#even if one of them was low key sidelined later on despite being one of the characters who was well-rounded and had the most potential

[courtesanofdeath]

The Five Wise Generals

[ynainna]

The Grave of Cecilias

synopsis: Despite it having been several hundred years since the end of the Archon War, Venti’s heart is still heavy with the grief of those he’s lost.

word count: 1,800

pairing: venti x f. reader

genre: angst

warnings: some spoilers from the recent last archon quest (aka the ver 1.1 story update), bad writing lol, angst (but not really I think?)

notes: look, originally my first fic was going to be a Diluc fic so it would be a perfect catalyst for my dumbass self but Venti is just perfect for some angsting time. Sorry in advance for my writing lmfao. I also think some of these facts are inaccurate but I’m a bit stupid and didn’t completely connect some dots from the wiki that I should’ve and due to the fact, ya know, p l o t. Feedback is also welcome but pls be nice about it. This is also extremely bad and  I high key think this is horrible lmao. It’s so bad.

In the days of the Archons, years before the eruption of the Archon War, Gods roamed. Each God was responsible and represented different things, often symbolizing what their powers were. In which there was the God of Dust and the God of Blizzards. Gods had been abundant that it isn’t a surprise that there was once a Goddess of Flora. 

It is no secret that gods gained their power from the worship of others. Due to the Goddess of Flora often being pushed aside to give way to the stronger gods, she had very little following from the people of Teyvat, making her one of the weaker gods. Instead of growing bitter at both her situation and her people, she had embraced her lower status. She was often heard saying, “It is better to be loved by a few who love you for yourself than to be loved by the whole for greed,” in response to them asking about it.

In her small following, there was a civilization that had worshipped her the most. The small civilization had been the ones responsible for the creation of the Cecilia Garden, their gift to the ancient god who had favored the common white flowers, Cecilias, as her favorite.

Cecilias, in the age of the Archon War, wasn’t a rarity and was often the cause of the white sea. The only traces left of the said white sea in the records were from the Cecilia Garden where it was said that it was such a common flower that it was written as “the sea of white flowers”. 

The legends tell very few stories about the fate of the Sea of White, often only found in the debris and faded writings in the ruins of old. Cecilias of this day and age are often only found to grow in the high cliffs, specifically numerous on the infamous Starsnatch cliff. 

Not many know the history of Starsnatch Cliff. Long before it was Starsnatch Cliff or the place where the last of the Cecilias grow, it was simply the plains. 

Cecilias were abundant in the age of the Archons, never far from your sight at every turn. It is a wonder to a few on how a flower had only grown exclusive to one area. 

While not many know the history of Starsnatch, the most one would have to know is it was where the end of a love story between two gods, torn apart by war, was.

Venti’s favorite flower is Cecilias. It’s not his favorite flower due to its simple beauty or even its rarity but due to its history. Prior to the Cecilias, his favorite had been the Dandelions, which was no surprise to others. He had only started to favor the Cecilias near the beginning of the Archon War and even then that was only due to you.

Starsnatch Cliff is many things but to Venti it had only been a reminder of his grief. 

To Venti, it’s your grave.

Venti has lived for more than a thousand years so it’s a given that he would have a few missing memories of the past and a hesitance to recollect any memories from the age of the Archons. Despite it, there are a few he remembers very vividly.

He remembers your smile. It was a soft curve accompanied by cheeks tinged with a faint glow of pink. He remembers your eyes, twinkling, crinkling in the corners in your glee. 

And while he remembers very few things now, he has always remembered every part and memory he has of you, good or not.

The last he has of you was near the beginning of the Archon War.

The first he has of you were at the end of Decarabian’s reign and the death of his dear friend.

He remembers, mourning his death, readying his burial when you appeared with your gentle hands and kind understanding smile. In your hands had been Cecilias, freshly picked.

With your hands you guided him to a place and helped him bury his friend, silence was the only thing between you. You were kind enough to ignore the tears and the sniffles. You finished at sunset. The only trace of you that was left was the picked Cecilias he had first seen you with. Despite his grief, Venti felt the corner of his lips tug up to a small smile.

He doesn’t ask until later on in your friendship about why you had given his friend the Cecilias. You only answer with a small smile at his question. To this day, he still doesn’t know why but he has a feeling.

He treasures the memories of him loving you and mourns the memories he retains of everything of the love lost between you.

The Archon War had not been kind to anyone, even to you and to him. 

It is common knowledge that the Archon War had killed off a lot of gods, many of whom are buried under the grounds and some being sealed off. It was a time of turmoil, you don’t expect or hope to come out of it alive, you only fight and hope it is enough to survive another day.

You were the Goddess of Flora, responsible for the growth of the world’s vegetation. Due to such low status, your responsibilities were very little. The growth of vegetation, the worry for the changing of seasons, and your people had been the only things that were your responsibilities. 

You had no desire for power nor anything more. You had only wished to care for your people to the utmost best of your abilities and to continue living the way you had lived.

But war does not discriminate.

It didn’t matter if you didn’t have the desire to fight others. You fight or you die. You, a god once often seen at the sidelines or invisible, was pushed into the fighting ring built by greed and arrogance.

While you may have not wanted to fight in the war, you had to, if not for you, for your people. In your death, your only thought had been about your people and Barbatos. It had only ever been them.

It’s raining. Venti thinks the world is laughing at them or maybe the God of Storms or Rain is mocking them for being weak, for falling in love at a time like this where it is a sign of weakness.

His hands are bloody and shaking as he holds you closer to his body. His sight is blurred by his tears that are blending in with the rain. Grief is clogging his throat and he can’t breathe. There’s not enough time for anyone to save you.

The previous battle had taken a toll on both of you and Venti. While Venti’s were only fatigue and mild injuries, yours were fatal. You had taken a wound to your gut and while it isn’t often a major injury to gods, your powers had been drained and the fatigue you feel is what makes it fatal. There’s nothing that can fix it.

You know it.

He knows it.

But despite this, logic can’t seem to get through Venti’s panic. His mind is going rampant and he can’t seem to know where to put his hands or what to fix. 

You look at him with your heavy eyelids, lips quivering as you strain your body to move. With great difficulty, you bring your bloody and mangled hands towards Venti’s cheeks, landing heavily. Venti freezes, his eyes wide at the contact.

With a heavy heart, he turns his head towards you to meet your eyes. His hand slowly creeps up to the hand on his cheek. He feels his grief to come back up, scratching and clawing at his heart. When your eyes meet, you smile. Strained and quivering, but a smile nonetheless.

He feels his breath hitch at your smile. You smile like the sunset, the gradual end. The tears come up again, you had only ever smiled like the sunrise and to see it grow smaller, to see it fade is another type of pain.

“Love, no,” he whispers, throat dry as he looks at your eyes. “Don’t leave me. Hang on, please. You’ll be okay. Please. Please. Please...” Venti pleads, voice growing hoarse as the grief creeps back up with ravenous hunger. 

“Barbatos...” you wheeze out, eyes slowly fluttering as you try to hold on for him, just for a few seconds, “I...I... I love...you. T-Thank you...for... for-for lo...ving me.”

“No love, stop. Stop trying to say goodbye, please, no. No. I love you. I love you so much so please don’t leave me. I can’t do this without you,” Venti heaves out with a raspy voice, clutching your hand with a harsh grip in hope of keeping you here, with him.

“Don’t leave me” he cries out.

Even with your injuries and numbness, the sight of his tears and grief caused a pang of pain to erupt. 

“Love,” you rasp out, tears pouring out of your eyes, that were once glittering and now dull, “you have... to let me go.”

“NO!” he denies your pleas. 

“Please... just give me more time with you... anything for you. Please.”

You cough, blood coming up and the cold hands of death creeping closer to you.

“I love you... so much. L-Live on for me... please.”

You don’t hear anything after that, not your lovers sobbing and pleading for you to come back, to hold on.

Not long after, you fade into a million different golden dust. No body left to bury.

In your death, the Cecilias slowly disappear from the world despite your followers trying their utmost best to keep it from dying away. But without their god and with no protection, even they eventually fell. With their fall, the Sea of White was no more.

In memory of you, the world created a grave for you. 

Due to his love and memory of you, Venti caused the winds to only carry the Cecilias seeds to only fly around your grave and causing your grave to be the only place where Cecilias grew. Despite it having been several hundred years since the end of the Archon War, Venti’s heart is still heavy with the grief of those he’s lost.

History doesn’t write of the Goddess of Flora, there isn’t a lot of text written about her in fact. No hints about a possible connection with the Anemo God. And no one needs to know.

All who does is Venti. It’s all he has left of you that’s his and his alone.

In your death, the winds had howled and grew rough and sharp. 

Long before Starsnatch Cliff was anything, it was your grave.

It was the Grave of Cecilias.

[seijorhi]

ok so i’m the stripper au anon and honestly i was thinking the reader was the stripper but my mind is wandering 😳

Ok ok, I’ve had like three other anons ask for the yandere stripper version so let’s go with that one lol

My first thought was Bokuto, but I’ve written about him a bunch, so I went with Mr Ushijima Wakatoshi 👀

TW dub con? I guess? Nsfw(ish)

Let’s say that the first time is for a friend. She’s always been a little on the wilder side, so when she takes you, her very best friend and maid of honour aside and tells you that she wants something fun for her bachelorette party, you don’t miss a beat. You know she loves the man she’s going to marry more than life itself, but you also know that she might just have a bit of a weakness for tall, muscular, stupidly hot men.

You can’t exactly blame her for that, not when it makes picking the stripper you’re hiring for her last night as a single woman that much easier. The pictures on the website don’t do the man justice, when he shows up, dressed in a cheesy fireman’s outfit complete with a red helmet and asks in the bluntest voice you’ve ever heard whether he can come inside and take a look because ‘there had been a call that things were about to heat up’ you don’t know whether to burst into laughter or flush. He looks like a Greek god, all muscular and tall, with a stupidly chiselled jawline - but he’s not here for you.

It’s easy, as he all but straddles your friend, gyrating his hips against her as she runs her fingers down those ridiculously defined abs just to sit back and have a good time. She clearly is - cheering and laughing, drooling a little as Ushijima winks and does a full body roll, flexing every muscle before ripping off his pants completely. How does one even get that kind of a body? People shouldn’t be allowed to just walk around every day being that attractive.

When his routine is over your friend is a blushing, beaming mess. Totally over the moon, and just before your stripper slips away, you make sure to take him aside and give him a generous tip. “You were amazing, thank you so much!”

He nods his head once politely, “It’s my job.”

Of course it is, he must do this kind of thing every day, but still, you’re grateful that he could make your friend’s bachelorette party that much better.

A month or so later, when another friend has her birthday and you’re once again delegated to chief party planner - the question is not whether or not you will hire a stripper, but whether you can get that sexy as hell fireman stripper again.

Turns out you can, and olive eyes flash with recognition as you open the door for him once more. He’s dressed as a policeman this time, because there was talk of ‘bad girls doing naughty things,’ and it’s ‘his job to investigate.’ You figure it’s kind of like porn, you’re not there for the terrible acting, you’re there to see a ridiculously hot man strip and dance for you.

Which he does, to your other friends’ delight. And yours too, you suppose. Though it is strange, last time it felt like your friend was the only one in the room with him - outside of a little dancing and teasing for the rest of you, his attention was focused solely on her. This time, your other friend is the one handcuffed to her seat - ‘bad girls don’t get to touch,’ he’d growled - but you swear that those olive green eyes keep finding yours across the room.

Nobody else seems to notice, and your friend loves every minute of the attention he does give her. When all is said and done, just like last time you find a quiet moment to slip aside and thank him with another tip. This time he bows, “You’re welcome. I’m glad you asked for me again.”

There’s an odd feeling fluttering in your stomach as he says it. The words are blunt as they usually are, but there’s something in the way that he looks at you that makes you think there’s something more he’s trying to say.

You wonder how many strippers rely on repeat clients.

“Perhaps next time...” he trails off, looking deep in thought. Behind you one of the girls drunkenly calls your name, and with an apologetic smile, you press the envelope of money into his hands and quickly thank him again before ushering him out.

Strippers are harmless fun, but after two long nights with Ushijima’s services, the thought of stupidly hot men stripping for you has kind of lost its appeal. Of course it had absolutely nothing to do with the odd, uncomfortable feeling you were left with last time. Nothing at all.

When your own birthday swings around, you make your friends swear that you’re just going to do something low key. No big parties, no drinking till the sun comes up, and absolutely no strippers.

There’s a part of you that’s almost worried that if your friends keep asking for you to hire Ushijima again he’ll think you’re some kind of stalker and put out a restraining order against you.

They swore pinkie promises, but you don’t know why you’re surprised when not even half an hour after they all arrive, your doorbell rings, and there is Ushijima.

You honestly want the world to swallow you up.

He’s dressed in jeans and plaid, a god awful cowboy’s hat on sitting his head, and when he catches sight of you you could swear that despite his stoic visage, he almost looks pleased.

You told them you didn’t want this, you definitely didn’t want Ushijima, but the cheers go up before you can even open your mouth to protest, he takes you by the hand (his own is strong, swallowing yours up completely) and leads you back inside your apartment, tossing you down onto a seat your friends all too willingly pull out.

This time it’s different. You swear that he wasn’t as close with the other girls, he wasn’t touching them as much. His hands are running up and down your sides, his face buried in the crook of your neck and panting his hips roll against your lap. You can feel the insistent press of his hardening cock as he grinds himself against you.

He grunts, low enough so that only you can hear and suddenly pulls you from your seat. His fingers trail down your waist as he drops into a crouch before you, only to hoist you upwards without warning, forcing you to wrap your legs around him just to steady yourself. His face is nuzzled into your chest, an arm at your back, the other curled around your ass, keeping you pressed up against him.

He’s everywhere, touching you everywhere, and your friends just holler and laugh and drink like it’s not an issue. And maybe it isn’t, but you swear that he wasn’t like this with them, growling when you dare to try and move your hands away from his body. His lips at your neck, and he’s kissing you, sucking a mark into the delicate skin as a hand slides between your spread thighs...

He pulls away before you can draw attention, staring at you with smouldering eyes as he ends his routine.

You feel sick, violated almost - but this is a party, and your friends have paid for Ushijima to tease you, to touch you. You can’t cause a scene, you don’t want to. He’s just doing his job, you remind yourself - it must just feel a little different, being the one in the hot seat rather than watching from the sidelines.

Still, you can’t help the pit in your stomach as your friend takes Ushijima aside and thanks him with a tip in hand. He’s talking with her, but those eyes, dark, hungry and wanting, keep flickering back to you.

You make a silent vow that this’ll be the last time. You’ve all had your fun, but no more strippers, it’s just... too intense.

Too bad that Ushijima has other ideas for you.

[hellsbellschime]

Ok, so I’ve always noticed some of the racism on TVD , most notably the treatment of Marcel and Emily, and the founders day parade episode (which, as a Virginian I have to say that the episode made me low-key ashamed when I re-watched it years later). But it took me a while to catch onto the racism on Bonnie‘s character. I was wondering if you have done a meta about it and could link me to it, or if you could do one?

Well it only took me like a year but here ya go!

Despite the fact that The Vampire Diaries is a show that was ostensibly created for girls and young women, the show undeniably seems to lack a certain level of respect or basic interest in its female characters. And while every single significant female character demonstrates that misogynistic point of view in one way or another, one of the most unique, distinct, and apparent instances of The Vampire Diaries' sexism is on peak display with one of it's leading female characters, Bonnie Bennett.

Bonnie obviously occupies a particularly interesting role in the series because she's the only black leading character, and it's also hard to miss that The Vampire Diaries universe has a pretty apparent issue with it's non-white characters as well.

The race problem on TVD expresses itself in a few different, extremely blatant ways. The most obvious issue with people of color on The Vampire Diaries is that those who are actually PoC within the narrative itself are typically pushed to the sidelines and relegated to supporting players at best, but there is also an issue with presenting PoC performers who are white-passing as white characters.

None of the PoC characters in The Vampire Diaries get very good treatment, but the series seems to be exceptionally problematic when it comes to its presentation of black characters. While black people arguably get more representation than any other non-white characters in this fictional world, they are almost all outrageously attractive, extremely light-skinned, and conveniently lacking in any emotional needs or inner life that needs to be addressed within the narrative, seemingly designed to show up, perform whatever service is necessary, and once again fade into the background if not just be killed off entirely.

This is an issue with every black character in the series, but given that Bonnie is the most significant and prominent in the series, it comes as no surprise that she was affected the most intensely by these biases. It's one thing to be a black character, it's one thing to be a female character, but being a black female character in the TVD universe is exceptionally crippling. But how exactly did the misogynoir of The Vampire Diaries completely neutralize Bonnie Bennett as a character?

Bonnie was mistreated, dismissed, and outright ignored in many big and small ways throughout the course of the show. But, a lot of that treatment can be pretty easily sorted into a few categorizations. The Vampire Diaries went through a pretty seismic shift from the start of the show to the end, but it has always been a series that falls primarily into two genres, the supernatural thriller genre and the romance genre.

The show pretty clearly transformed from a show that was firstly a supernatural story with a romantic subgenre into an almost entirely romantic story with a supernatural backdrop, but it's safe to say that the vast majority of the plotlines were either focused on magic or love. And, it's not particularly difficult to see how Bonnie was forcibly excluded from a predominant storyline in each genre, even when it made absolutely no sense.

Bonnie was a completely inexperienced witch at the start of TVD, so her cluelessness and powerlessness made a certain amount of sense at that point. But by the end of season 2 at the very latest, it seems fully established that she is one of the most powerful living witches in the world, and for the bulk of the series it is plainly acknowledged that she is one of the most powerful witches who ever lived. Which is exactly why Bonnie's position in the narrative is baffling.

In quite a few instances, Bonnie's magical abilities seem to be somewhat inconsistent, at least in the sense that, if she can solve some of the biggest problems that the Mystic Falls gang is confronted with, then it's very odd that she can't solve the others. And while plenty of characters in TVD are occasionally used as plot devices rather than characters, Bonnie seems to be the one who is specifically designed to show up, fix what needs fixing, and then become set dressing once she's no longer necessary as the mystical solution to every unsolvable issue.

And this is actually a significant problem with the witches at large, but of course is most recognizable with Bonnie because she is the most prominent witch. While not all witches are women of color, it seems like they are far more represented in that faction of the magical world than in any other. So then, it's interesting that the witches are presented as servants of nature who are meant to selflessly restore order to the world without actually using their abilities for their own personal gain.

Of course there are plenty of witches who appear to use their powers for themselves, but still, it's incredibly meaningful that the lone black main character in the series is constantly sacrificing herself for the sake of the otherwise entirely white cast of characters. It's even more meaningful that she seems to willingly put herself in the line of fire every time, and it's also extremely telling that she suffers and even dies without complaint for the sake of other people.

And while TVD has never been the kind of show to linger on emotional moments for too long, Bonnie seems to stick out like a sore thumb in this circumstance as well. Most of the main and even supporting characters have moments where their pain is acknowledged and at least has a second to breathe, but there are quite a few situations where Bonnie should be upset but isn't, or where her emotional journey as a character literally takes place off screen.

This lack of acknowledgment and nearly complete omission of an internal emotional life that doesn't involve sacrificing herself for her friends only further makes Bonnie feel like a plot device instead of a character. And, while no character needs a romantic relationship to make their character complete, it is incredibly relevant that, on a series that was built largely on a foundation of romance and arguably became a completely romantically driven show by its end, only one of the female leads was pretty much never presented as a viable love interest.

Nearly every character is either threatened or charmed into doing what someone else wants them to at some point during The Vampire Diaries, however, Bonnie's charm-to-threaten ratio seems to lean very heavily in favor of threatening. That in itself wouldn't necessarily be a huge issue, but it seems to punish Bonnie in a way that is so severe that it's completely illogical.

Trying to intimidate Elena or Caroline, people who at best have the strength of a baby vampire and at worst are as powerful as a normal human, makes sense. But trying to strongarm the most powerful witch in the world instead of just convincing her to do what you ask seems like an incredibly dangerous and completely baffling decision.

And yet, that is how Bonnie is forced to do nearly everything that she doesn't want to do in eight seasons of the series. By the end of season 2, TVD has canonically confirmed that Bonnie is powerful enough to destroy Klaus Mikaelson, and yet people like Klaus, Katherine, and even vampires as young as Damon get Bonnie to do things by simply bullying or even assaulting her into doing it. And what does Bonnie typically do in response? Absolutely nothing.

At a certain point, the consistent contrast between Bonnie's mystical strength and the way that people treat her in order to use that strength becomes a pretty gaping plot hole. And while it's not unheard of for someone to try to sweet talk Bonnie into joining their team, it is almost always done by a character who is far less powerful than she is and who is completely irrelevant to the narrative at large.

In contrast to characters like Elena and Caroline, the distinction between them becomes even more obvious. Perhaps a thin argument could be made that because Elena is a doppelganger that makes her a tad more unique, but when one of the most powerful creatures on the planet was wrapped around Caroline's finger, it really begs the question, why wasn't anyone ever as invested or even obsessed with Bonnie as they were with the other two female leads on the series?

After all, Elena's love was consistently treated as if it was the greatest prize that anyone could possibly win, and the two male leads were completely obsessed with her and willing to do anything they could to try to win her over. And despite the fact that Elena was at the center of the love triangle that was a significant driving force behind the story for the entire series, she still managed to score a few love interests that weren't Salvatores throughout the show's eight seasons as well.

And, while Caroline was actually treated as more of the reject love interest in comparison to the unattainable Elena, her record with romance is also incredibly varied. Even though she was portrayed at best as the consolation prize and at worst the abuse victim, she did have some sort of romantic relationship with the two male leads in the show. Or at least, that is how The Vampire Diaries chose to portray it.

In addition to her horrorshow with Damon and her incredibly brief marriage with Stefan, Caroline is also a love interest for Klaus, Matt, Tyler, and disgustingly, Alaric. Arguably the only main male character who doesn't serve as Caroline's love interest or potential love interest at any point is Jeremy.

Although this laundry list of love interests can be partially excused by the fact that Caroline is characterized as someone who wants to date a lot, the contrast bet0ween characters like Caroline and Elena and characters like Bonnie is astonishing.

Over a nearly decade-long run, Bonnie's only legitimate leading men are Jeremy, Elena's kid brother who Bonnie will willingly die for but who also prefers a literal dead person over her at one point, and Enzo, her epic love romance that comes about at the very end of the series in a relationship that almost entirely develops off-screen.

Of course, female characters do not need love interests to validate their characterization or very existence, however in an environment where every single barely significant supporting character seems to get at least two love interests, it's incredibly telling that Bonnie Bennett gets two important love stories in eight seasons of storytelling.

It seems even more relevant that the show seemingly went out of its way to sidestep almost any and all opportunities for romance in Bonnie's character arc. Whether it was Kol, Kai, or Damon Salvatore, there were quite a few instances where there was a clear and easy route to develop a love interest for Bonnie in a way that made sense and had a pretty solid amount of audience support, and yet the series always went out of its way to avoid it.

In stark contrast, Caroline is still seen as a viable option for a burgeoning love story when she's pregnant, and Elena is an acceptable love interest when she's literally unconscious. And yet, in a series that began with romance as its secondary genre and that evolved into a romance series with a supernatural backdrop, Bonnie is supposedly not as appealing of a love interest as Elena and Caroline regardless of any circumstances, no matter how insane.

If these issues existed in a vacuum then they might be excusable, but considering how poorly The Vampire Diaries treated its female characters and black characters, it's pretty much impossible to avoid the reality that Bonnie Bennett's entire character arc was likely hamstrung by the fact that she was a black girl.

In any reasonable circumstances, Bonnie would have arguably been at the center of every single supernatural storyline, and she logically would have been a far more appealing love interest to any powerful characters in the series. But instead she spent the vast majority of her screentime with her inner characterization ignored, her personal development unexplored, and serving as little more than a glorified deus ex machina who didn't even want her friends to bother mourning her when she literally sacrificed her life for them.

Representation was always an issue in The Vampire Diaries universe, and unfortunately it seems like Bonnie was the definition of their token black character. Although the series had eight entire years to course correct and had many seasons where they were desperate for new ideas and decent character development, the racism and misogyny of the series seemingly prevented them from ever tapping into the enormous untapped potential of someone who should have been one of their flagship lead characters.

[camelely]

13rw S4 Fix

 So i did one of these for last season and I think now that I’ve had some time to think about S4 I’ll do the same. While last season I thought the issue was one character being overused. But here it seems like there were multiple smaller things that could have improved the whole season Again I’m keeping the same basic plotline and characters :) 

1) Winston 

Have Winston stay at Hillcrest. Him moving to Liberty did nothing for the main plot and he was basically a red herring through most of it. Let him try are befriend the characters from the outside. He can learn about Jess from Bryce’s trial and the news coverage and then try to befriend her at Monet’s. This is where he meets and later starts to date Alex. Since he doesn’t go to liberty school Alex sees him as a sort of escape and lets him in. Clay and Ani dont tell everyone about him because they dont know he is trying to get close to them. It makes them seem less like assholes and more like people. They don’t mention his connection to Monty because they dont realize how close he is getting to answers. Clay can still suspect he did the graffiti, after all it was a break in and a non student could have done that. Plus Estella is another red herring in the school. She serves that purpose so let Winston be the outsider looking in. His arc would still be about knowing a different Monty and not knowing who is was at Liberty but now he is literally the outsider who didn’t really get Monty, rather than it just being a figurative thing at the prom. You can still have the prom scene it would just be entirely imagined rather than the half imagined thing they went with. I think they overused the people talking to ghosts thing so here it would be a  fantasy of Monty and the relationship they had rather then a representation of what could have been. However I don’t think this would have retracted from the point. Also play him up, he is a sympathetic antagonist and it sucks how much he is sidelined for Diego. I didn’t hate Diego but Winston and him basically went through the same arc. They were pro Monty and ending up dating a member of the group, couldnt believe that member was involved and then learned something about Bryce and Monty agreed to move on and just did. All while saying they will alway care for that member of the group. It was an unnecessary rehash. Having WInston be the outsider looking in and Diego the insider looking out also lets their characters compliment each other. They should still work together, just have Winston contact him looking for Monty’s friends. It’s simple. 

2) Tyler and Tony 

Oh Tyler. The character who seems to be in the middle of everything despite never doing anything himself. I didn’t mind his arc of helping the cops find the guys who sold the illegal guns. But Tony’s suspicions, eventually leading to Clay and Tony finding out the truth and just moving on never really go anywhere. I think  it would be cool if Tyler tells Tony, despite the cops telling him not to tell anyone, because he trusts Tony. But Tony, who has had bad run ins with the cops, thinks it is a bad idea. He doesn’t want Tyler taking the deal. Tyler says its the only way the guns wont be traced back to them but Tony thinks teh cops are planning to double cross them to mind out more about Bryce and Monty. At the same time he starts getting close to that cop that takes him boxing and helps him get into college (i dont remember his name for the life of me lol). Tyler sees this as being hypocritical and pulls away. Tony still suspects Tyler is behind the lock down because he is pulling away and Tony is getting paranoid. The rest of their story can still be the same but this way they can show Tony’s paranoia and his loyalty. 

As for Tyler and Estella, It was fine. The scene of them in the bathroom was really powerful, being in the bathroom with a de la cruz and becoming comfortable because isnt her brother was really nice. This could even be another reason Tony and Tyler fight. Tony can be paranoid that Tyler is trusting her too quickly and think she will turn on him. 

3) Jess

Her arc with the principal, being scared and agreeing with the security measures before she sees them in action was really interesting. Focus more on it and less on her manipulating Diego. I did like parts of that arc for her so I don’t want it completely gone but I do think focusing on her working with the principal would have been cool. I would call more attention to her first meeting and her agreeing with the measures and slowly show her change her mind and start to turn against them. Maybe even have an early scene of her and ANi talking about it and have Jess admit she feels safer. Move the creepy cop trying to pat her down to the second or third day. So she can have a moment where they make her feel safe before the negative experience. I loved the protest and a bit better build up would have made it amazing

Her arc with Ani. They fought over Bryce... It should have been a conversation. Not a moment where Ani judges Diego and then they argue. I still think this arc should have been Chloe and Jess and should have been in last season. But they had the opportunity to include Chloe this season and just didnt. I’ll talk about this a bit more in the Zach section but I think Chloe should have been at Prom and the moment between the Ani Jess and Chloe should have been then. It would be right after Jess and Ani made up and would have been cool. 

I don’t think she should have had scenes where she saw and talked to Bryce. Yes it created some powerful moments but they could be reworked. Have WInston use his wealth to commission a positive thing in the paper about Bryce and Monty and have her talk to his idealized photo of Bryce. I will mention it in the Clay section but her hallucinations detracted from his journey with mental health. 

4) Clay

Okay two thing here the first is his arc with mental health, hallucinations, and blackouts. They used it for drama and I wish they hadnt. It should have been about him healing. I didnt mind the way they handled the realization for clay that it was him doing everything (Did they explain the symbol he kept drawing because I missed it if they did? or i just forgot because it was that forgettable lol) but I think the whole thing could have been handled a lot better and a more educated fan then I can provide a better explanation for what exactly was off about it. I will say the the therapy sessions were repetitive and I know thats realistic but for a tv show its boring. The scene were Clay goes to his home was weird and low key scary. I understand the purpose but  I wish he had called him and asked to meet at his office instead. A more likable and relatable journey for Clay with his mental health would be really good for a show that was accused of glorying suicide (personally i dont think it did. My inbox is open if you wanna talk though :))

The second thing is the phantom phone caller. I hate this trope so it might just be me but this is so stale. There are exactly two ways it could go. The person could know everything and be a real problem or the person could be fishing for information and not be a real problem. The whole thing was predicable since Winston had red herring written all over him, Estella was barely developed, and on this show it is always the football guys. Instead let the pranks be smaller and less crazy. Like these boys had to coordinate a lot to mess with Clay. There should be more than one prank and end with a Monty doll and Clay holding a knife to set up the camp episode. But they should be pranks, not the phantom caller psychological torture bs. The blood shower can also happen just on a different day. Clay can be confused about what is real and what isnt making him even more worried about his blackouts and again assuming the mental health arc is handled well, the pranks can be a real part of it. Dumping him in the pit on the camping trip also seemed kinda attempted murdery so maybe do something like tie him to a tree of the path or in a small dirt ditch not a rocky pit where if he hit his head or fell weird the team would all be murderers. 

5) Alex

His arc with Charlie was one of my favorite stories this season. I was also not bothered by him getting close to and exploring his sexuality with Winston and Zach. I’m in the minority but I’m glad Zalex wasn’t made canon and Zach was used to be an effective (kinda) ally and good friend. Plus this way Zalex can live on in the fandom untouched or ruined by the writers interpretation. 

