#he is pushed by the adults in his life to commit every atrocity he ever commits and to do it with a smile on his face

[wcdonaldo]

i lied btw. my largest character flaw is that i think shinji matou is one of my favorite fsn characters and i hold his writing in relatively high regard among the already stacked cast of the vn

[riahlynn101]

"I Love You to the Moon and Back" (5).

I hope you guys enjoyed the story <3 Thank you, guys, for all the support, it's much appreciated :D!!

Trigger warnings: blood, children in distress, and All for One and the commission being themselves.

Sidenote: I'm going to write an epilogue at some point this week, as well as a few different (one shot) stories that have the same premise but change a few things around.

For instance:

-Inko not dying. -Aizawa being the main father figure in the story (while All Might and All for One hash it out in the background). -Inko not dying and being rewound. -All for One working through his own childhood trauma while being forced to live with All Might. On top of which he has to go to U.A, and watch his son be parented by everyone except him.

Chapter 5

--

Tenko is scared. 

He’s been scared for a majority of his life. It’s familiar, like an old, worn shirt. First with his father whenever he got into one of his moods. Then, wandering aimlessly on the streets. Voicelessly asking for help that no one intended to give him. Help that….

…that Sensei gave him. 

Despite the precarious circumstance, Tenko can’t help but wonder if Izuku being his cousin and Sensei being Izuku’s dad might be connected. Surely it must be more than coincidence that Izuku’s mom is also related to Nana? Sensei wouldn’t target his aunt, marry and have a child with her, just to forsake Nana’s legacy, right? Right?

He would.

Tenko uses his free hand to scratch at his neck. 

That means his baby cousin is in danger. With Tenko gone, what if Sensei tries to mold him into a villain? He won’t let that happen. He promises himself that, no matter what, he’ll do for Izuku what no adult ever did for him: provide protection. 

The president has his wrist in a tight grip. It’s uncomfortable but any attempts to say as much are met with an icy glare. And getting a member of staff’s attention is utterly useless. They seem to ignore the ongoing struggle of a grown man dragging an eight-year-old by the wrist through the hospital. One nurse even had the gull to wave at them as they passed. 

“Let go!” He exclaims, using four fingers (even with gloves on he worries that his quirk might activate beyond his control) to swat at the president’s arms. His arm is tugged roughly. 

“Stop!” The president demands. “We’re almost there.”

Tenko calms himself down enough to look around. He recognizes this floor. He furrowed his eyebrows. “This is…. the hallway to Izuku’s room.”

“Yes.”

“But…you said-”

The president lightly chuckles. “I’ve said lots of things. Lying for the greater good is a part of my job.”

They’re almost to Izuku’s room. 

The room that the president said they transferred him out of. 

The room that Tenko left to get his cousin help.

The room where his cousin was is struggling to breathe.

(Don’t think negatively! He’s okay. He’s fine! Izuku isn’t dead! He isn’t!)

“You said they transferred him to another room.” He tries wrenching his wrist out of the president’s grasp. It hurts, especially when he yanks on his arm to make Tenko stop, but he doesn’t quit this time. He wriggles. “I- we have to get a nurse. He’s having trouble breathing. Please,” he begs.

The president pauses mid-step. The look he gives Tenko reminds him of the night father slapped him. He feels just as weak and helpless as he did back then. Only difference being a quirk accident isn’t going to save him now. 

“And what if I say, no?”

He doesn’t want it to. His hands are already covered in the blood of hundreds, if not thousands. Every night he has nightmares of the atrocities he’s committed; has had nightmares since Sensei took him in. Except back then-when he was Shigaraki Tomura-it was easy to push those feelings deep, deep down. 

“Please,” Tenko begs again, heart pounding in his chest.

A few measly days ago, he had been the most feared person in the entire world. A force to be reckoned with. He had a single-minded focus on causing mass amounts of destruction.

The president hums, considering the request. 

Outside of the league, he has no real connections. It’s been that way for years. He’s adapted to it, but he’ll never get used to being alone. 

“If Izuku dies then all your plans go to waste,” Tenko says. He has to fight the urge to scratch at his neck. It’s a habit he needs to break. 

He had a family once. They loved him, even father in his own, broken way. He misses them terribly, all the time. If reality were a video game, he would have hit restart and destroyed all his progress just to spend five more minutes with them.

“He won’t,” the president says, resuming his dragging of Tenko to room 383. 

But life isn’t a video game. He doesn’t get a redo. His family is dead, and they’re never coming back. His cousin is his only family left in the world. The only person who saw him at his worst and decided that he needed to be saved. So….

“No!” 

…he’ll be damned if he doesn’t fight for the second chance he was given. 

Tenko finally wrenches free. He jumps back, narrowly avoiding the president’s heavy hand. 

He doesn’t wait for the president to react before booking it down the hall and towards All for One’s room. With any luck he can catch All Might. 

-x-x-x-

Hisashi stares at the bottles of medicine in front of him. The labels are small, and he has to squint to differentiate between all of them. 

Izuku falls into another coughing fit, startling him. He tenses up.

“It’s okay, Izuku,” he hears Yoichi murmur. 

Hisashi relaxes, refocusing.

It shouldn’t be this hard to find an inhaler. There are a million and one different kinds of pain meds, even more antibiotics and antivirals, but no corticosteroids. 

He huffs. 

He really, really doesn’t want to ask his brother for help. It’s embarrassing and every older brother’s worst nightmare. The last time he asked for Yoichi’s help was to get his hand free from the cookie jar, and his brother never let him live that down. 

Izuku whimpers. His coughing fit, at least for now, is over. But Hisashi knows he’s running on borrowed time. 

He grits his teeth. 

For Izuku. For my son. 

“Yoichi?” 

His brother hums, sounding distracted. 

“Do you happen to remember what your medicine was called?”

“Please,” Yoichi counters.

“Yoichi, your nephew is on the verge of dying.”

“He won’t, and it never hurts to be polite. You taught me that, Nii-San.”

Hisashi, with his back to his brother, can still sense his smug smile. There’s not much he can retort with. He did, while raising Yoichi, instill that manners are important. And the fact that his brother’s (and presumably the other vestiges) prolonging what, in any other instance, would be a death sentence (choking for ten-plus minutes without immediate medical intervention), calms him down a little. 

Hisashi is willing to swallow his pride. Just this once; for his son. 

“Please, can you tell me the name of the medicine? I can’t find any corticosteroids.”

“Now, was that so hard?” His brother lightly teases him before his tone turns serious. “I used an albuterol sulfate inhaler. I think I spotted one on the third or second shelf. It should be in a red and white box.”

“I already looked-” He spots a red and white box with the words: ProAir HFA: Albuterol Sulfate printed across the front. Not wasting a second longer, he unboxes the inhaler.

 Hisashi hurries over to his son’s side. He shakes the inhaler, propping his son’s head up with one of his hands. Izuku’s eyes are unfocused and glazed over. A groan escapes his lips and he tries to turn away. 

Yoichi leans down to whisper something in Izuku’s ear. His medium length hair tickles Izuku’s face; he watches his son’s face scrunch up at the sensation. 

(He will never get over how much the vestiges can interact with the living, or really, only with his son, him, and Tomura. But that has to count for something, right?)

His son relaxes. Hisashi administers the medicine. One puff, followed by ten seconds of ensuring his son breathes as deeply as he can. Another puff, followed by ten seconds of his son regaining his breath. Rinse and repeat a few more times. 

When his son is finally breathing on his own. Hisashi can’t help but hug him tightly. That had been a close call.

Too close. 

“I love you so much,” he tells his son, the words muffled by Izuku’s unruly curls. 

His son murmurs something unintelligible. 

Hisashi pulls back. “What was that, baby?”

Izuku blinks sluggishly. Drool has crusted around his mouth, and Hisashi has to stop himself from using his thumb to clear it away. His curls are more of a mess than usual, weighed down slightly by sweat. 

He looks up at Hiashi, the corners of his mouth up ticking into a small smile. “I love you too, daddy.” 

-x-x-x-

Toshinori is halfway down the hall from All for One’s room when he sees Tenko running full force towards him. 

“Tenko!” He calls, waving the boy over. “What happened? Is everything okay?”

Tenko is sobbing, trembling all over. “The president…he….and Izuku.” His breathing is fast and shallow. He blinks rapidly; his fingers clenching and unclenching. “He lied! The president wants….wants…” He trails off, crying harder. 

It’s then, staring at his master’s grandson, that it finally sets in how deeply traumatized Tenko Shimura is. 

Toshinori gets down on his knees, ignoring the creaky sounds they make. He gently places his hands on Tenko’s shoulders. 

Tenko looks at him, still in the middle of an anxiety attack. “Please, help him.”

There’s a more pressing issue. Time is of the essence, and there’s no telling what the president intends to do. He should spring into action, running full sprint to Young Midoriya’s room. But….

 Toshinori brings the boy closer, wrapping his arms around him. “It’s going to be alright.” 

Tenko stiffens, arms hanging limply at his sides. Slowly he relaxes into the hug, sinking into the embrace. Toshinori can feel Tenko’s tears wetting his shirt. His heart breaks a little bit more. 

When they pull away from each other, Tenko’s eyes are puffy and red, but he’s no longer crying. He sniffs, regaining his composure. “We should get going.”

“Yes, I think I know where they stash their medicine. Would you be so kind as to find an inhaler? It should say what it is on the box. It isn’t much, but it might be enough to stop Young Midoriya’s coughing fit.”

Tenko nods, looking unsure. “But…but what about the president?”

“Leave him to me.”

-x-x-x-

Nakaya stares at the empty bed. 

The sheets are rumpled and there’s a lunch tray on the floor. A few spots of red mark the white bedding, likely from the boy’s IV being removed. 

All this planning for nothing. 

He sighs, exhausted from today’s events. It’s not ideal but he might have to cut his losses. At least for now. He’ll pass along a note to staff to call the commission if Midoriya turns up. 

Nakaya turns to leave. 

Something hits him in the face. A wave of pain soon follows. He stumbles back, falling on his back. It takes a few seconds to make sense of what he’s seeing. 

Yagi stands above him, shaking his wrist. “I’ve been wanting to do that since I met you.”

Once the shock wears off, because surely All Might of all people would know better, he sits up. “You’re going to regret that,” he says, dabbing a handkerchief to his bloody nose. 

“Am I?” He asks. “Nurse Anita, you can come in now.”

Nakaya’s eyes widened. 

“Nurse Anita has agreed to give a full testimony on what you did here today. She says you used unlawful authority to coerce and threaten the hospital staff here to keep them from doing their jobs. And she’s not the only one to claim this. A security guard mentioned he saw you on the cameras earlier cornering a nurse.”

“So?”

“So? Even for the president of the commission, using open coercion is frowned upon. The commission, as you know, is quick to dispose of anyone that might make the public look at them unfavorably.”

Nayaka’s heart skips a beat. “These are unprecedented times.”

“They are,” Yagi agrees. “But most of Japan is still functional, like this city we’re in. Public opinion still matters to the commission. You’re not going to get out this unscathed.”

“What do you want? Money? Power?” He tries to think up every possible bribe. “Food? Women?”

“You hurt my boys.”

Nayaka shrinks back. 

“I sent Tenko to go get an inhaler from the medicine closet.” 

Nurse Anita pipes up. “Usually, we keep the medicine closet locked up. It would be very irresponsible of us not to.”

“Oh, when I passed by it earlier, I saw that it was slightly ajar.” Yagi’s eyes flit over to the empty bed. Fear flashes in his eyes. “Tenko told me you lied about transferring Young Midoriya to another floor, and Nurse Anita confirmed that. So, where is he?”

-x-x-x-

Hisashi is picking up his son, when he hears the unmistakable sound of someone coming over to the door.

He glances around the room. There’s no where he can hide. He’s too tall, and his son’s still too out of it to be trusted to stay in one place. 

As if on cue, Izuku mumbles something that sounds a lot like: “All Might is the bestest.” But he could be wrong (God, he hopes he’s wrong). 

The door handle starts to turn. 

Hisashi goes over every quirk he owns. There’s not many. A handful of a handful from what he had before rewind. He got All for One at fourteen and didn’t dare use it (on purpose) until much later. All of the ones he has right now are from him accidentally taking people’s quirks. 

None of them are teleportation. 

None of them are helpful.

The door creaks open.

Hisashi holds his breath, holding his son close. He hasn’t decided if he’ll surrender peacefully or try to escape some other way. For once, he would like to avoid confrontation. Izuku doesn’t need to see that. 

In steps Tomura who, upon seeing him, shrinks back. His eyes dart down to the body in his arms. Anger flashes in Tomura’s eyes. A deep-seated resentment bubbling to the surface. 

All for One feels a smidge of empathy. He himself once held that same anger, that same resentment for so many people. People that hurt his family and him. He can still recall all these hundreds of years later, the nasty words and feeling so small and helpless. 

But…he’s All for One- the supervillain-he has a part to play. He doesn’t get to feel empathy for anyone besides a select few. 

“Tomura,” he greets. “Lovely seeing you here.”

“Put my cousin down!” Tomura is glowering at him. All of his hackles are raised.

Okay, clearly, playing the villain won’t work here. All for One rethinks his approach. What would he do if someone, he thought was dangerous, was holding Yoichi when they were kids?

I would have probably killed them. Scratch that, I would have definitely killed them.  

Okay…so, new approach. What if he kicked Tomura, really, really hard? He’s smaller than he used to be, and All for One has a good three or four feet on him. It shouldn’t be too hard. But then there’s the possibility of Izuku finding out, and if he accidentally ends up killing him, he’ll be upset. That’s one headache he doesn’t need. 

What if-

“Sensei?” 

All for One shakes his head. “Tomura, please, stand aside. I have no intention to harm him.”

“I won’t let you turn him into a villain! He deserves better than that!”

“Why- Tomura, I’m retiring from villainy,” the for now goes unsaid, “and we both know Izuku could never become a villain. Being heroic is so deeply ingrained in him that there’s no way for him to shake it.”

Tomura stops glowering and lowers his arms. Not a total surrender, as he’s still blocking the exit, but progress is progress. He looks at the ground.

“But…but if you take him,” Tenko looks up at him, bottom lip quivering, “I’ll be all alone again. He’s all I have left.”

This time All for One can’t help the wince he gives. 

He doesn’t feel bad.

He doesn’t feel bad. 

He doesn’t feel bad.

“I’m sure All Might can…keep you company?” All for One cranes his neck to look behind Tomura. If the blond oaf shows up then it’s game over. He’s not in any shape to fight All Might, even if the man’s a shadow of his former self. 

He may be tall, but his body is malnourished. 

“Please, don’t take him from me.”

“I’m sorry. It’s not forever. I’m sure both of you will meet again. Someday.”

Tomura shakes his head. “Please, please, please, please, please, no, no, no…” 

All for One takes a risk and lightly shoves Tomura out the way. He lands on his hands and knees, giving enough time to leave the room. 

As he starts for the main exit, he can hear the boy sobbing. Izuku squirms in his arms, stirring. 

Hisashi shushes Izuku, lightly bouncing him. 

“Sensei!” Tomura yells. 

All for One turns to see him in the doorway of the room, sitting on his knees. He wipes at his eyes with the back of his hand. 

“Why!? Why me? Why my family?” His shoulders shake as his body’s wracked with sobs. 

All for One stares at him. He has a million reasons why he chose the Shimura family to mess with. Most of which start and end with the she-demon known as Nana Shimura. Others, like in the instance of his beautiful wife, were because he craved love and affection. 

“Because I’m a broken man, and I don’t think there’s ever been a time in my existence where I haven’t been broken. And when I see other people who aren’t. Who are happy and just living their lives, I have the urge to break them too.”

“You’re a horrible person,” Tomura spits out. 

“I am,” he agrees with no hint of satisfaction. 

“I…I wish you had just left me to die.”

All for One looks over his former student. He wasn’t overly involved in the boy’s development, which was on purpose. He couldn’t afford to become attached. “For what it’s worth, I’m glad I didn’t. Goodbye, Tenko.”

[gch1995]

Jedi apologists are such hypocrites. Yes Anakin killed men, women, and children- after they kidnapped and murdered his mother. He felt awful about it and broke down. But say he didn't kill the kids, just left them in the desert with the corpses of their parents. To live or die on their own. And one Tusken teen came for revenge. Only got caught. Sent to prison. And Anakin told the kid oh you will have to forgive. Pretty cold- oh sorry I am describing Mace Windu. Or he could have burn them alive and made jokes. Oh- that Master Mundi. Or just cut off all their limbs to die in the suns. Oh- that is Obi Wan

Yeah, Anakin being willing to murder children was horrendous, regardless of the abuse,emotional/mental health issues, and shitty circumstances of compromised agency under the corrupt, exploitative, hypocritical, and legally messed up galactic superpower governments in the old Republic/Jedi Order and Empire.

However, while Anakin’s crimes were inexcusably atrocious, I also think it’s easy for a lot of fans to overlook just how similarly awful the instances of systematic abuse, betrayal, crime, manipulation, and oppression that Obi-Wan, Yoda, Mace Windu, the Jedi Council, many of the other Jedi adults, and the Republic government of his time were willing to enable and/or commit against anyone who either benefitted them or got in the way of whatever they considered the “greater good” of their cause, too.

We just happen to see Anakin committing more of those instances of abuse and crime because the narrative of the prequels is primarily from his point of view, not theirs. Obi-Wan, Yoda, Qui-Gonn, Mace Windu, and many of the other members of the old Jedi Order and Republic didn’t really ever get much chance to develop a personal sense of morality and self-awareness in regards to the horror of these atrocities and manipulations they got taught to commit for the Jedi Order or self-protection out of what was truly just excessive anger, distrust, and fear to take a risk to do any better when the odds were against them.

Yeah, they did because every creature is born with free will and independence that can never be entirely suppressed and erased, but it was a lot easier for them to ignore those voices of common sense, individuality, love for close family and friends over a purported “greater good,” and self-awareness pricking the back of their minds than it was for Anakin and especially Luke because they never got any sort of chance to really develop a realistic outlook on the galaxy or themselves living in an environment full of authority figures who taught them that any form of critical thinking, independence, or expression was “wrong” from the ages of infancy-three.

In short, I think that a lot of characters from the prequel era Jedi, particularly Obi-Wan Kenobi, Mace-Windu, and Yoda, actually developed more of an angry, cowardly, terrified, selfish, ruthless, and vindictive side than they were willing to admit to anyone else, including themselves. In a way, that denial and poorly developed sense of self-awareness in regards to their own desires, negative feelings, and flaws kept them from being in danger of falling too far to the dark side. Anakin went dark and remained on the dark side as a pretty terrible Sith for so long, not just because his agency was compromised, but because he was afraid, he was angry, and he was too self-aware in regards to his own flaws and the flaws in both of these systems he spent his whole life to just pretend they didn’t exist. Luke avoided the dark side, but also didn’t get caught up in the detached, hypocritical, willfully in-denial, toxic, and self-righteous “goodness” of the old Jedi because he had enough courage in his self-awareness in regards to his own agency, his own beliefs, his own flaws, and the strengths and flaws in the ways of both the old Jedi Order and the Sith to be able to feel confident enough to open up about it, push for changes, and stand his ground under pressure.

Anakin had strong self-awareness, though he learned to cover it up with those “greater good” and “Anakin is dead” lines, but tragically weak self-confidence in his personal agency and beliefs under the Jedi and Sidious without much healthy support after being separated from his mother, which is why he fell. Obi-Wan, Yoda, and many members of the old Jedi Order never were in serious danger of falling because they were taught to be exceedingly confident in the ways of their broken institution’s code and “greater good” as an excuse to justify every awful thing they did out of fear of the unknown, but woefully lacking in the necessary amount of courage, humility, flexibility, and self-acceptance to face their own issues, face the world around them, adapt, and step outside of their safety to put themselves out there and make a difference for the better.

[lazypeachsoul]

i chased you all the way to Riga - h.z.

