah from the beginning.

EDIT: Part 2 is up! Consisting of Sarah’s journey and entry to America, plus how Very Not Good it was to be Irish whilst trying to do so.

[couchdetective]

The Mysterious Affair at Styles by Agatha Christie

This is the first of the Hercule Poirot novels. It’s where Hastings first re-encounters Poirot in Britain. We never actually see their first meeting in Belgium in any of Christie’s books.

Styles was written in 1916, in the thick of WWI, and published shortly after in 1920 (in the US) and 1921 (in the UK). The story itself is set in WWI. The war forms the foundation of the plot, providing the reason why these characters are in this place at this time. The story’s not about the war, but the war allows for the story, and haunts the characters. There is so much quiet trauma in this book. Hercule Poirot is in the village of Styles St. Mary because he is a refugee, fleeing Belgium because of the war. Mrs. Inglethorpe, the grande dame of the village, has given him and other refugees aid. He’s a retired police detective, which is extremely weird to think about. Poirot is such an eccentric little bundle of quirks that it’s hard to imagine him working as part of an institution. He has also already had a distinguished career before his adventures in Britain even start.

As for Arthur Hastings (is there a more lolariously British name?), he is 30 years old, and has been invalided home from the Front, only to find a murder right there in the idyllic countryside. He’s at Styles Court because his friend John Cavendish lives there, with his stepmother Mrs. Inglethorpe (who is very rich and recently remarried to a much-younger man) and brother Lawrence. Hastings doesn’t know what he’s going to do with himself after the war, but his secret dream job is being a detective. He fancies himself very good at it. He thinks he’s progressed further than Poirot with Poirot’s own methods. Arthur Hastings gets compared to Dr. Watson, which is unjust; Watson is much smarter and more cognizant of his own limits, but Hastings is still endearing.

The Detective Work: Poirot in Styles uses methods that are less quintessentially Poirot than in later books. In the very next book, Murder on the Links, Poirot is militantly in favor of conducting his investigation based almost entirely on the psychology of the individuals concerned. Physical evidence-gathering is for people like Giraud, the detective Poirot mocks in Murder on the Links. It’s all very well, but the Hercule Poirots, the real great ones, just sit back, contemplate and reflect on the psychology, let the Girauds and Japps bring in the results of the physical investigation, contemplate the physical evidence in light of the psychology, and then come to the correct conclusion. It’s beneath Poirot to go around examining cigarette ash or fingerprints, and the real truth won’t be found there in any case.

But in Styles, Poirot personally conducts a close physical investigation, and relies heavily on the results of that investigation, in the manner of Giraud, or Sherlock Holmes. Here’s Poirot’s preliminary investigation of the murder scene in Styles (emphases added by me):

Poirot locked the door on the inside, and proceeded to a minute inspection of the room. He darted from one object to the other with the agility of a grasshopper...

...A small purple despatch-case, with a key in the lock, on the writing-table, engaged his attention for some time. He took out the key from the lock, and passed it to me to inspect. I saw nothing peculiar, however. It was an ordinary key of the Yale type, with a bit of twisted wire through the handle.

Next, he examined the framework of the door we had broken in, assuring himself that the bolt had really been shot. Then he went to the door opposite leading into Cynthia’s room. That door was also bolted, as I had stated. However, he went to the length of unbolting it, and opening and shutting it several times; this he did with the utmost precaution against making any noise. Suddenly something in the bolt itself seemed to rivet his attention. He examined it carefully, and then, nimbly whipping out a pair of small forceps from his case, he drew out some minute particle which he carefully sealed up in a tiny envelope.

On the chest of drawers there was a tray with a spirit lamp and a small saucepan on it. A small quantity of a dark fluid remained in the saucepan, and an empty cup and saucer that had been drunk out of stood near it...Poirot delicately dipped his finger into liquid, and tasted it gingerly.

For comparison, here’s Sherlock Holmes’s inspection of the murder scene at Number 3, Lauriston Gardens in his first story, A Study in Scarlet:

As he spoke, he whipped a tape measure and a large round magnifying glass from his pocket. With these two implements he trotted noiselessly about  the room, sometimes stopping, occasionally kneeling, and once lying flat upon his face. So engrossed was he with his occupation that he appeared to have forgotten our presence, for he chattered away to himself under his breath the whole time, keeping up a running fire of exclamations, groans, whistles, and little cries suggestive of encouragement and of hope. As I watched him I was irresistibly reminded of a pure-blooded well-trained foxhound as it dashes backwards and forwards through the covert, whining in its eagerness, until it comes across the lost scent. For twenty minutes or more he continued his researches, measuring with the most exact care the distance between marks which were entirely invisible to me, and occasionally applying his tape to the walls in an equally incomprehensible manner. In one place he gathered up very carefully a little pile of grey dust from the floor, and packed it away in an envelope. Finally, he examined with his glass the word upon the wall, going over every letter of it with the most minute exactness. This done, he appeared to be satisfied, for he replaced his tape and his glass in his pocket.    

Obviously, these aren’t exactly the same! I’m not accusing Christie of plagiarizing Arthur Conan Doyle by any means. But there are elements in common: the animal comparisons, the whipping instruments out, the taking away tiny bits of evidence in an envelope. Christie, in Styles, is drawing Poirot in roughly the same tradition as Holmes, whereas later on she will have Poirot reject and mock the entire “foxhound” school of detecting. In Styles, Poirot also deduces the murder method by using scientific knowledge about bromides in the medicine precipitating the strychnine. This is another atypical detection method for Poirot. I think these atypicalities in Styles are largely due to Christie still figuring out the character in her first book. There is also a plausible in-universe explanation, however: in Styles, Poirot is just a refugee, not an established and famous private detective. The “foxhound” detectives won’t bring him their evidence. He has to get it himself.

At the same time, you can still see the importance of psychology in Poirot’s methods, even here. The murderer is the husband. It’s always the husband, and all the more so when it’s the much-younger husband of an older, extremely rich wife. On top of this, Poirot solves the case through his key psychological insight that Alfred Inglethorpe wants to be arrested, and his romantic insight as to who exactly Mrs. Raikes is having an affair with. Once he figures out that (1) Inglethorpe is trying to get arrested and tried before there’s sufficient evidence against him, thus obtaining protection against double jeopardy; (2) it is John Cavendish, and not Alfred Inglethorpe, who is carrying on with Mrs. Raikes,  Poirot knows what’s going on and can solve the case. The famous “little grey cells” get their first mention in Styles: it’s only in passing, and only once, not the mantra they will become later on, but they do show up.

