#i used to live on a farm and at one point had over twenty feral cats just wandering around my lawn

[shouts-into-the-void]

Everyone at work shocked and horrified that I would want a third cat, as if that is a remotely high number of cats

[schleierkauz]

Some Highlights from the 03.05 Stream

As usual, here’s some interesting bits of the last Cornelia Funke Q&A. I tried to structure it all a bit better this time but these talks are pretty chaotic sooo... bear with me. There’s more interesting stuff under the read more, I just put it there because it was getting so long. Anything in (brackets) is my own commentary. I hope you enjoy! :)

Inkworld

Q: What's the deal with the death bond between Mo and Dustfinger and will it be relevant in the new book? A: Since Dustfinger is probably immortal now, he’s been operating on a different level than Mo who is very much still mortal. Other than that, Cornelia doesn't want to reveal too much about TCoR for now. She worked on it the day before the stream, and she shows us the notebook she uses for it.

She thought she had a pretty good idea of what the story was going to be but more and more things keep happening and the book is already looking to be a lot longer and more complex than she intended.

- She will focus on TCoR once the move to Italy is complete and she's very excited about that since the Inkworld is essentially Magical Italy. She can't wait to sit in Volterra and write about Ombra.

- The TCoR sketch book might just be published at some point as a sort of bonus making-of book since it's already full of illustrations and other fun stuff

(That looks like the witch character, doesn’t it? I wonder who the other woman is... And god, I wish I could actually read the text. :/)

- The Inkworld exists around 1360 by our understanding of time

- The Mystery Chapter I translated ages ago is still canon! More info on that in the Reckless section

Q: Will we ever get to read the "original" Inkheart by Fenoglio? A: No, never. Cornelia's writing style is too different from Fenoglio's and she wouldn't be able to pull it off. 

However! Cornelia still hopes for an Inkworld TV show that would begin long before the story of the first book. She already has a notebook all about Dustfinger's and the Black Prince's childhoods, how they met each other as well as other characters such as Roxane etc. Fenoglio didn't care much for their backstories so Cornelia feels like she can explore them without stepping on his toes.

- A long time ago, Cornelia had an editor who thought Dustfinger was a bad character (lmao. imagine being that wrong.)

Reckless

Q: Will one of the short stories Cornelia wants to write about the Mirrorworld be about Nerron's mother? A: Interesting idea! She will consider it.

Q: Will Cornelia include African and/or Indigenous stories in the Mirrorworld? A: Yes! She planned to do it in the sixth book but right now it looks like it might happen in the fifth, so she's trying to figure out how to include South-American fairytales alongside African and Indigenous ones. She wants to include those stories through characters we meet along the way, without necessarily taking the story to those places directly. Or maybe she'll write a separate book entirely to do those fairytales justice. 

- The Mirrorworld exists around 1860 by our time

- Cornelia feels like there will be a lot of Mirrorworld spin-offs because she keeps having ideas and loves writing in that world

Q: Did Spieler (Player(?)), when he was in the "real" world, know about Capricorn and Fenoglio's Inkheart book? A: The silver book that makes people into silvertongues was created by Spieler. For a while he found it very convenient to travel the worlds through books but eventually he realised that books tend to develop a will of their own, which is why he ultimately decided to travel via mirrors. He probably knows about Fenoglio but Cornelia doesn't think he'd care much about Capricorn since he's playing in an entirely different league of villainy.

- Cornelia just signed a contract for a Reckless TV show

Cornelias new Farm in Italy

Q: Will she have animals on the new farm as well? A: Probably not! Right now she's more interested in befriending wild animals. Her dogs will stay with her but otherwise she wants to focus on wild animals as well as wild flowers. She wants to share her garden with any animal that stops by - including, hopefully, the occasional feral cat.

- Cornelia is getting into animation! She will work with a friend of hers who is a teacher in that field to create a little stop motion/animation studio on the farm so artists can bring their characters to life in a new way and create short movies.

Q: How can artists apply to be invited to the farm? A: Cornelia doesn't want people to apply directly, she'd rather leave it up to chance and fate. Most of her artists were recommended to her by friends or former colleagues and this method is working very well. She encourages people to post their work on the internet or send it to her via her website or twitter or something, she just doesn't want to hold contests regularly because it would be overwhelming and she doesn't want to have to reject people. Also, it's aimed at young artists who are just starting out and it’s mainly for girls/women, although not exclusively.

Side note, she plans to have another farm in Germany (probably in Schleswig-Holstein) and there will be other projects that happen there.

Q: Will it be possible to visit the farms, will they sell tickets? A: Cornelia doesn't want to sell tickets and definitely doesn't want "Disneyland vibes". The Mirror Farm (in Germany) isn't supposed to make money but she rather wants it to be a gift to her readers. They'll have to somehow limit how many people show up at once but there will be "open days" where anyone can just show up. Cornelia also wants to offer workshops or something similar herself once or twice a year, where people would have the chance to meet her in person.

Bonus: Life Lessons with Cornelia

Q: Does Cornelia have any advice for people in their mid-twenties who are not quite sure what to do with their lives? A: Figure out what you want to do and follow your heart because being stuck doing something you don't care about at all will make you miserable. And then it comes down to discipline and hard work. You might never get rich doing what you love but someone in their 20s is still young enough to try all kinds of different things and find a path that works. The important thing is actually following through instead of just endlessly thinking about what could be. Travel the world, try different jobs. Don't be fooled into thinking you have to go to university/college, that's nonsense. Knowing how to build a sturdy table or plant a good herb garden makes someone an artist in Cornelia's eyes. Listen to advice but don't blindly follow it. Don't be afraid to change your dreams. Make mistakes and learn from them. You live in one of the richest countries in the world, you won't starve or die on the streets so be grateful and be brave.

Misc.

- The three of them spend the first eight minutes of the stream telling us to visit this website and check out the cool bridge their bookshop is built on and the blackbird that moved into the store

- Cornelia's daughter got married and it was beautiful :)

- Cornelia is looking forward to moving to Italy and being closer to "us" and European artists. She says she'll miss California but she is incredibly tired of all the wild fires.

- Cornelia is now fully vaccinated 

- Cornelia is working on a book about two girls. One used to live in Germany in the 40s-50s, was blind and collected plants from all over the world with her father. She would write letters about those plants to her sister, and those letters are found one day by a girl from Brooklyn. She starts to go looking for the plants the letters are about in the botanical garden. Cornelia has an assistant who keeps sending her pictures from that botanical garden and it's a very fun project because it's very rooted in the real world yet Cornelia still gets to tell a story about a friendship that takes place through letters. She hopes to have finished it by August

- The Wild Chicks movie might just actually happen and everyone's excited about it

- An animated Igraine Ohnefurcht movie is in the works

- So is an animated Geisterritter/Ghost Knight movie

- Cornelia keeps losing books and other important things in the mail and it is pretty infuriating

- Cornelia recommends the book "Sand Talk" and once again says white people should be careful about not speaking over marginalised groups in the name of protecting them

[fangmaw]

misc vampire bf scene #2

"That's it. We're going to the farm."

Hex lifted his head from the arm of the couch to frown at Caleb, currently standing two feet in front of him, arms crossed.

"You heard me. Get your vampire ass off the couch and grab your coat." He jangled his keys and watched Hex bury his face in a throw pillow with a groan.

"Don't wanna."

Caleb softened, but stood his ground. "You've barely moved the past three days. Last time you fed off me, I practically had to drag you away."

Hex tilted his head enough to make eye contact and regarded him for several seconds before he spoke. "I'm sorry, Caleb. I didn't mean to hurt you." His voice wavered slightly as he turned away again.

"No, I didn't mean-" Caleb fumbled as he stepped up to the couch and knelt alongside his boyfriend. He slid an arm over his chest and pressed his own torso to the man's back, enveloping him. "I'm fine. I know you'd never hurt me." He felt Hex murmur in agreement. "I brought it up because it illustrates my point— you're getting hungrier."

Hex sighed and held Caleb's outstretched arm to his chest before leaning down to place a kiss on the back of his hand. "Still don't wanna."

"Well, I can't bring a sheep into the apartment without someone noticing, so it looks like we have a dilemma." At that, Hex made an effort to roll over, and Caleb quickly hopped back to his feet. 

"How do you know your aunt won't care?"

Satisfied that he'd won, at least for now, Caleb turned to hunt down a warmer jacket as he replied, "It's a massive farm. Ranch? Not important. What matters is that I know where it is, I have keys to most of the gates and outbuildings, and there's enough livestock that a couple heads can be chalked up to animal attacks without ruining anyone's livelihood."

He disappeared into the bedroom and soon returned, bearing his own fleece-lined windbreaker and a sweater for Hex. As he shrugged into the teal behemoth, he watched Hex rise and stretch his back. His face looked drawn, and the skin above his collar more taut. Before Caleb had a chance to pity him, the ghoul saw that he had returned and grinned, exposing dual rows of jagged teeth. Hex thanked him and tugged the garment on over his head.

The turtleneck hid his collar from view; unfortunate, but Caleb still had the satisfaction of knowing it was there. Since Hex didn't leave the house much, Caleb had chosen something a bit more obvious than he would have otherwise - a lovely strip of black leather, fashioned into a choker as clasped with a petite silver lock. Hex was delighted to receive it —though not surprised, as after Caleb mentioned the idea, he had to measure Hex's neck to get it fitted, and at that point the gig was well and truly up. He wore it with pride nearly every day, and frequently Caleb caught him admiring how it looked in the mirror, or absently reaching up to touch it.

Looking at the collar always stirred that needless protective instinct in his head. Hex was more than capable of destroying any possible bodily threat that came his or Caleb's way, but seeing the clear mark around his neck, bold and unabashed, he felt that responsibility anew. He wanted to care for what was his.

Idly, he wondered if Hex felt something of the same for him. They'd never explicitly talked about it before, but Hex was always so tender with him after a bite, even just a nibble. Caleb was hesitant to broach the subject. He knew Hex struggled with reconciling biological necessity with kink, but it probably wouldn't hurt to ask. Eventually. Right now, they had other priorities, and they'd all be happier and more relaxed if Hex was fed properly first.

Hex was still a bit tense in the car. The Minnesota back roads were treacherous this time of year, and it was pitch dark beyond the headlights, so Caleb was focused mostly on the asphalt ahead of them. Even so, the restlessness of his passenger was hard to miss.

Out of the corner of his eye, Caleb caught him chewing at one of his claws and swatted in roughly the right direction.

"Quit that."

"You're not my mom," mumbled Hex. He did stop gnawing at the nail, though.

"No, I'm your chauffeur."