Request: by @alekssmorozova “Could i request Daddy!Zemo + spanking pretty please ? Have a good day/evening. 🎇❤️”

Warnings: +18. Minors DNI. daddy kink, spanking.

Word count: 2k.

A/N: i'm so incredibly sorry I'm posting this at 2 am. my computer in playing dumb with me. hope you enjoy it 🌼 Gif by @h-zemo

Translations: "Gutes Mädchen" means "good girl"; "gelb" means "yellow"; "rot" means "red"; "Schatz" means "treasure (pet name)".

Masterlist.

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Waving goodbye to the security man you finally got out of the office building after an exhausting day at work. Meetings seemed to be a constant nowadays. Working for one of the biggest law firms in times when tensions are high and disputes seem to be more common, work was never scarce. But that meant free time was.

Normally you would have paid more attention to your surroundings, but the ache in your head and your heeled feet prevented you from really observing the environment. It wasn’t until you were unlocking your car that you felt someone behind you.

Turning around ready to disarm any potential attacker, you were stopped by a hand grabbing your arm. Expecting an attack you tried to free your arm to be able to defend yourself, but the attack never came. Looking up you found a man not much taller than yourself, covered with a long coat and a purple balaclava. It wasn’t until you found a pair of deep brown eyes looking at you that you understood who your “attacker” was.

Shaking off his hand you took a step back, trying to understand what was going on. He couldn’t be here in Riga. Last thing you knew about him he was in a high security prison in Germany, locked in solitary confinement. “Zemo?” Was the first thing that came out of your lips. It wasn’t loud but you knew he heard you when he moved to take the covering off.

"Schatz.” He spoke, accent heavier than you remembered. Probably the result of only using german to communicate during his years in prison.

His hair was still fairly intact for having been covered and his face, although sunken in from lack of normal nutrition, was still as handsome and mysterious as ever.

“You haven’t called me that in a long time Helmut.”

“I would’ve, if you had called or visited me in my imprisonment.”

His voice sounded strained and you then realized he must have not been allowed many visitors during that time. And even if he was, nobody would visit him after what he had done. Well, nobody except old Oeznik maybe.

“You know I couldn’t do it, if they had known we were involved in any way my life would have become hell.” You tried to excuse yourself, even if it was the truth. “how are you here anyways? Not that the visit is not a nice surprise but-”

“I escaped.” He answered but you know that was not the entire truth. Zemo was intelligent enough to know escaping would not grant him the kind of freedom he wanted. “Well, somebody got me out because I was needed in a mission, and now we are here following a lead. It’s a long story and one I don’t think we should have out in the open.”

He was looking around now, confirming his runaway status. He probably shouldn’t even be in the parking lot of one of the biggest office buildings in the city. You unlocked your car and moved to get inside of the car. Helmut stayed still, probably expecting you to run away, but you just pointed to the passenger seat with your head.

Once he was inside you started the car and tried to exit the parking lot as if a wanted criminal wasn’t sitting next to you. Once you were crossing the gates you took a deep breath and you felt your muscles relax. You could feel Zemo’s gaze on the side of your face, clearly not expecting this turn in the night.

“If I hadn’t left the lot Arnis would have come looking for me, he worries.” You tried to explain while keeping your eyes on the road. “And I imagine you don’t want to be seen.”

He nodded and moved his gaze from your figure and looked outside the window. From the small peeks you took, he looked to be deep in thought. You didn’t really understand what possessed you to make him get in your car, or to take him to your house. Maybe it was the past you shared or the remorse of not seeing him in the last years. Maybe even the remorse of not being there to stop him from committing those atrocities.

You parked your car on the street right in front of your apartment building. The less distance you had to travel the less of a chance of being caught. And even with all the precautions you didn’t feel completely safe until you closed the front door of your apartment and locked the door.

Seeing Baron Helmut Zemo standing in your tiny rented apartment felt silly. This man who had grown up close to royalty, who had lived in the best houses and schools in Europe, now stood next to cheap Ikea furniture and bad room decorations.

“Nice house.” He tried to break the ice but it only made you want to laugh at the ridiculousness of the situation.

“Not all of us are born into nobility Baron. Now, are you going to tell me what is going on? I have the feeling that whoever broke you out might have no idea where you are right now.”

“Always so intelligent, schatz.” He smirked taking off his characteristing long coat and elegantly draping it over the sofa.

The scene reminded you of the last time you two were alone together, and how the night ended. He started rolling the sleeves of his red shirt and you started to see the old Helmut Zemo. The one who didn’t have to be worried about the world trying to catch him and could be his enchanting self. The Helmut Zemo who knew how to get the attention, born to be a leader.

“I’m not supposed to be here. I suppose James and Samuel are running around the city looking for me. But I’m in the best company I could imagine.”

“And I suppose what your entire mission is, right?”

“Again, so intelligent. You know what would happen if you were to be associated with me. You said so yourself.” He was looking at every detail of the room, but you especially you. “I did not come as a runaway looking for shelter. I came as a...friend.”

The tone he used to describe your relationship hurt but told you more than the rest of the conversation. It was true that you never used another label other than friends, always good friends and friends with benefits sometimes.

“Is that all we are, friend?” You couldn’t hold your tongue, the situation bringing you back to the dynamic you had before everything went to shit.

“Well, a few years ago you used to call me a different name, didn’t you?”

You were too worried about the situation to realize how close Zemo had gotten, making you jump slightly when you felt his hand in your shoulder. Softly moving it up and caressing your skin the hand found a home pressed against the side of your neck, lovingly but with authority.

“I spoke to you, my love. Don’t tell me you have forgotten.”

“I haven’t.” You spoke quickly almost as if your entire body knew what to do without needing orders from your brain. “Daddy.”

The smirk that spread through his face ignited every memory in your brain that included Zemo. From the first time you met back in Sokovia to the many nights spent together as young adults, including the years spent apart when he married and the reunion after disaster struck.

Without realizing you moved your entire body forward, pressing yourself against the man and your lips to his. The moment your lips touched it felt electric, like a current that had been dormant came alive again.

The kiss became ravenous, teeth clashing and hands pawing at each other's clothes. The small apartment felt immense when thinking of moving to the bedroom staying as close together as possible.

Breaking the kiss you looked at him and saw his usually expressive eyes were clouded with determination. You knew Zemo enjoyed the chase, and you were going to give it to him. Moving your face closer to him as if to kiss him again gave you the best distraction you could imagine.

Pushing Helmut back you started running towards the bedroom, moving furniture on your way to make the chase more thrilling. You tried to close the door behind you but he had reached you easier than you believed, as if he had never lost his military training.

“Why are you running away? Is it because you know you were bad?” His sweet voice a contrast to his authoritative figure.

Helmut Zemo was not the tallest or strongest man, but he had an air of power around him that the strongest men on the planet would want to have for themselves. And you would relegate all your power to this man, trusting him blindly.

“No daddy. I know you enjoy chasing me.”

“I do. I chased you all the way to a parking lot here in Letonia, didn’t I?” He was walking towards you until you hit the back of your knees against the mattress making you fall. “But I do think you need a punishment. You did forget about me.”

Your heart was beating loudly inside your chest and your entire body felt hot, the situation was familiar to you but that didn’t make it less exciting. He lowered his face to your now lower position and kissed your forehead softly, a silent question about what was going to happen next.

You grabbed his dominant hand and kissed the palm softly, granting him permission to carry out the punishment. You could tell what he was about to ask and responded before he could even get the question out.

“Gelb means uncomfortable. Rot is stop.”

“Gutes Mädchen”

His hand snaked its way to the back of your head, intertwining with your hair. Pulling softly he moved your head back, giving him access to your entire neck. His kisses were soft and almost ticklish. But you knew the softness would be gone soon.

He sat down on the bed, making himself comfortable before parting his legs and gesturing with his hand between them. Quickly standing up you stood in between them, allowing his hands to run through your hips until they found the belt of your work dress pants. He worked the fabric with confidence until you felt it slip from your frame.

His hands directly against your skin seemed to ignite every nerve in your body and when they moved to work the buttons of your shirt your breath caught in your chest.

“My sweet girl. I have missed you.” He whispered before kissing the skin of your hip that was revealed by the lack of clothing. “You are just as soft and warm as I remember you. I almost feel sorry for having to punish you.”

You had to suppress a whine at his words but he seemed to hear anyway. He was a natural speaker and hearing him speak that way too you made you warm and the heat seemed to pool in your lower belly.

“Please, daddy. I can’t wait.”

He chuckled softly, chucking the clothes far away and moving back to allow you to drape yourself over his lap. And that’s exactly what you did. You found your position so quickly that it almost felt like no time had passed since the last time.

His calloused hand caressed the back of your thighs moving closer and closer to the sensitive skin of your butt,causing goosebumps to raise on your skin. You rested your cheek against the comforter, humming as a sign that you were ready.

And suddenly the hum became a surprised moan when you felt the crash of Zemo’s hand against your skin. He soothed the skin and started muttering in german. “Let’s count to 6 and see if you learned, okay?” You nodded and another spank resounded around the room. “I need you to speak, beautiful.”

“Yes daddy, 6.”

He started soothing the skin again before you felt another shocking spank against your bottom. Every single strike made you moan and groan louder, and you weren’t the only one. Helmut was groaning not only because of the effort but at seeing your reactions and the probably very went patch on your panties.

You could feel how excited Helmut was getting against your belly that was carefully pressed against his groin. Even through the thick trousers the erection was more than obvious and only made you more excited for what was about to come.

Any thought of crimes, sentences, escapes from prison or other people were buried deeper in your mind with every moment that passed.

“Six.” You moaned when the palm crashed against your now sore bottom for the last time.

The entire room was buzzing with excitement, you bottom sore in the best way you could imagine and the hands of your past lover caressing the reddened skin.

“You did so good, beautiful. But I’m not letting you go now.”

“Please daddy...don’t stop now.”

Taglist: @teenwonder @sky-writes-stuff @kyli314

[some-jw-things]

For me personally, one of the hardest aspects of leaving a cult was how it fucked up my perception of love.

“Love-bombing” is a recruitment technique. You walk in through that door for the first time, and the entire congregation can’t wait to greet you and befriend you and they’re sometimes actually counting every minute they spend speaking to you so they can log it in their service report. You are offered instant love from a whole new community, for seemingly nothing, just for being there. Not earned, not gradual. Everyone in a Kingdom Hall loves one another

There were brothers and sisters I had never spoken to directly and that I didn’t know the names of. I was told since I was born that I should be willing to give my life and die for any one of them, no exceptions whatsoever. You aren’t allowed to dislike or openly have any issues with anyone in the congregation because of this specifically.

And then on top of this, we’re taught that only Jehovah’s Witnesses have love among themselves. There’s approximately 20 Bible verses they use to back this, they talk about the moral atrocities of every other religion as proof but of course the Society has never had a scandal ever— at least not one we were told about, and with the “don’t read outside sources” doctrine, they can get away with anything. They can get away with painting themselves as the only true, pure, morally upright religion in existence

When I said I was leaving, my dad told me straight up that I would never experience love again in my life. Only Jehovah’s Witnesses has that.

I know it’s easier to explain and more relatable for worldly people when we talk about the sky burning in Armageddon, friends and family falling and dying by our sides, going underground to live in a bunker and hide from the government, facing permanent eternal death— all those things that the Society has promised us, and we can point to and say they’re terrifying. It’s easy. It’s understandable.

The part that’s harder to explain is that I’ve expected my whole life that I’ll die young but the idea of living completely alone and unloved for however much longer I have— that kept me in a lot longer than the other stuff did. It’s a very effective control mechanism, being told that no one will ever genuinely care for you outside of this group

And then there’s the shit that Witnesses do to family relationships

At varying points in time, I have been fully convinced that the only things keeping my mother from leaving my dad were the congregation punishments and financial concerns. It’s a bit like their marriage came straight out of the 1940s: divorce is a sin, would get them disfellowshipped, and my mom doesn’t have the money to live on her own even if she could. My dad doesn’t do any of the housework whatsoever— all of that gets pushed to his wife and children. My mother blames herself for this, because apparently it’s her fault for “spoiling” him when he got badly injured twenty years ago. My dad, being the head of the household, has the final authority on any of our decisions he chooses to involve himself in, despite knowing almost nothing about what’s going on with us at any given time. The disparity of the housework wouldn’t be so bad, but my parents both work full time, not just my dad.

A few years back, my sister and I were in an extended period of anger over this. We weren’t outright trying to convince mom to leave dad (her main defense being that she was getting older and she had made her choice years ago), but it came damn close. My sister asked mom to name three things she loved about dad.

A half hour later, she didn’t have any.

She loves my dad, in the way a Christian wife loves her Christian husband. She couldn’t name any specific way, but she insists she does. She will never leave him.

They love each other. I know this. I don’t understand it.

I was terrified by the idea of marriage since I was eight years old. For Jehovah’s Witnesses, marriage is in no way between equals. I’ve gotten in trouble for implying that men and women could be equal. Marriage under this system means an even bigger loss of autonomy than I already had. The JW idealized loving relationship looks like hell to me

I said earlier that I was going to talk about familial love but I got sidetracked by romance, I’m coming back to it now

Familial love is completely 100% conditional. A JW will receive love if and only if they adhere to a strict set of terms. Upon violation of the terms, all love will be immediately revoked.

When a Jehovah’s Witness leaves the religion, their friends and family are supposed to shun them. No contact whatsoever, through any medium. If the ex-JW is an adult, they’re supposed to be kicked out of the house. If they’re still a minor, they are allowed to continue living there and communication is allowed only as far as it is needed for household functioning

This is love for Jehovah’s Witnesses. It is instant, enduring, boundless, to the extent of being willing to give your life for one another within seconds of finding out someone is a fellow brother or sister.

Until you commit a sin. Sinning makes you unlovable, here.

A girl I grew up with was kicked out, homeless, not even given time to pack a bag, because she fell in love with a worldly boy and interfaith dating is not allowed. This had nothing to do with any sexual sin. The boy just wasn’t a Jehovah’s Witness, and that was enough.

There was a man who left the congregation years back, along with his wife. He contacted his mother a few years later and wanted her to meet his kids. He wanted them to spend at least one day together. She told him very bluntly that she wanted nothing to do with him or his family anymore. She relayed this story in service, and everyone comforted her and told her how strong she was, how proud Jehovah must be.

Romantic love is bound up in rigid rules. You do not sit next to someone of a different gender unless you’re engaged or close to it. You don’t go on dates without a chaperone, you don’t spend even a minute alone without a chaperone. Texting and dating have a blurred line, so that needs to be policed. If you date for over a year, then you’re leading that person on. You’re a spinster or a bachelor by age 25. Divorce is a sin. Divorce will get you disfellowshipped.

There was a woman in my congregation who went to Bethel and met a man there. They knew each other for two weeks before getting engaged. And divorce is a disfellowshipping offense. There were so many older couples in my congregation who had stories like that, who had dated for only a handful of months, and I guess they love each other like my parents love each other

We’re told that disfellowshipping is a loving arrangement. Shunning is an expression of love. It’s spiritual rock bottom: it’s meant to be the wake up call that makes you realize how badly you need God and the Org. It’s meant to be incentive to repent, start following all the rules again, and beg for reinstatement. You want to see your loved ones again, don’t you? And they want to see you. That’s why they’re doing this, see, because they love you and care about you.

In the cult, love is used almost exclusively to hurt people.

[thetorturerwrites]

Lamb Ch 10 - I Am Owed

***This amazing artwork was gifted to me by @elmidol​​. Please do not re-use or re-post it without permission from them and/or myself. Don’t be a dickbag.

Previous Chapter

Summary: In this new, awkward quiet, there were two things you reminded yourself of constantly. Things you’d kept fighting. The utter shift in his demeanor, however, made them concrete.

The first was that The Ren was not human, and expecting him to behave as such was folly.  

The second was that The Ren was right. Begrudgingly, you admitted that you learned more when you stopped asking him questions in favor of quiet observation.

Author’s Note: Please note: This chapter deals with dark themes, including self-harm and un-aliving; mentions of pregnancy and mass death.

This is the time for adulting; know your triggers and police yourselves.

***

Corruption, violence, and faithlessness consumed the Galaxy. Third Man knew only greed, depravity, and wickedness.

Angry and vengeful, Grandfather Sky Walker demanded the brothers begin anew.

“Wipe clean the face of every planet,” he commanded. “Let not a single creature survive my wrath.”

And so, The Ren stretched his substantial power across the Galaxy, darkening all, down to the scantest light of life.

Kylo.

It fit him perfectly, both abrupt and beautiful. You thought about it daily — how he chose a name apart from the one he was given, how he chose something that someone could whisper, moan, or shout. It would fit every situation perfectly. You wondered how long it had been since he told someone his name, or if he’d ever done so at all.

But a wall came down after that day. A price you paid for your nosiness.

After telling you his name, he stopped kissing you, stopped grazing his fingers along your skin in the gentle way that made butterflies dance in your belly. He made you sleep in his bed, and he used you at least twice per day, but he hardly spoke, and he hardly worried for your enjoyment. It was a business transaction. Nothing more. 

It’s how he had you each morning. What should have been an erotic moments were tainted by his lack of consideration. His only goal was your pregnancy, and he hunted it relentlessly. On hands and knees for him again, you gripped the silk, sable covers and buried your face into the crook of your arm while he pommeled you from behind. He trapped you in a delirium that was both maddeningly good and incredibly empty. 

He forced your cunt open wide with his girth and rattled your bones with powerful thrusts, a snap of his hips that made you see stars. You didn’t want to moan; but when his eager cock nudged at the deepest part of you, the target he sought every time, you had to bite your lip to keep it down. Each time, his grip left bruises, marks you had to soak away in the bath; and each time, you whimpered and hiccuped into the bedsheets, not willing to give him the satisfaction of seeing the wreckage he made of you if he didn’t care.

Involuntarily, your pussy spasmed around him. You learned that the fiercer you squeezed shut your eyes, the more your cunt tightened for him to mirror it. Since then, you curled into a ball, as small as possible, and tucked your arms beneath you, turning your cheek against the bed. Your body betrayed you repeatedly, clenching and contracting around him. Your pussy was always ready to receive him, even through the brutal sting of it being broken open too quickly.

You suspected he delighted in making you cum when you didn’t want to, but he didn’t show it. The only sign you had that you pleased him was a grunt here or a groan there, but he always kept them contained behind clenched teeth and a locked jaw.

Blessedly, his pace tripped into erratic. He buried himself in you to the hilt and flooded you with his seed, not heeding for a second that you wept. Finished with you and your nonsense, he allowed you to fall into a disheveled mess as he dressed. He hardly looked at you anymore, committed to acting like you didn’t exist until he wanted your cunt. If you had even an inkling this would be the result, you’d have never asked his name. In giving you such an intimate detail, he liked you less; but whether it was because you’d outwitted him and made him tell you something profound or because you wasted your question on something so simple as a name, you couldn’t say.

In this new, awkward quiet, there were two things you reminded yourself of constantly. Things you’d kept fighting. The utter shift in his demeanor, however, made them concrete.

The first was that The Ren was not human, and expecting him to behave as such was folly. Since you’d arrived, you argued with yourself over the existence of his feelings. If he had them, you surmised, they must differ from anything you could comprehend. But undoubtedly, someone, something, so complicated and profound as he felt.

You laid that argument to rest once and for all. The chill that settled over your every interaction proved he felt nothing. At the very least, he felt nothing for you. 

The second was that The Ren was right. Begrudgingly, you admitted that you learned more when you stopped asking him questions in favor of quiet observation. If he suspected your sudden pledge to silence, he refrained from commenting on it. You assumed that he preferred it. He only wanted one thing from you; and as long as you gave it, he didn’t care how you passed your days or the tumultuousness of your pitiable mortal emotions.

It was the not caring what you did, the modicum of freedom, that made space for your education.

