#law and order needs to keep their shows self contained within one another

[cycat4077]

Well, that was a dumpster fire 🙄

[my2phetaliaheadcanons]

Hey hey heeey~ I just thought of something. What if from the order where the female reader country was forced to get married (That one from Germany and Russia) her boss tells them after a year of the marriage that they want her to get divorced and marry another country for convenience? Saying something like:

"Oh well, since we are better off there is no need for you to stay married to that country, rather I will engage you to another one from which we will get more benefit. Think about your people first and then how you feel, I don't care if you are both in love, you are someone very nice and outgoing lady, I'm sure any other better country will want to marry you."

Do you think it could be with the characters England, America, Russia, Germany, Canada and Sweden. All separately with 2p version and Yandere 2p? If you want to do it either way that's fine! Thank you very much

I only did four out of the six characters. This is because of my character limit is four, unless you ask for a specific group. You are more than welcome to request part two for the ones I didn’t do, or even a part one for the ones I did this time. A yandere version could also be written. Thank you again for the request, I hope you have a good day!

Russia – When his little wife comes to him with this appalling news Viktor will not be pleased. He had publicly declared that he loved you, and you had done the same. Viktor had also gone above and beyond in his duties as a husband. His love for you had led to amazingly beneficial for your people, and yet your boss wanted to end that.

Viktor, on the other hand, does understand that your boss wants what’s best for your people, but he doesn’t care. As long as you are healthy and he can help you, then there is no need for another. Viktor also carries the belief that divorce is only needed for extreme situations, and that other problems can and should be worked out.

In addition, if you are willing, Viktor is willing to raise hell to protect your marriage. He starts simply enough, pressuring your boss with his presence and offering details about why the two of you should remain united. Treaties and trade are the biggest pushes Viktor gives, but as time goes on, they become what Viktor uses against your boss. Many nations would avoid trading because of Viktor’s words, while enemies would start to rise from almost nowhere.

In the end, your boss will give in. Viktor is a big nation with lots to offer, he is correct in that he can not only provide for you but your people as well. So, why not keep letting him do so.

Sweden – Bernard only looks like he takes the news well. Though his hustru knows better, they can see the tightness in his smile. He is not pleased. Even if you thought had a fleeting feeling of just giving in to your boss, Bernard is there to remind you why it is important to fight for your marriage.

Being silver-tongued, Bernard has the benefit of easing his hustru while also convincing your boss to drop this evil idea. It may take some work, but Bernard is not easily dissuaded. He will spend hours with your boss, learning all he can while still dropping hints about how there is no benefit to taking you from him.

If it doesn’t work, then your boss gets annoyed. He won’t outright yell because Bernard has been nothing but diplomatic to him. Your boss may not even be able to deny the good points, but your boss refuses to give in. Especially since other bosses have sent in letters about marrying you to their nations. This is Bernard’s tipping point.

From this Bernard will resort to his final trick, disappearing. He has done with all kinds of people for all kinds of reasons throughout the centuries. Even though his own bosses have found some hiding places, they haven’t found them all. So, Bernard, will bring you both to the oldest one and hunker down until this is all done away with.

Since both of you are important, I can see this working. After like three months, your boss will give in and your marriage will be stronger than ever.

England – At the news Oliver is going to be shocked. He knew that bosses could be stupid, but he never knew that one would be so stupid as to cross him. His shock turns into giggles as he walks over to you and gives a quick kiss. Smoothing your hair, Oliver lets you know not to worry.

Oliver is the king of getting his way. He comes on strong because he wants to make sure that your boss knows why this should not go through. Firstly, Oliver is gonna send a box of cupcakes and a letter. The cupcakes won’t kill, but your boss is gonna feel all kinds of sick. Think the cupcakes Todd Packer gives out in the Office. The letter will be simply written, but still carry the deadly intent. It contains details about what should happen if your boss would continue to attempt to destroy his marriage.

You won’t be able to warn your boss about any of this, because you’ll be with Oliver, enjoying a wonderful date. He also won’t tell you that this is his plan. The only clue you get that anything happened is a phone call.

The call pretty much your boss apologizing for attempting to hurt you and saying have a good night with Oliver. After you two celebrate, Oliver will call your boss. He tells your boss a simple thank you, before walking over to cuddle with you.

Germany – This lazy guard dog gets aggressive once in a while, and this is that moment. He is your husband; he has given himself to you and only you. If you can’t stop your boss, he will. The thought alone of you being taken, causes his angry burns so intensely that he starts to turn red. His breathing gets ragged, and Luther grabs the nearest phone.

With the phone in hand, Luther dials your boss. In those tense few seconds of silence, attempts at calming him down only lead to him pulling you to him. There he just pets your head, until your boss answers. Not even a syllable is spoken before the grilling starts.

Words of anger, betrayal, and threats fly from the mouths of both parties. It takes about five minutes before the phone is angrily thrown down. Pulling you even closer, Luther promises that he will fix this and ensure that you two will remain as one.

Luther’s next choice of action is to use his resources. First, he will go to his boss. Offer deals in ways that could help you two remain together. If they work great, Luther will return to his laid-back self, if not then it's gonna get scary.

Luther calls on favors that he’s been owed. It adds up to quite a bit and tell them all to either drop their courtship or face his fists. This works for many nations, there are many recalls and a huge drop of interest in you. Those that still persist, Luther calls in the rest of the Axis for help. He will do the beat down, but the rest of them help keep away the allies of the offender.

In the end, you two win. Mainly because everyone realizes Luther loves you enough to give up his lazy lifestyle, and this leads to no one wanting to court you. Luther’s aggressive state will calm with the news, and he will go back to being a lazy guard dog. Always close, giving you affection and you two will celebrate like true husband and wife.

Yandere Version: So, the yandere version of this story would have ended differently. There would have been more stalking, and preparations made by the nations to ensure that their sweet little ray of light remains theirs. Also, in my opinion, yandere is a horror trope and as such having them as her husband would be horrific. Unless Stockholm syndrome takes hold, it's only gonna be bliss for one party.

Russia – As a yandere who had his родная within his arms, Viktor is willing to go to war to ensures that she stays there.

It will start simply enough, like his normal self, Viktor will mention lists of why they should remain together. Similar things as before, but his patience is much shorter than before. As in, the second it is confirmed he has a rival, hell will be raised.

Yandere Viktor does it very simply. Starve your country out. It starts with blockades, the intimidating huge Russian warships start to affect trade. Then it escalates to raiding incoming ships and shooting down planes. It is nothing pretty, and your country will struggle to fight back against this world power.

As your citizens suffer, you will start to feel ill. Viktor’s hurt by your pain; he doesn’t show it though. Instead, he holds you close, doing his best to comfort you. Running his fingers through your hair, asking what you need, administering medicine, and more. Though, there would be times when you are alone because of Viktor having to lead the charge against your people. After all, he was the one that wanted it.

In the end, your country is on the verge of collapse. So, they give into the Russian Government, maybe even suggest a merger. Viktor is pleased that you won’t be taken from him and didn’t even have to resort to full-out war. Viktor is saddened at your ill state, but he promises to help you rebuild, after all his influences will help make it all better.

Sweden – Bernard is quick to act the second he realizes that your marriage is under threat. He has a horribly awful plan.

First and foremost, you are hidden away. Just like normal Bernard, he will use one of his oldest and best-hidden hiding places. For anyone that is curious, his best hiding spot is like a big hobbit hole. Deep in the ground, warm and cozy. That little piece of nerdiness is where you will stay. It’s nice until you realize that only Bernard knows where the door is.

Well, Bernard then goes on the offensive. Taking care of any challenges that threaten his spot as your husband. Eventually, that’s not enough, so Bernard decides to target the source of his marital distress, your boss. With the begrudging help of his brothers, they take your capital. This is where you start to feel ill. For as your capital burns, so do you.

Once your boss is cornered, a simple secret declaration is signed. It is a law that decrees that you shall never be taken from Bernard. As nations, no regular citizens shall be alerted to this new law and it leaves you tied to him. After all, it is said until death do you part.

England – Oliver acts very similarly to his yandere self. Though he is much more direct as a yandere.

Yandere Oliver walks into your boss’ office the moment he hears about this foolish plan. His sources, the flying bunnies, would ensure that he hears this plan before you even have a chance to. At this point in your marriage you have finally calmed down, started to accept your place by his side, and he will not risk having you riled up again.

His smile will be like an angered Cheshire cat, wide and tight. No one will want to interact with him and those that watch him pass will pray for his victim. Once he corners your boss and making sure that no one will interfere, Oliver wastes no time drawing his knife.

He is clear with his threat. Let him and his dearie stay together or face a deadly curse. One that would affect all the choices he makes, and yet somehow not harm you in the slightest. Even if your boss gave in to Oliver would make sure scandals would abound, and hopefully, this would push him to either resigning or causing trouble. If your boss causes more trouble then he would have no choice, but to act on your behalf, and kill him.

In the end, Oliver got his wish. You two are still together, and the troublemaker is gone.

Germany – As a yandere, Luther will appear calm at first. It will feel like a trick being played by his kitten. Another attempt at getting away, that is until his own boss calls him.

After that phone call, Luther is quick to start fighting against the order. He starts by asking if you know of anything that could be used against your boss. Scandals, blackmail, family, or even secret pleasures that he could use to his advantage. If you don't give it willingly, then he's gonna force it out of you. Whatever you name, Luther is gonna use.

From there it is simple Luther has his own government back him with whatever info you had forced out of you. It makes for an interesting engagement with your boss. He isn’t happy with what happens, but he is willing to work with the German government.

At first, your boss may just extend the time you two are married. Maybe it’s another year or only a few months, but Luther will take it. This gives him more time to figure out something more damaging.

That more damaging thing is killing off your boss. Luther reasons that if he kills off your boss, the next one will keep you together. Luther will do it up close and personal, using his brass knuckles and then his firearm to finish the job. Sure, your nation will be in flames, but his government can clean up the pieces.

From there it's simple, he helped you in a crisis, and now your marriage is secure.

[augustheart]

Unchained is an Important Episode

A few days ago we watched Unchained (or Unchained Melody), and it turns out I have a lot of things to say about it. I’m going to assume everyone who reads this has a passing knowledge of the bare bones plot of Quantum Leap, but to refresh your memory if you haven’t seen the episode in awhile or if you haven’t seen it for whatever reason, the basic plot is that Sam leaps into the body of someone working in a chain gang and has to save another inmate there, Boone, who is falsely convicted and serving a grossly inflated sentence due to racial profiling. The premise is ostensibly based off the 1958 film “The Defiant Ones,” though it only practically translates so far as it is also a movie about two prisoners from a chain gang (one Black, one white) who are shackled together, even if Boone and Chance (the man who Sam has leapt into for the duration of the episode) aren’t directly chained to each other for large pieces of the story. 

A disclaimer before I start talking about it: I am not at all an expert on prisons, jails, and the United States carceral system—especially not the justice system of the 1950s, when the episode is set. However, I’m the child of someone who works in the criminal justice system, specifically in immigration law and with people who have been wrongfully convicted, so the issue is close to my heart and is the reason why I was looking forward to watching this episode for the first time.

The first thing I want to say about this episode is that it’s good. Even when the episodes we watch aren’t good, I still generally have fun and enjoy myself. But Unchained is good. Really, really good, thanks in large part to how much Basil Wallace destroys his role as Boone. I don’t think I’ve seen him in anything else, but after watching him perform for only forty-something-odd minutes, I’m comfortable saying he’s a powerhouse of an actor. Boone is the heart of this episode in a way that not every person Sam is there to help is. The entire episode, you root for him to be released. And he is, but not in the way I was expecting.

A lot of times when media is set within the prison system, strides are taken to reassure the audience that there are good people working in it, and all you need to do is find one sheriff who isn’t corrupt or one warden who doesn’t want to watch you burn to line their pockets. While Unchained starts to go that route, with a warden on the work site appearing somewhat sympathetic and listening when Sam accuses the actual perpetrator of the crime of framing Boone, this ultimately leads nowhere. Every person there is making money off of these people being incarcerated. That’s why Chance is serving literally years longer than his nine month sentence for petty crimes, and part of the reason why Boone is serving fifteen years for a crime he never committed. The justice system has no incentive to release its prisoners, innocent or not. Even if there was, magically, a good-hearted warden or prison guard or anyone who will care enough to help free someone like Boone, who is an innocent victim of racial profiling, they still won’t be effective, because the system is designed to keep people cycling throughout it in order to break them down and make them more likely to reoffend, something that was as true in the 50s (and the 90s, when the episode was released) as it is today. And while the system may keep its hold on white people like Chance (and by extension, Sam), it is far more designed to lock up and destroy Black people like Boone, another thing that has been constant about prisons since their foundation was laid. 

So how do Boone and Chance get away? Through escape.

There is no way for them to be released through legal means. Boone’s life may have been saved within the very first segment of the episode, when Sam stops him from being executed for escaping (because that is what an extrajudicial killing like that is), but the prison system has already started to destroy him, even if he hasn’t given up hope on being able to make it out. Nobody cares and is going to help them at a higher level and unfortunately nobody will help them legally from the outside. The only way to break free is to quite literally cut their chains and make a run for it. And, shockingly to me, this is presented as the correct course of action—because it is. It’s the only way they could’ve gotten away and it is better to break laws to escape than to die in prison praying that someone will notice and take pity on them, at least in this context. I won’t say that every person should immediately start trying to escape, because it’s incredibly dangerous for them to even try and can make things so, so much worse for them, but I will say that Sam helping Boone escape was absolutely the right note to end the episode on and it is exactly as hopeful as it is presented, even before Al tells Sam that Boone would go on to essentially have the life he always wanted to.

I do have some things I wish they’d done, though, the largest of which is that I wish they had spent some time humanizing the other prisoners. While at the beginning they’re helping Boone and Chance escape, which is something I really liked seeing, at the end they seem to have completely switched around on them and now are happy to watch them kill each other. While this could’ve been commentary on how the prison system encourages a crabs-in-a-barrel mentality of constant violence and infighting, it unfortunately wasn’t. I think it also would’ve been easy to put in a brief scene of Sam as Chance talking to more of the prisoners, or listening to Boone talk to them, or something like that, where we find out more about their sentencing and realize as an audience that these people are likely serving time based on false or incredibly inflated charges (especially if they aren’t white), and while some of them did legitimately commit larger crimes, they’re still being treated like they aren’t human and are simply expendable objects, which is something they don’t deserve. Sadly we don’t get a scene like this, though at least the time was devoted to showing Boone as a tragic hero who deserves what he gets in the end—a life away from a chain gang doing something he loves. 