"Should've found a different driver. I always forget how small your car is." Though he couldn't see Hex's expression, Caleb could hear the smile on his voice.

Caleb chuckled a bit, and the pair fell into a silence. Caleb took it upon himself to slay the elephant in the room.

"Are you nervous because it's live animals?"

Hex didn't reply for a moment, so Caleb chanced a glance at his face. He was looking down at his hands, toying with a loose stitch at the hem of his sweater.

"I guess."

Caleb kept watching the road. They were less than twenty minutes out at this point, plus some time to find a good parking spot. He heard Hex sigh.

"It's been a really long time since I was feeding off animals regularly. I'm not sure- what if- it was different before. I was different." Hex breathed heavily. "Does that make any sense?"

With a nod, Caleb replied, "I think so. What if you think of it this way: you're always on my ass about eating something and drinking plenty of water after you have a treat; this can just be me getting payback. You don't even have a choice. I want you strong and healthy, so you'd better do as I say, or else." With a smirk, he flicked his eyes back to his partner, who was considerably more relaxed and currently mid-eyeroll.

"I hate how much that works on me."

"My psychic powers are unparalleled. And we're getting close. You had better start planning out your menu."

Turns out, cows have a lot of blood. Like, well over a gallon. Not that Hex seemed to mind.

The ghoul had whined about the cold the entire time they spent sneaking around the pasture, but now he was on his knees in the muddy snow, hunched over a limp heifer that quit kicking a good five minutes ago.

Caleb was nervously checking his phone, both for time and in case he got some last minute text from his aunt that she was coming back tonight. They were beyond the reach of the sparse lightposts framing the pasture, so even if there was someone nearby, they were as good as invisible. By the light of his phone's lock screen, Caleb could get a better view of Hex.

It was fascinating to watch. His face was magnetically pressed to the soft skin under the animal's jaw, while his hands roamed aimlessly about the body. Occasionally he would take a deep pull, struggling against the dying heart, and dig his claws into the nearby flesh, reflexively. Caleb bent lower, close enough he could see Hex's jaw work as he adjusted his grip, nosing along the stretch of muscle and making a fresh wound.

Though Caleb was tempted to place a hand on his back, he thought better of it and maintained his distance. He knew enough about animal behavior not to disrupt a predator while it was feeding. Even domestic dogs bite when they're approached incorrectly.

Caleb settled for taking a squat on the opposite side of the cow, a good few feet away, but close enough that his pathetic light permitted him vision. For a handful of further minutes, the only sounds were muffled breaths against wet fur and the crunch of Caleb's boots as he shifted his weight.

It took him a second to realize Hex had gone still.

"Hey." He would never use the word "feral" to describe Hex to his face. It was good that he was able to relax so much, especially with Caleb around, but it was always wise to test the waters after something intense like this.

"Mmph." Hex's face still hung limp off his shoulders, pressed to the animal's neck.

Caleb smirked. "You good?" Dork.

"Mm. Good cow."

With a short laugh Caleb got up. "I'm coming over, okay?" He could just discern the outline of Hex nodding against his expired dinner. Caleb surprised himself by throwing caution to the wind and kneeling in the slush. He lit up his screen and balanced the device on the massive shoulder to his left. The greenish glow let him locate Hex's hand and cover it with his mittened own. "Well, I'm glad you liked it. I'm impressed by your capacity."

Hex finally sat up, just enough to brace his forearms on the beast's back and allow Caleb a full view of the gorey mess. The animal's neck looked as though it had been run through with a garden rake, the flesh thoroughly tilled by Hex's greedy mouth. The ghoul in question tugged his hand out from under Caleb's to swipe his fingers across the dark blood cooling on his face. He laved his tongue over the digits before he looked to Caleb, grinning.

"I live to please." His suave demeanor buckled when his gut audibly complained about the rapid influx of fluid it was dealing with.

"I suppose I've never seen you really pack it away before." Caleb’s eyes widened as he watched Hex delicately push himself the rest of the way up off the animal and sit—or rather, try. The waistband of his jeans was giving him some trouble. Caleb watched him swiftly unbutton and unzip the garment with his slobbery fingers and bite back a sigh.

"Holy shit," Caleb gawked.

Hex narrowed his eyes, but he looked far too satisfied to actually emote irritation. "I'd like to see you drink a fucking cow and not bloat up a little bit." He tugged self-consciously at his sweater, now clinging tight to his midsection. He muffled a hic behind his sleeve. "Ugh."

"Swallow some air?"

"I will bite you."

"You can't possibly still be hungry."

As though it had gained sentience, Hex's stomach growled angrily.

"No way."

Hex stuck out his bloody tongue. He was always far more playful after he fed, even if he had glutted himself beyond all human decency.

"It's a freak biology thing. Eating makes me hungry. It's like snakes and stuff." Hex leaned back on his hands, far too proud of himself.

Caleb frowned slightly as he thought. "Do we need to get you another cow? Because I'm not sure I can swing that, and definitely not again next week."

"It wouldn't be much of an animal attack if they just found this lady dead and bloodless.” Hex gave the cow’s head an affectionate pat. “A good carnivore would take advantage of all that precious organ meat before abandoning its catch."

"I'd argue I caught this one," Caleb huffed.

"We can both take credit. You can barely see out here." Hex fell out of the banter to eye the soon-to-be carcass.

"You're drooling, dumbass."

"Sorry," Hex mumbled.

"Don't be. I'm happy for you. But, uh, I'm not sure I want to watch, if that's okay." Hex tried to hide his dejected expression under a guise of wiping saliva and cow off his face. Caleb's heart sank. "If I go now, I can have the car all warmed up by the time you're finished, so it'll be nice and cozy when you immediately fall asleep."

This seemed to reassure Hex, as the dopey grin was back. He stifled another soft burp. "Uh, will you be okay to get back by yourself?"

Caleb picked up his phone from its bovine perch and waggled it. "Flashlight." Hex nodded, but looked dubious. "I'll be fine. Promise." Caleb got up and did his best to brush the unmelted snow off his now slush-soaked pants.

Hex nodded and waited until Caleb was within the range of the lamps before tearing open the heifer's belly and burying his head in its chest cavity.

[hozukitofu]

the kids are doing espionage

He would like to preface everything by a singly stated -

It was Qing's idea.

He is only a simple tech boy, a robotic engineering undergrad, someone who just wants to corrupt enough of the capitalistic system and its funds to fund his recycling robot, to delete the littering problems around campus.

The facts that he happens to know like one bad form of martial arts and by virtue of being a robotics student, great with tools and improvised weapon creation, are irrelevant. Besides the point.

But Qing is deep down, within that core of his questionably existing heart, an opportunist - an investor of assets. She sees potential, she invests in it. That's always how it goes.

Zizhen is eating, simply existing, thinking about robots and redeeming himself at a round of chess with uncle Shao when Qing barges into his absolutely mundane life, waving a USB stick in front of his nose, crowing about how she cracked the capitalism code.

Normally he would care.

"That's great, cool, jie, but -" he doesn't even have time to bat the excited blonde away before a proposition is coerced into his food.

"You! Wanna be an anti-government agent?"

Zizhen almost drops his fork.

"I'm sorry," he blinks, not even bothering with his food any longer because his appetite had taken a nose dive out the processing plants by the back of the college. "What. Did you just say?"

Qing was going to elaborate, but he doesn't let her.

"No, it was rhetorical - jie! I'm not becoming your agent for hire! I'm too soft for killing people!" He denies, vehemently, because look at him! He wears clothes that have to oblige by fluffy and big standard, and his hair cannot be let loose outside of the house if it isn’t wavy and bouncy. 

Doctor Wei calls him marshmallow unironically, on top of Romantic Guy, with debatable nuances under the friendly moniker because that’s his life goal, to be as soft and sweet as humanly possible. He is only someone who strives to dismantle the system in the ways he clumsily knows how to, but he always goes back to helping people at the end of the day. 

Becoming a hitman for hire is never something he would consider, or ever would. 

Qing badgered and wheedled, bombarded him with the benefits, the sheer overwhelming scale of everything good and pure tipping and burying onto his side of the balancing plates, to which he avoids, like one would, if a pack of mosquitoes with malaria starts heading your way. He had blended into the crowd. Worn disguises to avoid this woman's hawkish eyesight. Climbed out a window to avoid persecution and inevitable screeching. Legitimately broke into a dead sprint across the canteen as soon as he spotted Song-Xiao Qing looking for him.

One of these days she will catch up to him, and she will skin him alive, but not today. He weaves around busy college students arriving and leaving their lecture halls, his long arms tucked closely to his chest so that nobody snags them off him. It is a laborious chase that she incurred onto his person, and he dreads the reality where she finally hacks into a computer somewhere and puts a tracker onto him so that she can be two steps ahead of him and then she can beat him into the ground on the basis of him avoiding her like she will personally break all of his robots inside and out.

"Ouyang Zizhen!" He hears a death roar, and runs faster.

Gotta put that threefold authentication code into all of his login devices so that the two steps pre-planning stage doesn't happen. Yes. But run first.

-

He’s fallen asleep across a horizontal surface - he’s pretty sure that this is the first horizontal surface his eyes park on and his brain immediately decreed that We’re napping. Now. ASAP pronto LOL.

He comes back to the world of living when he is toed awake by a person, voice vaguely threatening and familiar to his ears -

“Ouyang. Ouyang.”

“Noo,” he whines, thinking it to be his father. “Dad I have the day off.”

“Zizhen. You will wake up or I will walk all over your face. Your choice, sweet guy.”

He sits up, immediately awake.

Look, he’s a coward. He has high sensors in-built to detect approaching danger to his person. It’s how he made it beyond high school to go where he does now. It’s nothing to be proud of - surviving, just barely, in this cutthroat world is a goddamn miracle, if he has to say so himself. So what if he’s a coward. He’s still alive. That’s what matters.

Also he has a feeling that if he had keep on sleeping, he will open his eyes in the next life, as a bug. Because he had been horrifically murdered in this life and that death was so bad that a bug’s body is the only viable and painless reincarnation the gods deem fitting for little poor him.

“I’m up,” he wheezes, vertigo slamming onto his head. “I’m physically with you but my brain had just taken a holiday. Please allow it some time to return.”

“I don’t need your brain for this,” Qing beams at him, mouth spreading in a Joker-ish feral look. “I’ve got a favour to ask.”

I’ve got a favour to ask sounds exactly like those questions that ask you for something but if you deny, you will die on sight. 

The way his upperclassman is smiling at him gives him all the answers he has. 