Perhaps he was satisfied you were as tied to this place as he; or, perhaps he didn’t care at all what happened to you, but he no longer barred you from venturing outside, and you learned that the border to Hosnia was half a day’s walk from the mouth of his keep to where you’d entered. Further, you learned that unless The Ren’s underlings were with him, they patrolled that border, ever ready for a threat he could not expect.

You knew exactly who that was now, and why he would come.

Inside, you discovered that although The Ren had a throne room, he was only ever in it to leave. You found multiple nooks from which to spy; and for a fortnight, you watched him come and go. You learned that the doorway responded to him only, but it remained open long enough for him and his team to pass through, regardless if he took them or not. If he was alone, that portal remained open long enough for them to cross its threshold. 

Long enough for anyone to do it.

The most important thing you learned was that it was 12 steps from your current hiding spot to that door. 

There were only a handful of outcomes on the other side; and after weighing them all, you decided it was worth the gamble. He left you with no option but to steal your information; and if you died over there, you would be free of this bleak existence. You doubted he would allow you to return to your family in death, but you would be rid of him and the vacant way he looked at you. It was that apathy, that muted disgust that cracked you apart a little more day by day.

Waiting for him to return was excruciating. Once you decided on your plan, everything seemed to stretch on for an eternity. But finally, it was time, ready or not.  Here you were, blood rushing, ears ringing, holding your breath lest he hear you with his damnable godly talents.

The sudden echo of energy strikes, the crackle of air that signaled his return ignited your adrenaline. Squeezing your eyes shut, you concentrated on the sounds, admonishing your senses to work better, faster.  Then you heard his boots. One step, two steps. He would turn to his right as he always did, and you had seconds to make it through. You stood up onto bare toes, electing to forego your boots in favor of stealth. 

This was it. The moment was yours. Ever the stupid girl, you pushed off the wall, sprinted the 12 steps, and vaulted across the static boundary, leaving the growl of your name behind.

What you careened headlong into was too stunning to name.

It was a paralyzed world, stopped in time, bleak, and awash in shades of destruction. Trees stood black as soot against a charred ground; buildings crashed and rumbled to rubble along the horizon; bodies lay all around, burned to nothing but bones. There was not a leaf, not a flower, not a carrion to recover the life that was once here. You blinked, frozen to the spot at the atrocity of it all. Dead bodies. Dead foliage. Dead planet.

To your roots, you knew this was a planet-wide phenomenon. It was a razing that hadn’t been seen in millennia, the kind most people believed to be fable.

Large fingers beneath your collar jerked you off the ground and backwards. You tumbled into the raging beast, pushing against the pillar of his chest and twisting to get free. You wanted to scream, to slap and claw his flat affect of a face, but he pinned your arm behind your back painfully.

You hunched over, falling into him, and your sobs had you pressed against his shoulder, seeking comfort that would never be there. You managed only a strangled, hoarse whisper.

“What did you do?”

He snarled, spun you, and mashed your back against his front, wrapping you in an iron hold. He made you look with fingers dug harshly into your cheeks. He was so angry you felt the tremble of his digits against your skin. If you didn’t open your eyes, if you disobeyed, you feared he would do worse.

“You asked how I spend my days.” His furious breath tickled your ear, loosing a shudder that registered through your terror. He seethed. You could hear it in his voice, straining in a semblance of calm but aching to explode. ���Look.”

Abruptly, the landscape changed. No longer standing atop a hill, you looked out over a cliff, gawking at what clearly used to be a sea but was instead dried and barren. Another shift had you in the center of a scorched forest, then a hollowed out city. Your lungs, nose, and eyes burned from debris and dust hanging too thick to fall. The air changed again, and again, and again, but the scattered atmospheres had one commonality. You fought to inhale it, the remnants of destruction inundating your senses. 

Foolishly, you thought the doorway was the key; but just as every time before, you were wrong, too simple-minded to work it all out. While it needed him to function, he did not need it. World after woebegone world flashed in front of you. All the same - devoid of vibrancy, emptied of the living. He left husks in his tracks, fractured shells to punctuate his passing.

“Stop.” You croaked, hanging limp in his concrete arms. “Please stop. Why are you doing this?”

As always, it was one question too many. Releasing his grip on your face, he shoved you away, sending you crashing to the ground. 

“What could you possibly understand about the cosmos, you perpetual idiot?”

When you looked up at him, your eyes went round as moons. Your throat dried out, and your fingers dug into the sod beneath you. You shook away tears, thinking perhaps a less blurry lens would put him back to the way he was yesterday. But no. You looked upon a tragic figure, set ablaze by the sort of feeling you believed him to be incapable.

He was resplendent. Righteous malice morphed his already angular features into hard lines. His eyes shone a dangerous obsidian, and his lips quivered in a way that should not be so enticing. He could blink you out of existence, but you remained engulfed by the expanse of his disconsolate stare. He was endless and, you feared, unknowable. For a moment, he seemed to be larger, more real and more solid than ever before, but it was fleeting, obliterated by the war raging inside. He threw an arm out, gesturing for you to take it all in.

“My job.” He sneered, the word practically dripped with disdain. “My consuming, inescapable, infernal purpose.” 

You nearly spoke, nearly proved for the hundredth time that you were an idiot. Somehow, you found the wherewithal to snap your mouth shut so hard it clacked. His fists clenched, and he looked away. You watched his jaw tick, heard the grinding of his teeth. Despite the clear and present danger, you had to say something. There was no other option. With the weight of precisely all of creation on the line, you must try to reason with madness.

Mustn't you?

“Surely, he didn't mean this.” 

It was barely a whisper, the horrified challenge buried deep in your gullet. He was on you in a flash, hauling you up from the ground to hang like a limp doll. Absurdity in the face of absoluteness.

“You think you know what gods mean to do? Your Sky Walker and his peaceful middle way?” His voice tore at your soul, all jagged edges and steel. “Whom do you think he burdened so you could live freely? Whom did he abandon to an eternity of servitude?”

You clutched at his shoulders, legs flailing in the air to find something to stand upon. But when you caught his eye, you found not only anger, but a sorrowful determination. Time stopped; your entire torso seized, sending a burning radiating through your ribs. You saw it then. Saw the unstoppable slog through time, colored bitter by anger and loneliness. It all coalesced for you in this terrible, gut-twisting understanding.

He never had a choice.

You had choices. Free will. Limitless possibilities. Your eyes again lost focus, and you fought to keep your mouth from trembling. No doubt he would see your empathy, your compassion for his predicament as pity; and no doubt, he would punish you for it. Curling your fingers into his coat, you shook your head because you had no words to give him, nothing more than the ramblings of a child.

“I am owed an audience.” His tone evened out, smoothing into that tantalizing seduction you knew and craved so well. His fingers brushed against your sooty cheeks, almost tenderly. “That's the difference between us, lamb. You talk about genocide, about vengeance and purpose; but every day, you move further from that path.”

Again, you shook your head, but you couldn’t look away. Dismayed, you tried to block out what you knew he would say. What came next was a horrible truth, one you didn’t want to know. But you had only yourself to blame. Like a zealot, you pursued his secrets; and now, you could never give them back.

“I am genocide,” he said.

His eyes hardened a second before his lips found the quivering of your chin. He ignored your half-hearted imploring. There was no changing his course. He was resolute and beyond redemption.

“I will annihilate you all until he comes.”

“What happens when you find him?” You surprised yourself with the question. “To me?”

To us.  Your battered spirit wanted to ask, to demand he reconsider you, but you swallowed it down, wondering when the rest of you decided you were his despite his hatred.

The plump of his lips flattened into a hard line as he set you on your feet. Your accursed curiosity led you to a second grim fact. Your stomach banged, and your jaws ached from how hard you fought to keep them in check. Tumbling along the line from what he had revealed, you worked out what he hadn’t.

He would challenge Sky Walker.  And one of them would die. 

You struggled, mind racing. Your jittery eyes traced a curling wisp of his shoulder into nothingness. It was more pronounced today, the unsteady solidity, and you realized that the more he committed to leaving, to possibly dying, the more he bled away at the edges. In searching for a means to be free, he was already fading.

That’s what Solo meant. This was the damage. Without him, the cosmic balance no longer existed. He tipped the scales further and further every day he kept this quest. He would reach that goal; there was no way around it. This hatred, this murderous need to find Sky Walker, who never allowed him the same freedoms as man, dogged his every moment. One way or another, he would…

“I’m the back-up plan.” Understanding dawned, and your voice grew stronger. Unconsciously, one hand covered the lower swell of your belly while one covered your heart. “Aren’t I? If you can’t find him, you mean to make an heir, a replacement.”

Not someone to love. Not someone to ease the ache of solitude. Someone to take over. An escape.

“You’re going to leave.” Your eyes hardened to match his, irritation suffusing your face with heat. “Aren’t you? You’re going to leave us behind without a second thought.”

Whereas you were so angry you didn’t realize your slip of tongue, he caught it. His deadly eyes flashed. He tangled thick fingers in your hair and wrenched your head back, cataloging your responses in his predaceous way. 

“When?” His voice dropped into husky, a gravelly, unnerving timbre that made you squirm in his hold.

You tried not to think about the long-gone days when he used that tone on you, when he wrapped his limbs around you and fucked you into blissful oblivion, when he kissed you until you couldn’t breathe. You tried to hold on to your anger, but the living prisms he had as eyes were distracting, so beautiful you lost track of your ire. He rubbed his thumb back and forth across your mouth in that soothing way that made you want to beg. Your resolve was weak compared to his.

“A-a few weeks, I think,” you mumbled, fidgeting. Maybe if you whispered, it wouldn’t be real. “I’m not sure.”

Rigid fingers wrapped around your neck, tempting it to swallow anxiously. He squeezed until you hitched up onto your toes, trying to keep a bit of leverage and not expire at the end of his arm.

“And yet, you purposefully threw yourself onto an unknown planet, endangering my child.”

It wasn’t a question. He wanted no argument, no excuse or fake reasoning. He didn’t want an apology. You could clearly see he wanted to discipline you for your insolence and idiocy. Your brow furrowed, an icy heat blossoming in your middle. It was more than sympathy. More than compassion or understanding. You felt this deep in the dark of your mind, in the recesses you’d only discovered existed since you crossed into Hosnia.

The tremble of your voice calmed. The twist and twitch of your arms and fingers settled. Your breathing found a steady tempo because this wasn’t a childish fancy. It wasn’t a juvenile overreaction or vapid gambit. You had a reason to come here, and it was a reason he had to understand. It was his language.

“Why is it alright for you to want to die but not me?”

Something new eased the fury in his features. The grip on your pulse loosened, and his lips parted. He looked down on you with what could only be surprise. It was a look you’d seen only a few times before.

“You’re seeking the one being in all of creation that can kill you; and if he does, I won’t even know. You’ll have left me behind.” 

The depth of your honesty had you quaking, but it was not fear or anger. 

“I’m already alone. You already hate me. I have no one to go back to and no reason to carry on bearing your loathing. Pregnant or not, I have every reason and right to want to walk off a cliff.”

You couldn’t cry, yell, shake, or stomp. Admitting you’d like to die should have produced something of an emotion, but you only met his assessing eyes with yours. They shone with tears you could not shed. You had no more feelings to give today.

“I’d like to go home, please,” you said flatly.

He was expecting you to say something else; it was as clear as his midnight sky in Hosnia. You looked away, unable to hold his gaze a second longer. He let go of your throat and slipped his fingers out of your hair. Grasping your upper arm, he pulled you into him, a cradle you longed for but found yourself hating. In seconds, the air changed from alien to recognizable. Benumbed and silent, you slithered out of his embrace, shoving off his arms to flee.

This time, you were the one to walk away, leaving him standing in the throne room as befit a hollow statue.

[val-aquenta]

Angstpril for the prompt: Screaming

Not going to lie, but the prompt wasn’t followed greatly, but whatever

Here on ao3

Tatooine really was one big dusty planet in the outer rim. That was how Anaki- how it had been described quite a few times, often with a couple more disparaging comments added on. Despite the harsh land that caused dull pain in his back, and a soreness in his joints, Obi-Wan found that he sometimes found Tatooine nice. Meditating in a cool cave, the bones of an old creature floating around him, energy humming in the air, was an experience Ben found himself enjoying. It was easy, in meditation to forget, or to try to. Ben did not think he could ever look past the emptiness he now felt where once the links to various Jedi had remained, where the link to… Anakin had been. In meditation, though, he could look away from himself, could look into the galaxy. 

Of course, he often refrained from reaching out too far, fearful to draw the gaze of the Emperor or the apprentice, so he usually remained focused around Tatooine. Dusty, orange, sandy, and barren Tatooine. 

Interestingly enough, there were almost little pockets of condensed Force across the planets. In caves, canyons, and dunes, Obi-Wan found that there were hints of a past hidden in these points. While psychometry had never been a skill of his, he was most average in his Force powers with no tricks like Mace’s strange visions or Quinlan’s psychometry, he found himself being drawn into vague imprints of these pasts. Whether it was a young twi’lek running from slavery or if it was a Hutt grimly grinning at some gruesome display of strength, small imprints would find themselves to him, pressing against him. He could feel the grains of sand against a lekku, or the heat pressing against a tail. Sometimes it is uncomfortable or even painful, like the time he had stumbled across the site of a Krayt dragon’s death. The painful stabbing of hunger and fatigue and the knowledge of his… it’s slow decay was pressed onto him. Other times, it was the simple joy of holding a child close by. 

Regardless, he found himself going out and looking for these places. When he found one, he would note what he felt and what he thought might have happened in his journals. There was little else to do beyond occasionally checking in with the Lars, not too often as that would anger Owen, and keeping his own hovel clean. As such, he found it interesting to go out and document his own musings, his findings, or anything interesting he stumbled across. 

Today was such a day. His tattered cloak, patched multiple times yet still loyally hanging onto life, around his shoulders. A small pack of water and food strapped to his back and his lightsaber in his hands. He walked a long way, following the large canyon further than he had ever gone before. Occasionally an interesting rock or cave drew his attention, but something further out there called to him. 

His empty pouch slowly began to fill with small knick knacks he picked up. A piece of bone here, a rock that he could polish into jewelry there. Still, he felt himself being pulled towards some place in the distance. With a sigh, he climbed out of the canyon and pulled the hood more comfortably over his head. The suns were creeping closer to the edge of the horizon, drowning the already orange sand in an extra layer of deep red. It was rather picturesque, he admitted. If the grains of sand bothering his skin were ignored… and, come to think of it, the heat from the sun boring into his back, and the dryness of the air, and- If many things were ignored, Ben just might recommend it to someone for solely the beautiful sunset. 

The gentle sloping hills of sand flattened out into more solid, somewhat rocky terrain. The silver moons rising up cast a white light on the orange sand, though it left a gentle darkness. With night came the cool Obi-Wan very much enjoyed. The shade was a relief to the hot day. Still, the sand retained heat and, if he lay his palm across the surface, he might be able to feel an inkling of the heat curling into his hand. As time went on, the sand would lose its heat and become cold and soothing to touch, calmin Ben would say. 

Finally he stumbled across some… village? Tusken, most likely, if his knowledge of their lifestyle was to be trusted, which it honestly shouldn’t, he had met them a few times. Regardless, this town was empty. Fire had burned some of the huts. Nobody inhabited this place, obvious with the general decay of the huts. Some of them were crumbling, roofs fallen in. “I wonder why I’ve been brought here.” Ben mused out loud, taking a moment to stretch his back and muscles. He was young… well decently young, but the three years fighting a war paired with the years spent on Tatooine aged him prematurely. The rather vain part of him kept trying to hide it, but he had a fairly large crop of gray hairs that grew every day, the ginger ones being replaced by the wispier ones. 

Ben walked forwards, heeding the note of the force. Perhaps… some kind of fire had taken over the village, but they would probably have come here and fixed it or scavenged to help them survive. Perhaps… they had died? But there were no bodies? A mystery. Reaching the centre of the town, there was one hut, still largely intact. He could feel deaths here. Surprise, fear and… guilt? Interesting. Obi-Wan continued forward, parting the drapes of the hut and entering. The roof was still intact and there was no lighting, leaving the place dark. Nothing of interest was in the hut. A bed and a little cupboard by the side. Honestly, he did not want to meditate here where the echoes of death were still felt, but the Force spoke, so he left the hut and sat down, outside in front of the remains of the campfire that was half buried in sand.

In meditation, the imprints of death and fear were felt as well as a grand anger and pain. They felt… familiar. He sunk deeper, focusing on the feelings and asking the Force if that was all it wanted to show him. Suddenly, the Force exploded around him with anger that was definitely familiar. So familiar as he had felt it only a few years earlier in the heat of Mustafar. The familiar feeling brought tears to his eyes as he dug deeper, wondering when Anakin had been here. Perhaps, as a child he had experienced the town burn down. 

Ben pushed away his own feelings for a while, determined to focus on exactly what the Force wanted to show him. An image, just a flash of Anakin’s face, at the end of his apprenticeship with a braid falling down his side, illuminated by a fire was twisted in anger and grief. Confusion warred with caution and for a moment he considered pulling back, but he did not, burning the image to his memory before pushing it aside. Faintly, he noticed his bag was floating along with some stones and bits of plant. There was a pause as if the Force was giving this time to think about it, but Obi-Wan knew he had to know. What was Anakin involved with on Tatooine that he had no idea of.

“I slaughtered them.” Came a faint voice, Anakin’s voice Ben realised with horror, accompanied with imprints of fear. Not Anakin's fear, but the fear of a Tusken, a child. “Like animals.” The voice continues. Obi-Wan feels the knowledge brand itself against his heart. Even before his final fall from grace, Anakin had… had done this. He can feel tears rolling down his cheeks. Did he ever know Anakin?

A new voice, higher. Padmè. “To be angry is to be human.” Immediately the wailing of a Tusken child replaces her voice as the murderer, the killer, as Anakin steps forwards, blue light swinging. It hurts his ears. To be angry, yes, but to do this… not. The pain of betrayal burns. That Padmè had not said anything, had never revealed this stings his chest. There is a brief glimpse of a mother trying to cover the screaming children as Anakin advances, head bowed down, the shadows playing with his features to turn them sinister. The mother tries to hush the children, to send them away, but not moments later she is dead, a clean cut through the middle. The children cry out as he moves forwards, moving back and back until their backs are pressing against the hut’s walls. There is a brief moment where the killer stops and the Tusken children stop crying for a moment before the lightsaber rises against them. 

Obi-Wan feels them, hears them as they cry out. He does not realise how loud it was until there is a cold silence and he sees Anakin walking forwards, unlit lightsaber calmly clipped onto his belt. He stops, catching the noise of faint gasping breaths, faintly crying in pain. He turns and walks and walks until he sees the Tusken, this one an adult who has been wounded by the saber, their stomach cut cleanly. Fear filters out from the Tusken as they spot Anakin. Anakin raises a hand and, in a familiar move, clenches his fist until there is no life under his hands. 

Ben wrenches himself from the vision, falling forwards with a cry. Tears pour from his eyes as he looks around and notes where the Tusken people had fallen, where their bodies would have been had they not been buried by a different tribe. The town is silent, only the wind howling through every now and then. In the Force however, the violent deaths echo in a faint cry for help, mirroring what had happened that bloody night. Obi-Wan does not know how long he spends sitting there, trying to reconcile the fact that Anakin had committed these atrocities long before the fall of the Jedi. That he had lived a lie of bringing peace when he had slaughtered a village indiscriminately. Ben spends a long time sitting there, enough for the moons to rise high in the sky before he starts leaving. He must get home. His banthas need help and he has been gone long enough. He casts one final look at the burnt Tusken village before turning back to his home.

[benwllbond]

if you werent just an online love pt 12

(note: this does reference buford, and the case does involve csa. while this is not graphic, i thought it best to warn you. also, on a lighter note, this chapter seems kinda disconnected to the main plot, i know, but it ties back in soon!)

As was the way of life when working for the Behavioural Analysis Unit, Derek had his sleep interrupted by a phone call. 

While it wasn’t exactly common for them to be called out in the middle of the night - normally their cases could wait until the morning, but not this time.