Prison workforces have only superficially changed from then, and I mean that in the sense of all three time periods—when the episode was set, when it was released, and now. They’re still essentially just as abusive to their “workers” and are designed to destroy the people who are “employed” by them, no matter what work they force them to do. Personally, I think Unchained is an episode that absolutely holds up, even if I do have some things I would change. I recommend people watch it if they think they can handle it despite the heavy subject matter, even if they don’t have much context, because most Quantum Leap episodes are fairly self-contained and this one is no exception. It isn’t perfect, but considering the time it was made and how well it holds up, it’s still a damn good episode about an abusive facet of the United States prison system. 

[alltingfinns]

The Reichenbach Fall

Back again.

18 months since the last appointment. So he has kept seeing her. (Sherlock was probably proud that John ignored Mycroft’s advice to fire her.)

John’s face during that scene. :’(

Bit forced way to get the Reichenbach fall in there without leaving London.

“He means thank you”

Married!

John smiled at the camera but frowns in the photo. Just a continuity error? Or John got bad luck with the photo.

No faith in Sherlock picking up on sarcasm when it comes to remarks about his diplomatic tact.

The Deerstalker. About to be embraced by Sherlock as the costume for “being Sherlock”. The Coat is for feeling himself, The Deerstalker is for putting up the persona.

And of course Sherlock made sure to note the mention/s of John in the article.

“Confirmed Bachelor”. And even when it’s just “bachelor” John picks up on the implications.

I love the comedy effect of one dialogue = two conversations scenes.

The Netflix Swedish subtitle substitutes “confirmed” for ”inbitne” which is more like “stubborn” or “persistent”. 😏

“Why would it upset you?”

It’s not just the hindsight of Sholto, it’s the terribly wrong conclusion that Sherlock is going to arrive at.

“It keeps doing that”. It’s fun to contrast this scene with TST where he starts out barely looking up from the phone.

Talking people into suicide, bit of a theme really for this show. The idea of murdering through suicide goading, homophobia is a serial killer.

He did as John asked of him and found himself a low profile case. And John just snarks about it. The underappreciation goes both ways sometimes.

The fancy animations on the phone. Just because.

Everyone’s spilling tea but Lestrade. But then again his paper cup says coffee and balance of probability says that’s what he’s drinking. So the coffee doesn’t spill.

I miss the “not our division” meme.

I like the physics idea of using a diamond to concentrate the force to a point. Diamonds are hard enough to fully transfer the force that Jim is applying.

Why is John’s robe so short?

The purity of how John looks at Sherlock just after he was threatened by a terrorist, with Sherlock’s face lit up like a Disney princess.

The male guard nodding like there’s nothing untoward about asking the female guard “would you mind slipping your hand into my pocket?”

“Right, nothing creepy or suggestive about that.”

What is the point of that scene anyway? Is it about adding sexual undertones in general to Jim? Adding menace? Is chewing gum another code? I mean it’s short, but it still feels like it should mean something.

Maybe to compare to the next one.

Maybe to highlight the bias where Jim coming on strong to a woman looks threatening but Kitty coming on strong to Sherlock doesn’t (from a heterosexist viewpoint).

Want to shut up Sherlock? Bring up his and John’s relationship and suddenly he has no quick reply. And so many know this weakness of his.

“Set the record straight”

How have I missed this play on words? How? HOW?!?

Do not press Sherlock’s buttons if you can’t stand up to scrutiny.

Backseat driving a court case. Then again he’s probably well aware of court proceedings in order to determine what evidence would or would not convince a jury.

Every big villain Sherlock gets an animal. But also Jim isn’t a man, but an idea.

The guy who ate the wafer looking down at the crumbs on his jacket. Underrated comedy

That cut is one of the best jokes in the show. The best touch is showing Sherlock taking a breath to talk rather than just cutting immediately after the judge’s question.

This is the most married episode. John’s “what did I say” here, the earlier domesticity, etc.

The “look”. Sherlock assuming John knows what he’s thinking, but at least John knows him well enough to know that’s what he’s assuming.

Most married episode

I am going to be a mess in the end, aren’t I?

John’s hand is nervous with the verdict.

Sherlock offering John’s chair. Maybe he’s fine with Jim sitting there like he is with Mycroft, or he’s using reverse psychology, or he just really doesn’t want Jim in his chair.

I’m definitely overthinking this, but the chairs are given importance in the show.

“Did you listen” in a singsong voice. His phone signal being “Staying Alive”? Does that count? Or is he referring to John “showing his hand”?

“Tiny line of computer code”. This is a fun nod to the fact that computer hacking is often more social than technical. Why brute force a password if you can get to the one who made it? Like the court case. He didn’t need a defense, he just needed to get to the right people.

Jim knows what people want and fear.

“I should get myself a live-in one.” Que a million Moran fics. (Or maybe Morstan?)

Where does this debt come from? Why does Jim owe him a fall?

Did he already know they had a basket of apples in their living room? Would he have carried one in his pocket if they didn’t?

What if he got it set up together with the surveillance? Banking on John and Sherlock being so oblivious as to assume it was the other (or mrs Hudson) who put it in?

Two months later, which was six weeks after a montage that was three months earlier. Assuming rounding errors and we’re now within the very week or so that John went to therapy. Things are going to be happening very fast now, but at least he didn’t wait that long to get help.

“Why must my in-law be such a drama queen?”

“And a wanker as well?!?”

No seriously, not even getting the driver to warn John about the club rules?

This is so much funnier when you’ve been watching clips of “Yes Minister” on YouTube. I can definitely picture Humphrey being a member of the Diogenes. Where’s the crossover fic?

Every scene with John and Mycroft from now on are going to be snark-to-snark combat. Probably because this is the point where John is so comfortable with him that he can go full out.

Ooohhh that music cue! Mycroft’s “I stood for an hour leaning on an umbrella to ensure I got the perfect pose for dramatic effect” music.

Not sure if it’s wise to fill up a ptsd ridden ex soldier with paranoia fuel.

But John’s lack of self preservation strikes again and he just opens a mysterious envelope with his fingers.

And then plays with the crumbs inside.

The one brain cell containing John’s self preservation instinct is screaming, but unheard as it has long since been disconnected.

Still don’t get why the recovery of that one painting got him a hero title.

This is getting long. I’ll post this and start on the next post.

[spacesnail3000]

Brooklyn’s Sweetheart Chapter 15: Big Fucking Trouble—With a Capital T

Pairing: Stucky x Reader

Chapter Summary: Steve has some real Anger Management Issues (capitalized for emphasis). Perhaps he should try some coping techniques, like deep breathing, or restorative yoga, or a hefty glass of straight whiskey.

Word Count: 4,660

Warnings: Language, violence, anger issues

A/N: So I know it's been quite a few weeks, and I'm sorry for taking so long to get the next chapter out! i've been swamped with assignments, and then Thanksgiving happened, and it's just been a hectic time so you'll have to forgive me. Big thanks to my beta, @jessieray98​ --she's AMAZING!!

Masterlist / AO3

“Do you think this is normal?” Bucky muttered to Steve the next night. It was dinnertime and Y/N was sitting at the table, staring blankly at the pizza in front of her.

She had been like this all day. Silent, brooding, sad. She had stayed in bed until noon; although Steve had wanted to wake her up earlier, Bucky convinced him to let her sleep in. They only woke her up when it was time for lunch, which she barely touched. Now at dinner, she still wasn’t eating, although they had ordered from her favorite pizza place.

Steve, who was at the counter with Bucky dishing up their own pizza, frowned, replying in a quiet voice that she couldn’t hear, “She’s gotta eat some time.”

“She’s grieving. If she doesn’t want to talk, we shouldn’t make her.”

“We can at least make her eat,” Steve grumbled, irate at the entire situation. They went to go sit next to her at the table.

“Ready to eat?” Bucky asked, trying to keep his tone cheerful. After Bucky and Steve had already finished their first slices, she still hadn’t taken a single bite of hers.

Steve was fed up, and of course, he had never been the best at controlling his temper. The tension had been building all day, and Bucky should have expected things to blow up soon enough. “Eat your damn food, Y/N,” Steve barked at her.

“I’m not hungry.” Her voice was hoarse from not speaking all day and from all the crying she had done when they weren’t looking.

“Can’t you just eat one slice?” Bucky coaxed, his voice soft. “Please?”

She clenched her jaw, a rush of anger towards Bucky surging through her. Stuffing it down into the depths of her chest, she tightened her hands into fists, trying her hardest to contain the rage within, body tense with the effort. “No,” she answered him shortly, afraid if she opened her mouth for any longer, she would let everything out, every vile thing she wanted to say to them.

Steve had just about had it. “Y/N,” he snapped, “You’re gonna eat a slice of that fucking pizza. Right. Now.”

“Or what?” The petulant girl before him maintained eye contact with him. Steve’s eyes flashed, the vein in his temple pulsing. She couldn’t help but challenge him. Maybe to show him that she wouldn’t bend to his will, maybe to see just what he would do about it.

He and Bucky were both on their feet at once. Steve started towards Y/N, hands ready to grab her by the hair, but Bucky stood in his path, stopping him from touching her.

“Steve,” Bucky grunted, using all his strength to hold Steve back, “Steve, think about this. Now is not the time!”

“The little brat needs to learn her place,” Steve snarled. Meanwhile, Y/N watched on, shocked. It was the first time Bucky had ever intervened in Steve teaching her a lesson. Even before that summer, back when Steve’s punishments didn’t involve sexual misconduct, Bucky had always allowed Steve to rebuke her and scold her to his heart’s content. But this wasn’t a matter of her disobeying little rules or being a brat. She wasn’t going to let them control her anymore.

“Go to bed,” Bucky ordered her in a low growl. She obeyed, not for the sake of following his orders, but because she couldn’t stand to be around Steve anymore. Scurrying to Bucky’s bedroom, she shut the door and locked it just as she heard the front door open and slam closed. The noise made her jump, and she rushed to get into Bucky’s bed,  curling up in his comforter. It smelled like him, his cologne, sandalwood and tobacco.

Despite her anger towards him now, her disgust at the man who helped kill her father, the scent brought back so many memories, and she let herself sink into them.

Snowy days curled up together watching movies, naps taken after school when she didn’t have swim practice, warm hugs and tender touches that didn’t mean anything more than friendship at the time. She and Bucky had always had fun together—he always seemed to encourage her rowdiness, her competitive side. Racing him downhill when they went on skiing trips, or competing who could do the most laps at the pool, or who could build the biggest sandcastle at the beach.

But Bucky was more than just that. Bucky was always her solace, not just a protector or guardian, but a source of comfort, peace. Memories of Bucky comforting her when her father yelled at her, distracting her while her father held tense mob meetings downstairs, keeping her safe when strange men came to their house, their predatory gazes pinned on her whenever she would enter the room. Not just safety, but security, especially when Steve wasn’t available to be that role for her.

Steve, on the other hand, had always been that rule maker, the one to lay down the law, to keep her safe at the expense of her happiness. At one point, he had been a friend, too, sweet and kind and coddling, albeit overprotective to a fault. But he certainly hadn’t always been angry and mean. She was 14 years old when his mother died, and that’s when Steve grew cold—not just with her, but with everyone.

Her memories of Steve before that were different. He always made sure she was fed, and warm, and safe, and happy. He used to pick her up every day after school and buy her food—hot dogs, or pizza, or ice cream, indulge her in whatever she chose. The only time he wasn’t kind to her was when she was a brat, and even then, he would reprimand her and then make it up to her afterwards with gentle words and hugs and treats to make up for it.

After his mother died, Tony took Steve under his wing, focused on him more than the other young men in the mob, groomed him to be cold and calculating and emotionless, just as a mob leader should be. The only emotion Steve was allowed to show was anger, all of his sadness bottled up inside him, waiting to be released as rage and violence.

Occasionally, she still saw glimpses of his old self. Those moments of softness became few and far between, and Y/N cherished them whenever they came. The locket he gave her for her birthday, the time he taught her how to paint, the morning cuddles they had shared just the other day—those rare moments of affection and kindness that she missed dearly, that she yearned for.

As sudden as the thought came, she berated herself for it. Steve had helped kill her father. She wasn’t supposed to want him, just like she wasn’t supposed to want Bucky. Her heart broke for the thousandth time as she recounted how sweet they could be. How could she ever reconcile that with their despicable actions?

Unable to help herself, she cried silently into Bucky’s pillow, until she fell into a light sleep.

Steve came back home a few hours later, knuckles bloody and bruised. In the meantime, Bucky had stress-eaten the entire pizza, half a tub of chocolate ice cream, and he was just considering whether to make a Cubano or a Reuben sandwich when the lock turned and Steve walked in.

Shiny with sweat, dirt all over his clothes, knuckles bruised and bloody, Bucky could tell that Steve had been beating something up. Or someone, based on his split lip and the cut above his eyebrow.

“Steve—”

Before Bucky could get a word in, Steve sent him a sharp glare, stormed into the bathroom, and slammed the door shut. By the time he heard the sound of the shower running, he had all of the ingredients out for both sandwiches and was hastily slathering mustard onto bread.

He craved the sandwiches of the deli down the street, but he felt wary about leaving Steve alone with their girl.

The entire situation made Bucky unbelievably anxious, especially since Steve had been such a menace the past few days. Sure, the man had a temper—anger issues, definitely—but it wasn’t usual for him to be so cross with Y/N, even when she was acting petulant and obnoxious. Now, though, the mob was in danger. The tension was so high, Steve’s stress was peaked, and it bled into his mood, making him much more volatile than usual.

Another component was that they had begun this relationship with her. Now that Steve felt a broader sense of ownership and responsibility over her, it was different; her anger and defiance and deliberate disobedience felt more personal somehow.

