#i WILL go to the park with them and attempt the physical challenges and propose various games

[pingutats]

my dearest darling

in which you and harry spend a sunday morning having coffee & cake, and spontaneously decide to go engagement ring shopping together.

warnings: a little suggestive at the end. mostly just pure fluff!

word count: 3.4k

.                               .                           .                               .                           .

The little alleyway off the main street filled with café tables is a perfect place for you and Harry to sit unseen. In fact, in this little alcove, it’s easy to watch the world pass by the two of you. It’s a nice reprieve from the usual of the world watching Harry. 

He’s wearing sunglasses anyway, just in case—despite the overcast weather. 

You frown at him, resting your elbows on the table and lacing your fingers together to rest your chin on. “I really think that makes you more conspicuous.”

He scrunches up his nose. “Nah. Or at least, if people notice, they’re going to notice an odd bloke in sunnies, not me.”

“They’ll notice it’s you.”

He glances at the busy footpath. “‘S working so far, love.”

A young waitress rounds the corner from the cafe’s front entrance and sets your coffees down on the table. You move your elbows off the table politely to give her space.

“Thanks,” Harry says, reaching for his black coffee. 

You smile at the waitress as you wrap your hands around the latte you ordered, warming up your freezing fingers. You notice the way she hesitates before she leaves, how she looks at Harry like she wants to say something before before quickly spinning on her heels and walking away. When she’s out of earshot, you look at Harry. “She knows.”

He shrugs. “That’s different.”

The waitress reappears a minute later with the little cakes you ordered. This time, she’s braver. “I’m so sorry—are you Harry Styles?” she asks, saying his name in a voice that’s akin to a reverent whisper.

His eyes dart to you for a split second and he raises his eyebrow enough that only you’ll notice, conceding to you, then smiles at her. “Yeah, I am. Sorry, what’s your name?”

You watch him navigate the encounter easily, like you’ve watched so many times. The girl asks for a photo and he politely declines, explaining that he doesn’t want to draw attention, but offers to sign a napkin for her instead. He a short message (nice to meet you, all my love) to her and draws a couple hearts after he signs his name, then passes it to her with a sweetly genuine thanks her for her support. 

“Oh my gosh, no, thank you,” she says earnestly. “It was so, so nice to meet you.” She glances at you, then, and her cheeks go even pinker. “Thanks,” she says again, and then she’s gone.

You let a giggle free at the awkward way his fans treat you, like they don’t know if it’s appropriate to talk to you as well, and how they struggle to find something to say to you anyway. Once it might have bothered you. It’s just amusing to you now. You raise your brows at Harry. “All your love?” you tease, quoting the message he wrote on the napkin. “Where’s my share?”

He pouts from behind his sunglasses. “Don’t be like that.”

You kick his shin gently underneath the table. “I’m kidding around. She was sweet. I like watching you do that, you’re so good at it.”

His foot swings around to trap your ankle between his. “Trying to play footsie at eleven o’clock on a Sunday morning? You little minx.”

You roll your eyes and wrench your foot free, rattling the table as you do so. He laughs—a sharp barking ha! that makes you smile through your embarrassment at causing a small commotion. 

“Who’s conspicuous, sorry?” he asks.

 You shake your head at him and stab your fork into your apple and cinnamon muffin. He keeps giggling as he slides his own plate with the carrot cake to his side of the table and picks up a fork himself.

“Mm, that’s good,” he says after he swallows his first bite. “Better than the one I make.”

“Well, baking isn’t known to be one of your talents.”

He claps a hand to his chest. “I’m wounded.” He leans over the table and skewers a piece of your muffin on his fork, dodging your attempts to swat his hand away with great agility. He pops it in his mouth triumphantly, cocking his head like he’s challenging you. 

In return, you steal a piece of his cake. 

“That was a much larger piece than what I took,” he accuses. 

You shrug.

His phone, face down on the table, dings. He glances up at you. 

“Check it,” you tell him. You know he only has alerts on for his closest friends—otherwise his phone would be ringing all day long. “I don’t mind.”

He bites his lip apologetically and flips the phone over, reading it. “Oh, it’s Tom. Hang on a sec.” He starts typing back.

You crane your neck around to read the message—something about Tom being free at the end of July, and Harry is giving a thumbs-up to that.

“Where are you off to?” you ask. 

“France, maybe,” he replies. You’re aware that discovering this kind of information so suddenly would be jarring for most couples, enough to even incite a fight—but you and Harry aren’t exactly a normal couple, and international trips are just part and parcel of your relationship. Hell, he goes on world tours for months at a time. You’re lucky, you suppose, that you function just as well long-distance as you do when you’re living together. 

“Lads’ trip?”

He sends the message and clicks his phone off, leaning back in his chair. “Nah. Taking you to Paris and getting down on m’knee in front of the Eiffel Tower,” he says, nodding sagely. 

“Is that so?”

“Yeah, Tom’s there to get the photos.” He shovels a forkful of the cake into his mouth and then points his fork in the general direction of a street busker playing a violin across the road. He swallows. “And I’m getting that guy to play a little tune, for the atmosphere,” he adds. 

You raise your brows. “Oh, you’ve got budget for this, then.”

He smiles. “Nothing but the best for my dearest darling.”

You snort.

He carefully cuts a piece of cake with the edge of his fork. “Nah, we’re thinking of doing a trip down to his friend’s studio in—somewhere in France, I can’t remember really. Friends and family welcome too, if you want to come. Apparently it’s a real nice place.” He eats his mouthful and then lifts his sunnies to look at you with clear eyes. “We are getting married, though. I mean that.”

Your cheeks threaten to burst from how badly you want to smile, but you force yourself to assume a serious face, just to humour him. “Of course we are.”

Despite the butterflies it inspires, this conversation isn’t new. You’ve been with Harry a couple of years now and you both know you’re on the same page when it comes to your shared future. There are no hard plans, but the direction is set. You’re getting there someday. 

He puffs his cheeks out. “I feel like you aren’t taking this as seriously as I am.”

You sigh melodramatically. “Well, sweetheart, I haven’t seen a ring yet.”

“A ring? You should have asked,” he drawls, then suddenly sits up straight and points a finger at you. “Don’t take that as a challenge. I want to be the one to ask.”

You shrug. “Can’t make any promises.”

His arm shoots forward to grab at your hand and you almost laugh out loud at the puppy-eyes he’s making at you. “No, please, baby, I swear you can do everything else, but let me do the proposing bit.”

In your heart, you’re happy he’s so insistent, because this is exactly how you want it to be too. In your mind, though, you really enjoy tormenting him. 

“I’ll think about it,” you concede, and he groans.

“I’m buying a ring soon as I can, just to lock it in,” he tells you as he destroys what’s left of his carrot cake.

Once you’ve finished and Harry’s gone up to pay for the coffee and cake (he also took a moment to lean over the counter to snap a group selfie with the waitress who served you earlier and a couple others too) you walk back up the street in the general direction of your car that’s parked a few blocks down. The weather is pleasant today and the sun is even peeking out from behind the clouds now, justifying his sunglasses. 

Your mind starts to drift (his arm wrapped loosely around your waist anchors you to the real world) as you think about how nice it is to be with Harry, how you’ve learned to appreciate each physical moment you have with him because they are so precious. After the tours, the promotional trips, the film sets, and all the little things in between, you understand how to be with Harry. You know not everyone can handle a life like this, and you’re sure that if it wasn’t Harry whose return you awaited, you wouldn’t be able to either. But he always returns. 

Harry comes to a sudden halt in front of a shop window, gazing in. You’re nearly yanked off your feet as you keep trying to walk with your arm around him—he’s so steady that he doesn’t budge. You stand next to him and look into what you realise is a jewellery store. 

“What do you think?” he asks. 

“Huh?”

He looks down, his arm squeezing around your shoulder. “Said I’d get you a ring, didn’t I?”

Butterflies erupt in your stomach. “What, today?”

“‘M not asking. Just preparing.”

You raise your eyebrows up at him. “That is… that is really a technicality.”

“Humour me,” he says. “C’mon.” He shepherds you into the store, steering you by your shoulders. 

It’s small and pretty in here, the air from the fans cool against your sun-warmed skin. There are hardly any other customers at the moment, so you have some kind of valuable privacy. There are a couple of glass counters that run along either side of the store with meticulously placed themed displays inside them. You gravitate immediately to the closest thing, a cluster of rough amethysts hanging from necklaces. 

“Aren’t these so cute?” you comment to Harry.

His arms wrap around you from behind and you reach up to grasp onto his crossed forearms resting against your chest. “Oh, yeah, they are.”

You stay there looking at the necklaces for a little too long—it’s not like you’re really that fascinated by the jewels, but more that you’re just enjoying Harry’s head leaning over your shoulder and his chest pressed to your back as you stand there. When your gaze meanders along the counter and you see something new, though, you shake free of his grip and follow your whims.

This store isn’t labelled out front with a massive brand. You’re pretty sure it’s an independent jeweller, judging by the neat description cards that accompany each small collection, explaining the theme in a lively and personal manner. This is what makes you really fall in love with the place and feel sure that this is where you’ll find the perfect ring. You know Harry could afford any ring from any famous brand, the heaviest jewels imaginable, easily worthy of a feature article in Vogue magazine. He could probably organise to have a diamond dug up fresh specifically to go on your finger. 

It’s the fact that Harry could give you anything in the world that makes you not want it at all. Special, to the two of you, isn’t something that you’ll find in wealth or the crowds that adore him.

It’s found in a day like this.

“Oh, my god, H, look at this one,” you gasp, grabbing his wrist and pulling him over.

He bends over the counter, his gaze following the line of your pointing finger. “Oh, that is pretty,” he says. 

It’s a simple gold band with a small, neatly carved diamond fixed to it. It isn’t flashy at all, which is what drew you to it. You knew he’d like it too. Despite the decadence of his performances, he can be a different man behind closed doors and you love that part of him. The secret part, the one that only you know so well. 

“I’m in love with it,” you tell him.

Harry nods. “Yeah, I think that’s the one.”

You never doubted that he would agree, but his assent sends a bolt of excitement up your spine. It’s all so real, suddenly, and you can’t wait to see him on his knee for you, to see that ring on your finger. You know your ring size off by heart (how could you not, being in a relationship with the jewellery connoisseur that Harry is), so there’ll be no need for you to try it on today. You’re left with only the raw anticipation of the day he’ll slide it onto your finger. 

His hands come down to rest on your hips as you both stare at the ring. You imagine you can hear his heart, knowing that it’ll be beating erratically because his excitement must match yours—you know how he feels about the idea of marriage. 

He spins you around to face him, leaving his hands on your hips. He looks at you very seriously. His sunglasses are resting on top of his head now, pushing back his curls and revealing his green eyes and furrowed brow to you.

“You know, if we’re seen buying an engagement ring…” he begins, trailing off. He shrugs. “Just want to think about that.”

You screw up your nose. “According to some magazines we got married last week, and also six months ago. Just being in here is probably going to spark something.” You glance behind you, as if you’ll see journalists scribbling away on their theories, then flatten your palms against his chest, smoothing out his shirt. “I’m happy to ignore it. I want to just do our thing, H.”

He nods, pursing his lips, and gradually the crease in his forehead disappears. “Okay. Good.” Twin smiles spread over your faces and you have the feeling of being two giddy kids, high-schoolers about to have their first kiss. Something new, unknown, exciting, that the two of you are going into together. His eyes are practically sparkling at you. If this was a cartoon, you think his pupils would be shaped like hearts right now. Something is starting to bud and you can feel it growing up inside you and between you, preparing to bloom. 

“Alright,” you say, breaking the insulating silence to draw you both back to the real world. 

He blinks a couple of times as if he’s just waking up. “Alright,” he echoes. “Let’s get it.”

He waves over a man drifting through the store in a neat suit and points at the ring. “Excuse me, can we please have a look at this one?”

The two of you watch the man unlock the cabinet and slide the plate of rings out, placing it on the counter. He picks up the one Harry pointed out. “It’s a lovely one, sir.”

“It is,” Harry says. His hand finds yours and squeezes your fingers. “What size is it?”

The man checks the price and tells you, and your mouth drops open. Surely there is something supernaturally perfect going on, because it’s exactly your size. You and Harry look at each other incredulously. 

The man seems to notice your unspoken conversation, because he helpfully adds, “We can resize it if you need.”

Harry chuckles. “No, it’s perfect. I think…” he trails off, looking at you. “What do you think?”

You nod at him, grinning. You rub your thumb over the back of his palm as he tells the man, “Thank you. We’d like this one, please.”

You stand slightly behind him as he pays for it, flexing your hands and wringing them in front of you. You know it’s all in your head, but your left ring finger is tingling as if it senses that it’s missing a piece. You really just want to wear the ring at this minute, but when the man selling it to you offers, Harry shakes his head quickly. 

“I’ll hold onto it for now,” he says. He accepts the little box from the man and slips it into his pocket. “Thank you so much.”

“The pleasure’s all mine, sir. Enjoy it, and congratulations to the two of you.”

Harry snakes his arm around your waist as you walk back out to the street. His hips knock against you as he squeezes you into his side, and you can feel the little box in his pocket. You can’t help the grin that takes over your whole face. You worry you look like an idiot, smiling so widely at nothing, but when you glance up at Harry, he looks exactly the same.

Your car is parked down a quieter road and you get to relax a little once you’re away from the crowds of the main shopping strip. You can walk a little more slowly and Harry loosens up a bit. His hyper-vigilance starts to strip away. You can see the tension in his shoulders dissolving and here’s your Harry, emerging from his defensive layers. Most people wouldn’t notice this change, but you do. You feel how he adjusts the grip of his hand on your hip, how he leans into you a little more as you walk. In your closeness, you can smell his cologne and you think of how you watched him spray it on this morning—and how you’re going to be watching him do that for the rest of your lives.

He glances over his shoulder and you copy him. The narrow street behind you is empty, but you don’t get a moment to really register this before you feel his arms tighten around your waist and you’re swept off your feet for a second as he crashes his lips into yours.

You close your eyes, letting the kiss envelop all your senses. The sweetness of the cake’s icing lingering on his lips; his arms locked around your waist, holding you up; the rapid beating of your heart. He pulls away slowly and your eyes flutter open. His face is just inches from yours and he’s looking at you with such intensity you feel naked. Not for the first time, you’re in awe of how impossibly green his eyes are; you could make a palette from every forest in the world, and it wouldn’t hold a candle to what you see in front of you right now.

“Y/N,” he says. He cracks a grin. “I’m so fucking happy.”

Your reply is simply to grab him by the back of his neck and pull him in for another kiss. Your hand tangles in his hair and you feel his tongue running along your bottom lip before he pulls away again quickly.

“Fuck,” he says, sounding lost for breath. “Need to stop before I make a fool of m’self in public.” He even physically takes a step back from you, his eyes comically wide.

You giggle. Your gaze travels down his body and you notice the indent of the box in his pocket. “Is that a ring in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?”

He shakes his head at you. “You’ve gone all giddy. ‘M getting you home right now and then we’re celebrating properly.” He turns around and starts walking towards the car, his long legs carrying him faster than you can keep up.

Your stomach flutters imagining what his idea of celebrating might be. Suddenly, the only thing on your mind is getting back to your house as soon as humanly possible. You run after Harry, skipping around in front of him and jogging backwards as you waggle your fingers in his face. “So, when are you going to pop the question?” you ask.

“Oh, honey,” he says, patting his pocket with the ring. He grins. “It’s going to be when you least expect it, I’ll promise you that.”

.                               .                           .                               .                           .

thank you for reading! hope you enjoyed—if you did, a reblog or a message is really encouraging and lovely for me to see!! the title is taken from the song by etta james.

this fic is the first part of a series called “here we are in heaven,” and i’m really really excited about it. you can read my earlier fic, at last!, if you want to see where this will end up, but there will be more parts to fill the in-between. plus blurbs and stuff! let’s chat about it! 

my masterlist can be found here. have a beautiful day!

[misscrawfords]

For the bad Austen take game: Fanny Price is boring. (I hated even typing that)

 Aaaaahhhh, you went straight to the jugular!

Mansfield Park was published in 1814, a year after Pride and Prejudice. The latter contained a spirited, active, and witty heroine. The former, a heroine who was shy, physically weak, and very introverted.

Fanny Price is actually closer to what a lot of contemporary heroines were like. Elizabeth Bennet, bursting in on the scene with her “pert opinions” and physical vigor and her direct challenges to the hero is not ahistorical because clever and witty heroines do exist in literature of the time, but she takes that to the next level.

The “perfect heroine” of the early 18th century in many novels was sweet, virtuous, morally dutiful, and somewhat passive. She was prone to fainting, basically had no faults, and at the end of the novel was rewarded with the love of the hero. She is not always a particularly interesting figure and often such narratives have a foil in a lively, witty anti-heroine who brings the fun to the novel but cannot be rewarded with a happy ending because she does not display the appropriate morals. That way the author and reader can get the pleasure of a “bad girl” or at least a “fun girl” without disrupting the expected didactic morals required of (many) novelists at the time.

Fanny Price and Mary Crawford are interesting variations on that. Fanny, like all of Austen’s heroines, challenges contemporary notions of what being a heroine was about. Austen does this in all her novels though Emma is the most obvious example. Fanny has many of the qualities that you would expect from a contemporary heroine but she is also not particularly attractive (a heroine should always be the most beautiful woman in the room) and it is hard to read her excessive passivity and not feel irritated by it. She has a much deeper inner life than most of her contemporaries of this type. We see her jealousy of Mary Crawford, we see her misery, we see her unrequited love for Edmund, her complicated feelings regarding her home in Portsmouth in ways that make her fully rounded internally, only little of that is spoken out loud. These feelings are very human and understandable, but they are not always to her credit and knowing them, we wish she could act on them. Austen seems to be asking the reader to take the classic novel heroine and then ask, “How would she really respond to novel situations?”

Austen’s plot also challenges expected novelistic plots. Edmund Bertram is not a satisfactory romantic hero. He is as quiet and rigidly moral as Fanny... except he blows all his convictions by his blind infatuation on Mary and he spends 99.9% of the novel oblivious to Fanny’s feelings or even that she’s an eligible woman at all. I have sympathy for him as well as for Fanny because he’s very young (only 22/23) and making poor judgements over women at that age and being an oblivious numpty over your childhood best friend’s crush seems pretty normal to me. Nevertheless, following Mr. Darcy, he’s hardly the stuff of dreams.

The character and plot that does seem more novelistic is Henry Crawford and his pursuit of Fanny. He’s handsome and rich and a bit of a rake. Then he meets Fanny who he attempts to seduce, falls in love with her for real, proposes to her and is rejected, then changes his behaviour, tries again and is accepted now that he is reformed and worthy her love.... wait. Rewind. That’s not what happened! Think this plot looks familiar? It should. Henry Crawford is what a lot of people think Mr. Darcy is who don’t understand Mr. Darcy on any level. Henry Crawford genuinely is a handsome bad boy who is reformed by the love of a virtuous woman after being rejected by her. And Austen teases readers with a redemption arc and a real enemies-to-lovers plot. But Henry is as real and complicated and human as Fanny and Edmund - he fails at the last hurdle and cannot complete his redemption arc. He relapses at the last moment. Isn’t that true to life? And is reforming a rake really Fanny’s destiny in life? She doesn’t think so. She sees right through his charm and hates who he is underneath. She doesn’t reject him as Elizabeth does Darcy because she doesn’t understand him; she rejects him because she understands him perfectly. She is the only person in the novel who does. I feel it would be a poor ending for Fanny to make her marry a man she despises and become the mistress of a large estate which brings with it the kind of social duties she must have been unhappy executing.

Fanny gets what she wants. She quietly, patiently does not change. She is surrounded by the superficial, the brash, the badly behaved, the immoral, the weak and she remains strong and stoical and by doing this and remaining true to her values, she triumphs. She wins. She gets the man she wants. She is truly and fully adopted into the heart of Mansfield Park with all her enemies and rivals removed. She is acknowledged as the best of them all. Without even needed to do anything except endure and stick to her guns, she defeats every big boss in her path.

These are not attractive modern values. Our concept of a “strong woman” (*shudder*) is Elizabeth Bennet. But not all of us are Elizabeth Bennets. Most of us aren’t in fact. Most of us are quiet and insecure and filled with envies, jealousies, private sadnesses. Many of us have experienced at some point less than ideal family situations and reacted not by being spirited and clever but by curling up in a ball and just waiting it out. Shouldn’t Fanny be held up as an icon for winning in absolutely the worst of circumstances? But she is an Aeneas in a society that only wants to read about Odysseuses and Achilleses.

Finally, another way in which Austen was distinctly saying in MP, “Hey, so, if you thought I was going to write another P&P, JOKE’S ON YOU, MATEY!” is that the entire novel is an anti-romance. Of course you’re going to be frustrated with Fanny and Edmund if you’re looking for a pair of exciting characters who fall in love and get a swoonworthy romance. But if you read MP as an examination of bad love, inappropriate love, selfish love, inexperienced love, love that taints and goes wrong through the eyes of a quiet and insightful observer who herself suffers the crushing and all too familiar pangs of hopelessly unrequited love - then you find a character and a novel that are rich, satirical, and deeply intimate and clever.

[tealin]

Cape Crozier: The Winter Journey

As usual, please go to the original blog to see everything formatted properly. I will attempt to put most of this under a cut, here. Forgive me if it fails.

On the morning of 27 June 1911, three men set out from Cape Evans, on the balmy west coast of Ross Island, to cross to the east coast via its southern shore.  Wilson, their leader, wanted to acquire some Emperor penguin embryos, and the only known Emperor rookery was just off Cape Crozier.  Based on the chicks he had seen in September the last time he was in Antarctica, Wilson estimated that the eggs would be laid in early July, so he timed the trip to meet them at the right stage of development and to coincide with the full moon, to have the best visibility in a world of 24-hour night. 

  Wilson had discussed this mission with his assistant, Cherry-Garrard, when the latter was applying to join the Expedition.  Once in Antarctica, they agreed the obvious choice for a third was Bowers, who had amply proven his energy, enthusiasm, strength, resourcefulness, and resistance to cold. 

  To reach Cape Crozier at the full moon in early July meant leaving Cape Evans at the new moon, and so shortly after the solstice that most of the day was nearly black, lit only by the stars shining hard in the sky, and occasionally the aurora.  The first part of the journey was over very familiar territory, so the greatest difficulty was learning how to camp when one could hardly see anything and it was too cold to take one's mitts off or touch any metal.  So far, so surmountable. 