“Morgan, we need to get to the office ASAP. A young boy has been kidnapped, and we need to get on top of this,” Hotch said, through the phone, before promptly hanging up to call the rest of the team. He sounded weary, and Derek couldn’t tell if it was from the interrupted sleep, or from the atrocity that was the crime that had just been committed. Possibly both.

So up he got, out of bed - he didn’t mind so much, since the experience of sleeping with Spencer (just sleeping!) he no longer was as well rested, longing for that warm, lanky body to be in bed beside him. Derek hated that he missed it so much, but figured there wasn’t much he could do other than try and move on, acknowledging that it was in the past.

He pushed those thoughts out of his mind - he didn't have the time to be thinking like that, not when some poor little boy was somewhere, being faced with horrors that, as Derek knew better than most, no child should ever have to experience. That little boy didn’t have time for Derek to be wasting, wallowing in the misery of his unrequited love. 

The parents of the boy, who were surely worried sick, would be horrified to find out that one of the FBI Agents tasked with finding their son, saving him, was too busy considering his own woes in regards to romance. It was a trivial issue in the grand scheme of things, especially then.

As such, he raced around, getting ready, focused solely on getting to the office fast enough as to put the odds as far in the boy’s favour as possible. Derek hurried out the door and into his car as quickly as possible, not even stopping to say goodbye to Clooney, who was sitting dejectedly at the door, having been abandoned for the night.

It was the end of February, meaning the days were cool, but easily bearable to someone used to Chicago winters, but the nights were still frigid.

The poor boy, he must be freezing.

Derek’s mind couldn’t help but flash back to his own time, spent in a cabin in the freezing cold, suffering a cruel form of torture. He prayed that the kid was going through something less painful than that, that maybe he had just run away, or had managed to escape, if he was being held.

He stepped on the accelerator harder. 

Fuck the traffic laws. A kid’s life is at stake!

Before he knew it, he was parked, and walking into the office, where Hotch, Gideon, Spencer and Elle were sitting.

“We are just waiting on Garcia and JJ,” Hotch informed him as he entered the briefing room. There was a grim silence that overtook the room once those words had been spoken, everyone’s eyes alternating between studying the case files and watching the clock, well aware that with every second that passed, the chance they would find the boy alive decreased.

Thankfully, it was only a minute until Garcia arrived, JJ following just minutes after. Upon their entrances, Hotch began to inform them of the details of the case.

“Samuel Adams, 11, was taken from a camping site just a few miles away from here. He had gone to collect some sticks for a fire, however never returned. His parents reported him missing after they were unable to locate him, and that was when we were called in, as a result of the recent release of a hebephile from prison.”

They all shared concerned looks at the knowledge that this wasn’t just any creep who took children, but that this was someone who was going to hurt this sweet, innocent boy, in such an adult, painful way.

Derek’s worst fears were realised, knowing some of the ways that the boy, Samuel, was going to be scarred for life. His considerations of how miserable it was sleeping alone were long gone, replaced with fear, which he was trying to overwhelm with dedication to finding this kid, before it became something he would never recover from.

His brain went into focus, and he tried not to let anything else in.

[aquietwritingcorner]

Comfortember 2020 Day 3: Nightmare Word Count: 1017 Author: Katie/Ally (aquietwritingcorner/realitybreakgirl)   Rating: T Characters:  Olivier Armstrong Warnings: torture aftermath Summary: Olivier has a long path to recovery after her rescue. Nightmares are only the start. Thankfully, she had good friends to help her through it. Notes:  This ties back into Whumptober Days 1, 24, and 30, and Comfortember Day 1. There’s also an alternate version with a rare ship too, because I couldn’t decide what I liked better!

  Nightmare

  Screams were never something that Olivier had been prone to. Even as a girl, she hadn’t tended to scream so much as yell. Her father used to call them her battle yells and tell her she sounded like she was sounding an attack or giving an order. When she did scream, it was usually a cause for concern. It meant she was hurt, or very scared, and usually in a situation that she couldn’t do anything about. She had screamed the time Alex had accidently broken her arm when they were playing. She had screamed when she was small, and someone tried to kidnap her. She had screamed when she fell off a small drop off as a child and, although unharmed, had been scared by the experience.

As an adult, she didn’t scream. She yelled, she ordered, she grunted, she grimaced, she groaned, she shouted, but she never screamed.

Until recently.

Her scream echoed throughout the sickbay as she jolted to life, trying to fight something that wasn’t there, and something that she wasn’t strong enough to fight off. A door flew open, and in a panic she managed to get her hands free of the material they were trapped in, she grabbed something that was nearby—she wasn’t even sure what—and threw it as hard as she could manage at the figure in the door. It was a weak throw and it sent pain flaring through her, but it did what it was supposed to, and the figure ducked anyway. Olivier’s hands had sought out and found her sword, and, pushing through the pain and in a shaking grasp, she lifted it.

“Stay away!” she warned, her voice shaking, and painfilled. The sword shook in her hands. Pain raced up and down her, especially on her back, but it took a backseat to the thoughts of defend, defend, defend! “Stay back!”

The figure didn’t move inside the room more, but it did reach over to the side. Suddenly the room was full of light, and Olivier winced, tensing up but didn’t drop her sword, no matter how much her arms were shaking and the shudder of pain that went through her. When she was able to blink back the brightness, she realized that the figure she had been staring at was none other then Miles, and he was looking at her with concern.

“…Miles…” she said, and let her sword drop to the bed. She realized that she was in sickbay, and she looked back up at him, confusion filling her eyes for a moment. “…I’m at Briggs.”

He apparently felt safe enough, because he stepped further into the room, letting the door swing shut behind him. “Yes, you are,” he confirmed.

She stared at him for a moment, and then let her gaze and her shoulders drop. Her arms shook, even though they weren’t holding her sword up anymore, and she stared at her hands. They had bandages on them, and she suddenly realized just how much pain her back and her legs were in. Another shudder went through her.

“I—” she said. “I—I thought… I was…”

She shuddered again, and she closed her eyes both in pain and from emotion. She heard Miles step closer, and her eyes shot open, watching his every move closely. It wasn’t that she didn’t trust him, it was just that she was nervous to let anyone near her without watching them. He was respectful of it, though, and stayed in her eyesight. He stopped just short of her, right by her bedside. For a moment, they stared at each other. He reached up, taking off his snow blindness glasses, and looked at her.

“You’re safe now, Olivier,” he said, and his voice was soft, warm, and most of all, the voice of a friend.

It broke her more then anything that Geogreg Sodeset had ever managed to do.

Her shoulders slumped, her head sank down, and her eyes filled with tears. Within seconds, the sound of her soft sobs filled the quiet sickbay. Just as quickly, Miles stepped closer, and gently held her to him. She didn’t fight it, but she let herself lean into him, needing the support. She felt his hand run through her ruined hair, all chopped off at terrible angles, and shuddered again, this time at a memory.

“Was it about your time there?” he asked her, and he didn’t need to say more for her to understand.

“Yes,” she responded.

“What happened?”

She was quiet for a long moment. “…he had me again,” she said. “whipping me, beating me. And then—he started—he—" She couldn’t keep going, closing her eyes tightly and shuddering again. She felt Miles’s arms tighten on her. “I saw things, Miles. Experiments he did. Horrible, awful things. Things that went beyond torture into… I don’t know. Evil. Pure evil. If… if he had been able to, those things would have been me. I was too valuable, but he told me what he wanted to do, he had this look in his eyes, he—” she paused to swallow. “I never dreamed such atrocities could be committed without alchemy, but he did it.”

Miles arms tightened again. “He’ll never get the chance,” he said. “He didn’t, and he never will.”

“…I know,” she said. “But its hard to convince my mind of that.”

Especially when she was so tired. So tired and in so much pain.

Miles nodded. “I understand. That’s why we’re here to help you through it.”

She let out a sigh and leaned heavier on Miles.

“You should rest,” he said, still not letting her go, but instead slowly easing her back, doing his best to put her in the least amount of pain that he could. “I’ll be by your side. And if not me, then another bear.”

She gave a nod, and let him settle her in. The pain of her movements were catching up with her. Hopefully, with her most loyal bear and deep friend next to her, she could sleep easy for the rest of the night.

[synthient]

The Key to Understanding Deltarune: The Halloween Hack

So we’re currently in the middle of a 4000 year content hiatus

Which is unfortunate, because ever since the big iconic Halloween-day surprise demo drop, my brain has been rattling a baseball bat against the inside of my skull and chanting “CONTENT, CONTENT, CONTENT”

Undertale was like candy for the thematic analysis side of my brain. I still wake up in a cold sweat some nights going “fun value......he put a quantitative value on fun.....numbers going up.....”

I am desperate to know what kind of themes Deltarune is going to tackle. Can you effectively predict that from one (1) 3 hour demo? No. Does my brain care? No.

Which is what lead me to the wonderful world of intertextuality, or examining how a media text is shaped by other media texts

It started out with a kiss, how did it end up like this with me doing a playthrough of EarthBound, the video game that Toby has cited as his biggest inspiration for Undertale

That was fun & interesting (the “throwing away an emotionally engaging experience to grimly make Numbers Go Up” thing feels a lot closer to home after trying and failing to get the sword of kings), but it didn’t provide much insight into Deltarune, specifically. It wasn’t enough. I needed more. I was willing to dig into literally any intertext (except Homestuck, which no force on this earth can compel me to read :) )

anyway thats how I ended up playing Toby Fox’s high school fangame

And somehow (sorry Toby) I walked out of there with an unironic theory (a game theory....if you will....): Deltarune is Toby’s adult reexamination of the Halloween Hack.

What is the Halloween Hack?

You know that thing where, like, people take the engine of a Pokemon game and edit it so there’s a new region and a bunch of new fakemon, and also There’s Swears Now

In 2008, Toby Fox entered a contest on an EarthBound fansite for the best Halloween-themed EarthBound hack

In one sense, reducing the Halloween Hack to a “bad romhack with swears” is a little bit of a disservice. There are some glimmers in there of a really affecting, thought-provoking game, and you can see some of the early blueprints of what would later become Undertale (“do video game ‘monsters’ really deserve to die” is a major theme, and the character of Dr. Andonuts was effectively split up into Alpyhs, Asgore, and Sans)

But it’s also. very much a fangame made by a 16-year-old.

You can read a basic summary of the Hack here. High school-age Toby wrote two pretty extensive analyses of his thought process behind the game. I’ll be referring back to them a lot, and I’d highly suggest giving them a read--Toby’s been so famously resistant to making any Word of God statements about Undertale that it’s kind of fascinating to see him being so candid

an extremely long and rambling examination of How This All Relates To Deltarune

The Halloween Hack opens in the town of Halloween Twoson. Twoson is one of the cites in EarthBound, and here it’s been painted orange. and there’s pumpkins now

See, high school Toby had...a bit of a chip on his shoulder. In the Making Of notes, he explains that he was frustrated that “most people generally thought I was just ‘another funny guy’”. So he designed the opening of the game to seem unoriginally close to the original EarthBound--like “a regular, funny, lazy hack”--to lull players into a false sense of security before the horror elements set in.

Two interesting things there:

“Lazily, unoriginally close to the source game” sounds an awful lot like the Dark World segment of Deltarune

Halloween Twoson looks very visually similar to Hometown

Toby’s description of Twoson also sounds pretty Hometown-esque:

The main impressions of Twoson that I wanted to give the player were: It's funny. It's a nice fall day outside. The person hacking this game is ridiculously lazy. It's a nice place to live. If you look at it a little closely, it's kind of claustrophobic.  

And when does the horror kick in? When the player descends into the underground tunnels beneath the city.

The “horror” in the Halloween Hack is, however, Pretty Not Good.

There’s a whole lot of the flavor text narrator (put a pin in that one) insisting “this is so scary. you’re so scared. your hands shake and your head throbs because you’re so scared.” There’s also a thing where the battle text keeps going “the shambling zombie BITES your HEAD OFF!!! (you lose 15 hp).”

I think the True Lab sequence in Undertale is a decent demonstration that Toby’s come a long way since then (and that Honey We’ve Got A Storm Coming :’) ). But you know what the Hack’s style of horror reminds me of?

My first thought when I beat the demo and saw this stinger was “this looks like an intentionally shitty creepypasta.” Now I wonder if it’s lowkey adult Toby poking a little fun at teenage Toby

The Halloween Hack is a game about railroading. It’s Spec Ops The Line before there was Spec Ops The Line.

According to Toby:

The main theme of this game is the lack of choice. There is really no choice in this game. From the moment you start to the moment you finish, you're destined to kill Dr. Andonuts. There are two endings, but they both eventually end up the same way. It's all a big joke on the player.

You know why there isn't a choice there? Because you already chose to make Varik go into the door. You already chose to go forward. The only real choice, as Varik realizes at the end of the game, is to stop or keep going. By "stop" he means "turn off the game," and that's all you can do. Anything you play is your own fault for playing, and that's the only real choice you can make.

Interesting? Yeah. A little obnoxious? Also yeah.

That’s one of the criticisms people had of Spec Ops. "The atrocities we commit when we feel like we don’t have a choice” is an intriguing theme, but “~the only way to win is not to play~ [the game I worked hard on for the express purpose of people playing it]” isn’t a very satisfying conclusion.

Undertale, in direct contrast to the Hack, is all about choice. It earns the right to guilt you for the No Mercy Run by giving you every opportunity not to go through with it.

But even Undertale plays a little with the concept of railroading--you can’t stay with Toriel; you can’t spare Asgore in any of the neutral runs; you can’t save Asriel.

Now Deltarune seems to be returning full-on to the Hack’s “your choices don’t matter” premise. But it’s going to need to find something more insightful and satisfying to say about it.

Which makes me really curious about this:

If the Hack has a secondary theme besides railroading/lack of choice, it’s The Soul-Crushing Impact Of Internalized Homophobia.

The tragic antagonist, Dr. Andonuts, destroys his own life trying to repress his gay desire. He retreats into a dream world made of his neuroses and trauma, and he’s inevitably Otherized and murdered by the player. He’s something of a dark version of Alphys, who “disappears” into her lab without ever meeting and getting support from Frisk, Papyrus, and Undyne.

Undertale takes an opposite approach to its lgbt themes--the Underground is a utopia where homophobia and transphobia don’t exist. Everyone respects Frisk’s and Chara’s pronouns. Alphys finds solace and healing in her relationship with Undyne.

It’s a heartwarming growth from the despair in the Halloween Hack. And it’s a vision that’s been deeply meaningful to a lot of people. But that doesn’t mean that there’s no value in exploring issues of homophobia. 16-year-old Toby tried to do that, but...wasn’t exactly at a point where he was equipped to handle it with a ton of sensitivity and nuance.

(There’s. There’s a boss battle where you fight the physical manifestation of Andonuts’ gay repression. It’s a crotch. You fight a crotch.)

Some of the hints in the Deltarune demo, however--the Toriel Has Become Catholic thing; the fact that Alphys and Undyne haven’t met and Mettaton hasn’t been able to transition; the potential trans implications of choosing a name only to have it discarded for an assigned one (“you can’t choose who you are in this world”)--make me suspect that’s one of the themes that Toby will try to revisit from an adult perspective.

The Hack is interested in the idea of the flavor text narrator as a distinct, intelligent entity, whose thoughts and goals don’t always align with those of the player character or the player. 

The Hack’s narrator makes a habit of dictating “your” emotions to you (you’re scared; you can sense ‘the monster’ and you want to kill it; etc). The narration starts to seem more and more unreliable, until, as Toby put it, “The narrator starts talking to you personally...rambling about incoherent things.”

At the game’s turning point, you’re given a yes/no choice to kill Dr. Andonuts. Choose yes, and the narrator (mockingly?) calls you a good person, describes the murder you commit, and then narrates what appears to be your (or their? or Varik’s?) psychological breakdown. Choose no, and the narrator tells you that’s not a real choice and redirects you back to the yes/no box. If you press the b-button to try and opt out of the choice (the game’s unofficial subtitle is “Press the B-Button Stupid,” and doing so allows you to follow Andonuts into his dream world), the narrator starts to panic, although the game ultimately ends the same way.

Not to NarraChara Real, but NarraChara Real 

The Hack is also interested in the idea of the player character as a possibly-unwilling puppet controlled by the player (who in turn is controlled by the railroading/their need to beat the game).

According to Toby:  

 As you approach someone you've never met that you're labeling as a monster, your body pushes you forward to kill him. What's funny is that it's not even uncontrolled, it's really just the force of the player's controller pushing that little bounty hunter into murdering Andonuts. You might not realize it, but Varik is almost dead, and yet he can't stop moving because you keep pushing those buttons. 

The Halloween Hack is, fundamentally, a nostalgic meditation on an existing game.

It’s a little obvious to say, but the Hack isn’t a standalone game. It’s a hack of EarthBound.

Toby writes:

EarthBound dominated my childhood, shaped my preteen years, and played a large role in molding me into the offbeat pseudohippie I am today. It gave me a sense of humor. It helped me learn how to read. Its lessons served as a basis for my sense of justice and courage.

But at age 16, Toby’s feeling about the game that had shaped him were a little mixed. He describes “the staleness of a fifteen-year-old video game” as one of his motivations for making the Hack.

In Deltarune, he (kind of hilariously) has Alphys parrot his teen-self’s “staleness” line:

(I could write a whole meta just on the Mew Mew Kissy Cutie vs Mew Mew Kissy Cutie 2 thing)

Still, Toby’s nostalgia for EarthBound is essential to how the Hack operates. Earlier, I said there were glimmers of an thoughtful, affecting game buried in the “bad romhack with swears.” The most genuinely moving moment in the Hack, in my opinion, is the Onett sequence. 

You wander though a faded, dream world version of Onett--the hometown from EarthBound--while a slowed down arrangement of the Onett music plays. Snatches of forgotten conversations appear on road signs. Various monsters from EarthBound follow slowly behind you, but don’t attack. The only battles are against creatures called “Remember Me?”

The EarthBound characters appear to recognize “Varik” as Ness, EarthBound’s protagonist--or are they recognizing you, the player, as the same person who played EarthBound once upon a time?

The one problem, of course, is that not everyone has played EarthBound. It’s a relatively niche game. The sense of remembrance and regret and loss in the Onett sequence is universal, but being shaped as a person by the specific video game EarthBound isn’t a universal experience.

But in the years since the Hack, Toby has created something with a wider reach than EarthBound. Something that can evoke that sense of memory and nostalgia in players. A familiar game that he can take apart, rearrange, and examine in an entirely different light.

He made Undertale.

And now he’s rearranging the pieces into Deltarune.

[aspiringwarriorlibrarian]

Ableism in Star Wars: Why Deformity as a Shorthand for Moral Character Needs to End

Anyone who’s followed this blog for any length of time knows damn well I hate Snoke’s deformities. He has no backstory, no depth of character, no last name and no legacy. The only thing that he does have, and that the writers have considered adequate to give him (rather than showing or telling his atrocities) is that he’s ugly. That’s it. End of discussion. He’s ugly so he’s bad. And it pisses me off so much that everyone thought that was acceptable.

I wish I could say that it was a first-graders’ view of the world, but to be frank, the first graders I knew have a more nuanced take than the constant hammering in of “good people look good, evil people look evil” in the Sequel Trilogy. We got long, lingering looks on how ugly Kylo Ren’s scar is, while Finn who had his spine split open lengthwise by a goddamn lightsaber is up and running with only a few staples on the back of his jacket and no indication that this effected him at all. Mark Hamill and Carrie Fisher were both made to lose weight to fit the roles they were given, even though the rapid weight cycling Hollywood pushes on all of its stars is actively dangerous for the health of older people. (Because, as we all now, Luke who’s spent years rotting away in his island prison, evidenced by his exposed hand, haggard robes, and beard would totally care about that. Really.) And of course everyone’s been snarky about Rey somehow finding a cosmetics bar on the island before she goes to meet Kylo because how dare a woman not be wearing make-up, ever.