Her behavior annoyed Bucky, especially the night she had gone to Manhattan with Wanda, putting herself in danger so carelessly. However, for the most part, he was just concerned about her, and frustrated that he couldn’t do anything to help. He knew what it was like to lose parents, and he knew she would be going through the stages of grief. His mood had bounced all over the place in the immediate time after his parents died—until he had discovered unhealthy coping mechanisms, like sex and drugs and suppressing his emotions.

That had been years ago, and it had taken him a long time to get back to some sense of normalcy. He knew that she would be changed forever by this turn of events.

It broke his heart to see her like this. He hadn’t been with her for long—it had only been a week or so since their illicit relationship had begun, but Bucky already felt so strongly for her. He had only ever been in love with Steve—had never fallen out of love with him, to be honest—and he couldn’t help but think it felt much the same with Y/N.

Now wasn’t the time for that issue, though. He would only scare her away during her time of crisis and make everything worse.

By the time Bucky had made both sandwiches and mulled over the entire situation, the water in the bathroom turned off, and Bucky held his breath, waiting for Steve. He exited the bathroom along with a cloud of steam, a towel slung around his waist.

He looked miserable. The anger had worn off by then, leaving a sense of helplessness for the situation.

Steve sat on the couch, not bothering to put on clothes. “She’s never going to trust me.”

“Steve—”

“We did all of this wrong. Now I don’t know how to get a hold of her.” He couldn’t control her, and that’s what scared Steve the most. It scared him to the point of rage, to the point of violence.

Manipulating her had always been so easy. What had changed? Was it him? Had he lost his touch? Was he so terrifying now with the storm of uncontrolled anger and tension within, that he had lost her completely?

Or was it her? Was she old enough now to see him for who he really is?

And if that was the truth—well, no wonder she wanted nothing to do with him. Steve didn’t deserve anything as good as her.

Bucky sat beside him, sensing Steve’s self-doubt, his anger, his sadness. Steve always worked so hard to suppress the emotions, but Bucky could read him better than anyone. He couldn’t hide anything from Bucky.

“Here,” Bucky said, handing Steve the Cubano. “Eat up.”

And they ate the sandwiches, side by side, while the girl who owned their hearts slept in the next room.

The next morning proved to be even harder than the previous night.

“Darling. Honey. Sweetheart.” Bucky was given the task of waking Y/N up for the funeral. Steve stood in the doorway, observing, determined not to get involved. “You gotta wake up. You need to get ready.”

She grunted and shoved his hand away from stroking her hair. “No.”

“The funeral is in an hour. We need to get ready to go.”

“I’m not going.”

Bucky released a breath through his nose. “Honey, I know you’re mad at him. I know he did terrible things. But this is the last time you’re going to be able to get any closure with him. You need to go to the funeral.”

“I’m. Not. Going.”

“You’re gonna be mad for a long time, that’s not gonna change, but in the long run, this will help with—”

“Bucky, I’m not fucking going!” she yelled, smacking his hand away from her. “Leave me the fuck alone!”

Rage boiled through Steve, a dangerous drug, a familiar old friend. He couldn’t stop it. “Y/N,” he seethed through clenched teeth, “Get up, you are going to the goddamn funeral.”

“No, I’m not!”

“Everyone is expecting you to be there!” he shouted, losing his temper once again.

Well, Y/N had a temper of her own, and after stewing in her rage all night, she was ready to yell at Steve for any reason. “Fuck you! You can’t make me go, Steve!” she sneered his name with so much disrespect, and Bucky only blinked once before Steve was on her, hand in her hair, dragging her out of bed. Her shrieks echoed throughout the apartment as Steve pulled her into the bathroom, and she scrambled behind him every step of the way, nails clawing at his wrist, trying in vain to keep up with his long strides.

He tossed her in the tub and twisted the shower knob with enough force to yank it off, and once cold water started to spray down on her, her yells only increased in volume, curse words and rude names sprinkled in liberally, language that they had rarely heard her use before.

“You fucking asshole, stop it! Let me go! I’m not going to the—"

Steve ignored the verbal onslaught, crouching down and trying to pull her clothes off. “Help me out, Buck,” Steve grunted when her flailing limbs became too much to handle. Bucky held her down, thwarting each attempted punch and kick, while Steve managed to get all of her clothes off. By the time she was nude, her face was flushed and angry tears began to well up in her eyes.

“Fuck both of you! You’re both bastards! I can’t believe I ever liked you—”

Steve silenced her by aiming the detachable showerhead directly at her face, making her cough and splutter as she got a lungful of water. It provided enough of a distraction for Bucky to start shampooing her hair while Steve scrubbed a bar of soap over her skin. All the while, her tears fell, but her tirade did not lighten between her sobs.

“This will be good for you in the long run,” Bucky said evenly as he washed her hair.

“No it won’t!” she growled, thrashing in their grip until Steve held her down with soapy hands, a bruising grip on her wrists.

“Calm the fuck down,” he grunted, “You’re going to the fucking funeral, you little brat, so help me—"

“You’re horrible!” she wailed, chest heaving as she gulped in more air. “You’re horrible, and despicable, and degenerate—and—and—and your mother would’ve been so disappointed in you Steve—”

Wasting no time, Steve silenced her with his fist against her face, something in between a punch and a slap that left her collapsed at the bottom of the tub, ears ringing, vision blacking out for a moment while she regained her wits.

Bucky pulled her back up, not to comfort her, but to continue bathing her. Rinsing his hands, he swiped his fingers against her aching cheek where Steve had left milky suds against angry red flesh, then continued scrubbing conditioner into her hair. “Tip your head back,” he instructed her, an impassive expression plastered on his face, guiding her head back with utilitarian movements. Not too gentle but not rough, either.

Towering above her, Steve met her gaze. She had never seen him look at her like that before—not just anger, but wrath and disgust written across his features. “Don’t you ever talk about my mother again.” His tone was low, threatening, and his eyes shone with hatred or tears or something else she couldn’t tell.

He stormed out of the bathroom then, and she resumed crying, silently this time.

Bucky didn’t have much sympathy for her, not when she delivered such a low blow. He continued his soothing actions of rinsing out her conditioner, then grabbed the bar of soap to continue washing her body. “You shouldn’t have mentioned his mother.”

I know, she thought. “I don’t care,” she replied with a sullen sniffle, taking the soap bar from him.

“Can you do this yourself?” he asked.

“Yes,” she gritted. “You can leave.”

“Don’t take too long.”

As she scrubbed her skin with the soap, shivering from the frigid temperature of the water, she thought about what might happen at the funeral.

The Catholic traditions her family subscribed to mandate a wake, which was to take place that morning. Then the hour-long Mass to follow, and then the funeral afterwards. There would be so many people from the mob there—they would probably be the only ones in attendance, in fact.

Her father’s parents were no longer alive, and he had no siblings or other family. Her mother wouldn’t be there, of course—and her mother had no family left that cared about Obadiah.

Aside from the mob, who else did Obadiah have?

She didn’t want to see any of the mob, especially not for these funeral proceedings that would take hours. Her father had somehow betrayed them, and then they arranged for his death. Where did that leave her?

It was sure to be long, and tortuous, and painful, and…

Well, she had no intention of going either way.

She turned up the hot water and sat back, letting the stream warm her up and relax her muscles.

Twenty minutes passed and she still hadn’t come out or even turned off the shower, and Bucky was starting to get anxious again. Steve, on the other hand, was seething as Bucky tied his tie for him, a half-Windsor knot tied to perfection.

“Some nerve she has,” he hissed, every muscle in his body tensed up in the effort not to punch something—again. He had put a hole through the kitchen drywall after exiting the bathroom. “What’re we gonna do with her, Buck?”

“I don’t know,” Bucky sighed as he tightened the knot up to Steve’s throat. “But now is not the time. We just need to get through this funeral—that’s it.”

“Well if she doesn’t come out soon, we’re going to be late.”

“I’m sure she’d be pleased with that,” Bucky muttered, leaving Steve’s bedroom and approaching the bathroom door. “Honey, time’s up,” he called, knocking gently on the wood. When he tried to open it, it was locked. There was no answer from her.

“Tony’s on his way,” Steve said, coming out of his bedroom, tapping on his phone. “She ready?”

“She locked herself in.”

Steve’s phone might have cracked from the force he gripped it at that news, face flushing again with anger. With how many mood swings he was having in that morning alone, Bucky wondered if he should be worried for Steve’s blood pressure. Steve stormed up to the bathroom door and practically pressed himself flat against it. “Y/N!” he shouted, pounding his fist on the door, the wood rattling against the doorframe. “Open up this door, now! You’re in big fucking trouble!”

Still no response.

Big fucking Trouble—with a capital T.

A stifling panic began to creep over Bucky, a fleeting concern that maybe she had done something—something thoughtless, although she had never had a propensity for self-harm, these were dire times and God knows what was going through her mind—

Steve was yelling again—had never really stopped. “Answer me or I’m gonna break this fucking door down and—”

“Leave me alone!” came her despaired cry. “Go to the funeral without me, I’m not going!”

Relief flooded through Bucky’s mind, thankful at least that the worst-case scenario hadn’t happened.

“You little bitch, you are not going to ruin this today!” Just as Steve reared back to burst through the door, Bucky placed a calming hand on his back. “Steve, let’s just wait for Tony. Maybe he can talk some sense into her.”

“He can try…” Steve grumbled, turning around and storming into the kitchen. “I need a drink…”

“Yeah you do,” Bucky said under his breath. Steve didn’t hear. Bucky felt like he needed a drink, too.

It was only 8:30 a.m.

About ten minutes passed before the buzzer rang, and Bucky let Tony up promptly.

Tony let himself into the house. “How’s she doing?” he asked in a hushed voice. Then he registered the sound of water from the bathroom. “Wait—is she in the shower? She’s not ready yet?” Steve handed Tony a glass of scotch and poured himself another glass. Tony glanced between the glass, Steve’s expression (which could only be described as royally pissed off), and the bathroom door. “What the fuck is going on?”

“She’s being uncooperative,” Bucky said.

Steve snorted. “Uncooperative is putting it lightly. She’s a downright nightmare.”

“She’s being a little combative, using some vulgar language—”

“A little?” Steve rolled his eyes.  “Listen, she’s refusing to go to the damn funeral, and she locked herself in the bathroom.”

“Oh boy.” Tony sighed, drained his scotch, and rubbed a hand down his face. Then he moved towards the bathroom door, muttering to himself. “It’s only eight in the morning and I already have to deal with this shit. Should’ve known Obadiah Stane’s funeral couldn’t go smoothly. He always manages to fuck something up, even in the afterlife.”

Then he knocked gently on the door. “Hey kid, it’s Tony.”

“Go away!” The girl inside shouted, and something thumped against the door, like she had thrown something against it. Bucky thought it sounded like a shampoo bottle.

“Jesus,” Tony muttered, glaring at the other men in the room. “You really worked her up, didn’t you?”

Steve pointed his finger accusingly at the door. “She’s a fucking brat. You try to control her and see if it turns out any better.”

Tony rolled his eyes, then knocked again, harder. “Listen, you’re gonna turn the water off and put on some clothes and then we’re going to have a nice long chat about your behavior. If you don’t come out in the next two minutes, I’m busting this door down and I know you don’t want me to see you naked. So hustle.”

Much to the surprise of all the men in the room, the running water ceased, and a few minutes later, she came out, hair wrapped in a towel and body wrapped in Bucky’s flannel robe. It was way too big for her, the hem dropping to the floor, the sleeves encompassing her hands. Bucky would’ve thought she looked cute if she didn’t look like a tea kettle ready to boil over.

“I’m not going to that man’s funeral, and you can’t make me.”

Tony sighed. “Can we skip all the ‘he’s not my father’ bullshit and get straight to the point? There are people from the mob expecting you there to represent your family. This funeral means more than just you, so you’re going to stop being an insolent brat and get ready to go. We’re already going to be late for the wake.”

She laughed, mean and cruel and so unlike the girl they knew. “I’m fresh out of fucks to give about what the mob expects from me. I expected both my parents to be here for me as I’m growing up, but that’s not possible anymore, so.”

“You think you’re the only person in the mob with a tragic backstory? Abusive, absent parents? Parents dying? Read the room, kid.”

She glanced at all three men, anger flowing out of their eyes.

Tony continued. “You have a responsibility to the mob. We’re your family and we always will be—you can’t escape it, so put on your big girl panties and your funeral dress so we can get to the church on time!”

She sneered. “You’re not my family. And I have no responsibility to you.” Then she retreated into Bucky’s bedroom. Tony followed quickly and caught the door as she tried to slam it shut.

“Get out!”

Tony was getting desperate. “What will it take to get you to go to this funeral? I’ll literally give you anything you want.”

Her eyes lit up with something, and Tony knew he was speaking her language. Spoiled and pampered her entire life (with mob money, Tony restrained himself from pointing out), bargaining was the only way to get her to cooperate, especially with such a large-scale tantrum as this.

“I want to go to NYU.”

Well, Steve and Bucky didn’t like that.

“That’s completely out of the question!”

“How the hell are we supposed to protect you if you’re off in Manhattan?”

Her retort was sharp and bitter, “Oh and you’ve been doing such a good job of protecting me now? I’m gonna have a bruise on my face from your fist, Steve, or did you conveniently forget about that once Tony arrived?”

Tony groaned, rubbing his temples, then ushered her into the bedroom. “Can’t fucking think with you children shouting at each other!” He forcefully pushed her on the bed and she bounced a little as he began to pace around the room. “So they’ve been hitting you? That’s why you want to go to NYU?”

She swallowed down her nerves and glared at him. “I have a scholarship, Tony—I’m not just going to throw it away!”

Tony shook his head. “Your father was never going to let you go. He was going to marry you off to someone in another gang.”

She smiled, bitter. “I’m not surprised. But now he’s out of the picture. I’m 18, Tony, I can do whatever I want.” When Tony didn’t answer, she frowned. “Unless you were planning on doing that exact same thing?”

He shook his head. “Not to just anyone. You already seem to get along with Steve and Bucky. What about one of them?”

She shook her head, vehemence leaving her tone and desperation taking its place. “No, Tony, please don’t make me marry them! I couldn’t live with that!”