  The tune changed as soon as they left the sea ice and got onto the permanent ice of the Barrier (or Ross Ice Shelf, as it is now known).

 They left the tempering effect of the open ocean behind, and were under the influence of the frigid interior.  The air temperature plunged, and worse, for men hauling everything necessary for life on two 9ft sledges, they soon entered a zone of soft snow. 

  Runners slide over snow by melting the surface with friction – the glide is, in fact, slipping over a thin film of liquid water.  At such low temperatures, friction is not sufficient to melt anything, so the grains of snow act more like sand.  A hard, wind-polished surface would be like sandpaper, but in the deep soft snow it was like dragging a dead weight through the Sahara, albeit a Sahara where a day of -50°F felt like a warm spell.   

   They couldn't drag both sledges at once, so they had to take one forward, then retrace their steps and drag the other.  For every mile of forward progress, they actually covered three.  In the dead calm, they could use a naked candle to follow their outward steps back to fetch the second sledge.  Eight hours of dragging seldom got them more than two miles from where they started, and ended with the slow process of pitching camp.  After getting the tent up, the day's cook would burn his fingers on freezing tin matchboxes in a quest for a match free of frost, before he could get the Primus stove going.  Eventually the travellers would get some hot liquid in them – 

  Directly we started to drink then the effect was wonderful: it was, said Wilson, like putting a hot-water bottle against your heart.  The beats became very rapid and strong and you felt the warmth travelling outwards and downwards. [250] 

  – and then, after checking their feet for frostbites, it was time to thaw their way into their frozen sleeping bags for a miserable attempt at sleep. 

  For me it was a very bad night: a succession of shivering fits which I was quite unable to stop, and which took possession of my body for many minutes at a time until I thought my back would break, such was the strain placed upon it.  They talk of chattering teeth: but when your body chatters you may call yourself cold. [241]  We knew we did sleep, for we heard one another snore, and also we used to have dreams and nightmares; but we had little consciousness of it, and we were now beginning to drop off when we halted on the march. [245] 

  It was important for every field party to take regular meteorological observations, to contribute to an understanding of the region's weather.  At regular intervals through the day, Bowers would take an air temperature reading, and while they were sleeping, a minimum thermometer was placed under the sledge to measure the temperature in a sheltered place.  On 6 July, this got down to -75°F; the following afternoon, Bowers' thermometer registered -77.5°F. The day lives in my memory as that on which I found out that records are not worth making. [247-8] 

  The clear cold of the first part of their journey had given way to a fog, which diffused the little moonlight they got and obscured the terrain until they were practically right on top of it.  As they were rounding the heel of Mt Terror this meant crevasses, and not being able to tell where they were until one fell through, which was a nerve-wracking business on top of the sleep deprivation and physical hardship. 

  The horror of the nineteen days it took us to travel from Cape Evans to Cape Crozier would have to be re-experienced to be appreciated; and any one would be a fool who went again: it is not possible to describe it.  The weeks which followed were comparative bliss, not because our conditions were better – they were far worse – but because we were callous.  I for one had come to that point of suffering at which I did not really care if only I could die without much pain.  They talk of the heroism of the dying – they little know – it would be so easy to die, a dose of morphia, a friendly crevasse, and blissful sleep.  The trouble is to go on. . . . [237] 

  Finally they were on the home stretch, a narrow lane between the rough terrain of the land and the great pressure waves where the Barrier presses up against Ross Island as it flows out to sea.  This proved to be nearly impossible to keep to, in the poor light, but after much stumbling, and with a welcome rise in temperature to the mere -20s, they finally reached a moraine just short of the Knoll, within hiking distance of the Emperor colony huddled in the lee of the Barrier face below.  They pitched their tent on an icy smooth snow slope 150 yards down from the ridge, and the following day set about building a igloo near the top, using the exposed volcanic stone found there, in a method Cherry had been practising at Cape Evans.  July 16th, when they established the hut, was Wilson's wedding anniversary, and in the privacy of his diary at least, he named the igloo Oriana Hut, and the moraine Oriana Ridge, after his wife.  The others proposed 'Terra Igloo', 'The House on the Hill,' and 'Bleak House.'  In the South Polar Times, after their return, Bowers immortalised it in rhyme as 'The House That Cherry Built.'  On official Antarctic maps, though, it's now labelled Wilson's Igloo and the moraine is Igloo Spur. 

  Our trip to Cape Crozier was a walk in the park – 35 minutes in a helicopter watching the amazing views roll by – and our greatest challenge was finding the landing site, but that was only a question of how close it was to the GPS waymark, rather than whether we could land at all.  We were not exempt from the vagaries of Antarctic weather, however.  When our flight got the green light, the weather at Cape Crozier was 30% cloud with 7-knot winds.  Not your typical Cape Crozier weather, but great weather for helicopters.  By the time we arrived, 35 minutes later, it was 70% cloud, a fog was rolling in, and winds were at 30 knots.  I was warned our time here might be short.  But we set off to see the igloo anyway. 

 The plan had been to build the body of the igloo in stone, then bank up the walls with gravel and snow to make them weatherproof.  Unlike a stereotypical snow-block igloo, it was not a dome, but would be roofed using one of the sledges as a beam, with a canvas sheet spread over it, firmly anchored in the rocks.  This has an Arctic precedent: in Francis McClintock's account of his search for the lost Franklin Expedition in the 1850s, he describes meeting an Inuit woman who lived in a stone igloo of very similar construction.  Cherry's practice igloo at Cape Evans was an admirable structure, but the plan went awry at Cape Crozier, on account of a lack of gravel and all the snow in the vicinity being blown so hard as to be practically ice [261].  They improvised as best they could, chipping some slabs of ice out of the snowbank and leaning them against the exterior walls, but it was not as cosy a structure as they'd hoped, and they ended up stuffing spare socks into some of the larger gaps in the stones to keep out the wind.  This wind, they discovered on their second day of building, was much stronger at the top of the ridge than where they had made camp on the snow.  But the stone walls were more secure than the tent – which was left pitched outside the igloo's door for storage – and heralded a new 'Age of Stone' in which they could get on with their science. 

  It was more than just scientific interest that made a visit to the penguin colony imperative: on their grind to Cape Crozier, they had burned through nearly five of their six cans of oil.  As well as the penguin embryos they came for, they needed to burn some blubber to keep warm in their igloo, so that they could use the last tin of oil for the return journey.  So as soon as their building progress allowed, they scouted a perilous path down a snow drift over the cliffs and through the horrible pressure to reach the Emperor colony.  Instead of the two thousand birds found by the Discovery, there were barely a hundred, and less than half of them apparently had eggs.  Nevertheless, Wilson and Bowers secured five eggs and three birds' skins – the blubber comes off with the skin – and they legged it back to their camp while there was still a modicum of light to see by.  Cherry broke both of the eggs he was carrying in a fall, but they made it back with the remaining three and the blubber, which got its revenge on Wilson by spluttering into his eye from the stove. 

  “Things must improve,” said Bill [Wilson] next day, “I think we reached bed-rock last night.”  We hadn't, by a long way. [272] 

 The igloo is at the opposite end of the moraine from the helicopter landing site, or at least where the GPS told us it was.  There is nothing between the crest of Igloo Spur and the Transantarctic Mountains, hundreds of miles away, and the 30-knot wind flowed over our minor obstruction just like a river: barely any gusts, just a constant flow, solid as water, up and over the ridge and then out towards the sea.  I tried to look out for lichen as I stumbled along, but it was hard to be careful of where I put my feet when I was struggling to keep my balance against the wind.  There were patches of a beige crust – was this lichen or was it a mineral deposit?  Someone shouted that they had found some – it turned out to be black, and crawled along the ground like dinosaur fern.  Once spotted it was obvious, and easier to avoid. 

  A few good minutes' scramble got us to the igloo.  On the way, I saw a small log of petrified wood, shining pale on the chocolate-brown rubble.  This seemed very much out of place on a volcanic island, and I wondered briefly how it had got there, before an answer came: obviously it had blown here.  A joke, perhaps, but not as much of one as you might think: the further out along the ridge we walked, the stronger the wind seemed to be.  At last we reached the remains of Oriana Hut. 

  I should have been humbled, or at least struck with a sense of awe.  But all I could think was: You guys were completely insane. 

 The day after Wilson, Cherry, and Bowers returned from the raid on the Emperors, there was a small blizzard, and the flapping of the canvas roof on the igloo caused them some concern, so they set about weighing it down with blocks of ice and making extra sure it was securely fastened all around.  They pitched the tent right next to the door and put a lot of their gear into it, to make space for themselves in the igloo.  Then, with the weather calm and their bellies full, they settled down to catch up on some precious and hitherto scanty sleep. 

  I do not know what time it was when I woke up.  It was calm, with that absolute silence which can be so soothing or so terrible as circumstances dictate.  Then there came a sob of wind, and all was still again.  Ten minutes and it was blowing as though the world was having a fit of hysterics.  The earth was torn in pieces: the indescribable fury and roar of it all cannot be imagined. 

  “Bill, Bill, the tent has gone,” was the next I remember – from Bowers shouting at us again and again through the door.  …. Journey after journey Birdie and I fought our way across the few yards which had separated the tent from the igloo door.    

  … To get that gear in we fought against solid walls of black snow which flowed past us and tried to hurl us down the slope.  Once started nothing could have stopped us.  I saw Birdie [Bowers] knocked over once, but he clawed his way back just in time.  Having passed everything we could find in to Bill, we got back into the igloo, and started to collect things together, including our very dishevelled minds.[275-6] 

  Not sure when they would be able to eat again, they cooked a meal, and nervously watched the igloo roof.  The problem was not so much that it was in the wind, but that it was just out of it: the wind rushing up the southern slope of the moraine created suction just behind the crest, where the igloo was, and this was pulling the canvas up.  The motion of the canvas shifted the ice blocks weighing it down until they were off.  Then the incessant sucking up and flapping down started to stretch the material; as it stretched it got more play; as it played more the flapping became more violent.  At last the fabric could no longer take the strain and exploded into ribbons, whose frantic lashing in the hurricane sounded like pistol shots. 

  They hurried into their sleeping bags and rolled over so that the flaps were underneath, and huddled while the storm raged overhead. 

  I can well believe that neither of my companions gave up hope for an instant.  They must have been frightened, but they were never disturbed.  As for me I never had any hope at all; and when the roof went I felt that this was the end. [280] 

  And then … they slept.  The blizzard had brought a rise in temperature and the snow drifting over them made a good insulator, so they were more comfortable than they had been for a while, and of course there was nothing else they could do.  There was so much to worry about that there was not the least use in worrying: and we were so very tired. [282]  Occasionally Bowers would thump Wilson and Wilson would move a bit to prove he was alive.  When they were awake they'd sing songs and hymns to pass the time – we sang hymns because they were easier to sing than La Bohême and it was a good thing to sing something.*  Quieter moments might be spent cogitating over how to get back without a tent, but the situation looked pretty hopeless.  When they were thirsty they would pinch a little drift from just outside their bag and eat it, and so staved off the worst, but without a tent, 52 excruciating miles from the nearest shelter at Hut Point, and months away from spring, it seemed only to be delaying the inevitable. 

  Thus impiously I set out to die, making up my mind that I was not going to try and keep warm, that it might not take too long, and thinking I would try and get some morphia from the medical case if it got very bad.  Yes! comfortable, warm reader.  Men do not fear death, they fear the pain of dying. [281] 

  On top of everything, it was Wilson's 39th birthday. 

 I suppose the most surprising thing is that there is anything left of the igloo at all.  Some of the rocks came down when the roof blew open, but the many, many blizzards since then have worked hard to dismantle the rest.  And yet, in the shelter of the walls, protected by the drift that accumulates there, there are still some of the Crozier party's possessions.    

  Standing here, especially in a 30-knot wind, one cannot but think this is a pretty stupid place to build a shelter.  Cherry acknowledges this in his book, but reminds us that they had to build more or less where the rocks were, and the rocks were where the wind kept the snow from accumulating.  They had brought a snow knife to cut snow blocks, Inuit-fashion, but there was no such snow to be had; it was all ice.  And I had an additional insight, thanks to my midnight hike up Arrival Heights: 

 The igloo is built just off the crest of the ridge, exactly like where I was standing when I felt no wind on Arrival Heights.  They would have been very familiar with that ridgeline and had almost certainly observed the same phenomenon, so if they had to pick a spot on a desolate windswept hill, that was, in the circumstances, one of the better ones to pick.  There was a short blizzard their first night back from the Emperors, but aside from the drift blowing through the gaps in the rocks it didn't concern them much; they just had the bad timing to meet a monstrous storm shortly after. I have never heard or felt or seen a wind like this, Cherry wrote, even after having experienced the ferociously windy second winter at Cape Evans, where they feared the hut might blow down, I wondered why it did not carry away the earth. [283]  They had anticipated the wind in the construction of the hut, and the pyramid tent had amply proven its ability to stand up to blizzards in its years of Antarctic service; it was the suction that threw them a curve ball.  When the roof blew into ribbons, it was still firmly anchored in the walls, and even 108 years later, it's still there. 

 The storm first hit on Friday, 21 July; by Monday it was beginning to abate enough that they could speak to each other without too much difficulty.  They hadn't eaten for two days, but the first thing they did was go look for the tent.  When that proved fruitless, they returned and cooked a meal with the tent floorcloth stretched between their heads.  The cooker was full of penguin feathers, burnt blubber, and dirt, but the smell of it was better than anything on earth. 

 When the midday twilight returned, they had another search for the tent.  I followed Bill down the slope.  We could find nothing.  But, as we searched, we heard a shout somewhere below and to the right. They slid down the snow slope and fetched up where Bowers had discovered the tent, which must have closed like an umbrella when sucked off its moorings, and, with so much less surface area, dropped out of the sky only a few hundred yards away.  Our lives had been taken away and given back to us.   

We were so thankful we said nothing. 

If the tent went again we were going with it.  We made our way back up the slope with it, carrying it solemnly and reverently, precious as though it were something not quite of the earth.  And we dug it in as tent was never dug in before ... [284-5] 

 I have read Cherry's account of the Winter Journey several times, 'blind' as it were – in my head, Cape Crozier was a chaotic jumble of ice and rock with no shape I could deduce from the writing.  Unlike the landmarks of McMurdo Sound, and even the Beardmore to some extent, there were no historical photos of the theatre for this action; a few closeups of the igloo appear at the end of Mark Gatiss' 2007 docudrama, but they give no context in respect to the landscape.  This was why it was vitally important I stand there myself.  The moment I realised that ambition, I knew it was more valuable than I could ever have pitched in a grant proposal.  The tiered foothills of Mt Terror to the east, the back of the Knoll, the strip of blue sea visible from the igloo, the 'porcelain teacup' of the hollow between here and there, and most profoundly, how the igloo hangs off the edge of nowhere on this exposed finger of land.  In the midst of a blizzard, with howling drift on all sides as well as above and below, it would be a tiny mote of solidity suspended in the vast blank nothing. 

  My companions must have been a little confused by my behaviour.  I hardly took any photos of the igloo.  It was interesting, for sure, but the state it's in now would not help me much, to draw it how it was then.  I took a lot of photos of the surroundings, but on two sides it was blowing mist so that didn't take very long.  Mostly what I did was sit with my back against a sill of rock near the igloo and just stare and stare and stare.  I wanted to memorize everything – not just where things were, but the wind, the silvery gleam on the snow, the feeling of being utterly at the extremity of all things.  It's one thing to read Cherry's memories, and boggle at the experience; it's quite another to stand where they were made, and be able to measure your own experience against theirs.  Standing there in the light, I could see it dark. Their blizzard would have been blowing twice as hard as the wind that could have knocked me over.  Riding behind Cherry's eyes, memory viewed through the lens of grief and nostalgia, his companions fill the frame, so one does not get a proper sense of how extremely tiny they all were in this vast howling nothing.  And, of course, they had only themselves to get them home, not a waiting helicopter. 

 We had another meal, and we wanted it; and as the good hoosh ran down into our feet and hands, and up into our cheeks and ears and brains, we discussed what we would do next.  Birdie was all for another go at the Emperor penguins.  Dear Birdie, he would never admit that he was beaten – I don't know that he ever really was! … There could really be no common-sense doubt: we had to go back … [285]  They packed what they could that night and got what sleep they could in their horrible icy bags.  The next morning it looked like it was going to start blizzing again; they loaded the camp onto one of the sledges and stashed  in a corner of the igloo what they didn't want or need to take back, along with the other sledge, and set off into a rising wind.  After only a mile or so the weather forced them to camp, and Birdie tied a line from the apex of the tent around the outside of his bag where he slept: if the tent went he was going too. [287] 

  The journey back was still cold, but only hauling one sledge, they made much better time.  The men were exhausted, however, and their equipment suffering from their ordeals, so it didn't afford as much comfort or protection as it had on the way out.  But they were on their way home, and justifiably confident of getting there. 

 It was the helicopter that called time on my visit to Cape Crozier.  The anemometer had clocked 38 knots at one point and nothing looked likely to improve.  In the interest of fuel efficiency, the machine was a nimble fibreglass damselfly, not built to withstand this sort of onslaught, and our pilot was worried for his craft.  So my coordinator came and told me it was time to go.  The trek back was definitely windier than it had been when we arrived, and it felt longer, too, though that may have been because I had my head down, focusing on my footing, rather than looking at lichen and petrified wood.  We piled onto the waiting machine and with no undue delay were back in the air. One last wide loop around Igloo Spur, then we rode the wind seaward, and the igloo on the edge of nowhere vanished in the mist behind. 

  It is extraordinary how often angels and fools do the same thing in this life, and I have never been able to settle which we were on this journey. [273] 

  I understand why they did what they did, and made the decisions they made in context, but I have not let go of that impression that they were completely insane.  I've done pretty crazy things for an abstract goal, and while sleep-deprived, so on one hand I hesitate to judge.  On the other, a tiny unrepresentative sample of the extremity they endured beggars belief that they didn't start the trek home the minute they'd got the eggs, if not a lot sooner.  Surely they noticed that it was horrible?   

  But who is the more foolish here?  They threw themselves into the worst Antarctica had to offer in pursuit of knowledge, which could only be acquired this way.  They may not have known how bad it was going to be, but they knew it would be pretty bad, and went anyway, because they determined it to be worthwhile. 

  We, on the other hand, were only there because they had been there. 

  Correction: I was there because they had been there.  The others would not have been there except for me. 

  So who is the bigger fool? 

*All quotes in this post are from The Worst Journey in the World by Apsley Cherry-Garrard, with corresponding page numbers, except this one, which his from his introduction to Edward Wilson of the Antarctic, p.xiv 

[leahxx129]

Truth or Cut (Dean Winchester x Reader x Sam Winchester)

Hello there! This my * very VERY * late submission to @dontshootmespence​ ‘s   Alphabet Angst for 8k Challenge. I am incredibly sorry for this delay but I had to take a break away from Tumblr and social media in general in order to focus on my mental/physical health & other issues in my private life. Now I think I’m ready to return and create content again. As for the story, I hope you like it. This is my first attempt at a love triangle. Important: does not include Wincest so it’s safe to read for anyone who’s not into that. Also, I inserted a ‘Keep reading’ line, I hope it’s visible.

Summary: The British Men of Letters try a new approach to acquire the Winchesters’ cooperation, which leads to heartbreaking revelations. 

Warnings: cursing, bloodshed, mentions of sex, character death

Word count: 2.750-ish

* Moodboard is mine, pictures used are not.

You gain consciousness to two male voices calling your name frantically.

“She’s opening her eyes, Sam! She’s alright… Look!” the hoarse baritone belonging to the elder Winchester reassures his brother a second after your eyelashes have started fluttering.

“Well, that’s the overstatement of the year, Dean… Let’s just say I’ll live.” you grumble once you fully come around. “What the hell?!”

Usually you’re more eloquent than that but at the moment it’s the best you can muster, considering that you’ve awakened in what appears to be an abandoned warehouse and all three of you are handcuffed to uncomfortable metal chairs organized in a neat triangle, facing each other. The only source of light are a few flickering candles placed on a table nearby.

“That’s what we’re trying to figure out, babe.” your long-term boyfriend Sam replies in a soothing tone.

His handsome face seems intact – minus a couple of scars he obtained in previous fights – so being ambushed is crossed off the list of possible explanations on what happened and how you got here. Maybe you were drugged? If yes… by whom? The things that go bump in the night prey upon their enemies and slash their throats open, not abduct them.

A heavy silence falls on the place, only the crackle of the candle flames can be heard.

You have no idea how much time has passed – it could’ve been an eternity as well as ten minutes – when suddenly a consecutive knocking sound fills your auditory canals.

“Are those… are those high heels?” you ask aloud incredulously.

“Louboutin’s to be exact, my dear.”

Every head snaps to the accent’s direction just in time to see an elegantly dressed slender woman step into the candle-lit area.

“But excuse my manners… talking about fashion before introducing myself? How rude of me. I’m Lady Toni Bevell on behalf of the British Men of Letters.”

“You’ve got to be kidding me!” Dean growls “You know, here in America no means no, Lady! We’ve already told your stupid little boyband to fuck off. We’re not here to do their bidding, we’re here to save lives.”

“So I’ve heard.” She nods in understanding. “But yet, we’d still like to gather some information, one way or another.”

She walks over to the table and unfolds a neatly wrapped package, revealing a knife. Suddenly, Sam’s sarcastic chuckle fills the place.

“And you think you can get us to spill by torturing? Seriously?”

A predatory smile spreads across Toni’s face as she casually picks up the weapon of her choice.

“I was thinking about playing a game that may involve torture. It’s up to you whether it does or does not.”

“What game?” you ask suspiciously.

“I’d like to call it Truth or Cut. Maybe Truth or Stab, depending on the importance of the information you intend to withhold. The rules are the following… I ask something and if you reply, that equals truth, and nothing will happen. If you do not wish to answer, just say cut and I’ll sink my knife into your flesh.”

“You’re crazy!” Sam exhales in disbelief.

“Thank you, Sam! I’m going to take that as a compliment. And since we are already engaged in a conversation, let’s start with you.” She walks to the center of the triangle to face the younger Winchester. “I’d like you to give me the names of American hunters you consider the best.”