They should have given us Alex in therapy. He tried to kill himself had a traumatic injury, an arc with steroid abuse, and an arc about killing someone. All of which were forgotten this season. All the other characters seemed to be dealing with Bryce and Monty, why not focus on Alex? Even if it isnt in therapy just let him exist in his feelings.

6) Zach

I have one major issue with Zach’s arc, the lack of Chloe. She was the reason he almost killed a man. Let them date, let him start to spiral while dating her. She doesnt know what he did. Have them grow apart on screen but her still connecting to him and not wanting to give up on him. They should go to prom together. I know the hooker was supposed to represent Zach turning into Bryce with the hookers and the drunken sex/potential rape  and cocaine. But Chloe fills the same comparison. He brings cocaine she is not okay with it, He tries to convince her to have sex in the back she is not having it. Maybe he tries to convince maybe it becomes a bit worse than that but she breaks up with him at prom and leaves early. She sees Bryce in him, she doesnt have to say it but you can see it on her face and she walks away when her mind and heart tells her to this time no making excuses. Boom Chloe actually has an arc. As for Zach this is a big wake up call for him he sees what we had become. I know it is later in the actual show but I think it should be in the prom episode so he can have a better conclusion in the finale, like the other characters. The whole season was a downward spiral and I wish we got to see more of him pulling himself out of it. If the whole finale is him getting better even though he wont be all the way done he will be in a better place up the end.

7) Justin

Okay the hard one. I think the writers really wanted to kill him. I mean a fan favorite, who did bad things, and the death would be in the series finale. this is a tv writer’s drug of choice. So I’m gonna do a fix where I still kill him first then to the ideal version. Ok so first Justin dies. No HIV/AIDS. It was out of nowhere, unneeded, and seemed a bit insensitive. If you want it to be related to his drug use, make it so he got a bad batch when he relapsed. Or maybe organ failure. If it doens’t need to be drug related it can be an accident or someone he knew on the streets getting revenge, like that drug dealer we spent time with last season. Or if Justin helps Tyler put the gun salesmen behind bars then have it be retaliation for that. He can still go to the hospital and have goodbyes but it wont be an aids diagnosis and death in the same episode. I know they had signs in earlier episodes but the timeline is still really fucked up...

An ideal ending would have him live. He can still pass out at Prom. The diagnosis can be a combination of stress and withdrawal symptoms.He can be the red herring for the person in the coffin. If Justin lives he can represent hope. He can show the audience that you can get better and things can work out. Even if you are sick and think you will die you can do better be better and live in a better world. Plus I love him and really wanted him to be happy. The message would be you can get out of a bad situation and wold have ended a sad series on a positive note. Even if you are a bad person. Even if you have bad circumstance. Even if it feels like the world is against you, it can get better if you put in the effort. Which felt like the message the show was going for in eariler seasons by showing the people on the tapes doing better but abandoned this last season.

So who would I put in the coffin. Ani’s mom. Now I know she wasn’t a well liked character and her mom wouldn’t have the same audience or character reaction Justin’s death did. But this version isn’t about making the audience sad. Ani would finally have a plot that was really about her, her mom died, Bryce’s mom basically wants to provide for her. And she isn’t sure what to do. Justins funeral felt like it was overshadowed by graduation anyway. Now Ani’s moms absence and the funeral being overshadowed both make sense. She is going to college and doing what she can to honor her mom. And the death of a parent causes Clay to immediately appreciate his own family more. The theme in the first season with Clay was appreciating and acting on his feelings for Hannah before she was gone. Ani’s mom dying is a reality check for him and he know the most important things are his family and friends. Justin’s arc was about finding a family and he did. The core of the show is about family, friends, and the importance of  a strong support system. And starting it with a mother grieving her daughter and ending it with a daughter grieving her mother would be a cool full circle moment.

This post is really long so if you read all the way down Thank you! :) 

[downwiththeficness]

In the Bond-Chapter 8

Summary: Lilah often wished she’d never said yes to working with the Gecko brothers—usually while dodging gunfire. At no time was she regretting that decision more than when she’s hanging upside down from the ceiling, staring down a group of hungry culebras and one (1) extremely powerful sun god.

Word Count: ~2,900

Warnings: Blood, Violence, Gore

A/N: This is an AU of my Story In the Blood, which can be read here. Basically, this fic explores what would have happened if Lilah had met up with Geckos before she met Brasa.

Taglist: @symbiont13

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Lilah fiddled with the cup as she leaned against her car. It was after dark and the night was cool enough that she was wearing a long sleeved shirt beneath her hoodie. Her knife weighed against her forearm, though she’d forgone the gun. She didn’t anticipate a fight, here.

The elevator stood silently nearby, a stoic guard against the conversation she was itching to have—not a conversation, an argument.  Lilah had been very clear with herself.  This was not going to be a screaming match. She could handle this like a normal, mature, fully functioning adult. Sort of.

Lilah had spent the rest of the trip home and the haul all the way out here debating him in her head. Her anger had only grown over time, snowballing into a heavy weight in the pit of her stomach. She didn’t like how sick it made her that there was yet another secret she was only finding out after the fact. It made her feel like she couldn’t make good decisions, couldn’t keep her own self interest in focus.

With a deep breath, she pushed from the car and stepped to the elevator, jabbing the call button before shoving the cup into the little paper gift bag she’d brought along to hide it in. Couldn’t be walking around willy nilly with valuable artifacts.

The door opened and she stepped inside, poking absently at the floor she needed. The carriage dropped and Lilah leaned against the back of it, trying to control her feelings. It was not a simple task. Lilah liked to think of herself as easy going, but she found lies by omission to be particularly distasteful. And, this was one hell of a lie by omission.

Fucking immortal. And, he hadn’t even bothered to give her a heads up. The fucking gall of it.  She shook her head as the doors opened, striding out into the club with a singular purpose. Ignoring the looks she was no doubt receiving for being so under dressed, Lilah moved through the room to the back door, keyed the code she’d been given, and stepped through it.

As she closed the door behind her, the edges of her vision blurred a little, her body swaying. With a groan, she rested a hand on the wall and waited for the feeling to pass. It happened from time to time, and Lilah had always dismissed it as a product of the stress she had been under lately. Now, she wondered if this was a product of her body adjusting to the immortality that she hadn’t been told about. After a moment, Lilah was able to regain her composure and she made her way to the large double doors of Brasa’s public office. She knocked, waited, knocked again, tried the handle, and found it locked.

Blowing out a frustrated breath, Lilah crossed her arms, the bag swinging with the movement. It took about two seconds before she was moving impatiently further down the hall, glancing through open doors to see if she could find someone to ask about Brasa’s whereabouts. He knew she was delivering the cup tonight, should have been expecting her.  It was yet another frustrating thing to add to the pile of frustrating things.

Turning a corner, Lilah caught the sound of voices from down the hall.  Finally. They came from the open doors of a massive room. Lilah hesitated at the doorway, her lips pulling back from her teeth in a grimace.  Cast in a warm red light, it appeared to be some kind of...church. The room’s open floor plan was cut into four parts by long pews, the circumference lined by columns. Lilah edged inside and moved around the perimeter so that she could watch from the sidelines.  

The voices hushed, attention turning towards the front of the room.  Lilah, grateful that she was being mostly ignored, crept forward, moving from column to column. At the front (or was it the back?) of the room stood an altar, the staff she’d procured standing upright behind it.

There was a palpable feeling in the air that made the hair on her arms stand up despite two layers of clothing.  The crowd was undulating, pushing forward towards the altar, their eyes hungry. Lilah caught a flash of fang here or there, audible growls rolling towards her. Her spine straightened as she reflexively checked for danger. Fortunately for her, they were more focused on what was going near the altar to pay much attention to her.

He moved through shadow from the opposite side of the room, his familiar leather jacket swinging with his steps.  Lilah pressed her body against the column, craning her neck so that she could see him better. Brasa faced the crowd, a storm in his expression. He spoke in a halting, sharp language that stung her ears, but she couldn’t stop herself from leaning forward to hear him.

Keeping low, she moved to another column, closing the distance between them. Column by column she moved, until she was nearly parallel to him, watching the side of his face as he continued to speak.

Lilah didn’t understand a word he was saying, it didn’t sound like any language she’d ever heard, but she could read his body. He was angry, and with his anger seemed to come a heat that billowed outwards, chasing away the chill. Sweat dripped from her temple down the side of her cheek. It dropped down her jaw to her chest, running between her breasts and over her stomach. Her palms slipped on the stone.

His speech rose to a crescendo, and he pointed to the crowd. Lilah actually flinched with the motion, her hands flexing where they rested on the stone. There was an audible gasp, and a voice that spoke quickly. She knew that tone—pleading. The woman was brought forward, struggling against the grip of two men. Lilah felt her chest tighten, her mind already three steps ahead and screaming at her to look away.

The woman was laid on the altar and he stood over her, talking lowly. Lilah recognized that look. Don’t kill me, it said. Please, I’ll do anything. Too many times had Lilah see this look.  And, like all the others, she felt pity for this woman.

He was unmoved, and there was a ferocity in his expression that chilled her, despite the oppressive heat of the room. One gloved hand slid down the woman’s chest to her belly, and then in a quick, jerking movement, it was inside of her. Reaching up through the rib cage. Lilah felt her stomach turn as she watched him dig further, heard the woman’s screams.

After a moment, he pulled free, holding a snake high in the air. A roar build among the crowd and she thought she saw some of their faces distort grotesquely. He held the snake high for a few beats, then tossed it into a fire burning behind him. The woman on the altar screamed, a high, unearthly thing to Lilah’s ears.

She felt bile rise up into her throat as he reached back inside the woman. A second later, he was holding her heart in front of him. The crowd roared so loudly her ears rang.

“Oh, don’t do it,” she breathed, biting her lip hard.

With his free hand, he held it up and squeezed. Blood poured from the heart into his mouth, his eyes flaming red with rage. She’d never seen those eyes before, and it frightened her.  Lilah stepped away from the column, moving through the room and out into the hall, glad that everyone was too entranced by the scene he was making to notice her dry heaving on her way out.

She stumbled back to the doors of Brasa’s office, once more hesitating, her eyes flicking towards the exit. Lilah could drop the package, head back, no one would ever know what she saw. She’d have to come up with some sort of excuse for her frazzled state when she got back—or, she could stop at a diner and drink coffee until her body stopped shaking.

Warmth pressed all along her back, and Lilah knew that she’d hesitated far too long. Turning, she caught him rounding the corner, his step slowing as he approached. She watched him watching her, his expression guarded and just this side of angry.

Lilah took a step back, holding the bag protectively in front of her.

“You saw,” he announced, his voice low and raw.

She nodded.

“Will you allow me to explain?”

Lilah now had two things that she wanted him to explain, and she hoped that the list wouldn’t get any longer. She was already feeling reed thin and fragile. Too wrapped up in her thoughts to pay attention to how her fingers were fidgeting with the little ribbon handles of the gift bag in her hands. She gave him another nod.

Unlocking the doors, Brasa urged her inside, closing the door behind them. The sound of it echoed in the empty room. Everything was still—the air, the water on either side of the walkway, Lilah. She stood in place as Brasa circled around her and started walking towards his desk. Only his look over his shoulder at her forced her feet to move forward.

Swinging the bag at her side, Lilah walked a few steps behind, her sneakers tapping across the tile floor, until she reached one of the chairs. She almost sat. She almost sank down tiredly into that chair and let his voice calm her anger. Lilah remained standing.

Gingerly, she sat the parcel on his desk, then pushed her hands into the front pocket of her sweatshirt. Brasa eyed her, then the bag, before leaning down and picking it up. He looked inside briefly, and set it aside. The empty air thinned further, and Lilah clenched her jaw to keep from screaming all the things she’d been thinking over the last day. Heat that had nothing to do with the male standing before her rose to burn through her chest and belly. She took a deep breath to steady herself.

“I won’t ask what you know of culebra death rituals,” he began, the cant of his shoulders tense as he spoke, “But, what you saw in there was necessary.” He waited a beat for her response, received none, and kept going, “She killed an entire family, slaughtered them for their blood, and left them to be found by the authorities. She brought unnecessary attention to us, put the safety of the whole group at risk. I had to make an example of her.”

The last sentence was punctuated by his hand falling down on the desk, a move of finality. Lilah flinched, blinking rapidly. It didn’t matter that he had a good reason for what she’d just seen. What mattered was he’d been lying to her—at minimum, he’d been withholding information that she needed.

“You’re not going to argue with me?”

Lilah shook her head, “No. I agree with your reasoning, if not your method.”

His eyes narrowed, “You were angry before you walked in, weren’t you.” He sighed, standing and rounding the desk to stand before her, “What happened?”

Don’t yell. Don’t. Yell.

Lilah yelled, “You fucking lied to me!”

Head tilting back, Brasa’s expression was confused, “I have not.”

“Lying by omission is a lie.”

She hadn’t yelled that last bit, but she had said it through clenched teeth that she was absolutely baring at him. Well...there went being a mature adult.

Hand coming up to rub at the bridge of his nose, Brasa simply asked, “What have I omitted?”

Incredulous, Lilah held up both her hands, palms to the ceiling, “Oh, I don’t know, how about the fact that I’m immortal now? Is that a big enough omission for you?”

He stared at her for a few seconds, pulling his lips between his teeth as he thought. Lilah felt her frustration grow at the lack of reaction, the calm that he exuded when she was so goddamned fired up.

“I had hoped to tell you about this gradually,” he said finally, taking a step back and sitting on the desk, his hands dangling between his thighs.

She shifted on her feet, sucking air through her teeth, “I think you’d better tell me now.”

He lifted a shoulder, “There is not much more to say. You will live for a long time.”

“How?”

His brows drew together, “How?”

Apparently, the echo had seeped into him as well. She crossed her arms, fixing him with an angry frown.

With a shake of his head, Brasa stood and slipped his hands into his pockets, “I suppose ‘magic’ won’t be an acceptable answer.”

“You suppose correctly.”

The growl in her voice was foreign to her. Lilah couldn’t remember the last time she’d been so angry. It made her body, already tired from the long trip, ache all over. She wanted to sleep for ten years, she wanted stand in the middle of a field and scream for an hour, she wanted to purchase another round of explosives and blow up something big.

Brasa’s jaw worked, “The blood. It always comes down to the blood. My blood is stronger than yours. It subsumes it, changes it, changes you.”

In the sewers...that was when it had happened.

“Does it,” she croaked, clearing her throat, “Is it instantaneous? Can it be reversed?”

His expression stilled, and that was all the answer she needed. Lilah felt her chest constrict, her eyes water. She sniffed and dropped her gaze to the floor. Her anger dissipated into a strange kind of sorrow for something she never knew she’d have to grieve.

“I’m sorry.”

And just like that, her anger ignited all over again, giving her the energy to push back her tears and sneer at him, “You don’t get to apologize for this. You knew exactly what you were doing.”

His lip curled, “And what were my options? My bondmate falls through a skylight into the middle of a ring of very thirsty culebras, shoots me, runs away, and then detonates explosives to drop the building on top of us. In less than ten minutes you had proven to me that I couldn’t take a single chance for your safety.”

Her hand curled into little fists against her chest, “You could have let me go. You could have let me make my own decision.”

Pushing from the desk, he stepped into her space, looking down his nose at her, “You did make your decision. It would have ended your life in that basement if I hadn’t gotten you out. It was your decision that made my decision for me.”

She scoffed, “I made that decision out of fear.”

“And you think I didn’t?” he shot back, “Lilah, do you have any idea how fragile you were? How fragile you still are? You’ll live longer, yes, but you are still no match for my enemies.”

“You think I haven’t made enemies? I’m a thief, Brasa. I’ve stolen from some seriously heavy hitters, I’m wanted in several countries. I once accidentally performed a small coup in a town hall that got a bomb put in my rental—so glad I paid the extra insurance that time.”

He was already shaking his head, “Humans, Lilah. You’ve pissed off humans.”

“Please,” she drawled, “Culabras are way, way less creative than a human.  Their primary drive is to be fed regularly and to stay out of the sunlight. A human? They’ll destroy everything you ever love and make you watch.”

Eyes closing briefly, Brasa took a calming breath, “How can you be so flippant? I am their leader, I have been controlling their food supply.”

“And I am your weakness,” she spit at him, “Thank you for that reminder.”

He dropped his chin and looked at her with regret in his eyes, “I just wanted you safe.”

“No,” she said, her voice resigned, “You wanted to be in control. You knew it would connect us, you knew it would give you the ability to know me in ways I would have never let you know me, not so quickly.”

Pulling back a little, Brasa gave no denial. He simply watched her, looking lost.

“That was not fair,” Lilah said, eventually.

He nodded, eyes glancing off to the side, then, “How long will you be gone?”

“What?”

Shrugging, he repeated the question, followed by, “That’s what you’re going to do. You’re going to run away. How long?”

Lilah physically took a step back as her mind mentally did the same, “I don’t know.”

He gave a humorless laugh, “Not even following your own rules, Lilah?”

Policy number one…

She sighed deeply, the hypocrisy not lost on her, “You once asked me for time. I’m asking for the same thing, in return.”

Brasa nodded, then moved around his desk and opened one of the drawers. He pulled an old book from its depths, moving to hand it to her.  Lilah took it, thumbs rubbing over the cover.

To her unasked questions, he said, “Its written in Spanish, but I’m sure you’ll find an effective translator. That should answer most of your questions regarding the bond.”

Lilah didn’t thank him. Her brain was already five hours ahead, sitting on a jet to Canada. It would take nothing to book the flight and the cabin she’d been eyeing for months. With one last look at him, Lilah turned and walked out.

[hogtown-socialist-alternative]

How Socialists Defeated Amazon’s Bid to Buy Seattle’s Elections

By Ty Moore -November 9, 2019

Jeff Bezos’s bid to buy Seattle City Council has backfired. Despite big business dropping unprecedented cash behind Amazon-backed candidates in all seven council races, Seattle voters rejected this attempt to flip the council to the right in all but two of the seven council races. In Seattle’s most-watched, most expensive, and most polarized council in decades, Socialist Alternative’s Kshama Sawant appears to have won a narrow victory.

(Watch the victory press conference here. )

After election night returns showed Sawant behind by 8 points, with 46% to Egan Orion’s 54%, the corporate media and big business sounded triumphalist. But 60% of late arriving ballots counted in the following days swung toward Kshama. By Friday evening’s count Sawant had crested 3.6% past Orion with a lead of 1,515 votes, with that number likely to rise a bit further in the days ahead.

Washington State’s mail-in ballot system allows voters to mail in their ballots up to three weeks before election day. Early voters tend to be older and wealthier, with later voters being disproportionately younger, working class, and renters – those more likely to vote socialist. This year the late ballot bump for Sawant was bigger than ever, a reflection of the huge 58% turnout in District 3. Even our critics in the local media were forced to credit Socialist Alternative’s record-breaking get-out-the-vote operation.

The high turnout also reflected the wave of outrage that swept Seattle in the final three weeks of the election following Amazon’s $1 million “money bomb” dropped on Seattle on October 14. This brought Amazon’s total contribution to the Seattle Chamber of Commerce PAC to $1.5 million, and corporate PAC spending as a whole to over $4.1 million – approaching five times the previous record!

National political figures weighed in against Amazon, followed by a wave of national media attention. The Wall Street Journal’s Editorial Board complained that “Bernie Sanders tweeted this week that Amazon’s spending in Seattle was ‘a perfect example of the out-of-control corporate greed we are going to end.’ Elizabeth Warren decried Amazon for ‘trying to tilt the Seattle City Council elections in their favor,’ adding that ‘I have a plan to get big money out of politics.’”

A Referendum on Corporate Power

Warning that Bezos’s $1.5 million gamble to defeat Sawant and other progressives may have backfired, Seattle Times columnist Danny Westneat said: “The election was playing out as a referendum on the performance of the City Council.” An Elway/Crosscut poll showed 67% of likely voters supporting “someone who wants to change” the Council’s direction. Westneat continued: “Now [the election] could well be a referendum on Amazon and corporate power” (10/23/19).

Of course, the Seattle Times is at the forefront of a relentless corporate propaganda offensive to blame Sawant and other so-called “left ideologues” for the failed “performance of the City Council” in addressing Seattle’s homelessness and affordability crisis, the top concern for voters. The paper endorsed Amazon-backed candidates in all seven council races, portraying them as “change” candidates.

In reality, Seattle’s housing crisis is part of the global failure of capitalism, which treats housing as a commodity to enrich billionaire speculators, rather than as a basic human right. Working people are right to be angry at the inaction of city, state, and federal authorities to address the crisis. But blame for this falls squarely on a political establishment that is complicit with corporate power, not on activists and political leaders like Kshama Sawant calling for universal rent control and taxing big business to massively expand quality public housing.

Amazon executives’ chosen opponent for Kshama was Egan Orion, a fully corporate candidate who posed as a “progressive” to win votes. Orion put posters up all over town saying he accepted no corporate PAC money despite the fact that he applied for corporate PAC money, interviewed with the PAC, and thanked them when he got their endorsement. He sent out mailers with lies about Kshama to every household.

Orion’s supporters tore down over 1,000 Kshama Sawant yard signs throughout the district, and in the final two weeks, they vandalized over 200 signs with spray-painted profanities. Crucial to overcoming the lies and attacks against our campaign was building widespread public awareness about this attempt to buy the election through thousands of conversations on the doors and at street corners by our members and volunteers.

Debate on Seattle’s Left

Once again, Seattle has shown that socialists and working people can take on the most powerful corporate titans and win. This victory should give confidence to movements everywhere, from the recent wave of mass anti-austerity and democracy protests spreading across the globe, to the youth climate strikes, labor battles, as well as other socialist election campaigns including Bernie Sanders’ inspiring fight for the presidency.

Yet it would be a major mistake to imagine that similar victories can be won through struggle and determination alone. The role of Marxist perspectives, program, and organization was essential in Seattle and will be vital to defeating the concentrated power of the capitalist class everywhere.

At the start of the election campaign, a de-facto alliance between big business, key labor leaders, and most liberal political figures had coalesced to try and defeat Sawant and block the election of Democratic Socialists of America candidate Shaun Scott in District 4. This anti-Sawant alliance came to life in the aftermath of the “Tax Amazon” campaign in 2018, which went down in defeat following aggressive bullying by Amazon, including threats to move jobs out of Seattle.

The broad coalition built around the Tax Amazon campaign, in which Sawant’s office and Socialist Alternative played a central role, initially won unanimous passage of the tax on the top 3% of Seattle corporations to pay for affordable housing and homeless services. However, facing intense pressure from big business and a well-funded repeal campaign, this coalition was shattered and city council repealed the tax in a 7-2 vote just one month later.

From left-liberal and pro-business voices alike, blame for the defeat was put on the “divisive” approach of Sawant and Socialist Alternative. Despite support from a number of unions, leaders of the Ironworkers and other trades angrily denounced the campaign as a “tax on jobs,” fearful that Amazon would follow through on their threats to cut back new construction in retaliation.

In the August 6 primary, with no endorsements from her fellow city councilmembers or other prominent Democratic Party politicians, with labor publicly divided, Sawant received just 37% in the primary election. “No incumbent in recent memory has survived a primary showing that low,” wrote Westneat in the Seattle Times (8/7/19). “[T]he days on the council for the crusader for rent control and taxes on big business could be numbered.”

The Fight for Unity Against Amazon

If Sawant and Socialist Alternative had adopted the approach of most liberal and labor leaders to try and avoid a direct confrontation with Amazon, it’s likely Jeff Bezos’ bullying strategy and attempt to buy the city council would have succeeded. There was nothing automatic about the widespread working-class distrust toward corporate power getting organized into a coherent fightback.

In fact, most elections across the U.S. don’t feature bold working-class challenges, given the corporate domination of the two-party system. Even in Seattle, where the local Democratic Party organizations have shifted leftward under the impact of Sanders and other left challengers, this hasn’t resulted in strong working class fighters running for city council in most races.

Socialist Alternative based our electoral strategy on confidence that, if offered a fighting lead, working class and young people in Seattle were capable of defeating Amazon and big business. Crucial to this strategy was the potential for working-class pressure from below to push progressive and labor leaders off the sidelines and into a united fight with us against Seattle’s corporate establishment. Socialist Alternative members provided the Marxist backbone of this strategy. Their energy, self-sacrifice, and political skills successfully built  perhaps the most powerful grassroots election campaign in Seattle history.  

Over 1,000 volunteers and SA members have helped us knock on over 225,000 doors and make 200,000 phone calls. 7,900 working people donated to the campaign, and with a median donation of $20 we raised $570,000, smashing all previous records for both the number of donors and total amount raised. We’ll be publishing a fuller report of this historic effort soon.

The dynamic unleashed after the primary election confirmed our strategy. Candidates backed by Amazon and big business moved on to the general election in all seven council races, facing off against more progressive candidates. With the looming threat of the Chamber of Commerce engineering a wholesale takeover of City Hall, our call for maximum unity against big business rapidly gained traction among grassroots activists, exerting pressure on bigger political players.

More endorsements for Sawant, as well as Shaun Scott, began rolling in from progressive leaders and groups who had sat on the sidelines in the primary. The scandalous effort of conservative labor leaders to win Egan Orion the Labor Council’s endorsement was defeated when over 300 union members signed an open letter in protest. By the final weeks, 21 unions had endorsed Sawant – a substantial majority of the union locals who endorsed in the District 3 race. A joint event promoting a Green New Deal for Seattle was organized with Sawant, Morales, and Scott speaking, an important display of programmatic left unity that was absent in the primary.

In a major defeat for the business-backed Democratic establishment who have long-dominated city  politics, local Democratic Party groups endorsed both Shaun Scott and Kshama Sawant in September (they had already endorsed Morales in the primary). Sawant is the first independent socialist ever endorsed by Seattle’s Democrats, and this endorsement was made despite her very public calls for left Democrats, labor, and social movements to join together to build a new party for working people. This victory, the product of an energetic grassroots effort, was linked to passing resolutions condemning corporate PAC spending  through four Democratic Party organizations.

All this laid the basis for our re-election campaign to become the central driving force behind a unified response when Amazon dropped their $1 million money bomb on October 14th. Alongside the Democratic Party groups, we organized a press conference two days later outside of Amazon headquarters, followed by rally called by Amazon workers a week later.

This broke the dam. A wave of national media coverage followed. In a high profile reversal, even Lorena Gonzalez and Teresa Mosqueda – the liberal city councilmembers who had publicly called for Sawant’s defeat in the primary – felt compelled to speak at the rally against Amazon and announce their endorsement of both Sawant and Scott. A wave of other progressive Democratic Party leaders followed suit.

The  naked attempt by Jeff Bezos to buy Seattle City council backfired, but only because it met a well-prepared united front strategy to mobilize working class anger into a unifying force, pushing even reluctant labor and liberal leaders into alliance with socialists to fight big business. The role of Socialist Alternative, with our clear analysis, strategy, and a politically self-confident membership, was absolutely vital to moving these wider forces into united action.

As the wave of socialist election campaigns across the country continues to expand, the rich lessons of how we defeated Jeff Bezos in his hometown can help serious socialist organizers develop winning strategies for working class struggle everywhere.

https://www.socialistalternative.org

[theonewiththefanfics]

Whatever It Takes (one-shot)

Synopsys: This is the fight of their lives. Get the stones, bring everyone back, but don’t screw up what happened during the last five years. But maybe there’s a chance to bring back even those that weren’t dusted. Well, whatever the case, that is what the Reader will do if the opportunity presents itself.

Pairing: Loki x f!Reader

Genre: angst/ fluff

Warnings: swearing, blood, mentions of wounds and death

Word count: 15676 (I don’t have a life :) )

       Whatever it takes.        The words echoed through Y/N’s head like a mantra. They were going back in time to retrieve the Infinity Stones. As insane as that sounded, it was their actual plan. The only plan that gave them hope to bring everyone back.        “All right,” Tony brought Y/N back from the dazed state, readying herself as she stood next to Steve. “You heard the man. Stroke those keys, jolly green.”        “Tractors engaged,” Bruce announced, and she pulled in a shuddering breath. They were actually going to do this.        From the corner of her eye, she saw Rocket hand Clint a shrunken version of the ship her father and Nebula had arrived on. “You promise to bring that back in one piece, right?”        Clint rolled his eyes, voice uninterested as he moved to stand next to Nat. “Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. I’ll do my best.”        “As promises go, that was pretty lame.”        It had been a while since Y/N found anything remotely funny, so when the snort escaped her nose, she was shocked herself. The past five years had been hellish. And even that was an understatement.        To be completely honest, she had been luckier than most. She still had her dad, and Pepper had survived the snap as well. The twenty-two days he’d been M.I.A in space Y/N would’ve completely lost it if not for her mom. Though they were not blood-related she refused to call her otherwise. The woman had helped Tony raise her, and there would be no other way she’d regard her or him. They were her family.