I know, I know, this is what Hollywood does. Hollywood is rife with lookism. But Star Wars goes below the skin deep by outright saying that Snoke is evil because he’s deformed. And for a series that invented the blockbuster, that sells it’s toys and books and ideologies to billions across the world, that message is going to stick unless it is challenged, deconstructed, and burned.

Looks as a shorthand for moral character is embedded deeply in our society. If you’re fat, you’re lazy. If you’re ugly, you didn’t take care of yourself. If you have bad teeth, you’re disgusting. If you’re disabled, you didn’t try hard enough. And every ounce of it is bullshit. The only people who have the money and time to drastically alter their appearance are the upper classes, for whom the moral of “looks as moral character” is a sort of divine right, proof that they deserve what they have and that the lower classes are in their place because they didn’t try hard enough. The idea that people can control their appearance is classist, dangerous, and wrong, and the only reason it’s stuck around is that it affirms the righteousness of the upper classes and keeps others in their place.

The in-universe explanation for why “ugly is evil” is that the Force is deeply intertwined with life and thus you corrupt it and then yourself. This applies to Snoke and no one else. Sure, Palpatine and Vader are deformed and the subconscious enforcing of the “looks as moral character” is bullshit, but at least it was from outside forces. Every other dark side character, no matter what crimes they commit (genocide, torture, slavery, murder), looks fine aside from the occasional yellow eyes, which are more fantasy shorthand than any real life-deformity. What’s more, this idea of “scientist playing with life in cruel experiments is ugly” has no real-world basis. The sadistic scientists of the world put the marks of their evil on the bodies of others, not their own. The scientists and doctors who did put their own bodies on the line were heroic. This ideology of looks as moral character harms the victims of evil, not evil itself. Those who are burned or had acid thrown upon them or any number of deformities are at worst morally neutral, as they came from accident, and most often demonizes people who were harmed by others.

Through disability representation and racial representation, Star Wars has used its diversity to reinforce its messages onto all sorts of children, showing them characters who look like them and inspiring them. But a single accident, a burn, a deformity, takes all those heroes away in one fell swoop. You’re ugly. You’re evil. You’re hated by the world and in so much pain, and Star Wars, once your beloved heroes, is now the fodder for your classmates’ taunts. And that breaks my heart. We are the adults. We know that looks as moral character is wrong. And all of us, no matter how old, deserve better.

It’s time to take our pretty heroes/ugly villains dichotomy, box it up, and throw it into a goddamn fire. No more deformity as shorthand. No more “Snoke is ugly because he’s evil” in fact, let’s retcon that the fuck out because continuity matters less than bad messaging and you’ve retconned things for less. Heroes get show their injuries, be ugly or scarred or even (gasp) fat. No ifs, ands, or buts about, disconnect the idea of looks as character entirely from the narrative and never let it creep back, stomp it out. Don’t tut in the corners, shout it at Lucasfilm as loud as you can that this is unacceptable until they listen and give us the heroes and villains we deserve.

TL;DR The pretty heroes/ugly villains dichotomy in Star Wars needs to fucking die and we need to make enough noise so they realize that.

[gillzilla]

A Treatise on the aTROSity, Including How Hope Came to Me in the Form of The Lego Movie 2, Knives Out, and Little Women

I will start out by saying that I have never made a real, detailed post on Tumblr, mainly because social media kind of scares me. But the Reylo community's amazing kindness, strength, openness, and willingness to speak the truth in their writing over the last week and a half is honestly what has gotten me through the heartbreak and depression caused by the stabbing in the chest that was this movie. I am one of the people who loves Kylo/Ben Solo because I have mental health conditions and an abuse/trauma history within my family, which is also why the holidays are hard for me, so a big thanks to the people in charge of the story for TROS for making it even harder this year. After a week and a half of legitimate mourning for the butchering of the themes of Star Wars and of all the characters, but particularly the sequel trilogy characters, I am ready to add my two cents to all that has already been written about this movie.

First off, I have not been a Star Wars fan for my whole life. My parents tried to introduce me to the original trilogy as a kid by taking me to see A New Hope in the movie theater for the 20th anniversary screening in 1997. I fell asleep for most of it and was terrified by the trash compactor scene, so you could say the movie did not resonate with me. It actually wasn't until Phantom Menace came out that I started to get attached to Star Wars. So many older fans love to shit on that movie, and it certainly has many flaws, but a lot of us who were around the same age as Anakin when that movie came out and are now adults have started to speak up about how the movie was a gateway into Star Wars for us. Anakin gave me a window into the Star Wars universe that I could understand and relate to. I could relate to Anakin being a kind-hearted kid who wanted to help others and just wanted adults he could look up to, and I liked the podracing scenes. As with every single other sci-fi/fantasy hero's journey story that I loved as a kid, I empathized with and related to a male hero. Now, the wooden dialogue/acting/directing of Attack of the Clones and the tragic ending of Revenge of the Sith that left me so emotionally devastated that I vividly remember calling my friend to tell her I was so depressed I couldn't focus on studying for my eighth grade English final, kind of took me out of Star Wars again. There had been a spark there, but at that point I figured, eh, I guess it's not really for me after all.

I didn't rediscover Star Wars until the end of the first semester of my freshman year of college. This was a very difficult time in my life, as I was in what I would now consider to be a mental health crisis that unfortunately lasted for five years because I was too ashamed and uneducated about mental health to seek out help. I was very, very lonely during that time. It was close to finals week and I was sick, so as I sat in my dorm room I decided, why not pop in those DVDs of the original trilogy that I got at Costco last month. After watching them, I remember thinking, "Why have I not been watching these my whole life???" The original trilogy hooked me after that point and I started watching the movies every year around Christmas in commemoration of my rediscovery of them.

I was just as surprised as anyone when I found out that Disney bought Lucasfilm and that they were going to make a sequel trilogy. I had thought there would never be any more Star Wars, so I was overjoyed, though tentative, because I knew that though I loved Star Wars, it also had a tendency to make missteps that were somewhat endemic to sci-fi/fantasy hero's journey stories, such as poorly written dialogue, emphasis on ridiculous plot points that took away from the deeper overall themes, lack of diverse characters, and objectification/misogyny against female characters (I do not like watching Return of the Jedi because I hate, HATE the Jabba's palace stuff for what they did to Leia, honestly they gave Leia nothing interesting to do in that whole movie basically, but that's a whole nother essay).

So I went into The Force Awakens not really knowing what to expect. But oh my god, was I blown away. I am not lying when I say that I cried for at least an hour after the scene where Rey and Kylo are both reaching out for the legacy saber and it goes to Rey as the music swells, oh my god. I FINALLY realized what it meant to feel seen in the stories that I loved. My whole life I had been attached to and empathizing with male heroes, because they were pretty much the only heroes out there. To see Rey as this amazing female heroine who was not objectified and was a compelling character with an intriguing backstory that I related to as a child with a trauma history who often grew up feeling lonely, and to see that she was going to be the main Jedi in this new trilogy, I was overjoyed. It gave me hope. And then, on top of that, we got Adam Driver. Need I say any more. So many people have written about what an absolutely incredible actor Adam is, and I swear he is the only actor who could have pulled off the role of Kylo/Ben. The first time I saw TFA I didn't catch all the nuances of the character and his dynamic with Rey, but something about him really intrigued me (and made me want to watch everything Adam had ever been in). My love for TFA led me to start investing time in the online Star Wars fandom, which I never considered myself to be a part of previously, as the fandom had always reeked of being a "no girls allowed" type of zone. I found out about amazing, female-led podcasts that I started listening to every week and whose hosts I value just as much as my friends. I also started following the Reylo fandom on Tumblr. Learning more about the mythology behind the sequel trilogy, including how the creators were writing Rey's story as a heroine's journey and her and Kylo/Ben as dual protagonists, added so much to my understanding of what was going on in the storytelling and gave me the words to describe why I was connecting with these stories so much. I can honestly say that Star Wars and the Reylo fandom generally have been instrumental in helping me to get through the last four years, which have been a very difficult and isolating period in my life.

And now I'm up to TROS. As so many have said, the vast majority of it is a steaming pile of trash. People have done such an amazing job of breaking down why this story and how it treated its characters and retconned the beautiful story and themes that Rian gave us in TLJ was so painful for us. Many have pointed out that this movie is a result of catering to the most toxic portion of the Star Wars fandom, the "dudebros." Going further, I want to state that, whether consciously or not on the part of the cis, straight, white, male writers/director/CEO of Disney, this movie is a reassertion of masculinist ideologies. I want to clarify that when I talk about "masculinist" vs. feminist ideologies, I am talking about how our society and culture defines "masculine" vs. "feminine" ideas, traits, etc. Gender has nothing to with biological determinism and is socially and culturally constructed. Masculinist ideologies include beliefs such as extreme individualism, competition, "us vs. them" dichotomies, and power and value being defined based on hierarchy, which necessitates the use of violence to perpetuate the hierarchy. Feminist ideologies include valuing community and collaboration, connection and empathy, the idea that every person has inherent worth regardless of their productivity, actions, mistakes, class, race, sexuality, etc., respect for all people, and an abolishing of hierarchies. Masculinist ideologies are those of the white supremacist hetero-patriarchy, which, as we can see playing out in various ways all over the world, has been rearing its head in a very obvious and ugly fashion the past few years (though of course it has been around for wayyyyy longer than that).

Anyone who has been reading the fantastic analyses of TROS by those in the Reylo community can likely see how TLJ and even the story as it was set up in TFA were communicating feminist ideologies. One big example of this is Kylo Ren/Ben himself as a character. As so many have eloquently described, this is a complex character that commits atrocities, but is shown to be a victim of immense abuse and trauma that was failed by everyone in his family when he needed them most. This is a character that, had he been able to have the full and well-written redemption arc that he deserved, would have had an extremely moving story of how toxic masculinity and masculinist ideology is destroying boys and men by keeping them from being full people who can express all of their emotions, be vulnerable, and be open to love and connection. Reylo resonates so much with me not because it is about Rey supposedly doing all the work to change Kylo in some sort of toxic, co-dependent way, but because Rey and Kylo/Ben were always equals to each other. They both pushed each other to be better, more whole people. The wonderful work that folks have put into analyzing the mythology behind the feminine and masculine symbolism in TFA and TLJ (again, to clarify, "masculine" and "feminine" being culturally defined terms), and even the more obvious original goal of the sequel trilogy for the force to finally be balanced by Rey and Ben themselves becoming balanced between dark and light all relate to these gender issues. Balancing the dark and light sides of the force is also about balancing the "masculine" and "feminine" aspects within themselves.

This is a beautiful message that has so many real world implications. In our world, for lack of a better term, everything "feminine" is basically shat on. Patriarchy hates anything "feminine." This is how sexism plays out, but it also has to do with the ideologies that we believe in, down to our basic understandings of empathy and whether or not people have inherent value. The world would certainly be a better place if the "masculine" and "feminine" were better balanced, specifically if "feminine," and feminist, ideologies were more valued. This is what makes TROS feel like a stab directly in the heart. This was a trilogy that clearly did have feminist messages, regardless of DLF's bullshitting about Star Wars being "for everyone." Star Wars has always been progressive, the original trilogy is about rebels taking on fascists for god's sake. DLF's pandering to the most toxic part of the fandom for TROS is therefore representative of a much larger cultural, social, and political battle that is going on around the world right now. We are at a turning point for humanity in which we are starting to face the devastation that has occurred due to masculinist ideologies being the most highly regarded and utilized by those in power, but those in power are also trying to maintain their power by strongly reasserting those ideologies. So I would argue that this is not just about one movie that I and many other people didn't like. This movie is a small representation of a much larger battle that we're fighting.

Now, that reassertion of masculinist ideology that was the stabbing in the heart of watching TROS has made me super, duper depressed for the past week or so because, as others have pointed out, it communicated to me that no matter how hard we fight, the white supremacist hetero-patriarchy will reassert itself and win in the end. It even re-triggered the pain I've felt over the past few years since our current president came into office in the U.S. However, as I near the end of this long treatise I would like to share the stories that gave me hope over these past few days. I re-watched The Lego Movie 2 the other day, and that story gave me hope. The "bad guy" in that story is a literal embodiment of toxic masculinity/masculinist ideology, and it ends with the male hero realizing that he doesn't need to sacrifice his humanity and connections to other people to be a hero, or even just to be a man. How to Train Your Dragon 3 also told a story about a male hero/leader that rejects masculinist ideology. Additionally, I was given hope by Rian's amazing movie, Knives Out, which I went to see solely because people on Tumblr recommended it (thank you folks!). Rian had a clear theme and vision for this story that was about exposing and dissecting what I would call "toxic whiteness," and what it does to a family and those around them. And lastly, I saw Greta Gerwig's incredible adaptation of Little Women today, and that gave me hope because one of its main themes is about the struggle that (cis, heterosexual) women have in asserting themselves as full humans with talents, dreams and goals for their lives outside of being in romantic relationships, but also wanting to have romantic relationships at the same time. As has been said by so many, "STRONG" WOMEN CAN FALL IN LOVE AND HAVE ROMANTIC/SEXUAL RELATIONSHIPS. Feminism is about giving all people the chance to be fully human, and for heterosexual women that includes being able to have a relationship with a man and still be valued and respected for everything that we are outside of that relationship. The above mentioned stories, and others (She-Ra, Dragon Prince, AtLA & Legend of Korra, I'm sure there are others) give me hope that there are creators out there that are communicating feminist themes, even in big-budget movies that lots of people go to see. We need more of this. Tied to this is that THE HEROINE'S JOURNEY OF THE SEQUEL TRILOGY SHOULD HAVE BEEN WRITTEN/DIRECTED BY A WOMAN/WOMEN. Folks, we need the opportunities to tell our own stories. All of the diverse folks out there, if you are a creator, please keep on creating! We need you out there and we value all of the beautiful, integral work that you do!

So in sum, I'm not going to let what happened with TROS ruin my love of Star Wars or of the sequel trilogy. The story belongs to the fans now, and there are so many of us out there to care for it. You better be sure that I will never stop speaking up about how wronged we were by TROS, that is the hill I will die on. But I am not giving up hope and I hope that you will also join me in not giving up hope. As Poe stated so well in TLJ (with one minor adjustment), "We are the spark that will light the fire that will burn the [patriarchy] down." End of treatise.

[emperorren]

How do you think redemption could be handled in the case that 1) Kylo has been Supreme Leader for a significant amount of time, and 2) Kylo isn’t going to be ‘reforming’ the First Order in any way? I would have a hard time accepting that redemption if there is a gap where he’s Supreme Leader for a while. I have a hard time conceptualizing what event or events could take place that would push him to leave the darkness behind and get the GA to root for him if he hasn’t begun changing after Crait.

I think you’re thinking too hard. Vader was a bad, horrible, not good guy for 20+ years before he redeemed himself—did the movies bother to show every single atrocity he committed as an enforcer of the Empire? Were those years and those crimes appropriately weighted against his chances for redemption, when the moment came for him? Did we see what Vader’s “motivations” for leaving the darkness behind were, other than wanting to save his son? No, and nobody complained. For all we know, Vader never had any conflict about the Empire or his methods, and was perfectly fine with it until he wasn’t.

Even if 1) Kylo is Supreme Leader for a significant amount of time, we’re not gonna see this period in detail during the trilogy itself. We’re just going to read a tl;dr in the opening crawl, and the fallout of it will be the set up for IX’s main plot. Whether it’s been three years or three days, it won’t really make a difference in terms of screen time. What really counts is what happens on screen, and I mean in terms of both the audience’s perception and the bulk of characterization. The star wars trilogy movies tend to condensate in broad strokes an amount of evolution and character development that would take ten episodes, or ten thousand pages to be described properly—you need to suspend your disbelief to an extent and fill the gaps with your imagination, but the gist is there and is usually perfectly encapsulated via iconic plot twists. It took less than a week for Kylo to fall for Rey and turn against his long time mentor/abuser. An equally sudden twist can be all he needs to snap out of his supreme leader shenanigans, even if those have been going on for years.

As for 2), I doubt Kylo is going to reform the First Order in any significant way. Even if he tries, he will inevitably face opposition within the FO itself (which could be part of his plot arc for IX, and what spurs him to snap out of it). But he might not feel any impulse to try at all, not until the sheer horribleness of it kicks him in the fangs. By the end of VIII, he’s clearly still okay with the methods and the purpose of the First Order, and the First Order itself can’t suddenly become a humanitarian organization, nor can Lucasfilm afford to muddle the (necessarily) simplistic political subtext of SW by introducing the VERY questionable concept of a /benevolent dictatorship/ (without subverting it in the same movie). The First Order is bad and needs to stay bad. Kylo’s time as Supreme Leader is the nadir of his arc, not his chance to do some good for the galaxy. His redemption arc will kick into high gear only when he turns his back on it, and whatever he does before getting to that point will be the necessary darkness before the dawn (which only makes the dawn look brighter). 

Now, about what could make him turn his back on it…

I have a hard time conceptualizing what event or events could take place that would push him to leave the darkness behind and get the GA to root for him if he hasn’t begun changing after Crait.

But he has begun changing, hasn’t he? Just the way he looks at Rey in their last connection, the softness, the regret, the longing on his face… But oh, you mean politically and morally… as I said earlier, Kylo needs a reality check. For all his cynicism he’s an idealist, and very good at deluding himself (I believe one of the reasons he can’t seem to let go of his Evilness is that he killed his father for it. He refuses to believe it was a false ideal, another failed purpose, another smokescreen that didn’t live up to his expectations. He can’t accept it, it would destroy him, so he prefers to live in this self-induced hallucination that the FO is actually something worth killing for). When reality kicked him in the face in TLJ and demanded him to sacrifice Rey, he killed Snoke instead. I suspect he’ll need another crisis to finally question all of his ideals, not just his loyalty to the old wrinkled turnip.

Kylo is also very self-protective. Even at his most selfless, when he chooses Rey over Snoke—he does it in a way that lowers the risks for himself as much as possible. (he lets Rey into Snoke’s room pretending he’s turning her over; he stays at a safe distance when she’s being tortured, he remains demure and quiet so that Snoke doesn’t lash out at him, he even kills Snoke via remote-control; sure, from a logical standpoint it was probably the only way Snoke would lower his guard enough to be killed, but I suspect there’s an element of self-preservation as well—which is not uncommon in abuse victims). Kylo is fiercely jealous and protective of his beliefs, his dignity, his grudges, his dreams of grandeur, his delusions, his own life—those aren’t things he’s ready to let go. (yet.) 

But maybe there’s another huge turning point coming up for him, this time so dramatic that he’ll see that nothing is as important as saving the one(s) he loves (which can only happen AFTER he acknowledges he loves anyone at all, which… he hasn’t, not really), and it will be the moment when he’s finally ready to let go, and make that one unquestionably selfless act that will be his redemption.

Like… honestly, it could be as simple as facing Rey in combat for the first time (*) after vowing to “destroy” her and finding he just. can’t. do. it.—and this sends him into a spiral that makes him finally question everything he’s worked for so far and understand his place can’t be where Rey can’t follow. Which isn’t something he necessarily realized in the throne room (he killed Snoke thinking Rey would join him—he wasn’t ready to sacrifice everything yet).

Or realizing that Rey’s happiness matters to him more than he’d ever thought, so he saves not just her life, but her friends’ as well. Add to this the probable emotional turmoil caused by his mother’s death, and Hux’s rising in popularity among the FO and antagonizing him more and more explicitly, making him feel like a lion among wolves, having to constantly guard his back, living 24/7in fear of a galactic Ides of March. He thought the only way to “become what he’s meant to be” was removing any attachment (killing them if he has to)—but the truth is he doesn’t really know how it feels, having been in a codependent relationship with Snoke for most of his adult life. Now that for the first time he’s truly alone, he’s going to realize that his no attachments policy won’t make him more powerful, it only makes him lonely and completely vulnerable to malignity and betrayals. This will make him miss Rey more excruciatingly than ever… and hopefully reevaluate what it means to have a family… what it means to love and be loved. Once he gets to this point (and to get there, he has to experience how it feels to be alone on top of a war machine), it’s all downhill to the final redemption.