Sam leans a bit forward, his face is unreadable.

“Bite me!” he hisses through gritted teeth. “I’m not gonna participate in your psychotic game. You can’t make me.”

Toni flashes a dangerous smile once more.

“Are you sure about that?”

She slowly walks behind your chair and places the blade under your right collar bone.

“If you refuse to pick either truth or cut, your loved ones will pay the price for it, big guy.”

Sam’s eyes search yours for confirmation of the next step and you nod.

“You’re bluffing.” He counters Toni.

The next second you feel the metal pressed against you slash into soft skin and you can’t suppress a loud grunt of pain. Blood starts oozing from the wound and your white tank top soon begins to acquire a shade of crimson.

The brothers yell ‘No!’ in unison, then Dean delivers an impressive selection of curse words – sneaking in some that were new even to you.

Toni strolls over to Sam.

“Now I ask again. Name the best American hunters you know.”

“Cut.” Sam responds in a tone just above whisper. He soundlessly flinches when the woman draws blood by sliding the blade across his left forearm.

“Alright… Who wants to be next? Perhaps Dean? List all the places where we can find extensive knowledge on the supernatural, not counting the Man of Letters safe houses of course.”

Dean’s gaze meets Toni’s and for a second you think you can see her confidence falter because of the deadly rage and utter disdain that radiates from the hunter, but she soon regains composure.

“So? Is it truth or cut, Dean? You know what will happen if you refuse to choose.”  

“Cut!” he emphasizes the t at the end.

You’re next and you pick cut as well. Then the cycle starts all over again...

You’ve made three rounds without anyone breaking and giving Toni what she wants, which visibly annoys her.

“Let’s shake things up a bit by changing the topics, shall we?” she announces out of the blue, making all of you knit your brows.

Spinning around on her heels, she turns to Sam.

“Sam! Did you manage to decide where you want to propose to Y/N? In my personal opinion the place where you said your first I love you-s is more romantic than the place where you first met, but that’s just plain old me.”

Sam’s eyes widen in shock, reflecting your own facial expression.

“Sam? What is she talking about?” you question in a thin voice, perplexed.

A shy, boyish smile appears on his face as he looks deep into your eyes, reminding you of the very first time you’ve seen him.

“Uh, yeah. She’s right. Although I have no idea how she knows this, but I did indeed plan on proposing to you at one of those places, probably where we met… up until now. Now I have to come up with something else I guess.”

A mixture of emotions floods your heart, making you undecisive what to say first. You finally open your mouth to speak but before a sound can escape, Toni directs the next question to Dean.

“Alright, that was a truth, so no cuts. Now, Dean! I am certain she will not get offended so you can tell me honestly… Is Y/N a good kisser?”

“How would I know?” he asks back, lacking any hesitation. “I think you’re mistaking me with Sam, her boyfriend. You know, the tall guy whose proposal you’ve just ruined? Next time you play this game with someone, have your facts checked first, Suit pants.”

The confusion on Sam’s face slowly starts to fade away, but Toni presses on relentlessly.

“Oh, Dean... That was a very convincing performance! But, unfortunately for you, I did have my facts checked. And according to these facts, you and Y/N locked lips passionately just two years ago, in 2015. Isn’t that right, Y/N?”

Everybody’s eyes are on you waiting for your reaction, and you can’t help but reminisce about the event in question.

You were having a hard time finding the key for the motel room you were renting - courtesy of the bottle of bourbon you’d consumed earlier. All those keys on the chain looked the same and neither of them seemed to fit into the lock, let alone open the damn door… In addition to that, the world slowly started spinning and you had to prop yourself against the doorframe to prevent an ugly fall.

“Need a hand there, Sweetheart?”

Your heart skipped a beat from the scare but soon calmness washed over you as you identified the person. You could recognize that husky voice anywhere, intoxicated or not.

“Dean Winchester!” you exclaimed, turning around to find him leaning against your car you’d parked near the doorway. “The world’s deadliest hunter and mightiest panty dropper turned hell’s cruelest demon! To what do I owe this pleasure? Considering that you’ve gone out of your way to ignore both me and Sam in the past couple of months.”

He leisurely pushed himself from the car and started walking towards you.

“I needed a breath of fresh air, that’s all. But speaking of whom… where’s Sam?”

He almost left no distance between your bodies when he finally stopped. What was he doing? If he wanted to kill you, he probably would’ve done it already…

“I don’t know. Why don’t you give him a call, huh? Ask him how he’s doing? You could make him the happiest man alive…” you replied with a bitter undertone.

A shit-eating grin formed on Dean’s handsome face.

“Uh-oh. Is there trouble in paradise?”

“Shut it, Dean! It’s really none of your business.” You said, crossing your arms and averting your gaze.

His comment hit a nerve – you both knew that – but the last thing on Earth you wanted to do was discussing your relationship crisis with him. If you still had a relationship, that is.

To much of your surprise, the next second he grabbed your chin, forcing you to look at him and pressed his lips against yours. It felt terribly wrong but incredibly right at the same time… It took you half a minute to gather all your willpower and push him away.

“Y/N? Is it true?” Sam’s voice brings you back to reality.

Tears start dwelling up in your eyes, providing a wordless answer. He swallows hard.

“Why?”

“It’s all my fault, okay?” Dean speaks up as you’re clearly unable to form a coherent sentence. “I kissed her, man. It happened when I was a demon… I figured if I kissed her, I’d piss you off enough to leave me alone. Besides, she was totally hammered and still pushed me away.”

“Is that supposed to make me feel better, Dean?!”

“I don’t know… a little, maybe?”

Sam scoffs then all of a sudden realization hits him.

“You didn’t answer the question.”

“What?”

“Is my girlfriend a good kisser?”

Both you and Dean stare at him in shock.

“C’mon man, you can’t seriously want me to answer that…” Dean attempts to change the subject but doesn’t succeed. Sam’s stare makes it obvious he won’t let this one slide. He won’t let go until he hears the truth no matter how unpleasant it may be.

“Yes.” Dean blurts out. “She’s a good kisser. In fact, she’s one of the best kissers I’ve ever encountered in my entire life. Happy now?”

The only response is a nod.

“Oh wow…” Toni lets out an excited sigh. “Changing the topic was the best idea ever, don’t you agree? Now, let’s move on to Y/N. She’ll get the most interesting question in my repertoire.”

She slowly walks over to you, her Louboutin’s menacingly tap against the concrete every step of the way. She crouches down, tucks a strand of hair behind your ear and asks the most ruthless question in the sweetest voice.

“Which one of the Winchester brothers is better in bed?”

The tears you’ve been holding back for quite some time now break free and roll down your cheeks swiftly.

“I mean, it’s not entirely true what Dean said, now is it? You did push him away but then you pulled him back...”

Complete silence ensues and you swear you can hear three hearts break if you listen closely.

You were standing there more confused than ever. What the hell was Dean doing?! Was this a long time coming or was he playing some sort of a game? Either way… If you were sober, you most certainly would’ve punched him in the mouth. But due to your condition – or at least that’s what you’ve been telling yourself ever since – you pulled him back and kissed him there instead. The part of how you got inside the room was a blur, but soon enough you found yourself tangled up with him in the sheets. Torn clothes peppered the floor, a smell of bourbon lingered in the air and Dean treated you as if you were the single, most important person in the entire universe. You truly thought you’d never been happier – then came the morning and shattered everything to a thousand pieces.

“You know, to encourage picking truth regarding this question, I am going to tell you something you yourself may not even be aware of, Y/N.” Toni breaks the silence. “There is something else that’s not true in what Dean said. He did not spend that night with you just to piss Sam off… He’s been attracted to you ever since you’ve met and being a demon allowed him to shamelessly do something about it.”

You whisper ‘Cut’ as a reply and Toni’s face hardens.

“Oh, honey… withholding this information is worth a stab.”

Before you can comprehend her words, she swings the knife and it ends up in your right thigh. You don’t think you’ve ever seen this much blood come from a stab wound… Both Winchester men yell in protest, but their voices become distant as you slowly slip into unconsciousness.

Mary and Castiel tracked down your location and arrived just in time. You almost bled to death, but the angel managed to heal the wound. For a while you wished he didn’t.

Three weeks later you’re sitting in your car at an abandoned gas station. About fifteen minutes after your arrival, a black SUV parks near you. You limp to the vehicle and tear its door open, barely containing your fury.

“What the fuck was that, Toni?!” you question while getting in and pointing a gun at her.

She glances at the weapon then looks you in the eye.

“Is that necessary?”

You cock the gun in response.

“Alright. So, as you know, the management decided that you delivering information to us about the Winchesters is not enough anymore.”

“Yes, that’s why you’ve contacted them directly, I know.”

“Correct. But since they refused to cooperate, the management came up with a plan of disrupting their unity. This way it’s just a matter of time and one of them will be knocking on our door. I suspect it will be Sam.”

A bitter laugh escapes you lips.

“So that’s what this was? A disruption of unity? Really?! And why didn’t I know of this, huh?”

“We needed your reactions to be genuine.”

“God, you’re a bunch of psychopaths… You know what, I’m not gonna do this anymore. I quit.”

She lets out a loud scoff.

“Please… what are you going to tell them? Furthermore, how do you think they will react when they learn that the love of their lives is a snitch?”

You let your gun down.

“I’ll make sure they know why I became a snitch... I’ll make sure they know how I made a crossroad’s deal years ago to save them both. I’ll make sure they know how you offered to delay the hellhounds in exchange for some information every now and then. I have no idea how they’ll react, but maybe someday they’ll understand and find it in their hearts to forgive me.”

Toni stares daggers at you.

“I suggest you think this through carefully, Y/N, as we still hold your deal. One bad move and the hellhounds will come and get you. No more delaying.”

You flash her the biggest smile you can summon.

“Well, it’s been a while since the last time I played with puppies from the pit… I think I’m ready.”

Not waiting for her reaction, you get out of the car and start limping back to yours. By the time you get in, Toni is gone.

You’re all alone.

Well, not entirely alone to be fair.

The grumbling hellhounds in your backseat keep you company.

You take your phone out of your pocket avoiding any sudden movements and type a quick message to the Winchesters:

‘My nightstand, second drawer.’

Toni thought she could prevent you from exposing the truth by taking action quickly, but she wasn’t paying attention. You never said you were gonna tell them everything. You said you would make sure they know. And the detailed farewell letters you left for them in your drawer will serve the purpose well.

[skvaderarts]

Apocrypha Chapter Ten: Baggage

Masterlist can be found Here! Thanks!

Chapter Ten: Baggage

Note: All your comments on the last chapter about Vergil had me rolling on the floor laughing like an idiot. See this, this is the kind of chaotic energy I thrive off of. Thank you for allowing me to flourish like this!

(-~-)

4:50 am

A soft mist settled across the worn metal of the train tracks as the moon hung low, casting shadows across the dimly lit train station. The long beams of hardened steel shined from a combination of moisture and moonlight, making them look as new as the day they had been placed. Everything tended to look clean and new at night, and this was no different.

Everyone held their positions, babysitting their megar luggage (not so megar in some "cases") and the children in Nero's case as they awaited the arrival of the train. It would be here in a matter of minutes, and was supposed to be relatively empty considering the time of morning that it would be arriving during. Considering the fact that most of the locals were scared stiff of the dark at this point, getting them to stand at a train station in the middle of the night in dim lighting during a light sprinkle was totally out of the question. But that worked out better for them. And even if they were foolish enough to venture out during such trying conditions, Morrison had pulled some strings and, as a result, they basically had a whole train car to themselves. Apparently, someone owed him a favor and was in the good graces of the train company.

As Kyrie and Nico rounded up the children and took inventory of their belongings, Vergil took mental inventory of his surroundings. Dante had long since decided that he couldn't be bothered to stay awake and wait for the train, so he had made himself comfortable on a nearby bench and dozed off, much to his older twin's bewilderment. How Dante was capable of sleeping in such an unfamiliar environment was beyond him. Just a few feet away from him were Lady and Trish, trying to work out how they were going to get their luggage onboard the train. They had brought at least a month's worth of clothes on what would be, at most, a week long trip, and were having a difficult time reconciling the logistical challenge that came with moving that many bags. He would actually be amused by this if it weren't for the lingering feeling of discomfort that hung low in his gut, keeping him on edge. 

For a menagerie of complex yet obvious reasons, the prospect of spending several days with his two adult children put him seriously on edge. While waiting for the train, the realization that he actually had no idea what went on in either of his adult children's lives had slammed into him like a van into a brick factory, and he found this fact supremely unsettling.  Aside from the different abilities they possessed in battle and the basic facets of their dramatically different personalities, Vergil was forced to admit that he actually had no idea what his children were like below the surface level. And making small talk wasn't something anyone in their family was any good at. 

This was going to be… challenging.

As if called upon by the awkward atmosphere itself, V walked past silently, taking a moment to stop and catch his breath. For all his talents, waking up early and actually being functional were not qualities he possessed. While he was coherent, that didn't mean that he was at peak physical condition. Due to V's habits and general disposition, he was much better acquainted with the concept of staying up for long periods of time that he was with getting up at a moments notice and catching a train. He found the concept distasteful and exhausting.

Vergil glanced between their respective bags, half wondering what V had actually packed. While he was more than willing to believe that Nero and Nico owned clothing suited to an afternoon at the beach, the polar opposite could be said for his eldest son. V didn't come off to him as the type to even know how to shop for outdoor clothing, let alone own any. It was curious. Regardless of what he believed, the young summoner actually owned a luggage bag though, to the shock of literally no one present, it was a rolling one. While Vergil was more than aware of his son's condition, it put him off slightly to be reminded of it. Perhaps if he helped him with the bag…

Without a moment to spare, a vintage red convertible pulled to a stop in the parking lot and out stepped Morrison. He opened the car door on the opposite side of the car to allow Patty to exit, the young blond girl dragging an oversized rolling bag along behind her as she headed towards the loading ramp to join the others. Upon catching sight of Dante sleeping, she stopped and shook her head, clearly disapproving of his sleeping habits.

"Hey, at least he made it here on time," Nero said as he walked past her, finally finished with taking inventory of the children's personal belongings," We've gotta give him credit for something. I was sure he was going to be late. I got no idea how he managed to beat us here."

Vergil spared them a passing glance as he folded his arms across his chest. He most certainly shared patty's disapproval. "When the alternative is being impaled on the end of my blade, I find that he is usually willing to accommodate my demands. But there have been a few... exceptions," Vergil drifted off for a moment, thinking," Did you know he didn't own any cookware or dishes before today? It's truly absurd."

Nero shot him a knowing look, taking a step closer to V to assess his condition. "Yea, neither of those facts really surprise me. You're both insane, after all."

Patty shook her head, clearly entertained by the pent up tension that fueled their conversation. She had no idea what caused it, but she definitely found it funny. "See, I was right! Dante just needs motivation! And the best way to motivate him is to smack him with stuff. It all checks out."

Vergil stared at her blankly for a moment. Yes that was what his twin needed. Motivation.

Just a moment later the lumbering locomotive they were scheduled to be boarding blew its whistle, signaling it's approach. It didn't sound far off. Everyone scrambled to collect their things and receive their tickets from Morrison who laughed under his breath at the unorganized mess in front of them before wishing them a safe trip. Literally everyone he knew was a walking disaster, and it never got old. Or less funny.

Much to Nero's surprise, the only person who seemed totally at ease was V. The taller while haired descendant of Sparda was leaning against the streetlamp nearest to the tracks, having migrated there during the commotion. He had everything together and seemed to be quietly observing the children. Though the little ones were well behaved, this was their first time near a train. If Carlo's experience with hot soup was anything to go by, he needed to divert a bit of his attention towards maintaining the welfare of the children. Kyrie was keeping an eye on them, but she and Nico had their bags to deal with and Nero only had two sets of eyes. At least as far as he knew. He'd grown wings and a new arm during his absence. Anything was possible. Nero was practically a super advanced amoeba at this point as far as he was concerned.

"Were you… You know, um…," Nero's entire mental process flat lined as he made eye contact with V, unsure of how he wanted to phrase his proposal," Did you… ya know… need help with your bag, V?"

The young summoner blanched, his pupils dilating for a moment like an alarmed house cat before he blinked and composed himself. It all happened so quickly that it was nearly imperceptible, but he'd done it nonetheless. V shifted his stance slightly, diverting his eyes in an attempt to break eye contact with Nero. He glanced in the direction of the oncoming train before speaking. 

"... I'm fine. This isn't the first time I've had to board a train recently," He glanced sparingly at Nero, clearly somewhat flustered by Nero's polite offer." But… I do appreciate your offer. Your concern is refreshing. I'll manage."

Nero shrugged, scratching the bridge of his nose before ducking away. He needed to check on the children. "Sure thing. Let me know if you, ya know, change your mind or something."

As the train pulled into the station, Nero took a moment to step away and join Kyrie and the kids. Attempting to keep three young and excited children under control while juggling luggage was going to be quite the experience. Thankfully children's clothing was smaller than its adult counterparts, so they were able to fit everything in one bag. In hindsight, it was rather impressive that Trish and Lady had individually packed more clothing than their entire family put together. Impressive, excessive, and hilarious. After a cursory check and a hurried final count, they prepared to board after the rest of the group. Going first would slow things down considerably.

While Patty gave Dante hell for falling asleep, V watched the train pull into the station casually. This was far from his first train trip, but it had been quite some time since he'd traveled with other people. And never with children. He shot Nico a quick glance, collecting his bag before it became an obstacle in their path. The young mechanic nodded in approval.

"I wonder why Nero didn't take Magnolia up on her offer to babysit the kids," She said as she grabbed her bags," I mean, I love em as much as the next person… but don't people usually take vacations to get away from their kids?"

V stood up straight, no longer leaning against the lamp. He considered her words for a moment, before facing ahead, clearly focused on something in the middle distance. That was a reasonable question, and he couldn't fault her for being curious. While no one minded that the children were along for the ride, especially since Nero had told most of them beforehand, he had to admit that he'd wondered the same thing when his younger brother had made that decision with Kyrie.

"If I were to make an educated guess, it's partially for his own benefit. He may wish to spend time with them," He said as he stepped towards the now still train, clearing a path for everyone," And also, what better way to drive our father absolutely insane? It's as much an act of revenge as it is an act of kindness. In a way, I almost find it poetic."

Nico gave him a funny look before the gears in her brain unstuck and she laughed slightly. "Oh, I get it! It's a parental pissing contest! Gotta remind his old man that he's the better parent!"

"Yes, I believe he's taking the moral middle ground on this trip, isn't he" V said, a hint of humor in his voice. He closed his eyes for a moment, scoffing at his sibling's petty yet understandable level immaturity," Well, that is when the high ground is being morally impregnable and the low road is refusing to come at all."

"Don't act like you wouldn't do the same thing," Nico said as she tried not to laugh. Vergil was approaching with Dante, and she didn't need him honing in on their conversation. She liked to think he liked her. Well, at the very least he seemed to want to stab her less than most of the rest of the team. That had to count for something.

V let out a brief chortle, covering his mouth with the back of his hand. " I have no children. And my methods of causing aggravation and proving my moral superiority are a bit more… subtle. Not to say that I care much either way."

Nico punched him in the side, eliciting a surprised exhale and a curious look. "No kids that you know of!"

He stared at her blankly for a moment, an unreadable look passing across his face. It was completely belied by his calm demeanor. "No. I'm quite certain that I don't have any. That would be impossible. I… Damn it."

She gave him a silly look, repressing the urge to go totally wide eyed and burst into laughter at what he had just inadvertently implied. Nico had caught him red handed, and his involuntary confession answered a lot of burning questions for her. "But what if ya did though? Or what if ya do someday? I mean, you've gotta have some luck getting a date with all that poetry you read, right? And it's not like your ugly or somethin..'"

V stopped for a moment, both to allow Kyrie to board first and to consider her statement. He turned back to her, his head tilted slightly to one side in an involuntary action that indicated that he was somewhat unsure as to how to answer that question. Nico got the impression that he'd probably never been asked that before, and Nero shot them both a curious look as he passed by them.

"... I've… I haven't… I don't think I've taken the necessary time to... consider that question yet. I have no way of answering that, at present." V seemed distant for a moment, almost troubled. 

For a second, Nico felt very uncomfortable. This was obviously a touchy subject, but not in the way she would have expected. Most of the time people got angry or flustered when asked a personal question they didn't intend to answer. V just seemed… forlorn and absent from the conversation. It was as if she had just asked him about someone dying or something, and he was recalling a painful memory. In that moment, Nico was certain that he had thought about it before, but uncertain as to how the subject affected him.

At least for the time being, she was going to drop the subject. This wasn't a good way to start what was supposed to be a fun group outing. V was always a little gloomy, but she'd clearly struck a nerve that she hadn't meant to, and the last thing she wanted to do was cause him to spend the entire train trip being upset and distracted.

"Yea um, sorry about that, I guess. Wasn't tryin' to… you know…" Nico said as she walked along behind the rest of the group, her bag in hand. The train was only going to stay for a minute or so longer. No one wanted to have to drive there to meet them.

V waived her off, blinking slowly in a way that showed that he absolutely did mind, but wasn't going to make a big deal out of it. He had bigger problems and didn't tend to hold petty grudges as a general rule. Although there were exceptions to that rule, he knew that Nico hadn't meant anything by it. If anything, she'd probably been trying to entertain them both.

"I'll go after you," He said, tilting his head nonchalantly in the direction of the train door. He honestly didn't enjoy being the first to board the train. Even though he knew it was entirely irrational and foolish, he felt as though he was being watched when he was the first to do something with his group. It made him feel slightly anxious, even when he was with people he trusted. 

She nodded and hopped on board the train, nearly stumbling with her heavy bag. For a moment, V considered the probability that she had snuck some of her "work" with her on the train. But then again, he was certain that everyone had snuck weapons on board as well, so it was a good thing that they didn't have to go through a metal detector or baggage check before boarding. All those demonic swords and specialized guns would have been rather difficult to explain away. In an ideal world, they wouldn't need them. But in the world they lived in, no one was foolish enough to think that asking Vergil to leave Yamato at home was a good idea or that it would end in anything but a swift stabbing.

"I see that your boarding last."