       But then he’d come back. With Captain Carol Danvers carrying the spaceship, he was safely placed on the ground. Steve rushed forward to help him off the steps, and Y/N crumbled to the ground upon seeing her dad after almost three years of her own absence.        After that and the Avengers’ unsuccessful retrieval of the stones, the three of them moved into a lakeside house and just stayed there. Y/N recounted what had happened after she’d been trapped in the Rainbow Bridge after Thor’s last visit to Earth. When the topic of Loki and her being together came up, she had almost given Tony a heart attack.        “Don’t worry dad,” she sniffled, “he won’t come back.”        In any other circumstance, he would’ve been happy about the crazy Asgardian not stepping a foot near his daughter, but the tone of her voice made him realize that it wasn’t a good thing.        “How so?” he had mumbled in her hair.        “Same reason we lost so many others,” Y/N had replied. “Only that time he didn’t snap his fingers, but his neck.”        The two spent the rest of the night curled up into one another, trying to keep the other somewhat together before Pep joined and helped them start the mending of their hearts.        Then Morgan was born. Y/N didn’t know how to feel about it at first. It felt like they were trying to move on while others were left to piece together the broken shards, but when her sister’s little finger had wrapped around her own, the fierce love that filled her chest was a force to be reckoned with.        Now, Y/N surveyed the room, and excitement started to fill up her body, despite everything. This was their chance, not only to bring everyone back but to keep what they had gained. Because there would be no other outcome she’d accept.        “See you in a minute,” Nat remarked, and a moment later they were all flying through the quantum realm.        Y/N had never been a squeamish person. Whenever they had movie nights and Clint or Sam, as always, picked a horror film, no matter how many guts flew towards the screen, she was unfazed. Quite a lot of the time, her line of work consisted of splattering other’s brains against walls. And when you can control everything with just your mind, frying someone from the inside out wasn’t uncommon.        But the second they were thrown on the Chitauri overrun streets of 2012 New York, Y/N was slammed against a car, and she had to hold onto it for dear life.         “Bug, you okay?” Tony’s hand went to her back to soothingly rub it.        “ ‘M alright,” Y/N wheezed. Fuck that breakfast was really hard to keep down. “Just give me a second.”        While she was recuperating, Steve laid out the plan once more. “All right, we all have our assignments. Two stones uptown, one stone, down. Stay low. Keep an eye on the clock.”        Originally Y/N was supposed to go with Bruce to The Sanctorum, but they ended up deciding she’d be great backup for the rest as they would have to get past not only Loki and whatever he might decide to do, but also Hydra.        Right as they were about to split, 2012 Hulk landed with a harsh thud on the ground, flipping a car over onto a Chitauri troop before jumping on top of it as if he was a kid jumping on a bed.        Y/N looked over at Bruce who had a hand on his face.        “Feel free to smash if things don’t go your way,” Steve patted him on the arm, and Bruce sighed.        “I think it’s gratuitous, but whatever.”        For a moment everyone watched as he removed his shirt and reluctantly punched a car before throwing a motorcycle.        “Okay,” Tony pulled them back, “it’s time to move.”        Through an underground tunnel that connected the garage to the main parts of the Stark Tower, Steve rushed inside with Y/N, while Tony and an ant-sized Scott flew in through the window.        “I’ll take the stairs up and wait by the elevator,” Steve commented, “I need you to find two of the security suits and suit up. Tony will be with you shortly.”        “Got it, Cap,” Y/N gave him a mock salute and was off to the races.        They didn’t have much time. Hydra would get the staff pretty much immediately, and then it was up to Steve to retrieve it, while Tony had to help Scott get into the position to cause 2012 Tony a heart attack, and then subsequently get the case with the Tesseract to them.        “A heart attack, really?” Y/N had first remarked, eyebrows shooting up in disbelief. “You clearly have zero care for your own life, do you? And what if mom finds out?”        “Got any better ideas?”        “Uhh knock yourself out and pass as yourself? Trigger the security system? Maybe something that won't put your survival at risk.”        “Do I look like I could pass as a version of myself from back in the day?”        That was true. Tony had gotten significantly greyer, and the lines on his face were more prominent, though in Y/N’s opinion that was more so to do with all of the grief, not age.        “I dunno,” she had smirked and crossed her arms, feet resting on the top of the table as they went through the information of what they knew of the stones, “put a little bit of dye in there, and I’d say you’re as good as new.”        Tony gave her a gentle smile and wrapped an arm around her shoulders. Y/N instantly put her head on his chest and relaxed. “Thanks, bug, for caring about me,” he muttered. “You always know how to lift me up.”        “That’s what family does.”        Now, Y/N was rifling through the SHIELD uniforms quickly taking one that seemed to be her size and another one to fit Tony.        “Ugh, Mr Rogers,” Tony exasperated through the comms as all of them got into position, “I almost forgot that that suit did nothing for your ass.”        “No one asked you to look,” Steve sighed through almost gritted teeth, but Y/N had to agree. The 2012 suit had been a complete flop in accentuating the Captains assets.        “I think you look great, Cap,” Scott responded. “As far as I’m concerned, that’s America’s ass.”        “You done there?” Y/N whispered as she moved into position downstairs to wait by the elevator. “We’re kinda on a mission here. Also, America’s ass only appeared when he got into that hot ass stealth suit. Thank you, dad, for that.”        Steve groaned while Tony chuckled. “Thank you, bug. I’m glad at least someone appreciates my designs. But also, do not ever talk about looking at Steve’s ass ever again, or I’ll ground you.”        “How can I not?” she muttered. “It’s right there.”        But before Steve could say a syllable, Tony spoke up. “All right, Cap. I got our sceptre in the elevator just passing the 80th floor.”        “On it,” he was back to his ‘soldier mode’. “Head to the lobby.”        “Alright. I’ll see you there. Kid?”        “Waiting for you by the staircase, the second suit is secured,” Y/N confirmed and settled in her position.        “You’re a gem, bug.”        Y/N smirked, and she would’ve stayed somewhat happy if not for STRIKE team appearing. “Ugh,” she groaned and sneered in Hydra’s direction. “Can I take those guys out? Preferably with a sniper?”        “We don’t have time for that, kiddo,” Tony’s voice was now right next to her.        “Bullshit, there’s always time for a little bit of that.”        Tony rolled his eyes, but nevertheless, everyone was more or less in position. “Thumbelina, do you copy? I’ve got eyes on the prize,” he murmured right as his own younger version started to walk out of the building but was interrupted by Alexander Pierce showing up.        “Bombs away.”        A few seconds passed without anything happening, making Y/N’s nerves spike when Scott exclaimed, “Is, is that Axe body spray?”        “Yeah, I had a can just for emergencies. Relax. Can we focus please?”    “I’m going inside you.”    “Ew,” Y/N winched, “don’t ever say anything like that ever again.”    From the sidelines, she observed everyone until her eyes befell on Loki. She knew she’d see him here, there was no escaping that, but Y/N thought she had prepared herself better than this. Her breath got stuck hallway to her throat and tears threatened to spill from her eyes because here he was – in chains, yes, but alive. Alive and breathing and snarking back.    “All right, move it, Stuart Little,” Tony was starting to get impatient. “Things are getting dicey up here. Let’s go.”    “You promise me you won’t die?”    Tony rolled his eye, and Y/N slapped his arm. “You’re only giving me a mild cardiac dysrhythmia.”    Scott rebutted. “That doesn’t sound mild.”    “Do it, Lang! Window’s closing in. Pull my pin!”    And that’s when he did it. “Here goes!”    If Y/N was being honest up until five years ago that day had been the worst of her life. After watching her dad fly a nuke into space with Pepper right beside her, and now seeing him crumble to the floor, was incredibly hard. To the point, she almost rushed to his side because the horrific memories were bad enough, but as planned, 2012 Tony dropped the case, and Scott kicked it towards the 2023 Tony and Y/N.    With one swift movement, he had the Tesseract, and both were on their way to the meetup point. Then everything turned south. The Hulk smashed out from the stairs, knocking Tony and Y/N out of the way, and the suitcase with the Tesseract flew open, making the cube bounce out and slide all over the floor.        “Shit,” Y/N almost yelled and scrambled to her feet right as the glowing stone stopped by Loki’s feet. She didn’t need to be a mind reader to know what would happen next.        Without thinking, Y/N grabbed onto 2012 Loki’s shoulder right as he took the Tesseract and used it to disappear. A second later, the two tumbled onto the ground, and she managed to knock the cube out of his hold.        Unsurprisingly, his chains and the mask on his face were off in an instant, signifying the fact he had just been playing along. Maybe his plan all along had been to bring together the Avengers in hopes of stopping Thanos one day, no matter if under the influence of the Mind stone or not. Or maybe he had just wanted to get back to Asgard and rule there.    The two were up, their clothes covered in dirt, but Y/N’s focus on the Tesseract instead of the alien looking planet surrounding them, and Loki’s was on her.        “I need that,” she said pointing at the cube.        “That’s not a nice way to ask though, is it?” Loki snarked back, the two circling one another like lions ready to attack. When his back was on the stone, and it was in her eyesight, she got ready. Y/N blew a strand of hair out of her face and whipped her gaze back to look at the younger Loki.    “I wasn’t asking.” And that’s when she pounced.        When they first started training together, Loki had had the upper hand. For one, he was a literal god with hundreds of years of experience, and two, she wanted to learn his tricks. He was able to make new moves and surprise her, catch her off guard and bring her down, but this time Y/N knew she had him.        They’d been together for three years, and though that was nothing but a blink of an eye for him, she knew how his body moved and bent, where his mind went to as he thought of his next attack or defence. Y/N knew him like the back of her hand.        The second she deflected his dagger and twisted his arm around, she slammed the back of his knee and elbowed him in the back of his head. She had him. But Loki was stunned in a different kind of a way.        “How did you know I’d do it?” his blue eyes were wide and looking at Y/N in complete bafflement.        She didn’t deign to respond, instead, just kicked him in the jaw sending his head backwards.        Three more steps and the Tesseract would be hers, but of course, once again things had to go south. A cold palm grabbed at her ankle, harshly yanking her down. Y/N was happy she managed to keep her tongue behind her teeth, but the clank wasn’t pleasant either way.        “I’m sorry,” he smirked scrambling to straddle her, “but this will hurt.”        His fingers pressed against her forehead, and Y/N’s eyes rolled to the back of her head. But Loki was not expecting the things he saw.        It was him. But it wasn’t. And yet it was him with her and they were… tangled together in a bed. Their legs brushing against the other’s, soft fingers tracing his jaw and cheekbone while his lips left invisible marks on her lids, brows, nose and finally where she carved him the most – lips.        “If paradise exists,” her voice was quiet as if she was afraid to pull them out of the moment, “this is it.”        “Really? In the arms of a child’s nightmare?”        “In the arms of the coolest man in the existence of the universe. Quite literally, your skin is freezing cold.”         Loki snorted shaking his head. “That’s because I’m a Frost Giant, darling.”        “Mhm,” her eyes were closed, content, “you never fail to remind me that. Especially as one of the reasons as to why I should be afraid of you.”        “You should.”        Her Y/E/C eyes were now open and had a defiant look in them. “Yet here we are.”        “Yet here. We. Are,” he accentuated each word with a kiss.        And what was so weird to the Loki watching what undoubtedly were Y/N’s memories, was the pure love her felt radiating off from them. No animosity, no scheming or underlying negative intent. When she gazed up at him, all he could feel was love.        Loki retracted with a gasp clutching his arm to himself as if it had been singed, while Y/N balled up in a fetal position, fingers quickly burying themselves in her hair.        “Just please,” her voice cracked. “I need it. I need it to make everything better… I couldn’t save you then… let me do something good for once.”        Loki didn’t respond. He just stood there shocked and… and hurt. Hurt because the girl on the ground was weeping and weeping for him. Hurt because she looked like a fractured vase ready to crumble at the softest touch. Hurt because somehow someway the two of them would meet, fall in love, and, once again, he’d ruin something so precious.        “I don’t want to hurt you,” Y/N gritted with a tearstained face, but with such defiance in her features, it took Loki aback as she finally glanced back at him, standing up on sure feet. “But I will if I have to.”        “Why didn’t you use your powers on me?”        That was not the question Y/N expected Loki to ask. In fact, she hadn’t used her powers ever since Thanos, so the only way he could know that was if he had felt them in her memories. Back then she’d have no problems surrounding the both of them in a telekinetic bubble to keep the world away.        “ ‘M a bit rusty,” Y/N gritted and steadied herself again, “but I’m also desperate. So, I’ll do what I have to.”        With that said, glimmering silver threads started to weave up and down her veins right to the middle of her forearms. It felt good to let loose, but after having bottled everything up for so long, Y/N was afraid she might explode. Though, if that was the cost, she’d pay it.        Just as the blood vessels in her eyes turned from red to silver, power now fully encompassing her body, the Asgardian prince suddenly whipped his head to the side to where the Tesseract laid.        “Do you trust me?” Loki asked, and as he said that, his eyes turned from the blue hue they’d assumed while under the power of the Mind stone into his jade orbs. It was like a punch into Y/N’s guts for she was looking into the eyes where her home was. So similar yet so different.        “You? Not really, no.”        But he just rolled his eyes like her Loki used to. With both of his hands raised, he moved closer to the cube. “Don’t,” he glanced at Y/N as she twisted her palm upwards ready to strike. “I promise I’m not going to flee. I swear… on my Mother.”        With those words all will to fight left her, her powers pushed back into that bottle where she’d hidden them. Because Loki might’ve been the god of lies, but he would never break a promise he’d vowed to keep on his Mother.        Y/N watched as he cautiously took the final steps to the Tesseract and lifted it from the ground. And though she expected to have to fight him for it, Loki marched towards her and extended his free hand.        “Trust me on this one. That’s all I’m asking.”        His green eyes bore into hers so deeply Y/N felt her heart breaking once again. Just like it had when she had stared at her lover in his final moments of defiance before they ceased to sparkle forever.        She wasn’t even fully in control of her own body when her hand slid in his cold one, and, once again, they were transported to somewhere else. Instant warmth from all around surrounded Y/N as she beheld green vines wrapped around marble pillars, and a nightlight sky full of stars.        Y/N was about to ask Loki where he’d taken her, but next to her stood not a tall man, but a slender woman with hair down to her waist. For a second, Y/N was dumbfounded as she scanned over the expanse of the garden, in search for Loki before she realized that woman was Loki. That’s when she remembered his shapeshifting abilities were more than just snakes and ravens.        “You know, it’s a good thing you never assumed your female form while with me.”        “Really?” she smirked, but Y/N could see the underlying uncertainty in his face. “How so?”        “Because somehow I can guarantee you would wear my clothes, and I was not prepared for you to look better in them than me. You always had trouble with asking for things… And you were out of my league as a dude, so as a woman I’d have no chance.”        Her shoulders instantly dropped, and Loki ushered them to start moving.        “Where are we, by the way? Just curious.” Y/N piped up as they ventured towards two grand oak doors with intricate designs before being swept inside by the moving crowd. The large hall they’d entered was nothing short of grandiose.        Huge tables were set up in long lines where people feasted on all imaginable things whether fruits, meats or vegetables. Everything and anything your heart could desire could be found on them. And the people were no different.        The shapes and sizes did not matter, nor did the colour of their skin because each and every person was dressed in jewel encrusted and gold-thread lined clothes, their hairs up and loose in different styles, each more intricate than the other.        But nothing matched the place itself. The warmth it radiated was not only physical form the ginormous hearths lining the sides of the room, but also emotional. It was welcoming and endearing. With the yellow light that surrounded them, stars shining through a cupola right above them, Y/N never wanted to leave this place. And how could she when right at the far side of the room by a table that stood higher than anyone else’s, her Loki sat and drank?        “Loki?”        Despite the fact that her voice was not raised but at a normal level, despite the roars of laughter of the rest in the room, instantly his head snapped up from where he had been leaning to the side listening in on what a gorgeous woman was telling him.    His green eyes widened in disbelief, and for a minute both just remained as they were – Y/N frozen in the middle of the aisle, and Loki sitting on the gilded chair. Then he was up and jumping over the table running towards her.        The wind got knocked out from both of them as their bodies collided. They were crying, rivers flowing from their eyes as they trembled in the others grasp. For Y/N, it might have been five years, but for Loki, although it was a split second, it felt like an eternity. Any moment without her was too long in his already centuries-long life.        “I love you,” Y/N instantly said grabbing onto his cheeks and pulling back, completely not believing he was there, but she would not let go of this moment. “I love you and I’m not wasting another second. I didn’t get a chance to say it before, but now, knowing this might be it forever, I’m… I’m not going to let this slip. I love you, I’m in love with you, all of that and above.”        “I – you,” Loki couldn’t form any words, green eyes frantically taking in every inch of Y/N’s face. His body screamed at him to never let go, to wrap his arms around her and pull her flush to him. To become and remain as one. But the only thing he could do was ask, “how are you here?”        “He won, Loki.”        “What?”        “Thanos,” Y/N sighed and shook her head, “he won. He got the rest of the stones, snapped his fingers and wiped out half the universe.”        “S-so you’re gone as well?” the question was barely audible. There was such pain in his eyes and such guilt, Y/N instantly knew what he was thinking of – I failed, and this is my fault. Even sacrificing everything wasn’t enough. I failed you, and you’re dead because of me.        “No,” she grabbed his face between her palms, “no… I’m… still alive… Even if I was… you know… dead, I don’t think, I’d be here, in Valhalla and such… actually, it’s been five years since then. And now we’re on a time heist.”        His black eyebrow raised in a sleek arch. “A time heist?”        “Well, that’s what Scott calls it.”        “Who’s Scott?”        “Ant-Man.”        “Ant-Man?”        “It’s,” Y/N huffed, “it’s a long story. But basically, the stones are in the past, so we’re here to get them so we can undo the Snap.”        His hand had remained on her waist the whole time, but the second she mentioned the Snap it tightened its grip. “Then how did you end up here?”        “I uh,” Y/N smirked and shook her head looking down at the ground, “I met someone along the way.”        Loki’s heart shattered at the words, but he willed himself to smile. It had been five years for her, and the only thing in his life that he found had meaning, was her happiness. Sure, he wanted it to be him, but he couldn’t blame Y/N for trying to move on.        “They’re really great if they allowed this opportunity,” his slender finger brought her chin up, and their eyes met once again. “But I don’t think they’d like it if you professed your love for someone else.”        Y/N’s eyebrows scrunched up, and her mouth opened but no words escaped her. She couldn’t understand what Loki was talking about, but then it dawned on her, and she had to hold off the snort that threatened to escape.        “No,” she shook her head, “I don’t think he’d mind much. He’s…. a bit brash right now, a bit self-centred… and frankly quite the asshole.”        She could feel the other Loki bristle from somewhere behind them, but Y/N’s lips pulled in a soft smile.        “But underneath that, I know there’s a good person with a broken heart. And that they just crave a bit of love. So no, I don’t think you’d mind much if I told you I loved you.”        “Wha-“ but Loki didn’t finish his sentence as the puzzle pieces settled in place. Time heist. Past. The stones. Undoubtedly New York and the Tesseract. Which meant he himself was somewhere in Valhalla in disguise with the blue cube and had brought her here to him.        A tear slipped down his cheek, and Y/N wiped it away with her calloused thumb. Too many battles stood between the soft woman he'd met and the hardened warrior in front of him. Not that she couldn’t hold herself before, but now he could see too many harsh edges on her… too many for her to ever have.    “I’m one lucky man, aren’t I? To have such a kind soul give her all to me?”    “And I’m one lucky girl to have you trust her with your heart.”        “You know,” he swallowed hard, “that whatever happens, I can’t come with you, and I won’t come back after you snap your fingers…” a tear rolled down Loki’s cheek, and with a sad smile, Y/N wiped it away. “I wasn’t one of the decimated.”        “I know. But at least we got this. At least now you know I love you.”        “I already did, darling. You didn’t need to say it. I could see it in everything you did for me, and never,” he made sure the last word was hard and strong and sure, “have I doubted it. I love you too.”        “I’m so sorry I couldn’t save you,” Y/N murmured in the crook of his neck, hot tears splashing against his chilled skin.        “Had you tried to do anything, you would’ve succumbed to the same fate. And I could never exist knowing I was the cause of it.”        Y/N sniffled shaking her head. “I mean you wouldn’t be. It’d be my own stupidity, but whatever.”        The rumble, however, broken it was, seeped out from his bones into hers, if only for a moment reminding her of the good times they’d spent together. Of all the laughter they’d shared, and had now been granted another moment.        Y/N felt someone approach, and right as she pulled her head away from Loki’s chest, a perfectly manicured hand settled on his shoulder.    “My son,” a woman with golden tresses and the kindest smile Y/N had ever seen stood next to them. “Is she the one?”        The girl pulled back completely and wiped her suddenly sweaty palms against the tactical suit only to dirty them more with the soot that covered it.        “It’s uh very nice to meet you. I’d say it’s absolutely lovely, but given the circumstances, I really can’t.”        “Can’t say I’m too happy about the circumstances either, but to finally meet the woman who’s been taking care of my son’s heart, is a pleasure,” Frigga responded with a gentle grin.        Loki’s palm briefly tightened around Y/N’s waist before he slid it down to grab her hand in his. One last second.        “Loki’s been talking about you a lot.”        Y/N sniffled and wiped away a tear. “Hope only bad things. That way I have a higher chance to impress.”        Frigga sighed and shook her head. “Just the good ones, I’m afraid.”        “And here I thought I could woo your mother,” Y/N chuckled, but everyone around them could hear how forced the levity was. She was just about to give her final final goodbyes when someone coming forth from the crowd startled her.        She had turned back into her male-Loki form, given how there was no point in hiding anymore. Y/N had practically spelt it out that it was him who had brought them to Valhalla with the Tesseract, and no illusion would ever fool Frigga.    “Y/N?” he asked looking at the Tesseract in his hands, teeth gnawing on his bottom lip. “Approximately after how much time do we meet after New York?”        “Give or take a couple of years, why?”        “If I go back,” and now the younger Loki was looking at the possible incarnation of his older self and the woman, “will we meet for certain?”        “Loki,” Y/N went up to him detaching from her lover’s grasp. “If you go back if you do as my Loki did… you’ll most likely succumb to the same fate…” tenderly she placed both her palms on his cheeks and made him keep his gaze on her. “You have a chance to leave all this behind. Ditch that damned Tesseract, and live out your life. Because Thanos won’t stop. Not now, not ever. That’s why we’re trying to undo everything. You go back, and you’ll die.”        For a second the 2012 Loki seemed to rethink everything especially as his eyes drifted to where his older counterpart stood next to his mother. And a relieved sort of smile came over his face. “Somehow, that fate doesn’t seem so bad. Especially if only for a moment I get to have a happy life… if only for a moment I get to know you… because even death doesn’t seem to keep you away from me.”        Y/N snorted and rolled her eyes, punching Loki in the arm before pulling him into a hug. “I probably shouldn’t be saying this but just so you know,” she mumbled, “when we first meet, I beat the shit out of you.”        “You kinda already did,” Loki’s grip tightened before letting go.        “Oh no,” her Loki approached the two, “what she did to you – me? – was nothing. Trust me… or yourself… I guess? This is all so very confusing.”        Reluctantly Y/N turned back to her Loki, letting her forehead rest against his chest.        “I wish we had more time,” he whispered hiding his nose in her hair and gently stroking the locks. They were shorter and dryer than he remembered. As if she hadn’t had a single moment to take care of herself. Or hadn’t wanted to.        “I know,” Y/N gulped and released a shuddering breath keeping the sobs away. “But I’ve learned to be grateful even for the smallest of moments… and this was more than I ever hoped to have. I just wish whenever I die, I could come here,” Y/N whimpered, “to you… I could come home.”        “Nothing and no one will ever replace you, and every second without you, my love, is Hel. You are my everything. Don’t forget that.”        “Somehow this love declaration,” Y/N sniffled, “isn’t making me feel any better. I don’t want you to be miserable.”        Loki tilted his head to the side but smiled. “You made sure that I knew perfection through you, so it’s kind of your fault,” and before she could rebut, his lips were on hers. For the first time in five years, they were on hers once again. And Y/N was not about to let him go that easily.        The thought that people were all around them was completely thrown to the wind, and she grabbed at the hairs on the nape of Loki’s neck and brutally yanked his head closer, making him moan into the kiss. The touch of their lips was already messy from all the tears, but when his tongue snaked its way into Y/N’s mouth, she completely melted, to the point he had to keep her body against his as tightly as possible to prevent her from collapsing to the ground.        “I don’t want to go,” she choked back once both came up for some air, “I don’t want to leave you.”        “But you have to.” He hated the words that left his mouth. If it was up to Loki, he’d grab Y/N by her waist have her wrap her legs around his, and he’d go to ends of Valhalla to spend an eternity with her. But alas, that was not in their cards. “Make everything right. Bring everyone home.”        And Y/N nodded, not daring to look up at him because she knew she’d completely break if she did. Without a glance back, she grabbed onto the hand of 2012 Loki and nodded at him to do it. To open the portal. But he didn’t.        “You said that Thanos won… and now you went back in time to undo what he did…” 2012 Loki seemed lost in thought as he chewed on his lip before uttering, “What if there was a possibility both of you could return? I mean, I did bring you here,” Loki gave Y/N a pointed look and flipped the Tesseract in his hand. “What makes it that he can’t walk out with you?”        “In theory, that’s all fine and dandy, but that is the Space stone, not the Time stone. If we’d return anywhere that would most likely be back to 2012, but I need to get back to 2023, and this,” Y/N pointed at the Stark-designed bracelet, “is the only way. We travel through the quantum realm, and I only have enough Pym particles for one jump let alone another bracelet.”        “So, you get back to 2012, travel to whatever time you need to get more of those particles, get Stark to create another bracelet, and you’re set to go.”        “It’s not that simple,” Y/N exasperated. “First of all, I have no idea when Pym invented them. Second of all, if I get stuck there, I literally have no way to get back apart from staying there and growing old, most likely creating a new timeline as is, and that would fuck up a whole bunch of things for me.”        “Y/N,” 2012 Loki’s voice was low and gentle. Soothing almost. “Are you su-“        “Just do it,” she hissed, red-rimmed eyes boring into his. “Just take me back.”        And there was nothing else to it. With a bowed head, Y/N awaited for that pull she’d felt while they’d been flung through space the first time, and a couple of seconds later they were back in Stark tower, though now it was a secluded enough room, most likely a storage area instead of the crowded lobby.        “So,” Loki looked over his shoulder to spot any guards and then back to Y/N, “this is it, huh?”        She lifted her shoulders and then dropped them with a deep huff. “I guess so. I still mean it by the way,” she wiped away a tear. “That you’re an asshole.”        Loki smirked twirling the Tesseract in his hand. “Noted.”        “Miss Y/L/N?” a voice she hadn’t heard in years popped onto the speakers. Y/N and Loki both dropped to the ground crouching behind the wall, and his head turned to the side as her breath hitched.        The voice was uncertain as if he couldn’t understand what was going on, but it was really him.        “Hey, J.A.R.V.I.S. How are ya’?”    “I’m quite alright, Miss, but may I ask, what are you doing with the prisoner? You know your father and the Avengers are looking for him.”        Loki’s face turned into a sneer, and Y/N had to put an arm out in front of him, so he didn’t do anything stupid like give away their position of where they were hiding if for whatever reason someone was down there.        “Yeah, I do, bud, but here’s the thing…” she bit on her lip. Dad would kill her. “I think both you and I know something’s going on.”        There was a pause, as J.A.R.V.I.S contemplated her words. “Yes, I think I do. Given how my scans showed there were two Mr Starks in the building as well as two Captain Rogers and an undefined male the size of an ant, I’m quite certain that other things than the attack are going on as well.”        Y/N smiled, looking up at the ceiling. “You were always the clever one out of all of us.”        “I’m an A.I. Miss,” and even though his voice was levelled, she could hear the sarcasm slip through, “I do know everything.”        “Yeah, you do,” Y/N whispered and glanced at Loki who was just observing the interaction. His eyebrow raised in question.        “Ok,” she finally said. “Here’s the deal – you need to keep this information to yourself. No matter what dad says or does, do not let him know this. I’m pretty certain you know there’s another Banner in the city as well, but I need you to keep the last half an hour under lock and key and throw it in the ocean. For everyone’s sakes.”        J.A.R.V.I.S’s answer came a second later. “And when Mr Stark asks me to replay the footage for the debrief?”        “Just,” Y/N shrugged, “act as if we were never here. A.K.A – erase the parts were there suddenly showed up duplicates of people. And when I get out of here, that as well, please?”        “I can, Miss, but first you’ll have to get past the S.H.I.E.L.D guards situated on each floor as well as the STRIKE team.”        “Mhm,” and then something went off in her mind. “Speaking of S.H.I.E.L.D – you might want to dig a bit deeper into what you found on the Hellacarrier.”        “And what would I presumably find there?”        “Oh you know,” Y/N waved J.A.R.V.I.S off like it was nothing, “some little tidbits of hidden Hydra members within S.H.I.E.L.D.”        “That is… truly interesting.”        “Indeed,” Y/N nodded along. In a way, she was trying to prolong every second she could spend in this timeline, because no matter the fact it wasn’t her Loki, it was Loki one way or another.        “Don’t you need to go?” he motioned with his head to the bracelet that sat snugly against her knuckles. And she did, actually. She had to find Tony, Steve and Scott and explain what the hell had happened when some words spoken to her before wouldn’t leave her mind.        “J.A.R.V.I.S, buddy,” Y/N spoke looking up to Loki. “Can you help me with a little science project?”

***

       His heart had shattered five years ago when he’d had his final look on Y/N’s face to engrain every detail in his mind before Thanos snapped his neck. This – her having been in Valhalla and having had those few moments with her - hurt more.        Loki was just about to walk away, his mother wiping away the tears that streamed down his cheeks when the Tesseract portal opened once again, and his 2012 version stepped out with Y/N.        “This is your choice,” she held up a second bracelet, twin to the one on her own hand. “But we might need your help in whatever happens.”        She was visibly shaking, fingers holding onto the piece of technology with such a tight grip, the leather glove covering her palm looked about to burst.        Loki’s head whipped back to look at Frigga, to maybe see her own face just as stunned as he was, but that was not the case. Just as kind as her smile had been from the beginning, it remained at that moment.        “Go,” she muttered to Loki, before pressing a gentle kiss to her son’s forehead. “Be with the one you love.”        It was the only thing he needed to hear. As much as it hurt to leave his mother behind, he knew there’d come a time the two would be reunited. But this was his time to be with Y/N. A second chance that if let go of, would never return.        Practically sprinting, he grabbed the bracelet from her extended fingers, and he saw how her form sagged with relief, a chocked back sob lumping up somewhere in her throat.        “Oh, and please take care of your brother!” Frigga exclaimed before the three were enveloped in blue-black clouds of smoke, and then they were gone.

***

       Two more seconds, a recalibration of the bracelets, and Loki and Y/N were whisked away from the destruction of 2012 New York and back to the old Avengers compound in 2023.        “Y/N?” Tony was baffled as to how she was back, fully prepared to drown himself in grief as he had thought he’d lost her.        “Brother?” Thor’s breathless whisper to Loki was filled with so much joy it was like he was visibly beaming. But then everyone’s eyes drifted to the empty spot next to Clint.        “Clint, where’s Nat?” Bruce asked stepping forward.        Y/N squeezed Loki’s hand harder. Just by the look on Steve’s face and Clint’s broken soul, she knew the answer.        The archer didn’t even look at them as he stepped off the platform and slammed the stone on the table nearby. “She got the stone.” And he walked out.        Y/N was about to be sick. She was about to throw up right in the middle of the stand, but not before ruining a bunch of punching bags. Her powers screamed at her to be released, to somehow alleviate the anger coursing through her veins, but she pushed everything down, just like she had for five years.        Suddenly, the fact she had Loki with her, that they were together meant little to nothing. Because Nat was gone.        It felt like an exchange. Like it was Y/N’s fault. Selfishly she had thought they could have it all. Keep what they had, and bring back what they’d lost. Those were Tony’s words. But as they repeated themselves through her brain while she stalked away and outside the compound, she couldn’t help the hand that slapped over her mouth.        What was it worth if it meant her family would still be broken in pieces?        “Darling?” her trickster’s soothing voice full of concern came from somewhere behind her, but Y/N wasn’t ready to face him.        “Can you give me a moment?” hoarse words came as her response. “I just need a minute alone.”        “I truly don’t think that’s the be-“        “Please.”        She couldn’t keep it together for much longer, and she sure as hell won’t let him see in that kind of a state. Especially because Y/N blamed her decision for the loss of Nat.        “Just,” she cleared her throat not looking back at him. “Just give me a moment, and I’ll be back inside. Thor probably wants to talk, so you should go to him.”        But Loki turned out to be closer than expected. His cold lips pressed a single kiss to the base of her neck. “I’m always there for you.” With that, he retreated as Y/N had asked. That’s when the dam broke.        She crumpled into a little ball, two trembling palms pressed against her mouth to keep in the sobs inside, as she leaned her head against the wall of the building. And she remained in that same position for a good while just letting grief and pain consume every inch of her body until someone sat down by her.        “What happened?” Tony asked, pulling Y/N into his side. “Are you alright? How is he here? Why is he here?”        “Firstly,” she choked on her own spit before straightening out. His calming touch on her back, easing some of that hurt. They all were hurting. “2012 Hulk was not happy about you making him take the stairs, which lead to us losing the Tesseract, and me jumping to try and get to Loki. Secondly, I’m fine. Thirdly, that is a bit harder and longer to explain. And lastly, because we might need his help.”        “With what?”        “Dad,” she whispered, “we have no idea what could happen to whoever wields the stones. Not only does he have powers that include healing, but he knows more about those things than we do… and he’s in a better condition to explain that to us than Thor, at least right now. Everything that happened was a hard blow on him… he might try and do something stupid.”        She gave him a painful smile because she knew Tony understood she was talking about herself as well. “People might try and do a lot of things out of guilt.”        That’s when Tony’s head cleared. “Like try and snap his fingers?”        “Mhm,” Y/N nodded leaning her head on his shoulder. “Loki might be the only voice of reason to keep him from it.”        “And you?”    “What about me?”        “Will he be enough to keep you from doing something stupid?”        A little lightness settled in her heart. “I’m a Stark. Stupid’s our middle name.”