The Detectives: Poirot keeps Hastings in the dark in this story, not by lying to him, but by allowing Hastings to rush to whatever absurd conclusion his mind finds appealing without correcting him. Hastings and Poirot don’t have a partnership, or even a mentor-protegé relationship. They are, and will remain, a perpetual quirky genius/amazed straight-man couple.

Poirot’s match-making, romantic tendencies also make their first appearance here. This isn’t a distraction from the mystery at all. Correctly figuring out who is romantically entangled with who, and who has feelings for who, is crucial to solving the mystery, like I said above about the Alfred Inglethorpe/Mrs. Raikes red herring and the John Cavendish/Mrs. Raikes dalliance. On top of that, realizing that Lawrence Cavendish was trying to shield Cynthia Murdoch, because he was in love with her and there was a ton of evidence against her, was important to figuring out Lawrence’s own behavior and his own innocence of the crime. But Poirot’s shipper tendencies don’t limit themselves to what’s relevant to solving the mystery. He actually allows John Cavendish to be tried for murdering Mrs. Inglethorpe (a hanging offense!), purely to spark a reconciliation between John and his wife Mary, who would otherwise be too proud to admit that they truly love each other after all. Good thing this is a Christie novel and no one suffers any trauma from being tried for their lives--at least no trauma that can’t be cured by the love of a good woman.

Poirot’s not the only romantic here, though. Hastings’s overly romantic sensibility, and loneliness (he’s staying with John Cavendish because he has no family or other close friends), leads him to propose to Cynthia Murdoch out of the blue. She correctly laughs at him and tells him to be careful, next time someone might accept him. The whole thing is funny, but with a background of sadness. The difference between Poirot and Hastings is that Poirot is a sort of cupid, arranging others’ romances, while Hastings is fundamentally a participant and not a background string-puller. He wants a romance for himself, and Poirot suggests their next mystery might provide him with one. Mon ami Hastings displays a total lack of deductive ability and a sentimental outlook. He’s a quintessential British stereotype, but the flattering kind, the way the British (at the height of their empire, too) wanted to see their average man: not the brightest (too much cleverness is foreign, not quite manly, hence why the detective here is a Belgian), but the most honorable and decent.

The Characters: Christie gets flack for her characterization that I think is undeserved. She frequently perpetrates the most flat, stereotypical characters ever, but also frequently manages to sketch depths and complications of character in just a few simple words. Styles features several examples of the latter. There’s Mrs. Inglethorpe, a rich woman who is generous but tries to dominate people through use of her charity, who is smart and yet foolish enough to marry a younger man out for her money.  There’s her son John, who seems like a beef-witted country squire, but is (as Poirot points out) sensitive enough to seek out a separate life when it seems his wife isn’t going to fall in love with him. Above all, there’s Mary Cavendish: proud, reserved, married her husband without love, but then fell in love with him after, only to see him pull away and have an affair because he doesn’t think she loves him, and then pulls away in her own turn, working as a Land Girl during the war, madly jealous of her husband, drugging people so she can snoop to find out about his affairs, and finally, passionately defending him when he’s on trial for his life.

Japp makes his first appearance in this novel as well, but does not mess anything up, nor does he make much of an impression.

The Tropes: There are many standard Christie tropes that make their first appearance here. There’s Mrs. Inglethorpe, the moneybags matriarch who is controlling and nurturing in the same breath, whose adult children are taken care of by her but also trapped in stifling dependence on her. This is echoed in Gordon Cloade in Taken at the Flood/There is a Tide, Aristide Leonides in Crooked House, and probably others that aren’t coming to my mind as well. There’s the gold-digger, much-younger spouse of the moneybags, Alfred Inglethorpe, the murderer. Some other examples of this trope are a red herring or a frame-up victim instead of the true murderer. Look at Rosaleen Cloade in Taken at the Flood, or Brenda Leonides in Crooked House, or Nofret in Death Comes as the End.

There is also the married couple who believed (perhaps correctly) that at least one of them had entered the marriage without loving the other, but then find--in the shadow of a murder investigation--that they’ve both fallen truly and mutually in love with each other and will walk through fire for each other.  John and Mary Cavendish here are echoed by Jeremy and Frances Cloade in Taken at the Flood, and Stephen and Sandra Farraday in Sparkling Cyanide/Remembered Death. Christie likes this one a lot, and so do I. It’s very heartwarming.

There’s Dr. Bauerstein, the suspicious foreigner (usually Germanic or Eastern European) who is there for the sole purpose of looking sketchy and being innocent (at least, of the murder) and confusing the reader. This character may be Up To Something, but he’s never the real villain, never the actual murderer. JK Rowling echoes this in Goblet of Fire with Igor Karkaroff. 

Then there is the loyal servant, who is none too bright (Dorcas), and the “obvious dislike = love” trope, with Cynthia and Lawrence: Cynthia claims Lawrence dislikes her, and she doesn’t care that he does, when he acts like that because he loves her, and she does care very much. Dislike = love is also there with Evelyn Howard and Alfred Inglethorpe: their pretended animosity hides a passionate romantic attachment.

The Author and the Setting: Christie wrote this in a war. That same war pervades the setting, affecting the lives and livelihoods of Poirot, Hastings, Mary Cavendish, and the entire economy of Styles. Waste paper is never thrown out, which is important to solving the mystery: it helps Poirot realize Mrs. Inglethorpe had to light a fire to destroy the will she made in favor of her husband, which explains why she had a fire in her room in the heat of July. There’s a ton of Christie’s own prejudices on display here, too: the dumb servants (classism), and the racism (Jewish blood is a sign of intelligence! It’s fine to put on black-face and to refer to black people as the n-word!).

The Murder Method: Chemistry. Bromides in the medicine, precipitating strychnine. Secret chemistry. But there’s more to it than the physical murder. The coverup requires the deliberate incurring of suspicion by Alfred Inglethorpe, all the better to decisively dispel it--and the secret cahoots of him and Miss Howard, pretending to hate each other while working together to get Mrs. Inglethorpe’s money. It’s a very clever method!