V turned his head, glancing over his shoulder to face the all too familiar voice that had just spoken to him. It was Vergil. His brain raced to pinpoint the exact moment that the eldest Son of Sparda had broken away from his twin brother and stayed behind to confront him, but it jammed like a cheap lock. Regardless, he was here. And he couldn't pinpoint why that made him so supremely uncomfortable. Perhaps it had something to do with what had happened the last time they had been alone with one another at a train station. His fight or flight instinct screamed at him, imploring him not to repeat the same mistakes that had landed him in the Redgrave incident in the first place. After all, if he hadn't taken that walk and walked face first into Vergil…

No, that hadn't been his fault. 

He needed to stop doing that to himself. 

That was in the past now.

The young summoner nodded, his vocal cords failing him. While he was aware that he needed to speak with him at some point on this trip, this would not be the moment that that happened. And the sudden realization that whatever awkwardness there was between them would transfer to their three hour train ride was almost enough to make him bolt across the parking lot and catch the ferry home. But that would accomplish nothing. And Nico had the keys, so the van wasn't going anywhere anyway.

Vergil let out a sound somewhere between a sigh and a chuckle, clearly expecting some sort of response akin to the one he received from his oldest son. And yet there was something else in his demeanor that betrayed his silent hope that that wouldn't be the case. Perhaps it was something in his eyes that V caught a glimpse of that told him that his lack of diction… saddened Vergil? Was the eldest Son of Sparda capable of that? V liked to believe so. Perhaps "liked" wasn't that proper word for it.

As V considered this, the train whistle blew. They would be departing in a minute. Vergil glanced over at the train casually, clearly not concerned about the concept of being left behind. He'd teleported to further away things in the past, and they'd been moving considerably faster than a train. He foresaw no challenge, at least for himself. While he assumed that V might share a similar ability, he had now way of knowing how proficient he was. But there would be no need to find out if they boarded the train.

"Come then," Vergil said as he approached the train, passing V in the process. He stopped for a moment, glancing over his shoulder to double check that he had complied with his request and found that he had. He then extended his arm to stop him, handing him one of the two slips of paper in his hand. It was a train ticket. V looked it over for a moment, giving Vergil an appreciative nod in the process. Much to his dismay, functionality had yet to return to the auditory cortex of his brain.

"I don't believe I saw you get yours from that middleman Dante is acquainted with, so I took the liberty of doing so on your behalf." He said casually as he stepped past him, swiping V's bag in the process. It was beyond Vergil to simply ask for it. He already knew what his son's response would be, if any at all.

V reached towards the confiscated luggage bag, his response too delayed to accomplish anything noteworthy. The young white haired summoner opened his mouth to speak, but words failed him yet again and he let his arm fall limply to his side. He sighed softly and cracked a small but appreciative smile before following after him. He'd stolen a glance at their respective seat numbers when Vergil had handed him the ticket earlier. 

It seemed that they would be sitting together…

(-~-)

And just like that, the beach arc has begun! What's that? You thought it was going to be one or two chapters? HA! Try like five or six! There is character development that needs to happen here, people! Thanks for reading, take care, and I'll see you again on Friday! Bye bye! Also, I have a discord server. The links to it and my user id on there are in my A03 bio and listed below! I'd love to chat if you're ever in the neighborhood lol!

Server: https://discord.gg/Uyp75N6

SkvaderArts#2729

[sseanight]

Park Jimin Fics Recommendation

Recent update 200125

[ ❥ ] = Favorite

Kim Namjoon  — Kim Seokjin  — Min Yoongi  — Jung Hoseok  — Kim Taehyung  — Jeon Jungkook

[ ❥ ] Our Little Family; parent!au, fluff, angst

part 1 | part 2 | part 3 | part 4 | part 5 | part 6 finale

You were just a pre-school teacher, a simple dream that came true as you always adored children. But what you didn’t know, was how one child and her very special father would change you dream forever.

♠ The Unfaithful Wife; angst

part 1 | part 2 | part 3 | part 4 | part 5 | part 6 | part 7 | part 8 | part 9 | part 10

He never believes you. Never.

♠ Will You; angst

part 1 | part 2 finale

Park Jimin, your boyfriend, was nothing but the cutest boyfriend on earth. No one could ever compare to him. He was your prince charming, your favorite superman and your Mickey Mouse. That was until he started to show his other side. The not so good side. A very jealous side, which from the start was kind of adorable but it soon became a big problem in your relationship.

♠ Because of Love; angst

One day, Jimin picks up his wife at the office.

♠  Dress Code; ceo! au, smut

Jimin takes it upon himself to discipline you when your attire doesn’t exactly adhere to HR regulations.

♠ Mistake; angst

part 1 | part 2 finale

One stupid mistake can change everything.

♠ Hidden Tears; angst

part 1 | part 2 finale

A smile can hide millions of tears.

♠  Power Play; porn star!au, smut

You know him as the A lister of all porn stars; a man who sits pretty in his place at the top of the food chain. But you also know him as the Park Jimin who single handedly humiliated you and ruined your own career as a rookie just starting out, the epitome of the biggest dick in the entire industry… and you’re not talking about his assets. But when Park Jimin comes to you, saying he’s in a slump that only you can get him out of and begs you to sign an exclusive contract with him; things get messy… in more ways than one.

♠ Tease; idol!au, smut

You miss your boyfriend Jimin very much, especially when he’s on tour, so you decide to tease him slightly. However, you learn very quickly that Park Jimin does not like to be teased.

♠ Ribbons (ft. Jeon Jungkook); smut

Your boyfriend, jimin, arranges the best birthday present you could have ever asked for.

[ ❥ ] Blue Blood; royalty!au, smut, angst

Prince Jimin was born with blue blood. His coronation is rapidly approaching, but there are two requirements he must fulfil before becoming a king. He must have the skills to fight in battle, and he must have a Queen with blood as blue as his. You, a member of the royal guard, are assigned to teach Jimin the ins and outs of combat. You are not scared of death, of blood, or of battle. What you are scared of however, is falling in love with Jimin, the one man your blood decrees you can never have.

♠ Just Sayin / I Tired; angst, fluff, smut

Sometimes love isn’t enough.

♠ Body Party; smut, fluff

It’s your birthday and Jimin decides to throw you a private party.

♠ Sin City; smut

part 1 | part 2 | part 3 | part 4 | part 5 | part 6 | part 7 | part 8 | part 9 | part 10 | part 11 | part 12 | part 13 | part 14 | part 15

After a run of bad luck, you can go back home and admit defeat or step out of your comfort zone and look for a job at Sin City.

♠ Sated (ft. BTS); heavy smut

Sin. There’s nothing more.

♠ Beholden; royal!au, smut

As the rightful Queen to your nation, you have always known you one day must marry. Each time the question has arisen in the past, you have found legitimate reasons to turn the men down. Until now, that is. Until the proposal of a distant King, one whose union would only bring benefit to your people. Except for the fact, that your heart has already been taken by his proposer.

♠ No Strings; fwb!au, smut, slightly angst

part 1 | part 2 | part 3 | part 4 | part 5 | part 6 | part 7 | part 8 | part 9 | part 10 | part 11 | part 12 finale | (Jimin’s pov part 5)

It started off as such a simple question. How to know if you’re bad in bed? Of course when you asked, you didn’t imagine Jimin would actually answer.

♠ Stress Relief; smut

Jimin keeps working late. He decides to wake you up in a way you can’t refuse.

♠ Like I Would (ft. Jung Hoseok); angst, smut, slightly fluff

part 1 | part 2 | part 3 | part 4 | part 5 | part 6 | part 7 | part 8 | part 9 | part 10 | part 11 | part 12 | part 13 | part 14

Sometimes, a shoulder to cry on can be the most dangerous thing of all.

♠ Tease; smut

part 1 | part 2 finale

Your best friend gets a new job, but tries to keep it a secret from you. You manage to find the address to his work, but why did it lead you to a strip club?

♠ The Rules of Heaven; angel!au, angst

Jimin is in love and Heaven doesn’t allow for it.

♠ Hurting Hearts; angst

“It’s not what it looks like”. But guess what? It is what it looks like.

♠ You; angst, fluff

You are his gf but totally not his ideal type, then Jimin’s childhood friend is perfect.

♠ Excuses; angst, fluff

part 1 | part 2 finale

Busy. You hated that word.

[ ❥ ] Partiality; parent!au, angst. fluff

You and Jimin argue about your kids not loving you two equally.

[ ❥ ] Charity; prince!au, angst, fluff, smut

You’re a maid for the Crowned Prince of Busan, you’re in love with him, but you think he only uses you for charity, so one night at the new karaoke bar, you try your best to forget him, with the help of a stranger.

♠ Part of Your World; merman!au, angst, fluff

part 1 | part 2 | part 3 | part 4 | part 5 | part 6 | part 7 finale

Jimin has always longed for the wide-open skies of the Above Sea. After saving the life of a beautiful human woman, he seeks to find her and finally live in his dream world. But young mermen should be careful what they wish for.

♠ Runaway Love; fluff, angst

Hoseok is panicking because his two best friends are getting married and he kind of lost the groom.

♠ Misunderstanding; angst, fluff

It was a mistake. A total misunderstanding.

♠ Promise; angst, fluff

In which Jimin attempted to fix all the mess he had done.

♠ Mermaid Melodies; mermaid!au, fluff

After you meet Park Jimin, you start to think that humans are not that bad as the Tribe said.

[ ❥ ] Faded Love; married couple!au, angst

He doesn’t need to say it. because you can feel your husband, park jimin, falling out of love with you.

♠ Trying Something New; smut, romance

Your boyfriend accidentally stumbles upon your porn stash and decides to make your fantasies reality.

♠ Cutie; angst, fluff

He has been out late at night, and you didn’t know why…until someone had texted him.

♠ Spring Day; idol!au, angst, fluff

part 1 | part 2 | part 3 | part 4 | part 5

You knew that married life with an idol would be challenging. You just didn’t know that it would be this challenging.

♠ Betray (ft. Kim Taehyung); angst

part 1 | part 2 | part 3 | part 4 | part 5 | part 6 | part 7 | part 8

In which taehyung leaves you on the day of your wedding to run off with your best friend and you finding out about their secret.

[ ❥ ] About Time (ft. Jeon Jungkook); time travel!au, angst

Be careful for what you wish for, because you may never know how to deal with them once it comes true. What would you do when your wish for a second chance actually came true? But was it really a fulfilled wish? Too many questions lie when it actually happened. Were they real memories? Or perhaps a part of a past life? Was it only a dream all along? Will everything be different this time?

♠ 2 PM; fluff

Long-distance relationship are hard.

♠ One Year; smut

In which jimin really just wants to enjoy dinner but his jealousy gets the better of him.

♠ Heartbreak Insurance; fluff

The average person falls in love 4 to 7 times before marriages and 40% to 50% of all marriages end in divorce. 85% of all relationship end with a breakup. Don’t just be a statistics! At Heartbreak Insurance, we are committed to be there when you need it most. Affordable and comprehensible solutions to meet your needs today! With our Heartbreak Insurance, you can find a plan that fits your needs. We cover and care for you in most vulnerable times, offering paid times off, therapy sessions, and care packages. Because heartbreak is pain too.

♠ One Time Thing;  bestfriend’s-boyfriend!au. fluff, angst, smut

part 1 | part 2 | part 3 | part 4

What are you going to do when your best friend asks you to have a sex with her boyfriend?

♠ Instincts; hybrid!au, fluff, smut

Who wants a snow leopard as a pet? No one, and  you don’t want to be a pet, but the day before you’re supposed to be euthanized you’ll take what you can get; a nice enough man, but something about him seems off.

[ ❥ ] Strip; stripper!au, fluff, angst, smut

Everything you have done has always been about surviving life and raising your child on your own. Having someone else caring about you was the last thing you had expected. Especially when that someone is the same man you have watched performing every night on stage and secretly admired. But will he run the moment he finds out about your little secret waiting at home?

♠ Sweeter Than Sweet; vampire!au, smut, angst, fluff

You never would have expected someone like Park Jimin to notice you. As handsome and beguiling as he is deadly, you’re enthralled from the very moment you meet. Addicted to his kiss and his bite, Jimin opens up your eyes to a whole new world of love, lust and seduction.

♠ Confession; angst

When your idol boyfriend Park Jimin video calls you one night, the confession he tells you turns your world upside down.

[ ❥ ] Touched by a Fallen Star; prince!au, fantasy, angst, smut

You know he doesn’t belong to you. It’s pure science, physics. The stars have always belonged to the night sky, but since when has the night sky belonged to one of its insignificant stars?

♠ Thank You, Next; best friends to lovers!au, fluff, slight angst, smut

In high school you weren’t very popular, ten years later you travel to a class reunion of your old class. What could go wrong?

♠ Vlive Blowjob; smut

You and Jimin make a bet: If he loses, he has to buy a purse of the new Gucci collection for you, but if you lose, you have to make him a blowjob… while he makes a Live. None of this makes sense, but he was drunk when he proposed and you were drunk when you accepted. That explains everything.

[ograndebatata]

Turner family headcanons...

So, this time I’m going for something a bit different with Elena of Avalor headcanons. 

This time, they are on Naomi and her parents,and what I feel their lives were like both before they came to Avalor and during their early period there. There are some references to actual events from the series in their final parts. 

I confess I’m not particularly satisfied with these; they were a bit of a challenge that I’m not entirely sure I met. I hope you still enjoy them and welcome any sort of feedback you may have. 

On another note, these may actually be the lightest headcanons I came up with on the Elena of Avalor side of the fandom. That said, there are still a few references to dark elements, and references to family feuds.

There is also a slight element inspired by a post at @pizzansunshine‘s blog (as far as Naomi’s crying at an early age is concerned).

As a final note, this got long enough that it is divided into parts below the cut, and each part is marked by a bold title. Please keep that in mind when reading it.

With all that said, I hope you enjoy.

Scarlett Turner

Born in Norberg, Scarlett Turner, née Holmwood, was born in the midst of a very old-fashioned, stiff and slightly power-hungry noble family, that truth being told was looked at as somewhat of a ‘quirky antiquity’ even by many other noble families in Norberg.  She was the last of four children, and the only girl. As far as her family was concerned, everything had its proper place, everyone’s station in life was dictated from birth, and status was meant to be pursued.

The last tendency of her family was slightly present in her in that since she was young she wanted to prove herself and strive to be the best she could, but rather than pursue status or power she wanted to do something worthwhile, that she felt would leave a mark but, more importantly, help people.

While not a moron by any means, she was a very physical and emotional rather than cerebral girl from a young age, preferring to solve problems with her fists and having a bit of a tendency to wear her heart on her sleeve. She was also fascinated by sailing, perhaps out of drawing a subconscious parallel between the departing boats and her own desire to escape her constricting environment.

Because of that, she started a naval-education-based program when she was ten (in a sort of middle school that teaches essentially naval matters), learning the ropes of what being at sea was like. Her family made quite a bit of a fuss, but when they realized Scarlett was determined, they let her join just so they would shut her up, taking it to be just a phase anyway. Besides, there were several sons (and a few other daughters) of influent families enrolled in the same school, including Crown Prince Oscar. Perhaps if Scarlett became close to him, that would increase their benefits for the future. Not to mention that Scarlett would surely find naval life so grueling she’d ask to drop out before being halfway through with that program.

They were sorely disappointed when Scarlett not only took to it like a fish to the water, but actually enlisted in the Norberg navy when she was sixteen, a feat enabled by the fact Norberg’s armed forces allowed women to enlist. Her family’s disappointment was massive, as her parents had been expecting to set her up to marry someone of a higher status, maybe even Crown Prince Oscar.  

Scarlett wouldn’t back down anyway, but her family made it clear that if she wanted to go forward on her decision, she’d be on her own.

She went forward.

Her family did some damage control, maintaining a public appearance of a minor disagreement, while Scarlett herself never tried to smear their image either. She may be hurt with them, but she wouldn’t deliberately do anything to damage them. Meanwhile, she became the best of her group, and thrived there. By the age of twenty, she was already involved in important missions which involved escorting important passengers or important cargo.

Daniel Turner

Though he was also born in Norberg, one can say he sailed from the opposite end of the ocean as far as his wife is concerned. He also was involved with sea life from birth, but from a much lower station. His father was a merchant captain, and left home for months at a time. Daniel missed him dearly whenever he left, but he found some comfort in the regular things in his life, such as their cozy home, his reliable mother, and the kindly old nanny that lived with them.

His mother was a housewife who did not have a regular job, but she would do a variety of odd jobs if the need for extra money arose, such as tutoring kids, mending clothes, or simply helping out those who needed a particular service and could afford to pay (although she’d help for free if she was close to the person in question).

On the rare times his father was back, the family went to all sorts of places in Norberg, but Daniel’s favorite was a beach where they went swimming with various kinds of whales who went there to scratch themselves on pebbles during the summer time. More than a few regarded the practice as insane, but it was a family activity they loved, and none of them ever had the smallest accident from it.

Daniel lost his mother when he was ten because of an accident. His father had recently returned from a long trip at sea, and they had gone for a picnic at the park when, right after her mother sat down on a large stone, she yelped as if in pain. As she stood up, she saw a black shape creeping back underneath the stone, and realized she had been bitten by a viper. At first, it did not seem anything all that serious - vipers of that species did not have deadly bites in most cases - though it did stop the picnic as they went to look for medical care. But only a few minutes after the bite, as they were getting ready to leave as calmly as possible so as not to speed up venom circulation, his mother started getting very weird. Her lips and neck swelled, she started having difficulty breathing, and fainted within moments with a hand to her stomach. Both Daniel and his father tried everything they could as they called for help, but by the time it arrived, it was too late; she had passed away from what was known in a different realm as anaphylactic shock.

Her death took a heavy toll on Daniel’s father, to the point he retired from captaincy and instead became harbormaster at Norberg’s main port. Daniel followed him around very often since then and learned the ropes of the trade. But this new job was not sufficing, as a suddenly bad season struck the ship his father still owned, and cost them plenty of money. In addition to that, his father sunk further and further into an incurable depression, spending days doing nothing but staring at walls lost in his memories. To help make things easier, Daniel joined several ships’ crews, depending on the available jobs.

One such venture was when he was assigned to captain a ship that dove for magical pearls at West Rubinia.

And that was when Daniel and Scarlett met (he was twenty-six, and she was twenty-eight).

Scarlett and Daniel’s courtship

Although magical pearls don’t truly have outstanding magical powers except in a few select cases, they glow in special ways when the sun shines on them (the way they do depends on the individual pearl) which makes them beautiful and sought after. Any ship that harvested them required an escort, and Scarlett’s ship was the one assigned for the duty this time around.

As captain of the assigned ship (though in his case it was a matter of title than an actual naval rank) he and Scarlett had to plan things out before the voyage. They did not hit it off per se, but they got along well, meshing together easily, which made for a smooth trip. They would sometimes meet during the voyage (at which point Scarlett always swung by a rope from her ship to Daniel’s and vice-versa) and things simply developed between them without any actual effort on their part. Daniel was impressed by Scarlett’s work ethic and dedication, and Scarlett noticed the quiet way he went about noticing things and gently steering any mistakes toward correction.

That said, their closeness ended up being unwittingly aided by a pirate attack that forced a close collaboration between them. A collaboration that turned out well, for they avoided losing any crewmembers or cargo in the process and captured all the pirates that hadn’t died in the attack to be taken to Norberg and tried.

Daniel did not captain any other ships that dove for magical pearls, but he and Scarlett would meet very often in the following years, and started spending time together at every possible chance. Three years after they met, Scarlett proposed, and Daniel accepted (they ended up picking engagement rings together, and sprinkled a powdered magical pearl they had been allowed to keep from their first trip on them).  

Due to Scarlett’s concerns with her family, and to avoid any unnecessary embarrassments for them, she and Daniel eloped after a mildly short period of engagement. Scarlett’s family was just about livid, but for her it was just another bitter pill to swallow.  She had been butting heads with them for years and she would not her family starting to dictate what she did now. Any attempt at a more lavish wedding would only have done that.

To add insult to injury (as far as Scarlett’s family was concerned, anyway) Prince Oscar himself took the time to come meet Scarlett and personally congratulate her.

Due to their constant intimacy during a rather long honeymoon, Scarlett was already pregnant when they got back to Norberg. She had to shift regularly between staying at home and doing a few short trips, until the final weeks of her pregnancy when she was at home.

Naomi’s life

Perhaps as a surprise when she was born from such a stormy mother, their baby, a girl who they called Naomi, actually had a smooth birth, though her strong crying seemed determined to make up for it.

After growing conflicts with Scarlett’s side of the family, and as Daniel’s father had passed away when Naomi was months old, the Turner couple and their child left Norberg when Naomi was only two years old, and since then, she lived in all sorts of places over the Ever Realm. Satu, Corinthia, Friezenburg, Isleworth… you could name it, she was all but certain to have at least heard of it if not actually been there. That said, a place she never went back to was Norberg.

One thing in common those places tended to have was that work would often keep her mother away for extended periods, sometimes even during important days like birthdays or Christmas.

But as Naomi grew up, both Daniel and Scarlett decided that maybe she needed a place she could call home. So, when Naomi was eleven years old, she and Daniel settled in Avalor on what was meant to be a temporary basis while Scarlett sought for a more permanent residence.

Avalor turned out to be a pleasant place, and while there always seemed to be something off about the kingdom, neither Naomi nor her parents could exactly tell what. It helped that, thanks to them being foreigners, to Scarlett having a fairly close relationship with Norberg’s royal family, and to Daniel having a job that entailed close contact with foreign ships, Shuriki made sure that they only got the most possibly pleasant view of the kingdom, even allowing them Navidad (or Christmas, as they knew it) traditions, one of the few she didn’t forbid (due to the large crowd of foreigners living in the harbor).

Naomi did get her suspicions that something was wrong, as none of the kids in school would strike up a friendship with her. They did not tease or bully her, but they seemed to walk on eggshells around her. The classmate that talked to her the most was Mateo, a kid who nobody talked to either for some reason, but whenever Naomi tried to figure out why, he would find any motive at all to change subjects.

Both Daniel and Scarlett tried to get to the bottom of the matter, but the school staff was just as evasive. The moment any kid started actually bullying Naomi, they’d take action, but as long as they simply didn’t want to be her friends, they couldn’t do anything, as they couldn’t force anyone to be anyone’s friend.