“That’s a little dramatic. You know, a few slaps and punches are less than what a lot of mob wives get. Your own mother included.”

“It’s not just that!” She exclaimed before she could think better if it and shut her mouth.

Tony waited for her to elaborate. “What else could it possibly be?”

She shook her head, then laughed. “I know they helped kill him. My father. I can’t marry the men who did that.”

Tony sighed and sat next to her on the bed. “You know, they technically didn’t kill him. They were just the lookout—“

“Oh, don’t try to rationalize it, Tony! They participated in the murder of my father—“

“Oh, so he’s your father now? What happened to all that crap about your biological father?”

Fed up, she jumped up from the bed and faced him, yelling out, “I refuse to live with murderers, Tony! That’s where I draw the line!”

Then it was quiet, and they both knew that Steve and Bucky likely heard her outburst.

Tony finally broke the silence. “NYU? Really?”

“Yes. I want to go to NYU and live in Manhattan. And if you don’t accept these terms,” she thought for a moment, “I’m going to make such a big scene at the funeral that you’re going to wish I had just stayed home.”

Well. He didn’t really have a choice, now did he?

[niqhtlord01]

(Photo by barbarian_j-d9levbi)  Niqhtlord’s wondrous world of aliens present “An introduction to Alien Species”

Species: Predatoria

Biology: 

The Predatorian species are a race of humanoid figured fish people resembling upright sharks that have evolved over the millennia to grow additional extremities such as arms and legs at the expense of their tails, though there are recorded a few Predatoria that have kept their tails. 

Predatorian’s have the unique ability to retract their finger and toe webbing at will turning powerful flippers into full dexterity hands and feet with control over every toe and finger. 

Depending on the individual Predatorian some are able to breath oxygen through their gills with relative ease, others have been noted to be able to breath oxygen normally as well but require to take breathers from a special neck brace filled with water from their homeworld, and there are those that require the specialized neck brace 24/7 to remain above ground. Scientists have speculated that this may be a result of the depth of water each individual resided in for the majority of their lives with more oxygen rich water residing near the surface allowing for easier breath while heavier water resides in deeper portions of the planet leaving said individuals to breath through the neck braces. These effects often force the Predatorian body to adept which results in specific changes that can not be altered.   As a result of the intense gravity, Predatorian muscles are nearly ten times stronger than the average galactic life form. Their genetic makeup compresses several dozen layers of muscles over each other to the point that they become so interwoven that even though a knife may break the skin it snaps upon contact with the muscles. As a result surgery often requires special living crustaceans from their homeworld to be used as scalpels as only their claws have evolved to cut through the muscles. 

With regards to the Predatoria brain scientists have been astounded by the possibilities it opens. It appears that all Predatoria, regardless of age, have a perfect memory and can remember anything that they have experienced during their lives. Be it a physical encounter, a face of a stranger, a the words of a book read in school, anything and everything is remembered.  What may seem like a potential overload of information also has a genetic fail safe in place to stop Predatoria from going mad. They possess the unique ability to manually shut down portions of their brain as to not per-say forget something, but to have it never have existed at all. The process in which they can achieve this level of mental control is unknown, but it has been proven that they can deactivate and reactivate portions of their brain and memory at will. This gives them the false appearance of being slow or dim minded when in reality they are searching their memories and reactivating which ones are relevant to the current situation why deactivating those that are not.  Incidentally the Predatoria are acutely aware of this and when giving themselves names tend to keep them short and simple as longer names can trigger secondary memories as understandings behind each meaning become active.  

Homeworld: 

The Predatoria homeworld is roughly 95% water and under higher than normal levels of gravity. The landmass has remained relatively devoid of higher forms of life and has remained largely jungle rich fields with the exception of the newly created star port and small settlement adjacent the star port. 

The majority of lifeforms reside in the natural oceans clustered into coral cities that dot the underwater landscape. Much of the infrastructure is carefully created organic materials that have been bred by Predatorian’s for specific purposes and it is rare to find refined materials within the underwater domain. 

Orbital scans show that much like any other world the landscape under water has mountains, hills, ravines, plains, and other naturally formed landscapes.  

Industry: 

All trade is conducted on the surface at the star port under strict regulations. No machine is permitted to enter the waters of the world as Predatoria see their oceans as sacred and any outside material as sacrilege to enter. They have been more relax with offworlders taking a swim in their oceans, but react harshly in the event they leave trash behind as punishment for littering is having the limb in question that littered devoured by a swarm of Shredder fish that strip flesh from bone in seconds.  

To this end the rare metals, gems, and food found in the ocean is entirely harvested by the Predatoria population.  It remains unknown how the Predatoria conduct these practices as any attempt to send recording devices beneath the waves have been crushed by the pressure or eaten by curious sea creatures. 

WARNING: While not impossible to visit the planet for tourism purposes it is advised that offworlders refrain from swimming. Due to the intensity of the planet’s gravity if not careful a person could be pushed down into the water and drown. To swim through the oceans of Predatoria would be the equivalent of swimming through sand underneath ten feet of additional sand. 

History: 

Initial contact with the species remains unconfirmed. What is known is that first contact was made by a group of outlaws on the run. Their ship had been damaged in a recent scuffle with the Cosmic Federation’s police forces and landed on the Predatoria homeworld to make repairs. The ships engines sent disturbances through the water as it passed over it alerting the Predatoria who quickly came to investigate. Initial contact was somewhat hostile as the outlaws, startled by the appearance of the Predatoria, attacked and killed several that had come ashore to observe the new comers. The blood of the dead slowly dripped back into the sea triggering a blood frenzy among the people at the death of their own. Within hours swarms of Predatoria began emerging from the ocean seeking revenge and quickly slaughtered the remaining crew just as they set off a distress beacon.  With the intruders dead the majority of the Predatoria retreated back into the ocean while several remained out of sheer curiosity to inspect what the outlaws had left behind. Several days had passed when one of the Cosmic Federation’s police ships landed on the planet to investigate the distress signal. There they discovered several Predatoria studying the outlaws ship, though they still only had the basic understanding of its functions.  Unlike the outlaws the police force had been trained in “new contact” scenarios and was prepared. The officer in charge ordered that one of his men send a signal to the Cosmic Federation for a diplomatic detail while they initiated friendly talks. Several of the Predatoria had retreated back into the ocean when they saw the police forces, thinking they were the same as the outlaws that attacked them before. The remaining ones had taken up the weapons of the outlaws and mimicked what they had seen them do. Some of the officers wanted to fire but the officer in charge ordered them to place their weapons on the ground and show no hostility.  From this point forward additional diplomatic talks were eventually held and through trial and error an understanding was established with Predatorian’s.

Current Status: 

Lacking space fairing technology, the Predatorian’s were not able to become a member of the Cosmic Federation. However, they were given the status of a “Protectorate” allowing them to trade with the Cosmic Federation as well as being protected by the law. With the general desire to make refined metals from their homeworld it is unlikely that the Predatoria will ever develop space fairing vehicles, though this mater seems of little importance to them as they have embraced interplanetary communication and can easily negotiate travel from another species if desired.  

With the sudden influx of interplanetary trade Predatoria culture was hit with new technological wonders that attracted several thousand of their species to leave their homeworld for the first time. 

Given their natural physique, many of their kind have been recruited into manual labor positions as a single Predatorian can do the work of five power loaders. 

A somewhat ironic turn of events has also brought the attention of the criminal underworld as Predatorian’s are brought in as added muscle or bodyguards. Some underground fight rings even trade in captured Predatoria slaves, though due to the cost needed to contain a single Predatoria only the more high end fight ring establishments have been crazy enough to attempt this. 

Some have used their skills and knowledge to become powerful crime lords themselves with their own private pocket underground empires. 

Wars:

As of yet there have been no recording of major conflicts instigated by or against the Predatoria. The nature of their homeworld and positioning of their critical facilities underwater greatly inhibits enemies from attacking them as they would be fighting the planet itself. Blockades are also useless as the planet is near entirely self sufficient with the exception of technology brought in from off world.  The only instances of aggression that have been recorded are often from individual members of the species. Such individuals include one Mr. Fig, second in command of the Amelia Starfeld, pirate queen of the asteroid fields. Mr. Fig was at one time a considerable pirate in his own right before joining the crew of Amelia Starfeld with a list of wanted posters and misdeeds long enough to fill several books with bounty notices alone. The exact reasoning behind the sudden joining is unknown, but there are rumors with regards to a certain lost card wager. Since joining her crew he has proved an able bodied second in command and a staunch bodyguard, saving his captain’s life on several occasions.  The second individual is slightly less known, going only by his alias “Mr. Big”. His true name has never been discovered while his alias was given to him by a human child who is by all means his second in command. Mr. Big may be considered by some politicians as nothing more than a common criminal, but that is only to downplay the reality that he runs one of the largest private armies past the Sleisian Belt. Earliest records list him on board a slavery ship bound for a massive auction. The guards threw a young girl into his cell thinking he would eat her on the spot and it would amuse them. He did not eat her, if for the only reason at the time to pass the boredom of being alone in the cell. This proved beneficial as the young girl was able to memorize the access code to their cell door by listening to the subtle tones of the keypad outside that even the Predatorian could not distinguish and free the two of them from their cell. Proceeding swiftly they freed many of the other prisoners and instigated a ship-wide riot that saw the death of every slaver. Afterwards the little girl refused to leave his side and he had grown rather fond of the young girl and took her on as his daughter. The pair then took the ship to the nearest black market and sold it, using the profits to fund what would become their criminal empire.    

[totalliberationfront]

Giving and receiving freely is the basis of long term consensual community. Existing state, nonprofit and private entities were crafted to maintain the global capitalist order. These entities occasionally dole out useful material aid to a select few; however it will always be in conjunction with consolidating power for the present order. These forces manifested and maintain the carceral state. They are responsible for the tear gas, the beatings, the police unions and the mandatory minimum sentences. There is no dignity in begging for scraps from the masters table. We seek to empower not to dictate. We seek to empty every cage and grow gardens in their stead. We demand nothing short of total liberation for humans and our animal kin.

The practice of Mutual Aid is the process by which people come together to directly meet one another's needs without politicians or bosses interceding. Human beings are social animals who evolved surviving in non-hierarchical groups. We have an affinity for self care, community care and individual expression. Through coming together to meet our material, emotional and social needs we present an alternative to the racist hierarchical settler state we find ourselves in. The oppressive saga of empire, capitalism slavery and compulsory heterosexuality is a broken narrative. We seek an end to the occupation and to the exploitation of stolen land.

Mutual Aid posits that the Social Contract as envisioned by Liberals is woefully inadequate and the dictates of authoritarians and fascists are antithetical to life. We need not cede our autonomy nor our labor to exploitative systems. We need not cede our bodies to confinement. We are taught the gospel of work yet many who work go hungry. Many who have skills can't find paid work which implements them. Much of the productive activity humans engage in has devastating ecological consequences, as we do it in the interest of capital. We as communities can do better. We cannot rely on outside entities to help us. Abolishing them is necessary for our survival.

Professions serving existing entities within the present order will inherently be limited in their capacity to produce change. Individuals trained to operate in those professions often acquire skills and education which can be used to empower our communities. Many of those individuals now professionals are incentivized to hoard  their knowledge for material gain. However, material gain matters little in a dying world where one is alienated from other people. Some with privilege see through the notion that cops and politicians are their true allies. Some see the concepts of law and crime for what they are; tools of the oppressor.

In our present era where the material lives of many of these professionals has declined, while the visible accumulation of wealth by the exploiting classes has increased, many professionals are more inclined to share their knowledge. Every year they see the carceral state destroys more lives with solitary confinement, police brutality and the willful infliction of PTSD and they want to strike back. There are an array of people eager to absorb and implement their knowledge, who have not been granted the same educational or career opportunities by the system as the professional class. These folx have an equally relevant set of skills to share with professionals.

When we make an Anarchist space, dedicated to gender freedom, decolonization, prison abolition and black liberation folx inclined to share and support will find us. We keep showing up and we keep doing the real work. Direct Action and a co-occurring support network will inspire and educate. When we make time to help each other process the overlapping layers of oppression strangling us all and poisoning the earth we begin to grow. The powers that be understand how to lop the head off of vertical structures. They lie in wait for the vanguard party and the terrorist cell. Egoists and those dedicated to hierarchy recognize parallel frameworks.

Rather than work within the system or construct a parallel institution we can build dual power via Mycelic Growth. We recognize that orgs, affinity groups, networks etc.. are all necessary structures; however they are tools of liberation for the larger community and friend circles which populate them. Our relationships are the core of the revolutionary project. Maintaining those relationships as systems of support, empowerment and education is our primary task. As the powers of reaction seek to define and contain us we must be like water. We must be able to take a new form without waiting for permission from a governing assembly or leader. We will meet the needs of our neighbors and ourselves the best we can, starting today.

We share skills and knowledge at the speed of trust, seeking to undercut our own possible hierarchical gain. We encourage the flourishing of interlocking groups with interlocking values blooming independently then laying down root systems; intertwining with others. If an org becomes legitimized as a charity or nonprofit by the powers that be, that org should be an entry point to other projects. The material services that org provides needs to be grounded in an actual need while also serving as an entry point for other forms of Direct Action. We disperse zines, PDFs articles and albums hoping you will lay down new roots searching for our own.

We start with food and other basic goods. We get as many people giving those out for free as possible. We ask people what they need and give it to them. We step up the level and quality of goods. We point to our successes and the failures of the state. We occupy until extracted by colonial agents. We are there for each other when the pigs shut us down, and when we are there when its time to reorganize and reopen. Seeing that we can do these things for a few people breaks the spell. Why do we have to wait on medical care? Why can't we remodel and build until everyone is housed? Why isn't their food growing on every available patch of land? Why aren't we getting together with out neighbors and making these decisions through building consensus and direct democracy?  

It starts by handing things out and grows to producing the things we need together. It continues when we take action in the streets. Our banners hang outside of jails and prisons. Our friends stand with us in a total expression of their being. It flourishes when the community seizes a factory or stops an eviction. It won't end until whiteness is abolished.  