Remember: for all it’s entangled with politics and riddled with *space fascism* shenanigans, Kylo’s story is not political. His “crimes”, his “darkness”—that he needs to redeem himself from—aren’t whatever political/military action he undertakes, but the emotional wounds he inflicts on himself and his loved ones. The goal is to heal those wounds, and that’s what his redemption will be: emotional healing. In this perspective, his turning point will be motivated by a new understanding of feelings and relationships, an emotional epiphany, rather than a political or even moral one.

(*) however long the time jump will be, I tend to doubt we’re gonna have significant “missing moments” between Rey and Kylo. Maybe some offscreen force skyping, but I find that unlikely too. Their relationship is just too important to occur off screen, even in part.

[unsettlingshortstories]

The Midnight Meat Train

Clive Barker (1984) LEON KAUFMAN WAS no longer new to the city. The Palace of Delights, he’d always called it, in the days of his innocence. But that was when he’d lived in Atlanta, and New York was still a kind of promised land, where anything and everything was possible. Now Kaufman had lived three and a half months in his dream-city, and the Palace of Delights seemed less than delightful. Was it really only a season since he stepped out of Port Authority Bus Station and looked up 42nd Street towards the Broadway intersection? So short a time to lose so many treasured illusions. He was embarrassed now even to think of his naivety. It made him wince to remember how he had stood and announced aloud: ‘New York, I love you.’ Love? Never. It had been at best an infatuation. And now, after only three months living with his object of adoration, spending his days and nights in her presence, she had lost her aura of perfection. New York was just a city. He had seen her wake in the morning like a slut, and pick murdered men from between her teeth, and suicides from the tangles of her hair. He had seen her late at night, her dirty back streets shamelessly courting depravity. He had watched her in the hot afternoon, sluggish and ugly, indifferent to the atrocities that were being committed every hour in her throttled passages. It was no Palace of Delights. It bred death, not pleasure. Everyone he met had brushed with violence; it was a fact of life. It was almost chic to have known someone who had died a violent death. It was proof of living in that city. But Kaufman had loved New York from afar for almost twenty years. He’d planned his love affair for most of his adult life. It was not easy, therefore, to shake the passion off, as though he had never felt it. There were still times, very early, before the cop-sirens began, or at twilight, when Manhattan was still a miracle. For those moments, and for the sake of his dreams, he still gave her the benefit of the doubt, even when her behaviour was less than ladylike. She didn’t make such forgiveness easy. In the few months that Kaufman had lived in New York her streets had been awash with spilt blood. In fact, it was not so much the streets themselves, but the tunnels beneath those streets.

‘Subway Slaughter’ was the catch-phrase of the month. Only the previous week another three killings had been reported. The bodies had been discovered in one of the subway cars on the AVENUE OF THE AMERICAS, hacked open and partially disembowelled, as though an efficient abattoir operative had been interrupted in his work. The killings were so thoroughly professional that the police were interviewing every man on their records who had some past connection with the butchery trade. The meat-packaging plants on the water-front were being watched, the slaughter-houses scoured for clues. A swift arrest was promised, though none was made. This recent trio of corpses was not the first to be discovered in such a state; the very day that Kaufman had arrived a story had broken in The Times that was still the talk of every morbid secretary in the office. The story went that a German visitor, lost in the subway system late at night, had come across a body in a train. The victim was a well-built, attractive thirty-year-old woman from Brooklyn. She had been completely stripped. Every shred of clothing, every article of jewellery. Even the studs in her ears. More bizarre than the stripping was the neat and systematic way in which the clothes had been folded and placed in individual plastic bags on the seat beside the corpse. This was no irrational slasher at work. This was a highly-organized mind: a lunatic with a strong sense of tidiness. Further, and yet more bizarre than the careful stripping of the corpse, was the outrage that had then been perpetrated upon it. The reports claimed, though the Police Department failed to confirm this, that the body had been meticulously shaved. Every hair had been removed: from the head, from the groin, from beneath the arms; all cut and scorched back to the flesh. Even the eyebrows and eyelashes had been plucked out. Finally, this all too naked slab had been hung by the feet from one of the holding handles set in the roof of the car, and a black plastic bucket, lined with a black plastic bag, had been placed beneath the corpse to catch the steady fall of blood from its wounds. n that state, stripped, shaved, suspended and practically bled white, the body of Loretta Dyer had been found. It was disgusting, it was meticulous, and it was deeply confusing. There had been no rape, nor any sign of torture. The woman had been swiftly and efficiently dispatched as though she was a piece of meat. And the butcher was still loose. The City Fathers, in their wisdom, declared a complete close-down on press reports of the slaughter. It was said that the man who had found the body was in protective custody in New Jersey, out of sight of enquiring journalists. But the cover-up had failed. Some greedy cop had leaked the salient details to a reporter from The Times. Everyone in New York now knew the horrible story of the slaughters. It was a topic of conversation in every Deli and bar; and, of course, on the subway. But Loretta Dyer was only the first. Now three more bodies had been found in identical circumstances; though the work had clearly been interrupted on this occasion. Not all the bodies had been shaved, and the jugulars had not been severed to bleed them. There was another, more significant difference in the discovery: it was not a tourist who had stumbled on the sight, it was a reporter from The New York Times.

Kaufman surveyed the report that sprawled across the front page of the newspaper. He had no prurient interest in the story, unlike his elbow mate along the counter of the Deli. All he felt was a mild disgust, that made him push his plate of over-cooked eggs aside. It was simply further proof of his city’s decadence. He could take no pleasure in her sickness. Nevertheless, being human, he could not entirely ignore the gory details on the page in front of him. The article was unsensationally written, but the simple clarity of the style made the subject seem more appalling. He couldn’t help wondering, too, about the man behind the atrocities. Was there one psychotic loose, or several, each inspired to copy the original murder? Perhaps this was only the beginning of the horror. Maybe more murders would follow, until at last the murderer, in his exhilaration or exhaustion, would step beyond caution and be taken. Until then the city, Kaufman’s adored city, would live in a state somewhere between hysteria and ecstasy.

At his elbow a bearded man knocked over Kaufman’s coffee.

‘Shit!’ he said.

Kaufman shifted on his stool to avoid the dribble of coffee running off the counter.

‘Shit,’ the man said again.

‘No harm done,’ said Kaufman.

He looked at the man with a slightly disdainful expression on his face. The clumsy bastard was attempting to soak up the coffee with a napkin, which was turning to mush as he did so. Kaufman found himself wondering if this oaf, with his florid cheeks and his uncultivated beard, was capable of murder. Was there any sign on that over-fed face, any clue in the shape of his head or the turn of his small eyes that gave his true nature away? The man spoke.

‘Wannanother?’

Kaufman shook his head.

‘Coffee. Regular. Dark,’ the oaf said to the girl behind the counter. She looked up from cleaning the grill of cold fat.

‘Huh?’

‘Coffee. You deaf?’

The man grinned at Kaufman.

‘Deaf,’ he said.

Kaufman noticed he had three teeth missing from his lower jaw.

‘Looks bad, huh?’ he said.

What did he mean? The coffee? The absence of his teeth?

‘Three people like that. Carved up.’ Kaufman nodded.

‘Makes you think,’ he said. ‘Sure.’

‘I mean, it’s a cover-up isn’t it? They know who did it.’

This conversation’s ridiculous, thought Kaufman. He took off his spectacles and pocketed them: the bearded face was no longer in focus. That was some improvement at least.

‘Bastards,’ he said. ‘Fucking bastards, all of them. I’ll lay you anything it’s a cover-up.’

‘Of what?’

‘They got the evidence: they’re just keeping us in the fucking dark. There’s something out there that’s not human.’

Kaufman understood. It was a conspiracy theory the oaf was trotting out. He’d heard them so often; a panacea.

‘See, they do all this cloning stuff and it gets out of hand.

They could be growing fucking monsters for all we know.

There’s something down there they won’t tell us about.

Cover-up, like I say. Lay you anything.’ Kaufman found the man’s certainty attractive. Monsters, on the prowl. Six heads: a dozen eyes. Why not?

He knew why not. Because that excused his city: that let her off the hook. And Kaufman believed in his heart that the monsters to be found in the tunnels were perfectly human. The bearded man threw his money on the counter and got up, sliding his fat bottom off the stained plastic stool.

‘Probably a fucking cop,’ he said, as his parting shot. ‘Tried to make a fucking hero, made a fucking monster instead.’ He grinned grotesquely. ‘Lay you anything,’ he continued and lumbered out without another word.

Kaufman slowly exhaled through his nose, feeling the tension in his body abate. He hated that sort of confrontation: it made him feel tongue-tied and ineffectual. Come to think of it, he hated that kind of man: the opinionated brute that New York bred so well.

It was coming up to six when Mahogany woke. The morning rain had turned into a light drizzle by twilight. The air was about as clear-smelling as it ever got in Manhattan. He stretched on his bed, threw off the dirty blanket and got up for work. In the bathroom the rain was dripping on the box of the air-conditioner, filling the apartment with a rhythmical slapping sound. Mahogany turned on the television to cover the noise, uninterested in anything it had to offer. He went to the window. The street six floors below was thick with traffic and people. After a hard day’s work New York was on its way home: to play, to make love. People were streaming out of their offices and into their automobiles. Some would be testy after a day’s sweaty labour in a badly-aired office; others, benign as sheep, would be wandering home down the Avenues, ushered along by a ceaseless current of bodies. Still others would even now be cramming on to the subway, blind to the graffiti on every wall, deaf to the babble of their own voices, and to the cold thunder of the tunnels. It pleased Mahogany to think of that. He was, after all, not one of the common herd. He could stand at his window and look down on a thousand heads below him, and know he was a chosen man. He had deadlines to meet, of course, like the people in the street. But his work was not their senseless labour, it was more like a sacred duty. He needed to live, and sleep, and shit like them, too. But it was not financial necessity that drove him, but the demands of history. He was in a great tradition, that stretched further back than America. He was a night-stalker: like Jack the Ripper, like Gilles de Rais, a living embodiment of death, a wraith with a human face. He was a haunter of sleep, and an awakener of terrors. The people below him could not know his face; nor would care to look twice at him. But his stare caught them, and weighed them up, selecting only the ripest from the passing parade, choosing only the healthy and the young to fall under his sanctified knife. Sometimes Mahogany longed to announce his identity to the world, but he had responsibilities and they bore on him heavily. He couldn’t expect fame. His was a secret life, and it was merely pride that longed for recognition. After all, he thought, does the beef salute the butcher as it throbs to its knees? All in all, he was content. To be part of that great tradition was enough, would always have to remain enough. Recently, however, there had been discoveries. They weren’t his fault of course. Nobody could possibly blame him. But it was a bad time. Life was not as easy as it had been ten years ago. He was that much older, of course, and that made the job more exhausting; and more and more the obligations weighed on his shoulders. He was a chosen man, and that was a difficult privilege to live with.

He wondered, now and then, if it wasn’t time to think about training a younger man for his duties. There would need to be consultations with the Fathers, but sooner or later a replacement would have to be found, and it would be, he felt, a criminal waste of his experience not to take on an apprentice. There were so many felicities he could pass on. The tricks of his extraordinary trade. The best way to stalk, to cut, to strip, to bleed. The best meat for the purpose. The simplest way to dispose of the remains. So much detail, so much accumulated expertise. Mahogany wandered into the bathroom and turned on the shower. As he stepped in he looked down at his body. The small paunch, the greying hairs on his sagging chest, the scars, and pimples that littered his pale skin. He was getting old. Still, tonight, like every other night, he had a job to do. Kaufman hurried back into the lobby with his sandwich, turning down his collar and brushing rain off his hair. The clock above the elevator read seven-sixteen. He would work through until ten, no later. The elevator took him up to the twelfth floor and to the Pappas offices. He traipsed unhappily through the maze of empty desks and hooded machines to his little territory, which was still illuminated. The women who cleaned the offices were chatting down the corridor: otherwise the place was lifeless. He took off his coat, shook the rain off it as best he could, and hung it up. Then he sat down in front of the piles of orders he had been tussling with for the best part of three days, and began work. It would only take one more night’s labour, he felt sure, to break the back of the job, and he found it easier to concentrate without the incessant clatter of typists and typewriters on every side. He unwrapped his ham on whole-wheat with extra mayonnaise and settled in for the evening.

It was nine now. Mahogany was dressed for the nightshift. He had his usual sober suit on, with his brown tie neatly knotted, his silver cufflinks (a gift from his first wife) placed in the sleeves of his immaculately pressed shirt, his thinning hair gleaming with oil, his nails snipped and polished, his face flushed with cologne. His bag was packed. The towels, the instruments, his chain-mail apron. He checked his appearance in the mirror. He could, he thought, still be taken for a man of forty-five, fifty at the outside.

As he surveyed his face he reminded himself of his duty. Above all, he must be careful. There would be eyes on him every step of the way, watching his performance tonight, and judging it. He must walk out like an innocent, arousing no suspicion. If they only knew, he thought. The people who walked, ran and skipped past him on the streets: who collided with him without apology: who met his gaze with contempt: who smiled at his bulk, looking uneasy in his ill- fitting suit. If only they knew what he did, what he was and what he carried. Caution, he said to himself, and turned off the light. The apartment was dark. He went to the door and opened it, used to walking in blackness. Happy in it. The rain clouds had cleared entirely. Mahogany made his way down Amsterdam towards the Subway at 145th Street. Tonight he’d take the AVENUE OF THE AMERICAS again, his favourite line, and often the most productive. Down the Subway steps, token in hand. Through the automatic gates. The smell of the tunnels was in his nostrils now. Not the smell of the deep tunnels of course. They had a scent all of their own. But there was reassurance even in the stale electric air of this shallow line. The regurgitated breath of a million travellers circulated in this warren, mingling with the breath of creatures far older; things with voices soft like clay, whose appetites were abominable. How he loved it. The scent, the dark, the thunder.

He stood on the platform and scanned his fellow-travellers critically. There were one or two bodies he contemplated following, but there was so much dross amongst them: so few worth the chase. The physically wasted, the obese, the ill, the weary. Bodies destroyed by excess and by indifference. As a professional it sickened him, though he understood the weakness that spoiled the best of men. He lingered in the station for over an hour, wandering between platforms while the trains came and went, came and went, and the people with them. There was so little of quality around it was dispiriting. It seemed he had to wait longer and longer every day to find flesh worthy of use. It was now almost half past ten and he had not seen a single creature who was really ideal for slaughter. No matter, he told himself, there was time yet. Very soon the theatre crowd would be emerging. They were always good for a sturdy body or two. The well-fed intelligentsia, clutching their ticket-stubs and opining on the diversions of art - oh yes, there’d be something there. If not, and there were nights when it seemed he would never find something suitable, he’d have to ride down-town and corner a couple of lovers out late, or find an athlete or two, fresh from one of the gyms. They were always sure to offer good material, except that with such healthy specimens there was always the risk of resistance. He remembered catching two black bucks a year ago or more, with maybe forty years between them, father and son perhaps. They’d resisted with knives, and he’d been hospitalised for six weeks. It had been a close fought encounter and one that had set him doubting his skills. Worse, it had made him wonder what his masters would have done with him had he suffered a fatal injury. Would he have been delivered to his family in New Jersey, and given a decent Christian burial? Or would his carcass have been thrown into the dark, for their own use?

The headline of the New York Post, discarded on the seat across from him caught Mahogany’s eye: ‘Police All-Out to Catch Killer’. He couldn’t resist a smile. Thoughts of failure, weakness and death evaporated. After all, he was that man, that killer, and tonight the thought of capture was laughable. After all, wasn’t his career sanctioned by the highest possible authorities? No policeman could hold him, no court pass judgement on him. The very forces of law and order that made such a show of his pursuit served his masters no less than he; he almost wished some two-bit cop would catch him, take him in triumph before the judge, just to see the looks on their faces when the word came up from the dark that Mahogany was a protected man, above every law on the statute books. It was now well after ten-thirty. The trickle of theatre-goers had begun, but there was nothing likely so far. He’d want to let the rush pass anyway: just follow one or two choice pieces to the end of the line. He bided his time, like any wise hunter.

Kaufman was not finished by eleven, an hour after he’d promised himself release. But exasperation and ennui were making the job more difficult, and the sheets of figures were beginning to blur in front of him. At ten past eleven he threw down his pen and admitted defeat. He rubbed his hot eyes with the cushions of his palms till his head filled with colours.

‘Fuck it,’ he said.

He never swore in company. But once in a while to say fuck it to himself was a great consolation. He made his way out of the office, damp coat over his arm, and headed for the elevator. His limbs felt drugged and his eyes would scarcely stay open. It was colder outside than he had anticipated, and the air brought him out of his lethargy a little. He walked towards the Subway at 34th Street. Catch an Express to Far Rockaway. Home in an hour. Neither Kaufman nor Mahogany knew it, but at 96th and Broadway the Police had arrested what they took to be the Subway Killer, having trapped him in one of the up-town trains. A small man of European extraction, wielding a hammer and a saw, had cornered a young woman in the second car and threatened to cut her in half in the name of Jehovah. Whether he was capable of fulfilling his threat was doubtful. As it was, he didn’t get the chance. While the rest of the passengers (including two Marines) looked on, the intended victim landed a kick to the man’s testicles. He dropped the hammer. She picked it up and broke his lower jaw and right cheek-bone with it before the Marines stepped in. When the train halted at 96th the Police were waiting to arrest the Subway Butcher. They rushed the car in a horde, yelling like banshees and scared as shit. The Butcher was lying in one corner of the car with his face in pieces. They carted him away, triumphant. The woman, after questioning, went home with the Marines. It was to be a useful diversion, though Mahogany couldn’t know it at the time. It took the Police the best part of the night to determine the identity of their prisoner, chiefly because he couldn’t do more than drool through his shattered jaw. It wasn’t until three-thirty in the morning that one Captain Davis, coming on duty, recognized the man as a retired flower salesman from the Bronx called Hank Vasarely. Hank, it seemed, was regularly arrested for threatening behaviour and indecent exposure, all in the name of Jehovah. Appearances deceived: he was about as dangerous as the Easter Bunny. This was not the Subway Slaughterer. But by the time the cops had worked that out, Mahogany had been about his business a long while.

It was eleven-fifteen when Kaufman got on the Express through to Mott Avenue. He shared the car with two other travellers. One was a middle-aged black woman in a purple coat, the other a pale, acne-ridden adolescent who was staring at the ‘Kiss My White Ass’ graffiti on the ceiling with spaced-out eyes. Kaufman was in the first car. He had a journey of thirty-five minutes’ duration ahead of him. He let his eyes slide closed, reassured by the rhythmical rocking of the train. It was a tedious journey and he was tired. He didn’t see Mahogany’s face, either, staring through the door between the cars, looking through for some more meat.

At 14th Street the black woman got out. Nobody got in. Kaufman opened his eyes briefly, taking in the empty platform at 14th, then shut them again. The doors hissed closed. He was drifting in that warm somewhere between awareness and sleep and there was a fluttering of nascent dreams in his head. It was a good feeling. The train was off again, rattling down into the tunnels. Maybe, at the back of his dozing mind, Kaufman half-registered that the doors between the second and first cars had been slid open. Maybe he smelt the sudden gush of tunnel-air, and registered that the noise of wheels was momentarily louder. But he chose to ignore it. Maybe he even heard the scuffle as Mahogany subdued the youth with the spaced- out stare. But the sound was too distant and the promise of sleep was too tempting. He drowsed on. For some reason his dreams were of his mother’s kitchen. She was chopping turnips and smiling sweetly as she chopped. He was only small in his dream and was looking up at her radiant face while she worked. Chop. Chop. Chop. His eyes jerked open. His mother vanished. The car was empty and the youth was gone. How long had he been dozing? He hadn’t remembered the train stopping at West 4th Street. He got up, his head full of slumber, and almost fell over as the train rocked violently. It seemed to have gathered quite a substantial head of speed. Maybe the driver was keen to be home, wrapped up in bed with his wife. They were going at a fair lick; in fact it was bloody terrifying. There was a blind drawn down over the window between the cars which hadn’t been down before as he remembered. A little concern crept into Kaufman’s sober head. Suppose he’d been sleeping a long while, and the guard had overlooked him in the car. Perhaps they’d passed Far Rockaway and the train was now speeding on its way to wherever they took the trains for the night.