***

       Just as predicted, once the glove was done and ready to be used, Thor volunteered to be the one to wield it. Despite Tony’s protests saying that he wasn’t in the right condition to do so, despite Steve saying it was okay to let it be someone else, the thunder god would not back down.        Y/N had not spoken to Loki about what had happened to her once outside the compound, but she had been right when talking to her father. He was the only clear voice that could get through his brother’s mind.        “Brother,” Loki spoke looking into Thor’s eyes that had tears in them as he so desperately was trying to push his way to the gauntlet. “Let this one go. Please.”        “Just,” Thor smashed his fist against Loki’s chest but there was no fight left in him. “Just let me do one good thing. Let me bring them back.”        “You’ve done enough, brother,” Loki’s voice soothed him. “Let someone else do the fighting for once.”        One final weak punch against his chest, but Thor backed down, and Bruce stepped up.        What happened next was a blur. Bruce dawned the gauntlet, he snapped his fingers, Loki dropping to his knees next to Tony as they applied what healing medicine and magic, they knew. Scott made everyone notice how there was suddenly much more life outside, and Clint’s phone rang, his wife on the other side of the line. Then everything was blown up.        Quite literally, a barrage of bombs obliterated the compound, sending everyone every which way. Y/N had enough of a mind to surround herself in a ball of telekinetic shield as she plummeted towards the hole in the ground, debris and rubble settling on top of her while rushing water quickly filled up the space.        She had no idea where anyone else was. Y/N could hear voices speak through the comms, what sounded like Tony trying to wake up Steve, and Rhodey was calling for help somewhere not far from where she herself was stuck, but there was so much ringing in her head, it took all of her concentration to keep the shield up to not get crushed by the tons of concrete about to fall on her head, Y/N couldn’t respond to the people calling to check if she was alright.        Her comms crackled before they completely gave out. Y/N was on her own.

***

       Not only was everything down below the rushing waters and rubble chaos, but on the up as well. Thanos was back and stronger than ever. As Steve, Tony and Thor went against the Mad Titan much as they had half a decade ago, even without the stones, it seemed so much dier.        He was practically invincible, his double-edged sword slashing at Steve’s shield with such vigour that he felt it in his teeth.        “Okay, Thor,” Tony announced seeing Thanos fling Steve away. “Hit me.”        Thor smashed both Mjolnir and Stormbreaker together and with a yell, directed the lightning to the wing-like opening of Tony’s suit which he instantly charged up with, and shot Thanos with all of his repulsors. But even that would not take him down.        As Thor swung Mjolnir at Thanos, and Tony charged to deliver another hit, the Mad Titan managed to grab the Iron Man suit, and used it as a human shield, properly knocking the genius out.        Thanos’s smirk widened as Thor came his way, ready to deliver the killing blow, his battle axe pointed at his neck, but one little misstep, and he had the upper hand over the Asgardian. With a wicked grin, he grasped onto the handle of the weapon made specifically to kill him and pushed Stormbreaker deeper and deeper into Thor’s chest. Right as it was about to pierce the god’s skin, Mjolnir flew into Thanos’s face.        Everyone was blindsided for a moment making the two conscious Avengers and the purple nutsack turn their heads to the side.        With unreal rage shining in her green eyes as she stared down the Thanos, Nat lifted her head. And then a devilish smirk pulled up the corner of her lip. A smile that made even the Mad Titan bristle.        “I’m always picking up after you boys, huh?”        She didn’t give him even a second to recuperate before swinging the hammer right up into his jaw, making the alien fly backwards.        “I knew it,” Thor’s brilliant grin was such a stark contrast to the scene around them, it almost felt out of place. Almost.        “Guess we got the answer to that age-old question?” a teary-eyes Steve limped towards Nat, his heart bursting at the seams. He always knew she was worthy, despite her past. None of theirs was clean, but it wasn’t about that. It was about doing everything to right those wrongs. And Natasha was the purest form of that.        “Guess we did,” Nat smirked and twirled the hammer in her hand before rotating around herself and smashing it against the shield where Steve had crouched down and lifted it above his head.        But the rejoicing didn’t last long. Thanos once again got the upper hand. With Tony still out, F.R.I.D.A.Y desperately trying to wake her boss up, Nat flung against the wall and stunned, and Thor slammed so hard against the ground he could feel his rib crack, it was just the Captain left standing.        Slash after slash after slash Thanos practically destroyed Steve’s shield before throwing him away. He looked at the jagged edges of the symbol of freedom. Something that symbolized what Captain America was; now shattered and broken. But even then, he stood up.        Swaying and barely able to hold on his feet, Steve was ready to face Thanos, no matter if he had help and his family by his side or alone. He was still that same kid from Brooklyn who didn’t know when to back out of a fight. And this was the fight of their lives.        He’d been afraid a few times in his life, stubbornness mostly making him disregard the queasy feeling in his stomach. The first time was when he stood up to a bully at school. He was way bigger than Steve, and the blond knew he’d get a pummeling. The second time he was truly afraid again was when he lost Bucky. When he was clutching to that side of the train and watched as his best friend fell to his death, and Steve could do nothing.        Putting that plane in the ocean was another one. He’d prepared himself for death, to be knocked out immediately, but that was not true. Instead, Steve, with horror flushing through his body, realized that permanent sleep would not come for a while. So, he’d laid down on the ground and waited. All he remembers after that is cold.        Waking up in a different century without anyone to hold on for support was another one. Then finding out Bucky had been alive this whole time tortured and under the control of Hydra one more. The breaking apart of his makeshift family and cluelessness as to what to do now, another. Thanos. And now the purple grape once more.        But his army was no match for what they’d fought in Wakanda. This was a universe against one man. Yet even through that, even with his body screaming for him to stop, Steve fastened the belts of his shield tighter to his arm and faced the oncoming onslaught.        And then…        “Cap, you hear me?”        His comms crackled once more.        “Cap, it’s Sam. Can you hear me?”        His heart sped up.        “On your left.”        Slowly, not wanting to believe the voice ringing through the communication system, Steve turned to his left only to see bright orange sparks fly in a circular motion. And then it spread. With each passing heartbeat, it grew wider and wider and then, as tears of joy and relief flew down Steve’s cheeks, as he saw Tony finally regain consciousness and Thor and Nat all sat up from the ground, Sam flew into the air.        He flew in a sharp U-turn motion around Steve before back inside the portal, Shuri, T’Challa and Okoye leading the Wakandan army. It was a message to Thanos form the family he’d taken and but was now back. Don’t you dare touch him.        Fear morphed into hope as more and more portals opened, and he saw Bucky and Groot exit, he saw people and creatures he didn’t know join the fight, sky splitting apart and letting space ships stand their ground against Thanos as well.        The universe. He hadn’t just pissed off Earth, Steve remembered. He’d fucked with the whole damned universe and now had come the reckoning hour. With a little flinch to the side, Steve watched as Giant Man emerged from the rubble of what used to be his home, but in his palm was more help.        Bruce with Rhodey next to him and Rocket placed on his shoulder all stepped onto the battlefield, while Y/N, her veins and eyes glowing silver, floated herself and Loki next to him.        Steve hadn’t seen her use her powers in so long, he felt physical relief, and when Wanda settled herself next to both her and Loki, the Scarlet Witch’s eyes glowing a blazing red while the trickster’s hands were surrounded by jade swirls, he knew that this time would be different. They had the upper hand.    “Avengers!” he yelled rushing to stand in place as the leader, letting that hope and happiness and rage fuel him as the army made of everyone willing to fight in the whole cosmos had his back. Steve was ready.    “Assemble.”        Repulsors and lightning and the Seidr and so much more blurred together as everyone charged at Thanos.        “How do you wield this thing?” Natasha grunted swinging the hammer at one of the beasts coming her way and taking off its jaw. “It’s horribly balanced.”        “Trust me,” Thor huffed and motioned with his head to Stormbreaker. “This one’s worse.”        “Tasha?” Clint’s voice cracked at the last syllable when he finally emerged from the rubble, and she was the first person he saw. His eyes immediately started watering. Somehow by some impossible force, his redhead was there. And wielding Mjolnir.        For a split second, their eyes met, and Clint was greeted by the widest smile in the universe, but she didn’t get to run and hug her best friend when she was knocked down by a beast, a painful grunt escaping her, but Sam was there and took the hound off its balance and viciously stabbed it in the chest with his wings.        There’d be time to bring her in the tightest hug ever and smack her over the head for what she’d done on Vormir, Clint told himself. He’d make sure of it.        “Cap, what do you want me to do with this damn thing?” he spoke into the comms while dodging the attacks coming his way.        “Get those stones as far away as possible!”        “Wait!” Loki yelled and rushed to get to Clint. “Give me the Gauntlet.”        “Not a chance, Rock of Ages,” the archer extended his sword. The last time the two were in the same room they had not ended on the best of terms. And even though he'd helped bruce after he'd redone the Snap, he still didn't trust the god.        “Oh you, moron,” Loki gritted, making a clone of himself behind Clint. Unfortunately for the Avenger, he wasn’t fast enough, and the raven-haired god snatched the Gauntlet, but despite what Clint expected him to do by pulling the thing on and wielding the stones, he didn’t.        Instead, Loki grabbed the Space Stone. For a moment he was overwhelmed by the pure power it radiated and dropped down to his knee, making Clint have to fend off a few attackers, but then Loki was up, back straight and eyes glowing cobalt blue with a smile that chilled the archer to the core.        “Uh, guys, Witch-boy has the stone.”        “What?” Steve was almost panicking. “Get that thing away from Loki!”        But as Clint was just about to fight with the god once more, he stopped dead in his tracks. As he looked upon the man who once had him under mind control and made him fight his friends, his family, he instead turned around and protected him, with Y/N guarding Loki’s twelve because both in the sky and on the ground two large portals were being opened.    Not the kind the Wizards and Strange had with the glowing orange sparks, but blue-black clouds rolling into themselves as they expanded and glorious rows of golden armoured soldiers came marching out while the silvery gleam of the swords of the Valkyries, the wings of their Pegasus’s glinting in the sunlight of Valhalla took to the skies.    “Thought we might need some help, so I gathered the best of the best. Now,” he said replacing the Infinity stone back into the gauntlet, “get them out of here.”    And never in his life did Clint think he’d be taking an order from Loki, yet there he was nodding and running away.    “No,” Bruce interrupted, “we need to get them back where they came from.”    Y/N grunted and whipped her head around as she barely avoided a lethal slash of a claw. “No way to get them back,” Loki yelled over the commotion and ducked as Tony blasted his repulsor over his head and pulverized an alien. “Thanos destroyed the quantum tunnel.”    But then Scott, as before with his time heist idea brought hope once again. “Hold on! That wasn’t our only time machine!”    And over all of the commotion, everyone heard the annoying sound of his car’s honk.    “Anyone seen an ugly brown van up there?” Steve sprinted up the debris to oversee the field, but the Valkyries had a better advantage point.    “Yes,” Brunhilde managed to reply as she led the charge against the Leviathans, “but you’re not gonna like where it’s parked.”    “Scott, how long do you need to get that thing working?” Tony asked, killing a beast that was about to pounce on Pepper from behind.    Scott shook his head surveying the position he was in and where the van was. “Maybe ten minutes.”    “Get it started,” Steve ordered. “We’ll get the stones to you.”    And with Hope’s confirmation that they were on it, everyone now refocused their attention on protecting the stones and making sure they were delivered to Scott safe and sound.        Though everyone was fighting to the best of their abilities, back to back with strangers as if they’d known one another their whole lives, people still got taken down. One of the beasts had gotten a claw in Bruce’s ruined shoulder and had pushed him to the ground. Brawl overtook his brain part as he tried to fight it off, but it was no use as tons of pressure were put on the wound, pain clouding his whole being until it wasn’t.        Sudden relief and the release of pressure came when Natasha had swung the hammer and dislodged the thing off of Bruce’s body.    “I thought I failed. I – I couldn’t bring you back.” He didn’t even care about the horrible throbbing in his side. Nat was back. She was there, and her palms were on his cheeks, green eyes looking over every inch of his body to see if there were any more injuries.    “But you did, big guy,” Nat crouched down pulling Bruce in a hug. “Just not to here, but where I was – 2014 Vormir. Took me a moment to gather my bearings, and then I jumped back into the quantum tunnel.” She pulled back and gave him a smile. “A split second later Thanos showed up, and I got blown away. Did you really think you’d live your lives without me? In any case, I’d find a way to haunt your asses. I could smell the stupid even from galaxies and years away.”    “Well, as Y/N said,” Tony remarked into the comms. “Stupid’s our family’s middle name.”    “Speaking of stupid,” Loki piped in, “how’s the van going?”    “The system’s fired,” a clearly distressed Hope replied. “Scott’s hotwiring it now.”    A collective ‘fuck’ could be heard ringing through the field. When Y/N got the information, her own comm long ago useless and discarded somewhere under the compound, she felt something in her gut was about to sour.    Whipping her head around, her eyes befell on Wanda pulling Thanos apart limb by limb, the pain from losing her brother years ago and then Vision right in front of her fueling her powers.    In that little moment, Y/N had been distracted, Loki’s hand wrapped around her waist as he flung her to the side, away from the attack of a Leviathan.    “What are you thinking?!” he yelled, terrified that had he been a second too late she’d be dead.    “Thanos-“ but Y/N didn’t have enough time to even finish the sentence when blasters started raining down on them. Even though her instinct was to curl up in a ball and shield her head, that’s how long she hadn’t used her powers, Y/N gathered herself enough to extend her hands upwards much like the sorcerers had and created a shield to protect the ones on the ground.    Each hit against it was like a knife to a part of her body. Loki had grabbed onto her shoulder, pushing his own powers into her veins to help her somehow, but even with their combined strengths, he knew Y/N wouldn’t last long, and neither would he.    The god could feel her fatigue and how each blast slowly but surely depleted more and more of her essence.    “I love you, my darling,” he muttered leaning his head down and kissing her neck. “More than anything.”    And though it was intended to be a goodbye, as he was about to push all of his powers into Y/N to keep her alive, the assault stopped. Instead, the blasters turned their nozzles to the sky and fired there.    She sagged against his side, Loki immediately supporting her weight as everyone watched in confusion as to what they were firing at.    “Does F.R.I.D.A.Y know anything?” Y/N asked still blinded by the smoke that covered the sky.    “Not as fa-“ he started but then the ship was struck by a single blinding beam and brought down in moments crash-landing in the lake. Carol.    “D-Do you know her?” Loki asked clearly bewildered at Y/N’s smiling expression.    “We just might have a chance,” came her simultaneous reply as the Captain said, “Danvers, we need an assist here.”    She was the additional force they needed, but she was also the additional motivation for Thanos to get the stones faster.    As everyone gathered behind to protect Captain Marvel, the glove and in turn Peter Parker from any harm that might come his way, Y/N noticed how Wanda took to the skies with the Valkyries, meaning Thanos knew he could have his shot now. But not if she had any say in it.    Whipping the last bits of her powers around the Mad Titan, Y/N brought him to the ground; pushing so that his elbows and back were flush against the battered earth. She was quickly breaking down, the flame that burned inside of her dwindling like a candle in the wind, but she had enough for one last move. One last sacrifice.    “I love you, Loki,” Y/N whispered to her trickster, watching as he fought a horde of the Outriders, and gave all of herself to the kill.    Proxima Midnight's spear into her shoulder threw her off balance. The pain was unexpected and harsh. Y/N let go of Thanos, and that gave him the chance to throw her away like a ragdoll.    “That’s my kid!” she vaguely heard Tony roar or maybe whisper but there was no time to focus on that. Proxima Midnight was clambering her way towards Y/N, and then again, as she was about to bring her powers to null and give her life in the process, pain shot down from her shoulder all the way to her side, as Loki had grabbed the spear and with lethal accuracy struck Proxima Midnight in the chest.    Y/N was gasping and whimpering from how much everything hurt, but that was nothing compared to the numbing fear that spread once she saw Thanos extend his hand up in the air with their version of the gauntlet on it. Somehow while she was fighting her own battle, he’d gotten the stones. It had all been for nothing.    “I am inevitable,” Thanos grunted, staring down Tony, but when his fingers snapped, when they were supposed to be wiped out from existence, nothing happened.    Y/N didn’t need an explanation as to what was about to happen. She had had a gut feeling of where everything was going right from the get-go but seeing the man that had raised her as his own despite it not being so, seeing her father figure raise his gaze to meet Thanos’s made her heart plummet.    The nanotech pulled the stones upward and settled them against each knuckle with the Soul stone in the middle. Y/N knew this was it. She knew it would be the end. But someone she had never expected to intrude did.    “Stark, take my hand!” Quill yelled as he sprinted towards the genius with an outstretched palm. Everyone but Nebula, Groot, Rocket and Drax seemed confused, as the Guardians were already rushing towards where Tony was kneeling on the ground.    The second Peter’s hand connected to his, both let out gasps – Tony of relief, Peter of strain as the power of the stones rippled through them both. That’s when everyone on the battlefield sprang into action rushing to their sides.    A moment of confusion from Thanos, was enough for the rest of the Avengers to gather and grab onto the extended palms of the Guardian’s, while Y/N clasped onto his right shoulder with Pepper behind her, then Steve, Nat, Clint, Thor and Loki lengthening the line.    The second Bucky took hold of Sam’s hand, was when Thanos realized what was going on. Everyone else was preoccupied with becoming a part of the chain, but not Carol. Scrambling up from the ground, she shot to the Mad Titan mid-run and knocked him over, bringing him into a chokehold, while Strange and the rest of his Wizards created a huge shield around all the heroes and kept the barrage away.    Thanos raised his fist into the air signalling his army to attack while trying to get rid of Carol, but it was no use. As Peter Parker finished off the chain, taking a hold of Bucky’s and then Shuri’s palms, creating a full-on circle with Tony in the middle, Carol had her arms wrapped around Thanos’s neck, pulling him back and throwing him off his balance while Wong, Strange and the rest of the Wizards created shields of magic to guard them.    “And we… are… the Avengers…”    With a final defying smile to Thanos, the monster that had been haunting him for more than a decade in life and in nightmares, Tony snapped his own fingers. The use of the stones made everyone groan as the collective power of them rushed through the connected bodies, but one by one, the army disintegrated before their eyes as did Thanos himself; sitting alone on a piece of debris with a bowed head in defeat.    The moment the deed was done, Tony asked F.R.I.D.A.Y to release his arm, dropping the metal piece with the stones to the ground, relieving everyone and himself from the painful strain.    Y/N’s shoulder started to profusely bleed, more so than it had before, and the last thing she saw before darkness came was the beautiful face of her Loki. If this was it, she was glad they’d had at least those few moments together. And then everything was black.

***

       Never in her life did Y/N think the first thing she’d hear after waking up from a coma would be Tony’s yelling about how irresponsible she was, Pepper’s sobs of how stupid and selfish it was of her to leave them like that and Loki’s incessant pacing, while from time to time he threw her a worried gaze which quickly turned into an icy dagger.    “Wow, what a ‘welcome back, you’re not dead’ greeting this is,” Y/N grumbled and quickly regretted it.    “Don’t start this, missy,” Pepper was beyond furious. “Do you know how scared Morgan was when we brought you here like that? When she saw you bleeding and unconscious?”    “You are so grounded for lying,” Tony piped in from his wheelchair.    “And then that whole time travel thing!” Y/N’s mom continued. “I mean, I get that I can’t stop every idiotic thing your dad does, but you! I thought you had some sense in that brain of yours! And how dare you fall into that coma! Three days!”    Y/N was about to mutter a ‘technically it wasn’t my choice’ but the glare she got from Loki was enough to shut her up. Sure, all the words were harsh and should’ve been breaking her heart left and right, but for her, it was hard to keep the smile away. So, she didn’t.    “And what do you think is so funny?” Tony grunted, annoyance clearly written all over his face. Y/N just shook her head.    “Nothing,” she shrugged and then hissed when her body reminded her something had been jammed pretty harshly in her shoulder. “Just that I love you too. All of you.”    That stopped Pepper’s ranting and Loki’s pacing.    “I love you too, sweetheart,” Pep instantly replied, and threw her body against Y/N’s, pulling her in for as tight of a hug her daughter could handle.         “You just scared all of us so bad.”    “I know,” she muttered, looking over at her dad and then Loki. “I’m sorry. But to be fair,” she mumbled into Pep’s shoulder, “dad did an even stupider thing.”    The older woman laughed and pulled back wiping away her tears and the tears that had spilt down Y/N’s own cheeks. “Trust me, he already heard every single thing on my mind about that stunt he pulled.”    “And you couldn’t wait for me to wake up because…?”