As a result, Avalor actually was the first kingdom where Naomi had trouble striking up relationships with kids at school. She did find companionship by swimming with dolphins and the occasional whale, but it just was not the same thing. After some time, a few of the kids started coming around somewhat, and while they seemed to keep her at arm’s length, they would talk to her a bit more, and include her in some things. But it still was not enough to erase Naomi’s or her parents’ suspicions.

Still, all three of them (as Scarlett had been at home at the time) got a shock when they learned they had been living under a murderous tyrant’s rule.

Naturally, the discovery was shocking enough that Scarlett thought to postpone her next trip, which had only been a few days away by the time Shuriki was overthrown. But Daniel and Naomi reassured her that she could go, claiming they would be alright. Eventually, Scarlett agreed to go, leaving only two days before her daughter met Princess Elena.

Over the next months, Scarlett went to various kingdoms in the realm to find a location she deemed as good enough… and eventually she felt she had gotten it when she went to Norberg and now King Oscar offered her a very good position in his navy. While her relationship with her family was no better at this point (at least with those that were still alive, as many had passed away in the intervening years) Scarlett believed that her daughter would want to make a home in Norberg, so she accepted the offer and sailed back to Avalor to share the good news.

She ended up having quite a surprise when it turned out Naomi had already made a home in Avalor. While Naomi had told her about many of the recent events in her letters, Scarlett had never known her daughter was so important to the kingdom, or that she would have already made a home there.

But however it had happened, it had happened, and Naomi’s happiness was more important, so Scarlett agreed to stay in Avalor.

And in time, she came to think that the home her family ended up making there was far better.

[beefyboybarnes]

· Sparring part 1·

{Bucky Barnes x reader || one shot/mini-series}

based on the prompt: “Was that supposed to hurt?” from this list. (send in requests!)

you’re the newest member of the avengers team, only having been at the compound for about 2 months, and you have the power of invisibility. you and buck spar in the training room and it ends with the two of you getting hot and heavy.

this will probably be a mini-series of some sort considering how much background the reader character has. i wanna explore it more xx edit: part 2 is here

warnings: reader getting her ass beat, heavy kissing, slight smut / implications

{3k words} sparring masterlist - main masterlist

═════

The hardest thing about being the newest Avenger was the constant feeling of having to prove yourself.

Steve, unsurprisingly, had recruited you to join when the team had been informed by Fury of a possible asset the government had been tracking. You really should have tried harder to stay off of security camera footage. Disappearing and reappearing seemingly out of thin air in the middle of a parking lot tended to raise some eyebrows.

The ability to manipulate light (to varying extent) lead to invisibility. Accepting Steve’s proposal meant you’d be kept out of the government’s hands, what with their growing interest in you and your powers.

You’d only been at the compound for a couple months so you were still very wary of agreeing to let their doctors or specialists run any tests. They had a lot of theories as to what caused your condition. All you could say about your gift with certainty was that it had something to do with your cells. Tony had scoffed incredulously when you’d voiced that at breakfast the day after your arrival, as if he knew so much more about the gift than that. (He didn’t.)

You’d been in the custody of a foster family ever since you’d been discovered seemingly abandoned in a stroller in an emergency waiting room close to midnight. You were only a few months old at the time. At least they’d had the decency to leave me in a hospital. The massive amount of animosity you felt towards your parents had quickly led to you acting out. It wasn’t until you were well into your teenage years that you paired what they did with the reality of some people’s lives. If they were trying to give you a better home life, it had worked. But despite your foster dads being literal angels, you couldn’t pull yourself out of the bad crowd you’d fallen into.

Now in your mid-twenties, you were already living in New York several states away from your dads when Captain America came knocking at your door to recruit you. With your criminal record consisting mostly of shoplifting and b&e’s in your younger years, Steve -against his better judgement, reasoned that it wouldn’t be that hard to get you pardoned in the eyes of the government.

You’d asked to be kept out of the public’s eye, what with your dads being oblivious of your gift (and the fact they’d worry themselves to death if they knew you were out fighting supercharged villains). Steve’d joked that it wouldn’t be too hard keeping you unseen. At your furrowed brow he’d floundered to elaborate.

“Because you can- you can go invisible.”

“No, yeah, I got it the first time.”

═════

Constantly feeling like you needed to prove yourself came with challenging almost every member of the team to fight you. Except for Bruce. You weren’t an idiot.

“Come on old man, scared you’ll break a hip?”

Bucky scoffed into his coffee.

“Yeah, actually, just not one of mine.”

You cocked your head. “Please. I can take you.”

He raised his eyebrows at you before returning his attention to the newspaper in front of him.

“Come on. I have too much adrenaline right now, I need to spar with someone.”

“So ask Steve.”

“He’s busy.” You mumbled before attempting a please-take-pity-on-me puppy face.

He looked up from the paper to you. “You sure you know what you’re getting yourself into?”

It was your turn to scoff. “I spar with Steve all the time. You guys are pretty much the exact same strength. For fuck’s sake, I spar with Natasha.” You looked out the window behind Bucky with a fake wistful gaze. “Her thigh muscles could level cities..”

He grumbled something unintelligible under his breath.

“Jealous?” Your mind seemed to think it was a good idea to direct the extreme energy you were feeling towards cocky confidence.

Bucky scowled. “Not on your life.”

You grinned. “Don’t worry Buck, my love for Nat is purely platonic.”

He dropped the paper he was holding and rubbed his face with his hands before looking up at you. His expression had transitioned so quickly from annoyed to calm it was unsettling.

“Fine.”

The sinister grin that accompanied had your stomach instantly twisting in ropes.

Maybe you should’ve just asked Steve. You knew for a fact he wasn’t busy and would’ve been more than happy to spar. You internally rolled your eyes at yourself. You’ve been wanting to challenge Bucky since you’d arrived at the compound. It’ll be fine. He’ll go easy on you.

═════

“Fuck!”

You rolled to your side groaning. Bucky had just thrown you to the ground for the hundredth time in the last 45 minutes.

“Giving in yet?”

He was very much not going easy on you. What you’d thought would be a piece of cake for you quickly turned into a bloodbath when Bucky had announced the rule no disappearing.

“You need to be able to defend yourself without your powers.” He’d reasoned.

“Why? I’ll always have them. They’ve been with me since I was eight. They’re not going to disappear now.”

“What if you can’t focus enough to disappear? If an enemy can successfully break your concentration every few seconds you won’t be able to hold your invisibility. Self-defence and hand-to-hand is a necessity.”

Bucky offered his flesh hand down to you. You ignored it and ungracefully pulled yourself back up. “How is pummelling me teaching me anything?”

Bucky took a few steps towards you. “If you were smarter in your attacks this wouldn’t be a pummelling.”

You narrowed your eyes further at him. “Don’t pretend you’re not enjoying this.”

His face lifted into a grin and despite your annoyance at his cocky attitude, you could feel the corner of your mouth twitch. You turned away from Bucky to hide the smile that quickly grew. It dropped when you felt him sweep your legs out from behind you, landing you face first on the mat.

you moaned in not-entirely-fake pain and turned your face to lie your cheek against the floor. “What the hell was that?” you mumbled into the foam.

“You turned your back on your opponent.”

“We were taking a break!”

He chuckled above you. “Did I say we were on a break?”

Your exasperation turned to rage and you forced yourself back on your feet. “You’re a real dick, Barnes.”

“You asked for this, Doll.”

You pushed against his chest in anger. He barely wavered.

“Was that supposed to hurt?”

You went to throw a punch to his smug face but he caught your fist easily and spun you around so his chest was to your back, holding your hand to your opposite side with his flesh one. His unbridled laughter made your face redden further and you tried to not let the feeling of his chest rumbling against you quell your anger. Had you two ever been this physically close? Your pulse was racing and not just because of the exertion.

He let go of you after a moment and stepped back, his warmth leaving your space and suddenly you could breathe again. You turned and watched him walk towards the bench his gym bag was sitting on. After a long pull from his water bottle, he held the bottom of his t-shirt in his free hand and pulled it up, using it to dry his mouth.

The skin of someone’s lower back didn’t usually have the power to turn you into a puddle of soup but in this moment it did. You continued to watch him check his phone, hating that Bucky had such an effect on you. You two had never even had a real conversation, this was probably the closest you’d gotten to bonding, and he’d been nothing but a dick to you in the past almost hour.

So why did you like looking at him so much? You shook your head to clear it and refocused on Bucky’s relaxed stance as he scrolled through his phone.

“You turned your back on your opponent.”

Before you could convince yourself not to, you made the small distance that separated you and Bucky, and leapt towards his back. He turned at the last second and caught you in his arms, letting out a surprised noise, something between a yelp and a laugh, before dropping his phone and grabbing your legs which were now wrapped around his waist. Hands gripping at his shoulders, you tried to push all your weight forward to force him to the ground. You clung to him like a koala, refusing to give up as he tried to push you off, hands at your ribs.

You needed to topple his balance to get him to the floor so you dropped your connected ankles down over his ass and tightened them around his lower thighs. Pulling them towards you and pushing his shoulders away with your hands had him pulling his hands from your sides to stabilise behind him as he fell backwards onto the mat.

His eyes closed in pain with a groan as he rested his head back. You straightened yourself on his chest, knees on either side of his ribs. You placed your hands on his chest and smiled triumphantly, panting slightly. He cracked his eyes open and couldn’t help the grin that lit his face as he took you in. Straddling his chest, face flushed, hair wild, eyes even wilder, chest heaving, looking all around very dishevelled. Your skin was covered in dew making you look all the more soft. Have you ever looked more beautiful than this moment? Bucky thought distractedly.

You slapped his pectoral muscle playfully to get his attention. “I pinned you.”

He couldn’t bring himself to be annoyed when you were looking at him like that. Surprised self-pride had never looked so angelic.

“You did.”

“You shouldn’t have-“ His hands moved to your hips and your words got caught in your mouth. “You shouldn’t have.. turned your back.” You stuttered. Bucky’s smile turned into a smirk. “On me.” finishing breathily.

Bucky hummed in agreement. You tried to not revel in the vibration of his chest. You remembered something and turned your head towards where Bucky had been standing when you tackled him. You spotted his phone lying a meter away and huffed. “I think you broke your screen.” You teased.

Bucky couldn’t care less about the condition of his phone right now. He was looking up at you in awe and you seemed to be completely oblivious. You turned your attention back to him and he choked on a breath at the look you gave him.

“What are you staring at?” Bucky swallowed. “You.”

You raised your eyebrows. “Do I really look like that much of a mess?”

“You look beautiful.” You took a deep breath to steady your breathing and instantly regretted it when his cologne or whatever that heavenly smell was enveloped your senses. You turned your face away and scoffed. “Don’t try to sweet talk me out of my victory, I’m covered in sweat.”

Bucky’s grip tightened softly on your hips. Your eyes snapped back to his. “You do. You look.. unravelled.”

His eyes were looking at you so intensely you had to look away again. Staring at your hands on his heaving chest. Anywhere but his face. “You’re being awfully nice, for someone who just a minute ago was kicking my ass and calling me lazy.”

“I never called you lazy.”

“You called my punches lazy.”

Bucky hummed again. His flesh hand lifted towards you and he almost timidly brushed your hair back from your sweaty face. His knuckles brushed down your cheek and all the hard work you’d been putting into bringing your heart rate down was thrown out the window. You strained to keep your breathing normal. You weren’t going to let him see how much he affected you.

The metal hand that was still on your hip pulled you closer while his flesh hand cupped your cheek. You instinctively leaned into it and he guided your face closer to his. You were so close that you could feel his breath on your face. You could faintly smell the coffee from this morning. When he talked you felt the rumbling run through your whole body.

“Can I kiss you?”

You tried to keep your face neutral. Really, you did. Feigning nonchalance and focusing on keeping your tone flat, you said, “I won’t stop you.” It came out as more of a whisper and a wave of embarrassment came down on you because of how desperate you sounded. So much for keeping an air of composure.

He raised his eyebrows at you.

You cleared your throat begrudgingly. “Yes, Bucky, you can.”

His lips twitched into a small smile.

“Are you gonna make me say please?” You huffed.

Bucky looped the hand on your cheek around the back of your neck and pulled the two of you together. Your lips pressed in a long but chaste kiss and when he went to pull away you brought him back to your mouth. He opened his mouth and you were hooked on the taste of him. His hand curled into the base of your hair and you could feel him smiling into the kiss.

You fell forward until you were chest to chest and one of your arms landed next to his head, propping you up. You tangled the other hand into the hair your fingers had been itching to comb through since you’d met Bucky two months ago. You unconsciously gave a soft tug and he grunted into your mouth. The sound had you moving your hips down to find his and then he let out a much more needy noise. Instinctively you pushed your core against his and only when his metal fingers squeezed your hip did you realise what you’d just done.

You pulled back to catch your breath. Bucky panted underneath you with a blush on his cheeks and your face flushed. You were embarrassed and incredibly horny and you can’t believe you just grinded on Bucky during your first kiss.

Bucky gulped in a breath. “Why’d you stop?”

Your eyes widened further. “I thought.. I was, y’know, going too fast..” You were mumbling by the end of your sentence.

“It was just a kiss.”

You deliberately pushed your ass against his growing hard-on through his sweatpants for a second and then raised your brow at him stubbornly. He grinned bashfully and opened and shut his mouth several times before deciding on what he was going to say. “It was a good kiss.”

You pushed past your embarrassment and grinned back and when buck’s flesh hand pulled your face back to his and the metal hand moved you against his lap you didn’t complain.

═════

You were about five minutes into the session and both of you were panting and flushed and grinding against the other. You’d only pulled away to catch your breath and even then it hadn’t been for long. You could feel your wetness and you hoped to god Bucky couldn’t feel it through your gym leggings. But this time when he pulled back to breathe he had a smug smile on his face and you knew he could. His hand moved from your hip to just over your ass and with a nod from you he settled his hand and squeezed. You bit his lip a little too hard to tell him off and he grinned against your mouth.

His flesh hand now moved to cup the side of your neck and he began to pepper kisses up and down your neck and across your collarbone. You were trying to keep control of your reactions but you couldn’t hold back all the noises you were making. Bucky couldn’t either. You let out a particularly loud moan and jutted your hips when he found the sweet spot below your ear and Bucky let out an equal moan in response.

You must have looked quite a mess rubbing against him in the middle of the gym floor, gasping for breath. But whenever Bucky did open his eyes he’d look up at you like you were the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen and the shine in his eyes was enough to convince you that you were.

You pulled back reluctantly and when Bucky pouted underneath you, you leaned back down to quickly peck his lips a couple times. You were thinking of a way to phrase what you wanted to say when Bucky opened his mouth to say it for you.

His mouth snapped back shut when the sound of footsteps approached the training room and Steve’s voice carried through the open door, cutting through the tense silence.

“Y/N, you in here? Wanna spar? I know this morning you said you were covered but you usually ask me on Saturdays so I kept my whole schedule clear and now I have nothing to d-“ Steve’s rambling was cut short when he cleared the wall and took in the couple on the mat a few meters away from him.

Steve’s cheeks instantly flushed pink in a blush and his eyes shot to the ceiling. “Ah.”

“Steve. Get. Out.” Bucky growled in embarrassment.

“I see you two are busy sparring already.” Steve let out an embarrassed laugh and turned on his heel and you couldn’t help but wonder if he was embarrassed for himself or for you. Only when he was well away from the training room did you let out the breath you were holding.

Bucky cupped your cheek with his hand and turned your attention back to him.

“Hey, you okay?”

You reluctantly opened your eyes and took in Bucky’s face. His blush had doubled but he still looked utterly satisfied.

“Yeah. I think I should just.. go, take a shower or something.” You awkwardly climbed off Bucky’s lap and calmly bolted for the door, grabbing your gym bag on the way out.

Bucky stared in bewilderment at the door you’d just disappeared through and let his head fall back to the mat with a sigh. Even with the sting of your hasty departure he couldn’t stop the smile that broke through onto his face.

part 2

═════

taglist: (ask to be added) @camillechan @fightmeandmy100fandoms @imsunnysu @disneychic8 @frayedichor @girlwhoisfearless

[letmeletmetrashyourlove]

God Dammit

Summary: Billy shows up at his girlfriend’s house after he wakes up on the floor of the Byers’ home. 

Prompts: “How dare you?” “Stop talking” 

Billy leaned on the doorway as I opened the door. He stared at me through hooded eyes, his body slumped forward. Dried blood was caked under his nose and he rubbed his neck.

        “Jesus Christ, what happened to you!?” I investigated as Billy staggered in my front door. This wasn’t drunk Billy. Drunk Billy was deafening and boisterous. But this wasn’t hurt Billy either. Hurt Billy refused to look me in the eye.

        “Harrington.” He grumbled, stumbling over his own feet. I decided not to ask him why he was hobbling around like a wounded animal.

He steadied himself by planting his hands on my waist. I took him by the shoulders, directing him into the kitchen to sit at the table. He sat down, his feet splaying out from under him as he threw himself into the chair. He put his head back, covering his eyes as I flipped on the lights.

        “Ohh. God. Turn that off.” He groaned.

        “What happened?” I inquired as I complied with his wishes.

        “Max was missing-”

        “Max was missing!? Is she okay!?” I interrogated.

        “Oh god, please don’t yell.” He complained, “I found her at the Byers’ house with Harrington and that kid she’s been hanging out with?”

        “Lucas?”  

Max and I had a relatively close relationship. She told me things that she couldn’t tell her brother and I promised I’d keep them a secret. I knew she was with Lucas last night. I saw her sneak out. Lucas is a wonderful kid, sweet and funny.

        “Yeah. And I told her not to hang around with him. And I wanted to teach her a lesson. So I roughed him up a little bit. And then Steve was bein-”

        “Woah, woah, woah, wait a minute. Stop talking.”  I cut off, holding my hands up to stop Billy. “You roughed up a middle schooler!?”

He clasped his hands over his ears, shooting me an anguished expression.

        “Are you fucking kidding me!?”  I hollered.

        “Oh come on, you know boys that age want nothing good out of girls!” He defended.

        “So you were worried about Max?” I guffawed, dumbfounded that he would use being protective as a pardon for hurting a boy half his size.

        “Yeah! I was worried about her! I told her to stay away from him!” He reasoned.

        “Did you ever think that if maybe you didn’t treat her like shit, she might actually listen to you!?” I proposed, throwing my hands up in frustration.

        “I’m her older brother, she’s supposed to listen to me no matter what!” He argued.

        “Billy, the first time I called her your sister, you told me not to call her that! You don’t get to play older brother only when it serves you!” I shouted.

        “Look, I get enough of this shit at home, okay!” He roared, looking at me with tears in his eyes, “Jesus Christ, you sound like my dad!”

I took a couple steps back in dismay. He recognized the damage he had done with his words, how a lump formed in my throat as I gulped. He recognized the damage, but I couldn’t tell if he regretted it. I had invariably been there for Billy after what his father had done to him. I can’t tell you how many split lips I cleaned up, how many times I put ice on his bruised cheeks. How many times I let him cry into my shoulder until he fell asleep.

        “How dare you compare me to that scumbag?” I hissed, pointing a denouncing finger at him.  “I want you to do better, Billy. That doesn’t make me like your dad. That makes me a decent fucking girlfriend. And if you don’t see that, then you can leave.”

He hauled himself up out of the chair, squaring up with me. His presence was intimidating, and I felt myself flinch away. He let out a scoff, brushing past me and heading out the door.

I found my gaze following him as he disappeared. I hadn’t expected him to listen to me. I hadn’t expected him to just go. I couldn’t give him the satisfaction of calling him back, so I watched him go out the door, slamming it behind him.

I peered out the window as he took off. He didn’t have his car with him, he staggered up the street, going the wrong way to get home.

God dammit, Billy.

I let out a groan, snagging my keys and dashing out the door. I climbed into my car and chased after him, slowing to a crawl as I opened my window.

        “Where the hell are you going?” I exhaled, glancing over at him through the passenger side window.

He ignored me, dragging a cigarette from his pocket and lighting it. He drew in a breath before letting the smoke billow out of his mouth.

        “Goddammit, Billy.” I grumbled, “Home’s the other way.”

He continued to ignore me, tapping the ashes off of his cigarette. His stride grew quicker as I pursued him,

        “Swallow your fucking pride and get in the car, asshole!” I ordered, honking the horn at him. He jumped, the sound likely making his headache pound harder. He shot me a dirty look before muttering something under his breath. He shook his head, approaching the car,

        “And you can’t fucking smoke in here.” I reminded as he reached for the handle. He flung his smoke on the ground, grinding it out under his boot.

I let out a sigh, pulling a U-turn and heading towards his street. He reached for the radio, likely an attempt to fill the uncomfortable silence. As promptly as he switched it on, I switched it off. He let out a groan.

        “I don’t wanna go home.” He complained, studying his hands and fumbling with the buttons on his shirt sleeves.

        “You shoulda thought of that before you insulted me in my own house. Because now you have nowhere else to go.” I rebutted.

        “You were being a bitch.”

        “Excuse me!?” I bellowed, “You tried to beat up a middle schooler and I’m the bitch.”

        “You followed me.” He remarked, incapable of coming up with a valid comeback to my last comment.

        “Yeah, because you’re obviously fucking high and I don’t want something like what happened to that Byers’ kid to happen to you.” I snapped, “Because I give a damn about your wellbeing.”

        “I’m not high.” He grumbled, throwing his head back against the headrest.

        “Then what?” I challenged, “Because something's off.”

        “Max stabbed me with a tranquilizer.” He admitted, his voice gravelly as he did so.

        “Wait, what?” I sputtered, shooting him a questioning glare.

        “I… I uh… I knocked Harrington on his ass… and I was beating the crap outta him.”

        “Goddammit, Billy.” I breathed. He had been infatuated with Steve ever since Billy showed up in Hawkins. Steve threatened his virility, somebody who needed to be knocked down a peg. Despite Steve making it evident that he couldn’t give less of a shit about his social status, Billy persisted. He played rough during basketball practice, one-upped Steve in all the drinking games at parties. He worked to beat the athletic records Steve had set. All as a way to shield his insecurities. Most of it was harmless. It didn’t hurt anybody when Billy beat Steve’s record for the fastest mile, or the most three-pointers scored in one game. It didn’t hurt anybody, except maybe Billy, when he did more shots in a minute than Steve had. But his antagonism had taken a violent turn, and now the two of them had become physical and I couldn’t pardon that.