As we grow our thoughts deepen. Why is that we need police and prisons, when me and my friends can solve so many issues by building rapport with folx and offering mediation? Why do we allow others to hold exclusive legal rights to the application of violence and the dividing up of material goods? Our questions become statements. We will learn to heal trauma and provide community. We will learn that communities can defend themselves. We demand total abolition and we demand a new society. We won't settle for less. We want everything.

In our own time and in our own space with our own words. Grow and share. Nurture and protect.

[tatiletotesamaze]

(found this while looking for something else. I can only assume it’s related to my big ethics essay considering what’s at the bottom, but even my digital file keeping is akin to post-it notes and scatted pieces of paper.)

"If the Empire is to have my life, why can't I have a say in how long they should have it? If I can decide what to do within it, why not outside it?" Rochester looked uneasily to Simone. She stared back at him, placid as a river sheathed in ice.

"If you get that," she said after a while. "Why can't I get that?"

"You should. I should. We paid our dues." Maybe everyone has.

For (contrived purpose) Wilhelm, Rochester and Qiu find themselves on a planet recently instituted with new leadership Imperial. In disguise they are not Imperial citizens and are treated harshly by the enforcement officers. Rochester area this as an injustice to the empire as he knows it: a corruption of the ideal of progress under Imperial leadership, the use of sith ideology outside of context. Wilhelm, being off a lower class, sees it as rote. There is a brief discussion on the ship about relationships: the expectation of Rochester to have had the marriage with Stion'n (or some other appropriate woman) before the intervention of Sith, Qiu remarks she gave eggs to the eugenics programme and Willem points out he "failed" an exam on 97/100 and  did not get invited to the programme despite surpassing colleagues in areas untested. As they prepare to leave Rochester involves himself in a riot against the planetary governor, believing that they will be replaced for their failings. It's some weeks later, on another planet, he learns of the retribution meted out against the populace, and sees the extent of the propaganda used.

"If there's no reward or punishment for unjust acts and likewise for just, or that for this moment we not consider them and think only of the act themselves, why act justly? Or unjustly?"

"Nothing?"

"Nothing at all."

Rochester shrugged. "I can't think of anything."

"So nothing in the act itself is preventing you?"

"You said no external factors. Aren't my own feelings external factors to the act?"

"So the justness or unjustness of an act is not in the act itself?"

"I don't know. Is a human life different to a leaf, if we don't consider consequences?"

"A 'human' life?"

"Sorry, a person's."

"And we consider consequences?"

"Aren't those the external factors? I wouldn't be rewarded for saving a murderer from drowning but rather punished for it?"

"Is a person's life not inherently worth something?"

"Beyond their being a murderer?"

"I think we might be getting off track."

"Well, if you remove consequences of the action, doesn't the action then become amoral?"

"How so?"

"There's no question of justice when I wave my hand, but if I strike someone with it, then the question arises. But if there's no consequence to myself or the person I hit, where's the need to question its justice or morality?"

"So, you think the justness of an action might stem from it taking place in a system of consequences and reactions?"

"I suppose so." A little uneasy. Unsure of his answers and thoughts for the road ahead was unpaved and long, and shrouded in ignorance.

It is, in the Imperial culture, just that the Sith might rule as they do for they are favoured, might is within their nature and the weakness self correcting in their system.

It is to be above one's station if, being not force sensitive, one attempts to exercise that rule of might.

The empire as a tool of sith has the might to be right, but its citizens within must act appropriately. As all citizens are equal, they are to act equally to each other (but they aren't equal, class and breeding are paramount, where it is merit one might advance but first merit is birth). To act as a sith is to put oneself on their footing, and thereby in their court. So that all citizens are equally protected from the Sith court, no citizen must enter it.

Under the sphere of philosophy comes the ministry of education which, in its entirety, covers education from childhood to adulthood, propaganda and censorship. Censorship in part extends the role of sith who search for heretics by ensuring that texts published to have anti-Imperial sentiment. This might include, but is not limited to, characters engaging in un-virtuous or sinful acts who do not get their comeuppance (see Hayes code) or who are otherwise depicted sympathetically, expect where they are sith and act in a sith manner (that is virtuous to a sith but not a citizen). Less so on core worlds but common on those conquered is the existence of illegal printing presses (sometimes actually paper and ink) that create anti-Imperial leaflets alongside unapproved works or uncensored versions of sort after works. Even though romance is a common genre in the empire and many books are sold cross borders, the Cabinet censors parts or rewrites whole chapters to better suit "Imperial tastes".

Virtues of the Empire:

Loyalty

Of the citizen:

Honesty

Integrity

"Strength of will"/perseverance

Charity to children

Courage

Pride (in the empire and ones achievements)

Wisdom

Temperance of action and feeling (self discipline)

Orderliness *at once keeping stuff in order, but also understanding one's place in the empire

Will to excellence *the best me and the best I can do makes the empire better as a whole or the the best I can do for the empire is the best me

cleanliness *don't smell

Unity *not necessarily friendliness, but not rocking the boat as it were

"In all ones actions and duties to uphold the standards of the Empire"

Timely - to know when best to be serious and to be jovial. Also, be on fucking time

Respectfulness

Of the Sith:

Cunning

Wisdom

To live one's truth (the existential ideal)

Strength

Will to power

Justice (upholding Imperial laws and ideals)

Magnificence

The Sith might also be expected to perform the virtues of the citizens listed above, particularly those of being timely, orderly and clean. When in the presence of Sith of higher standing, or of citizens of high standing particularly those of the military or intelligence, then such actions will also be expected.

Temperance (self discipline) - the Sith rule and control their emotions. Though one might become powerful through unbridled rage, one might lose oneself to it and lose one's mental faculties including (ironically) the _will_ to power, making one un-Sith-like.

As ever, these virtues are not to be practiced in excess nor be shied from. Life in the Empire is a balancing act.

The Empire contains three formal classes, four if slaves are considered.

There are the Citizens, which one could class all as for they all live within the Empire, but Citizens are those who are born to Imperial families, typically within core Imperial worlds. They have the force of longevity behind them, their presence and purpose within the Empire is inherent. They have the tried and true Imperial education, in mathematics, warfare, literature and the sciences. They all hold in some form a military position. A teacher can be called upon to fire a gun, as a baker can be expected to fix a tank. Full time military service is performed by all citizens for four years, and after that either continue within the military system or return to perform other vital roles within the Empire.

De facto citizens or the Treatise'd. Those living in planets the Empire has conquered, by war or through the Treaty of Coruscant. Formal expectations of them are the same, however Citizens oft treat them, not necessarily with contempt but not with high expectations. Citizens see their lack of Imperial education (something being rectified but sorely lacking in the adult generations) as a fault that prevents them from performing the best they can for the Empire (see the virtues). This disregard for their own experiences, talents and cultures does, to put it mildly, chafe the De Facto citizens.

The Sith. They can learn philosophy. It's not the most popular subject, but many who do involve themselves in the Ministry of Education, and by extension the Bureau of Propaganda and the censorship cabinet. Philosophy is a poor subject for citizens, as it gives one the ability to ask questions and not necessarily accept the answers given.

Rule consequentialism (not utility as this implies Bentham et al, but "to the betterment of the Empire" that is, does this action benefit the Empire, how so, to what extent) and virtue, as outlined. As the legal system must exist for the society to function there are of course pre-existing rules.

For an example from the game, murder. It is implicitly stated that murder is _not_ allowed (the quest of the acolyte sith ganking civs) through much of the society, up to the Dark Council, where it seems to be a matter of not getting caught (a virtue of the Sith is therefore cunning; Darth Thanaton's adherence to tradition in the face of the easier route is seen as an eccentricity ultimately turned weakness).

Education in the Sith language starts at an early age. For those who are sith born to sith, it is a natural process of learning as with any mother tongue. For those who have force abilities at a young age, or are believed to be likely of showing them, this is a more formal education one might expect on a school setting, starting also at a young age. Obviously this approach favours those who have the opportunity to learn and whose abilities can be either reasonably expected it recognised. Those who come into their abilities late, or come from de facto worlds, or even are slaves, may never receive this education. The ability to speak the sith language is a merit. This is how merits play out in the Empire, and how their meritocracy works. Birth is a merit, opportunity and privilege also.

[theclotizine]

Below you’ll find our Frequently Asked Questions for the zine! You can also find it under our FAQs page over on our sidebar.

1. What is a zine?

A zine or fanzine is a small-circulation, self-published work of original writings and/or arts. In our case, it would be fan-published.

2. What is this project about?

Because I Have You is the first volume of what is intended to be a collection of zines dedicated to the relationship between Cloud Strife and Tifa Lockhart from Final Fantasy VII. This zine will highlight and expand on the best of their fated encounters throughout the franchise.

3. How will contributors be compensated?

All contributors will receive a free digital and physical copy of the zine.

4. Where will the proceeds go?

After covering for production and shipping costs, the zine will be 50% for profit and 50% for charity. We want to ensure that we support contributors and also give to the community. We plan on donating the rest of the proceeds, if able, to Friends Without A Border. Contributors will also have the option to donate their profit as well.

5. What are artists required to do?

If you are applying to be an artist, you must send a portfolio of your works with your application. Your portfolio does not have to be strictly CloTi content as long as it shows off your work, but at least one of your example pieces should contain either or both characters. If you are applying for the NSFW portion, please include works that can show your skill in NSFW-rated content.

6. What are writers required to do?

If you are applying to be a writer, you must send a link to at least two one-shot works, each no longer than 5,000 words, with your application. At least one of your examples should be a CloTi piece, so we may see how you portray the characters. If you are applying for the NSFW portion, please include works that can show your skill in NSFW-rated content (M or E-rated fics on AO3).

7. Is traditional art allowed?

Yes. Please make sure to provide a clean, high quality scan of your work. Scanning in 600dpi or higher is preferred.

8. How old do I have to be to apply? Is there an age restriction?

All interested contributors must be 18 or older during the time of your application in order to be considered for the zine. With our planned nsfw companion zine, we want to ensure that all our contributors are of age. This is also to ensure that participants get their cut in profit. (Note: Minors are not allowed to receive money as compensation per the law.)

9. How many contributors are you accepting?

For the SFW book we plan to have roughly 25-30 page artists and 10-15 writers. There’s no exact number for the NSFW book yet as it’s digital (meaning the restrictions are a bit more lax without worrying about printing costs) and we’ll need to gauge how many applicants are willing to be in the NSFW book.

10. Why is this zine listed as both SFW and NSFW?

The main focus of the zine will be a physical, printed book of SFW content for anyone to purchase. All merch will be SFW as well. The NSFW content will only be available through a second digital PDF book. This was decided on in order to give more people the chance to participate as well as enjoy the content created in the zine.

11. Can I apply for both the NSFW and SFW books? Can I be accepted for both?

You are more than welcome to apply for both as long as you’re 18 or older. Whether people will be accepted into both and be asked to create pieces for both depend on how many people are accepted into the SFW book, as there are a limited number of spots for that half.

12. Are contributors allowed to collaborate? Can a writer collaborate with another writer or artist?

We welcome all sort of collaboration between our contributors! Do note, collaborations can only be established among contributors after they’ve been accepted into the zine and joined the Discord. Meaning, if you have a friend you’d like to apply and collaborate with, you will both need to apply as individuals, and there is no guarantee you will both get in. Collab specifics can be sorted out within the server.

SFW and NSFW contributors may collaborate together as long as the individuals involved are over 18, so they may properly discuss and share their ideas and WIPs. Any NSFW material will remain in the PDF book, however.

We also welcome any collaborations where artists would like to provide secondary, small pieces to accompany a writer’s story and decorate the story’s pages! These pieces will not be priority and artists who do volunteer to do this would still be expected to provide a full page illustration first and foremost. More details on collaborations will be available during claims and in the Discord server.

13. Can we include other characters that are not Cloud and Tifa?

Other characters can be included as long as Cloud and Tifa are still the main focus. Since this is a ship zine, please ensure that Cloud and Tifa are presented in a romantic light. As this is a CloTi focused zine, we’d prefer you to keep the focus on them together. Past or polyamorous relationships with other characters are not encouraged as it distracts from our theme. Secondary ships of other characters in the background is fine unless otherwise addressed by a mod. If you have questions pertaining to this, please do not hesitate to let any of the mods know.

14. Are AUs allowed?

As this is meant to be a highlight of Cloti within the original canon, AUs that can work within that canon are fine. AUs that change the universe (i.e. AUs based on another franchise/series, Omegaverse, Steampunk, etc.) are not allowed. Exceptions to this rule would be Dissidia and Kingdom Hearts.

15. Can I submit an older piece (art or fic) for the zine?

Unfortunately no. Please make sure that the piece is unpublished and brand new.

If you still have unanswered questions, please feel free to message us on our Curious Cat on Twitter, our ask on Tumblr, or email us at theclotizine@gmail.com!

[sweetdreamsjeff]

LAST GOODBYE the lost Jeff Buckley interview

One of the most revealing – and spine-chilling – interviews of Jeff Buckley’s short life was conducted for a fanzine with a small readership. Phil Smith resurrects it here, with thanks to Andrew Truth for the interview and extensive contributions

In 1995, fanzine journalism was giving the established music press a run for its money. Andrew Truth had been producing Plane Truth since 1988 but issue 15 (circulation: 500) was to be his last. It had interviews with the usual unusual selection of bands, some fondly remembered and some largely forgotten.

Lurking at the back of the fanzine was an encounter with Jeff Buckley, son of Tim and on the way to becoming a legend in his own right. Andrew had conducted the interview on 3 September 1994, before Buckley’s show at what was then The Hop & Grape (now part of Manchester Academy). Buckley had only just released Grace and started touring with a full band, which Andrew remembers him enthusing about. The album was yet to slow-burn its way into the hearts of millions. He had been recording a Mark Radcliffe session and playing Reading Festival and likened the part he played at the latter to being “a circus performer”. He was about to leave for the continent for further dates. His father’s reputation preceded him and for that reason, Andrew steered away from questions about family. They got on like a house on fire, Buckley rambling excitedly about his favourite music, playing live, his choice of cover versions, songwriting and immortality.