***

   It took everyone a couple more days to recuperate, but once everyone was back on their feet or as healed as they could be by that point, Tony and Pepper invited everyone to their lakeside house to their vow renewal. Y/N’s arm hung in a sling as she stood with Morgan clutching on her dress as their parents recited the promise to love and care for one another for the rest of their lives.    Nobody tried to hide their tears, letting them flow freely, because for the first time in a long while, they were from joy, and everyone had decided to embrace the feeling to the fullest extent.        As Happy led Morgan inside the house, with the promise of burgers, and Tony and Pepper went to the side to talk to Clint and his family for a bit, Y/N found herself wandering off to the lake.        The water was still a bit chilly, definitely not warm enough for swimming, but she had no problem putting her feet in it and letting the liquid ripple around her ankles. Loki found her just like that – surrounded by tranquillity and peace.        “Do you think he did it?” Y/N asked her head leaning against Loki’s shoulder as she surveyed the calm waters once he had sat down next to her on the little dock.        He had conjured up a full-on black suit, and she’d be lying if she said that outfit didn’t do things to her.        “Who did what?”        “You… or younger you. Do you think he went back and let himself be taken to Asgard, despite what I said would happen?”        “If he knows what’s good for him,” Loki’s cold finger lifted her chin up to look at him, “then yes.”        His lips brushed against hers with the last spoken words before he pressed them fully to Y/N’s. So long had they been deprived of one another’s love, he had become so touch starved in what had been single moments without her, it was insane. But he’d have to endure it a bit more.        “Ok, you two, knock it off,” Tony’s voice interrupted their peaceful moment. The whizz of his wheelchair was practically silent. “I don’t wanna see you shove your tongue down my daughter’s throat. If it was up to me, it’d be cut out from your mouth.”        “Dad!”        “You’re my child!” he exasperated. “It’s my duty to scare off any potential boyfriend, let alone someone like him.”        “In times like these, I really wanna play the ‘I’m adopted’ card,” Y/N huffed but pulled back from Loki and stood up to face her father.        “Adopted or not,” a stern finger was thrown her way. “You’re still my kid.”        And those words, the fact that he had always thought of her that way, the fact that when they’d seen one another after years apart, and his first reaction had been to cry and never let go, made something in her heart break.        “Promise?” Y/N tried her best to hide the husk in her voice. “That I’ll always be your kid?”        Tony’s rough palm grasped her own. Years of mechanical work had turned the once soft skin into coarse and blistered one, but the touch was as gentle as ever. “Even when I’m grey and old.”        Y/N snorted. “You already are.”        That made Tony scoff and pull his wheelchair away. “You sure we’re not blood-related?”        “Would that make a difference?”        “None whatsoever, bug,” came his immediate reply.        Loki had been standing to the side watching the interaction between the two. So much had happened from when he tried to take over New York to where they were now, and it was insane to think how much would still change. Though he could feel that Tony didn’t have the warmest of feelings towards him, no need for magic to figure that one out, Loki didn’t think there was any hatred either.        “Can I just,” he suddenly interrupted making the eyes of the two Starks flit up to him, so different yet the same. “I just… I want to apologize. For what happened in New York.”        “Which part?” Tony snarked back. “The one where you threw me out the window of my own tower or the one where you tried to enslave Earth.”        “Uhh… both?” Loki’s eyebrows raised and he gave Y/N a ‘help me’ look, but she just smiled and shook her head.        Tony sighed rolling his eyes. “Look. I’m not going to pretend that I’m okay with this cause, I’m not… but for whatever reason,” he gave Y/N a pointed look, “you mean a lot to my daughter. And during these five years, I’ve come to an understanding about it. Doesn’t mean I was or am happy about it… but I think at this point we’ve all been through enough shit to put the past in the past. So, truce?”        He extended his hand towards Loki. It was an open palm for him to grasp, but there was so much more lying underneath that single gesture. It was saying ‘I trust you with my daughter's heart. I’m willing to put my own hurt somewhere else for her happiness.’ It was also ‘If you ever dare hurt her in any way – emotional or otherwise – this will be the same hand that breaks your neck.        But Loki, after a moment of hesitation, of disbelief, grasped Tony’s palm and squeezed it. “Truce.”        “Okay, good,” the genius nodded his head and rolled back his chair a bit. “But if you start calling me dad, I’ll nuke you into space.”        Loki pressed his lips together in a thin line, but everyone could see the smile he was attempting to suppress. “Duly noted.”        As the god and the mortal conversed and were actually having a somewhat decent time, Y/N’s eyes drifted over the expanse of the field. It was surreal to have everyone there and to have met all the people that in one way or another had impacted their lives even if she hadn’t known of them.        For example – Peter Parker aka Spider-Man. He was holding Morgan in his lap and talking to Happy and Pepper, though everyone could see the chauffer’s fluttering gaze towards his Aunt May.        He had been the reason Tony had not been able to throw away Scott’s idea of time travel completely. He’d made such a huge impact in his life, Tony had almost sacrificed everything for his family. And Peter most likely would never know that. The guilt would be too much to handle, as Y/N still saw the pain flash through his eyes whenever his brown orbs dropped to the wheelchair Tony was bound to. So, her dad would keep it to himself.        Then there was Nat. A double agent with a heart you couldn’t trust that had become the soul of their group. Clint hadn’t let go of her hand or waist or any kind of contact with his best friend. Sure, he sorta had to when Steve had swept in after the battle and kissed the living daylights out of her, but the archer was sure to be at least in a ten feet radius of his fiery counterpart.        Bruce had Nathaniel on his shoulders as all of them talked, smiles that hid the horrors they’d faced adorned their features, but if for one day all of them could pretend that everything was perfect.        Almost.        As Y/N surveyed the scene, she saw Steve peck Nat’s cheek and run off to the side while Bruce took the giggling kid off his shoulders and set him beside his dad.        “It’ll only take a few seconds,” Steve replied to Nat whose arms were crossed as she chewed the bottom of her lip. “You won’t even notice that I’m gone.”        That’s when it hit Y/N – the stones still needed to be replaced. Without a word, to her dad or Loki, she detached from the trio and rushed to the makeshift platform.        “Just to warn you,” Nat bristled a bit, “you might not like what you find on Vormir.”        “I already hate that place without being there. I don’t think there’s much that would make it even worse than it being where you…” he gestured vaguely towards her form. “You know… you did that… thing that we’re not gonna mention out loud.”        A small smile tugged up at Nat’s lips. “Point taken, soldier. But just trust me on this one. You’re not gonna like what you’ll see.”       Giving Nat one last glance, that said ‘okay?’, Steve readied himself to make the jump again, Mjolnir, the suitcase with the stones and his old combat gear on. He double tapped the bracelet, and the red-white suit embraced him,     but not before Y/N stopped what they were doing.        “Hey, Steve?” she called to him, jogging up to the platform and making him remove the helmet.        “Yeah, bug?”        “Can I uh can I join you?”        That took Loki by surprise as he had run after her pretty much the second, she disappeared from his grasp. “Darling?”        “Don’t worry,” she gave him a quick peck, stroking his jaw and then went to snatch a second bracelet from Bruce. “I’ll be back in a minute. You won’t even notice that I was gone, I just have to do one thing.”        “And can I know what that thing is?”        Y/N hummed but shook her head. “Nope… I just… don’t wanna say anything unless it doesn’t work.” She gave him a half-smile, one last kiss on the lips and jogged back to where Steve stood.        “You two ready?” Bruce asked calibrating the machine up.        “Ready,” they replied in unison the last syllable masked by the suits morphing around their bodies.        “Making the jump in three…” Bruce started the countdown, and Loki crossed his arms.        “Two…”        The prince bit the inside of his cheek. She’ll be back.        “One…”        And then they were gone. In the stroke of lightning, both Y/N and Steve disappeared into the Quantum realm.        “Bringing them back in five seconds,” Bruce announced pretty much immediately, and Loki prepared himself for the most agonizing five seconds of his life. Five seconds from that moment would determine whether she decided to stay, or if she had failed to replace the stones, or worse – she was gone as a whole. And he didn’t know if he could take it.        “… two, one,” the scientist's voice reverberated through the Asgardian’s mind, and then they were back. But instead of happy and satisfied smiles, he was greeted with Steve’s furious tone.        “What the fuck was that, Y/N?”        “Whoa, language, Cap,” she chuckled and hopped off the platform.        “Don’t,” he pointed a finger at her. “Don’t start. You just decide to fuck off to who-knows-when without a single word?”        “Look, I just made a little detour to 2012, what’s the big deal?”        Before Steve could go further with his scolding, her boyfriend interrupted saving her from another onslaught of berating.        “So, you went back to check on me?” Loki’s eyebrow was raised in amusement as if he was not breaking down on the inside from relief that Y/N was back in his arms.        “You know, not everything is about you,” she bumped her hip with his. “Sometimes it’s about Tony.”        That definitely made the genius’s head perk up.    “Of course. Didn’t you know, everything’s about me?” Tony remarked, and Pepper, Steve and Nat all simultaneously rolled their eyes. “Wait, why is everything about me? Not that I’m complaining but I’d like to know what I’m being accused of first.”        “Actually, nothing this time,” Y/N smirked and moved towards him. “In fact, I wanna give you something. Can you uh, disable F.R.I.D.A.Y just for a moment though?”        Tony’s eyebrows furrowed but he did as asked.        With a tap against his right shoulder where the Iron Man arm was attached instead of a sling, a little port opened up, and Y/N stuck a flash drive into the slot. It took a moment for things to fire up, but when they did Tony’s heart jumped to his throat.        “Sir?”        And that’s when Steve realized what had happened.        “J.A.R.V.I.S?” Tony’s voice wavered in disbelief, and the eyes of the rest of the Avengers widened. Wanda upon hearing the familiar tone even went closer. Y/N thought she saw her mouth ‘Vis�� with furrowed eyebrows, but when there was nobody, the witch stopped in her tracks.        With glistening eyes, Tony looked up at her. “Why did you do that?”        Y/N shrugged, keeping her own tears at bay, but when he tugged on her hand and she sat down in his lap, she just burrowed her head in the crook of his neck. Tony just held onto her tighter. “He’s part of your family. Our family. And this time no one gets left behind.”        “I’m a bit out of the loop here, sir,” J.A.R.V.I.S.’s warm voice floated around them, making Y/N sniffle. “Would you please hook me up to the internet or just explain what is going on? For some reason, the connection has been lost.”        “Sure, thing buddy…” Tony dragged a hand down his face and placed the other one on Pepper’s palm that had grabbed his shoulder, leaning his cheek against it. His heart had never been this full in his entire life. Sure, there was a piece in Vision missing, but he was pretty sure if he worked together with Shuri and Wanda, they’d be able to get figure out a way to bring him back.    “It’s good to have you back, buddy,” he replied, clearing his voice once it cracked, and kissed Pepper’s hand in content.        “I was never gone, sir.”        And at that moment, it didn’t feel like the A.I. was saying, ‘I was never gone simply because Ultron never happened’. It was him saying ‘I’ve always been with you. You can’t get rid of me that easily.’        As Y/N stood up, watching her makeshift parents slowly make their way to the house the now ex-Captain who had passed on his shield to Sam approached.        “Why did you do that? Why didn’t you tell me?”Steve asked, walking to stand next to the woman as she crossed her arms and shrugged.        “I missed him. And if I missed him, then I can’t imagine how tough it must’ve been for dad. I mean, J.A.R.V.I.S was his friend, his family and was always there for him. And to lose him in such a horrible way and try and find it in someone who wasn’t really him… I just wanted to do something for him… he literally would’ve died if not for that crazy idea Quill had,” Y/N wiped away a tear. “I think it’s the least he deserves. And for the not telling part… I didn’t know it would work, I didn’t really think I’d be able to copy such a huge amount of data, so I didn’t wanna give false hope.”        “Stupid really is your middle name, huh?” Steve’s hand went to ruffle Y/N’s hair, but she flicked his hand away with a scoff.        “Do I need to bring in Bucky in this conversation? Cause I think he might have a few choice words for stupid being my middle name.”        “Nat,” Steve exclaimed dramatically, “save me!”        “Not a chance mister I-don’t-need-a-parachute-when-jumping-out-of-a-jet.”        “You don’t need a what now?” came the too calm voice of Bucky, from where he stood next to Sam, both talking about what it meant for him to take over Cap’s position.        ‘Run’ Loki mouthed to Steve, and without a second, he did, dashing to where Tony and Pepper were conversing with J.A.R.V.I.S just so he didn’t have to deal with Bucky’s scolding. He might have had his friend back, but that didn’t mean Bucky needed to know all the shit he’d been up to.        “So,” Loki leaned his forehead against Y/N’s, arms wrapping around her waist to secure her in place. “What were we doing before we were so rudely interrupted?"        “I think there’s someone else you need to talk to first,” Y/N detached from him with a small smile and nudged her chin towards a person standing behind Loki.        “I uh,” Thor fumbled for a moment and gave the two an apologetic smile, as they pulled back from one another, “I didn’t want to interrupt the moment.”        “That’s quite alright,” Loki mused, “you always knew the worst times to show up.”        Y/N slapped him in the arm hard enough that it made the raven-haired prince wince and pull away.        “What?”        “Be nice!”        With an 'I'm watching you' mouthed Loki's way, Y/N walked away from the brothers and went to talk to Peter. They hadn’t had a real chance to get to know one another, and she wanted to figure out who was the boy that her father loved so much, he was willing to give his life for.        “I’m,” Thor started. “I’m leaving Earth. For now, that is.”        That was not something Loki expected.       “And what will you do exactly?”        The blond shrugged. “It’s time for me to be who I am rather than who I’m supposed to be.”        Loki’s eyebrow raised. “And that includes…?”        “Don’t really know yet,” Thor shrugged, “but Asgard would need a new king.”        His brother’s mouth dropped open, but the thunder god just shrugged like it was something not even worth mentioning. “It’s what you’ve always wanted.”        “For a while, yes,” Loki nodded putting both his hands in his pockets before lifting his eyes from the ground and looking at Y/N who was talking to Peter and had Morgan on her hip. “But I think I’ve found a different reason to go on…”        Thor snorted, nudging his brother’s shoulder with his. “Anything to do with a certain girl?”        “Everything to do with a certain girl,” came Loki’s immediate reply. “So, you better find someone more qualified to take the place. I just know that this time I won’t waste the chance I’ve got.”        “I wouldn’t ask you to,” Thor almost murmured but it was loud enough for him to hear.  “How’s… mother and father?”        Loki gave him a sad smile. “They’re… good.”        Thor’s chin quivered for a moment before he slowly nodded, and his lips twitched upwards. “Did you give him a hard time about Hela?”        “Didn’t really get the chance, but I sure enjoyed it when he bristled first seeing me.”        “We’re a weird bunch, aren’t we?”        “The weirdest, but that’s what makes us great,” Loki patted Thor on the back, and together they moved to where everyone had gathered.        “Listen, I’m not happy about you and knock-off Severus Snape being together, so the second he hurts a single hair on your head, he’s dead,” he heard Tony exclaim, and Loki could practically feel the eye-roll Y/N made.        “Dad,” she groaned her arms crossed over her chest, but Loki couldn’t help the laugh that escaped his throat as his arms wove around her middle, and he rested his chin on her shoulder. He might have been permitted to enter Valhalla, but if there was a paradise it was there.        “Sissy,” Morgan pulled at Y/N’s sleeve and brought the attention to her, “who is that?”        “This is Loki,” she said with such fondness in her voice, that her little sister’s eyebrows furrowed identically like Tony’s did when he had to listen to bullshit.        “But that’s the one that attacked daddy!”        “Yeah, but,” she tried to find the correct way to explain everything that had happened but there was too much to say, so she just relented to the easy way out. “Remember when I said I was off in space for a bit? And I met someone?”        “Yeah,” she nodded still eyeing Loki suspiciously, “you said he protected and loved you. But why did he hurt daddy then?”        Loki who’d been biting the inside of his cheek while listening to the conversation put a gentle hand on the small of Y/N’s back. “If I may?”        She nodded albeit a bit reluctantly and watched as he crouched down to be eye level with Morgan.        “I – I did, hurt your father… and in turn, I know that hurt your sister, and for that, I will forever be sorry… but I’d like to think I’ve changed,” Loki spoke in the softest tone he ever had. Not even with Y/N had his voice held such tenderness. “I used to use my magic to harm others because it was the only thing, I thought I was good for but then I met your sister, and she showed me I’m capable of so much more.”        As he said that, he opened up his palm to the air, and Morgan gasped seeing the illusion of a Pegasus dancing above his fingers. Sure, she’d spent time around Thor before he went completely off-grid, but real magic was something unprecedented.    “You’re like Harry Potter!” she exclaimed. “Just without the wand!”        “Umm, sure,” Loki gave her a smile that wavered a bit because he had no clue who this mysterious person was, yet it seemed like someone she admired.            “Mom! I met an actual wizard” Morgan yelled running off in search for Pepper as Happy and Rhodey chuckled, but Tony had a mischievous smirk on his face. A new nickname was in the works.        A loud ‘excuse me!’ came from where Wong and Strange stood talking with Wanda, shock on both their faces, but Morgan didn’t care as she jumped up into her mother’s lap and started animatedly explaining Loki and his magic.        “Love, who’s Harry Potter?” he muttered in Y/N’s hair an arm securely around her waist.        “I’ll teach you all about him, don’t you worry,” she smiled turning to face him and clasped her palms behind Loki’s neck. “No boyfriend of mine will not know who The Boy Who Lived is. Besides,” her lips brushed against his making Loki chase after her, “we have all the time in the world to do so.”        “Promise?”        “Promise.”        Finally, after doing whatever it took, everything had fallen into place.        They were home.

Tags (crossed out wouldn’t take): @lumelgy @palaiasaurus64 @supernaturalbaesduh @breezy1415 @crazy--me @thatawkwardlittlefangirl @sea040561 @staryeyedgirl @deathbyarabbit @s-c-a-r-e-d-po-t-t-e-r @reblogger-not-a-blogger @m-a-t-91 @dalilx @i-need-a-hero-i-need-a-loki @maladaptive-ninja-returns @averyrogers83 @in-the-end-im-still-trash @gallifreyansass @dewy-biitch @avxgers @unlikelygalaxygiver @sweet-ladyy @magicwithaknife @ollyoxenfrees @bnhvrdy @tvwhoresblog @celebsimagines @thatkindofgurl @sj-thefan@nerissa98 @happyseagrill @asguardiansoftheavengers @crazybutconfidentaf @wishingforahome @pizzarollpatrol @desir-ae@marvels-queen-bee @julierousing98 @maggiesimps @horrorx570ximagines @luluthegreatandterrible @bambamwolf87 @drakesfiance @artbysteph87 @beets1bears1battlestargalactica

A/N: welp... this is a beast :D

Another family fix-it-fic from yours truly :D

P.S. what did ya think?

P.S.S. my tags are always open :)

[haildoodles-writing]

Where the Sky Meets the Sea - Prologue 

A Detroit: Become Human fic. AO3

Summary:  It’s been nearly a year since the deviant uprising--since Markus and his followers protested peacefully for android rights and deviancy spread like a wild virus. Rose Huggins, an old friend of Hank Anderson, had helped along the sidelines, quietly doing all she could to aid the newly established people. And after months of hard work on both sides, androids and humans found some semblance of peace . . . 

But when sporadic disappearances occur and strange evidence begins to show up at the DCPD, everything is flipped on its head.  And Rose, for better or for worse, will be its turning point.

Word Count: 3758

Pairing: Connor (RK800) x OFC

CHAPTER WARNING: Content in this chapter deals with some elements of domestic abuse, and thus may be triggering to some readers. If you or a loved one are experiencing any sort of domestic abuse, please do not hesitate to reach out to those who can help and offer support. We are here for you, and we love you. 

A/N: Welcome to WTSMTS, aka the dbh fic I’ve been planning on making for an eternity. I honestly don’t know how people will take this fic, and if it’ll even gain traction at all, but it doesn’t matter--I’ve been having fun making it, and I wanted to share it with you anyways! Enjoy <3

* * *

Rose Huggins had been feeling like she was being watched. 

Lately, it had been as if the hairs on the back of her neck and the goosebumps on her arms knew something she didn’t--especially at night. She didn’t know why. 

Taking the backroads, though sometimes revolting, proved to be a much faster method at getting home in the evenings. And so after her shift at Jimmy’s Bar or the rundown Thai restaurant next door, Rose would slip through the back and onto the garbage-ridden alleys, avoiding the main streets completely. 

Sure, it was unnerving, and she used to jump at any rat crossing near her feet or trash bag shifting in the breeze. But after two years into working both jobs, she came to learn that the dreary atmosphere was better than being late. She had a dull ache in her pinkie finger and an Urgent Care visit on her record to prove for that. 

That night, a regular from Jimmy’s had slipped out the door behind her and managed to catch her off guard. He had drunkenly stumbled after her for the past few blocks, somehow keeping track of her despite his twisted footing. And the comments he threw at her, at the bystanders, at the world in general--

It was safe to say that Rose wanted to vomit. 

Had it been early enough into the night, she would have sprinted to the train station and avoided him altogether. But it was too late by now, and she didn’t have the cash for a cab, so had to resort to simply keep him at a safe distance as she led him away from her home. At least he was too drunk to notice she was practically hugging the main roads. 

Rose had managed to lose him for good when she finally calmed. Her clutch on her keys loosened enough to swing back and forth—she was back on track to the house now; maybe a few minutes away. Close enough to see the DCPD lights and parked police cars near the main road. If she had time, she could have possibly stopped by, perhaps say hello to Hank Anderson and Gavin Reed—likely still there at this hour— and maybe string enough words together to have a conversation with Connor. 

Connor, who had shown up a year ago to catch deviating androids, only to become a deviant himself. Connor, who practically became Hank’s own son after the revolution calmed down enough. Connor, who made her throat constrict and her chest feel like it was going to collapse every time she saw him. 

The thought of seeing them--seeing him--was tempting, and she slowed to a halt at the steps of the DCPD. But then her pinky ached again, as if a steady reminder, and she decided that stopping by wouldn’t be the best idea. So she hurried home, ignoring the buzzing phone in her back pocket and the omnipresent feeling that she was being watched. 

But no matter how much the back of her neck itched and how many creaks and shuffles sounded right behind her, she never found anything. Only the wind, and the snow, and the distant sounds of Detroit.

She managed to reach the townhouse safely, climbing up the steps and twisting the key into the lock before noticing that the door was already slightly ajar. 

It was strange--her father always bolted up, even when he was home. He was always paranoid.

But the television was blasting from inside and kitchen lights were on, so Rose knew her father was there, at least. 

So she cracked open the door and slipped through, careful to avoid the street lights shining into the doorway. 

“You’re late,” a voice sounded from the couch. Harsh and gravelly, as if sifting through cobbled dirt. Something stirred in the pit of Rose’s stomach, twisting, but she snuffed it out without thinking twice. 

“Sorry, Father. Work kept me a little bit later than usual,” she lied through her teeth, pulling her shoes off and placing them neatly in her corner. And then she headed directly for the kitchen, pulling open the fridge and grabbing a can of beer from the bottom shelf. 

“Well tell your work to piss off next time, Rosy,” her father grumbled. But then he heard the beer top opening and huffed, leaning further into the couch and holding a waiting hand out. 

Her chest seized at every can she gave him, every bottle he demanded with an open hand. But it was usually only at night--and he stopped talking, at least. Stopped berating her, for just a moment longer. Better drunk and incapacitated on the couch than drunk and throwing things. 

Or drunk, and missing. That was the worst one. 

Her father took the can and inspected it, slandering the brand name. “Why’d you have to get this one, Rosy? You know better,” he snapped, even though he already had a few of the same cans empty around his lap. Either way, he was the one who had bought it—or had stolen; she didn’t really know how he got his supply anymore. All she knew is that she never bought anything herself. 

“I’m sorry,” she said anyway. 

He merely grunted and sipped from it, ignoring her completely. She dropped her hand from the back of the couch, a breath escaping her—but then fingers shot out and gripped her wrist, squeezing. It was nothing she couldn’t handle — but his thumb was pressing on a bruise through her shirt sleeve, and it made her breath catch. 

He squeezed for a moment longer, sighing. “Clean this mess up,” was all he ended up saying, releasing her wrist to gesture to the pile of trash he sat in. But then he fell silent, and Rose nodded, leaving him to float between realities for a while. 

She crept upstairs, head low until she reached her room at the end of the hallway. Her chest heaved out a sigh, her shoulders dropping as she walked into the bedroom. 

And as she changed into her painting clothes and prepped her easel and paints in the corner of the room, and as she painted until she could finally feel, Rose longed for something other than this life she had put herself in. 

*  *  *

Whenever a case of his wasn’t improving, Gavin Reed became one of the usuals at Jimmy’s Bar. 

When she first met him over a year ago, Rose constantly had to fight the twinge of annoyance every time he chatted her up. She had to bite her tongue to keep from huffing when he would vent about androids, of all creatures, infiltrating the DCPD. But then, through his arrogance and ranting, he would sometimes pause. He would ask her about her day, about what she did, and genuinely seem interested in it. Something not a lot of people did that often. 

So she would withstand his . . . Gavin-ness, every time he came in. If only for those small moments that he acted like a decent human being. 

Today, though, didn’t seem like it was a good day for him—if the way he stormed in fuming said anything, at least. 

He ignored Rose for a minute as she started making his regular, fists clenched against the table and head bowed. From what she could see, every word in the dictionary was spewing from his mouth. 

Eventually though, after Rose was finished helping a few others, Gavin lifted his head. A fresh bruise adorned his cheek. 

“Bad day?” Rose asked quietly, raising a brow as she set a glass of whiskey in front of him. Neat, as he liked it. 

Gavin sighed, downing the glass before pausing. “Got no idea, sweetheart.” He signaled to bring more, so she poured him a double rye. 

“Let me guess,” Rose said. “Nines?” 

If she had brought up androids six months ago, Gavin would’ve spewed expletives and cursed androids--usually one specific Connor--until her ears bled. But then he was assigned a new partner, Nines, Connor’s prototype successor, and he  . . . well, cooled. He wasn’t necessarily nice to Connor, by all means, but he grew comfortable with Nines and his ever-present company.

Though Gavin would never actually admit it.

Gavin pointed at Rose and clicked his tongue, before collapsing in on himself again. “I think he’s turning into a housecat,” he said. “He never leaves--” 

Rose looked around, nodding to the Nines-less bar.

“He’s outside,” Gavin muttered. At that, Rose outright laughed.

She sobered herself enough to shoot him a look. “That’s not new, though,” she pointed out. And it was true--Gavin often complained about Nines trailing after him constantly, both in and outside of work. Some sort of annoying guardian, he had said. But it wasn’t something Rose hadn’t heard of before--no, something else was bothering him. Something that made him much more sour than normal.

Gavin gave a thousand-mile stare past Rose’s shoulder. “There’s another one.” 

Another android--at the station, she guessed.

That would be . . . three then, working at the DCPD. Connor, and then Nines—and now another one, evidently. 

Another RK model, she presumed. 

By how hard Gavin was clenching the glass in his hands, she knew she was right. Another “Connor” walking around in the precinct; another “Connor” for him to get used to. 

It was nearly a year after the uprising, and Gavin wasn’t cold towards androids any longer--but he wasn’t exactly warm, either. 

“Well, at least you get a break for now, right?” Rose tried to lighten up the mood, offering him another drink. He took it without thinking twice. 

But then Gavin bit down, a muscle flickering in his jaw, and ground out, “Not for long.” 

Rose was nearly about to question him before the doorbell jingled, two silhouettes slipping through the doorway.  

And then Hank and Connor appeared in the dim lighting, Hank calling out a “Hey, kid,” and Connor giving a polite wave. Rose smiled in return, trying to level her breathing at seeing Connor--it had been a while, anyway.

In front of her, Gavin clenched his hand around the glass even tighter — if that was even possible, at this point. He stared at her arm, heaving a deep sigh. 

“Well, if it isn’t Hank and the tin can,” Gavin slurred, seemingly more exhausted than miffed. At least he wasn’t biting; Rose wasn’t in the mood to break up a fight tonight.

Even though Hank and Connor weren’t affected by him—in fact, Hank seemed amused at his ex-protege—Rose still cringed at the nickname. 

Connor, unperturbed, greeted them. “Hello, Detective Reed,” was all he said before turning to Rose, stepping around Gavin. “Hello, Rosalind.” 

“Rose,” she corrected him, still smiling and ignoring Gavin’s visible irritation. No one ever called her Rosalind, save her own mother. And that was nearly a decade ago. 

Hank scoffed, throwing a hand against Connor’s shoulder. “You don’t have to be so professional during work. I mean, how many times does she have to tell you, kid? It’s been like, what—a year?” 

Connor didn’t have to pause. “Ten months, twenty-three days, fifteen hours and forty-four minutes.” 

He said it so bluntly that Rose choked on a laugh, her stomach fluttering. 

At the sound of Rose’s giggle, Gavin unfroze, stepping between the three of them. “Hank, we’re off the clock today. Get him out.” 

Hank began to step forward and open his mouth, but Connor cut him off. “We just need to ask Rose some questions for a recent case.” 

Deviancy had done Connor well, and emotions began to lace his words—his expressions, his stance, everything. But still, in the moment, Connor composed himself enough to seem nonchalant about Gavin’s presence. Enough to annoy Gavin further. 

Hank had bet money that Gavin was just bitter about getting knocked out by Connor two punches in back in the evidence room, nearly a year ago. But Rose often thought it was something else, though.

Gavin looked back at Rose, gauging her reaction. “Fine,” he shrugged. And then he yanked out his wallet and handed Rose a handful of cash, reaching for his remaining glass and downing it with a grunt. Then he winked at Rose, clicking his tongue. “You tell me if these runts give you trouble, yeah?” 

If she was being honest with herself, Rose was impressed. Gavin, with alcohol in his system, not starting a fight? It was nearly unheard of. 

She bit her lip and nodded, satisfying Gavin enough. “Good luck, sweetheart,” he called, stepping around Hank and slapping a hand on Connor’s shoulder. 

And then he was gone, the doorbell signaling he had stepped into the night. 

Rose sighed, throwing a curl from her braid loose with a shake of her head. “I’m sorry,” she told them both. 

Hank scoffed as he took a seat at the bar, patting the seat next to him for Connor. “Don’t know what you need to be apologizing for, Squid.” 

Squid--a name Cole, his son, used to call her when she babysat him. Before he passed, Rose would walk to Hank’s house whenever he was called in and take care of Cole for years. And whether it was in the dead of night or at midday, she would come with the hand-sewn squid Cole loved. 

She still had that little stuffed squid on her nightstand. 

Rose smiled at Hank’s comment, rolling her eyes playfully. After checking on the other customers, she went to offer Hank his usual, opening her mouth to speak — but then Connor shot out a hand beside him, nearly brushing her own fingers against the table. 

“He won’t be drinking tonight,” Connor said. Rose raised an eyebrow.

A noise sounded in Hank’s throat, but then he swallowed it. Evidently, by the look Connor gave him, they had already discussed the matter. 

“I tried,” Hank shrugged—and then sighed at Rose’s raised brows. “Only drinking on weekends, now.” 

Apparently, Connor’s passing comments of them “working things out” with Hank’s drinking habits had proven true. Hank had seemed more sober lately, anyway. It was a nice improvement.

Rose grinned, genuinely happy for him. But, nonetheless, “So I won’t be seeing you around here that often, then?” 

Hank nodded. “Yeah, thanks to this kid,”—he grabbed Connor’s shoulder again, and a smile pulled at both of their mouths. “But Sumo needs more lovin’, if you ever wanna come over to watch him while we’re out.” 

At the mention of the old dog, Rose nodded enthusiastically. Hank only lived a few streets down from her, anyway, right by the docks—and the precious ball of fluff always needed more love. 

Connor’s face went soft at the mention of Sumo, his eyes taking in Rose’s giddy expression with an odd look on his face. But then his LED quickly flashed yellow, and his face dropped.

“We came here to ask you something, Rose,” Connor said. And Hank, with the conversation having been steered back on track, grew somber. 

“Yeah, Squid. We, ah . . .” Hank heaved a sigh, tapping his fingers on the table. Avoiding having to talk, most likely—which made Rose’s chest seize a bit. 

When they asked Rose for information before, there was no hesitation to their questions. What was making Hank so quiet this time? 

Rose watched a customer a few stools down drop some cash on the table as he exited and stepped over to him, collecting the change and grabbing the empty glasses before she turned to Connor and Hank completely. 

“Well,” Hank continued, “we know a lot passes around through here, and we know you hear everything. . .” — which was true. Rose knew almost as many people as Hank did, having grown up in the outskirts of Detroit, and word tended to travel fast through tipsy mouths. 

But this had already been established. At this point, Hank was stalling. 

Likely sensing her unease, Connor’s LED flashed as he eyed her. He moved his hand to rest on top of hers, to soothe her. 

If he noticed how her heartbeat sped up instead, he didn’t mention it. 

“We need to know if you’ve been experiencing anything strange lately,” he said, and Rose’s heart rate immediately died down. “We . . . we have reason to believe that you are being followed.” 

Rose froze completely, her jaw going slack. Her mind flicking to every instance the hair on her neck raised, every fleeing form she witnessed that somehow always behind her . . .

More than once recently, she had felt eyes on her. Watching. Waiting, silent, as she walked down the streets of Detroit. 

Rose had thought it was her mere imagination. 

“Yes,” Rose eventually blurted out, eyeing Connor’s hand. “I mean, no, I haven’t seen anyone, or heard anything. But . . .” A curl fell against her cheek as she tilted her head. 

Eyes scrunching, Hank spoke up. “You think you’re being followed, kiddo?” 

It took everything in her to force the words out--They’re cops, she reminded herself. They have to know this stuff. 

“Yeah,” she admitted. “I . . . Sometimes a couple drunks stalk me, but only for a few minutes before giving up. But lately, I’ve been feeling like someone’s been watching me--the entire way home.” But then she shrugged, brushing it off. “But I haven’t spotted anyone, so it may be nothing.” 

Connor tilted his head as his LED spun. “Human minds can pick up on subtle cues outside of their direct field of vision and not be completely aware of it,” he blurted. “You may be noticing someone’s gaze without actually seeing it. There is a chance your brain may be sending false alarms, but it’s still better to be cautious.”

Taking in the information, Rose’s eyes fell to Hank. “Why?” she asked. “I mean, what’s making you think I’m being followed?” 

At that moment, Jimmy himself walked through the front door, the bell jingling and throwing Rose out of her thoughts. Her shift was up. 

Hank clenched his jaw for a moment, considering. 

It was Connor that spoke up in the silence. “We received photographs at the precinct the other day,” he breathed, lowering his voice. “Candid photos of people around the city.” 

“And you were the main one,” Hank muttered. His eyes were cloudy, his face somber. 

Rose felt her blood run cold. 

From behind her, Jimmy clasped Rose on the shoulder and nodded to Hank in greeting. “I’ll take it from here,” he said. “You’re good to head on home.” 

She didn’t move. She couldn’t, not when someone was taking pictures of her, following her, for some unknown reason--

“I’ll walk you home,” Connor spoke up, retracting his hand from hers and sliding off the bar stool. “Hank needs to finish up at the precinct, but I can stay with you.” In response, Hank nodded. 

Rose let out a sigh of relief and nodded. 

And so they left her to gather her things, Hank squeezing her forearm in a gentle farewell and Connor standing politely at the exitway. His LED didn’t stray from blue, even when he and Rose stepped into the winter night and the chill took over. Always bright, always flickering. 

She wondered why he never decided to take it out. 

For a few minutes, neither of them spoke, and Connor let Rose take the lead as he processed everything around them. Looking for clues, most likely. 

But then she couldn’t stand the silence anymore, and she spoke up. “I heard there’s another RK model at the precinct,” she said, eyeing him as he glanced around through the snow. At her comment, his eyes flicked to her and he smiled, polite and cheerful. 

Her stomach flipped again. 

“His name is Corvus,” he said as they rounded another corner. “He’s my successor by three models--and he’s the last one, evidently.”

“The last one?” She thought there were more--there were around ten Connor models made, right?

“After the deviant uprising, CyberLife gave orders for every active RK unit to return to the Tower and be deactivated. The rest of my successors, save Nines, were all destroyed.” His voice was soft, quiet, and Rose noticed that he was rubbing his hands together--a nervous habit, she realized. Something he developed after the uprising.

Without thinking, Rose tugged on one of his hands and intertwined her fingers with his. For a second, his LED flashed--but then it faded back into its constant, soothing blue. She felt his hand squeeze back, if only for a moment, before she released her hold. 

“Except Corvus,” she responded, pulling him out of his thoughts. 

He nodded. “He was already deviated from his time at the Salt Lake City Police Department, and he came to Detroit a few days ago.” 

“To meet you?” 

Connor’s lip twitched. “To meet Markus.” 

Oh. She should have assumed. 

The tension between Markus and the general public had slowly settled over time, leaving Markus the ability to establish a community for deviants, just north of Detroit. It seemed that deviants were still flocking to him, even now.  

“I think you’d like him,” he mused. 

Rose was about to comment more--but then his LED sputtered into yellow, and he returned his attention to his surroundings as he processed. Looking for hints again--even though, oddly enough, there were none. 

She stifled the nagging thought, that doubt that she had ever seen anything at all. Maybe it was just her mind playing tricks on her--Connor had brought up that idea as an option, anyway.

She remained quiet as Connor processed everything, completely content with just his company until they reached the front steps of the townhouse. This time, it was late enough that she was sure her father was asleep--something that made her heave a sigh of relief. 

Connor remained on the sidewalk as Rose slowly climbed the steps, her feet nearly dragging.  “Thank you,” she murmured, turning on her heel to face him. In return, Connor bowed his head. 

For a moment, he said nothing, simply staring at her with an odd look on his face. But then his LED blinked all over again, and his expression slowly faded. 

“Let me know if you ever need anything, Rose,” he said, so sincerely that her chest warmed. She nearly grinned at the way he said her name. 

But she didn’t trust herself to speak, so she nodded, turning to unlock the door and slipping in with a small wave of farewell. 

He called for her before she could close the door.  “Come to the precinct tomorrow, during Hank’s break,” he requested. It was likely to meet Corvus, and she faltered a little at the idea of seeing Connor’s face on someone else--but it was he who asked her, and she couldn’t say no.

“Okay,” she said. “Tomorrow.”

Connor’s responding grin made her laugh. 

* * *

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[zdbztumble]

So About That Roxas…

Well, it’s that time - time to invite unholy disdain upon myself for my blasphemous views on fan favorite Roxas!

OK, that’s an exaggeration. I don’t know how unpopular what I’m about to say really is. And to make this perfectly clear up-front - I don’t dislike Roxas. I think he’s a fine character, and his (very) long prologue is one of the strongest parts of KH II. But I do find Roxas more valuable and compelling in how he relates to other characters, and in the fact that he is an aspect of Sora, than in his own right. All on his own, I don’t find Roxas to be particularly active or interesting.

And that isn’t a flaw. Given what Nobodies are (prior to DDD, at least), I would expect that from Roxas. Almost every member of Organization XIII isn’t terribly dynamic or dimensional on their own merits - their personalities are one-note (if that), which can be by turns tragic, obnoxious, or an effective foil for the protagonists. When Roxas draws jealousy from Hayner, general confusion from his friend group, some amount of pathos from Axel, mixed emotions from Riku and disdain from DiZ, and attraction from Namine, he’s a great example of the latter. I never find him obnoxious, and when he is on his own, there is a sense of tragedy with him. Because while Roxas may have agency, and does display a curiosity - almost an obsession, after a while - with gaining answers for the strange things happening to him, he’s ultimately empty. None of his joys, none of his curiosity - and not even his rages and despairs - last. He ends up defaulting, always, into a quiet, resigned, and hollow state, and he doesn’t seem happy about that. 