“What,” he grouses, mouth twisting, pulling his hoodie even more over his forehead and eyes, covering the majority of his freckles. They’re still here despite the lack of hours he spends in active avoidance of the sun and the majority of this goddamn school hates the sight of freckles like they’re something contagious so his instincts mostly had been ‘cover up’.

“Someone took something from me and I need a boy to get it back for Yours Truly,” she smiles, still feral and not the least friendly.

He squints suspiciously at her. “Why a boy. Is this hard even for you, lawbreaker extraordinaire?”

“I need a boy, you stupid robot builder,” she rolls her eyes, throwing a hairband onto the table in front of him. “Because someone from Gusu took my things and on virtue of me being a woman, I can’t enter without the security shooting me on sight.”

He groans out loud and slumps even further onto the table, hoping to become one with the recycled plastic. 

“I don’t even go there. They’ll shoot me on sight too. They have stun guns -”

She cuts him up, retying her space buns. He lets out a huff of hysterical air and rethinks back to every wrong decision he had ever taken in this life. 

“Which they’re not allowed to use on trespassers, chill. Listen, how you get it isn’t my problem. Get me the thing and I’ll squander all the favours you owe me.”

This sparks his interest. A-Qing is stingy. The stingiest person he has the misfortune of ever running across. She studies economics. She lives on cash alone. Just. Cash. She hoards money and favours and then harvests them like produce of her questionable farm.

Ouyang Zizhen owes Qing a lot of money for the completion of his robotics projects and the launch of his career as a junior lab assistant to the research team of the mechanical engineering department. She did all that, knowing that her investments were wise, and she constantly lords the favour over his head.

It sounds great, to get rid of one Song-Xiao Qing infinitely, but he can’t help but wonder if the catch, beyond You’ll die if you trespass Gusu like the absolute moron that you are. This sounds like it’s much more than just a suicide run. It sounds more like...a test? Of sorts? 

“All the favours?” He looks up, hood slipping, his freckles all in glorious sight and judging his upperclassman. “Are you sure?”

Qing-jie grins at him, looking every bit like the crook she is. “Are you?” 

“Heck, yes, why do you even ask. But I feel like you’re betting too much on this. How do you know if I’ll come back for you to squander all your favours for me? Seems fishy.”

“You’ll come back,” she waves him away. “I wouldn’t swear on it if I’m not sure. So, what of it, marshmallow? You want in?”

He can’t say no anyways. “You know I can’t say no,” he scowls, and refuses to shake her hand. “If I don’t come back, tell my father to take all my robots. And burn me paper money.”

Qing cackles right at his face. “You’re exaggerating, kid. It’ll be fine. I swear on it.”

“Your words are all lies anyways! Shut up!”

-

Research on how to get into Gusu? Actually kinda fun.

Actually sneaking into Gusu unscathed? Less fun. Bordering on traumatic.

Technically he knows the blueprints. Technically he knows that the scanning gates at the southern entry can fit an entire person if they just, like, lie down and limbo through the gaps of the plastic closing gates. Technically eight twenty-seven in the night is the time gap that he can safely limbo through without getting zapped by a stun gun. Technically from here he can just jog to the international student’s dorm and scale to the second floor, open the window fourth from the right, slide in, get the thing from under the desk, get out the way he did before, go home, change his name, get plastic surgery, genetically rewrite his fingerprints and DNA makeup, move back to Baling, call it quits.

Technically he knows all of this, but he had just slid through a scanning gate and his heart is trying to punch out of his own ribs. He’s wheezing as if he climbed up a mountain twice for no reason at all. None of this makes sense. Why is he here. He should go home. There’s still time. Father will be tired and disappointed but when is he not. 

No, his brain, traitorous, but also wanting to get rid of the human leech Song-Xiao Qing, mutters. No we will get back that bundle for Her Highness and then leave her presence indefinitely. That’s what we’ll do. 

He swings his feet, nothing short of Spiderman, into the intended room, huffing as it wastes him no effort. 

Too easy. Smells exactly like a trap.

It’s nearly curfew, except that people haven’t been rushing back through the easy way in, because he saw people coming out and they pretended to not see him as he came in. Are they stupid. Are they not going to come back for roll call and suffer the wrath of Lan Qiren? Or worse, He Who Must Not Be Named.

He reaches for the bundle, stuffs it under his hoodie, and prepares for take off, when a door swing open and someone walks in, without turning the lights on. 

His danger alarms not only went off, but into overtime and exhaustive underpaid labour. 

“Ouyang?” He hears, hissed in the dark. 

He should have covered his face, because wow he didn’t think he was that popular outside of his own robotics class for setting off that fire alarm back in first year. But. He is digressing from this imminent danger! This voice. That sounds distinctly similar.

“Do we know each other?” He hisses, crouching back in a Spongebob stance, eyes narrowed at the boy in the cats-covered face mask. He can’t make a run for it here but he can try for the knee caps. 

“Yes. Oh my god, yes,” the person pulls his face mask down and lo and behold, it’s -

“Lan? Lan Jingyi?” He gapes, while sidestepping a stray tennis ball lobbing at his head. “Why are you here?” 

Jingyi shoots back at him - “I go here. Why are you here?”

He throws up one hand, the other preoccupied with the bundle - “Qing-jie!”

“Bad answer, but expected,” Jingyi tuts his tongue, and shoves him out of the way. “You don’t seem the type to engage in trespass and theft.”

“Ha ha, pot calling the kettle black,” he sneers back, tracing back his steps. “Why are you here here. I know you go here, but this isn’t your room. Or anyone else’s room that you are affiliated with. It’s the international student wing. You never answered my question.”

He would not receive any answers because there are footsteps, grave and reverent footsteps, that bring pandemonium outside the corridor and Jingyi, not even thinking twice, shoves him into a wardrobe, finger on his lips.

“Quiet,” the boy hisses. “And when he’s gone, you can scram.”

Zizhen thinks that is the end of it, but somehow his bundle! Had gone missing from under his hoodie! When! And how!

“Lan, give that back!” He hisses, almost lunging and falling out of the closet. Jingyi shushes him even louder, forcing the doors to close in on his nose and shoes.

He grabs onto a wrist, clinging onto the arm stubbornly. Jingyi jostles his shoulder violently like he’s got himself a human-sized limpet that won’t let go and he elects to kicking it back to the depth of the closet, telling him to ‘stay put, come on, don’t make this harder for us’.

Zizhen is shoved back into the darkness of a small enclosed space with hangers falling onto his head and clothes dropping onto his shoulders. The tracking sticker he placed on his fingertip had migrated from him to the inside of Lan Jingyi’s hoodie. Now he waits.

There is a polite knock - because that’s Lans for you, polite even in walking and knocking. 

Jingyi answers the door with a soft - “Hello, uncle.”

For a moment Zizhen thought he actually screwed up and somehow stumbled head first into Lan Qiren of all people on the night he attempted trespass and theft, but he listens some more, waiting for the dulcet tones of disapproval that the Lan Headmaster is so famed for dishing out at his relatives slash pupils.

“Jingyi,” he hears, and. Well.

This is worse than Lan Qiren. Somehow he had messed up even worse than Lan Qiren.

Lan Wangji, the Hanguang-Jun, is in the same room as him. The professor reliable for dishing out punishments at Gusu. The resting disappointed man. Doctor Wei’s long-term crush and object of pursuit. He’s caught. He’s gone. They’re going to string his corpse like a disappointing sight from here so that all across the country, people can see what happens when idiot college boys who sneak into prestigious Gusu get as a punishment. 

He is suddenly religious. He asks for protection from the Buddha to the corner ghost to the Father, Son and the Holy Spirit. 

“I suggest you return to your own dorm,” Lan Wangji gravely - and flatly - informs Lan Jingyi. “Unless you want to introduce me to your friend?”

Lan Jingyi, for someone doing a theatre degree, is woefully awful at lying. He starts laughing hysterically and like a bloody hyena under noise suppression and the target of at least twenty stun guns and he’s lost all sense of control so now his fight or flight response is to laugh. 

Ouyang Zizhen regrets not leaving his father with a dying letter. It’ll be awful and humiliating to find him as a human flag on the top of Gusu’s flagpole. 

“What friend, Uncle Wangji? It’s only me here!” Jingyi hacks out hysterically, as footsteps start heading his way, purposeful and brisk.

There goes living through tonight then. 

“Hmn, what’s in the closet, Jingyi?” Hanguang-Jun asks, as the doors of the wardrobe rattle and -

promptly stop. 

Jingyi, because he’s panicking and somehow is still the greatest and most shocking improvised line under possibly murderous circumstances, blurts out, completely and utterly from nowhere.

“That closet is fine. It has no one in it! Well, not me anymore!”

Zizhen can barely swallow down the wheeze that tries to climb its way out of his nose because what. 

To his credit though, Lan Wangji stops his advance onto his hiding place, and promptly takes Lan Jingyi out of the room, so he hopes that he’s not being thrashed thoroughly for well, being gay, but in keeping it and using it as a distraction tactic on their Hanguang-Jun.

Zizhen quickly kicks the doors open and tumbles out, sliding the window up and climbing out, his watch telling him dimly that he has two more minutes before curfew comes and security tightens. He would check on Lan, but he’ll be fine. Hanguang-Jun isn’t a blind rule follower as the people make him out to be - by people, he meant just Doctor Wei, who went through a period of time in his life actively cursing and mooning over Lan Wangji, and it’s entertaining and just embarrassing to bear witness to. No. Bad memories. Let’s forget that and go back and report to Qing-jie.

He’s going to start breaking ankles the next time Lan Yuan asks for a big hang out.

-

“He took the bundle from you? Without touching you?”

“I snuck in the death place for that stupid bundle and that’s all you cared about?”

“Damn Lan. Anyways, good job, it’s fine, I’m seeing the golden trio in, like, ten hours. We can haggle the bundle back.”

He hears this, but he also has the tracker sticker. Does it work? Does it not work? Unclear. He’s not too sure. He hasn’t been doing this illegal theft and tracking gig for long. He lets Qing-jie and her favours reinstate themselves as constant reminders in his life as he stumbles back to his laptop and kick starts it to see how he’s going to not set a hoodie and a person on fire. 

-

The good news is Lan Jingyi and his Lan Approved Hoodie will not be catching on fire.

The even better news is that he can get rid of Song-Xiao Qing for life now, because he knows where the package is.

The bad news is that the package is in Jin Rulan’s home. His room, to be specific.