Buckley introduced himself by impulsively diving onto Andrew’s cafeteria table. He launched unprompted and with a distant air into part of one of his favourite interview topics, a solo LP by Deep Purple’s Jon Lord, as if transmitting thoughts from a superior galaxy and with a mischievous glint in his eyes. He dabbed sandalwood oil behind his ear while mimicking a cockney accent and singing jauntily: “‘Now we’ve made it, I’d like to do my orchestral piece called Gemini Suite about the signs of the zodiac.’ [Lord’s LP is] Great! It’s partly Bonanza, partly every horrible cliché. Like in Warner Brothers cartoons, Bugs Bunny music. It’s the funniest shit alive, all that 70s stuff. I can’t listen to it for long [though]. There’s a difference between indulgence and exploration.”

It had been Buckley’s questing approach in addition to his poetic soul and natural vocal talent that had drawn Andrew towards him at this early stage in his international career. Buckley settled into the interview, describing his nomadic upbringing as “a preparation and a curse, but everyone’s childhood is. It’s made it easier [for me to tour]. You’re the stranger constantly. People will find occasions where they’re readily accepted but other times, equally [the] weight of hostility comes towards you for no reason at all. I still attract the same things from childhood. People come to the shows and either run away screaming or really like it.”

Andrew expressed his contempt for middle-ground mediocrity in music. Buckley was more nuanced in his response, describing its fleeting effect: “Nothing [from the middle ground] comes to mind, that is ’cos I’ve forgotten it already. I’ve forgotten the effect and which art it was that gave me the effect. Either you remember Bob Dylan or you remember Michael Bolton.” Bolton was another Buckley interview hobby horse and appears to have been the bane of his life, and he was arguably a collective figure of hate for all alternative music fans at the time.

At the gig, Andrew described Buckley as bouncing about in a style that induced cries of “Kangaroo!”, his face dramatic and furrowed in anguish, seeming to curse injustices with disbelief. “People project tremendous amounts of personal low self-esteem and high self-esteem upon the stage, in equal parts sometimes. That’s the catharsis of going to a live show. If the performer is right, this is very co-dependent, but people go there to unload. There is this loud person who has come to a few of my gigs and her friends insist that she’s a very nice person but she can’t help but shout at me up on the stage. It’s something I just accept. It’s not like when Murphy’s Law played at The Plaza and four or five fights erupted within the space of 46 minutes. I don’t look out to see whether I’m connecting because it’s not up to me. I look out to see where the music should go. If the crowd is hot because their skin is hot due to the temperature, the set will be different. Or if it’s very cold outside and still, I’ll want to be the fireplace as best I can though sometimes I can’t accomplish it. I’m aware of the energy in the room. Moods and music fly about of their own will and they have no order and you can be either open or closed to them and that’s how the gig will go. Either from the stage or the audience, people open to emotions, movement, stories, feeling and dancing.”

Andrew asked Buckley about the unusually high number of cover versions on his first couple of releases. “It’s usually everything about [the song that attracts me], not just one thing. It’s different in the case of [Van Morrison’s] The Way Young Lovers Do. That came about because my friend Michael, who eventually joined the band, had a dream about me and him singing [it]. On a whim, I got it together and performed it one night. Then it became something else because the tempo I liked, the feel of it; the words and the song got into me. Any time I take a cover and wear it on my sleeve, it’s because it had something to do with my life and still marks a time in my life when I needed that song more than anything ever.”

Andrew expressed some shock at how good a rescue job Buckley had done with his Lilac Wine cover, as he previously disliked the Elkie Brooks version. Buckley said: “The version I’ve heard is Nina Simone’s. I’m not even sure who Elkie Brooks is. I don’t think it’s always a fair decision to have homogeneity for its own sake. I think that human beings contain many people… I do believe that there’s this one soul that lies directly through Edith Piaf and the Sex Pistols, I really know that exists: Joni Mitchell and John Cage; Billie Holiday and Bad Brains. An album in itself is a moment and the music may require for me to make an album that’s totally homogenised but not as a rule. It’s good to be varied because without knowing what sides there are to you, knowing your depths, you pretty much die. You never change and you stay in the same unbeatable format but, sooner or later, you become obsolete.”

Failure to evolve is to stymie yourself, suggested Andrew.

“That’s true. I’m not even that concerned with changing,” Jeff replied. “Just with discovery, because through discovering you may stay on one thing for a long time. Just evolving is important. Deliberately changing all the time is like making off with somebody who must change position in order to get into every [sexual] position and you never get anything started. ‘Would you please keep still, throw away the Kama Sutra and love my ass!’”

Buckley confessed to a couple of songs to which he would feel unable to add anything: “Parchment Farm Blues by Bukka White and Well I Wonder by The Smiths because I always end up doing it exactly like Morrissey does. The impetus for having covers was necessity. In the middle of a show taking people into a world that was completely my world, ‘boom’, right over there we’re into I Know It’s Over from The Queen Is Dead.”

In a segment of the interview which Andrew admits makes him a little queasy now, he picked up on Buckley’s Eternal Life and asked him if he desired immortality. Tim Buckley died young of a heroin overdose and his son was to tragically drown in 1997, only a few years after the Plane Truth interview.

“It is possible and it happens all the time, but just not in the way you want or expect it,” Buckley Jr said. “Beyond death, I know nothing but in human life… some people have a love for people around them that is so powerful and carries so many gifts with it that even when they die, people are still accomplishing things through this person’s love in them, because this person said, ‘I see you’re a writer. I see this postcard here and you’re killing me in this, you’re a great writer.’ And he’s saying, ‘I never thought about writing before. ‘But anyway, you’re a great writer and this is a great piece of work. I don’t even want to touch War And Peace, this is it,’ and, ‘boom’, he gets hit by a car and this person goes on to be a great writer or remembers that belief, against his own hope. It’s very strange, in that way, he’ll become immortal, he’ll always be remembered. He’ll be alive in people’s hearts, inside people.

“Then there’s books, records, movies, images. Here’s immortality in a nutshell: Marilyn Monroe, James Dean. They’re all around you but they don’t exist. That’s immortality in my cynical world. That’s Tinsel Town immortality, which is bullshit. They’ve lost immortality because they’ve lost their appearance as mortals. They’re symbols, gods, tools and puppets for people. There’s a fine line between being a god and a puppet...The Bible is used as a puppet and it’s untouchable and sacred but people use it as a pair of roller-skates or joke toilet paper with a psalm on every sheet. Being mortal and rooted in the earth is a very excruciating joy and not a lot of people can take it. Sometimes they just want to be famous, with no substance underneath, no work, no reason. To be famous and known and loved. They think it’s being loved but it’s just being worshipped and idolised and that’s not even being understood. It’s not even in the ballpark. It’s better to have people around you who understand you and when you come up to people in the street and talk about bagels and talk about the game, to have that connection there, it’s very important to me.

“If I wanted to be famous, I’d assassinate the President. There’s no life in it. There’s nothing wrong with being famous for something you do well or uniquely like if I invented the cure for AIDS, I wouldn’t mind being very famous. It’d be a great achievement. Or if I wrote a song that everyone loved, I wouldn’t mind that. It wouldn’t mean everything. That wouldn’t be the object or I’d be a junkie for fame, ‘I wasn’t famous for my orange juice song. It’s a great song but nobody likes it! I must suck!’ I have to be attuned to that and must have an everlasting relationship with this particular thing that there’s a public and then there’s me. At any given time, I am the public and Evan Dando [Lemonheads] is him and I understand that exchange. It’s a very strange arena and lots of people get thrown to the lions. Lots of people come away victorious for a time but then they’re out of the arena, that’s the end of it.”

Andrew ended the interview by asking about whether Buckley regularly wrote songs based on dreams, as Mojo Pin had been. “Dreaming, both waking and asleep, [is] a reservoir of mine. The thing is, there’s no difference for me between dream states and living. They both carry truth to them. I can read them both. I feel things in my dreams and I feel all the things that human beings’ lives bring them, except sometimes there are purple monsters or a chocolate dog trying to wake you up, but it’s still all very valid to me and I read situations in waking hours just like I read them in my sleeping hours, my sleeping hour, my lack of sleep world.”

[eddisgon-blog]

BERK ATAN? No, that’s actually EDGAR BONES from the MARAUDERS ERA. You know, the child of ENDER BONES and IRMAK BONES (NÉE KUNDAKÇI)? Only 29 years old, this GRYFFINDOR alumni works as an UNSPEAKABLE and is sided with THE ORDER OF THE PHOENIX. HE identifies as CIS-MAN and is a PUREBLOOD who is known to be RECKLESS, BELLIGERENT, and INTRANSIGENT but also TENACIOUS, JUST, and ASTUTE. — &&. ( CAMI, GMT, SHE/HER, 19. )

TW: death, child death, blood, alcoholism (vaguely)

yoho guess what, edgar is a reckless idiot who somehow has gotten even more reckless and yall are gonna have to put up with it! he’s also just as likely as harry to name his next kid albus so there’s that tidbit of info. his favourite colour is lilac. now here’s some worse info:

I.

the child of relevant members of wizarding community AND purebloods, things could have gone much differently for edgar, but that’s a fact he’s taken long to comprehend. the role his loving family, that believed in him every step of the way, played is one of love for edgar, but not something he’d, until rather recently, attribute to the way his story goes - not the way his story ends. their values, their love, their care, his siblings; they were truly so important in the makings of him.

irmak and ender were a strong tree, with branches all around him for protection, softening every blow and fall.  their safety and encouragement nurtured a deep desire within him to do whatever he set his mind to, regardless of the consequences. after all, if he tried hard enough, he’d get all of his wishes. as a child, edgar wasn’t learning how to fly a broomstick as fast as his friends and siblings, and he didn’t have any particular wish to take the heights, but his assumed failure only propelled him to try harder. for hours upon hours, he’d lose balance, fall to the ground and then get back up, knees dripping blood. his father found him at dinnertime, taking rounds around the house, conquering for the sake of conquering alone.

that tenacity never left the boy, determining his future within the gryffindor bravado, his push for better grades, his detentions and self-made heartbreaks, all because the riot in him would not let him stand still. hexes and kicks, edgar quickly became known as one not to anger, a likely future brutal auror, given his yearning for justice even after the smallest of infractions, like a group calling a muggleborn slurs after potions class - because the world was his to conquer, should he chose to, and he had nothing else to choose. 

entitled, they called him. edgar always prefer to see himself as an idealist instead. 

the moral code passed down by his family was instrumental in the shaping of who he became. eddie always knew wrong from right, and that certainty let him see the world as black or white, with no room for the indecisions his classmates exhibited, or the inconsistencies of the ministry, every newspaper headline contradictory with the previous. the world around him seemed to tip toe and edgar knew only how to slam in. 

his ways kept him close with a variety of friends, but especially to the other rowdy ones, unafraid to speak their minds and go just far enough to be thrown in detention once more. his ways also cost him the biggest thing he’d been after all of hogwarts: the prefect badge. 

II.

becoming an auror had a certain allure to it. an outlet for the flaming energy inside him, and for his yearning for justice, being a source of scenarios in which he could play the detective, a role he so enjoyed. training was brutal, however, and every day passed, his desire to live forever beneath a badge kept diming. edgar’s lack for motivation was noticeable, as if the light in his eyes had purely shut off, and his mates encouraged him to pursue other paths.

politics was out of the question, too grey for him. healing bored him to death (and he was never that great at herbology anyway). eddie considered journalism for a while, but the likely future of a dusty desk at the daily prophet, carrying out their at times sensationalist work, made him not want to read a newspaper ever again. but edgar couldn’t be adrift. he’d made damn sure all his life he was pushing himself to be the very best possible, edgar with a plan, edgar ready to make a dent on the world. to accept defeat would have very easily broken him. 

after short stints in ministry offices (from clerk, which lasted all of four days, to secretary, security, forgotten offices who’d hire pretty much anyway with decent grades) he became a hit wizard. his intellect suffered, not through any fault of his coworkers, but due to it being so damn close to auror work, except he couldn't call the shots, not could he investigate, piece together the puzzles like he so loved. in the meantime, he’d sought direction in life elsewhere: that pretty girl from the bar just at the end of his street whose talks of muggle films and news had always kept him for hours, drink in hand, too enthralled to sip. he hated the trickery of politics but he could hear her explaining the iron curtain for hours. anna had stuck around through every change, knowing little of the context of it all. then a little more. and a little more. small breaches of wizard law, small TREASONS. he’d moved in with her, shown her a spell or two. in a few years she was meeting his family, watching his cousins fly in a broom, reading his newspapers with the moving images and scary news of impending conflict. (even marrying the fool, later down the line)

hit wizard work is brutal, and it began to show. despite being an outlet for his inner riot, it put him in vulnerable positions, and anna worried - that simply had to stop. especially when she became pregnant. 

to this day, eddie isn’t certain who dropped his name in the department of mysteries - he suspects his father, or perhaps dumbledore, who’d begun seeing him more often (he did enjoy placing pawns in place, not that edgar would acknowledge such a grey-area) - the young man found a letter inside one of his kitchen cabinets. another later that day inside his pocket. he as being summoned, should he wish to go. an interview followed. for hours, edgar sat - lies, he paced around in excitement - solving puzzles, enigmas, philosophical debates; the stuff he left at hogwarts and at auror training. at last, something that brought that light back, filling him with interest. there were no limits, no bureaucratic doors closing - the questions were secret and so were his answers. the puzzle solver was hired the following day, circling through various sub-departments until he got settled doing research on the subject of death a year before the shift of time. the questions that troubled him the most involved immortality and the concept of a chronological finish line. he laughs at that now. 

the secrecy of his job was always the hardest part. eddie was never one to keep secrets, especially not when excitement ran through him, and he often spilled results and theories that had been found just because he couldn’t contain his excitement in.

sidenote: he’s a very gestural person. speaking for edgar means moving around, big physical gestures, arms flaying, a proper demonstration.

the conscience instilled in him in the past was raw energy when combined with his entitlement.the very same characteristics were what drew dumbledore to him, with a position in mind. edgar couldn’t say no to a side-job as a revolutionaire.  there, along with his work, was a change to leave something of value behind. plus, he had personal skin in the game then. his future wife was a target, he was a traitor, his children heresy. 

eddie had, as well, his experience as a hit wizard, which made him useful for field work. that same bravado and need to fix the world made him devoted with reckless abandon. dumbledore was a figure he worshipped, unable to see the flaws in their own plans. there was no way he could have made himself bigger of a target during the war, especially when it was not nearly as quiet of a fact as it should have been that he was an unspeakable, with access to untold knowledge - especially one his enemies looked for. a traitor who knew too much and was too damn stupid to keep that to himself. edgar was a man with lots to lose living in the shoes of a man with nothing to lose. 

that very year brougth another major event besides new career, the order and his first child: the murder of his parents, in the very hosue he’d grown up in, the very hosue his younger sister still lived in. visibly freaking the mold, perhaps even called traitors, the bones were a proeminent thorn in need of ripping out, and edgar got lost in the confusion of the year. he let it fuel him, of course, but he didn’t allow himself to properly grieve, nor to be present for his siblings who also needed to grieve. from a young age he’d been told to walk away if he was angry, to not mix such a horrible feeling and family, and that’s just what he did. the world was broken and it burned him from inside out so he stepped away and dealt with it (poorly) on his own, a decision that came to haunt him the following year once the dust settled. he’d left them, the one promise edgar couldn’t have broken - they’d needed each other and he’d left. not that he’s apologised as of yet, all these years, but the shame of his decision comes to light at times.