This is true of the Twilight Town prologue, at least. In the brief flashbacks we’re given in KH II, and at the beginning of the Sora/Roxas fight, a different Roxas appears. He’s still empty at the core, but his front to the world is crueler, dismissive even of the words of his supposed best friend Axel, and predatory. We learn later in the game that DiZ altered Roxas’s personality when he dropped him into the digital Twilight Town, and it’s not hard to see why. Even with the altered personality, the strongest display of feeling Roxas can manage is anger. It’s only when Roxas confronts Sora, accepts him as “a good other,” and fully rejoins with him, that Roxas appears genuinely happy and alive in KH II.

But I do have problems with how Roxas is used, in KH II and especially in 358/2 Days. To start with II - there are some pretty big missed opportunities. Roxas was a member of Organization XIII, presumably working toward their goals (to go just on what we see in KH II), and every member of the Organization who sees Sora recognizes Roxas within him. Wouldn’t it have been nice to have someone else do the same? If, when visiting one of the Disney worlds that Sora hasn’t been to before, there was a character who had a negative encounter with Roxas, and therefore fears Sora and the Keyblade?

The lack of any such scene speaks to a larger problem with Roxas in KH II: his limited relevance once the prologue ends. He does come up here and there throughout the play time, which I do appreciate, but he doesn’t really have an impact on Sora before their clash other than as a source of mild confusion. Sora’s reactions to being called by Roxas’s name never progress much past “huh? Cut that out!” and he has no real reaction to learning that his own Nobody was a member of Organization XIII. Had Roxas’s activities over the past year created a negative consequence that Sora had to deal with, that might have invited some internal conflict within Sora’s heart, culminating in a much more emotionally charged clash with Organizers like Xibar and Saix. Hell, even without such a scene, the knowledge that a part of him was a member of the bad guys could have, and should have, made Sora feel at least a little upset. That’s not to say that the absence of such a mini-arc is a dealbreaker for KH II; what we did get works well enough. But, much like Roxas himself, something seems to be missing.

A future game might have been able to address this issue...had it not been for 358/2 Days.

This isn’t a revisit of Days; I can’t very well revisit a game I only ever played the first few minutes of, years ago, before losing touch with the friend who had the DS card for it. You’ll get no views of the gameplay here. But I am familiar with Days; I’ve read the breakdowns, researched its writing, and watched the movie multiple times. And I gotta tell ya - I know the game has its fans, and it may have some strengths and concepts missing from other titles, but I really don’t care for its story. And that has a lot to do with how it mishandles Roxas.

I’ll start with a caveat - I am not the audience for Days. At no point while playing KH II did I ever want to know any more about Roxas or the Organization than that game saw fit to reveal. What we got was enough for them to work as the villains in that story, and that’s all I ever needed them to be. This was always going to be an easy title for me to skip, or at least not take any real interest in. But that’s a matter of taste. Plenty of people take more interest in the backstories of Roxas and the Organization than I do, and this was perfectly acceptable as a subject for a midquel game. But the execution, IMO, is a complete mess. It ignores or retcons several of the snippets we get about the Organization in KH II, to poor effect, and fails to expand on any of the villainous Organizers in a way that might turn them from one-note video game bosses and elements of a hive mind into fleshed-out characters. Axel is given several coats of whitewash, and his history with Saix lacks any resonance when Saix is left as such a hollow villain. There’s no playing alongside Disney characters in a game so given over to original KH lore, and that lore is rewritten in ways I don’t like. The trends of mystery for its own sake and teasing histories and future events at the expense of the story at hand continue, the same few points of lore and logistics are over-stressed, and the dialogue and voice acting just isn’t good (and can anyone tell me why they re-dubbed Christopher Lee in the HD movie version? I mean...it’s Christopher Lee!)

But as I said, the real problem is with Roxas. For a character meant to be the protagonist, Roxas cedes a lot of narrative real estate to new character Xion. Like Days itself, I know Xion has fans - ardent fans. I can’t argue with that, nor would I want to; you can like what you like, and I won’t assess and critique her as a character here. But all I can say about Xion is that, as a writer, she strikes me as redundant. A member of Organization XIII, unusually lacking in knowledge about their life beforehand, wielding the Keyblade, inducted into the Organization within this game, derived from Sora through unusual means, with a connection to Kairi and whose existence arrests Sora’s full restoration from the events of CoM; setting her character aside, Xion’s narrative function is exactly what Roxas’s was established to be by KH II.

One could say that the game makes a point of this, turning it into an orchestrated conflict between the two by Xemnas, but practically speaking, this means that Roxas spends a key chunk of the story displaced. He becomes a friend on the sidelines as the real meat of the story concerns a character who, from the very beginning, anyone who played KH II would know isn’t going to matter past this game. This ends up making Xion more important, and more interesting, than Roxas within Days itself. But almost everything that Xion goes through could have easily been given to him by dint of what we see in KH II. That Sora’s restoration is upset because his memories of Kairi are being absorbed into another being would have been especially appropriate for Roxas, since Kairi’s very name is always fractured in the restoration process during II’s prologue at first, and the process itself is at such a low number despite a year having passed until Roxas is in DiZ’s hands. Those character elements unique to Xion herself, and the conflict between her and Roxas engineered by Xemnas, aren’t enough to justify her presence in the larger KH story IMO, and end up confusing elements of the lore (replicas, memories, etc.) If she had been cut, and those aspects of her story relating to Sora’s restoration given to Roxas, the story and lore integrity would’ve been better for it.

But that wouldn’t have solved everything wrong with Roxas in Days. Let’s look back at what KH II shows us of a pre-DiZ Roxas again. A cold and predatory figure; the Dusks who first come for him in Twilight Town address him as their “liege,” implying that they served him the way other Nobodies serve the Organizers; the Organizers themselves seem to have been quite close to Roxas, taking his betrayal hard and referring to him as “brother.” And Organization XIII, as we see it in KH II vanilla, is a collective, with no real secret about its motives within the ranks - that motive being, in so many words, to let the remaining Heartless continue their genocide across the worlds just so that they can swoop in with the Keyblade, harvest the captive hearts, and offer them up to their Kingdom Hearts in a mad bid to gain hearts of their own.

So why is Roxas so innocent in Days?

That cold exterior, the flashes of temper - that’s not what we get from Roxas here. What we get is a blank slate who becomes a puppy as he strikes up a buddy-buddy relationship with Axel, and who later performs the same function for Xion. He talks about fighting the darkness and asks hopefully if he’s performing “good” deeds. His interactions with his friends show him to be cheerful and open. The Samurai are supposedly under his command, but that’s a detail relegated to the reports. His relationships with anyone in the Organization other than Axel and Xion don’t even warrant scenes in the movie, and nothing suggests that they would deem him “brother;” Saix and Xemnas regard him as no more than a tool . And even though he’s destroying Heartless with the Keyblade, and those hearts are becoming part of the Organization’s Kingdom Hearts...somehow this is a point he needs explained several times? And he and Xion openly doubt why they need hearts at all - a point presented as one to be sympathetic toward, despite everything from KH II and a good chunk of this very game stressing that it is in fact a problem that Nobodies lack hearts?

This is not what was indicated in KH II. What’s worse, it’s boring. A far more effective choice IMO would have been to let Roxas be villainous. Go the dark protagonist route; give us a cold hunter of a character, with the impulsive anger and fractured psyche Sora showed in CoM, fully aware of what the Organization is up to and the price that others will pay for it and still committed to the cause. Then, when the events of CoM play out in the background, and fragments of Sora’s memories find their way to Roxas (assuming we still cut Xion in this scenario), that’s the turning point. That’s when Roxas can doubt the Organization’s cause, when he can begin to question his lack of memories and his true identity, and betray the Organization by setting out to find Sora. Give him two separate fights with Riku, to justify the dialogue claiming such in KH II. Let him develop some awareness of Namine after he gets Sora’s memories; Namine’s dialogue in KH II indicates that they’ve never met before, but a connection at a distance could serve to give more substance to their relationship, and supply Namine with opportunities to develop as a character. Depict the scenes where she first comes into contact with DiZ and Riku, agrees to take on their help in restoring Sora’s memories, and feels conflicted about the moral gray area their harsh but necessary actions occupy. Let her be ultimately responsible for setting Riku on the right trail that ends up bringing Roxas into their hands.

Of course, one reason why they may have opted not to do this is because having a dark protagonist complicit in an evil scheme involving the deaths of countless people may have been difficult to pull off while still earning an E10 rating at most. And honestly, the story told by Days doesn’t strike me as  necessarily the best fit for a video game even as-is. They might have been better off with planning it as a proper movie from the get-go, instead of a string of cutscenes divorced from the gameplay as they ultimately presented it in the HD collections.

And another objection to this approach might have been that a villainous Roxas and morally ambiguous Namine might have been less “likable,” and therefore less usable in future titles. To that I say - so what? I didn’t want Roxas and Namine as characters in any titles past KH II anyway - not because they were bad characters, or because I didn’t like them, but because their stories concluded. Concluded on terms they chose, and were at peace with. It was tinged with a bittersweet quality, but they did get a “happy” ending. If a midquel story complicated their morality, that wouldn’t negate the events of KH II or the resolution they received; it would have created a journey to get them to that point, starting from a much darker place, and given more weight to the idea that it was necessary for them to rejoin with Sora and Kairi. I’d argue that would enrich what we see in KH II, whereas the actual route they took in titles like DDD and KH III disregards or undermines everything that made the ending of KH II work.

[justicelljc]

How People Learn to Become Resilient

By Maria Konnikova

February 11, 2016

Perception is key to resilience: Do you conceptualize an event as traumatic, or as a chance to learn and grow?

Norman Garmezy, a developmental psychologist and clinician at the University of Minnesota, met thousands of children in his four decades of research. But one boy in particular stuck with him. He was nine years old, with an alcoholic mother and an absent father. Each day, he would arrive at school with the exact same sandwich: two slices of bread with nothing in between. At home, there was no other food available, and no one to make any. Even so, Garmezy would later recall, the boy wanted to make sure that “no one would feel pity for him and no one would know the ineptitude of his mother.” Each day, without fail, he would walk in with a smile on his face and a “bread sandwich” tucked into his bag.

The boy with the bread sandwich was part of a special group of children. He belonged to a cohort of kids—the first of many—whom Garmezy would go on to identify as succeeding, even excelling, despite incredibly difficult circumstances. These were the children who exhibited a trait Garmezy would later identify as “resilience.” (He is widely credited with being the first to study the concept in an experimental setting.) Over many years, Garmezy would visit schools across the country, focussing on those in economically depressed areas, and follow a standard protocol. He would set up meetings with the principal, along with a school social worker or nurse, and pose the same question: Were there any children whose backgrounds had initially raised red flags—kids who seemed likely to become problem kids—who had instead become, surprisingly, a source of pride? “What I was saying was, ‘Can you identify stressed children who are making it here in your school?’ ” Garmezy said, in a 1999 interview. “There would be a long pause after my inquiry before the answer came. If I had said, ‘Do you have kids in this school who seem to be troubled?,’ there wouldn’t have been a moment’s delay. But to be asked about children who were adaptive and good citizens in the school and making it even though they had come out of very disturbed backgrounds—that was a new sort of inquiry. That’s the way we began.”

Resilience presents a challenge for psychologists. Whether you can be said to have it or not largely depends not on any particular psychological test but on the way your life unfolds. If you are lucky enough to never experience any sort of adversity, we won’t know how resilient you are. It’s only when you’re faced with obstacles, stress, and other environmental threats that resilience, or the lack of it, emerges: Do you succumb or do you surmount?

Environmental threats can come in various guises. Some are the result of low socioeconomic status and challenging home conditions. (Those are the threats studied in Garmezy’s work.) Often, such threats—parents with psychological or other problems; exposure to violence or poor treatment; being a child of problematic divorce—are chronic. Other threats are acute: experiencing or witnessing a traumatic violent encounter, for example, or being in an accident. What matters is the intensity and the duration of the stressor. In the case of acute stressors, the intensity is usually high. The stress resulting from chronic adversity, Garmezy wrote, might be lower—but it “exerts repeated and cumulative impact on resources and adaptation and persists for many months and typically considerably longer.”

Prior to Garmezy’s work on resilience, most research on trauma and negative life events had a reverse focus. Instead of looking at areas of strength, it looked at areas of vulnerability, investigating the experiences that make people susceptible to poor life outcomes (or that lead kids to be “troubled,” as Garmezy put it). Garmezy’s work opened the door to the study of protective factors: the elements of an individual’s background or personality that could enable success despite the challenges they faced. Garmezy retired from research before reaching any definitive conclusions—his career was cut short by early-onset Alzheimer’s—but his students and followers were able to identify elements that fell into two groups: individual, psychological factors and external, environmental factors, or disposition on the one hand and luck on the other.

In 1989 a developmental psychologist named Emmy Werner published the results of a thirty-two-year longitudinal project. She had followed a group of six hundred and ninety-eight children, in Kauai, Hawaii, from before birth through their third decade of life. Along the way, she’d monitored them for any exposure to stress: maternal stress in utero, poverty, problems in the family, and so on. Two-thirds of the children came from backgrounds that were, essentially, stable, successful, and happy; the other third qualified as “at risk.” Like Garmezy, she soon discovered that not all of the at-risk children reacted to stress in the same way. Two-thirds of them “developed serious learning or behavior problems by the age of ten, or had delinquency records, mental health problems, or teen-age pregnancies by the age of eighteen.” But the remaining third developed into “competent, confident, and caring young adults.” They had attained academic, domestic, and social success—and they were always ready to capitalize on new opportunities that arose.

What was it that set the resilient children apart? Because the individuals in her sample had been followed and tested consistently for three decades, Werner had a trove of data at her disposal. She found that several elements predicted resilience. Some elements had to do with luck: a resilient child might have a strong bond with a supportive caregiver, parent, teacher, or other mentor-like figure. But another, quite large set of elements was psychological, and had to do with how the children responded to the environment. From a young age, resilient children tended to “meet the world on their own terms.” They were autonomous and independent, would seek out new experiences, and had a “positive social orientation.” “Though not especially gifted, these children used whatever skills they had effectively,” Werner wrote. Perhaps most importantly, the resilient children had what psychologists call an “internal locus of control”: they believed that they, and not their circumstances, affected their achievements. The resilient children saw themselves as the orchestrators of their own fates. In fact, on a scale that measured locus of control, they scored more than two standard deviations away from the standardization group.

Werner also discovered that resilience could change over time. Some resilient children were especially unlucky: they experienced multiple strong stressors at vulnerable points and their resilience evaporated. Resilience, she explained, is like a constant calculation: Which side of the equation weighs more, the resilience or the stressors? The stressors can become so intense that resilience is overwhelmed. Most people, in short, have a breaking point. On the flip side, some people who weren’t resilient when they were little somehow learned the skills of resilience. They were able to overcome adversity later in life and went on to flourish as much as those who’d been resilient the whole way through. This, of course, raises the question of how resilience might be learned.

George Bonanno is a clinical psychologist at Columbia University’s Teachers College; he heads the Loss, Trauma, and Emotion Lab and has been studying resilience for nearly twenty-five years. Garmezy, Werner, and others have shown that some people are far better than others at dealing with adversity; Bonanno has been trying to figure out where that variation might come from. Bonanno’s theory of resilience starts with an observation: all of us possess the same fundamental stress-response system, which has evolved over millions of years and which we share with other animals. The vast majority of people are pretty good at using that system to deal with stress. When it comes to resilience, the question is: Why do some people use the system so much more frequently or effectively than others?

One of the central elements of resilience, Bonanno has found, is perception: Do you conceptualize an event as traumatic, or as an opportunity to learn and grow? “Events are not traumatic until we experience them as traumatic,” Bonanno told me, in December. “To call something a ‘traumatic event’ belies that fact.” He has coined a different term: PTE, or potentially traumatic event, which he argues is more accurate. The theory is straightforward. Every frightening event, no matter how negative it might seem from the sidelines, has the potential to be traumatic or not to the person experiencing it. (Bonanno focusses on acute negative events, where we may be seriously harmed; others who study resilience, including Garmezy and Werner, look more broadly.) Take something as terrible as the surprising death of a close friend: you might be sad, but if you can find a way to construe that event as filled with meaning—perhaps it leads to greater awareness of a certain disease, say, or to closer ties with the community—then it may not be seen as a trauma. (Indeed, Werner found that resilient individuals were far more likely to report having sources of spiritual and religious support than those who weren’t.) The experience isn’t inherent in the event; it resides in the event’s psychological construal.

It’s for this reason, Bonanno told me, that “stressful” or “traumatic” events in and of themselves don’t have much predictive power when it comes to life outcomes. “The prospective epidemiological data shows that exposure to potentially traumatic events does not predict later functioning,” he said. “It’s only predictive if there’s a negative response.” In other words, living through adversity, be it endemic to your environment or an acute negative event, doesn’t guarantee that you’ll suffer going forward. What matters is whether that adversity becomes traumatizing.

The good news is that positive construal can be taught. “We can make ourselves more or less vulnerable by how we think about things,” Bonanno said. In research at Columbia, the neuroscientist Kevin Ochsner has shown that teaching people to think of stimuli in different ways—to reframe them in positive terms when the initial response is negative, or in a less emotional way when the initial response is emotionally “hot”—changes how they experience and react to the stimulus. You can train people to better regulate their emotions, and the training seems to have lasting effects.

Similar work has been done with explanatory styles—the techniques we use to explain events. I’ve written before about the research of Martin Seligman, the University of Pennsylvania psychologist who pioneered much of the field of positive psychology: Seligman found that training people to change their explanatory styles from internal to external (“Bad events aren’t my fault”), from global to specific (“This is one narrow thing rather than a massive indication that something is wrong with my life”), and from permanent to impermanent (“I can change the situation, rather than assuming it’s fixed”) made them more psychologically successful and less prone to depression. The same goes for locus of control: not only is a more internal locus tied to perceiving less stress and performing better but changing your locus from external to internal leads to positive changes in both psychological well-being and objective work performance. The cognitive skills that underpin resilience, then, seem like they can indeed be learned over time, creating resilience where there was none.

Unfortunately, the opposite may also be true. “We can become less resilient, or less likely to be resilient,” Bonanno says. “We can create or exaggerate stressors very easily in our own minds. That’s the danger of the human condition.” Human beings are capable of worry and rumination: we can take a minor thing, blow it up in our heads, run through it over and over, and drive ourselves crazy until we feel like that minor thing is the biggest thing that ever happened. In a sense, it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. Frame adversity as a challenge, and you become more flexible and able to deal with it, move on, learn from it, and grow. Focus on it, frame it as a threat, and a potentially traumatic event becomes an enduring problem; you become more inflexible, and more likely to be negatively affected.

In December the New York Times Magazine published an essay called “The Profound Emptiness of ‘Resilience.’ ” It pointed out that the word is now used everywhere, often in ways that drain it of meaning and link it to vague concepts like “character.” But resilience doesn’t have to be an empty or vague concept. In fact, decades of research have revealed a lot about how it works. This research shows that resilience is, ultimately, a set of skills that can be taught. In recent years, we’ve taken to using the term sloppily—but our sloppy usage doesn’t mean that it hasn’t been usefully and precisely defined. It’s time we invest the time and energy to understand what “resilience” really means.

**Maria Konnikova is the author of “The Confidence Game” and “Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes.”

[bongaboi]

Arizona State: 2019 Sun Bowl Champions

EL PASO — In a scene imagined by few if any before it actually happened and almost assuredly never preceded by anything quite like it, Arizona State players poured a cooler of Kellogg's Frosted Flakes on the head of their coach in celebration on Tuesday.

It was not the traditional Gatorade bath that invariably comes with the biggest of wins. There will be no lighting of victory cigars. There may be some champagne toasts in the aftermath but those will primarily be to ring in the New Year and only more obliquely related to the outcome of their football game played several hours earlier.

But, still, the Sun Devils ended their 2019 season the right way and so they bathed their second-year head coach Herm Edwards in breakfast cereal and he certainly didn't mind it.

"First time I've ever got a bucket full of Frosted Flakes, that's new," Edwards said. "That helps. That's not cold. All I needed was some milk and I would have been fine."

In the play-calling debut of its new defensive coordinator Tony White, ASU forced six turnovers — more than in any game since October of 2009 against Washington State — and perhaps needed every one in its 20-14 win over Florida State in the Tony the Tiger Sun Bowl in front of 42,412 fans in the 86th playing of the game. The win concluded ASU's season at 8-5 overall, better than their initial 7-6 season under Edwards. Florida State finished its season at 6-7 overall.

Though they have aspirations for more extravagant celebrations in the future, the Sun Devils are content with where they are currently at two years into the Edwards-experiment, which was initially widely panned but now has taken on an unmistakable aura of emerging success.

"It shows the potential for our defense and how strong we're going to become," freshman safety Willie Harts said after collecting one of four ASU interceptions on the afternoon. "We're very young and still experienced and we're going to learn so much over the years."

With both teams missing key players due to early-NFL declarations and undertaking significant staffing changes including a new coordinator on both sides of the ball for the Sun Devils, there was a lot of sloppy, forgettable play on Tuesday. But also, some very memorable moments.

The Sun Devils held a halftime 9-0 lead and appeared to have the Seminoles offense in a vice grip before a five-minute stretch late in the third quarter that flipped the game upside down.

With multiple deep reserves on the field for ASU's defense due to the absence of starting redshirt freshman safety Cameron Phillips and injuries to junior cornerbacks Chase Lucas and Jack Jones, Florida State marched 91 yards in 11 plays including a fourth-and-3 conversion to score its first points at 3:47 of the third quarter and make it a suddenly close 9-7 ASU edge.

After redshirt sophomore punter Michael Turk — excellent in the game with eight punts for a 45.8 yard average with four inside the 20 — ended ASU's third straight series of the quarter with a punt on its next possession, the Seminoles immediately struck again to take a 14-9 lead. With Lucas and Jones watching from the sidelines, sophomore cornerback Timarcus Davis gave up a 91-yard touchdown strike to sophomore wide receiver Tamorrion Terry, a one-play scoring drive.

It didn't dent ASU's confidence whatsoever. On their next possession, the Sun Devils marched 59 yards on 12 plays in a drive that included a highlight-reel 27-yard scramble by freshman quarterback Jayden Daniels on third-and-10 and ended with sophomore kicker Cristian Zendejas making his fourth field goal of the day to tie a Sun Bowl record and cut his team's deficit to 14-12. But it was the Sun Devils' fourth red zone trip and they only had 12 points to show for it and still trailed.

That's when Harts sprung into action on a miscommunication between Florida State sophomore quarterback James Blackman and a receiver that placed a ball directly in the arms of the safety who started in place of Phillips. With a clear path to the end zone, Harts pushed ASU's lead to 20-14 after a successful 2-point try. The interception was Blackman's third of four on the day, with the Sun Devils needing two more turnovers later in the fourth quarter to salt the game away.

On Florida State's next drive, sophomore ASU linebacker Darien Butler made a tackle-for-loss on a fourth-and-2 get his team the ball back. Blackman then threw his fourth interception of the day to ASU senior linebacker Khaylan Kearse-Thomas on Florida State's next drive. And even with all of that, the Seminoles had one more chance in the game's final two minutes when Terry lost a fumble to ASU forced by sophomore linebacker Merlin Robertson and recovered by sophomore linebacker Tyler Johnson.

"Can't say enough about our kicker and our defense," Edwards said. "We get six turnovers we should probably win a game. That being said, these guys kept fighting back for us. They really did. I'm happy for our seniors. To end the season with a bowl victory for them is very important. We hit a slump during the season where we had lost four in a row. I reminded the players, when you get tired of losing, you're going to win again. We've won three in a row now. This is a good way to set the 2020 season off for us, with a bowl game (win). That's very important to us."

Kearse-Thomas, who early in the game was given a reprieve when a hit on Blackman was called targeting on the field but overturned on review, and Williams excelled in their final ASU outing. Kearse-Thomas had a team-high six solo tackles and nine total in addition to his interception and a quarterback hurry. Williams concluded his season without giving up a touchdown pass in coverage and was excellent throughout a game in which ASU's pass defense yielded just 155 yards excluding the 91-yard touchdown.

"I can't say enough about Khaylan and Kobe," Edwards said. "These guys are seniors. I take my hat off to them. When you get a coaching change and you put in your defense, that's hard. It's hard on seniors. It really is. They're looking at a new staff, saying, 'you're playing all these young guys, what about me?' Without these two guys we're not the defense we were this year.

"I'm glad for these guys because of what they've meant to me personally. I lean on them. They were always there, always energetic. They were the keys to the defense to be quite honest."

The Sun Devils won despite being out-gained in total offensive yards 470 to 282 because their defense held up well other than the flagging late third-quarter stretch and Blackman committing five turnovers on his own out of the six total by the Seminoles. Robertson had perhaps his best game of the season and forced both of Florida State's lost fumbles and recovered one of them on his own. Sophomore safety Aashari Crosswell and junior safety Evan Fields each had a first-half interception to contribute to the shutout pitched by ASU before intermission, the latter doing so after promising his mom he would get one for her on her birthday.

While Daniels — sacked three times on the day and under duress throughout — received the game's MVP honors for the Sun Devils despite a low-percentage 12 of 28 passing performance for just 195 yards in part because he led the team in rushing with 36 yards on 12 carries, it was the team's defensive playmaking that took center stage in the absence of senior receiver Brandon Aiyuk and junior running back Eno Benjamin.

Moreover, it was White's successful first attempt at calling plays after being promoted from cornerbacks coach to defensive coordinator, which resonated with Edwards and ASU players in the game's aftermath, particularly as it came in White's hometown in front of a large group of family and friends.

"One hundred tickets," Edwards said. "'One hundred tickets Tony White.' He has a fan base now. He grew up here. It was fun, we visited his brother's high school, worked out over there when we got here Thursday. He was excited. I'm happy for him. Gets to take over as the coordinator. I thought he did a great job. Had a shutout going in the first half."

Added Kearse-Thomas: "He got us prepared really well. I mean, we had all month to really prepare. We were very detailed in what we were doing and then he got the play call in for us and told us to go. [Linebackers coach Antonio Pierce] told us before the game, 'This could be a stat game if you want it to be.'"

Stats make players happy and especially so when it includes winning football games and having fun doing it. Under the team's previous coaching staff, that was not the case for some Sun Devils who now believe they are passing a torch to the next generation with a lot of fuel for what they see as an even brighter future.

"It's changed tremendously (under Edwards)," Kearse-Thomas said. "It's like (the movie) Coming to America. "Coming from a dictatorship ... just the freedom. Coach Herm, he allows us to be us. A couple years back we couldn't do that. It played a role in the success with ASU. I feel like him letting the kids be kids is a big step for the program."

[fakexface]

Season 3-Season 5

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 𝓣𝓮𝓵𝓵 𝓶𝓮 𝔀𝓱𝓪𝓽 𝔀𝓮 𝓹𝓻𝓪𝔂𝓲𝓷𝓰 𝓯𝓸𝓻; 𝓽𝓸𝓸 𝓶𝓪𝓷𝔂 𝓰𝓸𝓭𝓼. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

𝐒𝐞𝐚𝐬𝐨𝐧 𝐓𝐡𝐫𝐞𝐞 •Following their journey from Qarth, their ship, Balerion, arrives at the city of Astapor in Slaver's Bay. By then, the dragons had grown to the size of small dogs. While these dragons were now capable of hunting fish for themselves, they are still not large enough to be used as weapons of war to invade Westeros. Thus, Rhaegar needs an army. While the Unsullied, the elite warrior-eunuchs produced in Astapor, are regarded as some of the finest soldiers in the world, Rhaegar and Daenerys know that their being slave-soldiers would become problematic in Westeros, where slavery is outlawed. However, Jorah states that they have no choice but to settle for this solution since they have no other means of acquiring an army; Rhaegar argues that if they sail to Essos and meet with the Golden Company, they would have an army. This causes a slight rift to grow between Rhaegar and Jorah. Meanwhile, Viserys is dealing with sever seasickness.

•Upon arriving in Astapor, the siblings are given a tour of the Unsullied barracks by the Unsullied's owner, Kraznys mo Nakloz, with his slave girl Missandei translating his Low Valyrian into the Common Tongue of Westeros for the siblings. Since Kraznys does not know that Rhaegar, Daenerys, or Viserys understand Valyrian, he frequently insults them- especially Daenerys, much to Rhaegar’s annoyance.

•Throughout the tour, Kraznys explains that the Unsullied were trained for battle from the age of five, and that only one in four recruits survived the training. He also demonstrates that the Unsullied do not fear pain or death by slicing off the nipple of one soldier, much to Daenerys's disgust; Viserys goes to yell, but Rhaegar stops him, despite his own anger. This soldier not only shows no sign of pain but even thanks his slave master for the opportunity to serve him. They also learn that the Unsullied are trained not to show mercy or weakness by killing a newborn slave child in front of its mother at the end of their training. While Daenerys is outraged by this, she still asks Kraznys how many Unsullied are available while Rhaegar has to take a step back, tugging Viserys back with him. They are told that there are eight thousand soldiers for sale and that Rhaegar has until the next day to make a decision.

•En route back to their ship, Ser Jorah recommends that Rhaegar purchase the Unsullied, arguing that under his command, these slave soldiers will have a far better quality of life serving him than they would under Kraznys and his ilk. Daenerys is distracted by a playing child who follows her and Jorah. However, neither of them noticed a hooded man, armed with a dagger, following them. The child offers Daenerys a gift, a wooden ball, gesturing for her to open it.

•As she does, the hooded stranger knocks it out of her hand. In response, Rhaegar grabs the stranger, and in their struggle knock Daenerys to the ground. The ball then cracks in half, releasing a manticore. Before the creature can harm Daenerys with its lethal sting, the stranger, revealing himself to be Ser Barristan Selmy, kills it with his dagger. Meanwhile, the child hisses in a reptilian manner and uses magic to escape. Ser Barristan quickly identifies himself as one of their father's Kingsguard and begs Rhaegar, Viserys, and Daenerys’s forgiveness for failing House Targaryen during Robert's Rebellion. In return for his wrongs, he offers to serve in their Crownsguard, which Daenerys accepts immediately despite Rhaegar’s hesitance, given how Rhaegar knew Barristan from when he was younger. He makes a comment in passing referring to the tourney during the False Spring. Ser Barristan gives a nervous chuckle.