Okay, so maybe he met Jin Rulan a few times when he went to archery tournaments to cheer on Lan Yuan, a friend but also practicing archer to become as great as Wen Ning, Olympic-level archer. Maybe he and Jin Rulan had gotten into a few arguments over pointless things in the past, like all stupid middle schoolers do. The point is that since his friend is a friend of Rulan, he has the honour of being flung at, in the face, with the address of his sizable family manor, because Jin Rulan can and will, with no preamble or social niceties, and so now Zizhen knows where he lives.

Not that a simple Google search wouldn’t tell him which place this is, but being reminded with Jin Rulan, a runt then, probably a runt now, he hasn’t seen the kid in like, two years. A-Yuan doesn’t want him to start testing his robots on real life people and everyone who had ever interacted with Zizhen knows who’s first on his list to be humanly pitted (sorry, tested) against his robots. 

He bikes to the manor, easily buzzes his way in with a screwdriver and some tinkling with the system, and strolls right through the front door.

He did do research before this. Everyone’s out. Jin Rulan is out. He’ll just take the bundle and leave, and they don’t have to talk about it anymo -

Lan Jingyi tackles him to the floor from behind the door to Jin Rulan’s room, with a distant bark of a guard dog and Jin Rulan’s dulcet tones shrieking the heavens, hard, so that his dead ancestors can rise as zombies in the night and slap Zizhen back to Baling.

“How is he here?” He can hear Rulan yelling distinctly, as he grapples with Jingyi and rips the sticker cleanly from under his sleeve. 

Jingyi and him get along okay. When A-Yuan wants people to wait for him after guqin recitals, he has Zizhen and Jingyi wait for him, and they play jianzi as they quiz each other on class things they should know, bickering back and forth. They played soccer together a few times, and Jingyi’s good - Jingyi’s training to be in the under 20′s representative Asian Games in a few months. They get along fine. They love literature and art. Zizhen doesn’t want to set a short-circuiting robot onto him. 

Literally there is no reason for Jingyi to wrestle him to the ground like this outside of the context of a soccer match.

“You found us, how,” Jingyi demands, frowning. “Did you put a tracker on me?”

He huffs, bunching up his knees and kicking up, before rolling away with the bundle. “I will neither confirm or deny your accusations. Goodbye.”

Rulan is at the window, slamming it shut, and holding out a hand, snarling rabidly at him. The scuffle he was tackled into had knocked over metal plates and car parts all over the floor, everything looks like it’s a disaster zone, if he was at home then Father would have lost it. The shining mistress of the Jin family snarls at him, forcing him to step away from the window with the sight of his sharp canines alone, eyes narrowing at him and his bundle.

“Give that over,” he frowns. “And then you can scram.”

“I broke into your house to get it back,” he stresses, with hysterical stress. “No.”

“No can’t do, Ouyang,” Jingyi’s voice drifts to him, as his wrist is seized. “We need it.”

“And Qing-jie needs it, but none of y’all are telling me what you need it for -”

The door eases open with a loud creak, like a bow on an erhu string gone wrong, and both boys might as well have screamed in his face because the expressions on their faces are thunderous. 

“Uncle!” Jingyi squeaks. 

“Uncle!” Rulan also yips, stepping away from the window, and coming over to -

Oh my god he needs to scream.

Doctor Wei and Hanguang-Jun are at the door, brows raised in vague interest at the war zone spilling out all over their socked feet, Doctor Wei humming interestedly at their thunderstruck and mutually devastated faces. 

Jin Rulan is almost the same height as his uncle but he’s looking as if somebody ran over his finessed bow. He and Jingyi, who unhands Zizhen quickly, are both standing and arms splaying, kicking and shifting so that the mess of robot parts are somewhat not so obviously sprawling all over the floor.

“A-Zhen!” Doctor Wei beams, and proceeds to squeeze him in a hug until he dies, stuffing his face into a shirtfront with too much Versace sprayed all over it. “You didn’t say you were friends with the kids!”

“We don’t know each other,” he squeezes out, gasping as he’s released.

“Not a friend,” Rulan vehemently denies.

Lan Wangji lifts two unimpressed eyebrows. Rulan swallows back whatever else he was meant to say.

“Occasionally a friend?” Jingyi amends.

He turns and gripes at the Lan boy - “How can someone be occasionally a friend, you lump of spineless potato?”

“His insults are creative,” Doctor Wei notes, half way between an explanation and a praise. “Listen, kids -”

He then gets cut off by Jingyi and Rulan, talking not only over each other, but in synching fragmented sentences. 

Jingyi  “Uncles, we’re going to pack this up, we know you need the house for guests to come over -”

“ - and we will introduce you and acquaint everyone, but this guy needs to hand over his things first and then everyone can go,” Rulan finishes, hand still reaching out to Zizhen and his bundle.

He tries to step away, but two much taller men - Lan Wangji and Doctor Wei, are in his way, benevolently smiling and stoically staring down at him, and he feels his resolve crumbling. In fear, but also they are educators and they’ve perfectly polished the I’m not angry at you, I’m just disappointed and very very sad. 

“Sounds like a party in here,” he hears the dreaded singsong, the sound of the dead coming to collect his soul and putting him through all the levels of hell.

Song-Xiao Qing pokes her head around Lan Wangji’s elbow and beams at him. “Oh you’re here! I thought I had to call for you! You made my job so easy, marshmallow boy.”

“Uh,” he’s still being held captive by Doctor Wei. “Please. Explain.”

Lan Yuan finally emerges, serene, beautiful, refreshing and soft-spoken. 

“Many apologies for my family’s treatment of you, Zizhen-xiong. Would you like some tea?”

-

The gist of it is this -

It was a test. And his gut feelings were correct.

And the test was Would Ouyang Zizhen Make Good Agent. Apparently he passed, because nobody expected him to pursue the bundle all the way to the Jin Manor, along with wrestling with Jingyi so fiercely. 

“You -” he looks at Qing-jie, who is sipping chrysanthemum tea so calmly, as if she hadn’t led him on some wild goose chase. “I actually have no words. That was very clever.”

“I have words,” Jin Rulan, apparently part of whatever the hell this is too, whinges from his post at the arm of Lan Wangji’s chair. “Why him?” 

“What, besides the obvious?” Jingyi looks at his friend. “He held me off, and snuck into Gusu. Like, impressive?”

“The sticker was a nice touch,” Qing-jie notes. “Although we did make it easy on ya.”

“He’s calm,” A-Yuan smiles at him. “You’re very calm, even though you opposed to this vehemently.”

He gestures broadly, to Everyone Present. “I can’t exactly freak out before this peanut gallery. I want to live past 5 pm today. I have an aunt’s dinner I have to go to. I can’t die before that.”

A-Yuan shrugs like that’s a good answer. It is. He knows. He has a few fire-breathing aunts himself.

“So,” someone prompts. “About this -”

“The answer is still no,” he looks over specifically at Qing-jie, who he knows no doubt will be sending him on more of these trips.

“You did good though,” Jingyi notes. “Considering that you improv like, 9 out of 10 things.”

“Well excuse me for being new at this stuff, how am I supposed to -” he stops his snapping tone as a familiar face walks by, blinking widely as the entourage of idiots who may or may not are influencing a youth in joining the forces to lawbreaking. How is Hanguang-Jun in the middle of this, he just wants to talk. He swallows his caustic words, and cautions a wave to the boy. “Hey, A-Song.”

A-Song bows back to everyone. “Zizhen-xiong -”

“Calling me gege is fine, sheesh, this kid -”

“I’ll see you at tutoring, gege,” A-Song, Jin Rusong, literally the sweetest kid ever, smiles back politely, before he retreats back to where he has to go back to, leaving their Idiot Entourage to their own.

“You know my cousin?” Rulan quirks a judgemental eyebrow. 

“Yes,” he replies, tersely. “Can you not pay attention? He said tutoring. I tutor him. Shut up, I’m only mean to you because you’ve an awful personality.”

Nobody is sure who laughed but there is a ripple of a muffled laugh as Rulan screeches that I’ll have your head, Ouyang! 

“Our deal is off,” Qing-jie snaps her fingers before his face. “You can go now.”

“Just like that?” He squints, suspicious. “No forcing?”

“No forcing,” Doctor Wei smiles, the same Jiang-Wei smile that put the cardiac arrest in people’s hearts. People being undergraduates. “We’ll win you over one of these days,” Doctor Wei slaps a fist to a palm. “Our doors are always open for you to join, A-Zhen.”

Lan Wangji levels a stare at him. “Hmn.”

He’s not quite sure how Doctor Wei isn’t freaking out in the presence of his beloved Lan-er gege but he’s not going to ask or go there. He has a dinner to go to.

“Well,” he stands, and bows, because he still has manners. “I’ll be taking my leave?”

“I’ll see you off,” Doctor Wei also stands, turning to the four idiot monkeys first. “Here ya go, kids. Don’t be playing hot potato with that now.”

It’s then that he realises that his bundle is gone, yet again, and Doctor Wei had only hugged him once.

“Shall we go?” The Doctor’s eye glints, and he wants to bolt out the door.

-

“How are you a part of this too?” He hisses to the Good Doctor, the top medical examiner of the goddamn country and youngest biology professor in his college, as he is shown out. 

“I’ll tell you when you join,” is the cryptic answer he gets, as the doors close behind him. 

Tell me, his Kermit brain says. But then you’ll have to join, his rational robotics brain whispers back.

Zizhen elects to just scream at the door and turns on his heels marching out.

The nerve of some people! 

[hungergames-fanfic]

Grounded

Having to wake up before the sun is horrible. It’s cold but not really, my eyes are itchy and dry, daddy’s in a mood. I’m not having any fun. I guess that’s the point. I’m not supposed to have fun, this a punishment.

“First things first”, daddy says.

He makes me light an oil lantern on my own, at first the task makes me nervous. Last time he taught me I ain’t pay any attention, luckily all I had to really do was light it. “Easy, see”, daddy says when I smile at the flame.

In a way, he wasn’t kidding, that was the easiest task. For the entirety of the morning I’m put to collect chicken eggs. This takes me about an hour. Ari left so many behind that I fill up two buckets. Then, we have so many chickens it’s hard to walk in the coop without having to kick some. They flap around erratically and smack me with their wings. For a second there, I’m jumped by over twenty chickens.

Usually daddy only makes me do one thing and calls it a day, but not today. He’s still mad about yesterday. Ari and me getting lost, then finding out she ran away and we ain’t tell nobody. Has me shoveling up pig poop, carrying buckets of feed, tossing hay into the goat pen and spoils at the pigs. Has me working so hard I ain’t notice how hungry I am until my stomach starts to roar. Even then I ignore the noises and emptiness so daddy won’t have a reason to yell at me some more.