III. (the death tw and child death tw applies very heavily in this whole part)

the future comes with many harsh truths to take in. they won, but not really. the world had barely changed, so what was the point of all the sleepless nights, all the wounds he’d healed, all the missions he’d led? what was the point of standing proud in front of the masked foes? what was the point of burying his friends one by one? what was the point of dying as his children cried upstairs?

those were the news that truly shock him. edgar knew he’d get himself killed eventually, even if he did his best to deny it. but reckless, he didn’t think they’d come for anna, or for his three children. he’d set up protections, just in case, of course - wards around the house and portkeys in specific places meant for emergency escapes - but how could have expected a terrified seven year old to remember where they kept the music box that would take her to grandma’s house? the futility of it all hit him like a wave. 

edgar dug in as soon as he learned, damned be the questions his line of work had taught him to ask. time didn’t matter, not at all. what did was the bloodshed his story told. which friends wouldn’t have made it either. his sister, who’d survive only to have to fight the same war again, with worst odds. himself. his family. a bottle of firewhiskey next to the folders he’d gotten from ministry friends and connections. both vices, drinking and learning the painful details of the truth, were self-destructive tendencies he’d thought he’d long escaped. perhaps that was the bones curse, to always crawl back to whatever wrecked them even more in times of hurt.

every newspaper article, trial transcript and even the crime scene photographs he chased hell and below to get his hands on. it was addictive, to learn exactly how much he could blame himself, how much he could blame the war, and who he should exert vengeance on. by now, he knows how to draw a timeline of the event better than any auror on the case, minute by minute, victim by victim, player by player; as he obsessed over it for the first week and a half, non-stop. 

they’d followed him for days, believing him to be a way to the prophecies they searched, or to answers they might seek. and to take down a traitor. a rebel traitor at that. he’d been too blind to notice. they’d chipped slowly at his wards. they’d broken in one wednesday night, at dinner time, shortly before anna and the children had gotten home. edgar didn’t see them there when he put away his coat, when he saw the bags of takeout on the kitchen counter, when he asked the eldest, dahlia, if she had homework to do. like rats in the walls. 

he’d died downstairs. edgar broke a chair against the wall when he learned. he’d died downstairs, hand reaching up, head rested on the second step. after short but brutal torture, in which he seemed to have revealed more secrets than most whistleblowers, he still died downstairs, his moral sacrifice for nothing - but he was probably desperate, he thought, desperate to reach up, where anna, dahlia, oscar and oliver hid, from where he heard his son yell for him, from where he heard the toddler cry, from where he eventually heard anna scream in horror. even if he’d died upstairs too, he just wanted to be there, the last barrier between the world he’d brought upon his family and them. no matter how much furniture and vases she threw at death eaters, anna came to a wand fight ill prepared, and she was the first to go. the small one in her arms too. oscar followed, holding a shoe - it was the wrong one, the portkey shoe just a meter away. and edgar tried to run, to climb, but he remained downstairs, not nearly as close. dahlia was later, he read, assumingly because she was the hardest to find - underneath a bed. 

three weeks. that’s all he had until then. if the time shift had happened three weeks later, he’d be dead. 

the aftermath was a mess. muggle neighbours heard yelling and called the police while aurors arrived, but not soon enough to stop the confusing murder of a whole household from hitting local news. in 2029, it’s a cold case, has been for decades. but edgar had learned the truth wizardkind knew and he let him fuel him. after darkness, he bounced back with the flaming hope that made him join the order: he could change things. if he tried hard enough, harder than LAST time. if he just worked hard enough, edgar could fix this and forget there’s a grave with his name - but he can’t. ever since it happened, he visits it nearly weekly. it was looking old, nearly forgotten, like the world had moved on without him, without his family, without amelia, without his fallen revolutionary friends. he’s cleaned them up, put some flowers on them. you see, this time he’s actually a man with nothing to lose, nothing he hasn’t lost before. 

no amount of puzzle solving can erase the fact that he should not exist right now - edgar feels very much alive, perhaps more than ever before, now that blinding rage courses through him and now that the past is past and he has nothing to lose by trying a new timeline. but another him, just a few WEEKS older, is bone and dirt beneath a tombstone in his hometown, so now he searches for answers.

edgar is driven by the riot in his head, still very much the son of the revolution, even if his war ended forty-eight years ago.

NOW who’s ready for some character paralels? shadow moon (american gods), luke bankole (handmaids tale), meredith grey (grey’s anatomy), steven crain (thohh), elijah bradley (marvel), quentin coldwater (the magicians), sabrina spellman (tcaos), jessica jones (mcu) ?????

[bluewatsons]

Deborah Caslav Covino, Amending the Abject Body: Aesthetic Makeovers in Medicine and Culture; Chapter 1 (SUNY Press, 2004)

For Julia Kristeva, the intolerable, or abject, body leaks wastes and fluids, in violation of the desire and hope for the “clean and proper” body, thus making the boundaries and limitations of our selfhood ambiguous, and indicating our physical wasting and ultimate death. In her view, human and animal wastes such as feces, urine, vomit, tears, and saliva are repulsive because they test the notion of the self/other split upon which subjectivity depends. The skin of milk, for instance, puts one in mind of the thin skin membrane that defines the borders and the limits of the physical body; because human skin provides only a relatively flimsy and easily assaulted partition between the body’s inside and the world outside, this milky reminder disturbs our distinctions between outside and inside, I and other, moving us to retch, and want to vomit in an acute attempt to expel the scum from our being (Kristeva, Powers of Horror 2–3). As Elizabeth Grosz observes, “Abjection is a sickness at one’s own body, at the body beyond that ‘clean and proper’ thing, the body of the subject. Abjection is the result of recognizing that the body is more than, in excess of, the ‘clean and proper’” (78). The abject body repeatedly violates its own borders, and disrupts the wish for physical self-control and social propriety. We disavow our excretory bodies because they are signs of disorder, reminders of the body’s ambiguous limits (its leaking from multiple orifices), and of its ultimate death: “Such wastes drop so that I might live, until, from loss to loss, nothing remains in me and my entire body falls beyond the limit—cadere, cadaver” (Kristeva, Powers 3).1

Kristeva’s theory of abjection originates with her distinction between the semiotic and the symbolic in Revolution in Poetic Language. Here, Kristeva claims that language is the outgrowth of certain drives and desires that are somehow “presymbolic,” or we might say, prerepresentational. These drives and desires are semiotic, and their life exists in the place or space of the chora. Kristeva adapts the concept of the chora from Plato’s Timaeus, a dialogue between Socrates and Timaeus about the nature of material existence, where the chora is usually translated into English as “receptacle.” This passage from the Timaeus indicates that for Plato, the chora is the place out of which being develops:

For the moment, we need to keep in mind three types of things: that which comes to be, that in which it comes to be [chora], and that after which the thing coming to be is modeled, and which is the source of its coming to be. It is in fact appropriate to compare the receiving thing to a mother, the source to a father, and the nature between them to their offspring. (Zeyl 50d)

The chora is thus related for Plato, as for Kristeva, to the maternal. It is the place where the developing “thing” (in Kristeva’s case, a child) is “nurtured.” In human relationships, this nurturing consists of the mother responding to the child’s needs (that is, her heterogeneous energies and drives), and directing both the expression and the satisfaction of those needs. The child experiences hunger, alertness, and drowsiness, all of which are answered by the mother, who suckles the child, talks to her and makes faces at her, cuddles her as she drifts into sleep, and so on. Though the child hears words spoken around her, she has not yet been initiated into formal language, but experiences the world mainly in terms of rhythmic or sporadic movements, sounds without pre- scribed sense, feelings of pleasure or pain whose origin or cause is indefinite. Language is already beginning to develop in this semiotic phase of existence, since certain patterns of being in the wake of sound are imposed on the future speaking subject. She hears certain sounds—words—repeated around her, and registers a variety of tones and vocalizations in her surroundings, and they may gradually begin to correspond to states of bodily feeling, for instance, her mother’s soft whisper as she enjoys the warmth of being at the breast and filling her belly. The child is thus beginning to experience correspondences of sounds, words, desires, and feelings; a world is beginning to take form, but it is still a world that is largely dependent on the mother and her body for its maintenance and definition.

The semiotic phase is followed by a rupture, which Kristeva thinks of with reference to Lacan’s theory of the mirror stage. Lacan writes of a time in a young child’s development when she recognizes herself in a mirror for the first time. “What’s that?” the child thinks. “Why, that seems to be me, since when I move, the image moves; I see where I begin and end, so I am an individual, and that means that I am not continuous with my mother’s body, but separate from it.” This introduces the child to the idea that not only is she a person separate from the mother and from objects in the world, but also that persons and objects can be reflected back to her through representation, through images or figures that depict or describe persons and things, but which are not identical with those persons or things. This is the point at which encoded words become central. Because the child had not previously been aware of the world as a representational place of persons and objects, she had no connection with naming. But now, as she begins to cross from the semiotic—in which language was all movement, rhythm, sounds without referent—into the symbolic—in which language points at persons and things and gives them a public meaning—she needs to know the names of persons and things in order to communicate with others. This moment of drift from the semiotic toward naming—toward becoming participatory in a signifying system—is for Kristeva a “thetic phase” (98). Kristeva depicts a young child in a state of language in which the semiotic and the symbolic are cooperative: the sound the dog makes—”woof-woof ”—becomes the signifier for the dog, and the dog is called “woof-woof ” by the child. This is a thetic moment, in which the child “attribute[s] to [an entity] a semiotic fragment, which thereby becomes a signifier” (43).

A significant difference between Plato’s concept of the chora and Kristeva’s use of it is that Plato goes on to describe the chora as a kind of non- thing with reference to being:

[W]e shouldn’t call the mother or receptacle of what has come to be . . . either earth or air, fire or water, or any of their compounds or constituents. But if we speak of it as an invisible and characterless sort of thing, one that receives all things and shares in a most perplexing way in what is intelligible, a thing extremely difficult to comprehend, we shall not be misled. (Zeyl 51b)

Plato finds the chora to be a kind of cipher, a receptacle whose only function is to contain being, and being’s source is simply the father. For Kristeva, the chora is not characterless. Though it belongs to an arrangement that is prior to symbolic representation, it is nonetheless a place or space of significant activity, rather than an empty receptacle. The child’s early intimacy with the mother’s body is not only itself a kind of language, defined as it is by patterns of sound and movement, but it is the ground of all symbolic, or social language; it is what makes language acquisition possible.

Bearing in mind Plato’s reduction of the chora, or place of the mother, to nothing, we might be able to see how it is that Kristeva’s work is revolutionary. She is interested in the variety of ways in which semiosis and chora have been forgotten or repressed in and through a symbolic language that we might say is aligned with the Platonic view of the chora. The symbolic order, as it has taken shape in global culture, is an acculturated language that often simply acts as, sees itself as, a substitution for bodily instincts. The semiotic relationship to the mother, which had a less external relationship to the world—constituted as it was largely by the child’s drives and their private articulations—begins to be lost as the child enters the symbolic. And Kristeva proposes that much of the symbolic language in which we engage has the effect of establishing and maintaining us in a relationship with the not- Mother, who becomes the other, and we inhabit a world too radically external to the mother.

However, Kristeva tells us that the semiotic and symbolic languages are not discontinuous or discrete from one another:

These two modalities—the semiotic and the symbolic—are inseparable within the signifying process that constitutes language, and the dialectic between them determines the type of discourse (narrative, metalanguage, theory, poetry, etc.) involved; in other words, so-called “natural” language allows for different modes of articulation of the semiotic and the symbolic. (24)

The symbolic bears traces of the semiotic, of the mother tongue, of the “various processes and relations, anterior to sign and syntax . . . [which are] previous and necessary to the acquisition of language, but not identical to language” (96). So, the activity of the symbolic is not without what has largely become the pre-conscious or unconscious semiotic, even as it is a transformation, or sublimation, of it.

Kristeva’s contribution (in Revolution in Poetic Language and elsewhere) to efforts by philosophers and linguists to see the relationships among language, mind, and culture is to posit the semiotic processes as elemental to art. Revolution treats Mellarme and Lautreamont, showing how radical poetic language simultaneously incorporates and violates conventional grammar, syntax, and meaning.2 For Kristeva, a revival or recognition of semiotic language creates the possibility for breaking out of the constraints of a law-governed symbolic order, to create art that violates conventional rules, and “murders” proper meaning. Dreams and fantasies continue to remind us of the presence of the semiotic in our mental life, as do artistic and poetic productions.