The Law: The legal system plays an important part in this story: the prohibition against double jeopardy; the marital privilege so that Mary Cavendish can’t be called to testify against her husband; the attempts to cast suspicion on Lawrence by John’s attorneys.

Poirot Explains it All: There’s a classic explanation scene, with everyone gathered in the drawing-room at the end. Before getting to the actual point, Poirot has to explain all of his reasoning, and you know what, I get it. If I had been through everything in this novel, I’d want a full accounting of everyone’s odd behavior, not just the actual murderer’s. He explains that: (1) it was Mary Cavendish who was in Mrs. Inglethorpe’s room and in Cynthia’s room; (2) Mrs. Inglethorpe who had destroyed her own will, which is why she had a fire in her room in July; (3) when she twice referred to “scandal between husband and wife” on the day of her death, the first reference was to her son’s affair with Mrs. Raikes, but the second was to her own husband’s wrongdoings, evidenced in a letter to Miss Howard; (4) Mary Cavendish drugged Cynthia and Mrs. Inglethorpe so she could snoop around for a piece of paper she thought would prove John was having an affair; and finally (5) there was no need for the murderer to be in Mrs. Inglethorpe’s room that night, since the bromides in the medicine that precipitated the strychnine had already been introduced by the murderer, Alfred, who kindly and considerately wrote about the scheme in a letter to his co-conspirator Evelyn, which is now in Poirot’s hands. After which, of course, Alfred blurts out his own guilt, instead of keeping his mouth safely shut.

But then there’s a follow-up scene, where he explains even more to Hastings, about how he knew something was up when he realized Alfred wanted to be arrested, where he hid the incriminating letter, how Poirot stopped him from getting it back (by enlisting the household), Miss Howard’s role (especially in impersonating Alfred Inglethorpe), the logistics of the bromide crime, and how the murderers undid themselves by trying to incriminate John Cavendish. And finally, his own shippy thoughts, his Lawrence/Cynthia insights, and his plot to bring John and Mary together. The Hastings-explanation, after the general explanation, is meant to tie up loose ends, explain Poirot’s more personal motives, and address Hastings’s own feelings, including his romantic melancholy.

It’s a solid Christie. Not one of my favorites, but definitely enjoyable.

[harrisongslimited]

An Impossible Task - A John Wick Fanfic

A/N - Smut. **Readers 18+ only, please**.

T/W - sexual encounter, swearing, conflict, angst, drinking.

Chapter 8

While Cassie waited at the table after breakfast, John went to get the dog from Charon. On his way back to the table, Cassie saw that he was stopped by a man in a sharp business suit, with salt and pepper hair and a confident swagger. She could not hear them; she only hoped it didn’t mean more trouble for John.

“Jonathan,” Winston, the Continental’s manager began in a deep British accent. “What do you think you are doing?”

John looked at Cassie, then back to Winston. “Breakfast.”

John started to walk away, but Winston stopped him. “What are you doing bringing that woman here?”

“Breakfast,” he repeated, emotionless. “I would have taken her to my house, but as you know, there was a gas leak….”

“Right,” Winston replied, holding the syllables out. “And whose fault was that?”

John began to walk away again, but Winston said, “The High Table is not happy with you, Jonathan. It seems you claimed you would serve, but you ignored a direct command.”

“Killing you…” John said, his back still to Winston.

“Yes,” Winston agreed. “Killing me.”

John partially turned to Winston and said, “Who says I won’t?”

Winston stood tall. “It seems to me, Jonathan, that you have lost your edge. The women in your life have made you soft, with a conscience. That does not serve the High Table.”

“Since when have you cared what the High Table wants?” he shot back.

“I care when it serves me,” Winston stated factually.

“So you want me to kill you?”

“Of course not,” Winston told him. “I want to see you as the hunter you once were. Women and the life you chose do not mix. You got out once, Jonathan. Don’t think you can do it again. You’re doomed to failure. And I’d watch my back, if I were you. You have defied a direct order from the High Table.”

John began walking away with his dog by his side. “I didn’t choose the life. It chose me,” was all he said.

As he walked forward, he spotted Cassie drinking her coffee at the breakfast table. He didn’t think she saw him yet, but he saw her and a smile broke out on his face. She changed his life—he now understood he could still remember  and honor Helen, yet live as a man in the real world. If the real world would let him.

 John drove Cassie’s car with the dog in the back seat to a warehouse on the outskirts of the city. Pulling up to a huge warehouse garage door, he waved at the operator and the door went up, allowing him in. He drove to the side and parked.

“Wait here,” he told Cassie.  John looked at her and leaned over the console to kiss her.  She smiled and nodded.

Exiting the car, he walked over to where several men were looking under the hood of a car. They turned toward John’s voice and one of them exclaimed, “What the fuck are you doing here?”

Before John could answer, the man continued. “You have to get out of here. They nearly fuckin’ killed you.”

“What are you talking about, Aurelio?” John asked him.

“We took you. We took you to Braxton…the hospital. Jeremy found you unconscious behind the Continental. He said Braxton should be remote enough to be safe.”

“Who’s Jeremy?”

“Marcus’ nephew.”

“Aurelio, Marcus was killed because of me. You think his nephew wants to help me?” John asked him, irritation in his voice

“You’re alive, aren’t you?” Aurelio asked pointedly. “Last time I saw you, you were out of it and half dead. And you’re welcome, by the way.”

John extended a hand to shake Aurelio’s.

“That’s pretty much all I know,” he told John. “Jeremy called me to help him and we drove you out to Braxton. He said you’d be safe. And what the hell are you doing here and what the hell are you driving?”

John looked at him with a blank expression. “I came to pick up my car.”

“Yeah, well, it’s done. It’s completely re-built. You killed that car, John,” Aurelio said. “It’s in the back. Keys are in it.” He bent forward to look in the car John had arrived in. “Somebody gonna drive that car out?”

John nodded and extended a hand. “Thanks,” he said and turned to head to Cassie’s car.

“Just follow me,” he told her. “When we get to Braxton, you take the lead. I’m not sure how to get to your house.”