By the time the sun is high in the sky, hot with no light breezes, daddy calls me to the farm house. In a pen he has one of our bulls, he’s big and brown with the longest horns I’ve ever seen. The other one is just a calf. He hands me a brush and tells me “Billiard” needs to be brushed, then leaves me to this and goes out in the horse pen where I can hear him calling Spice, one of our three horses.

“Milk!”, I hear daddy a couple of minutes later, “Milk, down girl, down!”, followed by a loud distinct crash. It sounded like a wooden wall being torn down. “Goddamn it, Milk!”, daddy yells. Footsteps approach.

“Polomir!”, momma Bilmin yells at him, “now I know you ain’t talkin’ like that in front of Dora”, behind her are three men.

“Lookin’ like you need help”, Mr Oxoro says with a big smile. Usually his clothes look dirty like daddy’s after a long day but today he’s well dressed. Has cowboy hat on, in a bright red, long sleeve button up and navy blue jeans with the cleanest boots I’ve ever seen, he stunts with his attire. I say he can try all he want but he’s still funny looking. Short, with a big belly and the funniest waddled walk, he walks besides Eduardo and some other boy I’ve never seen before.

Eduardo looks nothing like his dad. Mr Oxoro is dark skinned. Eduardo looks like his momma. Tall, light skinned with pretty colored eyes. “Milk man’s kid”, Omarion said once. Whatever that means. The second I see Eddy my cheeks feel warm and I hide behind Billiard.

With them is another kid just as tall, he’s skinnier and tanned, his clothes are sun bleached and if there were a strong gust of wind it looks like he’d fly away with it. He looks amazed. His mouth open, looking all over the place like he ain’t ever seen so many animals before.

“This right here is Vano, one of my sister’s kids, they visitin’ for ah, y’know”, Mr Oxoro says tryna keep himself from saying “the reaping”. “Seen them a lil bored so I thought I’d bring’em down here to work”, he says holding on to his belt. Daddy swings his arm for a firm, friendly hand shake.

“Need help? Naw”, daddy says turning around to look at something. All the men chuckle.

“Since y’all here”, momma Bilmin says, “you ain’t gon need Dora no more. Dora!”, she calls for me.

I’ve been out here sweating all morning, I’m dirty and stink. I ain’t tryna have none of them see me, specially Eddy. My cheeks feel hot. “Dora?”, momma Bilmin calls for me just out the pen. Not having heard her creep up startles me into a shriek that makes me giggle out of sheer nervousness. Momma Bilmin laughs and pokes fun at me. “Girl look at you, almost feral, you been playin’ with the pigs?”, she chuckles.

Daddy puts Eddy and Vano work on the broken fence, who both stare at me walk out the barn. I wish momma Bilmin wasn’t holding my hand, they probably wanna laugh at me cause I’m dirty. This makes my cheeks warm again and I try my best not to look at them.

While daddy and Mr Oxoro go and catch Milk, who happens to be distracted by a patch of grass behind the pen where we keep our lactating cows, momma Bilmin talks about us spending the rest of the day together. She sounds excited and tells me about the book I read to her on Friday, how she wants to know more about corals. I’d be excited to read to her again but after working all morning, hungry and tired, all I want is a good nap.

Blessed with nice cold shower all I can do is laugh and play with momma Bilmin who despite finding all of them dead, won’t stop looking for live lice. Says she “ain’t stoppin’ until all those pests leave my baby’s head alone” and kisses my cheek. Afterwards, I’m made to wear a frilly dress and she ties my hair into half a braid, half a pony tail. It gives me the sense that we’re going out but she tells me we aren’t. Says momma is gonna love the way I look when she gets back from work.

For lunch she makes me a cheese sandwich with juice that has bits of fruit floating around. She sits with me at the table and talks about paying Efrain a visit tomorrow.

“You mean that, momma?”, I jump out of my seat so excited I almost fall off. Momma Bilmin smiles at me and nods. Says he’s better now and we can finally go visit. It’s been almost two whole months since I last seen him. I’m so excited to tell him about Ari being my new friend, I can’t wait to see his face. I also miss playing outside with him and the other kids. Wendy says they miss us too.

When we’re done eating, momma Bilmin and me go to her room and lay down on the bed. She has the ceiling fan at high velocity so it’s not as hot as it is in the kitchen. In no time, she’s fallen asleep and snores really low and quiet. It’s cute. I’m not sleepy though. Instead I quietly leave her room and go to mines. For a long second I stand in front of my bookshelf and stare at all the books that I have. Two shelves filled with them, none I wanna read.

Bored, I stare outside from the back kitchen door and watch Eddy and Vano still tryna fix the fence. Vano holds a plank, Eddy nails it in place making the whole fence wobble. Meanwhile daddy and Mr Oxoro walk around the open field pointing and talking amongst themselves. Looking around my eyes catch a glimpse of some of daddy’s mecate. Thin ropes he’s braided with horse hair. This gives me an idea. Daddy won’t teach me how to use a lasso cause I don’t have my own. What if I made one myself? I seen how he makes the ones he sells. It’s just four ropes braided into one that’s thick and slightly stiff. If he sees that I made one he won’t have any other choice but to teach me!

First rope over third rope, second rope over fourth rope, fourth rope over first rope. I go on and on and the ropes never seem to finish, but i am determined. Some duct tape where the braid is loose, a haircut where there are too many hairs poking out and lastly I put the lasso inside a water bucket to make it look wet and pretty. Daddy and Mr Oxoro joke and laugh while they inspect one of the cows. I’m not sure how long it takes for me to finish but by the time I do, daddy’s walking back to the barn, probably to check on Vano and Eddy.

It takes me maybe an hour to finish the world’s shortest lasso, still proud of myself, I go to them around with it in hand. “The roll of hay comes out to four-hundred, five-hundred, the O’doyles are flexible with the price”, daddy says to Mr Oxoro when I pull on the back of his shirt.

“Daddy look what I made!”, I interrupt with a big smile on my face.

“Girl you made a whip?”, Mr Oxoro asks. This makes daddy laugh but the second he sees it his smile fades away.

“That my mecate? Who gave you permission, Isadora?”, he sucks on his teeth, smacks me hard on the shoulder and takes it out of my hands. “Isadora”? Oh, he’s mad. “It took me a week to make these damn braids! I got Samsonite waitin’ and this girl..”, he pauses and pinches the brindge of his nose, “..when I open my eyes you best be on your way back inside”.

Stomping back to the house, holding in my angry tears, I notice Milk is out on the horse pen. She’s staring right at me and wags her nubby hairless tail. For some reason it feels like she’s calling me. Behind her, at the other side of the pen, Eddy climbs the new fence only to break it. Vano laughs and disappears behind the barn house. I crawl under the fence and make kissy noises to Milk. My dress is covered in dirt now. I don’t care, I making noises for her to come. After a few long seconds she finally starts walking over to me. This makes me happy. When she’s close enough I extend my arm and slowly try to touch her face. She lets me and even sniffs the palm of my hand. I remember daddy saying this is a good thing.

Eddy and Vano make me a little nervous cause I ain’t tryna embarrass myself in front of them but having broken the fence again they’re busy tryna look for more wood in the barn. With no possibility of judgment I get up close to Milk and give her a hug. Her letting me get this close for the first time makes me so happy I can’t stop giggling. Maybe this is why Ari is all giggles too. I feel Milk’s buzz cut mane and caress her face, when I stop she sniffs my hand and nibbles on my palm as if asking for more. With my yellow saddle already on, I dare myself to ride her. Part of me wants to, the other talks me out of it. I’ve only ridden her once and daddy was there to calm her down. “She already looks calm though”, I tell myself.

I stare back at daddy who’s not that far away. Him and Mr Oxoro stare and point a the hills past our land. I figure if anything happens, he’s right there. Picking up the courage, struggling to do so, I manage to climb the saddle and sit on her. All she does is huff and move a few feet. Nervous but thrilled I giggle. So happy to have climbed Milk all on my own I try to make her move forward so I can get the hang of riding a horse. Poking Milk’s neck I whisper for her to “go”, but all she does is huff and sniff the ground slowly walking towards the broken fence. I keep poking her and even dance back and forth tryna make her move to another direction but she doesn’t.

”This way”, I say wiggling my feet. She doesn’t budge. Disappointed, I give her a hug tryna hop off but suddenly Eddy speaks up. “Ain’t know you knew how to ride a horse”, he says popping out the barn. This spooks Milk. She neighs and stands up on her hind legs. Suddenly she leaps and takes off in a run, thrashing and kicking her hind legs tryna hit Eddy and fling me off. My scream is so loud that for a second I wonder who it is. My feet no longer on the stirrups, along with her trashing, makes me hit my face on the saddle horn. Unable to hold on, scared out of my mind, I let go.

Hard, dry mud rocks poke at my shoulder and my fall knocks the wind out of me. Having landed on top of my hand hurts so much I can’t move, I was screaming but not anymore, I can’t breathe and hot tears are rolling down my cheeks.

Milk thrashes and neighs running away. Eddy and Vano run up and help me sit up. Eddy takes one look at me and covers his eyes, rubbing his face and head. Vano sucks air through his teeth, he has a pained look on his face.

On their way back, daddy doesn’t run to me, he goes after Milk who kicks anything in her way. For a second I wish she was dead. Daddy should be here helping me, not her. She hurt 𝘮𝘦! Instead, Mr Oxoro comes to my aid. He helps me stand up but my knee hurts too much to stick out and the sight of my hand makes me scream only to go silent again. It feels hard to swallow. Nothing I could say or do can describe how much my hand hurts. The warm tears fall dawn my chin.

Behind me I hear momma Bilmin running up to us asking what happened. She approaches and takes a look at Mr Oxoro holding out my arm. My right thumb is bent backwards. There’s a bump where it used to be. This makes her scream too. Daddy is too busy tryna calm the stupid horse to come help.

“Why wasn’t you watchin’ her, Polomir!”, momma Bilmin screams at him. I’ve never seen her so mad before. She points at him and scolds him for having let me get on the horse. Daddy doesn’t say anything, he just walks back forcing Milk back to her pen.

“She was just with us, Miss Bilmin, she was just with us!”, Mr Oxoro says taking off his hat, scratching his sweaty balding head.

Daddy looks worried when he approaches. Momma Bilmin stands behind me, holding me so I won’t fall while I stand on one foot, she shushes and wipes my tears, caressing my face tryna stop me from crying. “You’re okay baby, you’re okay”, she says.