•The next day, Daenerys, Rhaegar, and Viserys, accompanied by Jorah and Barristan, walk along a sea wall known as the "Walk of Punishment". Here, any slave who shows insubordination is strapped to a cross and left to die out in public, as a warning to all other slaves. Daenerys offers a condemned man water, but he refuses to drink, saying that he just wants to die. Later, they continue their negotiations with Kraznys over their planned purchase of the Unsullied. During the meeting, Rhaegar announces that they would take all 8,000 Unsullied soldiers, including those in training. Kraznys initially dismisses his offer and instead offers to sell them one hundred soldiers. Daenerys then offers to sell him one of her dragons, much to Rhaegar’s confusion.

•In the end, Daenerys reaches an agreement with Kraznys to sell her biggest dragon, Vhagon, for all of the Unsullied soldiers. Jorah and Selmy object to this deal on the grounds that the dragons are key to winning the Iron Throne. Rhaegar is able to read between the lines, and becomes impressed with his baby sister, sitting back to watch how everything will plan out. Viserys remains silent, more so out of shock than anything. However, Daenerys appears to brush away their concerns and accepts the transaction, and also takes Missandei as a token of faith. Upon leaving the meeting, she scolds Jorah and Selmy for criticizing her decision in public. Rhaegar congratulates her on her cunning wit.

•Daenerys also asks Missandei for her name and whether she has any living family, but Missandei responds that she does not. Daenerys warns her that she was heading to war, she may be killed and fall sick and die. In response, Missandei recites the Valyrian aphorism: "Valar morghulis", which translated into the Common Tongue as "all men must die". Daenerys then realizes that Missandei actually knew High Valyrian, and also adds that "we are not men".

•On the day of the exchange, the slave masters and Kraznys, along with the 8,000 Unsullied warriors, meet with Daenerys, Viserys, and Rhaegar to complete the deal. Rhaegar hands the chained Rhaenyx to Kraznys, who does not realize that he has been give the wrong dragon. Rhaenyx is hostile towards his slave master. Kraznys then gives him the golden whip, the symbol of ownership over the Unsullied. After finalizing the transaction, Rhaegar tests these new powers by ordering the Unsullied, in Valyrian, to march forward and then halt. This shocks everyone including Jorah and Barristan, who did not know that he spoke Valyrian.

•Kraznys then complains that Rhaenyx did not obey his command, to which Rhaegar angrily retorts Rhaenyx does not obey him because he is not a slave; Kraznys is both stunned to learn he speaks fluent Valyrian, and horrified to realize Rhaegar understood his derogatory comments and insults about Daenerys the whole time, merely feigning ignorance to lull the Astapori into a false sense of security. Daenerys finds this encounter humorous, watching from the sidelines with Vhagon and Meraxal, named after her ancestors dragons, Vhagar, and Meraxes, perched upon her own shoulders. Rhaegar then orders the Unsullied to kill all the slave masters; Daenerys adds in for them to free all the slaves in Astapor, but to hurt no innocent people. When a panicking Kraznys desperately shouts for someone to kill her, Rhaegar orders Rhaenyx to burn Kraznys alive.

•With the Unsullied under his command, Rhaegar sacks Astapor with little resistance. Once it is done, he addresses all of the Unsullied warriors and tells them they are now free. He also gives them the option of leaving unharmed or fighting under his command as free men. At first, the Unsullied remain quiet, not knowing what to do with their newfound freedom. However, one Unsullied soldier begins to beat his spear against the ground, signifying his allegiance to him. The rest of the Unsullied follow suit shortly thereafter. Now in command of an army of free men, Rhaegar, Daenerys, and Viserys march forward with their new army while their dragons fly overhead and roar triumphantly.

•During their journey to Yunkai, the next great city of Slaver's Bay, Rhaegar ordered the Unsullied to elect a commander from their own ranks. The officers ultimately choose Grey Worm, who like all Unsullied, was given the name of a type of vermin. When Rhaegar instructed the Unsullied to go back to their own names or pick new ones they like, Grey Worm elected to keep his, as it was the name he had when The Silver Dragon and Daenerys Stormborn set him free.

•While Daenerys and Barristan were confident that they could conquer Yunkai since that city only bred sex slaves, Jorah expressed his concerns that the city's defenders would not fight them on the battlefield but would rather strengthen their position behind the walls and utilize guerrilla tactics against her army. Rhaegar agreed with Jorah, stating that doing this wouldn’t gain them anything: there were no soldiers to gain in Yunkai. Jorah also viewed the Yunkai campaign as a distraction from their main goal of taking Westeros. Daenerys was, however, adamant on freeing the slaves of Yunkai, who number in the hundreds of thousands.

•She ordered Grey Worm to send a messenger to the city and inform Yunkai's slaver rulers that they must either surrender or suffer the same fate as Astapor. Rhaegar did not stop her; Daenerys held an audience with the Yunkish herald, Razdal mo Eraz, who was one of the ruling "Wise Masters" of Yunkai. Razdal attempted to discourage Daenerys from attacking his city by claiming that numerous armies throughout history had tried and failed to conquer it. However, Daenerys was undaunted and commented that a hard-fought battle would give her Unsullied much-needed practice. Razdal then attempted to bribe her by providing her with the gold and ships needed to transport the army to Westeros. In exchange, Daenerys and her brothers would have to leave Yunkai in peace.

•In response, Daenerys makes a counter-offer: she will spare the lives of Razdal and the slave-masters of Yunkai if every slave (men, women, and children) in the city were set free, and given as much food, clothing, and property as they could carry in payment for their services. She threatened to show no mercy if Yunkai rejected her offer. Razdal was offended by Daenerys's demands and threatened to use Yunkai's "powerful friends" to destroy her. Rhaegar found this amusing, but did not step in to aid his sister, for this was her fight.

•Razdal's actions caused the dragons to make threatening gestures. When Razdal protested that he had been promised safe conduct, Daenerys responded that the dragons had made no such promise and took offense to him threatening her and her brothers. Razdal was also unable to reclaim the chests of gold he had brought with him. Following his departure, Daenerys ordered the knights to find out more about Yunkai's "powerful friends" before she decided to attack the city.

•They eventually discover that these "powerful friends" are the Second Sons, a professional mercenary company. While there are only 2,000 of them, the Second Sons are armored and mounted, enough to cause trouble for the Unsullied. Daenerys tells Barristan to organize a meeting with the Second Sons' captains, saying that men who fight for gold "can't afford to lose to a girl". Rhaegar agrees, though he is more curious to see these so-called “Second Sons” in person more than anything.

•Daenerys meets with the Captains Mero, a Braavosi who is also known as the Titan's Bastard, and Prendahl na Ghezn, a Ghiscari, and Prendahl's underling Daario Naharis. During the proceedings, Mero insults Daenerys by likening her to a whore and touches Missandei inappropriately. It takes Jorah and Viserys both to keep Rhaegar in check, for had they not, he would have drawn his blade and ended the meeting in a battle. Prendahl and Mero refuse Daenerys's offer of an alliance, pointing out they will not get their rewards until Rhaegar reclaims the Iron Throne. In response, Daenerys replies that they had no army a fortnight ago and that they had no dragons a year ago. Daenerys gives them two days to make up their mind and sends them away with the barrel of wine which Mero had departed.

•After the Second Sons depart, Daenerys instructs Barristan to kill Mero in the event that she had to fight with them. Barristan replies that he would be glad to do so. Later that night, Daenerys takes a bath and is surprised to learn that Missandei speaks nineteen languages. In response, Missandei comments that this shouldn't be that odd since it only took Daenerys a year to gain a reasonable grasp of Dothraki. The khaleesi bristles at the idea she speaks only reasonable Dothraki and switches to the language to teach Missandei a lesson, only to have her pronunciation corrected. Rhaegar, in the meantime, can be seen studying the night sky; Jorah approaches him, asking him if he misses King’s Landing. Rhaegar responds that he does, but he loathes to see the mess that it has become under the Lannister’s rule.

•Suddenly, an Unsullied enters and holds a knife to Missandei's throat, advising the women not to scream. He removes his helmet, revealing himself as Daario. He confesses that his captains want to kill Daenerys, but he disagreed with them. Instead, he beheaded them and shows their severed heads to Daenerys. Shortly after, Daario swears fealty to Daenerys. Thus, Daenerys gains a new ally in the conquest. She calls for Rhaegar, who quickly returns and is ready to kill Daario on the spot until Daenerys explains everything.•Rhaegar is still untrusting of Daario, for any man who was willing to kill the very men he fought beside was not honorable. Daenerys tries to argue with Rhaegar, but finds truth in his words, despite how trusting she wants to be.

•For their assault on Yunkai, the new captain Daario suggested attacking the city through its lightly defended back gate. Their plan was to infiltrate the city and open the main gates for the rest of the army to invade. While Ser Jorah and Rhaegar were skeptical of the plan, Daenerys and Grey Worm were willing to trust Daario. During the war meeting, Daario attempted to flirt with her. Rhaegar and Viserys both quickly intervened. When the battle began, Ser Barristan and Viserys remained behind to guard Daenerys. During that night, Rhaegar, Jorah, Daario, and Grey Worm infiltrated the city and fought their way through the slave soldiers guarding the city. Within a few hours, Targaryen forces had captured Yunkai.

•The following morning, Daenerys addressed the city's slaves with Missandei serving as her translator. Rhaegar and Viserys both stood back to allow Daenerys her time in the light. During her speech, Daenerys told the slaves that it was their own choice to reach for their freedom. As a result, the liberated slaves revered Dany as their "mhysa", which translated as "mother" from the Old Ghiscari language. Daenerys mingled with the former slaves who regarded her as a "glimmer of hope" in an increasingly dark world. Rhaegar smiles as he watches, pride filling him to see the people accepting Daenerys so willingly. Viserys grumbles that he has not had his time in the light yet. Viserys receives a light smack on the back of the head from Rhaegar.

𝐒𝐞𝐚𝐬𝐨𝐧 𝐅𝐨𝐮𝐫 •Daenerys, Rhaegar, and Viserys sit near the sea with the three dragons, each one about the size of a small horse. Dany strokes Vhagon’s head, while Rhaenyx and Meraxal fight over a dead lamb and Vahgon joins the fight. As Daenerys tries to calm him down, Vhagon, without warning, snaps at her with a hiss as a warning to not interfere. He then roars and goes to contest the kill. Rhaegar and Viserys both grab Daenerys and pull her back, with Rhaegar standing before his younger siblings. Vhagon snarls a warning at his mother. This act, that her own child would threaten her, and that they are outgrowing their influence and ability to control them, leaves Daenerys and Rhaegar visibly shaken.

•Rhaegar returns to his Unsullied army to resume the march to Meereen. He notices Grey Worm and Daario Naharis are absent and sets out to find them after being told they are "gambling". Daario explains they are deciding on which of them will ride up front with him in the vanguard. Frustrated, Rhaegar states that the honor goes to Daenerys and Viserys, as well as Ser Jorah and Ser Barristan as they did not keep him waiting all morning. He orders the two men to ride at the back with the livestock. He also adds that the last man holding his sword shall find themselves at the end of his own blade, begging.

���On the road to Meereen, Daenerys speaks with Missandei, who tells her that Meereen would be wise to fear her brother’s approach. Daario meets them on the cliff side, and Dany expresses her annoyance when he shows her flowers he has picked. He reveals that the flowers represent a portrait of the landscape, and serve various purposes, chiefly that knowing her surroundings is important to her strategy. Rhaegar watches this from afar; he states to Ser Jorah that he still does not trust Daario, though his knowledge of the land is worth keeping him around for.

•The marching army halts and Daenerys goes to the forefront, discovering a slave child nailed to a cross. The child is dead, her hand pointing the way to Meereen, and Ser Jorah tells Daenerys there is one for each mile to the last of the great slave cities, 163 in total. Rhaegar does not comment, but his face shows that of great pain. Viserys retches softly in the background. Ser Barristan offers to have outriders go ahead and bury them, but Daenerys refuses, ordering that each of them be buried, and their collars removed, but not before she has looked upon each and every face. Rhaegar cannot help but feel surprised and proud of his sister and joins her. Viserys is the only one who does not.

•Rhaegar, Daenerys, and their army eventually arrive at the gates of Meereen as they begins their siege. They are faced with a champions duel where a riding knight of Meereen challenges her to choose a champion that will fight for her. Daario Naharis, commander of the Second Sons and the most expendable member of Dany's entourage, volunteers to be her champion. Once Naharis quickly dispatches the Meereen champion, Rhaegar begins the siege of the city by speaking to the gathered slaves and then catapulting the broken chains of those Daenerys has freed across the city walls, demonstrating their previous successes. As the slaves examine the broken chains, the Great Masters look on, perhaps in fear.

•He sends the Unsullied, led by Grey Worm, to sneak into Meereen and start a slave revolt inside the city. The plan is successful, the slaves rise up against their masters, kill some of them and open the gates to the three siblings. They enter the city as liberators and the freedmen of Meereen celebrate Daenerys’s arrival by shouting "Mhysa" and throwing their old slaves' collars at her feet. She then has 163 Great Masters killed similarly to how they had murdered the slave children on the road to Meereen, and despite Ser Barristan's council to answer their injustice with mercy, she claims she is "answering injustice with justice". Rhaegar views this as a dangerous move, and voices his distaste to such a method; killing those who created such injustice would not create balance, but more of an eye-for-an-eye scenario. Despite this, he allows her to go ahead with her plan. The Great Harpy of Meereen at the apex of the Great Pyramid is covered with a great Targaryen banner as Rhaegar, Daenerys, and Viserys look down on the newly liberated city.

•As a meeting with his advisers and commanders of his forces is held in the highest quarters of the Great Pyramid, Rhaegar is informed that the Second Sons had taken the Meereenese navy, composed of 93 ships. Although Rhaegar did not command Daario to take them, Daenerys asks if it is enough to take their army to King's Landing. Jorah remarks that even though they might be able to take King's Landing, they wouldn't be able to hold all the Seven Kingdoms. He also tells her that in Yunkai, the Wise Masters re-established slavery and took control of the city, swearing to take revenge against Daenerys.

•In Astapor, the council Rhaegar has left behind to rule has been overthrown by a butcher named Cleon, who named himself "His Imperial Majesty". Rhaegar, angered, commands everyone except Ser Jorah and Daenerys to leave him, and here he questions his ability to rule the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros if they can't even pacify the three cities of Slaver's Bay. Thus, he decides to have Daenerys stay in Meereen to gather more knowledge and experience.

•Daenerys asks him what he intends to do, and he flashes a rare, toothy smile: he is going to take a third of the fleet and sail to gather the Golden Company. He instructs her on how to rule, spending the next four days preparing her to rule in his stead. Viserys would be there as well to give aid; Ser Jorah and Daario would remain as her guards. He would leave Greyworm and two thirds of the Unsullied, as well as Ser Barristan. He departs on the fifth day with thirty two ships, leaving behind sixty four for Daenerys and Viserys.Daenerys sets up the time to hear petitions from her new subjects. Among the first is a goatherd whose flock were roasted by the dragons; Dany orders him paid three times their value. Next is Hizdahr zo Loraq, who asks to be allowed to bury his father, one of the 163 Great Masters Daenerys ordered crucified. Dany is swayed by Hizdahr's arguments (aided by guilt upon realizing that the elder zo Loraq opposed the crucifixion of the slaves in the first place) and allows the burial. Missandei informs her that there are 200 more supplicants. Viserys aids her in her decision process, though his own opinions are often colder than what Daenerys decides.•Some weeks later, Daenerys is irritated to discover Daario in her private quarters. The mercenary tries to give her flowers, but the queen demands to know what he wants. Daario asks to be allowed to indulge in his only two talents: killing men and loving women. Dany counters that the Second Sons are assigned to patrol Meereen and keep the peace, and there are plenty of women in the city that Daario can pursue. Daario says that police work doesn't do the trick and that the only woman he wants isn't interested.

•Nonetheless, he confirms that he is sworn to her and that he will continue boring patrol work if that is what the queen wants, and only asks that she occasionally allow him to do what he is actually good at. In response, Daenerys orders him to take off his clothes.

•When Viserys learns of this the next day, he very nearly steals a dagger to go “chop off that mercenary prick’s prick,” and to “see how well he can please a woman without a cock or a tongue!”

•The following morning, as Daario leaves, Jorah enters, observing that he is earlier than most, but later than others. Daenerys brushes off his disapproval and says that she is sending the Second Sons to retake Yunkai. To ensure that slavery is truly dead in that city, Daario is under orders to kill every Wise Master the Second Sons encounter. Jorah protests, warning her that good and evil exists on both sides of every conflict, and that he wouldn't be advising her today if Eddard Stark had done to him what she is about to do to the Wise Masters, and that Rhaegar would disapprove, having said nearly the very same thing he had just spoken. After considering this, Daenerys instructs Jorah to tell Daario that she has changed her mind: his orders are now to accompany Hizdahr to Yunkai so that he can give the Wise Masters a choice: they can live in her new world, or die in their old one. As Jorah leaves, Dany says to tell Daario that it was Jorah who changed her mind.

•Daenerys is in her chambers with Missandei. The two are talking about Grey Worm and how Missandei caught him gazing while she was bathing naked downstream. Daenerys asks whether Missandei thinks he was spying on her. She says no, and Daenerys mentions that the Dothraki have no taboos against nudity or public love-making. Of course, Missandei is not Dothraki, but she says it doesn't matter, as Grey Worm isn't interested in her - none of the Unsullied desire women. Missandei says he was interested, surprisingly to both of them. Daenerys inquires whether, when a slave is castrated, the masters take "all of it" - both the "pillar" and the "stones." Missandei says she doesn't know, to which Daenerys asks if she's ever wondered. Thoughtful, Missandei confirms that she has. Later on, Viserys finds out that Jorah Mormont was spying on Daenerys.

•Jorah enters the throne room in Meereen. In an audience before her, a seething Daenerys demands an explanation, and Jorah says it is a plot by Tywin Lannister to divide them. Dany counters that the pardon was signed the year they met. Asking him whether he claims the pardon was forged, Jorah admits that it was not. He soon confesses to giving Varys information on Daenerys's activities in Essos. Daenerys angrily says that his telling them of her and her brothers still living and gaining ground led to her near-poisoning at the hands of a wine merchant. Jorah then protests that his actions stopped her from being poisoned, but Daenerys retorts this was only because he knew it might be coming. Jorah begs for her forgiveness, but Dany rebuffs him, saying he betrayed her, selling her secrets to the man she holds responsible for the death of her family. She spares his life, however, and gives him a day to leave Meereen. She warns that if he is seen in the city after that, his head will be thrown into Slaver's Bay. Jorah is last seen leaving Meereen on a horse.

•Viserys, alarmed at the changes that were suddenly occurring, sends a raven to Essos, hoping to reach his brother to tell him what had occurred. By this time, it had been a month since Rhaegar had left. The letter is written in High Valaryian.

•Meanwhile, Rhaegar has landed in Essos, and has been working to gain the favor of the current leader of the Golden Company, Harry Strickland. Upon arrival, he was pleased to note that what he had read as a child was true; that the high officers display a rude splendor. Like many in their trade they keep their worldly wealth upon their person, including jewelled swords, inlaid armor, heavy torcs, and fine silks. Many wear a lord's ransom in golden arm rings, with each ring signifying one year's service with the Golden Company.

•The captain-general's tent, made of cloth-of-gold, is surrounded by a ring of pikes topped with the gilded skulls of previous captains-general. A rather morbid display, but it signified strength- something that Rhaegar appreciated. He explained who he was, how Aegon Targaryen was his ancestor, and how he, along with his siblings and their dragons, intend to take back King’s Landing and rule the Seven Kingdoms once more, but that he couldn’t do such a thing without an army.Harry counters that Rhaegar has the Unsullied. Rhaegar replies that the Unsullied are a fraction of what he needed. He also added that the pay would be handsome, and waves forth Ser Barristan, who brings with him five trunks full of jewels and gold- all from House Targaryen.

•Harry agrees to help on the condition that only a portion of the Golden Company would return with Rhaegar at the time being; the rest would set sail for King’s Landing once Rhaegar was prepared to launch a formal attack. Rhaegar agreed with this, for it was the best deal that he would get.

•Daenerys sits in her throne room where she is receiving another day's supplicants. An old man named Fennesz approaches the throne. Fennesz explains that he was not one of the slaves who toiled away at manual labor, but a well-educated teacher and servant to Master Mighdal, who employed him as a teacher for his own children. He tells Daenerys that Master Mighdal's seven-year-old daughter Calla admires Daenerys, having learned of the Targaryen dynasty through Fennesz's teachings. As a servant of Master Mighdal, Fennesz was well-treated and even well-respected in the household, but when Daenerys forcibly freed all of the slaves in the city she did not understand the full-scale complications of suddenly having to care for so many people. Fennesz originally stayed in Master Mighdal's house after she took the city. Mighdal's children begged him to stay, but Mighdal and Fennesz agreed that he must leave rather than face reprisals, forcing Fennesz to become homeless. Daenerys insists that she had established mess halls to feed the freed slaves and barracks to house them. Fennesz says that he has visited these refugee centers and they are not very safe: the young prey on the old, harassing and robbing them. Daenerys insists that the Unsullied will restore order, but Fennesz points out that even assuming that they are able to ensure his physical safety, he has lost his livelihood and his purpose and is too old to start anew. Therefore, he has come to Daenerys to beg her permission to sell himself back to Mighdal. She is shocked that he would want to be an owned as a slave again, as a man might own a goat or a chair.

•He implores her that the young who can adapt rejoice in her new world, but for those too old to change, there is only fear and squalor. Nor, he says, is he alone: there are many supplicants waiting outside lining up to make similar requests. Daenerys is crestfallen and says she did not liberate the slaves of Meereen only to preside over the very injustice she sought to destroy, but surprisingly relents and admits that freedom means making one's own choices. Viserys argues, saying how this could become dangerous, how the masters could abuse this, that they should wait for Rhaegar to return, but she does not listen. Therefore, she allowed Fennesz to enter into a labor contract with Mighdal, but lasting no more than one year. He earnestly thanks her, and leaves. The next supplicant then enters, a shepherd carrying a bundle in his arms. The shepherd timidly approaches and states that he is unable to speak in the common tongue and requires Missandei to translate. Distraught, he tells Daenerys that the "winged shadow" came, placing the bundle on the ground and opening it to reveal charred bones - of a human child. Daenerys's largest dragon, the pitch-black Vhagon, has roasted the man's three-year-old daughter Zalla until this is all that was left of her.

•Horrified, Daenerys meets with Missandei and Grey Worm in private to discuss the details of Zalla's death and how to deal with the growing threat the dragons are posing to the people of Meereen. Grey Worm reports that Vhagon was last seen flying over the Black Cliffs three days ago, but he can no longer be found. Realizing that she can no longer control the dragons, Daenerys tells them to head with her to the catacombs under the city. Viserys, distraught, realizes what Daenerys intends to do, and tries to reason with her: chaining the dragons up would do more harm than good, that they need the open air and skies. Later, she leads her remaining two dragons, Rhaenyx and Meraxal, into the catacombs, where they are distracted by sheep carcasses. As they are feeding, Daenerys personally locks huge iron collars around their necks, which are secured by heavy chains. She weeps as she does so, as it is symbolically reducing the remaining "children" to chained-up slaves themselves. Viserys stands back and watches, not quite crying, but his eyes are damp as Daenerys returns without the dragons. Daenerys wordlessly leaves and closes the huge stone door to the catacombs behind her as her dragons grow distressed and pathetically call after her. When they attempt to follow, they realize they are chained in place.

•Rhaegar begins to travel back to Meereen, the thirty-two ships full of both Unsullied and members of the Golden Company. He mentions to Barristan how he cannot wait to finally return to Dragonstone, to Westeros.

𝐒𝐞𝐚𝐬𝐨𝐧 𝐅𝐢𝐯𝐞 •Following the removal of the golden harpy from the top of the Great Pyramid and the subsequent murder of White Rat, Daenerys is furious. She orders that he be buried with full honors in the Temple of the Graces as a statement to the Sons of the Harpy, and orders that the Unsullied patrol the streets of Meereen. She later receives Hizdahr zo Loraq's report on the situation in Yunkai. Daenerys is pleased that the Wise Masters will share their rule with the former slaves but refuses to support Hizdahr's concession of allowing the fighting pits to reopen. Viserys tries to talk her into opening the fighting pits, but is ignored outright with a door shut in his face, much to his annoyance. He yells through it, saying how she should listen to him if she didn’t want to “wake the dragon”- to which she laughs.

•Later that night, Daario tries to convince her to reconsider, explaining that he was once a slave who earned his freedom in the pits. The skills he learned ultimately led him to the Second Sons and thence to Daenerys. Upon learning that Vhagon hasn't been seen in weeks, Daario muses on the possibilities of a dragon king with no dragons. In response, Daenerys and Viserys visit Rhaenyx and Meraxal in the catacombs where she imprisoned them. To their horror, they try to attack upon hearing her voice and she is forced to flee with Viserys quickly closing the door. He then turns to her wordlessly, gesturing towards the catacombs as if to say “I told you so”.

•Daenerys leads a council meeting in the pyramid debating the fate of a Son of the Harpy that Daario and Grey Worm found. Barristan pleads that the man deserves a fair trial while the freed Meereenese slave, Mossador, insists Daenerys put the man to death. Viserys is torn during this discussion, for he can see either side, though he does agree that a fair trial would look better.

•Daenerys thanks the advisers for their council and dismisses them, but Viserys asks her for a word in private about their father, the "Mad King". Daenerys initially scoffs at Viserys for reminding her of what she considers her enemies' lies. He tells Daenerys about how their father set entire towns and castles ablaze, murdered sons in front of their fathers, and burned men alive with wildfire, laughing as they screamed. All of this led to a rebellion that killed every Targaryen save for her, Rhaegar and Viserys. Daenerys is visibly shocked but assures Viserys that she is not like their father. Viserys agrees, but he still warns her that the Mad King gave his enemies the justice he thought they deserved, and each time it made him feel powerful and right until the very end. Daenerys promises not to have the Son of the Harpy executed without a fair trial.

•Later, Mossador goes against Dany's order and executes the man, angering Daenerys. She decides to sentence Mossador to death, stating that killing the Son of the Harpy broke the law. A crowd gathers to witness Mossador's execution and Daenerys tells the crowd that when she conquered Meereen she promised freedom and justice, but one cannot exist without the other. Daenerys is escorted away by the Unsullied when riots break out between the freedmen and the masters.

•She retreats to her pyramid where she wants to spend time alone. She steps out onto her balcony and finds Vhagon atop the Great Pyramid. Daenerys is happy to see him and tries reaching out for him, which she hadn't done since the start of her reign over Meereen, but he flies away. Daenerys is left heartbroken as she gazes at Vhagon from the distance.Daenerys looks down at the streets below from her royal apartment in the Great Pyramid. Daario arrives telling her that Hizdahr is in the throne room awaiting her. Daario assures her that he has her well protected, despite claiming she could easily defend herself against Hizdahr. In the throne room, Daenerys hears Hizdahr plead again to reopen the fighting pits of Meereen, but she refuses. Viserys disagrees with this decision. Hizdahr rationally argues that the fighting pits provide a great spectacle that has always been enjoyed by both the masters and slaves, and is one of the few things that can bring the city together. Dany does not interrupt him this time as he continues to offer his proposal.

•Daenerys is devastated upon learning of one of the Unsullied’s untimely death at the hands of the Sons of the Harpy, and grieves over his corpse in the throne room. Upon the suggestion of Daario, Dany decides to round up each of the leaders of Meereen's noble families, including Hizdahr zo Loraq.

•Bringing the eight of them down to the catacombs where Rhaenyx and Meraxal, Dany, with the enforcement of the Unsullied, forces the leaders forwards towards the dragons until one of them is burned alive and then brutally torn apart. Viserys smiles at this, pleased with the fear it drew from the other leaders. Drawn into Dany's debate between mercy and revenge, Missandei advises her to trust the decision that she alone sees. Taking this advice, Dany approaches Hizdahr in his cell, admitting her mistake of refusing to open the fighting pits. Daenerys, in order to secure her bondage with the noble people of Meereen, decides to wed herself to Hizdahr, although she makes it clear that she will be the one in control. Viserys is completely blindsided by this decision, and takes Dany aside to talk to her about this- about their familial traditions. Daenerys will not hear it, claiming that this is the only way.

•Later, while in bed with Daario, Daenerys reassures him that her marriage to Hizdahr is purely political in order to maintain peace. Daario hints at jealousy and asks if Daenerys would marry him instead, but Daenerys, who would like nothing less, is forced to refuse him.

•To everyone's surprise, Viserys, Daenerys, and Hizdahr appear in one of the fighting pits to watch the opening of the games, though Daenerys is visibly uncomfortable at the violent butchery before her, and gets up to leave, she is convinced to stay by Hizdahr. Viserys remains as well, taking interest in the “savage games” of Meereen. While Daenerys argues with Hizdahr, another fighter emerges into the pit and proceeded to overpower the other participants, knocking them down one by one using non-lethal means that caused Dany to become intrigued by this newcomer. When the fighting is over, the surviving fighter reveals himself as Jorah, but Daenerys, who still hasn't forgiven him, orders him taken away. However, Jorah shouts out that he has brought Daenerys a gift. Jorah's companion enters the arena and introduces himself to Daenerys as Tyrion Lannister. Viserys very nearly spills his wine.Daenerys has both Tyrion and Jorah brought before her inside the Great Pyramid. Though she had doubts about the Lannister's claimed identity, she lets him try and talk her out of executing Jorah. On Tyrion's advice, she spares Jorah's life and banishes him from Meereen again (he counseled that she should not kill those devoted to her, but also that Jorah could not be present should she ever claim Westeros). Tyrion asks where Rhaegar is; Daenerys states that he is returning with the Golden Company, much to Tyrion’s shock.

•Later, over wine, Daenerys and Tyrion speak about their families and past. Daenerys is still thinking about executing Tyrion, mostly as revenge against the Lannisters for betraying her family, but decides not to when she sees Tyrion's indifference to death. Tyrion warns her that the noble families of Westeros are too busy fighting the game of thrones or exhausted to help them reclaim the Iron Throne, and suggests that they consolidate their power in Meereen and build a new kingdom for themselves. Daenerys says they will only stay in Meereen long enough to stabilize the situation and likens Westeros's game of thrones to a spinning wheel, with the Great Houses as spokes. Tyrion dismisses her idealism, noting that others have tried to stop the wheel, but Daenerys firmly declares that she and Rhaegar intend to break the wheel, not just stop it. She then informs Tyrion that she will advise Rhaegar to take him on as an advisor, but confiscates his wine – she needs him to communicate in complete sentences.