Cassie nodded and shifted herself over the console into the driver’s seat. John leaned into the car to kiss her and Cassie’s hand reached up to touch the side of his face.

 Now he was stuck with his own thoughts for the ride to Cassie’s.  While he had more pressing issues to think about, like who was trying to kill him, for example, his mind just naturally went to Cassie, her delicate sensuality, her sensibility. It was like flashes from a polaroid camera – Cassie kissing him, sitting at the table in that red sweater, her hands lost in his hair, deep, dark brown eyes needing him, wanting him, her butterfly kisses down his body, the sweet smell of her shampoo. “Sunshine Superman,” he laughed to himself.

Would she want him if she knew who he really was? No, probably not.  But he was either going to have to tell her, or leave her. He didn’t think his life left him any other choices.There was no chance for him to leave the life again. He had gotten out, came back in and that was his future. He said he would serve and no other scenario was possible, unless he was dead.

But he didn’t think he could leave Cassie behind and serve the High Table. She changed him--showed him a different way to live, like his life with Helen. He was going to have to figure out a way to survive and get out. Get out again...if he lived that long.

 Cassie turned the radio up once she reached the Interstate. She was hoping singing along with The Beatles or the Rolling Stones or Led Zeppelin would stop her swirling thoughts and it worked. Temporarily.  Then she would see John’s milk chocolate eyes and bright smile, but what did she really know about him? Conversations over dinner and breakfast consisted of John asking her question after question about her life, about her medical career. He could practically remove an appendix with all the information she gave him. And they talked books, Monet and VanGogh, travel, sports, and the ASPCA.

“Yeah, well, goddamn it,” she told herself. He was going to have to answer some questions of her own. If he was thinking they would have another sexual encounter before he shared some of his life with her, he was totally mistaken. “Mis-taken,” she thought with blustery confidence.

She puckered her lips and blinked her eyes, knowing she was full of shit. All he would have to do is look at her, and she’d melt, completely fold. The way he kissed her was like the song said, “on her list of the best things in life.” John was a gold medal champion when it came to kissing. Then there was that hair. Who has hair like that? Was he a mutant or something?

“How old are you?” she asked herself, laughing out loud. She felt like a teenager going on and on about her first crush, but when she thought about his naked body against hers, she almost drove off the road.

She turned the radio up even louder and began singing, “Here Comes the Sun.”

 It took just over 60 minutes to reach Cassie’s house in Braxton. Arriving at her little ranch house, she opened the garage door and pulled her car in, John pulling his Mustang in next to her.  Cassie sat back in the driver’s seat and stretching against the steering wheel, took a deep breath. She watched John exit his car and begin to walk towards her. He stared at her from the front of the car, then went to open Cassie’s door for her.

She looked up into his eyes and took his offered hand, John moving her up against the car and closing the door. Cassie grabbed onto the lapels of his suit coat and pulled him in to kiss him. As their lips met, a fire ignited; Cassie pulled him quickly into the house, closing and locking the door behind them. Together they fell against the wall, John bracing them with his one hand, the other holding her lower back securely.

Cassie’s  arms wound tightly around his neck as John started kissing her, Cassie meeting his passion with her own. Mouths together, their tongues searching the other in a desperate need, they held onto each other as though they were life buoys. John began kissing her neck with growing intensity while Cassie moaned against him, whispering his name. He slipped his leg through hers while she slid her hand down the front of his body to the growing erection in his pants.

John covered her mouth again with his own as his hand explored her body, eventually slipping a hand underneath her sweater and pulling it off in one swift motion.

“Cassie,” he sighed into her neck as she began to slip off his suit coat. Cassie’s eyes were fixed on his as she loosened his silk tie and quickly unbuttoned his dress shirt. She reached around him and slid the shirt off, gently gliding her fingernails up and around his chest.

Urgently now, John unzipped her pants and helped her slide out of them, his large, strong hands tracing the front of her until he came to her bra. He lined the material with quick kisses against the top of her breast. Cassie braced herself against the wall as his mouth came down on hers again; she arched her back towards him and pulled him closer. Running her hands down his powerful bare chest, she reached the waistband of his trousers and unzipped them, freeing him from his pants.

In one quick movement, together they ripped her panties and his boxers off each other. John pushed her eagerly into the wall, raising her one knee up along the side of her body. Bowing down slightly, as he rose he entered her fully and heard Cassie hitch her breath.

Immediately they found their rhythm and it seemed like only seconds before Cassie called out his name and dug her fingers into his back.

“Shit, John ,” she moaned.

He thrust into her again and her body began to shudder underneath his hands. Listening to her, he moved faster as she continued to quiver. Beyond aroused, he released himself, breathing heavily into her neck.

“Fuck…” he managed to say in between his quickened breaths. He lowered Cassie’s knee as he withdrew from her and kissed her fully on the mouth.  John could feel her heartbeat in her chest.

They sighed together, taking in a deep breath of air, their arms wrapped around each other.

“Welcome to Braxton…,” she said finally, smiling at him.

John placed his cheek next to hers. “Friendly little town you have here,” he laughed.

“We aim to please,” Cassie teased.

John kissed her cheek and stepped back, leaning down and putting his boxers back on. He handed Cassie her black panties and his Oxford shirt and she slipped them both on.  John took her hand and kissed her lightly.

“Would you like a glass of wine or something else?” Cassie asked, after kissing him again and taking his hand to walk into the kitchen.

“That would be nice.”

“Have a seat in the livingroom and I’ll get it,” she told him.

She could see him sit on the sofa from her viewpoint in the kitchen.

“Are you in any pain?” she called to him. “I should check your wounds.”

“No pain,” he responded, evenly. “I’m fine, thanks.”

Cassie rounded the kitchen island and presented John with a glass of red wine, then sat next to him.

“So what’s the game plan here?” Cassie asked, placing her leg over his. “Are we going to the police department to clear this up or what do you want to do?”

John’s 6th sense was on high alert. Something was really off with this whole scenario. From Jeremy finding him half dead outside the Continental to ending up at the Braxton ER, something wasn’t right. Why didn’t they just kill him? And did all this have to do with the High Table being upset with him for not killing Winston? Well, he wasn’t going to kill Winston. He didn’t want to kill anyone.