Without a word, daddy grabs my thumb and pulls on it fast and hard. It pops so loud Eddy flinches and looks away, Vano and Mr Oxoro wince, momma Bilmin whimpers and I scream so loud I feel lightheaded. I jump and kick tryna get daddy away from me but momma Bilmin ain’t strong enough to hold on. Back on the ground I cry so loud I feel like Sasha when was a baby.

Like a sack of potatoes, daddy puts me over his shoulders and walks off. Behind him momma Bilmin tells me “it’s alright, Dora” on the verge of tears while Mr Oxoro tells her “I swear to you on my youngest that little girl was just with us”. “Dad!”, Eddy snaps at him. All of them following us look like momma running after the mayor when he does something silly like leave out the wrong door. It makes me wanna laugh but it feels like I have my heart inside my hand and every time it beats, it hurts.

Inside the house, I sit and watch daddy wrap a white long bandage over my hand and thumb with what looks like a broken popsicle stick holding it straight. Says he’s fixed it already and I don’t need to see a doctor. For a second there, I begged him to take me to the hospital, I thought I was dying. This made momma Bilmin laugh but her hands shake and she rubs them together.

“What I tell you bout that horse, Dora”, daddy scolds me while tying my bandage, “always some with you, no but you don’t stop and think, you just go ahead”, “Polomir!”, momma Bilmin snaps at daddy. “Naw, aint nobody tell’er to go climb that dang horse”, he points out the door. He stares at me really mad and leaves. Already sobbing, I keep crying knowing daddy’s so mad he doesn’t wanna look at me no more.

Momma Bilmin touches her cheeks, her eyes are glassy and she shakes her head. “I’m sorry, momma”, I say.

“It’s okay, baby”, she assures me, “now come on, we need to figure out what we gon tell ya momma”. Oh, she’s gonna kill daddy. This makes me wail, mourning daddy’s eminent death.

[marvelousbirthdays]

Happy Birthday, kathryn-claire-oconnor!

September 5 - Something angsty or hurt/comfort-ish surrounding the thought of "Laura Barton's Home for the Superheroes and Enhanced."

For @kathryn-claire-oconnor

Contains spoilers for Logan

Written by @ozhawkauthor

“Mom!” came a high-pitched yell from upstairs, and Laura Barton sighed, dried her hands on her apron and went to see what mischief her youngest had gotten into now.

“Nathaniel Pietro Barton,” she propped her hands on her hips and shook her head. “What have I told you about strays?”

Nate had her husband’s eyes, and also Clint’s instinct for trouble. This time, though, it wasn’t a bird with a broken wing or an orphaned litter of fox cubs.

This time, he was leading an entire pack of children up her porch steps. He froze mid-step, looking equal parts guilty and defiant, giving Laura time to look the children over.

They were of varying ages, ranging from about eight up to almost Nate’s age of fourteen, she thought, and every single one of them was dressed in little more than rags. They were a diverse group, both boys and girls, of all sorts of racial descent. As they shifted around, bunching together defensively, she caught sight of one child whose skin was a distinct shade of blue, and her brows shot up.

It was almost twenty-five years to the day since Clint brought her his first ‘stray’ in the form of an angry, frightened Russian assassin still half-brainwashed by the Red Room. After she welcomed Natasha into their lives - and their bed - she’d thought he’d given it up. At least, until after Sokovia, when he showed up with a terrified, grieving teenage girl with enough power to blow them all to kingdom come.

“We didn’t know what else to do with her,” he confessed, and Laura took one look at Wanda’s red-rimmed eyes and opened her arms. Nine months pregnant, there was barely room for Wanda to get into her embrace, but somehow she managed it.

After that, the strays got more frequent. The Langs and their odd little entourage. Both sides of the mutant wars, at different times, and on one memorable occasion, at the same time. Which was when Laura laid down her rule. If the farm was a safe house, then it was neutral ground, for everyone. Grudges and grievances were left at the gate, and anyone breaching the single strict rule of the farm would feel the full wrath of everyone who considered it their sanctuary.

This was the first time anyone had brought a whole pack of feral mutant children to her door, though. It couldn’t have been Nate, much though that sort of thing was in his nature; she’d released him from his kitchen chores only half an hour ago.

“Clint!” Laura yelled at the top of her lungs.

Her husband knew the tone. He emerged from the barn at a dead run, stooping as he went to pull a knife from his boot. Even retired - long since retired, these days, after yet another one of his strays had picked up the Hawkeye mantle - he was never less than vigilant about her safety. Even at home, he was always armed, and Laura knew as he picked up his pace and ran faster towards her that the children weren’t any of his doing.

Which meant someone else had sent them. And whoever that someone else was - she could think of any number of possibilities, frankly - should have warned her. If, that is, the children were friendlies.

Suddenly feeling a little nauseous, Laura said “Nate, get behind me.”

“Mom?” Nate stared at her.

“Get behind me!”

The children clustered more tightly together, terror clear on too-thin faces as Clint leaped up onto the other end of the porch, a knife in each hand now ready to throw. It was one small girl with tangled dark hair who stepped forward to lead them, her hands out to her sides in a curious posture that seemed somehow familiar to Laura. Something niggled at the edges of her mind, but before she could tease the thought free, a boy stepped up beside the girl and spoke.

“Is this the Refuge?”

“Who told you that name?” Clint asked, but he didn’t lower his knives.

“My father,” the girl standing in the oddly familiar pose said. “Before he died. He said that there was a place called Refuge, and he told me how to find it. He said that even though he didn’t give me my name, whoever chose it picked the right one, because the other Laura he knew was the most amazing woman he’d ever met.”

Clint’s knives lowered slowly, though Laura knew he could have either one of them through an eyeball at this range faster than the kid could blink.

“Your name’s Laura?” he asked.

The girl nodded slowly. She had wide-set eyes in her too-thin face, and Laura was pretty sure there was dried blood on the sleeve of her denim jacket. Her maternal instincts came to the fore.

“Who was your father, sweetie?” she asked, her voice soft.

Those wide, expressive eyes settled on her face, and Little Laura, as she would forever after be known around the Barton farmstead, said unsteadily “Logan Howlett.”

Clint was so shocked he dropped one of his knives, which landed with a solid thunk point-down in the deck. “Logan’s dead? How?”

“Saving us,” the boy who’d asked about Refuge asked. They had to know Logan, Laura realized; he was the one who’d jokingly called the farm Refuge in the first place. It wasn’t a name that had ever been circulated. And the girl - that was why the stance was so familiar, she thought. It was the exact stance Logan took when he was preparing to fight.

Perhaps she was taking a big risk moving forward, but the desolate look on Little Laura’s face would have melted the hardest heart, and Laura Barton had a very soft heart indeed.

“It’s all right.” She moved slowly. No sudden movements. “Your dad was right, sweetheart. This is Refuge, and I’m Laura… and you’re safe here. All of you.”

The children didn’t relax, not yet. It would take a long time, and a great many of Laura’s lovingly home-cooked dinners, before the looks of fear were permanently gone from those pinched little faces. But as she kept on moving forward, her hands extended in welcome, and Little Laura dropped her defensive stance and moved forward to meet her, a ragged little cheer rose spontaneously from the group.

Smiling wryly, Clint stuck his knife back in his boot, reaching down to yank his knife from the deck. “Looks like you’re not the baby of the family any more,” he told Nate with a grin, slinging his arm around his youngest son’s shoulders as the pair of them watched Laura move fearlessly into the pack of children, gently caressing cheeks and smiling down at the newcomers.

“Awesome,” Nate said happily. “There’s so many of them, I’ll never have to do dishwasher duty again!”

[queerloquial]

(originally posted june 4, 2016)

a revenge fic that took so long to complete that i forgot just what i was exacting revenge for

the first time she steals his coat, the sheer weight of it takes her off guard. it takes both hands and a full two minutes of wobbly maneuvering to slip the bomber jacket over her shoulders. the edge of it comes nearly to her knees and it’s another five minutes of wandering the edges of sanctuary before she gets used to moving in it.

when he sees her in it, he laughs, face split with her favorite crooked grin. “it’s a bit big on you, princesa, you sure you wouldn’t rather have something in your size?” she rocks back on her heels, shoving her hands deeper into the pockets. a few caps, some scraps of paper, the odd-shaped rock she’d slipped into his hand last week. the jacket is solid and it’s warm and it smells so perfectly like him.

“no,” as idly as if she’s talking about the weather, “i think it suits me just fine.”

-

her hand shakes as she curls it over her mouth to stifle her ragged breathing- fear or blood loss, it’s anyone’s guess at this point. she’s not sure which possibility is worse: that the synths were already in the mayoral shelter when they arrived and only came out when they reached the heart of the bunker, or that they had been tracking her and jasper for fuck-knows-how-long and only happened to corner them today.

option c: it doesn’t matter. she’s going to die in this escape tunnel, alone. there’s no way he made it out of the gym. the deathclaw in the wall had already done a number on his leg, that ambush couldn’t have done him any favors.

the hot wound in her side screams when she shifts her weight, and she lets her head fall back against the tunnel wall with a dull thud. stupid fucking institute and their stupid fucking metal-men; one of the corpses grins at her, as much as it can with half its face scattered on the floor from her power fist. pale, bulging eyes catching just enough of the dim light to stare straight through her.

she’s glad, then, that she never did give the jacket back. the warm weight of it enveloping her curled body in one last hug; when she ducks her head down, the collar still smells like him. like her jasper.

the sound of heavy, dragging steps fills the tunnel. she stifles a whimper and screws her eyes shut. whatever last surprise boston’s final mayor has stored away for her, she is not going to let it ruin this moment. closer, closer, slightly faster, footfalls punctuated by labored breath. a heavy weight drops before her with a grunt of pain.

“no. no no no- princesa? /tsurin/?” her eyes crack open just enough to see jasper, ragged and bloody but very much alive, one shaking hand hovering inches from her shoulder. “estás bien, mi princesa?”

“sunt in viata, steaua mea,” she chokes out a reply in romanian. “i’m alive. for now.” there’s too much red in his smile, but her heart manages to lighten all the same. they’re alive, and that’ll do.