•Attended by Tyrion Lannister, Missandei, Viserys, Hizdahr zo Loraq and Daario Naharis, Daenerys sits in the royal box at the Daznak's Pit and watches to crowd; they are silent. Hizdahr tells her to clap her hands, which she does, beginning the Great Games. She then notices Jorah in the array of fighters, who gives the traditional dedication to her and manages to be the last fighter standing. At this moment, Jorah suddenly hurls a spear at the royal box – embedding itself in a Son of the Harpy sneaking behind Daario.

•Suddenly, Sons of the Harpy reveal themselves on every level of the arena and begin slaughtering collaborating Masters and freedmen alike – Hizdahr included. Jorah and Daario evacuate Daenerys from the royal box, while Tyrion and Viserys rescue Missandei. Finding the exits blocked, the group makes a stand in the center of the Pit with the remainder of the Unsullied defenders. Seeing they are hopelessly outnumbered, Daenerys takes Missandei's hand and closes her eyes, ready to face her death.

•At that moment, a draconic screech pierces the air, and Vhagon descends upon the arena, flying out of a giant flame burst. Many of the Sons scatter in terror as Vhagon bites and mercilessly burns the nearest ones to death. The Sons rally enough to attack Vhagon with spears, which Daenerys hastily makes an effort to remove. Trying to get Vhagon out of the Sons' range, Dany climbs atop his back and bids him to fly, becoming the first Targaryen dragonrider in over a century. The Sons of the Harpy temporarily routed, Daario, Jorah, Missandei and Tyrion look on in astonishment as Vhagon, with Daenerys on his back, soars away.

•Daenerys is able to still see as Viserys, with his attention on his baby sister, is cut down by a Son of the Harpy, much to her horror. Eventually, the Unsullied are able to contain the fighting, but Viserys’s wounds are simply too much and cannot be healed, and he dies within the fighting pit. His last thought was that the Targaryens are finally back with their mighty dragons, and how he could not wait to see Westeros from the air.

•Later, Daenerys finds herself far away from Meereen, atop an impressive hill in a sea of green grass. Vhagon is still recovering from his wounds and is uninterested in flying back. Unfortunately, he's also not interested in finding them any food. Daenerys wanders away to find something for them, but is shocked to see a trio of Dothraki bloodriders emerge. Within minutes, an entire khalasar has her surrounded. Understanding what might happen to her, she quickly removes a ring and drops it in the grass, determined to leave a trail.

[duhragonball]

Dragon Ball Z Super Broly 4: The Quest for Peace

I don’t know what image to use to start this off, so I’m gonna go with this shot of Bulma, because it’s pretty non-spoilery, and I thought she looked cute hiding back there in her li’l snowsuit.  

I’m not sure how to organize my thoughts on this, so let’s start with just a general overview of the movie.   It was really good, and I think this movie proves that Akira Toriyama still has a tremendous talent for storytelling.   I think he’s taken a lot of lumps from critics over the years, but personally I prefer to lay the blame on the other creators who work with him or for him on these types of projects.  The filler scenes I’ve been covering on my Dragon Ball Liveblog sort of bear this out.   The stuff adapted from the manga has very clear characterization and plot continuity.   Point A always leads to Point B and the loose ends tend to get tied up later on.    But whenever the other guys at Toei get involved, things get a little wonky, and the details don’t always add up.    The worst parts of the Dragon Ball Super anime have a similar feel to the dopiest filler scenes from Dragon Ball and DBZ, so I don’t think I’m lionizing Toriyama too much in this.   He’s not perfect, but he knows how to make these characters work. 

The best evidence of this is how he took a glorified monster heel like Broly and made him into a sympathetic character.   The Movie 8 version of Broly had a very similar origin story to this newer, greener Broly.   For the sake of discussion, I’m going to be calling them Broly ‘18 and Broly ‘93, all right?  

Broly ‘93 was born with a really amazing power level, and King Vegeta had him killed because he might become a potential danger some day.  Paragus tried to intervene, and ended up sharing his son’s fate, but they ended up saving each other’s lives and Paragus raised him in exile, dreaming of the day they could take revenge against King Vegeta. 

Broly ‘18... pretty much everything I just said, only King Vegeta shot him into space instead of trying to stab him.   That makes a huge difference, because it allows Paragus to run off and find him instead of getting condemned to death for defying King Vegeta in person.   One of the plot holes in Movie 8 was that Baby Broly ‘93 managed to survive getting stabbed and Paragus ‘93 managed to survive taking an energy blast from King Vegeta, and then they both survived the planet exploding.  

Watching this movie, I could really tell that Toriyama went over the 1993 film with a critical eye.    Not too many people watched Movie 8 and felt much sympathy for Broly, even though he kind of deserves some.  Broly ‘93′s dad controlled him with a creepy device, and tried to use him as a weapon of revenge against people he’d never met.  The trouble is that Broly ‘93 never got the spotlight to demonstrae why he might deserve some pity.   He just stood around and then he went bonkers and destroyed those aliens’ home planet.   Toriyama watched this and realized it’d be a more compelling story if the audience felt sorry for the big guy.  

And so you have scenes of Kid Broly trying to survive on his own.    You have new characters introduced who befriend Broly ‘18 and confront Paragus for how he treats him.   And when it’s time for Broly ‘18 to fight, he’s actually at a disadvantage.   Vegeta really works him over good for a long time before Broly starts building up enough power to defend himself.  It was rather shocking to me to see this character being treated as a weaker fighter, even temporarily.   This was probably something Movie 8 lacked.   Broly ‘93 looked pretty pathetic in his base form, but no one ever picked on him or anything.   Later, when Gogeta is finally turning the tide against Broly ‘18, it becomes clear that Broly ‘18 is definitely losing, and he’s going to be killed, and it’s not right, because he never asked for any of this.  

There’s a definite Android 8 quality to Broly ‘18.    It’s not quite the same.  Broly ‘18 isn’t a pacifist and he’s not afraid to fight, but he’s in that same boat where he’s a character introduced as this enormous threat, and then it turns out he’s pretty gentle at heart, and he’s only on the front lines because he’s been coerced into it.   I think Toriyama looked at the 1993 version and said “Okay, he’s way stronger than Goku and Vegeta.   That’s his gimmick, so he has to keep that aspect.   But there has to be some trade-off for that.   He has to have a great weakness to balance out his immense strength.” 

That’s pretty much true for all of the Dragon Ball characters.   Master Roshi is introduced as an invincible fighter, but he’s consumed with lust and other carnal desires.   Goku’s the great hero who always rises to the occasion, but he’s really naive and careless about a lot of things.   Bulma’s a technological genius, but physically weak and also very self-centered.   Vegeta is powerful, but often blinded by his ego.    Most of the movie villains lack that balance.   Broly ‘93 is a great example of a movie villain who’s just sort of unstoppable until the end of the movie, when Goku finally punches a hole in him and he explodes.  Broly ‘93, Bojack, Super Android 13, none of these big galoots are brought down by a fatal flaw.   They’re just really strong until it’s time for them to not be really strong any more, and then they get wrecked.

Improving this single aspect of the Broly concept opens up a world of possibilities.    For one thing, it makes all the fights in this new movie distinct.   I saw clips of Broly fighting different guys in this movie, which made me wonder how this was supposed to work.    Well, it’s actually pretty simple.   Broly steps off the spaceship, fights Vegeta, and then he starts losing.    Then he begins to learn how to keep up with Vegeta, and things get dicey.   Before it gets too tough for Vegeta, Goku decides to cut in and he fights evenly with Broly for a while, until he finds that he can’t keep up with him even at Super Saiyan Blue.    Then Goku and Vegeta tag team him for a little bit and pawn him off on Frieza.    By this point Broly’s gone so bonkers that he can’t distinguish one opponent from another, so Freiza becomes the object of his wrath while Goku and Geets take a breather to learn how to fuse.   Frieza can’t win, but he doesn’t need to, he just has to not die until Gogeta can return to close this thing out.    Then Gogeta fights Broly.  At this point Broly seems almost powerful enough to keep up, but Gogeta eventually wears him down, and Broly on the verge of defeat.  

It’s a beautiful thing.   You couldn’t do that with a 1990′s movie villain, because most of them were big dumb brutes without enough personality to function this way.    Broly ‘18 isn’t just an underdog who becomes and overdog and then becomes an underdog again.   What makes this formula work is that Cheelai and Leemo feel sorry for him on the sidelines.   On top of that I think Paragus truly does care about Broly ‘18, even though he’s a pretty lousy parent.   In the end, Paragus finally recognizes that King Vegeta had been right to exile Broly ‘18 all along.    He’s simply too dangerous for a combat situation.

I also really like how Goku tries to befriend him at the end of the movie.   It shows that Gogeta was only using lethal force as a last resort.    Once the battle is over and Broly’s no longer a threat, Goku wants to make things right and reassure Broly that they can be Saiyans and not have to kill each other or isolate themselves from the rest of the universe.   They could spar for funsies, like Goku and Vegeta did at the start of the movie.  

In particular, I’m very fond of the line at the end where Goku tells Cheelai his name, but adds “But Broly... Call me Kakarot.”   I love that because it’s like Goku is embracing this Saiyan custom of addressing each other by their Saiyan names.   He doesn’t call himself Kakarot, but all the other Saiyans do, and he wants Broly to feel like he can as well.    He can relate to Broly as a fellow outsider who had to grow up on another world.   He’s trying to give Broly a piece of the Saiyan culture, even if it’s a very small one.   It’s a big change from back when he angrily demanded that people not call him that because he was Son Goku.   After all these years, Goku’s comfortable being a Saiyan.   He doesn’t have to choose between being Goku or Kakarot.  He can be both.   He wants Broly to know he doesn’t have to choose either. 

It’s definitely a great Dragon Ball film.   The animation is well done, the writing is solid and on point.   There’s never really a place where things get dull for any appreciable length of time.   Even the space travel scenes are interesting, despite being rather low key. 

Is it better than Movie 8?   Well yeah, but I’m reluctant to say so, because I sort of have a soft spot for Movie 8, and I hate to just turn on it completely.    This new movie is superior in every objective way, though.   The characters are more developed, the action is more balanced, and the visuals are more compelling.   It’s forty minutes longer than Movie 8, and it shows.   There’s a lot of plot points that get breezed over in Movie 8, probably because there simply wasn’t room to explain how Piccolo got to the South Galaxy so quickly, or whatever else didn’t get explained.  The DBS movie actually used the Dragon Balls in the plot, which is usually a plus as Dragon Ball films go.   Call me stupid, though, but Movie 8 had Future Trunks and King Kai in it, and that makes a bigger difference than it really ought to.  

Is DBS: Broly a better movie than Fusion Reborn?   Hell no.  Fusion Reborn is friggin’ fantastic from start to finish.   Better plot, better music, cooler villain, beter visuals.   Yeah Gogeta got more time to shine in “Broly” but I’ll take a few seconds of Gogeta one-shotting the bad guy over ten minutes of Gogeta showing off.   Sometimes less is more, you know?   Fusion Reborn is untoppable, the end. 

Is it better than the Bardock TV Special?   Definitely, because the Bardock TV Special has some problems.   Is it a better Bardock/Destruction of Planet Vegeta story?  I’d have to give that some thought.   I don’t hate Dragon Ball Minus, but I don’t necessarily love the Father of Goku TV special either.   DBS: Broly pretty much adapted the entire Dragon Ball Minus story and just added in scenes of Paragus and King Vegeta.   Honestly, I’m not sure any of these really gets it right.   Each of them seems to treat Frieza’s betrayal and Goku’s trip to Earth as boxes on a checklist.   I’m not sure I can explain what I mean.    Best to save that for later.  

I’ve got other thoughts on this movie, but I think I’ll call it here for now.    If you want me to go on about a particular topic, shoot me an ask and I’ll talk about it.  But definitely, you should check this movie out.    It’s a really fun experience.

[acsversace-news]

Rather than offering standard gore and merely giving us the willies, The Assassination of Gianni Versace, Ryan Murphy’s second installment of American Crime Story on the FX channel (now available on Amazon Prime Video and ITunes), is one of the rare serial killer dramas genuinely interested in sexual mores, complex character, spiky history, and salient issues of class. Demanding, sometimes confounding, but nevertheless searing and absorbing, the series piles on layer after layer of pain, irony, and god-awful coincidence, its counter-clockwise structure designed to take us deeper and deeper into a human abyss.

Andrew Cunanan, the elusive Minotaur at the heart of this real-life ’90s labyrinth, is a deadbeat on the lam, a name-dropping, designer-obsessed social climber. On a tried-and-true procedural-thriller level, the limited series, chronicling the curly-haired monster sacré’s notorious murder spree and suicide, sheds light on the largest failed manhunt in U.S. history—a fascinating botch, the whole law enforcement fiasco resulting from rampant homophobia and pure incomprehension regarding “a gay parallel universe,” as Vanity Fair reporter Maureen Orth labels it in Vulgar Favors, her juicy recounting of the roller-coaster case. Another key factor is the homicidal young con man Cunanan’s startling ability to evade the cops. A wizard at blithely rearranging his Filipino-Sicilian heritage to suit his gold-digging needs, Cunanan could blend with chameleon ease into different communities—Italian, Greek, Latino, Asian, etc.—as “a multi-purpose ethnic.” Since the fugitive Cunanan had never been arrested, the only fingerprints to be found were on his California driver’s license.

The series is set in 1997—a pivotal year in LGBT history, as it marked the discovery of a viable treatment for AIDS, so the dread disease was no longer an outright death sentence. The show’s backward historical movement is a strategy that illuminates the beleaguered gay world of the period and ably avoids a Psychology 101 approach to motive and pathology, creating a dramatic and poignant memorial to the fleshed-out lives of Cunanan’s victims: we get the appealing, even ecstatic early moments of Cunanan’s relationships after we’ve witnessed the desperate, unraveling scenes and harrowing murders, and the effect is unsettling and difficult to shake.

As the far-reaching series spins further away from Versace’s sumptuous life in South Beach, “the pleasure capital of the gay world,” and from the spirited realms of high fashion, its trajectory and intent become a little puzzling, but the last few riveting episodes suggest Murphy’s main focus is to plumb Cunanan’s lethal mix of unhinged aspiration and greed and to link Versace’s well-documented life as a lauded fashion king, an openly gay man (challenged by AIDS-related illness), with the accomplished lives of Cunanan’s other gifted gay victims. Protean Andrew, a glad-handing, money-flashing teller of tall tales, functions as a soul-crippled shadow version of the flamboyant Italian designer. It’s primarily the last two episodes, “Creator/Destroyer” and “Alone,” that underscore the genius of Murphy’s overall design.

In his native Calabria, the child Versace, shored by his seamstress mother’s approval, sketches and discovers his interest in fashion, developing his métier, despite cruel bullying by his Catholic teachers and classmates. In contrast, Cunanan is raised, in neurotic, almost farcical fashion, to be a petulant Filipino-American prince by his dictatorial, cock-of-the-walk father, an embezzler and reflexive con man, so it’s clear Andrew’s propensity for around-the-clock deception is a direct result of his appalling daddy’s over-the-top spoiling, with a pinch of his Sicilian-American mother’s religious mania and mental illness added to the stew. Andrew is flimflam Pete’s and frail MaryAnn’s Frankenstein child. What we see of Cunanan’s shaky upbringing also clicks with his penchant for hooking up with “beaucoup-bucks” johns and well-heeled patrons: just as his father gave him the best and biggest room in the house, Cunanan lives and moves, for the most part, from one gravy train to the next.

Facing jail time for financial crimes, Cunanan’s dad flees his wife and children for good, but later an unusually determined Andrew tracks him down in Manila. In a savage moment, in what amounts to a 180-degree turn from his previous paternal adoration, Pete slaps and spits on Andrew, calling him “a sissy boy with a sissy mind.”

On Murphy’s hit series Glee, Darren Criss had the heart-on-his sleeve emotionality of a young Streisand or Garland, gradually emerging as the most expressive musical talent on the show, which was praised for—beyond its weekly ebullient songfest—its groundbreaking emphasis on “baby queers” and high school bullying. It seemed enough that the dynamite Criss could sing. In The Assassination of Gianni Versace, he gives a prismatic performance as Andrew Cunanan: he’s voluble, sly, strung-out on drugs (even shooting up between his grubby toes) or he’s coolly, scarily detached—a crystal meth Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. As the series progresses, we get to follow Andrew-in-a-social-whirl scenes (frankly a relief after the brackish murder segments) and to observe: the precocious, nose-in-a-book child reading Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited; the attention-grabbing, boundary-less teen sneaking off in cars with married men; the deluded, self-loathing bon vivant; the facile, coke-fueled charmer, with a geisha’s skill at entertaining rich men; and a relentless operator (with an IQ of 147), lying through his teeth, working the upper echelons of the gay community.

In several of its telltale social scenes, the show resembles John Guare’s Six Degrees of Separation, a drawing-room tragicomedy about a similarly adept gay con artist, and Anthony Minghella’s elegant 1999 film version of the Patricia Highsmith classic, The Talented Mr. Ripley. I remember watching Ripley when it first appeared and actually being reminded of Cunanan: what is it about the prospect of losing the good life that unhinges once-struggling or working-class people and sometimes drives them to murder? Is the luxury and the freedom money brings really so hopelessly addictive?

Melding rock with rebel fashion and, according to Orth, “a diehard infatuation with rank and power that smacked of new money vulgarity,” Versace’s brash, innovative work was “inspired by antiquity and sadomasochism.” In revealing counterpoint, Andrew Cunanan, an outcast aiming for an A-list life with a kind of “If they could see me now” fury, keeps his S&M habits, sideline drug dealing, pimping for the rich and closeted, and serious crystal meth use on the down low, so as not to scare away his upper-crust friends, lovers, and patrons. A bondage scene in the first episode, set to Phil Collins’s breezy “She’s an Easy Lover,” is the sort of libidinous freak-out Ryan Murphy has been serving up since the late seasons of Nip/Tuck;Criss does an impromptu, preppy-trying-to-be-wild dance before his duct-taped john that’s so perfect and right for the era that I almost laughed. He’s his own demented go-go boy.

Criss gives a tour-de-force turn as Cunanan, but the moving supporting performances are also stellar: Edgar Ramirez (as Versace); Ricky Martin (as the designer’s longtime partner); Jon Jon Briones (as wily Pete Cunanan); Cody Fern (as Cunanan’s dream man, a wheat-haired Midwestern Apollo); Mike Farrell and Michael Nouri (as Cunanan’s classy, wealthy, older lovers); Finn Wittrock (as a decent, brave but disconsolate Navy man caught up in Clinton’s swampy Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy); and the always-reliable Judith Light (as the blinkered wife of one of the murder victims, a honeyed Home Network purveyor of perfumes, cosmetics, and folksy advice). Penelope Cruz gives one of her most ferocious performances as Donatella, the world-weary fashion insurgent; Cruz uses the trademark Donatella snarl and swagger in such a creative way that it becomes almost lovable, suggesting the impassioned, caring sister underneath all the come-hither leather and glamorous packaging.

Despite some initially mixed, even dismissive reviews, this second installment of American Crime Story recently garnered 18 Emmy nominations, six of which went to the risk-taking actors. Murphy has, in the past, been all about shock and showmanship, but Assassination represents a newfound candor, fraught complexity, and daring in his work: he’s gone for something deeper and subtler here than his dynamic crowd-pleaser, The People Vs. O.J. Simpson, 2016’s most lauded show, or even his affecting, Emmy-winning TV version of Larry Kramer’s AIDS drama, The Normal Heart.

Just as the emboldened right has renewed its predictable attacks against the LGBT community, Murphy’s piercing, intricate series delves into the tyranny of the closet—the toxic effects of suppression, bigotry, and mainstream rejection. I’ve never admired Murphy’s bold, baroque eye and vision more.

[thesportssoundoff]

Joey’s Yankees Trade Deadline

Joey

July 22nd, 2019

In 2016, the Yankees used the trade deadline to try and play two different games at once. Realizing that the magic had run out and four to five years of delaying the inevitable was over; the Yanks traded Aroldis Chapman, Carlos Beltran and Andrew Miller to kick off what could've been a lengthy rebuild. Those three trades on their own restocked the farm system with premier top level talent with some lottery tickets thrown in that have paid dividends to this day. At the same time, a move here and a move provided them with some proven MLB players who allowed the team to flirt with being contenders down the stretch. It was a balancing act between rebuilding and placating your audience, one that ultimately paid off across the board. Watch this:

Aroldis Chapman turned into Gleyber Torres, Adam Warren and Billy McKinnie (more on him later).

Andrew Miller turned into Clint Frazier, Justus Sheffield (who has since turned into James Paxton) and some spare parts.

Carlos Beltran turned into Dillon Tate (more about him later), Erik Swanson (another player who turned into James Paxton) and Nick Green

In 2017, the Yankees were in the midst of a "restocking" of the shelves. The rebuild took less than a season and the team rode a trio of young stars (Aaron Judge, Didi Gregorious and Gary Sanchez) with a loaded farm system to back them up. They gambled on their window and made moves to try and take what was a fun potential playoff team into a full blown world series contender. The Yankees sent a bundle of high upside low floor prospects to Chicago in exchange for Todd Frazier, Tommy Kahnle and David Robertson. They made a filler move for Jaime Garcia to give them some support on the back end of the rotation. Finally they made the decision to give Oakland a balance of high upside guys and some players who could fill spots on a major league roster in exchange for the top available pitcher on the market in Sonny Gray. The team ultimately made the ALCS.

By 2018,  the Yankees story of being the fun rebuild into potential contenders was done and the Evil Empire was back. They spent their off-season swooping on key names and players. They got UNDER the luxury while adding the NL MVP in Giancarlo Stanton. By this time last year, the team had seen the likes of Gleyber Torres, Miguel Andujar, Luis Severino and Aaron Hicks all break through pretty much at once. Despite this, the Yankees felt like an empty World Series contender as Gary Sanchez collapsed, the 1B situation had eroded and as always, pitching was a premium. Despite spending most of the 2018 offseason preaching their desire for pitching, the Yankees never secured the "big" starter. They gambled on Sonny Gray rebooting and it never happened. They gambled on Tanaka being more consistent and he was a mystery. Guys like Domingo German and Johnny Loiasiga were inconsistent as pitchers tend to be. Making matters even more complicated, the Yankees had an impending roster crunch. They were full up on 40 man spots with a near limitless number of players in need of spots. As such the Yankees were active deadline players. They went out and got Lance Lynn, betting on peripherals (the same Lance Lynn who could be a key contributor to another team), in hopes he'd turn into something. Remember Billy McKinnie? Well the Yankees packaged him together with Brandon Drury to grab J.A. Happ. Happ wasn't the sexiest name on the FA market but the Yankees knew him from Toronto, respected the numbers and got him for pretty much a song. Dillon Tate? He went to Baltimore for Zach Britton. They also traded the likes of Adam Warren, Chasen Shreve and Giovanni Gallegos to create some space on the 40 man. One of the guys they got back? A "he hits the ball hard" 1B named Luke Voit. Voit went on to carry the offense when the likes of Judge and Stanton were sidelined or limited with injuries. Despite all the moves, the Yankees never quite hit their peak and the team was bounced out by the eventual world champions.

The 2019 Yankees enter the trade deadline in an interesting spot. This team is going to the playoffs and will almost certainly be the presumptive favorites in the AL. Their top opposition are the Houston Astros who like them are loaded up in the farm system with a need for pitching. Both teams stack up amazingly well against one another and the winner of that is almost certainly going to face the Dodgers. The Yankees path to a championship has never been clearer and this team is already making moves for October like trading for pinch runner extraordinaire Terrence Gore just so he can hang out in their minor leagues and show up around October. They saw a chance to make a move and got the AL home run leader Edwin Encarnacion just for further oomph in an oomphy line up. So what's the plan for July 31st? Well....

What Do They Need?

-Starting pitching

All teams need pitching but for a team with World Series aspirations? The Yankees REALLY need pitching. In a five game set, the Yankees will be able to roll out Masahiro Tanaka, CC Sabathia and James Paxton. That's more than good but it could be better. The Yankees rotation are volatile, even when you simply play the "all rotations are volatile" card. Tanaka has an elbow that could go at any time, CC Sabathia has one DL stint a half and James Paxton has never been all too durable himself. Behind those two guys you have J.A. Happ who is one of those aging arms trying to recalibrate his game in the juiced ball era and Domingo German who is likely to be on an innings limit. Despite the critiques of fans and baseball folks alike, the Yankees have found success with an opener (Chad Green starts, Nestor Cortes goes 3-4 innings) and can always rely on that. Can you do that in October? The Yankees' entire deadline is based around having a player who can start game 2 or 3 in the World Series behind Tanaka and potentially Paxton.

What Do They Want?

-Some relief help

The Yankees apparently want relief help which seems odd enough until you consider that their rotation may be five and fly come October. Tommy Kahnle, Adam Ottavino, Zach Britton and Aroldis Chapman make for four arms who can give you multiple innings but they could use upgrades elsewhere. Chad Green, David Hale, Nestor Cortes and Stephen Tarpley have all given the team some additional oomph out of the bullpen but this team could really use an additional arm in the pen. In a perfect world, the team has Dellin Betances back by September or Domingo German is in the bullpen for the second half of the year but no scenario goes 100% according to plan. They could also use a lefty primarily to buddy around with Britton out of the pen.

-Controllable years

The Yankees will eventually have to pay some folks they'd rather not lose out on (Didi, Betances) plus the likes of Aaron Judge, Gary Sanchez and company will need to be paid. What's more, the likes of CC Sabathia and Masahiro Tanaka potentially do not have long term futures for the Yankees. The Yankees want fiscally responsible controllable arms with years of control to be manipulated. Doesn't mean they won't go and chase down a rental but the rental approach last year ultimately cost them in the long run.

-High K rate/soft contact

This is very much a "No shit" comment but the Yankees prioritize guys who can miss bats OR initiate soft ground ball contact. The linedrive rate is a big deal for the Yankees because they ask pitchers to throw their offspeed stuff at extraordinary amount compares to the rest of the major leagues.  As such any pitcher giving up hard contact and throwing a lot of fastballs in NYS is probably not going to fare well and they'd rather avoid that mess entirely.

What Do They Have?

The Yankees have traded away plenty of assets, especially guys who were in theory "ready now" pieces. The likes of Billy McKinney, Dillon Tate, Justus Sheffield and company were sent away. Guys like Chasen Shreve, Adam Warren, Caleb Smith, Giovanni Gallegos and Garrett Cooper who were on the 40 man with no future on the roster were moved out for space and intentional signing bonus money. Most of the Yankees system depth exists on the lower levels, way down in the proverbial food chain which normally doesn't doesn't entice a GM to make moves. The BEST piece for the Yankees is outfielder Clint Frazier and that piece comes with plenty of questions. Clint Frazier is a fantastic power bat with "legendary bat speed" as Brian Cashman called it. He can hit for power AND average even if he K's a bit more than you'd like which is also why the Yankees are not going to give him away. Conversely, Frazier's defense is abysmal and it hasn't gotten better in the three years he's been on the Yankees. That's not including the questions about his make up, personality and injury history. The Yankees have a potential spot open for Clint Frazier next year but I get the feeling that he's not going to be here one way or another by the start of the 2020 season. Frazier's stock on the Yankees will forever feel like a balance between raw talent and limited patience. Beyond that the Yankees have oft injured slumping OF Estevan Florial and undersized flame throwing Deivi Garcia who has been a rapidly ascending arm who is limited by his build.

What the Yankees do have is an abundance of complimentary pieces. They're loaded with the sort of guys who ultimately find ways to contribute to teams when given opportunities and bolster trades around big pieces. For instance, a guy like Stephen Tarpley can appeal to a team as a potential LOOGY 7th inning guy if given a more consistent role. Teams collect guys like Luis Cessa (hard throwing guys who seem to lack a defined role on a team) all the time. Mike Tauchmann is a really solid 4th outfielder who plays tremendous defense, hits lefties well despite being a lefty and seems like the sort of guy teams are always looking for because . Flexy infleidler types like Tyler Wade and Thairo Estrada might be able to flourish in a more patient role and in the case of Estrada, there's high level upside for a guy who mashed pretty hard during his brief stint in the bigs. Even guys like Mike Ford, Chance Adams, Nestor Cortes and Ryan McBroom might find ways to become consistent contributors on other teams where they're not blocked by elite players. None of these guys can headline a package for a key piece but they can help amplify a deal and give teams a more instant reward while waiting for the "name" players of a trade to pan out. All a team has to do is look at how the likes of Miami and Toronto are getting some returns on talent the Yankees have given out.

The Best Case Scenario Is....

Easy enough for the Yankees, the best case scenario involves a starting pitcher arriving on their doorstep before the weekend ends. The Yankees tend to get help before the deadline crunch and with their lineup pretty much set across the board, their sole focus is on arms. A perfect scenario involves somebody like a Matthew Boyd or a Luis Castillo for a relatively modest price (can the Yankees convince a team that gambling on the upside of Florial plus some proven pieces can be a worthwhile starter point?) to give them not just an ace but a cost controlled ace under team control for a few years. The back up to the best case scenario pretty much revolves around two guys; Marcus Stroman and Robbie Ray. Both are guys a tier below the likes of Boyd, Minor and Castillo on paper with a more measured upside. Stroman in particular feels like a guy who the Yankees would more than love; still kinda young, a workhorse who is mentally tough, the sort of guy who would thrive in the spotlight who seems like he wants the opportunity to dos so. After getting their starter, the Yanks grab a lefty arm for the pen and do so without giving up Clint Frazier or Deivi Garcia.

The Worst Case Scenario Is...

There are two worst case scenarios and both feel uncomfortably realistic. The Yankees overpay out the wazoo for a guy like Trevor Bauer, Noah Syndergaard or Mike Minor; gambling big on their window being now and running the risk of overpaying for pitchers with a high level of bust potential. The Yankees go all in and give up a bunch to get one of the premier names who don't exactly fit what the long term profile of the Yankees is. The other worst case scenario is that there's NOBODY of consequence available and the Yankees are forced to accept the declining returns of a Madison Bumgarner. MadBum is an October baseball legend but he's aging with so-so peripherals who embodies the sort of rental the Yankees should aim to avoid. You're also going to wind up paying a sentimentality tax to San Francisco which when combined with the famed Yankee tax creates a ridiculous price point for this team. I also would imagine that the Yankees would cringe heavily and perish the thought of Zack Wheeler, Tanner Roark or Mike Leake as fallback options should every other key option be off the market.

One thing to remember....

The Boston Red Sox won the World Series last year with their starters averaging JUST over 5 innings a start. It's not a replica for success you want to copy but worst case scenario, there's no reason the Yankees couldn't go Tanaka-Sabathia-Paxton and some combination of Happ or German. It's not an ideal starting formula but it's also far from impossible. The Yankees could even bet on Luis Severino and German to piggyback off one another as long men in a postseason series. This is where having an insanely deep pen (with maybe a few bodies on the way) makes the Yankees different than just about any other team in this conversation except for the Rays.