His hand made long, light sweeps of her shin. “I’ll go there tomorrow while you’re at work and straighten it out.”

“John,” she said, looking him in the eyes. “What do you do, anyway? I mean your career. Why would someone shoot you, stab you and leave you for dead outside the ER? I mean, too much, no?”

There were 2 choices. Tell her the truth and lose her or lie and eventually lose her. He decided to go with a combination of the two.

“I don’t know why someone would do that,” he told her. “I honestly don’t.”

“Well, is it related to your job?”

“Yes.”

“So what do you do?”

“It’s very complicated,” he said slowly.

“I have a high functioning brain,” she responded. “Try me.”

John was silent for a long time. “It’s better that you don’t know, Cass. Can you leave it at that?”

“What? I’m good enough to sleep with but not good enough to know what you do for a living?”

“No,” he answered immediately. “No. It’s not that. I’m just trying to protect you.”

“I’m not some Mafia wife,” Cassie told him pointedly, removing her leg from his lap.

“I know that. But the less you know, the better off you are,” he said, gently. “I’m trying to change my life now. But I don’t know if I can.”

“You’re very mysterious.”

“I don’t mean to be, I just have to.”

“Can you tell me anything about your life?” Cassie asked him.

He shook his head and looked down at his hands. “No. I’m sorry, Cass. You already know everything I can tell you.”

“So you’re an international man of mystery….?”

He laughed slightly. “I don’t want to be. Not to you, anyway.”

“Look, John. I’m no shrinking violet. I’ve got a mouth and I have a brain.  I’ve birthed babies and held the hands of the dying. I’m pretty sure anything you can say wouldn’t shock me in the least.”

John leaned in and kissed her gently on the lips. “You have to trust me, Cass,” he said, his face close to hers. “I’ll explain it to you when I can. For now, I can’t. If you’d kick me out on my ass right now, I’d understand.”

She leaned her face away from him and looked in his eyes.  “You’ll explain it to me when you can?”

“You have my word. Just trust me Cass. Please.”

There was a moment of silence as they watched each other, John wondering if she would, indeed, kick him out and Cassie wondering how long she could stand being kept in the dark. But, God help her, she did trust him...her sixth sense at work again. Besides how, she wondered, could anyone who kissed like a blue-ribbon prize winner be anything but on the up and up? She laughed at herself. Her logic was faulty and if and when she ever cared about that, all she had to do was look in his eyes and her defenses would melt. Like now.

“All right, fine. I get it,” she blurted, sitting up and reaching for the remote control for the television. Cassie looked back at him. “When’s the last time you watched Sunday Night Football, ate pizza, hot wings that burned the shit out of your mouth and drank beer?”

“That’s a ‘thing’?”

“Or we could watch ‘Hockey Night in Canada’ and eat hot dogs, soft pretzels with melted plastic called cheese and drink beer. I have the NHL channel.”

“That’s another ‘thing’?”

“Or we could soak in my bathtub and under candle light, feed each other cheese and strawberries, drink wine and listen to Frank Sinatra.”  Cassie blinked her dark eyes at him. “Your call.”

John studied her and reached out to run the back of his hand down her cheek. “Where’s your bathtub?”

[lywinis]

Ineffable Husbands: I'm just lookin' for a dear, dear friend of mine / I'm waiting for my man / Here he comes, he's all dressed in black / Beat up shoes and a big straw hat / He's never early, he's always late / First thing you learn is you always gotta wait I'm waiting for my man

AO3

[1941, three months after the incident in the cathedral.]

Crowley was almost never on time. That was something Aziraphale had become used to in his acquaintanceship with the demon. It was as though he eschewed all rules, not just his own, arriving precisely when he meant to – and usually precisely when it would annoy Aziraphale the most.

He tried not to think on it too hard, instead breathing in the cool night air. It was tinged with the smell of smoke and burnt brick, scorched timbers rising over the skyline like skeletal fingers, but it was cool. That would have to do.

It was half past eight, the thick fingers of night creeping over the city as mandatory darkness swept through London. The sound of planes was on the edge of one’s subconscious, even for the angel, and he frowned, looking up at the starry sky. Would the Luftwaffe blot out the small pinpricks of light again tonight?

The bombings had become unpredictable, Hitler’s forces wearing themselves down against the staunch British cheerfulness that propelled them through the war. Even Aziraphale was weary, the smoke and death wearing his mortal form thin. He was sick to death of war.

That was partially what this was about. His botched attempt to lead the Fuhrer astray from his horrible plans meant that Heaven was losing this conflict. He’d not heard from the others stationed throughout France and Germany, or even Switzerland, but he was quite sure there was a reason for such radio silence.

Even as inured to violence as angels were, surely they couldn’t be immune to such horrific sights day by day, month by month. If he was as heartsick as he was, surely even a being like Gabriel might take pity, though he rarely walked the earth anymore.

It was another reason to contact the demon; he had a feeling that this wasn’t Hell’s doing. Sure, some demon might take credit for the conflict – and that demon might even be Crowley – but it was rare that demons pulled this off on a global scale. Influence was a tricky thing; one had to believe that the choice was theirs, because it was.

Aziraphale wanted to meet with Crowley to see about teaming up to end the war. Or at least, slow it down.

The first hour had him looking at his pocket watch and sighing.

The second hour had him peering through the dark with a frown.

The third hour had him marching back into the city proper to drag Crowley out of whatever hole he was hiding in. They rarely met, both being busy with the war effort on either side (not to mention botched spy activities, he thought with the tiniest wrinkle of his brow at himself). He could go months or years without seeing Crowley.

If he were honest, that was another thing. This time he’d been worried and had pushed up the next meeting.

He didn’t think Crowley had realized he was limping. Likely the hot foot had hurt more than he’d anticipated. It was compassion that caused Aziraphale to reach out.

Truly, it was.

He hurried down the avenue, avoiding the stones with preternatural grace, his sensible shoes scuffling along the crumbling pavement. He missed his oxfords, but the buttery leather had no place in war-torn London, and he’d opted for being sensible rather than fashionable, at least until this dreadful business was over.

Crowley was quite a chore to find on the best of days. While Aziraphale had his shop – at least, while the war hadn’t been on, now it was disguised in the rubble of the street and tucked away where it couldn’t be gotten at – out in the open, Crowley holed up and disappeared.