-

she’s certain the entire commonwealth is visible from atop this skyscraper, the burning orange light of sunset stretching across all of boston. up here, there’s nothing- no mutants, no ferals, no raiders, brotherhood assholes, or eerie institute constructs- nothing but her and jasper and the relative safety of a half-ruined building ravaged by hundreds of years of radiation and weathering.

the wind up here is biting cold, and she pulls the jacket tighter around her lean frame. while jasper sets about searching the debris for useful junk to take home, she busies herself with scanning the horizon for landmarks. wilson atomatoys factory to the south, just before the buildings give way to foggy marshland; the lights of diamond city standing out to the northwest, leading her eye to the unmistakable shape of corvega just on the horizon; the uss constitution and the distant fires of saugus ironworks far to the north.

she doesn’t notice him coming up behind her, not until his arms swing loosely around to draw her back against his chest, startling her back to the open air of the 57th floor. his apology comes with a low, rumbling chuckle, “lo siento, mi princesa.” the first kiss lands at her temple, and she cranes her neck so she can meet the second. neither of them moves as the minutes tick by; it’s a rare day when they can spend any length of time simply focused on one another, without any need to watch for danger.

at length, he breaks the silence- “you know, you’re going to have to give my jacket back eventually.” she simply smiles against his lips.

“never.”

-

the sun is shining when she finally decides to give the jacket back.

she digs the toes of her boots into the earth where she sits, dead leaves and twigs shifting and snapping with the movement. from this hill, crested with trees, she can see all of sanctuary. the bridge, flanked by turrets and spotlights, the flag of the minutemen welcoming traders and travelers alike. the streetlights, flickering on one by one as the sun sets across the way. settlers slowly rising from their posts, at the guard towers, the farm, the trading depot. the park by the river, bustling with kids of all ages.

“you did good here, you know.” her voice is quiet, tucked between her knees. “you really gave people… something to live for. a future, one that goes beyond the next twenty-four hours. here, and in d.c., goodneighbor, towns all across boston.”

she scrubs at her eyes before the cold wind stings too hard. “you changed them. and you changed me. three years ago, anyone had told me i’d fall in love with some 200-year-old asshole with more heart than sense, i’d have laughed them into next week. joke’s on me, huh, silt bean?” she sits up straighter, raising her head to grin at the sky, very pointedly not looking beside her. “if i were to sit here and list everything you did that made me love you, we’d be here until the next apocalypse. know that-” her voice catches in her throat, “you mean. /the world/. to me. and you always will.”

she stands, on shaky legs, and shrugs the bomber jacket off. it’s far more battered than when she first claimed it, torn and patched and slightly off-color in places. the scent of him is long gone from it, too, she notes when she hugs it tight to her chest. just one last hug.

“odihnă ușor, steaua mea,” she whispers as she drapes it over the burial marker. “rest easy, now, jasper. you’ve earned it.”

[hnhland]

Singleton Quarantine / Day 17 Joey’s Birthday ... Her Top 5

Today is Joey’s birthday, she is 17 years old.  That is a crotchety old lady age in feline years, she is in her early eighties!  Joey’s mother, Blizzy, was a left behind stray from a family that was evicted from their property.  I am 99% sure, Joey’s feline father was the feral cat living in the woods, left by the same family.  Blizzy had taken up residence in our garage, much to my own father’s anti-cat chagrin.  I, however, could not let a cat go cold and hungry in the middle of winter.

Joey and her siblings were born on a cold March night.  Earlier that afternoon, I watched Blizzy prance up the driveway, noticing her profile was much slimmer.  Putting two and two together, I observed her a little bit more and she twisted herself into the middle of a huge brush pile in the field.  I walked down there and listened intently, I heard kitten mewlings.  Knowing the temperature was supposed to drop below freezing, the great-kitten rescue commenced.  

Calling on our family friend, the late Betty Jo Hamilton, I knew her intrepid farming skills would come in handy.  Betty Jo rolled up in her farm truck with tools, and we dug into that brush pile.  We cut into the very center of that pile, through bramble, limbs, vines, etc and rescued 5 kittens nested in a pile of leaves.  Taking the kittens up to the house, with Blizzy yowling behind us, we placed them in a high walled recycling bin padded with towels.  There was a “runt” who did not survive the night, but Blizzy nursed and mother the remaining four kittens.  All kittens were fuzzy black with white markings.  

The plan was to get rid of all the kittens, Betty Jo agreed to take Blizzy to lead the life of a farm cat once the kittens were old enough to be alone.  On a side note, Blizzy lived about a year on the farm, then struck out on her own.  Last time we saw her, with her tail high, she was headed west through a Brookside corn field.  As the kittens grew, my mother made an effort to advertise at the local vet office, “FREE KITTENS.”   Several families contacted us and drove out to look and choose the kitten that fit their family best.  Oddly, enough, there was one kitten that always nipped, jumped, hissed or fought when picked up.  She was the kitten that no one wanted.  

Joey demonstrated an independent streak early in life.  She was the first to climb and escape the recycling bin wall.  In the house, was a large olive green hassock.  All you heard was nails scratching and clawing.  In ten minutes, you saw a fuzzy black and white face peeking over the edge, but you dare not help her the rest of the way.  She nipped her teeth at anyone reaching for her, until she made it all the way herself.  Joey stalked dust steaks, hid and attacked from chair legs or planters.  Joey climbed anything, never going around it … she was going over it.  Her strong personality and funny antics were so reminiscent of Betty Jo, I named her Joey, in honor of her rescuer.  

Betty Jo had many theories about human life and animal life.  One she passed onto us, was the theory of the Great Cat Cosmos.  You do not choose the cat, the cat chooses you.  I chose Joey’s name, but in reality Joey chose me, the Great Cat Cosmos at work.  I kept the cat that no one wanted and for 17 years of my life she has made life her own with antics, the beggar and thief of food, and her love of popcorn… My 3rd generation welfare cat from a brush pile.

Joey’s Top Five Moments

STUCK  - When Joey was a few months old, she tested her climbing ability.  Understand, I lived in the county with my parent’s prior to moving that summer.  At that time, Joey had inside and outside privileges.  However, one night, she never showed up.  I walked all over, calling her, and she was a no-show.  My parents got involved, in the dark we walked down the driveway, up the driveway, into the woods, down by the chicken house.  Every now and then, we would hear a faint meow and rustling, but nothing definitive.  We kept calling.  Finally, we triangulated the meowing and looked up.  She was about 15 - 20 feet up in a somewhat limbless pine tree. She was stuck.  With flashlights trained on her and coaxing, she inched down to about 10 feet.  Finally, my dad (the guy who hates cats) got his ladder out and rescued a kitten  stuck up in a tree.  Thus beginning her love of heights.  

THE DOG - Joey liked to spend time at what I called her Country Spa.  I lived in a cute, but small apartment in town.  Every now and then, I would take Joey to my parents home, so she could run around  and enjoy the outdoors.  On one of these visits, Betty Jo was visiting my parents with a small dog named Luke.  Luke did not belong to Betty Joe, but she was dog-sitting for her friends.  Luke was a friendly, people dog; he was not a friendly, cat dog.  Imagine at my parents home, the front of the house is two stories high, with a deck along one length.  We were enjoying the warm weather outside, with Joey rolling around in the grass.  Luke comes around the corner of the house and spies Joey, Joey sees Luke, and takes off.  Luke pursues Joey down the deck, Joey leaps, twists, lands, and starts to CLIMB.  Joey climbed up the side of the house.  Imagine, a two-story house, Joey is about 3 feet from the roof line, about 3 feet in from the edge, claws dug deep, clinging and hissing.  Refusing to let go.  Luke is barking furiously.  Mom and Betty Jo are laughing hysterically, I’m screaming at the cat.  Dad is drinking a beer.  Another cat rescue… from the height of a two story house.  

THE BAT - As I mentioned before, my apartment was small.  A cute adorable three room apartment.  It was on the 3rd floor.  My bedroom was on the street side with two windows facing front.  One night during the school year, Joey was just frantic, amped up over something. Chasing back and forth, acting strange.  This behavior continued into the evening, into the night, even as I was in bed.  It was almost like she was tracking or chasing something that I couldn’t see.  At some point during the night, she chased into my bedroom.  She clamored over the desks, knocking papers and pencils off.  She leapt and tore down a curtain, jumped on and over me. Destroyed the room!  I was furious, and I locked her out of the room.  She sat outside the door the entire night, restless and meowing.  

The next morning, I was getting ready for work, Joey chased into the room and shoved herself up into the open window.  I investigated, and saw a small bat shivering with fear, huddled just out of reach of Joey’s claws.  Immediately, I shut the window, called work saying I would be late, and called the building manager.  She came up, we decided to release the screen and hoped the bat would fly out.  I shoved Joey out of the bedroom, we counted down, and I released the screen.  The bat needed some encouragement to fly free.  Unbeknownst to us, Joey had opened the bedroom door.  As the building manager prodded the bat to take flight, Joey at a full run, leapt and jumped OUT the window to catch the bat.  Did I mention, I lived on the 3rd floor.  I lost my hold of the screen, and mid-air caught Joey flying out the window after the damn bat.  

THE ATTACK - Joey liked to play, she liked to play “rough.”  She used her teeth and claws, but she was never hateful.  One of her signature, “wake up and feed me” moves was a claw hooked on my nose.  But she always seemed to know the limit.  In the apartment, one day, I was sitting on the floor sorting papers.  She was beside me, rolling around.  I had my arm on her stomach, her legs were wrapped around my arm.  Unknowingly, I flipped her and she landed hard on her side. The thud was hard, it stunned her.  Immediately, she looked at me HARD and stalked off to a corner.  I apologized and tried to pet her, but she ignored my words, hissed and sulked in the corner, her back to me. I returned to sorting papers.  Next thing I know, with a war cry, I see a black blur leaping at me from the table and lands on my back.  Her claws are dug deep in my skin and she bites my shoulders.  I struggle to get her off, papers are a mess, I’m bleeding and she continued her attack.  She released her grip on me after a minute or so.  I’m certain that was her way of saying “F@*K YOU!!”        

HIGH PLACES - Joey loves watching, observing life around her and she always chooses the highest place.  When Joey was nowhere to be found, I learned to look up.  In the apartment, Joey often would sit on top of the fridge and watch.  This did not bother me.  However, it scared the crap out of me in the middle of the night getting something from the fridge.  A black cat during the night is hard to see, and when she swatted your head with her claws …   I dropped many things that way.  At my parent’s home, she would disappear for hours, only to find her stalking you from the rafters in the garage when I would collect her and take her home.  Certain, she was cat laughing at me saying, “stupid human.”  In my current home, Joey lurks at the top of stairs peeking around the corner, always watching.  I have found her in the top of closets, on top of bookshelves or dressers.  Currently, in her old lady age, her favorite high spot is on top of the couch cushion.  She still maintains her look of disdain, observing life around her.  

I hope Joey lives to be a hundred, but I know she won’t.  Most likely, she will live well into her twenties and force me to buy prescription cat food for the rest of her life…  Just to spite me and be a pain in ass.  I write to say Happy Birthday, to the best worst cat…  We, Luna and I, celebrate her today in quarantine with naps, cat food cake and popcorn laced with catnip (popcorn is her favorite snack).