‘Fuck it,’ he said aloud.

Should he go forward and ask the driver? It was such a bloody idiot question to ask: where am I? At this time of night was he likely to get more than a stream of abuse by way of reply? Then the train began to slow.

A station. Yes, a station. The train emerged from the tunnel and into the dirty light of the station at West 4th Street. He’d missed no stops…

So where had the boy gone?

He’d either ignored the warning on the car wall forbid-ding transfer between the cars while in transit, or else he’d gone into the driver’s cabin up front. Probably between the driver’s legs even now, Kaufman thought, his lip curling. It wasn’t unheard of. This was the Palace of Delights, after all, and everyone had their right to a little love in the dark.

Kaufman shrugged to himself. What did he care where the boy had gone?

The doors closed. Nobody had boarded the train. It shunted off from the station, the lights flickering as it used a surge of power to pick up some speed again. Kaufman felt the desire for sleep come over him afresh, but the sudden fear of being lost had pumped adrenalin into his system, and his limbs were tingling with nervous energy. His senses were sharpened too. Even over the clatter and the rumble of the wheels on the tracks, he heard the sound of tearing cloth coming from the next car. Was someone tearing their shirt off? He stood up, grasping one of the straps for balance. The window between the cars was completely curtained off, but he stared at it, frowning, as though he might suddenly discover X-ray vision. The car rocked and rolled. It was really travelling again.

Another ripping sound.

Was it rape?

With no more than a mild voyeuristic urge he moved down the see-sawing car towards the intersecting door, hoping there might be a chink in the curtain. His eyes were still fixed on the window, and he failed to notice the splatters of blood he was treading in. Until his heel slipped. He looked down. His stomach almost saw the blood before his brain and the ham on whole-wheat was half-way up his gullet catching in the back of his throat. Blood. He took several large gulps of stale air and looked away - back at the window. His head was saying: blood. Nothing would make the word go away. There was no more than a yard or two between him and the door now. He had to look. There was blood on his shoe, and a thin trail to the next car, but he still had to look. He had to.

He took two more steps to the door and scanned the curtain looking for a flaw in the blind: a pulled thread in the weave would be sufficient. There was a tiny hole. He glued his eye to it. His mind refused to accept what his eyes were seeing beyond the door. It rejected the spectacle as preposterous, as a dreamed sight. His reason said it couldn’t be real, but his flesh knew it was. His body became rigid with terror. His eyes, unblinking, could not close off the appalling scene through the curtain. He stayed at the door while the train rattled on, while his blood drained from his extremities, and his brain reeled from lack of oxygen. Bright spots of light flashed in front of his vision, blotting out the atrocity. Then he fainted.

He was unconscious when the train reached Jay Street. He was deaf to the driver’s announcement that all travellers beyond that station would have to change trains. Had he heard this he would have questioned the sense of it. No trains disgorged all their passengers at Jay Street; the line ran to Mott Avenue, via the Aqueduct Race Track, past JFK Airport. He would have asked what kind of train this could be. Except that he already knew. The truth was hanging in the next car. It was smiling contentedly to itself from behind a bloody chain-mail apron.

This was the Midnight Meat Train. There’s no accounting for time in a dead faint. It could have been seconds or hours that passed before Kaufman’s eyes flickered open again, and his mind focussed on his new-found situation. He lay under one of the seats now, sprawled along the vibrating wall of the car, hidden from view. Fate was with him so far he thought: somehow the rocking of the car must have jockeyed his unconscious body out of sight. He thought of the horror in Car Two, and swallowed back vomit. He was alone. Wherever the guard was (murdered perhaps), there was no way he could call for help. And the driver? Was he dead at his controls? Was the train even now hurtling through an unknown tunnel, a tunnel without a single station to identify it, towards its destruction? And if there was no crash to be killed in, there was always the Butcher, still hacking away a door’s thickness from where Kaufman lay. Whichever way he turned, the name on the door was Death. The noise was deafening, especially lying on the floor. Kaufman’s teeth were shaking in their sockets and his face felt numb with the vibration; even his skull was aching. Gradually he felt strength seeping back into his exhausted limbs. He cautiously stretched his fingers and clenched his fists, to set the blood flowing there again. And as the feeling returned, so did the nausea. He kept seeing the grisly brutality of the next car. He’d seen photographs of murder victims before, of course, but these were no common murders. He was in the same train as the Subway Butcher, the monster who strung his victims up by the feet from the straps, hairless and naked. How long would it be before the killer stepped through that door and claimed him? He was sure that if the slaughterer didn’t finish him, expectation would. He heard movement beyond the door. Instinct took over. Kaufman thrust himself further under the seat and tucked himself up into a tiny ball, with his sick-white face to the wall. Then he covered his head with his hands and closed his eyes as tightly as any child in terror of the Bogeyman. The door was slid open. Click. Whoosh. A rush of air up from the rails. It smelt stranger than any Kaufman had smelt before: and colder. This was somehow primal air in his nostrils, hostile and unfathomable air. It made him shudder. The door closed. Click.

The Butcher was close, Kaufman knew it. He could be standing no more than a matter of inches from where he lay. Was he even now looking down at Kaufman’s back? Even now bending, knife in hand, to scoop Kaufman out of his hiding place, like a snail hooked from its shell?

Nothing happened. He felt no breath on his neck. His spine was not slit open. There was simply a clatter of feet close to Kaufman’s head; then that same sound receding. Kaufman’s breath, held in his lungs ‘til they hurt, was expelled in a rasp between his teeth. Mahogany was almost disappointed that the sleeping man had alighted at West 4th Street. He was hoping for one more job to do that night, to keep him occupied while they descended. But no: the man had gone. The potential victim hadn’t looked that healthy anyway, he thought to himself, he was an anaemic Jewish accountant probably. The meat wouldn’t have been of any quality. Mahogany walked the length of the car to the driver’s cabin. He’d spend the rest of the journey there.

My Christ, thought Kaufman, he’s going to kill the driver. He heard the cabin door open. Then the voice of the Butcher: low and hoarse.

‘Hi.’

‘Hi.’

They knew each other.

‘All done?’

‘All done.’

Kaufman was shocked by the banality of the exchange. All done? What did that mean: all done? He missed the next few words as the train hit a particularly noisy section of track. Kaufman could resist looking no longer. Warily he uncurled himself and glanced over his shoulder down the length of the car. All he could see was the Butcher’s legs, and the bottom of the open cabin door. Damn. He wanted to see the monster’s face again. There was laughter now. Kaufman calculated the risks of his situation: the mathematics of panic. If he remained where he was, sooner or later the Butcher would glance down at him, and he’d be mincemeat. On the other hand, if he were to move from his hiding place he would risk being seen and pursued. Which was worse: stasis, and meeting his death trapped in a hole; or making a break for it and confronting his Maker in the middle of the car? Kaufman surprised himself with his mettle: he’d move.

Infinitesimally slowly he crawled out from under the seat, watching the Butcher’s back every minute as he did so. Once out, he began to crawl towards the door. Each step he took was a torment, but the Butcher seemed far too engrossed in his conversation to turn round. Kaufman had reached the door. He began to stand up, trying all the while to prepare himself for the sight he would meet in Car Two. The handle was grasped; and he slid the door open. The noise of the rails increased, and a wave of dank air, stinking of nothing on earth, came up at him. Surely the Butcher must hear, or smell? Surely he must turn - But no. Kaufman skinned his way through the slit he had opened and so through into the bloody chamber beyond. Relief made him careless. He failed to latch the door properly behind him and it began to slide open with the buffeting of the train. Mahogany put his head out of the cabin and stared down the car towards the door.

‘What the fuck’s that?’ said the driver.

‘Didn’t close the door properly. That’s all.’

Kaufman heard the Butcher walking towards the door. He crouched, a ball of consternation, against the intersecting wall, suddenly aware of how full his bowels were. The door was pulled closed from the other side, and the footsteps receded again. Safe, for another breath at least. Kaufman opened his eyes, steeling himself for the slaughter-pen in front of him. There was no avoiding it. It filled every one of his senses: the smell of opened entrails, the sight of the bodies, the feel of fluid on the floor under his fingers, the sound of the straps creaking beneath the weight of the corpses, even the air, tasting salty with blood. He was with death absolutely in that cubby-hole, hurtling through the dark. But there was no nausea now. There was no feeling left but a casual revulsion. He even found himself peering at the bodies with some curiosity. The carcass closest to him was the remains of the pimply youth he’d seen in Car One. The body hung upside-down, swinging back and forth to the rhythm of the train, in unison with its three fellows; an obscene dance macabre. Its arms dangled loosely from the shoulder joints, into which gashes an inch or two deep had been made, so the bodies would hang more neatly. Every part of the dead kid’s anatomy was swaying hypnotically. The tongue, hanging from the open mouth. The head, lolling on its slit neck. Even the youth’s penis flapped from side to side on his plucked groin. The head wound and the open jugular still pulsed blood into a black bucket. There was an elegance about the whole sight: the sign of a job well-done. Beyond that body were the strung-up corpses of two young white women and a darker skinned male. Kaufman turned his head on one side to look at their faces. They were quite blank. One of the girls was a beauty. He decided the male had been Puerto Rican. All were shorn of their head and body hair. In fact the air was still pungent with the smell of the shearing. Kaufman slid up the wall out of the crouching position, and as he did so one of the women’s bodies turned around, presenting a dorsal view. He was not prepared for this last horror.

The meat of her back had been entirely cleft open from neck to buttock and the muscle had been peeled back to expose the glistening vertebrae. It was the final triumph of the Butcher’s craft. Here they hung, these shaved, bled, slit slabs of humanity, opened up like fish, and ripe for devouring. Kaufman almost smiled at the perfection of its horror. He felt an offer of insanity tickling the base of his skull, tempting him into oblivion, promising a blank indifference to the world. He began to shake, uncontrollably. He felt his vocal cords trying to form a scream. It was intolerable: and yet to scream was to become in a short while like the creatures in front of him. ‘Fuck it,’ he said, more loudly than he’d intended, then pushing himself off from the wall he began to walk down the car between the swaying corpses, observing the neat piles of clothes and belongings that sat on the seats beside their owners. Under his feet the floor was sticky with drying bile. Even with his eyes closed to cracks he could see the blood in the buckets too clearly: it was thick and heady, flecks of grit turning in it. He was past the youth now and he could see the door into Car Three ahead. All he had to do was run this gauntlet of atrocities. He urged himself on, trying to ignore the horrors, and concentrate on the door that would lead him back into sanity. He was past the first woman. A few more yards, he said to himself, ten steps at most, less if he walked with confidence. Then the lights went out.

‘Jesus Christ,’ he said.

The train lurched, and Kaufman lost his balance. In the utter blackness he reached out for support and his flailing arms encompassed the body beside him. Before he could prevent himself he felt his hands sinking into the lukewarm flesh, and his fingers grasping the open edge of muscle on the dead woman’s back, his fingertips touching the bone of her spine. His cheek was laid against the bald flesh of the thigh. He screamed; and even as he screamed, the lights flickered back on. And as they flickered back on, and his scream died, he heard the noise of the Butcher’s feet approaching down the length of Car One towards the intervening door. He let go of the body he was embracing. His face was smeared with blood from her leg. He could feel it on his cheek, like war paint. The scream had cleared Kaufman’s head and he suddenly felt released into a kind of strength. There would be no pursuit down the train, he knew that: there would be no cowardice, not now. This was going to be a primitive confrontation, two human beings, face to face. And there would be no trick - none - that he couldn’t contemplate using to bring his enemy down. This was a matter of survival, pure and simple. The door-handle rattled.

Kaufman looked around for a weapon, his eye steady and calculating. His gaze fell on the pile of clothes beside the Puerto Rican’s body. There was a knife there, lying amongst the rhinestone rings and the imitation gold chains. A long-bladed, immaculately clean weapon, probably the man’s pride and joy. Reaching past the well-muscled body, Kaufman plucked the knife from the heap. It felt good in his hand; in fact it felt positively thrilling. The door was opening, and the face of the slaughterer came into view. Kaufman looked down the abattoir at Mahogany. He was not terribly fearsome, just another balding, overweight man of fifty. His face was heavy and his eyes deep-set. His mouth was rather small and delicately lipped. In fact he had a woman’s mouth. Mahogany could not understand where this intruder had appeared from, but he was aware that it was another over-sight, another sign of increasing incompetence. He must dispatch this ragged creature immediately. After all they could not be more than a mile or two from the end of the line. He must cut the little man down and have him hanging up by his heels before they reached their destination. He moved into Car Two.

‘You were asleep,’ he said, recognizing Kaufman. ‘I saw you.’

Kaufman said nothing.

‘You should have left the train. What were you trying to do? Hide from me?’

Kaufman still kept his silence.

Mahogany grasped the hand of the cleaver hanging from his well-used leather belt. It was dirty with blood, as was his chain-mail apron, his hammer and his saw.

‘As it is,’ he said, ‘I’ll have to do away with you.’ Kaufman raised the knife. It looked a little small beside the Butcher’s paraphernalia.

‘Fuck it,’ he said.

Mahogany grinned at the little man’s pretensions to defence.

‘You shouldn’t have seen this: it’s not for the likes of you,’ he said, taking another step towards Kaufman. ‘It’s secret.’

Oh, so he’s the divinely-inspired type is he? thought Kaufman. That explains something.

‘Fuck it,’ he said again.

The Butcher frowned. He didn’t like the little man’s indifference to his work, to his reputation.

‘We all have to die some time,’ he said. ‘You should be well pleased: you’re not going to be burnt up like most of them: I can use you. To feed the fathers.’ Kaufman’s only response was a grin. He was past being terrorized by this gross, shambling hulk.

The Butcher unhooked the cleaver from his belt and brandished it.

‘A dirty little Jew like you,’ he said, ‘should be thankful to be useful at all: meat’s the best you can aspire to.’

Without warning, the Butcher swung. The cleaver divided the air at some speed, but Kaufman stepped back. The cleaver sliced his coat-arm and buried itself in the Puerto Rican’s shank. The impact half-severed the leg and the weight of the body opened the gash even further. The exposed meat of the thigh was like prime steak, succulent and appetizing. The Butcher started to drag the cleaver out of the wound, and in that moment Kaufman sprang. The knife sped towards Mahogany’s eye, but an error of judgement buried it instead in his neck. It transfixed the column and appeared in a little gout of gore on the other side. Straight through. In one stroke. Straight through. Mahogany felt the blade in his neck as a choking sensation, almost as though he had caught a chicken bone in his throat. He made a ridiculous, halfhearted coughing sound. Blood issued from his lips, painting them, like lipstick on his woman’s mouth. The cleaver clattered to the floor.

Kaufman pulled out the knife. The two wounds spouted little arcs of blood. Mahogany collapsed to his knees, staring at the knife that had killed him. The little man was watching him quite passively. He was saying something, but Mahogany’s ears were deaf to the remarks, as though he was under water. Mahogany suddenly went blind. He knew with a nostalgia for his senses that he would not see or hear again. This was death: it was on him for certain. His hands still felt the weave of his trousers, however, and the hot splashes on his skin. His life seemed to totter on its tiptoes while his fingers grasped at one last sense. Then his body collapsed, and his hands, and his life, and his sacred duty folded up under a weight of grey flesh.

The Butcher was dead.

Kaufman dragged gulps of stale air into his lungs and grabbed one of the straps to steady his reeling body. Tears blotted out the shambles he stood in. A time passed: he didn’t know how long; he was lost in a dream of victory.

Then the train began to slow. He felt and heard the brakes being applied. The hanging bodies lurched forward as the careering train slowed, its wheels squealing on rails that were sweating slime.

Curiosity overtook Kaufman.

Would the train shunt into the Butcher’s underground slaughterhouse, decorated with the meats he had gathered through his career? And the laughing driver, so indifferent to the massacre, what would he do once the train had stopped? Whatever happened now was academic. He could face anything at all; watch and see.

The tannoy crackled. The voice of the driver:

‘We’re here man. Better take your place eh?’

Take your place? What did that mean?

The train had slowed to a snail’s pace. Outside the windows, everything was as dark as ever. The lights flickered, then went out. This time they didn’t come back on.

Kaufman was left in total darkness.

‘We’ll be out in half-an-hour,’ the tannoy announced, so like any station report.

The train had come to a stop. The sound of its wheels on the tracks, the rush of its passage, which Kaufman had grown so used to, were suddenly absent. All he could hear was the hum of the tannoy. He could still see nothing at all. Then, a hiss. The doors were opening. A smell entered the car, a smell so caustic that Kaufman clapped his hand over his face to shut it out.

He stood in silence, hand to mouth, for what seemed a lifetime. See no evil. Hear no evil. Speak no evil.

Then, there was a flicker of light outside the window. It threw the door frame into silhouette, and it grew stronger by degrees. Soon there was sufficient light in the car for Kaufman to see the crumpled body of the Butcher at his feet, and the sallow sides of meat hanging on every side of him. There was a whisper too, from the dark outside the train, a gathering of tiny noises like the voices of beetles. In the tunnel, shuffling towards the train, were human beings. Kaufman could see their outlines now. Some of them carried torches, which burned with a dead brown light. The noise was perhaps their feet on the damp earth, or perhaps their tongues clicking, or both. Kaufman wasn’t as naive as he’d been an hour before. Could there be any doubt as to the intention these things had, coming out of the blackness towards the train? The Butcher had slaughtered the men and women as meat for these cannibals, they were coming, like diners at the dinner-gong, to eat in this restaurant car.

Kaufman bent down and picked up the cleaver the Butcher had dropped. The noise of the creatures’ approach was louder every moment. He backed down the car away from the open doors, only to find that the doors behind him were also open, and there was the whisper of approach there too. He shrank back against one of the seats, and was about to take refuge under them when a hand, thin and frail to the point of transparency appeared around the door. He could not look away. Not that terror froze him as it had at the window. He simply wanted to watch. The creature stepped into the car. The torches behind it threw its face into shadow, but its outline could be clearly seen. There was nothing very remarkable about it. It had two arms and two legs as he did; its head was not abnormally shaped. The body was small, and the effort of climbing into the train made its breath coarse. It seemed more geriatric than psychotic; generations of fictional man-eaters had not prepared him for its distressing vulnerability. Behind it, similar creatures were appearing out of the darkness, shuffling into the train. In fact they were coming in at every door.

Kaufman was trapped. He weighed the cleaver in his hands, getting the balance of it, ready for the battle with these antique monsters. A torch had been brought into the car, and it illuminated the faces of the leaders. They were completely bald. The tired flesh of their faces was pulled tight over their skulls, so that it shone with tension. There were stains of decay and disease on their skin, and in places the muscle had withered to a black pus, through which the bone of cheek or temple was showing. Some of them were naked as babies, their pulpy, syphilitic bodies scarcely sexed. What had been breasts were leathery bags hanging off the torso, the genitalia shrunken away. Worse sights than the naked amongst them were those who wore a veil of clothes. It soon dawned on Kaufman that the rotting fabric slung around their shoulders, or knotted about their midriffs was made of human skins. Not one, but a dozen or more, heaped haphazardly on top of each other, like pathetic trophies. The leaders of this grotesque meal-line had reached the bodies now, and the gracile hands were laid upon the shanks of meat, and were running up and down the shaved flesh in a manner that suggested sensual pleasure. Tongues were dancing out of mouths, flecks of spittle landing on the meat. The eyes of the monsters were flickering back and forth with hunger and excitement.