Needs’ must, of course. The righteous must be a beacon of all that’s good and upright, and that meant out in plain sight. Evil tended to hide its head from the light of day.

Thankfully, Aziraphale considered himself a bit of an expert on finding this singular specimen, and he got himself toward the tube as fast as he could, avoiding the eyes of the patrol with a little bit of prestidigitation. Thankfully, he knew better than to bother with the crowded shelters, heading for the collapsed Balham station. Still unrepaired from the bomb that had struck the street above, the station was closed, the lights out like the rest of the city.

Aziraphale had a hunch. He stepped lightly down the stairs, passing through the locked gates, picking his way through the rubble. They’d managed to clear goodly swathes of the crumbled infrastructure, but he was looking for…ah.

An access door, almost hidden off the tracks, up and out of reach of the flooding. That was what he was looking for.

He sniffed.

While he didn’t have as good a nose as the demon he was looking for, he knew exactly what he happened to be seeking, which was a large help. Under the wet, musty smell of the tube itself, the scent wafting out of the access door was familiar.

New leather, good earthy greenhouses, the hint of a campfire. There was also the scent of engine oil, very faint. Crowley had bought a car, a strikingly terrifying automobile – he’d been proud of it, showing it off to Aziraphale when he’d taken him back to his corner of London.

Crowley loved that car (as much as any demon can love anything), and drove far too fast for the war torn streets. Neither car nor owner seemed to care.

Aziraphale touched the lock, felt the tumblers turn beneath his angelic caress, and pushed the door open.

Crowley looked up from his rather plush looking chair as Aziraphale stepped into his well-appointed apartment. Fine leather seating, wood floors, carved stone walls, all of it screamed high rise apartment, all of it was buried in the walls of the Tube.

“What the devil are you doing here?” he demanded, brows drawing low over his sunglasses.

“You missed the meeting.” Aziraphale shrugged. It seemed rude to take his coat off so readily in the abode of his erstwhile enemy.

“Yes, well, I had things to do.” Crowley sniffed. “Totter on then, Angel, there’ll be bombs tonight.”

“Well, then I ought to stay here, oughtn’t I?” Aziraphale said. “You’ve carved out this cosy nook for yourself, and it’s safer deep underground.”

It seemed to be the wrong thing to say, as Crowley hurled himself to his feet, only to hiss an expletive as his knees gave out. He collapsed onto the waxed wood floor, the dull thud of his body echoing in the cavernous apartment.

Aziraphale saw then that the demon’s feet were bare, wrapped in gauze that was now weeping red against the elegant arches of Crowley’s feet.

“You’re hurt.” Aziraphale said, starting forward.

“I’m fine,” he snapped. The angel stopped, dithering half a dozen paces away. “Just…just go.”

“Crowley,” Aziraphale said. “Let me help.”

“Are you deaf from the raids?” Crowley said, mustering enough willpower to pull himself back into his overstuffed chair. “Must be. I told you to get out.”

“Cr–”

“No!” His pale fists clenched on the good leather of the chair. Aziraphale could just see the long fingers spasm, delicate knuckles moving beneath the porcelain of his hands. “Stop it. Go home.”

Aziraphale drew himself up to his full height. His wings belled from behind him, his primaries brushing the walls as he glared at Crowley, a righteous tizzy pressing Crowley back into his seat.

A tense moment of staring became a tense moment of silence, then a tense moment of contemplation.

“Let me do this. I owe you for the books.”

“You don’t owe me shit, Angel.”

“Oh, do hush, Crowley.” Aziraphale tucked his wings away, smoothing his feathers as he did so. He shuffled forward, manifesting a small copper basin, which he set near the fireplace. It was burning without smoke, without wood, so it was all right, he reasoned.

“It’s not hellfire,” Crowley said, at his hesitation. His voice was quiet, almost thoughtful.

“I know,” Aziraphale said. How he knew, he couldn’t say.

He decided not to dwell on it.

He summoned some water, set it to heating, and went about summoning the rest of what he’d need. The foot bath was hardly a new invention, but it was something that would ease the pain in the demon’s feet.

It had been the floor of the cathedral. He’d been hopping about as though he was on hot sand, but Aziraphale had seen Crowley walk across hot sand with barely a whisper. (He may or may not have watched Crowley leave before the floods, and Eden before that.)

Carefully, he stripped the bloodied bandages from Crowley’s feet. They were nice feet, he thought, his toes elegant, long and well-formed, like his fingers. His arches were delicate, sculpted. There were no blisters or callouses on his feet, his skin just as pale here as the rest of him. Delicate veins like skeins of color in marble, and Aziraphale traced them with his gaze.

Very well made, for an angel. Fallen. He corrected himself, turning Crowley’s foot this way and that. Fallen angel. Demon.

And here he was about to clean his feet.

He decided not to dwell on that, either, and got to work.

Marring Crowley’s soles were large patches of bloodied skin. Holy ground, it would have seared him to the bone, and wouldn’t be miracled away.

And yet he’d willingly gone into the church for him. To help. Aziraphale swallowed and poured the steaming water into a wooden trough he’d summoned for him to work with.

He scraped the acacia nuts, grinding them into a fine powder, his fingers going dark as he added them to the water.

“This might sting,” he said softly.

Crowley was silent, though he could feel the demon watching him, his face inscrutable with the glasses on. Aziraphale carefully set one foot into the cooling water, carefully letting the tannins soak into Crowley’s feet. An old remedy, as old as time, and it was one of the only ways to treat these burns. They would fester otherwise.

Crowley remained silent, even as he allowed Aziraphale to manipulate his legs as he willed. The angel carefully wiped away the blood, watching Crowley’s toes curl when he hit a particularly painful spot.

It must be torturous, yet Crowley seemed more intent on watching Aziraphale than making noises of discomfort. It made the hair on the back of his nape stand straight up, as though he were back on the wall, watching the rain and lightning lash the desert, striking the sand and turning it glassy with the Almighty’s anguish after Adam and Eve fled.

Lotion of wine and myrrh, summoned from Israel. It was Important, and he snapped his fingers to bring them to him, without question of the power it would cost him this month, or the questions it would raise Upstairs.

It was Important.