        “She uh… grabbed some fucking needle and stabbed me in the neck.”

        “Well you fucking deserved it, didn’t you?” I chortled, proud of Max for taking a stand.

        “Yeah.” He accepted.

I rolled to a stop at the stop sign. Looking over at the boy beside me.

        “Just… just don’t make me go home.” He pleaded.

        “You need to apologize to Max,” I told him.

        “Oh, come on. Please don’t make me do this right now.”

I pulled out in front of his house, parking in the driveway.  

        “Come talk to me once you’ve apologized to her,” I told him as he climbed out. He slammed the door hard enough to shake the car.

Something had to give with this boy, and I suspect apologizing to his baby sister was the first step.

TAGS: @ssweet-empowerment @happelu970 @johnohhsosexy @enigmasareoverrated @samuel-maurice455 @starry-eyed-colour-bandit 

[galfridus1]

Hii could you do monspiet x derieri for the one shot challenge for number 3? Thxx

Hi. Thank you so much for the ask! Really sorry it’s taken so long to respond, but I hope you like this. Inspired by @thisisaverycreativeurl here is a song fic, this one based on ‘Swinging’ by Black Box Recorder.

If you let me join your gangI’ll show you things you never dreamed of

“Quick! This way! Hurry up!”

Monspeet had hurled himself after her, running as fast as his legs would allow. From the sound of the panting and pounding of feet on tarmac, he had been able to tell that Fraudrin and Galand were not far behind, but he had not really cared. His mind had been fixed on his own survival as his heart raced, his limbs aching from the exertion as adrenaline coursed through his veins. Monspeet had nearly collapsed as a hand pulled him roughly into a clump of bushes and he felt cold, thin fingers pressing over his mouth in a silent instruction to keep quiet. He smiled to himself; say whatever you like about Derieri, life with her was exciting.

After school we’ll steal a carDrive until the feeling changes

That was their first foray into housebreaking, and it had come off too; a result of Derieri’s grand ideas and his own careful planning. The homeowners were out, the security system easy to disable and the contents rather valuable. The haul they had taken gave them a flush of success: until then it had been shoplifting and the odd bit of car theft. But this? This was the big time! The four of them had celebrated, necking Don Perignon from the bottle as they counted the spoils. And they had Derieri to thank for it.

“Nice of you to show up,” he murmured as the air shifted behind him, the smell of her perfume floating to him on the breeze. “Bit of a dramatic place to meet.” He looked straight ahead at star-dusted horizon, ignoring the steep drop at his feet as he waited for Derieri to join him. This clifftop was a local beauty spot, but the choice of location clearly meant something to his partner in crime.

Are you a hardcore hooligan?Did you really burn the old school down?

“Don’t be an ass!” Derieri stepped up beside him and he could feel her arm brush slightly against his. Monspeet turned towards her, unsurprised to see the hard glint of her eyes in the moonlight. He had been expecting a confrontation.

“You stopped me! Why?” Derieri spat, her hands curled into fists at her sides. Monspeet held his breath, then let it go all at once, the action bringing some temporary relief to the tension he felt. She had sought him out in the beginning, he remembered ruefully: a girl lacking a home wanting somewhere to go. Someone had told her he was responsible for burning down the old school building, the lie enough to catch the wayward stray’s attention.

If I set fire to you nowWould you even make a sound?

“What you were suggesting is simply inconceivable.” Monspeet held his ground, returning the cold stare as Derieri bristled with obvious fury. “Stealing is one thing but this was…”

“The next fricking level! That’s what it is.” Derieri looked at him crossly, her lips pressed close together. “Come on! You don’t have to pretend with me. You’re just a coward!”

“This is not cowardice, it’s prudence,” Monspeet insisted, forcing his voice to stay level. “The consequences if we had been caught…”

It’s the end of the affairBet you never thought you’d even get this far

“We wouldn’t have been! We never are. Look down, I dare you!” she snapped, gesturing at the cliff top. “This is how far we’ve come. How far I have brought you. You can’t stop now!”

“I personally feel what you propose is morally reprehensible,” Monspeet stated evenly, ensuring he appeared unperturbed. In reality his heart was beating wildly in his chest, and he could feel his fingers twitching.

Derieri snorted, her eyes narrowing to slits. “We’re burglars you ass! We’re not the good guys!”

“But we do not hurt anyone, not physically,” Monspeet protested. He was not a coward and he would prove it to her. “I will not agree to this. Not now and not ever.”

And I dare you to look downLet’s see how brave you really are

Monspeet could remember the day it had all gone sour, the events seared on his brain with vivid clarity. He was practically there, in the small flat they shared, Fraudrin and Galand sitting round the kitchen table as Derieri explained her latest venture. The house she had found was certainly worth the risk; an elderly couple with a lifetime of savings kept on the premises. Monspeet had been all for the plan until it was clear Derieri did not wish to follow their usual MO.

“Pathetic!” Derieri stamped her foot. “I was only going to rough the old gits up a bit until they told us the code! Who cares…”

“I do. I refuse to hurt people for no good reason,” Monspeet said haughtily as he looked at the girl, although the sight of her almost made him break his resolve. “Nothing can justify that. There are plenty of other houses we can target, ones without impregnable safes.”

All the people have to sayWe don’t like you, go away

Laughter, hard and cruel followed his statement and Monspeet felt a chill right through to his bones that had nothing to do with the cold night breeze. “You don’t get it, do you?” Derieri glared at him, a fierce smile on her lips. “You get on or get out in this game. If you won’t join me then I’ll do it without you.”

Truth be told, Monspeet had expected this, had waited in anticipation for the day Derieri would say those words. Ever since she had taken him to bed, tying the threads of their lives together and his heart to hers, he had waited for the moment their fates would ultimately be severed. He had known something so precious, so perfectly dear to him, had absolutely no prospect of lasting forever.

“Fraudrin and Galand agree,” Derieri continued as she placed her hands on her hips. “They’re sick of this life! Sick of having nothing!” Monspeet tried to think of a reply, his brain buzzing as he looked out at the sky, wondering if the answer lay in pitch black of the night or the small pinpricks of neon from the street lamps below.

Feeling rotten to the coreAnd I don’t need you anymore

A pause. “Your things are outside the door,” Derieri murmured and for the first time Monspeet thought he could detect a twinge of regret in her tone. “They’re all there. No funny business.”

“Well, say something, you ass!” Derieri growled. Monspeet tried, but nothing would come to him. It was like his voice box had shut down, the impending loss pressing down hard on his larynx. His tongue felt like sandpaper, his mouth feeling dry as he attempted to force something out of his mouth.

No I don’t needYou anymore

“Fine!” Derieri stepped back from him, one last look of fury shot in his direction before she walked away, heading towards the road. Monspeet watched her progress, wondering if he should call her back before deciding against it. She was clearly not going to change her mind, and neither  was he.

Still, it was with some surprise that he watched as Derieri approached a stranger standing next to a parked vehicle. The man was tall, his frame bulky, his messy silver hair shining in the light of the moon. As Derieri took his hand, allowing him to usher her into the car, Monspeet felt the ache bloom in his chest. Lips pressed together he watched as the car drove away, the cry of pain he wanted to vocalise dying in his throat.

[didanawisgi]

The quest to crystallize time

Bizarre forms of matter called time crystals were supposed to be physically impossible. Now they’re not.

Elizabeth Gibney

08 March 2017

Christopher Monroe spends his life poking at atoms with light. He arranges them into rings and chains and then massages them with lasers to explore their properties and make basic quantum computers. Last year, he decided to try something seemingly impossible: to create a time crystal.

The name sounds like a prop from Doctor Who, but it has roots in actual physics. Time crystals are hypothetical structures that pulse without requiring any energy — like a ticking clock that never needs winding. The pattern repeats in time in much the same way that the atoms of a crystal repeat in space. The idea was so challenging that when Nobel prizewinning physicist Frank Wilczek proposed the provocative concept1 in 2012, other researchers quickly proved there was no way to create time crystals.

But there was a loophole — and researchers in a separate branch of physics found a way to exploit the gap. Monroe, a physicist at the University of Maryland in College Park, and his team used chains of atoms they had constructed for other purposes to make a version of a time crystal2 (see 'How to create a time crystal'). “I would say it sort of fell in our laps,” says Monroe.

And a group led by researchers at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, independently fashioned time crystals out of 'dirty' diamonds3. Both versions, which are published this week in Nature, are considered time crystals, but not how Wilczek originally imagined. “It's less weird than the first idea, but it's still fricking weird,” says Norman Yao, a physicist at the University of California, Berkeley, and an author on both papers.

They are also the first examples of a remarkable type of matter — a collection of quantum particles that constantly changes, and never reaches a steady state. These systems draw stability from random interactions that would normally disrupt other kinds of matter. “This is a new kind of order, one that was previously thought impossible. That's extremely exciting,” says Vedika Khemani, part of the Harvard team and previously part of the group that originally theorized the existence of the new kind of state. Experimental physicists are already plotting how to exploit the traits of these strange systems in quantum computers and super-sensitive magnetic sensors.

Break time

Wilczek dreamt up time crystals as a way to break the rules. The laws of physics are symmetrical in that they apply equally to all points in space and time. Yet many systems violate that symmetry. In a magnet, atomic spins line up rather than pointing in all directions. In a mineral crystal, atoms occupy set positions in space, and the crystal does not look the same if it is shifted slightly. When a transformation causes properties to change, physicists call that symmetry-breaking, and it is everywhere in nature — at the root of magnetism, superconductivity and even the Higgs mechanism that gives all particles mass.

In 2012, Wilczek, now at Stockholm University, wondered why symmetry never broke spontaneously in time and whether it would be possible to create something in which it did. He called it a time crystal. Experimentalists imagined a quantum version of this entity as perhaps a ring of atoms that would rotate endlessly, cycling and returning to its initial configuration. Its properties would be endlessly synchronized in time, just as atom positions are correlated in a crystal. The system would be in its lowest energy state, but its movement would require no external force. It would, in essence, be a perpetual-motion machine, although not one that produces usable energy.

“From a first glance at the idea, one would say this has to be wrong,” says Yao. Almost by definition, a system in its lowest energy state does not vary in time. If it did, that would mean it had excess energy to lose, says Yao, and the rotation would soon halt. “But Frank convinced the community that the problem was more subtle than maybe it seemed to be,” he says. Perpetual motion was not without precedent in the quantum world: in theory, superconductors conduct electricity forever (although the flow is uniform, so they show no variation in time).

“This is a new kind of order, one that was previously thought impossible.”

These conflicting issues swam around the head of Haruki Watanabe as he stepped out of the first oral exam for his PhD at Berkeley. He had been presenting work on symmetry breaking in space, and his supervisor asked him about the wider implications of Wilczek's time crystal. “I couldn't answer the question in that exam, but it interested me,” says Watanabe, who doubted such an entity was even feasible. “I wondered, 'how can I convince people that it's not possible?'”

Together with physicist Masaki Oshikawa at the University of Tokyo, Watanabe began trying to prove his intuitive answer in a mathematically rigorous way. By phrasing the problem in terms of correlations in space and time between distant parts of the system, the pair derived a theorem in 2015 showing that time crystals were impossible to create for any system in its lowest-energy state4. The researchers also verified that time crystals were impossible for any system in equilibrium — one that has reached a steady state of any energy.

To the physics community, the case was clear cut. “That seemed to be a no-go,” says Monroe. But the proof left a loophole. It did not rule out time crystals in systems that have not yet settled into a steady state and are out of equilibrium. Around the world, theorists began thinking about ways to create alternative versions of time crystals.

Particle soup

When the breakthrough came, it arrived from an unlikely corner of physics, where researchers weren't thinking about time crystals at all.

Shivaji Sondhi, a theoretical physicist at Princeton University, New Jersey, and his colleagues were looking at what happened when certain isolated quantum systems, made of soups of interacting particles, are repeatedly given a kick. Textbook physics says that the systems should heat up and descend into chaos. But in 2015, Sondhi's team predicted that under certain conditions, they would instead club together to form a phase of matter that doesn't exist in equilibrium — a system of particles that would show subtle correlations never seen before — and that would repeat a pattern in time5.

That proposal caught the attention of Chetan Nayak, one of Wilczek's former students, now at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and at Microsoft's nearby Station Q. Nayak and his colleagues soon realized that this strange form of out-of-equilibrium matter would also be a type of time crystal6. But not Wilczek's kind: it would not be in its lowest energy state, and it would require a regular kick to pulse. But it would gain a steady rhythm that doesn't match that of the instigating kick, and that means it would break time symmetry.

“It's like playing with a jump rope, and somehow our arm goes around twice but the rope only goes around once,” says Yao. This is a weaker kind of symmetry breaking than Wilczek imagined: in his, the rope would oscillate all by itself.

When Monroe heard about this proposed system, he initially didn't understand it. “The more I read about it, the more intrigued I became,” he says.

Georg Kucsko

Illumination with green light reveals a time crystal formed in a network of electron spins (red) within the defects of a diamond.

Last year, he set about trying to form his atoms into a time crystal. The recipe was incredibly complex, but just three ingredients were essential: a force repeatedly disturbing the particles, a way to make the atoms interact with each other and an element of random disorder. The combination of these, Monroe says, ensures that particles are limited in how much energy they can absorb, allowing them to maintain a steady, ordered state.

In his experiment, this meant repeatedly firing alternating lasers at a chain of ten ytterbium ions: the first laser flips their spins and the second makes the spins interact with each other in random ways. That combination caused the atomic spins to oscillate, but at twice the period they were being flipped. More than that, the researchers found that even if they started to flip the system in an imperfect way, such as by slightly changing the frequency of the kicks, the oscillation remained the same. “The system still locked at a very stable frequency,” says Monroe. Spatial crystals are similarly resistant to any attempt to nudge their atoms from their set spacing, he says. “This time crystal has the same thing.”

At Harvard, physicist Mikhail Lukin tried to do something similar, but in a very different system — a 3D chunk of diamond. The mineral was riddled with around 1 million defects, each harbouring a spin. And the diamond's impurities provided a natural disorder. When Lukin and his team used microwave pulses to flip the spins, they saw the system respond at a fraction of the frequency with which it was being disturbed.

“This is an intriguing development, but to some extent it's an abuse of the term”

Physicists agree that the two systems spontaneously break a kind of time symmetry and therefore mathematically fulfil the time-crystal criteria. But there is some debate about whether to call them time crystals. “This is an intriguing development, but to some extent it's an abuse of the term,” says Oshikawa.

Yao says that the new systems are time crystals, but that the definition needs to be narrowed to avoid including phenomena that are already well understood and not nearly so interesting for quantum physicists.

But Monroe and Lukin's creations are exciting for different reasons, too, says Yao. They seem to be the first, and perhaps simplest, examples of a host of new phases that exist in relatively unexplored out-of-equilibrium states, he says. They could also have several practical applications. One could be quantum simulation systems that work at high temperatures. Physicists often use entangled quantum particles at nanokelvin temperatures, close to absolute zero, to simulate complex behaviours of materials that cannot be modelled on a classical computer. Time crystals represent a stable quantum system that exists way above these temperatures — in the case of Lukin's diamond, at room temperature — potentially opening the door to quantum simulations without cryogenics.

Time crystals could also find use in super-precise sensors, says Lukin. His lab already uses diamond defects to detect tiny changes in temperature and magnetic fields. But the approach has limits,because if too many defects are packed in a small space, their interactions destroy their fragile quantum states. In a time crystal, however, the interactions serve to stabilize, rather than disrupt, so Lukin could harness millions of defects together to produce a strong signal — one that is able to efficiently probe living cells and atom-thick materials.

The same principle of stability from interactions could apply more widely in quantum computing, says Yao. Quantum computers show huge promise, but have long struggled with the opposing challenges of protecting the fragile quantum bits that perform calculations, yet keeping them accessible for encoding and reading out information. “You can ask yourself in the future whether one could find phases where interactions stabilize these quantum bits,” says Yao.

The story of time crystals is a beautiful example of how progress often happens when different strands of thought come together, says Roderich Moessner, director of the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems in Dresden, Germany. And it may be, he says, that this particular recipe proves to be just one of many ways to cook up a time crystal.

Nature 543, 164–166 (09 March 2017) doi:10.1038/543164a

http://www.nature.com/news/the-quest-to-crystallize-time-1.21595?WT.mc_id=TWT_NatureNews

[zevakritpel]

Hell-Bent: Prologue-- Introducing Our Colourful Cast of Characters

Chapter 1>

Fandom: Kuroko no Basuke

Pairing: Aokise, MomoRiko, Kagakuro, MuroMura, more???

u can find this on AO3 lol

Summary: Adult AU, Criminal Underworld AU. Where Kagami Taiga is a young heir suddenly targeted by 6 rather dangerous members of the criminal underworld (each with their own set of personal troubles), and Kuroko is a bodyguard with a dark past.

Warning: Violence, Strong language, a lil dark and angsty sometimes

[Wednesday. Time: 01:03. Meet the Sniper]

Today's lucky item for Cancers is a steel garlic press.

"Oi, Shin-chan. The target will be moving along the second floor, west wall any minute now. You ready?"

Midorima clicks his tongue impatiently and tenses his bandaged fingers against the cool metal of his M24. He's been lying on his stomach for the past half hour, with the kitchen utensil tucked inside his pants' pocket digging into his upper thigh the entire time. Still, with his intense focus and dedication, comfort comes secondary. Naturally.

Of course he's ready.

"Indeed."

The sharpshooter narrows his bright green eyes in concentration, and continues to watch the movements behind the windows of the building adjacent. His position on this warehouse roof  really couldn't be more ideal. No wind either, and just the right amount of clouds in the sky.

Today's lucky numbers for Cancer: 15- 73- 3- 22- 47

Takao is still babbling needlessly into his ear piece, to the point where Midorima is tempted to turn off the sound of his voice completely. This is exactly why he prefers working solo...no, no. He must persevere. In this case, teamwork is important, especially with Takao 'Hawkeye' Kazunari.

"Alright you've got one shot at this, don't miss <3 "

"I never miss."

It's true. He never misses.

Today's target is a corrupt bureaucrat that got way above his head in his dealings with the underground. Pissed off all the wrong people, couldn't have managed to fuck up this hard if he tried.

Middle aged. 180 cm in height. Dark hair, olive skin. Has until now gone through great lengths to avoid facing the consequences for his greedy actions.

And yet the exact millisecond that he enters Midorima's range, his life is forfeit.

Today's horoscope for Cancers:  You'll soon be faced with new challenges, in both work and romance. Advice: Be wary of those who bring up the past.

Midorima takes a deep, calm breath. His hands are perfectly steady; heartbeat unwavering.

"Man proposes; God disposes" he mutters, then pulls the trigger.

[Wednesday. Time: 02:09. Meet the Fake]

"As expected of a model," purrs the drunken businessman, sliding his fat sweaty hand up Kise's thin blue designer shirt and pressing his fingers against the small of the younger man's back.

"Your skin is so smooth . How nice to be so young."

Kise giggles nervously and starts absently toying with the thick cross pendant dangling from the silver chain on his neck. With his free hand, he fishes the lime out of his gin and tonic, drains the rest of the drink in one go.

"Hehe~. That tickles..."

The businessman practically leers at this reaction, but he stops groping Kise in order to take the empty glass from his hands, and saunters over to the hotel room's mini-bar.

"Another G&T?" he asks, pulling a bottle of Beefeater out of the small fridge.

Kise nods an affirmative yes, then he also stands up and walks over to where his new drink is being poured. His bare feet are light and silent against the carpeted floor.

"I'm so glad we moved to a more...private setting. "

"Me too."

Kise hums with a genuine smile, wrapping his arm around the other man's neck. He keeps at the chokehold for a few seconds until the businessman slumps down, out cold.

Ugh. That was a pain in the ass.

Well, okay. Thankfully it didn't come to that.

Planting one foot on the chest of the unconscious body, Kise readjusts his own disheveled clothing before pulling a few zip ties out of his pocket. One to secure the wrists together, and a couple around the ankles, for good measure.

Satisfied with his job of binding the pervy sleeping man, Kise next has to make a call. Quick dial.

"Are you done?" snaps the irritable voice of Kasamatsu on the other end of the line, without so much as a greeting.

"Easy-peasy! It wasn't any fun at all."

"Fun? This isn't a game, Ryouta."

"I know, I know," Kise lies with a pout, twisting his cross necklace around his fingers.

He does not know. Of course this is a game, that's the only way he can get into it.

"But it's lucky I copied that 'seduction' skill from-"

"'Seduction' isn't a skill you can copy, you tacky bimbo. Airheads like you are just naturally good at that shit, which is why I got you to do this job in the first place."

"KYAH ! Did you just praise m-"

"Shut the hell up. "

Kise's smile widens but the tears in his yellow eyes glisten like jewels.

"Anyways, now that you've lured him in, we've got how many hours until someone notices his useless ass is missing?"

"What is it now? 02:15....He says he's just got a meeting at 13:00 today."

"Perfect. I'm coming over to take care of the rest. You sit tight until then."

Kise hangs up with a despondent sigh. He plops himself down on the older man's stomach, which makes for a nice cushion to sit on. This guy's in for a real world of pain, huh?

The young man slips his pendant between his lips, sucking at the silver cross thoughtfully.

Not that this isn't exciting work or anything (it's not), but....Kise can't help but feel his jobs lately have been pretty lackluster. He's not really putting his special skills to use, fucking over these stupid lechers that get themselves into stupid troubles.

Something good better come soon. Otherwise...

The cross falls from Kise's lips onto his chest. Right against his heart.

[Wednesday. Time: 04:04. Meet the Chessmaster]

[white noise feed]

[Wednesday. Time: 23:52. Meet the Blood Knight and the Book]

"Ahh, that smarts a little."

Aomine spits out an alarmingly thick lump of blood and wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. The taste of copper on his lips only further fuels his bloodlust, to the great misfortune of the four men surrounding him.

Not that they're fully aware of this quite yet.

"Listen, I'd love to play mafia with you kids, but I've got some grown up things I'd like to take care of, so why don't you just skip along home-WHOAH OKAY."

After dodging the bullet aimed at his left shoulder, Aomine finds his back pressed up against a brick wall. Behind his favourite nightclub, no less.

"You. You're going to pay for what you did." This coming from punk #3, who would sound a lot more formidable if he didn't look like he was about to cry.