Eventually one of them saw Kaufman.

Its eyes stopped flickering for a moment, and fixed on him. A look of enquiry came over the face, making a parody of puzzlement.

‘You,’ it said. The voice was as wasted as the lips it came from.

Kaufman raised the cleaver a little, calculating his chances. There were perhaps thirty of them in the car and many more outside. But they looked so weak, and they had no weapons, but their skin and bones.

The monster spoke again, its voice quite well modulated, when it found itself, the piping of a once-cultured, once-charming man.

‘You came after the other, yes?’

It glanced down at the body of Mahogany. It had clearly taken in the situation very quickly.

‘Old anyway,’ it said, its watery eyes back on Kaufman, studying him with care.

‘Fuck you,’ said Kaufman.

The creature attempted a wry smile, but it had almost forgotten the technique and the result was a grimace which exposed a mouthful of teeth that had been systematically filed into points.

‘You must now do this for us,’ it said through the bestial grin.

‘We cannot survive without food.’

The hand patted the rump of human flesh. Kaufman had no reply to the idea. He just stared in disgust as the fingernails slid between the cleft in the buttocks, feeling the swell of tender muscle.

‘It disgusts us no less than you,’ said the creature. ‘But we’re bound to eat this meat, or we die. God knows, I have no appetite for it.’

The thing was drooling nevertheless.

Kaufman found his voice. It was small, more with a confusion of feelings than with fear.

‘What are you?’ He remembered the bearded man in the Deli.

‘Are you accidents of some kind?’

‘We are the City fathers,’ the thing said. ‘And mothers, and daughters and sons. The builders, the law-makers. We made this city.’

‘New York?’ said Kaufman. The Palace of Delights? 

‘Before you were born, before anyone living was born.’ As it spoke the creature’s fingernails were running up under the skin of the split body, and were peeling the thin elastic layer off the luscious brawn. Behind Kaufman, the other creatures had begun to unhook the bodies from the straps, their hands laid in that same delighting manner on the smooth breasts and flanks of flesh. These too had begun skinning the meat.

‘You will bring us more,’ the father said. ‘More meat for us. The other one was weak.’

Kaufman stared in disbelief.

‘Me?’ he said. ‘Feed you? What do you think I am?’

‘You must do it for us, and for those older than us. For those born before the city was thought of, when America was a timberland and desert.’

The fragile hand gestured out of the train.

Kaufman’s gaze followed the pointing finger into the gloom. There was something else outside the train which he’d failed to see before; much bigger than anything human. The pack of creatures parted to let Kaufman through so that he could inspect more closely whatever it was that stood outside, but his feet would not move.

‘Go on,’ said the father.

Kaufman thought of the city he’d loved. Were these really its ancients, its philosophers, its creators? He had to believe it. Perhaps there were people on the surface -bureaucrats, politicians, authorities of every kind - who knew this horrible secret and whose lives were dedicated to preserving these abominations, feeding them, as savages feed lambs to their gods. There was a horrible familiarity about this ritual. It rang a bell - not in Kaufman’s conscious mind, but in his deeper, older self. His feet, no longer obeying his mind, but his instinct to worship, moved. He walked through the corridor of bodies and stepped out of the train. The light of the torches scarcely began to illuminate the limitless darkness outside. The air seemed solid, it was so thick with the smell of ancient earth. But Kaufman smelt nothing. His head bowed, it was all he could do to prevent himself from fainting again. It was there; the precursor of man. The original American, whose homeland this was before Passamaquoddy or Cheyenne. Its eyes, if it had eyes, were on him. His body shook. His teeth chattered.

He could hear the noise of its anatomy: ticking, crack-ling, sobbing. It shifted a little in the dark. The sound of its movement was awesome. Like a mountain sitting up. Kaufman’s face was raised to it, and without thinking about what he was doing or why, he fell to his knees in the shit in front of the Father of Fathers. Every day of his life had been leading to this day, every moment quickening to this incalculable moment of holy terror. Had there been sufficient light in that pit to see the whole, perhaps his tepid heart would have burst. As it was he felt it flutter in his chest as he saw what he saw. It was a giant. Without head or limb. Without a feature that was analogous to human, without an organ that made sense, or senses. If it was like anything, it was like a shoal of fish. A thousand snouts all moving in unison, budding, blossoming and withering rhythmically. It was iridescent, like mother of pearl, but it was sometimes deeper than any colour Kaufman knew, or could put a name to. That was all Kaufman could see, and it was more than he wanted to see. There was much more in the darkness, flickering and flapping. But he could look no longer. He turned away, and as he did so a football was pitched out of the train and rolled to a halt in front of the Father. At least he thought it was a football, until he peered more attentively at it, and recognized it as a human head, the head of the Butcher. The skin of the face had been peeled off in strips. It glistened with blood as it lay in front of its Lord. Kaufman looked away, and walked back to the train. Every part of his body seemed to be weeping but his eyes. They were too hot with the sight behind him, they boiled his tears away. Inside, the creatures had already set about their supper. One, he saw, was plucking the blue sweet morsel of a woman’s eye out of the socket. Another had a hand in its mouth. At Kaufman’s feet lay the Butcher’s headless corpse, still bleeding profusely from where its neck had been bitten through.

The little father who had spoken earlier stood in front of Kaufman.

‘Serve us?’ it asked, gently, as you might ask a cow to follow you.

Kaufman was staring at the cleaver, the Butcher’s symbol of office. The creatures were leaving the car now, dragging the half-eaten bodies after them. As the torches were taken out of the car, darkness was returning. But before the lights had completely disappeared the father reached out and took hold of Kaufman’s face, thrusting him round to look at himself in the filthy glass of the car window. It was a thin reflection, but Kaufman could see quite well enough how changed he was. Whiter than any living man should be, covered in grime and blood. The father’s hand still gripped Kaufman’s face, and its forefinger hooked into his mouth and down his gullet, the nail scoring the back of his throat. Kaufman gagged on the intruder, but had no will left to repel the attack.

‘Serve,’ said the creature. ‘In silence.’

Too late, Kaufman realized the intention of the fingers -

Suddenly his tongue was seized tight and twisted on the root. Kaufman, in shock, dropped the cleaver. He tried to scream, but no sound came. Blood was in his throat, he heard his flesh tearing, and agonies convulsed him. Then the hand was out of his mouth and the scarlet, spittle-covered fingers were in front of his face, with his tongue, held between thumb and forefinger. Kaufman was speechless.

‘Serve,’ said the father, and stuffed the tongue into his own mouth, chewing on it with evident satisfaction. Kaufman fell to his knees, spewing up his sandwich. The father was already shuffling away into the dark; the rest of the ancients had disappeared into their warren for another night.

The tannoy crackled.

‘Home,’ said the driver.

The doors hissed closed and the sound of power surged through the train. The lights flickered on, then off again, then on.

The train began to move.

Kaufman lay on the floor, tears pouring down his face, tears of discomfiture and of resignation. He would bleed to death, he decided, where he lay. It wouldn’t matter if he died. It was a foul world anyway. The driver woke him. He opened his eyes. The face that was looking down at him was black, and not unfriendly. It grinned. Kaufman tried to say something, but his mouth was sealed up with dried blood. He jerked his head around like a driveller trying to spit out a word. Nothing came but grunts. He wasn’t dead. He hadn’t bled to death. The driver pulled him to his knees, talking to him as though he were a three-year-old. ‘You got a job to do, my man: they’re very pleased with you.’

The driver had licked his fingers, and was rubbing Kaufman’s swollen lips, trying to part them.

‘Lots to learn before tomorrow night. . .‘

Lots to learn. Lots to learn.

He led Kaufman out of the train. They were in no station he had ever seen before. It was white-tiled and absolutely pristine; a station-keeper’s Nirvana. No graffiti disfigured the walls. There were no token-booths, but then there were no gates and no passengers either. This was a line that provided only one service: The Meat Train. A morning shift of cleaners were already busy hosing the blood off the seats and the floor of the train. Somebody was stripping the Butcher’s body, in preparation for dispatch to New Jersey. All around Kaufman people were at work. A rain of dawn light was pouring through a grating in the roof of the station. Motes of dust hung in the beams, turning over and over. Kaufman watched them, entranced. He hadn’t seen such a beautiful thing since he was a child. Lovely dust. Over and over, and over and over. The driver had managed to separate Kaufman’s lips. His mouth was too wounded for him to move it, but at least he could breathe easily. And the pain was already beginning to subside. The driver smiled at him, then turned to the rest of the workers in the station.

‘I’d like to introduce Mahogany’s replacement. Our new butcher,’ he announced. The workers looked at Kaufman. There was a certain deference in their faces, which he found appealing. Kaufman looked up at the sunlight, now falling all around him. He jerked his head, signifying that he wanted to go up, into the open air. The driver nodded, and led him up a steep flight of steps and through an alley-way and so out on to the sidewalk.

It was a beautiful day. The bright sky over New York was streaked with filaments of pale pink cloud, and the air smelt of morning. The Streets and Avenues were practically empty. At a distance an occasional cab crossed an intersection, its engine a whisper; a runner sweated past on the other side of the street. Very soon these same deserted sidewalks would be thronged with people. The city would go about its business in ignorance: never knowing what it was built upon, or what it owed its life to. Without hesitation, Kaufman fell to his knees and kissed the dirty concrete with his bloody lips, silently swearing his eternal loyalty to its continuance. The Palace of Delights received the adoration without comment.

[supertam87]

How are you still a fan of Sam after all he's let happen to the fandom and to shippers in his name? You haven't personally been hurt by it so is it easier for you to ignore and pretend none of it ever happened? I'm struggling with my feelings about him and would love your insight.

As I have always said, I fan how I choose, and do my best to allow others the same privilege. If anyone reading this thinks I am talking about you, I promise you, I’m not.

I am sorry that there are people in the fandom who feel hurt. Its a shame that that was the result of something that should have been a fun and light-hearted experience. Please, however, don’t make assumptions, even posed as a question, such as ‘You haven’t personally been hurt by it so is it easier for you to ignore and pretend none of it ever happened?’ You don’t know what I have and haven’t been hurt by in this fandom, or by whom. I’m not pretending or ignoring anything. But I’m also not letting things have more presence in my life than they deserve.

You ask how I can still be a fan of Sam. First of all, I don’t believe that Sam did anything to fans, or allowed anything to be done to fans. I’ll talk more about that later. Even if I believed Sam did do something, that still doesn’t require me to stop supporting him. There is no one on this earth who has ever hurt me as deeply as my husband. No one has ever hurt him as deeply as I have. We don’t set out to hurt each other, but life is messy and people are imperfect. This is why I work every day of my life to practice the brutally hard art of forgiveness. Forgiveness isn’t an ‘If/Then’ equation. It’s not, ‘If this person is submissive and humble and admits all of their faults, then I will forgive.’ Forgiveness is a single party activity that is not dependent on any other person’s actions or opinions. I can forgive my husband when he hurts me because I choose to, whether or not he has asked for forgiveness. Forgiveness is for me, not him. Forgiveness makes me a better, happier, stronger person, more in control of my life. Let me ask you a question: Why would I NOT forgive my husband? Why would I hold on to anger, hurt or frustration? How would it benefit me? What would I get out of it? Heartburn, high blood pressure, anxiety - I don’t need more of that in my life. Besides, I know my husband is a really, really excellent man. His list of positive qualities is miles long. But he is imperfect, as am I. I forgive him, he forgives me, we focus on being better, learning from our mistakes and reveling in the soul fulfilling joy we find in each other. That is not ignoring or pretending, that is choosing our own happiness and health in spite of the messiness that is sharing life with another human. We are all responsible for our own happiness and happiness is a choice. My life is far from perfect and far from easy, but I am a generally happy person because I choose to be. Even if he did do something which hurt me (he didn’t), I can choose to forgive and move on. How can I still be a fan of Sam? Because I choose to be.

You ask how I can still be a fan of Sam after all he’s let happen to the fandom. He didn’t let anything happen to the fandom. We are not some unified group who get together each month and read the minutes and faithfully follow the bullet items on the agenda. Fandoms are very fluid bodies. There is no entrance exam, or document to sign, no oath to swear or dues to pay. People come and go as they please with no explanation due anyone at any time. Therefore, there is no control over what happens in a fandom at any given time, and my perception of this fandom is completely different from another fan, who may not be on Tumblr, but is on Twitter, or who is on Tumblr, but we have no followers in common. There are the Instagram fans, the Facebook fans, the multi-platform fans, the book group fans - and in each of these areas there are subsets of fans such as fanart, fanfiction, shipper, non-shipper, gifmaker, video maker, live tweeter, sam fan, cait fan, toby fan, graham fan, duncan fan, etc, etc, etc. There are thousands upon thousands of people who consider themselves part of this fandom. There are subsets of this fandom I probably haven’t even conceived of. We couldn’t possibly all share the same experiences, even in the same fandom, because there is simply too much diversity on every possible level. Therefore it is literally impossible for anything to happen to the fandom. You believe that something terrible happened to the shippers, but not even that is possible. Who are the shippers? Am I one, do you know how I categorize myself? We are all in control of our own experience. Sometimes that means not engaging or blocking, muting, ignoring, biting your tongue and generally not paying attention to people who don’t deserve your attention. It’s not Sam’s job to tutor us all about how to successfully fan, and it’s not his job to soothe ruffled feathers when one person hurts another person. How could he even begin to know? There are two sides to every story, so even if he was made aware of one side, what about the other side? We are adults. Our problems are our own. Not his. He has enough problems.

Again, you ask how can I still be a fan of Sam after everything that was done in his name. I don’t buy it. I refuse to hold Sam liable for other people’s actions. They are responsible for those actions. I am a Christian. I do not condone the thousands of years of atrocities that have been and continue to be committed in Jesus Christ’s name. I’m pretty sure He doesn’t either. I’m pretty sure Mohammed and Allah and myriad other well known figures don’t condone what was/is done in their names. I also believe that you are making assumptions about what Sam has condoned and what he hasn’t, what he knows and what he doesn’t and what his responsibilities are. Some people see malice where others see sarcasm. Some see apathy where other’s see focus directed somewhere else. We simply don’t know what has gone on behind the scenes, or what people really felt, thought or did. If someone was a horrible bully or troll (and there were several someones) that is on them. They made bad decisions. Really bad decisions. I do know that no one was required to engage with anyone else on Twitter or any other platform. Lucky for me, it isn’t my job in life to judge other people. My job is to do my best to be a good person and be good to other people. I believe we should try to lead by example. I am a fan of Sam because I don’t believe he did anything or allowed anything to be done to fans.

Do you really want to know why I am still a fan of Sam? You think you’ve been hurt by him, or someone associated with him? You think this has caused great distress in your life? Maybe it has. Here is something I know about Sam. His dad left him when he was three. Three years old. I have four kids. I know intimately what it’s like to have a three year old. I know how much they need. I know what it takes to raise a boy to manhood. It’s not easy. Sam had no contact with his dad. None. No advise, no outings, no support, no role model. He had no father. I’m sure this hurt him deeply and continues to hurt him. After years of absolutely no contact with his father, they were reconnected. His dad was dying of cancer. He did not push him away, tell him to die alone, tell him that he left so there could be no relationship, or any of a million other things he could have done. He chose the higher path. He traveled to see his father. He truly connected with him. He learned about him. He go to know him. He offered him love and support as this flawed man was dying. In short, he offered at least some form of forgiveness. I’m sure it was hard for him. I’m sure there were many horrible things he wanted to say. Maybe he did say them. But we know from his own words that it didn’t end on a horrible note. It ended on a positive, healing, healthy note. That’s pretty remarkable and admirable. That’s just one example out of many that illustrate why I think Sam is worthy of my attention. He is a good man. He is generous with his time, talent and wealth. He cares about people and he isn’t afraid to get his hands dirty in the process of helping others.

You are absolutely not required to be a fan of Sam. It’s a supremely optional activity. But my question for you is why would I NOT be a fan of Sam? I have yet to hear a single person give me even one legitimate reason why I shouldn’t be a fan, considering that I should probably hold him to the same standard to which I hold myself. We’re both pretty flawed, messy humans. Isn’t life grand?

[asktheboywholived]

do you think dark!remus still has his remus-y traits? does he also turn children or?? i'd love to read a list of your hcs for dark remus if you're ever bored!

(( OOC: Ooookay… I just came up with Dark!Remus on the fly, mostly because I wanted to do Remus with Tattoos and shit… So I’m completely bullshitting here…. let’s see how this goes. 

Remus is taken at the age of five, and raised in a small pack that is overseen by Fenrir outside of his home. Fenrir isn’t involved a lot with the raising of the kids, he just “takes care” of the pack in general, stops in every once in a while, uses them when he needs them, and makes sure that the caregivers raise the children the way he wants them to be raised. 

Most of the individuals in the pack are either people that were turned and fell out of touch with society at a young age, or people that were easy prey (homeless, runaways, etc.) Because of this the children receive a very limited education. 

On top of that, the pack, being made up of so many random victims thrown together for the sake of survival, suffers from a lot of internal contention. When Fenrir is not around, it’s hard to maintain order or civility. There are kind hearted wolves mixing with selfish, and sometimes dangerous wolves, making Remus’s childhood very unstable. 

Remus learns to survive through depending on his street smarts and basic survival skills. He is raised to believe that witches and wizards are cruel, vicious, and that they want him and his kind dead. He grows up isolated, hidden from the wizarding world, and that causes him to fear it. The only interaction he has with people outside of the pack is through hunting. 

Unlike Fenrir, the children’s main caregiver (who joins the pack when Remus turns eight) never gets the children involved in hunting. He is a kind man that was turned at a later age, and has compassion for humans.  

Remus hears little snippets about the wizarding world from this man, and grows curious. He and the caregiver become close, the caregiver sharing his knowledge with Remus and expanding the young man’s horizons. As Remus grows older, he begins to help with raising the kids, sharing his caregivers pro-wizarding-world ideals with them. His curiosity begins to peak, and soon he finds himself wanting to interact with the wizarding world. 

Unfortunately, Fenrir finds out about the caregiver’s empathetic feelings towards humans (and the fact that he keeps the children from hunting humans) and the man disappears from the pack. 

Fenrir, determined to do damage control, takes over leading Remus’s pack, and the following moon he takes Remus and a few of the older kids on their first hunt. Remus ends up getting too close to the city and attacking a young woman, and when he comes to she is turning, but doesn’t survive the transformation, and ends up dying. Remus is mortified by the experience and refuses to eat for days after, terrified that the meat being served is human. 

Fenrir realizes how much of an impact the caregiver had, and turns to manipulation and fear in order to get his “little ones” back on track.  

Remus, being older, is not as easily swayed, and Fenrir turns his attention to the rebellious wolf. He forces him on hunts, and punishes him when he doesn’t submit… determined to shape him. 

This causes Remus to push back harder, his resentment and fear towards Fenrir causing him to draw closer to the wizarding world. 

Fenrir then decides to switch tactics, making him his “right hand man”… giving him special treatment. Remus becomes more compliant, since the pack is the only life he knows and he fears leaving it, but Fenrir isn’t satisfied with compliance. 

He decides to give his “pup” a reason to fear and hate wizards, and ends up dragging Remus into the wizarding war, showing him the worst of humanity, and the atrocities that they commit on “monsters” like them. Remus starts to find himself slipping back into submission, his fear of wizards growing and overcoming any empathy he had felt for them. 

Fenrir then tests the waters and starts to send Remus out on specialized hunting missions… going into the cities to “collect” victims… instead of feeding off of the “scraps” on the streets. Fenrir wants the wizarding world to fear them… and the way to do that is through targeting the youth… the young soldiers that will be joining the war soon.

Take away the youth and the hope goes with it.  

Remus, having been educated about the wizarding world by the caregiver, is trained and sent in to lure young adults out of bars, to interact and smile and appeal to them, and then take them or turn them…

… You guys can imagine where this is going. ;) ))