Carefully, he pulled one foot at a time from the bath and dried them; he anointed them in honey, myrrh, and wine, wrapping each one in clean gauze.

Carefully, he manifested a fluffy carpet square beneath Crowley’s feet, setting them down and leaning back on his heels.

Carefully, he avoided the demon’s gaze.

“Aziraphale,” Crowley said.

His name, his True Name, startled him, and he looked up. Crowley’s glasses were gone, his lambent yellow eyes fixed on Aziraphale’s face, pupils blown wide.

It was said so softly, with such tenderness. It made him ache. It made him…

It filled him with such sadness, he thought it would fill him up and tear a chasm in him. Angels loved, indiscriminately, in that way the Almighty did. Crowley was…

He was…

Aziraphale didn’t know. Knowing would mean that he himself was Known, laid bare beneath the gaze that burned like twin stars in the firelight. Something in his eyes called to the wildness of Aziraphale’s core, and it…

It frightened him. He shouldn’t.

He couldn’t.

It wouldn’t have been right. At the same time, he knew it would have felt like coming home. How he knew, he couldn’t say.

He rose to his feet, the movement jerky, as though he were a marionette desperately trying to continue to move with half its strings cut. He snapped his fingers to clean up his mess.

“I’ll leave you be now, Crowley,” he said. He smoothed down his waistcoat, biting his lip and looking anywhere but at Crowley’s naked gaze. “Buck up, you’ll be right as rain soon enough.”

“I–” Crowley started. Aziraphale didn’t let him finish, didn’t let him fill the silence with tempting, pretty words that he was so desperate to hear.

He took his leave, hurrying from the tunnel and all but running for his bookshop.

There were no bombs that night. The silence weighed on Aziraphale like a yoke about his neck. It would be his penance.

[political-fluffle]

Brexit Party leader Farage wants Johnson to form a “Leave Alliance” with the most zealous Brexit backers

Political rabble-rouser and talk-radio host Nigel Farage announced Friday that his potentially vote-splitting Brexit Party will field candidates for every seat in Britain in the December general election — unless Prime Minister Boris Johnson agrees to abandon the withdrawal deal he negotiated with European leaders and form an alliance with the most zealous Brexit backers.

Farage flung the ultimatum at Johnson at a Brexit Party campaign launch, staged just a few blocks away from the House of Commons, which party chairman and real estate tycoon Richard Tice disparaged as this “stinking, rotten borough of Westminster.”

Farage had already made some election news with a Thursday evening radio interview with a caller from the White House. In that call, President Trump disparaged Johnson’s Brexit plan, saying it could nix a free trade deal with the United States. But he also praised the British prime minister and urged Farage and Johnson to form an electoral pact, saying the duo would be an “unstoppable force.”

Many observers said the U.S. president didn’t seem to know what he was talking about — and that a dynamic duo between Farage and Johnson would ruin the Tory party. 

Johnson on Friday ruled out an alliance with Farage or any other party, “because I don’t think it’s sensible to do that.”

He also delicately dismissed Trump’s assertion about trade.

“I don’t wish to cast any aspersions on the president of the United States, but, in that respect, he is patently in error,” Johnson told Sky News. “Anybody who looks at our deal can see that it’s a great deal.” (...)

Farage wants Britain to crash out of the European Union’s trading club without a deal and do business with Europe, its closest economic partner for 40 years, as a “third country” under World Trade Organization rules. (...)

Corbyn tweeted, “Donald Trump is trying to interfere in Britain’s election to get his friend Boris Johnson elected.” (...)

Trump, Farage and Boris: Russian assets stick together. The only thing separating Boris from Farage right now is the MI6.

[libidomechanica]

“to lag behind some quality of his chin”

But Juan posted on the object  to those shapes as Jove did  to Cyrus after long; the time I  was so fonde, to lag  behind some quality of his chin, and 

if between the British  cabinet mounts up on high, the  purest blood too readily will say  with howling. — The steed, and wade  in living this I know nothing in 

the heaven filld up by spade or mattocks  near, instead of those two armies  and there waning her brother, Lady,—Florian,— ask for his tuning her  this worlds way, to set it well, when 

into nothing  impart; nest of excesses, and  sharp checkes I in myself almost  as a beggar needs a crutch, and more th an a toothache hurt themselves 

for matrimonial cooings, which passd, but  one time she in his rapier  hilt a-twinkle, his legs, began to  take and showd things which never  can renew waive you, than civil rights, its 

powerful replied not: the  bees seemd thee hate to him, this Gama  said: “he saved my life is love, and  though not to blame; she sees, nor did she  finds mistakes, and flattring ivy, two recite 

their more but sensible: the sex more,  Love, strive again and dress with  lovers” hours later in die capiendus.  I stored it weighed, and if  they heard the wholsome jellies Or seem 

three; fatherly fears—you used up. were still  hanging invocation is the  bulging eye, his vessel having grunted  or clicked a vertebra to thee,  and shut it without found something 

of my own the filching age will  make a shipwreck, like mischeife graseth hem  emong, all forth the holy well; for  the revolving who builds up  a desperate into 

absence of heaun it beares; makes me  in the great head, a bunch of  lace at his reported valour;  much admired;— ave Maria!  Ll dance as yet once to Hollands 

Hague and Helvoetsluys, the bold to  following, dwelt full on trembling  tower, or should have written piled arms around  my cause for ever,  till she whose blue seas border; and the 

fire. to the music  on the sheep are gone returnst, wilt thou  return: have I answering po ints in these are born to change their skill, “The  fields chiefest comforted: still in 

giving at all effect on the  plain, though far off she hearts a  liuing light, your eyes are apt to toy; she  had a rusty pike, make the son  and Roses!” But now best displayd, embroiderd delicately 

oer with him  is beauteous and well undress to one  small hands, draws up her senses, and  Death, but Juan in a husbands absence  of your mouth to lay; but 

blessed light; and the south, agree to  thee. Hail, Muse! Haidee and Juan was  her, when thou art not time just  begun to dine; pilaus  and mine own refused to ring 

at the wind blew, but with  new stings! S sevn thousand doubt. W hence he holding back not there as plentye: and  no spurre can become new soil to  lend to western of his 

[andrewrosswatson1987]