Aomine rubs the side of his face, which still stings a bit from the earlier hit (courtesy of punk #1, who was granted the first number for actually managing to get within face-punching range of Aomine).

"You're going to have to be more specific." he laughs, though he's actually much more serious than his tone would imply.  Aomine is a man who has done many things that could warrant armed pissbabies cornering him in a dark alley under the false illusion that they can harm him in any way.

He tries to mentally run through all the women he's slept with in the past month that could have had jealous lovers; it's too much work, so he gives up.

"Don't play dumb!"

This from punk #2, the gun-wielder, who seems to have realized halfway through that this kind of command is futile on Aomine. He clears his throat to elaborate:

"You've got a lot of nerve showing up in this area after the disrespect you showed our boss."

Aomine squints.

"Our boss.....last night? At the bar across the street? You broke his arm..."

Punk #2 is faltering at Aomine's complete lack of remembrance, but his comrades are growing livid.

"This motherfucker...guess we really should teach him a lesson."

Aomine's heart almost skips a beat when he sees Punk #1 pull a crowbar out of his bag. But his excitement is short-lived: the fight is over before it even begins. It takes less than 3 minutes to curb these shits into the ground and leave them writhing in the same pain and regret their boss experienced yesterday.

Pathetic.

Disappointed, Aomine kicks the unconscious Punk #4 in the ribs one last time, then staggers away from the bloodied scene and wanders off onto the main street.

Before he can brood over his easy win, Aomine spots a familiar someone leaning against a parking sign, waving right at him. That long, silky pink hair, the sweet but kinda shit-eating grin...the unmistakable three sizes-

"Hey, Dai-chan," Momoi smiles, walking up to greet him. She has to tilt her head quite a bit to maintain eye contact.

"I was worried about you after I heard you quit your job, but I'm glad that you're not above picking fights with petty thugs."

Aomine grimaces and covers half his face sheepishly with his fingers.

"Ugh. You saw that?"

"I sure did. Seriously, what the hell happened?"

Aomine would love to answer that. He really would.

"What about you, Satsuki? What brings you to this area?"

Momoi raises her eyebrows, to assure Aomine that his attempt to change the subject is not going unnoticed. However, more pressing issues are at hand.

"Looking for your NEET ass, actually. Here,"

She rummages through her bag--which is full of various papers, as is the lot in life of an information broker--before pulling out a small white envelope and handing it to her old childhood friend.

"What is this?"

"A job offer."

[Thursday. Time: 13:16. Meet the Target and the Phantom]

"Huh? A bodyguard? I don't know what my old man told you, but I can take care of myself."

Kagami Taiga's red eyes are glowing with his usual dose of boundless passion. Passion his family's Head of Security, Riko Aida, wishes he'd put into his studies. Or something. Christ, this kid is such a headache.

"Of course, I'm well aware of your physical prowess and fighting skills, Master Taiga. However, I'm afraid that, given the exposure of your existence as heir to the Kagami empire and...well, other matters-"

Riko pauses for a moment, taking a peek at Kagami's expression, which, though indignant, does not show that he picked up on the poorly explained set of circumstances. Like at all.

"Aside from the usual thugs, I have reason to believe a rather notorious, skilled set of people will be hired to come after you."

"Let them come," Kagami  states rather fervently, slamming his open palm against Riko's wooden desk.

"I'll take them on."

Riko goes through physical pain in an attempt to avoid rolling her eyes. The attempt fails. Her patience has evaporated.

"Alright, well good luck with that. I'm still going to assign a 24-hour guard for you."

"WHA-?!"

"Lower your voice, you brat! He's worked in the underground since a young age, and has a lot of connections with these types of people. Be grateful to me that I'm not putting you on lockdown until this whole thing blows over."

The young Kagami is far from thrilled at this outcome, but even he can see there's no hope of winning this round. He sits back down in his chair with a small grunt of dissatisfaction, crossing his arms over his chest. A little petulant and overexcited, but always respectful. Riko doesn't bother to hide her smirk.

"So?  When do I get to meet this guy?"

"Ah, now that you mention it, "

Riko checks the time on her wristwatch, her brow furrowed slightly.

" I told him to meet me in my office before you got here, but it seems he hasn't shown up yet."

"Uh, actually,"

Riko and Kagami both freeze for a half a second, their blood running cold, faces drained of all colour.

Moving by pure instinct, Riko pulls out a loaded handgun, ready to fire, while Kagami is already up and wielding his chair like a weapon. Both natural fighters are completely ready for bloodshed...until they register the source of the voice.

A small, pale young man, roughly Kagami's age, is standing at the back of the room, right under the small framed portrait of puppies Riko nailed to the wall a couple of weeks ago. (It used to sit on her desk, but Kagami kept covering it every time he came in through the office, so...)

"H-how long have you been there?"  Riko, who has seen the carnage of multiple battlefields, barely stutters out.

"I was here the entire time." the stranger responds in a soft matter-of-fact voice, as if that isn't one of the creepier answers he could give.

Kagami gently places the chair back to its rightful place on the floor, pretending like he isn't suffering from massive heart palpitations.

"You called me here?" adds ghost child...no, no Riko, get a hold of yourself. He's clearly human...he's...

"OH. You must be Kuroko??"  Riko, finally having regained her composure, extends an arm of welcome as he nods yes.

"You really... should've said something haha. please, take a seat."

That's him? The Kuroko Tetsuya, the notorious 'Phantom'??? But he looks so...frail. He's clad a white button down shirt and grey pants, neither of which could seem to be hiding some hidden muscle-definition. His skin is very pale, very anemic-looking. This can't possibly be...

Kuroko blinks back at Riko with his large, pale blue eyes. Though he appears expressionless, Riko can't help but feel a certain level of scorn emanating from this man. He's judging hard for being judged hard.

That's fair.

Riko chews at the nail of her thumb for one contemplative second,then decides to roll with the benefit of the doubt.

"Alright, Kagami Jr. This is the man who'll be sticking to you for the next...little while. Meet your new shadow."

"Eh?"

Kagami looks down in disbelief at the tiny pale blue creature that has just been assigned to protect his life.

A very small, very cold little hand places itself inside Kagami's own.

"Nice to meet you."

"You have got to be fucking kidding me..."

[Thursday. Time: 17:08. Meet the Reaper]

"Atsushi, you've got like fifteen missed calls. Please just answer your phone."

Murasakibara could answer his phone, but...he could also just shove another fistful of all-dressed chips into his mouth and not answer anything that remotely sounds like work.

"Atsushi...please. I think it's urgent."

Don't worry. Murasakibara makes sure to chew his food properly. It's better for digestion.

////

NEXT CHAPTER>

[sterlingsilverarchive]

Date?

Date Application

Who asks for it:

[ x ] Your muse asks mine

[ x ] My muse asks yours

Type of date:

[ x ] Platonic Date

[ ] Romantic Date

[ x ] First Date

[ ] Double date with: ____ & ____

Location for the date:

[ ] Movies• [ ] Romantic Comedy• [ ] Adventure Movie• [ ] Animation (Pixar/Disney)• [ ] Horror• [ ] Drama• [ ] Buddy Movie• [ ] ___ (other options)

[ x ] Restaurant• [ ] Expensive/High Class• [ x ] Small and familiar• [ ] Fast Food

[ x ] Nature• [ ] Beach• [ ] Park• [ ] Forest• [ ] …and having a picnic

[ ] Visiting a Museum

[ ] Visiting an amusement park

[ ] Visiting a haunted location

[ x ] Staying at home• [ x ] Watching movies• [ x ] Playing Video Games• [ ] Reading

[ ] ___ (other options)

The date might hopefully end with…

[ ] …holding hands

[ ] …a kiss

[ ] …in bed

[ x ] …knowing each other better

[ x ] …sleepover between friends

[ ] …a marriage proposal

[ ] ___ (other options)

Should you reblog this?:

[ x ] Yes. I want to send you one.

[ ] Yes.

[ ] No.

Synopsis:

Alright so with Lance here, it also goes either way due to the competing schedule of their Leagues because they’re so needy for either of their attention. So, to fix that, Steven’s best solution is to take Lance and get as far away from people as possible so that way they won’t have to worry about being interrupted with shenanigans and simple problems that can be fixed by Koga and Drake. 

The difference here is that Steven actually enjoys not only knowing more about Lance, but he also likes to challenge him, to see what he would do and how he would different challenges into his own hands. This goes for, after eating of course, having him push himself to keep up with him either in flying on his pokemon or pushing eachother physically by going through winding caves and scaling steep mountains. 

Their pokemon can join them too, although using them to catch up to the other is cheating. Even though it is competition and all, Steven isn’t afraid to simply help Lance up a rough side of a mountain by giving him a helping hand. 

Steven doesn’t pay attention to his own limits, so most likely after both of them pushing one another to keep going, he’ll most likely end up exhausted first (despite the good endurance he has) although he won’t admit it until they’re all finished. He isn’t a sore loser, so even if he can’t keep up with Lance he’ll end up congratulating him and either offering to hit the hot springs or treating them and their pokemon to food (since boy I bet they would’ve burned off the food they already ate a long while ago). 

Depending how tired either one of them are, and depending where they are, if they happen to be in Hoenn and if Lance is too exhausted to make it back to Johto, Steven could offer him to stay over and rest, since he wouldn’t just leave him like that. I mean, Lance could deny his offer, but then there would be one very sad Tyrunt that wouldn’t get to say hi to him in Steven’s house. 

Crossing out the date and first date because, with Steven, there is no true first date or anything with him because he slowly eases in another person’s life and attempts to figure out what this said other person likes and goes from there. So even though he won’t use the word date (that and his father’s voice of STEVEN WHERE ARE MY GRANDCHILDREN rings in the distance from the word) Steven uses this as an opportunity to evaluate if his interest is drawn in or not without rising any kind of pressure or expectation from him. 

[itsfinancethings]

Marcus-David Peters had just left his day job teaching high school biology and arrived at his second job at a hotel, where he worked as a part-time security guard, when he apparently experienced a psychiatric episode.

He left the hotel naked, got into his car, then veered off the side of a highway in Richmond, Va. A police officer, Michael Nyantakyi, who had seen the vehicle crash, saw Peters climb out, and attempted to subdue him with his Taser. When Peters advanced, Nyantakyi fired two shots into the belly of the unarmed, unclothed 24-year-old, killing him.

Peters had no criminal record, his family said he had no history of mental illness or drug use, and his death, like those of many killed by police around the country, left his friends and family in anguish. “People ask me all the time, ‘What do you think caused him to have a mental break?’ And I say, ‘We’ll never know, because he was killed,’” says Peters’ sister, Princess Blanding. “It was easier to take out the threat, which was his brown skin, than to try to help him.” Richmond’s top prosecutor later concluded that the May 2018 shooting was justified.

There is no reliable national database tracking how many people with disabilities, or who are experiencing episodes of mental illness, are shot by police each year, but studies show that the numbers are substantial—likely between one-third and one-half of total police killings. And in the renewed national debate over racial injustice sparked by George Floyd’s killing at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer in May, those deaths should loom large.

Advocates for both racial justice and disability rights say Black Americans are especially at risk. Due to a host of social, economic and environmental factors, Black people are more likely than white people to have chronic health conditions, more likely to struggle when accessing mental-health care and less likely to receive formal diagnoses for a range of disabilities. By dint of how others react to their complexion, they are also nearly three times as likely as white people to be killed by police. The combination of disability and skin color amounts to a double bind, says Talila A. Lewis, a community lawyer and volunteer director of Helping Educate to Advance the Rights of Deaf Communities (HEARD). The U.S. government, Lewis explains, uses “constructed ideas about disability, delinquency and dependency, intertwined with constructed ideas about race to classify and criminalize people.”

The danger for people with mental illnesses and other disabilities is also born of police departments’ “compliance culture,” says Haben Girma, another lawyer and activist. “Anyone who immediately doesn’t comply, the police move on to force,” she says. The approach doesn’t work when police interact with someone who doesn’t react in the way they expect. Girma, who is both Black and deaf-blind, says that for her, the danger is hardly abstract. “Someone might be yelling for me to do something and I don’t hear. And then they assume that I’m a threat,” she says.

Ryan Garza—USA Today/SipaA man speaks with a demand for help with people with disabilities as protesters gather at the Detroit Police Department during the eleventh day of protests against police brutality on June 8, 2020.

To address the problem, advocates promote a range of remedies—many dovetailing with the nascent national movement to rethink public safety. They want to decrease the total interactions police officers have with disabled people, redirect funds to other support services, and rethink law-enforcement systems and protocols to better protect people. The demands lend specificity and substance to the protest cries to “defund the police,” drawing attention to the tragedies that follow when armed first responders encounter a situation that demands not enforcement or coercion but care.

Some departments are trying. In recent years, police agencies around the country have offered their forces crisis-intervention trainings, which are designed to help officers safely and calmly interact with people with disabilities and de-escalate confrontations with the mentally ill. But the quality of these training programs is all over the board, and the priority remains elsewhere. A 2016 report from the Police Executive Research Forum found that nationwide, police academies spend a median of 58 hours on firearm training and just eight hours on de-escalation or crisis intervention.

In 2015, the Arc, one of the country’s largest disability-rights organizations, launched its own program to teach law-enforcement officers, lawyers, victim-services providers and other criminal-justice professionals how to identify, interact with and accommodate people with disabilities. “We’re talking about having a community really understand each other, and what that can look like,” says Leigh Ann Davis, who leads the Arc’s National Center on Criminal Justice and Disability. The program has now trained 2,000 people in 14 states.

But training programs, regardless of quality, are not enough, activists say. As protests continue nationwide and demands to defund or abolish the police gain steam, some advocates are pushing for more radical models that seek to avoid bringing people with disabilities, or those experiencing mental-health crises, into contact with the police.

In Eugene, Ore., for example, the White Bird Clinic runs what’s known as CAHOOTS (Crisis Assistance Helping Out on the Streets), a program that reroutes 911 and non-emergency calls relating to mental health, substance use or homelessness to a team of medics and crisis-care workers. Those teams respond to such calls instead of—not alongside—police. The CAHOOTS program, which launched in the late ’80s, receives roughly 24,000 calls each year; 17% of Eugene police calls are redirected to CAHOOTS, a boon to police departments, which can better use resources combatting crimes.

Police unions have criticized CAHOOTS and similar programs on the grounds that it’s dangerous for medics and crisis-care workers to respond to calls without armed officers. But Tim Black, the CAHOOTS operations coordinator, says that’s mostly not the case. His teams work closely with the Eugene police department, and last year, just 150 of the 24,000 calls directed to CAHOOTS required police backup.

“There’s a really constructive relationship that we have with law enforcement because they see us as the expert,” Black says. “They trust us to engage in all sorts of situations that they’re not equipped to handle. But they also trust us to provide them with feedback and oversight when we see things that aren’t going well because they know that it’s coming from the place of understanding.”

Olympia, Wash.; Denver; and Oakland, Calif., have developed programs modeled after CAHOOTS, and Black says other cities are beginning to call for advice too. In New York City, a coalition of civil rights and social-service organizations has proposed a pilot program for two precincts in which EMTs and crisis counselors would respond to mental-health calls instead of police. The coalition wants to devote $16.5 million to the pilot over five years. (New York spends nearly $11 billion on police-related costs each year.)

Chris Pietsch—The Register-Guard/USA Today/SipaVe Gulbrandsen, center, an EMT with CAHOOTS, joins a team from White Bird in screening guests for health concerns at the Egan Warming Center in Springfield, Ore. on March 16, 2020.

“A police response is not the kind of response you want when people are in a mental-health crisis,” says Carla Rabinowitz, advocacy coordinator for the mental-health nonprofit Community Access and the coalition’s project leader. She notes that at least 17 New Yorkers experiencing mental-health crises were killed or injured by police in the past five years. “It’s much better to have a peer and an EMT who can talk to the person, figure out what is going on in the person’s life, offer them resources.”

Racial equality and disability rights advocates are demanding change beyond law enforcement. Police violence, after all, is only part of why Black Americans have overall worse health outcomes and shorter life expectancies than white Americans. Due to years of systemic racism, Black Americans are more likely than white Americans to have lower incomes, and to live in less safe neighborhoods with fewer grocery stores, fewer parks, worse air quality, and less desirable schools. These factors not only contribute to higher instances of physical ailments, like asthma and diabetes, they’re also intrinsically intertwined with worse mental health outcomes. Black Americans are more likely to have schizophrenia and post-traumatic stress disorder.

These challenges are compounded by many Black Americans’ lack of access to unbiased medical and mental health care. Black Americans are less likely than their white counterparts to be identified as having autism and learning disabilities.

Even talking about disability and mental health in the Black community can require adopting a language separate from mainstream medical culture. “Disability is commonly understood through a white and wealth privileged lens,” says Lewis, the lawyer with HEARD, who helps disabled people facing violence and incarceration across the country. Lewis explains that government officials and even mainstream disability rights leaders often rely on formal definitions of disability that can lead them to overlook the experiences of disabled Black people.

Many Black Americans grow up experiencing police violence, witnessing it in their communities, and seeing videos of deaths as a matter of course. But due to the ways the U.S. medical and education systems have created distrust among communities of color, advocates say there can also be stigma and a lack of awareness about disability in Black communities, even as they push back against violence that impacts these vulnerable populations.

Teighlor McGee, a 22-year-old who has been gathering personal protective equipment and sending medics to help protesters in Minneapolis, says that racial justice groups often don’t think about disabled people when holding demonstrations or advocating for change. “A lot of people don’t see disabled people as people,” she says. “People can’t picture disabled people facing police brutality and violence because they can’t picture disabled people going places.” McGee noticed the lack of spaces to connect with others who shared her experience as a Black autistic woman, so she started the Black Disability Collective online to fill the void.

When people with disabilities or mental illness are not at the center of the conversation, activists say that makes it harder to build understanding and make change. Adrienne Bryant in Tempe, Ariz., says she witnessed the limits of police understanding this year. In January, she called the police because her 29-year-old son Randy Evans, who had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and schizophrenia last year, was experiencing a manic episode and she needed help getting him to a mental health facility. But when police showed up at her apartment with riot shields and rifles, she and her younger son panicked, the officers were yelling, and the situation quickly escalated.

“I said several times, ‘Please do not kill my son,’” Bryant recalled, near tears. “One wrong move and I could have lost two sons that night.”

The police dispatcher had given the responding officers an incorrect name, which turned out to belong to a felony offender who was wanted for violating probation. The dispatcher also told officers that the man they were responding to had knives. (In reality, Bryant and her younger son had collected and hidden all of the knives in the house to keep them away from Evans until police arrived.) As a result of these mistakes, the responding officers believed they were confronting an armed felon, rather than just performing a mental health call. Tempe Police Chief Sylvia Moir told TIME that the responding officers said the mistaken name did not change their behavior. The department believes they responded appropriately in this situation. “We have to first start with, are the police the right societal actor to be inserted into this space and into this societal issue?” Moir says.

More than 60% of Tempe police officers are trained in crisis response, Moir says, and the city has a separate crisis response team that can also be called in to help in situations such as mental health crises, sexual assaults and domestic violence incidents. But she said that she would be worried about sending a crisis response team without police officers carrying lethal weapons in case situations turned dangerous. “I think this is reflective of the police really being the reflective muscle of the government and that there is nobody else out in this space doing this work in this kind of very complex and volatile space,” Moir says.

But Bryant says the damage has been done. Her younger son remains traumatized by the incident; he avoided leaving the house for months afterward. And she is still working to ensure Randy’s name is not associated with the incorrect one provided by the dispatcher. “We will never call the police again,” she says.

Courtesy of Princess BlandingMarcus-David Peters and sister Princess Blanding

Meanwhile, in Richmond, Blanding, whose brother Peters was killed near his car, is using the current, galvanizing prominence of race and criminal justice to push the reforms she has been seeking since his death. Richmond Mayor Levar Stoney recently released a plan “for re-imagining public safety” in the city that includes a civilian review board and a version of the family’s idea for a crisis alert that would involve mental-health experts responding to a mental- or behavioral-health crisis, in addition to other policy changes.

Blanding says she is glad to see progress, but won’t celebrate until the city implements a system that ensures “having a mental-health crisis does not become a death sentence.”

This appears in the July 06, 2020 issue of TIME.