[republicstandard]

Evidence Over Experience: Confronting Racial Supremacist Ideologies

The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., once said, “The most segregated hour of Christian America is eleven o’clock on Sunday morning.” Given that there is no governmentally-forced integration (yet), this observation, borne out by the statistics—close to 95% of American churches have congregations that are at least 80% one distinct race or ethnicity—tells us that when left to their own devices, most people naturally self-segregate. A trip to just about any major city will confirm this as different areas and neighborhoods have a distinct racial or ethnic composition, and in leaving the cities and heading into the suburbs (though gentrification sometimes reverses the process), and certainly the country, you’ll notice an increasingly uniform population of whites. This is actually true with many Western countries. This is anecdotal evidence and would not be permissible in a court of law, but people have eyes and instincts. Finnish sociologist Tatu Vanhanen observed:

(function(w,d,s,i){w.ldAdInit=w.ldAdInit||[];w.ldAdInit.push({slot:10817585113717094,size:[0, 0],id:"ld-7788-6480"});if(!d.getElementById(i)){var j=d.createElement(s),p=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];j.async=true;j.src="//cdn2.lockerdomecdn.com/_js/ajs.js";j.id=i;p.parentNode.insertBefore(j,p);}})(window,document,"script","ld-ajs");

Interest conflicts between ethnic groups are inevitable because ethnic groups are genetic kinship groups and because the struggle for existence concerns the survival of our own genes through our own or our relatives’ descendants.

To prefer our own is perfectly natural, or as Vanhanen put it, “Ethnic nepotism belongs to human nature.” It ensures our continued survival. For one to not prefer their own, they would have to be either literally psychotic, or, in select cases, there is something called Williams Syndrome, which is a kind of mild mental retardation where healthy fear of the unknown, strangers, social inhibition, and racial preference are all absent due to normal neural communications being disrupted. Why then the incessant drum-beat for one group and one group only to cast aside this preference for the genocidal embrace of “multi-culturalism”? We should’ve learned from the events of 376 AD at the latest that multi-culturalism is a bad idea. To quote Kevin MacDonald;

“White liberals…are deluding themselves about the attitudes of the non-Whites that they so eagerly embrace. Their liberalism won’t save them when push comes to shove.”

For Jared Taylor:

Americans therefore live a contradiction that makes it difficult to talk honestly about race. There is probably no other subject about which there is a greater divergence between what is said publicly and thought privately…At least that is true for whites…Blacks and Hispanics [openly reject] the civil-rights ideal of transcending race. For many minorities, race or ethnicity is central to their identity…Non-white racial/ethnic solidarity is an entrenched part of the political landscape, and the pressure tactics to which it gives rise have been very successful…[Whites] have dismantled and condemned their own racial identity in the expectation that others will do the same…They should…ponder the consequences of being the only group for whom [racial] identity is forbidden and who are permitted no aspirations as a group.

The government can obscure and re-classify races on the census and manipulate and doctor crime statistics, but it doesn’t change the fact that biology is the primary driver of culture. Sickle cell is not a social construct. Tay-Sachs is not a social construct. Given full self-determination, Liberia—which has a constitutional amendment barring whites from citizenship—Liberia did not become Wakanda. It became Liberia. Like Liberia, Haiti has had two hundred years with no white interference or help, and it has become a very close proxy for hell on earth. Ethiopia, master of its own destiny since the dawn of sedentary societies minus a five-year interregnum from 1936-1941, is no better off. So let’s stop with the fiction for once. The culture reflects the people.

When a black says they’re going to “educate you,” what you can expect is an endlessly self-referential polemic of microwaved post-colonial jargon heavily imbued with the “lived experience” of “blackness,” utterly devoid of quantitative reasoning or evidence of any kind. You may also encounter vague references to “trauma” and definite examples of slavery and Jim Crow, which they will never have experienced first-hand. Black culture is a dead-end. If we as whites are not nearly racially-conscious enough, blacks are the opposite, luxuriating in this “blackness” despite having contributed virtually nothing to civilization outside of the pop-cultural realm. If whites internalize and have high rates of suicidality, blacks externalize, with a toxic excess of self-esteem and an enactment of their frustrations on others.

Blacks account for about 13% of America’s population but commit 52.5% of its homicides and at least forty percent of other violent crimes. Blacks commit 85% of violent black-white interracial crimes (blacks are twenty-seven times more likely to attack whites than vice versa; Hispanics eight times more likely to attack whites than vice versa) and commit interracial aggravated assault over two hundred times more often than whites. Black males are fourteen times more likely than white males to commit homicide and are between seven to ten times more likely to commit a crime than whites. Over half of blacks convicted of rape in the last decade chose white victims. Even on college campuses, center of the one-in-four rape hysteria when in reality college campuses are statistically safer than the national average, blacks are grossly overrepresented. Consider the real rape culture on Baylor University’s campus or the fact that the University of Missouri football team, which is 65.3% percent black, commits sexual assaults at five times the rate of the general student population, which is 8% percent black.

Statistically speaking, a white woman dating a black man is about as bad a decision as it is possible to make: 92% of children from a white mother and black father are born out of wedlock, and 82% wind up on government assistance. As we know, single parenthood is the single greatest guarantor of inter-generational poverty. For that 8 % who get him to put a ring on it, you have this to look forward to: in black male-white female marriages, the white woman is 12.4 times more likely to be murdered by her spouse than if she had married a white man.

But, as Taleeb Starkes points out, if “a black person is killed by a white person (my note: which, as evidenced above, statistically happens far less often), the benefits for the deceased black person are seemingly limitless. They include:

Canonization with eternal recognition as a martyr.

Incessant comparisons to icons of the Civil Rights movement i.e. Emmet Till.

Front page news coverage, and despite criminal proclivities or rap sheet, benevolent-looking pictures will always be used to propagate the victimology narrative.

Marches and protests with customized slogan.

Foundation created with celebrity endorsements.

Birth parents and even step-parents will become celebrities (Mom may also get to speak at the United Nations).

Trademarked likeness (Note: This may cause family members to fight over rights).

Covered funeral expenses with the likelihood that a big shot from the Race Grievance Industry will deliver the eulogy.

The white perpetrator will be caricatured as a racist demon whose purpose was to snatch black lives.

The white perpetrator’s private information will be publicized on social networks with emphasis on vengeance.”

More blacks are killed by police per capita because they are in contact with the police far more often with their criminal overrepresentation! Always lamenting the predations on their communities, most blacks and browns never put two and two together—criminality isn’t a shapeless cloud that menaces the black ghettoes and the barrios, it is the young men whose fathers have abandoned them to roam free as feral thugs, looting and terrorizing their own communities, utterly unconcerned with general upkeep, steady employment, and social harmony. The high-fecundity blacks and browns have the lowest investment in parenting, so we have a situation similar to pack animals now, where the alpha cultivates what is essentially a harem, and the betas scrounge around the periphery of the pack, or are killed or exiled (probably to terrorize Europe). The decrease in pair-bonding leads to lower investment parenting and either single-parenthood or in the case of sharia-compliant marriages what is effectively single-parenthood as the men may have up to four wives and at least one sex slave.

Lower investment parenting and single parenthood lead to a whole host of elevated risk factors for criminality to psychological issues to dependence issues. Play this out a few generations, and the trends we are already seeing manifest themselves in ways wholly unconducive to the maintenance, let alone advancement, of civilization. It takes six Japanese women to reproduce what one woman from Niger is “accomplishing” with her womb. Neither is healthy. Over-population by high time preference people and under-population by low time preference people is going to lead to environmental degradation, lack of proper aquifer and reservoir maintenance, and eventual mass famine and starvation. The farms in Zimbabwe né Rhodesia plummeted to one-tenth of their productivity once they were seized from the white farmers, and the nation went from food-exporting to food-importing. We are witnessing a similar trend in South Africa. By the time you read this, there may well be no more running water in Cape Town.

Lothrop Stoddard wrote about the inevitable deterioration of a society under “The Lure of the Primitive” when its “life-line of civilization wore thinner and spurred to fiercer energy those waxing powers of barbarism and chaos.” What did Rhodesia and South Africa do that could’ve caused the present situation? What is much of the West rushing lemming-like off a cliff to do now? Ah, right: The enduring image of one dead child on a beach in Turkey as a result of irresponsible parenting has been enough to accelerate the flooding of the European continent with feral young black and brown men, but the horror stories of the native Europeans victimized by these people are swept away as nothing but collateral damage in the pursuit of DIVERSITY.

(function(w,d,s,i){w.ldAdInit=w.ldAdInit||[];w.ldAdInit.push({slot:10817587730962790,size:[0, 0],id:"ld-5979-7226"});if(!d.getElementById(i)){var j=d.createElement(s),p=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];j.async=true;j.src="//cdn2.lockerdomecdn.com/_js/ajs.js";j.id=i;p.parentNode.insertBefore(j,p);}})(window,document,"script","ld-ajs");

As whites, they are permitted no identity, and by extension, they are denied full personhood, especially if they are from the loathed lower classes. They have none of the mystique of the jungle primitive or the allure of the Orient, just bad teeth, a life on the dole, incomprehensible customs, and too many damn kids! Wait, is that the white lower class or the people the “elites” are importing? Remember, noticing is forbidden:

"If the Nazis hadn’t noticed that the Jews were actively debasing Germany during the Weimar era, the Holocaust would have never occurred, in which 6 million of the 2.4 million Jews in German-occupied Europe were mercilessly slaughtered, and their remains turned into useful household products like soap and lampshades. If white Southerners and South African Boers hadn’t noticed the criminal propensities of blacks, their reckless envy of whites and white accomplishment, and their general affinity for strongman-rule, we would have never had the brutal horrors of Jim Crow and apartheid. If Jesus Himself hadn’t noticed the man-made traditions and self-idolatry of the Pharisees, the specter of anti-Semitism would have never reared its ugly head. Noticing led to the greatest acts of oppression and injustice ever known in human history."

Forget everything you just read and get back in line, White Man. See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil!

Thank you for reading Republic Standard. We publish this magazine and the Freebird Forum because we believe in free speech- but it doesn't come cheap! Will you make a small donation towards our running costs? You can make a difference by clicking here.

If you love free speech, we are building the platform for you! Read about how we are building FreebirdTV, open source video hosting with no thought-policing.

The Republic Standard Web Shop is now open! Every piece of merchandise you buy is a victory against the nerds.

from Republic Standard | Conservative Thought & Culture Magazine https://ift.tt/2IcLvnp via IFTTT