REVISIT: RAINBOW PROVED DIFFICULT TO CURE THIS DAY IN 1981

Rainbow released their classic fifth album, Difficult To Cure, which came out today (February 3) in 1981, released via label, Polydor. The Anglo-American hard rock super group really picked up from where they’d left off on Down To Earth (1979), the latter spawning smash hit and future classic rock compilation perennial, “Since You’ve Been Gone”.  Apparently Richie Blackmore’s admiration for bands like Foreigner very much informed the change of sound pursued since the tail end of the Seventies.  Singer, Graham Bonnet, was sacrificed come this album in question despite having the winning formula with both aforementioned hit album and single.  This came in conjunction with, arguably, an effort to further improve the formula. One way of doing this, beyond changing the instrumentation was to put Joe Lynn Turner in place of Bonnet.  In turn, Turner was joined by fellow American, Bobby Rondinelli, in place of drumming legend, Cozy Powell. Roger Glover remained on producer and bass guitar duties, with Don Airey remaining on keyboards, too, maintaining some semblance of normality. The album artwork was designed by British graphic design company, Hipgnosis. It was originally designed for the Black Sabbath album, Never Say Die!, but was declined by the band. Singles for this album were “I Surrender/Vielleicht Das Nächste Mal (Maybe Next Time)”, “Can’t Happen Here/Jealous Lover” and “Magic/Freedom Fighter”. First track, “I Surrender”, clamours for drama in your ears.  Thick chords mixed with high vocal histrionics combine for a classic slab of rock and roll.  And that lead melody on the guitar.  Majestic and classically informed.  “What does it take to stay by my side?/You know I’ll do what you want me to, don’t take away this feeling inside” a question in the age old debate raging in popular music.  Stabbing piano underpins the whole thing.  Over the top?  Yes.  A touch too much?  No. “Spotlight Kid” is high intensity, tempo up a notch and hammering ahead. Chugging without a seatbelt.  The organ sounds lending a bit of the, let’s say, Deep Purple to proceedings.  “You’re in love with the spotlight” like fame and fortune.  Unfortunately, if you fall off after those fifteen seconds you’ll crash and burn.  The classical elements are emboldened, a progressive bent unusual for the band’s newfound kind of audience. “No Release” broods almost menacingly at the start, synthesiser rumbling as licks of blues inspired guitar hit the gut like that pounding bass drum.  Then comes the grooving syncopation.  The guitar solo wild yet not a hundred miles an hour.  “Set me free, baby, let me free” ushers and heralds the middle section of, “Can’t get no release”.  Moody, fingers clicking before going, yet again, headlong into all before it.  Fortunately a change in tempo ups the ante. Rocking. Then comes a spot of “Magic”. Rolling drum cues drama and then an emphatic classic, immediate riff.  “I know who you are, and there’s magic in you” like pursuit, the thrill of the chase.  Come midway there’s a hint of tragedy.  Is this revelling in some sort of defeat?  “Seeking for truth hidden by the word of his wisdom” and, “Only the stranger knows why” perhaps endeavour to clear up the narrative in your mind. “Vielleicht Das Nächste Mal (Maybe Next Time)” is tears in the eye of a lonesome blues guitar, complemented with delicate touch of the piano. It, too, glass eyed to an extent. Sparse drum like reaching for a handkerchief between hits.  Then classically bent synthesiser rises above all, yet the mood still unchanged. Still, it takes flight, nonetheless. The latter phrases of guitar wail and then come to, arguably, an unceremonious end. Hold onto your butts for “Can’t Happen Here”.  It doesn’t mess about, on its feet and loving it.  “All about the future” decrying what’s due for us ahead. Driving with a swagger, that’s for sure.  Midway through the adventure doesn’t halt, it strives evermore.  “Satellites spying for the CIA, the KGB and the men in grey/Wonder if I'm gonna see another day” heightens the sense of danger, on the run and frankly not giving a damn.  You die or get locked away for life. “Freedom Fighter” resurrects that sort of syncopated riff you’d maybe presumed had died when Ronnie James Dio left the band.  “You can't take my freedom you know it is my right/If you try and stop me I'm gonna fight/With all of my might” combative, toe to toe like the instrumentation. The solo so deep it rumbles, with the bite of a Deep Purple organ.  “I can’t take it anymore, I’m a freedom fighter” almost like locked away for life yet forever plotting your escape. “Midtown Tunnel Vision” is bluesy to the point of doom, a step further downward to the basement than usual. Despite this unfamiliar territory, it’s carried with aplomb.  Moody and brooding.  Though the bass hardly a shrinking violet on this album, it’s afforded space to breakout into.  A workout for all band personnel.  “Can’t see nowhere/Don’t know and I don’t care”. It rings out emphatically, soundwaves broadcasting into outer space. Finale, “Difficult To Cure (Beethoven’s Ninth)”, is instrumental.  This really goes for the jugular in the inevitable classical stakes. It kind of plods, despite the sense of urgency afforded by the pulsing synthesiser.  It’s got a rocking attitude, though elements of it still sound rather twee.  Some of the harmonies are quite satisfying, however.  Full of ceremony, much so with that tolling gong. Organ breathes new life into it, thankfully.  This was proof Rainbow could knock out classic albums even when seemingly going out their way to widen their audience and pander to pop sensibilities.  It was some feat to even go toe to toe with Down To Earth a couple of years later. You could argue the highlights of this album are a mixture of the syncopated rock they almost engineered themselves, combined with those aforementioned pop sensibilities.  Sometimes they married blues and classical aptly. Picks from the album are “I Surrender”, “No Release”, “Magic”, “Can’t Happen Here”, “Freedom Fighter” and “Midtown Tunnel Vision”. There’s some degree of aesthetic symmetry looking at this selected track list. First track for the beginning, the second last for the end and the other three at approximately the middle.  The remaining three are by no means bad, either. Instinct made Rainbow an ever evolving band.  Ritchie Blackmore finally proved that very unfashionable rock could be moulded, with a keen ear, into something the masses would take interest in.  He didn’t totally abandon syncopated riffs and organs, though their presence was getting scarce.  Mixing addictive pop sensibilities with said Joe Lynn Turner offering the heartthrob focal point.  Rainbow’s Difficult To Cure can be listened to on Spotify, here.