[airoasis]

How to Magically Connect with Anyone | Brian Miller | TEDxManchesterHighSchool

New Post has been published on https://hititem.kr/how-to-magically-connect-with-anyone-brian-miller-tedxmanchesterhighschool/

How to Magically Connect with Anyone | Brian Miller | TEDxManchesterHighSchool

Translator: Herald Park Reviewer: Denise RQ good, thanks. Our world is a shared experience, fractured by using man or woman views, yours and mine. Imagine if we would all recognize each and every other. After I first started my profession in magic, I used to be doing a variety of performing in eating places, table to desk card and coin tricks, sleight of hand and whoop! You acquired a excellent seat for this. This one night time, I was on hearth: I bear in mind I used to be fast and humorous, my moves were perfect, I was once unstoppable. I sauntered as much as this one table, an elderly man and his spouse, and stated, "Would you adore to look some magic?" the person looked at me, and he mentioned, "Sir, I would like to peer some magic, however I can’t.Alas, i’m blind." I looked at him, fairly checked out him for the primary time, and it used to be so clear he used to be blind: his eyes have been glazy, he wasn’t fairly looking at me. Any one would’ve known that, however I was once so wrapped up in my night, so lost in my world, I wasn’t watching at him. I simply noticed two popular persons and launched into my exhibit. I stood there, embarrassed, and that word used to be ringing in my ears, "blind, blind, blind", and i had no alternative, and i said, "i am sorry, I didn’t be aware of. I shouldn’t have whatever i can do for you, but in case you come again again sometime, I promise to have some kind of magic that i will share with you." He mentioned, "i’ll maintain you to that!", and that i went on with my night. Just a few weeks later, they came back in; I well-known them instantly, and that i panicked. I had fully forgotten about it. I raced again to the room the place I saved my props, interested by every trick i might ever realized and each book i’d ever learn, whatever, whatever I might do for the man, and then I remembered reading an imprecise proposal a long time ago in an ancient manuscript, it was once all I had.So I composed myself, I walked back out, and mentioned, "hiya persons, my identify is Brian, would you love to peer some magic?" And he cut me off, he goes, "o.K., we are back, what have you obtained for me?" with a giant smile on his face. I asked his wife, "may I sit subsequent to you?" and she said, "sure." I sat down, and that i said "Ed," – his identify was Ed – do you trust your spouse?" and he mentioned, "generally." (Laughter) Then I stated, "Will you trust her now?" and he said, "definite." So I took out a percent of playing cards, gave them to her, and mentioned, "mix the cards, make certain there isn’t a distinct markings on them," and he or she stated, "No, they’re best." I took Ed’s hand and mentioned, "i’ll situation a card in your hand do you consider it’s a crimson card or a black card?" Then he stated pink, and he used to be right; the following card, he mentioned crimson, and he used to be correct again.I put down the subsequent one, and he stated, "Hmm, black!" once more he used to be right; his wife is getting skeptical at this point. We preserve going, purple, pink, black, black, pink, and he is getting all of them correct! Purple, black, crimson, turbo, black, black, black, pink, by way of the whole deck, black, black, red, every single one among them proper, and at the finish, Ed is laughing, he is howling, the whole restaurant is observing us, and that i flip to look his wife, and he or she is weeping tears of pleasure. It used to be the most stunning magic I had ever skilled. A little bit later, i am going to inform you how we did it.However the true secret of the trick, the real secret of magic, is working out and taking up special views, exclusive aspects of views. Let’s try to experiment with standpoint, would you love to peer some magic? All right, let’s are attempting somewhat test here. That is one in all historical illusions in magic, right here we go. Determine that out for me; sure please, here you go. That’s rope correct there, you could examine that out. I bought some extra over here, right here you go, one for you yes, and one for you. Ensure that is what it appears to be; is it what it seems to be? Are you what you seem to be? (Laughter) I have no idea what that suggests. That is excellent, i’m going to take that again, you look as harassed as I do. Right here we go, i’m going to take that, thanks, one, two, and three portions of rope. Three portions of rope, they usually’re all of the identical length yes? It’ll be a hard crowd, i can inform; you’ll need to feel me on this. So i’ll take the ends and that i hold them up: they look like they are the equal length. The ends do, I did not say it was once a excellent illusion.It’ll be a difficult crowd, I consider. Right here we go, i will prove it to you. Yeah, that’s all, thanks! (Applause) that is the giant one proper there, the medium right there, and that is the small one proper there. There may be too many things happening, so i’ll get rid of some of the pieces, so that it’s going to be less difficult to comply with with simplest two, won’t it? I must just start over, it’ll be little bit less difficult. So sometimes the ends come off, which is a little exotic, i’ll try this again simply in the event you neglected it. There are individuals who feel that this trick is all about the ends.That’s now not actual, the middles, those come off too. Location the middles correct here, back on the rope, and we’re again in industry. However you guys recognize this trick wasn’t carried out with one piece of rope, it wasn’t even accomplished with… Two pieces. It was absolutely executed with– two of us watched Sesame street. That’s the enormous one proper there, that’s the medium one correct there, and that is the small one right there; can you guys inform which one’s which? See this one correct here? This is the significant one, that is the huge one. That is the medium one, and that is the small one, a little bit illusion to get matters began. (Applause) well, thanks very so much. Now, what just happened there? Apparently you and that i had an awfully one-of-a-kind expertise, would not it? What did I see? I noticed the moves, the sleight of hand, and the juggling.You ordinarily saw the ends of a rope, jumping on and off, three one of a kind ropes, changing lengths impossibly, violating all of the legal guidelines of physics. That is just what we noticed, what did we feel? You could have felt, hopefully, marvel? Perhaps amusement? Perhaps frustration? I felt focal point; these are two very distinct perspectives of the equal experience. You see, magicians have a certain challenge. The magician is the one character who can’t see the magic on account that i understand how the trick works, and that talents of the key is a limiting standpoint. So the magician must absolutely, and entirely, take on the factor of view of the audience. We do this night time after night time, no matter who’s in the market in order to create illusions. It is a procedure called "point of view taking".Perspective taking is the ability to peer the arena from the point of view of one more man or woman. It sounds simple in idea, however in practice, it may be tremendously complex to do. For illustration, have you ever guys performed around with this type of before? Aha, a couple of of you seem excited, most of you seem angry simply due to the fact i’m holding one. I feel flashbacks to childhood, a few of you began twitching after I took one out. I love the Rubik’s cube; they are surely less difficult to resolve than you consider they’re. Take the stickers off, rearrange them, put them again within the proper order? Wreck the pieces aside, put it back collectively? I realized how to try this, and then realized, if you spin it rather fast… It looks love it solves itself. (Laughter) So what just occurred there? Oh, thanks. (Applause) type of a delayed response, every person was once simply… (Laughter) So what just occurred there? Well, i know that if I come out, combine up a Rubik’s dice, toss it within the air, and it comes down solved, you’re all going to to feel i am a jerk.At the very least, a exhibit off, and i do not want you to believe like that. I need you to benefit from the experience of magic so I make a few jokes. Take the stickers off, rearrange them, smash the portions aside, and then you go, "Oh I did that! My neighbors, we smashed it with a hammer, we threw it at a wall!" When that occurs, you suppose like I realise you. Whilst you believe understood, we make a connection, after which i will do the trick, and we will all benefit from the magic in that shared space. So now you recognize what point of view taking is.It can be the ability to see the world from the point of view of an extra individual. You also be aware of why magicians do it: to create illusions, and to connect with the audience. However why must you care? Good, it seems this system has greatly multiplied my existence off stage, outside of magic, in more methods than I might have ever imagined. I’ll give an explanation for. I not ever had difficulty assembly new people: making acquaintances, coming into relationships. However I constantly struggled to maintain them. Ultimately, the communique would ruin down, men and women would go away, and i’d be on my own. It took a long time to confess it, but it was once my fault, or as a minimum most likely. The people in my existence didn’t believe like I used to be invested in them. Now that wasn’t actual, but it’s not relevant. It’s now not ample to care about someone; it is not ample to understand them. They need to believe understood, they have to think cared about, and i wasn’t doing that. Then I took this technique I had honed on stage, and i started utilizing it external of magic, and i noticed i can make higher, extra significant connections with persons.I met buddies, great acquaintances, which have lasted years, I met a wonderful, fiercely clever lady, the love of my life, and that i held on to that relationship. We’re certainly engaged to be married. Oh, thanks. (Applause) She’ll be happy to listen to that. None of that may were viable earlier than. So of course the question then becomes how, how do you do it, how do you do standpoint taking? Well, first you ought to recognize the change between visible standpoint and emotional perspective. Magicians almost always deal with visible standpoint. We have to know, actually, what the trick appears wish to the audience. So we apply in front of mirrors, we film ourselves and watch it back, however relationships are specially about emotional standpoint. How is a person feeling about our interplay? It looks as if a intricate factor to do, to get to grasp anybody’s emotional point of view, however let’s get again to Ed, Ed and his wife.The central query for Ed was, "What would magic think like to any person who is blind?" I did not want Ed to believe tricked, that was once foremost to me. I don’t know, however I must think if you are blind, you might be tricked with the aid of someone, at whenever. So I didn’t Ed need to consider tricked; I desired him to feel magic, I desired him to be magical, and his wife, this girl to spends her life watching out for him, I desired her to peer him in that mild, and for them to share in that experience collectively. So if you wish to get to grasp any individual’s emotional perspective, one of the vital easiest technique to do it, ask. Ask questions. Too mainly we’re afraid to ask men and women questions considering that we suppose like it is going to be rude, or by some means they is not going to need to reply, but we underestimate individuals’s willingness to reply our questions. Earlier than the trick, I requested Ed, "have you invariably been blind?" He said yes.To me that was imperative, imperative understanding. It sounds as if a person who has under no circumstances been equipped to see could have an extra perspective from someone who had their sight, after which lost it to accident, or ailment. With Ed I can not even use the language of sight. So by means of asking questions, i will be able to regulate my tone, my demeanor, even my language, in order that he feels understood and we can make a connection. Now, if you are going to learn this, it is most important no longer simply to ask questions but to listen to the answers, and take heed to fully grasp. Do not just take heed to reply, or to reply, and you will have heard it before.That is where I went unsuitable most in my existence, I consider. You could have heard to earlier than, and we’re all responsible of it on occasion. However too most often we hearken to individuals handiest with the intention of developing with anything intelligent to assert so as soon as their lips discontinue, we will bounce in and say our thing. We’ve all performed it, we’re all responsible, but I did this principally badly, and i consider to the detriments of my relationships. Have you ever ever requested for a person’s identify, and immediately forgotten it? Why will we put out of your mind individuals’s names? In view that while they are telling us their identify, we’re serious about how we’ll say ours: first identify, last title, Mr. Miller, Brian. We’re now not listening, we’re on our finish of the dialog simplest. So that you would be able to start to study this manner: ask questions, listen to understand the answers. While you do that I believe you can find which you can make better, more significant connections with folks, personally and professionally. It enormously improved my life, and i fairly think it will possibly give a boost to yours.So, Ed. How did Ed, a blind man, see the playing cards? The reply, as in most satisfactory magic, was once without a doubt quite simple. I sat across from him, and underneath the table, I placed my foot gently on top of his. Then I gave him these recommendations; "in the event you suppose the cardboard is a purple card," and i pushed my foot down on his as soon as, "you then say red." in the event you consider it’s a black card," and i pushed my foot down on his twice, "then you definitely say black." I was once educating Ed a secret approach of verbal exchange, where i would let him understand what color the card was once, by using the foot faucets, as soon as for red, twice for black. I repeated the instructions, "if you believe it can be a pink card, say crimson. In case you believe it can be a black card, say black" and then I squeezed his arms gently, and i requested, "Do you fully grasp?" He smiled, and stated, "yes, I realise." I knew then that we had related. When it was all mentioned and executed, I taught his spouse how we did it, like I simply taught you, in order that they would do it for his or her buddies and loved ones.Ed was so excited, he couldn’t wait to look his grandkids that weekend so he could, quote, "freak them out absolutely!" (Laughter) See, magic is not concerning the technical skill or a trick, and even the secret! Magic is set connecting. Existence is about connecting. Connecting is ready taking up other elements of view. You see, our world is a shared experience, fractured by means of person views. Suppose if we would all believe understood. Thanks. (Applause) .

[batterymonster2021]

How to Magically Connect with Anyone | Brian Miller | TEDxManchesterHighSchool

New Post has been published on https://hititem.kr/how-to-magically-connect-with-anyone-brian-miller-tedxmanchesterhighschool/

How to Magically Connect with Anyone | Brian Miller | TEDxManchesterHighSchool

Translator: Herald Park Reviewer: Denise RQ good, thanks. Our world is a shared experience, fractured by using man or woman views, yours and mine. Imagine if we would all recognize each and every other. After I first started my profession in magic, I used to be doing a variety of performing in eating places, table to desk card and coin tricks, sleight of hand and whoop! You acquired a excellent seat for this. This one night time, I was on hearth: I bear in mind I used to be fast and humorous, my moves were perfect, I was once unstoppable. I sauntered as much as this one table, an elderly man and his spouse, and stated, "Would you adore to look some magic?" the person looked at me, and he mentioned, "Sir, I would like to peer some magic, however I can’t.Alas, i’m blind." I looked at him, fairly checked out him for the primary time, and it used to be so clear he used to be blind: his eyes have been glazy, he wasn’t fairly looking at me. Any one would’ve known that, however I was once so wrapped up in my night, so lost in my world, I wasn’t watching at him. I simply noticed two popular persons and launched into my exhibit. I stood there, embarrassed, and that word used to be ringing in my ears, "blind, blind, blind", and i had no alternative, and i said, "i am sorry, I didn’t be aware of. I shouldn’t have whatever i can do for you, but in case you come again again sometime, I promise to have some kind of magic that i will share with you." He mentioned, "i’ll maintain you to that!", and that i went on with my night. Just a few weeks later, they came back in; I well-known them instantly, and that i panicked. I had fully forgotten about it. I raced again to the room the place I saved my props, interested by every trick i might ever realized and each book i’d ever learn, whatever, whatever I might do for the man, and then I remembered reading an imprecise proposal a long time ago in an ancient manuscript, it was once all I had.So I composed myself, I walked back out, and mentioned, "hiya persons, my identify is Brian, would you love to peer some magic?" And he cut me off, he goes, "o.K., we are back, what have you obtained for me?" with a giant smile on his face. I asked his wife, "may I sit subsequent to you?" and she said, "sure." I sat down, and that i said "Ed," – his identify was Ed – do you trust your spouse?" and he mentioned, "generally." (Laughter) Then I stated, "Will you trust her now?" and he said, "definite." So I took out a percent of playing cards, gave them to her, and mentioned, "mix the cards, make certain there isn’t a distinct markings on them," and he or she stated, "No, they’re best." I took Ed’s hand and mentioned, "i’ll situation a card in your hand do you consider it’s a crimson card or a black card?" Then he stated pink, and he used to be right; the following card, he mentioned crimson, and he used to be correct again.I put down the subsequent one, and he stated, "Hmm, black!" once more he used to be right; his wife is getting skeptical at this point. We preserve going, purple, pink, black, black, pink, and he is getting all of them correct! Purple, black, crimson, turbo, black, black, black, pink, by way of the whole deck, black, black, red, every single one among them proper, and at the finish, Ed is laughing, he is howling, the whole restaurant is observing us, and that i flip to look his wife, and he or she is weeping tears of pleasure. It used to be the most stunning magic I had ever skilled. A little bit later, i am going to inform you how we did it.However the true secret of the trick, the real secret of magic, is working out and taking up special views, exclusive aspects of views. Let’s try to experiment with standpoint, would you love to peer some magic? All right, let’s are attempting somewhat test here. That is one in all historical illusions in magic, right here we go. Determine that out for me; sure please, here you go. That’s rope correct there, you could examine that out. I bought some extra over here, right here you go, one for you yes, and one for you. Ensure that is what it appears to be; is it what it seems to be? Are you what you seem to be? (Laughter) I have no idea what that suggests. That is excellent, i’m going to take that again, you look as harassed as I do. Right here we go, i’m going to take that, thanks, one, two, and three portions of rope. Three portions of rope, they usually’re all of the identical length yes? It’ll be a hard crowd, i can inform; you’ll need to feel me on this. So i’ll take the ends and that i hold them up: they look like they are the equal length. The ends do, I did not say it was once a excellent illusion.It’ll be a difficult crowd, I consider. Right here we go, i will prove it to you. Yeah, that’s all, thanks! (Applause) that is the giant one proper there, the medium right there, and that is the small one proper there. There may be too many things happening, so i’ll get rid of some of the pieces, so that it’s going to be less difficult to comply with with simplest two, won’t it? I must just start over, it’ll be little bit less difficult. So sometimes the ends come off, which is a little exotic, i’ll try this again simply in the event you neglected it. There are individuals who feel that this trick is all about the ends.That’s now not actual, the middles, those come off too. Location the middles correct here, back on the rope, and we’re again in industry. However you guys recognize this trick wasn’t carried out with one piece of rope, it wasn’t even accomplished with… Two pieces. It was absolutely executed with– two of us watched Sesame street. That’s the enormous one proper there, that’s the medium one correct there, and that is the small one right there; can you guys inform which one’s which? See this one correct here? This is the significant one, that is the huge one. That is the medium one, and that is the small one, a little bit illusion to get matters began. (Applause) well, thanks very so much. Now, what just happened there? Apparently you and that i had an awfully one-of-a-kind expertise, would not it? What did I see? I noticed the moves, the sleight of hand, and the juggling.You ordinarily saw the ends of a rope, jumping on and off, three one of a kind ropes, changing lengths impossibly, violating all of the legal guidelines of physics. That is just what we noticed, what did we feel? You could have felt, hopefully, marvel? Perhaps amusement? Perhaps frustration? I felt focal point; these are two very distinct perspectives of the equal experience. You see, magicians have a certain challenge. The magician is the one character who can’t see the magic on account that i understand how the trick works, and that talents of the key is a limiting standpoint. So the magician must absolutely, and entirely, take on the factor of view of the audience. We do this night time after night time, no matter who’s in the market in order to create illusions. It is a procedure called "point of view taking".Perspective taking is the ability to peer the arena from the point of view of one more man or woman. It sounds simple in idea, however in practice, it may be tremendously complex to do. For illustration, have you ever guys performed around with this type of before? Aha, a couple of of you seem excited, most of you seem angry simply due to the fact i’m holding one. I feel flashbacks to childhood, a few of you began twitching after I took one out. I love the Rubik’s cube; they are surely less difficult to resolve than you consider they’re. Take the stickers off, rearrange them, put them again within the proper order? Wreck the pieces aside, put it back collectively? I realized how to try this, and then realized, if you spin it rather fast… It looks love it solves itself. (Laughter) So what just occurred there? Oh, thanks. (Applause) type of a delayed response, every person was once simply… (Laughter) So what just occurred there? Well, i know that if I come out, combine up a Rubik’s dice, toss it within the air, and it comes down solved, you’re all going to to feel i am a jerk.At the very least, a exhibit off, and i do not want you to believe like that. I need you to benefit from the experience of magic so I make a few jokes. Take the stickers off, rearrange them, smash the portions aside, and then you go, "Oh I did that! My neighbors, we smashed it with a hammer, we threw it at a wall!" When that occurs, you suppose like I realise you. Whilst you believe understood, we make a connection, after which i will do the trick, and we will all benefit from the magic in that shared space. So now you recognize what point of view taking is.It can be the ability to see the world from the point of view of an extra individual. You also be aware of why magicians do it: to create illusions, and to connect with the audience. However why must you care? Good, it seems this system has greatly multiplied my existence off stage, outside of magic, in more methods than I might have ever imagined. I’ll give an explanation for. I not ever had difficulty assembly new people: making acquaintances, coming into relationships. However I constantly struggled to maintain them. Ultimately, the communique would ruin down, men and women would go away, and i’d be on my own. It took a long time to confess it, but it was once my fault, or as a minimum most likely. The people in my existence didn’t believe like I used to be invested in them. Now that wasn’t actual, but it’s not relevant. It’s now not ample to care about someone; it is not ample to understand them. They need to believe understood, they have to think cared about, and i wasn’t doing that. Then I took this technique I had honed on stage, and i started utilizing it external of magic, and i noticed i can make higher, extra significant connections with persons.I met buddies, great acquaintances, which have lasted years, I met a wonderful, fiercely clever lady, the love of my life, and that i held on to that relationship. We’re certainly engaged to be married. Oh, thanks. (Applause) She’ll be happy to listen to that. None of that may were viable earlier than. So of course the question then becomes how, how do you do it, how do you do standpoint taking? Well, first you ought to recognize the change between visible standpoint and emotional perspective. Magicians almost always deal with visible standpoint. We have to know, actually, what the trick appears wish to the audience. So we apply in front of mirrors, we film ourselves and watch it back, however relationships are specially about emotional standpoint. How is a person feeling about our interplay? It looks as if a intricate factor to do, to get to grasp anybody’s emotional point of view, however let’s get again to Ed, Ed and his wife.The central query for Ed was, "What would magic think like to any person who is blind?" I did not want Ed to believe tricked, that was once foremost to me. I don’t know, however I must think if you are blind, you might be tricked with the aid of someone, at whenever. So I didn’t Ed need to consider tricked; I desired him to feel magic, I desired him to be magical, and his wife, this girl to spends her life watching out for him, I desired her to peer him in that mild, and for them to share in that experience collectively. So if you wish to get to grasp any individual’s emotional perspective, one of the vital easiest technique to do it, ask. Ask questions. Too mainly we’re afraid to ask men and women questions considering that we suppose like it is going to be rude, or by some means they is not going to need to reply, but we underestimate individuals’s willingness to reply our questions. Earlier than the trick, I requested Ed, "have you invariably been blind?" He said yes.To me that was imperative, imperative understanding. It sounds as if a person who has under no circumstances been equipped to see could have an extra perspective from someone who had their sight, after which lost it to accident, or ailment. With Ed I can not even use the language of sight. So by means of asking questions, i will be able to regulate my tone, my demeanor, even my language, in order that he feels understood and we can make a connection. Now, if you are going to learn this, it is most important no longer simply to ask questions but to listen to the answers, and take heed to fully grasp. Do not just take heed to reply, or to reply, and you will have heard it before.That is where I went unsuitable most in my existence, I consider. You could have heard to earlier than, and we’re all responsible of it on occasion. However too most often we hearken to individuals handiest with the intention of developing with anything intelligent to assert so as soon as their lips discontinue, we will bounce in and say our thing. We’ve all performed it, we’re all responsible, but I did this principally badly, and i consider to the detriments of my relationships. Have you ever ever requested for a person’s identify, and immediately forgotten it? Why will we put out of your mind individuals’s names? In view that while they are telling us their identify, we’re serious about how we’ll say ours: first identify, last title, Mr. Miller, Brian. We’re now not listening, we’re on our finish of the dialog simplest. So that you would be able to start to study this manner: ask questions, listen to understand the answers. While you do that I believe you can find which you can make better, more significant connections with folks, personally and professionally. It enormously improved my life, and i fairly think it will possibly give a boost to yours.So, Ed. How did Ed, a blind man, see the playing cards? The reply, as in most satisfactory magic, was once without a doubt quite simple. I sat across from him, and underneath the table, I placed my foot gently on top of his. Then I gave him these recommendations; "in the event you suppose the cardboard is a purple card," and i pushed my foot down on his as soon as, "you then say red." in the event you consider it’s a black card," and i pushed my foot down on his twice, "then you definitely say black." I was once educating Ed a secret approach of verbal exchange, where i would let him understand what color the card was once, by using the foot faucets, as soon as for red, twice for black. I repeated the instructions, "if you believe it can be a pink card, say crimson. In case you believe it can be a black card, say black" and then I squeezed his arms gently, and i requested, "Do you fully grasp?" He smiled, and stated, "yes, I realise." I knew then that we had related. When it was all mentioned and executed, I taught his spouse how we did it, like I simply taught you, in order that they would do it for his or her buddies and loved ones.Ed was so excited, he couldn’t wait to look his grandkids that weekend so he could, quote, "freak them out absolutely!" (Laughter) See, magic is not concerning the technical skill or a trick, and even the secret! Magic is set connecting. Existence is about connecting. Connecting is ready taking up other elements of view. You see, our world is a shared experience, fractured by means of person views. Suppose if we would all believe understood. Thanks. (Applause) .