Kristeva’s argument for the retrieval of the semiotic strains or energies through a reading of poetic language is revolutionary, since a rigid insistence on the priority of the Symbolic Order in symbolic language3 not only makes linguistics a failed or partial enterprise, but also stifles creativity and silences the body. If the semiotic state is a time in which the child’s bodily instincts are given more expression, more play, the child who has entered into the s/Symbolic condition finds language exerting its regulating influence the more forcefully on the bodily instincts, so that the psychology and behavior of the child begin to be shaped in the image of the Symbolic.4

In the mirror phase, the child begins to turn toward that formative figure in her life that represents the symbolic order, which Kristeva and Lacan both associate with The Law of the Father, though Kristeva also associates the father with love, and this is another way in which she qualifies or complicates Lacan. As Plato indicates, the source and model of becoming “real” in the world is understood as the father, in contrast to the receptacle within which early dependence takes place, which is the mother. Thus the sensual and maternal semiotic world is largely supplanted by the symbolic world, which involves turning toward the rules of language, of expression, of codified behavior, of rules and regulations, of conventions.

The mother is left behind—abjected, Kristeva says—and with her all elements of the self that threaten or violate codes of behavior and discursive expression. She is thus separated from “the clean and proper subject,” whose body is regulated by codes of good social behavior, and repressed in and through symbolic language. For Kristeva, everything that is filthy or disorderly or uncivilized is in the same “place” as the left-behind mother, in the realm of the abject. Like the semiotic, then, the abject is also what is sup- pressed and repressed within and through symbolic language. So this horror of the abject body is, as with the semiotic, linked with the body of the mother, but with an even more radically other mother than that addressed through the concept of the semiotic. One of Kristeva’s interests is the ways in which the necessary abjection of the mother—our separation from her in order to become individualized, to take objects, to enter language, to become good citizens of the family and the social world—is mistranslated into the abjection of women in general, who are reduced to the maternal function.

The abject is, as we are beginning to see, a more radical alterity than the semiotic: it refers to the power of the mother’s body over the child, a power that is not perfectly brought under the control of the Symbolic or Paternal Order. The mother’s body represents a threat, and in her essay, “Stabat Mater,” Kristeva demonstrates how the threat of the mother is brought under control, domesticated in the myth of the Holy Virgin, mother of Christ. She argues that the Christian virginal representation of the maternal satisfies the aims of the (phallocentric) Symbolic Order because the virgin is the impossible ideal up to which all women are held, and serves as mother, daughter, and wife to the Holy Son. Kristeva herself disrupts this narrative in the course of the essay by inserting stream-of-consciousness soliloquies about the experience of maternity. For Kristeva, the pregnant woman—as opposed to the figure of immaculate conception, the erasure of women’s sex—is a figure of the dou- bling of self into other, and the eventual splitting of the self into the other, a figure that bespeaks both the identification of the self with the other, and the negation of self in the other that makes the recognition of the other possible.

The symbolic order mostly succeeds in abjecting the mother, repressing her power, as Kristeva indicates in “Motherhood According to Giovanni Bellini”:

It is as if paternity were necessary in order to relieve the archaic impact of the maternal body on man; in order to complete the investigation of a ravishing maternal jouissance but also of its terrorizing aggressivity; in order somehow to admit the threat that the male feels as much from the possessive maternal body as from his separation from it—a threat that he immediately returns to that body. (Desire in Language 263)

Abjecting the mother goes beyond simply recognizing the need to separate from the mother, and enter language, because it is also motivated by the Paternal Order’s fear that the mother’s body is a devouring body. The semiotic mother, we recall, does participate in the process of imposing patterns and order on the life of the infant, and is, in that sense, an arm of the Symbolic Order.5 The abject mother is an archaic mother because she is, as Kelly Oliver says, “pre-identity, presubject, preobject” (57), and in that way, utterly non- compliant with the clean and proper bodies regulated by the symbolic order: “Kristeva gives [in Powers of Horror] a [further] example of the revolutionary effect of the repressed maternal in language. [Here,] the authority of our religion, morality, politics, and language comes through the repression of horror [of the abject body]. . . . Our culture is founded on this horror” (101). As Oliver says, “The Symbolic can maintain itself only by maintaining its borders; and the abject points to the fragility of those borders” (56).

Pain

We might view each socially abject body as analogous to the mother who is both the object of waste and, with her menstrual blood, its distinctive source; each is a castoff unless and until it reenters the cultural logic that articulates health and beauty, a reentry advertised by the aesthetic clinic. Each experiences, to borrow a concept from David Bakan, telic decentralization. In biological terms, telic decentralization describes the action of living cells that divide and differentiate in the service of organismic growth. The teleological, or purposive form of the body is understood as both its drive toward integrity and its capacity to function in specialized ways. Bakan conceives of the human body as composed of various loci of organization, or multiple teleological centers, including disease tele and constructive tele. Disease tele are of the lowest order, because they do not work for the common good of the organism, and do not communicate with the constructive tele. Bakan also posits a psychical form of telic decentralization, making use of the Freudian tripartite mind, in which the psyche as a whole splits into the id, ego, and superego. In a healthy organism, the three psychic telic centers communicate with one another, working toward the greater good of the organism. This form of telic decentralization accounts not only for the mind’s complexity, but also for its degeneration into incoherence or fragmentation: certain experiential trauma may be repressed, producing neuroses and psychoses which result from a lack of free- flowing communication among psychic centers.

Bakan applies the concept of telic decentralization beyond the individual body and mind to the relation between individual persons who are divided through their bodies from the larger social body. Here, Bakan focuses on physical pain as he discusses this separation: “Pain is the burden of the organism separated out of the larger [social] telos . . . the occasion when one is ripped from union into a condition of physical individuality” (64).6 For both Bakan and Elaine Scarry—who adapts a number of Bakan’s concepts in The Body in Pain7—the ego moves to externalize, or make alien, the source of its suffering. Significantly, Kristeva says, “The abject has only one quality of the object—that of being opposed to I” (Powers 1). The alienation of pain (from the self) and the objectification of pain (as diagnosis) are psychotherapeutic counterparts for the sufferer seeking relief. Diagnostic objectification, the means by which the sufferer brings pain into the external, and potentially curative, world of cause and effect, is also the means by which she psychologically makes pain alien.

The point of substantiating pain is to cancel it. Intervention is the point at which sufferer and nonsuffering community meet, an event that must take place in order for the sufferer to retrieve her social connectedness: “A cry of pain coming from one person may, at the very least, evoke in another an effort to help the person who is in pain; and thus pain is also a means of returning to the dominion of the social telos” (Bakan 61, emphasis added). (Alien) pain divides the sufferer not only from her own (pained) body, but also from the (supreme) pain-free population for whom pain is a deviant and unnatural condition. Reestablishing oneself among this group—becoming “recentralized”— requires not only that the sufferer make her pain known, but also that the pain be eliminated (Bakan 61). To objectify pain is thus to stamp it out in two senses: to give it tangible shape, and, potentially, to extinguish it. In other words, she must lose her suffering parts. Though Bakan has compassionate healing in mind when he speaks of pain’s obliteration, it is also true that the obliteration of pain removes the sight of suffering from “the dominion of the social telos.”

Through their developing recognition that the aesthetic surgical industry needed justification on medical terms, as a service in relief of pain and suffering (and thus committed to the “recentralizing” of its patients), aesthetic surgeons had found by the mid-twentieth century a viable way to define their enterprise as a respectable and necessary medical practice by claiming that body beautification acts as a kind of psychotherapy. As both Sander Gilman and Elizabeth Haiken demonstrate, the aesthetic surgical industry owes what legitimacy it now enjoys to the reciprocal ideas that dissatisfaction with the body causes unhappiness, and that this unhappiness will lift when the patient’s body is beautified.8 Gilman points out that the birth and devel- opment of psychoanalysis roughly coincides with the establishment of modern aesthetic surgery, and observes an inverse relationship between surgical aes- theticizing and psychoanalytic therapies:

The basic premise of aesthetic surgery rests on the simple reversal of the psychosomatic model that underlies orthodox psychoanalysis. For the psychoanalyst psychic ‘misery’ is written on the body as physical symptoms; for the aesthetic surgeon, the ‘unhappiness’ of the patient is the result of the physical nature of the body. (Creating Beauty 13)

The industry’s continuing use of this “somatopsychic” dynamic, in which altering the body affects the mind, comes forward in its specialized use of the term “psychosurgery” to indicate the ultimate destination of the surgeon’s scalpel (see, for example, Engler 30–32). Pruzinsky’s and Edgerton’s well-documented 1990 observation that “[t]he only rationale for performing aesthetic plastic surgery is to improve the patient’s psychological well-being” (217) indicates that by the beginning of the 1990s, better mental health had become the industry’s raison d’etre.

The estrangement of persons from the body parts that cause psychic affliction—in obeisance to a social telos that requires bodily sacrifices in the name of wellness—is active in an aesthetic surgical industry-imaginary that decentralizes the targets of its appeals, encouraging prospective patients to see the body as an inventory of parts, one or more of which produce suffering, and which must thus be erased. On the whole, the aesthetically unmodified body is posited as an unfortunate deviation from the beautified bodies considered integral to a well-functioning relationship between the individual and her society. This is to say that the felt alienness of the unsatisfactory body parts to the sufferer’s ego is always tied up with the very ways in which the body is understood by a community whose language allows only for an abjecting model.

Communication and Expulsion

The disarticulation of mind and body, and body from self and society, centralized for Kristeva in the abject mother, is brought forward as a problem for feminist psychoanalysis by Teresa Brennan, who would answer Freud’s “riddle of femininity”—involving women’s greater depletion of sublimating energies following from the Oedipal conflict—through a focus on his theory of the mind as an economic, individualized, autonomous structure. Brennan argues that subjects are not autonomous entities, but exist in a lived relation to and exchange of psychic energies with other subjects. The “imprint” of one’s own psychic energies—desires and demands—is always potentially transferable to the other, and this dynamic defines the process of masculinization and feminization. Brennan returns us to Freud by establishing the body as structuring a language fundamental to psychological subjects. She argues, in phylogenetic terms, that beings in utero speak a language that is both logical (allowing for a communication with flesh that facilitates growth and development), and affective (in a dependent relation with the flesh of another). Physiological growth involves a chain of interconnected events that progresses from one state to another:

Presumably facilitating connections are basic to the language of the flesh, which has to be logical, in the sense that one thing connects with another in a way that facilitates growth. . . . [L]ogical thought, the connections made through words, is a kind of mimesis of a hypothetical original form of communication which was both mental and physical. (223)

Yet the constructive power inherent in human language suffers because at some point language becomes disconnected from the affective feeling that once made up a part of its character.

This process has, for Brennan, gendered significance, so that the male subject’s language typically disengages from its affective part, displacing it onto an other, while it is the female subject that typically accepts this imposition, and loses some capacity for transforming feeling into speech. This imposition has devastating results for women:

Moreover it is a divorce that suggests that affects, or emotions, are the confused residue of the original logic of the flesh, left over and muddled up once they have been subtracted from that original logic through speech, after the subject has been cut off from that fleshly logic, or castrated. (224)

Masculine practice displaces or disposes of affective feeling onto the woman, needing her, but as a kind of wastebasket, so that she becomes the castrated affect. Woman’s relegation to affect and body remains, however, somehow unnatural to the logic of the body in Brennan’s construction, inimical to the communicative potential of body language.

Brennan qualifies the constructionist jump to the social, not in order to argue that social conditions do not inform psychological subjects, nor that change is possible because social conditions are largely constructed. She looks at features of reproductive embodiment that may predispose us to certain psychological patterns, the understanding of which, she argues, can help us to more effectively modify social conditions. Brennan focuses on the body as a pre-conditioned language: there is a biologically realized tendency to connectedness that the body acts out, and that the body imitates. That tendency, on a biological level, is essentially constructive: it makes life, it assures growth. For Brennan, physiological growth is logical: a chain of interconnected events that takes us from one state to another. Acknowledging Lacan’s positing of a psychological world that is structured as and by language, Brennan wants to locate this in the body, in the flesh:

If, as I have argued, some part of the structure of language is based on an original form of intra-uterine communication, then the question had to arise as to why language works in ways that either facilitate or hinder connections. Presumably facilitating connections are basic to the language of the flesh, which has to be logical, in the sense that one thing connects with another in a way that facilitates growth. This suggests that logical thought, the connections made through words, is a kind of mimesis of a hypothetical original form of communication which was both mental and physical. And if, as I have argued, the word can be turned in certain directions, a turning hinged on its connection with a visual image, affects, and motor activity, then this direction will affect the ease with which connections are made. This must be so, given that the image can lock a word inside hysteria (femininity). In masculinity, the outward forceful projection of image and affects should allow those words to flow more freely, but at the price of a divorce from affective feeling. (223–24)

In this model of body and communication, the network of connections is purely constructive. There is no address to the problems of decay and dying, to the presymbolic semiotic that is illogical and eventually abject, or to the fact that growth entails waste.

Therefore, to Brennan’s answer to the riddle of femininity, I would add that the wasting of the flesh is also an aspect of the body’s life, activating a symbolic that both resists abjection and associates it with the female body. Understanding this initially involves acknowledging that the growth of the body entails the expulsion—the abjection—of its nonnutritive contents. Just as the body is an articulate organ that fosters communication in the service of growth, this growth—and later, mature health—of the body requires the expulsion of what would otherwise contribute to sepsis. As natural as it may be to have communication among cells in order to promote growth, and an intrauterine “conversation” with the cells of the mother’s body upon which the fetus depends, that fetus is also expelling waste through the placenta into the mother. Thus, our growth and health entail not only a certain constructive logic, but also the expulsion of the contents of decay and death. This is the way we first know what it is to expel into and onto an other.

One could say that the two forces or efforts—communication and expulsion—work in tandem, as a physiological unit, which sets up the psyche to attach certain significances to the body’s activity. During intrauterine life, it will simply be the case that the subject perceives itself as an articulating body that requires an other into or onto whom it may displace its waste product. Later, it will be the woman/(m)other who becomes the conscious receptacle of choice, at first due to her perceived connection to the child’s body, and later due to bodily associations with abjection: menstruation, pregnancy, lactation, excess of adipose tissue. She is, as Kristeva has argued, the fleshly language before it becomes sanitized and masked as the logic of the symbolic order. Maternity is, in this sense, the opening of one’s body to the act of being shat into or upon, and interestingly, this dynamic is reflected in the male/female sexual parts.9

What I press here, in association with Brennan’s propositions about the divorce of mind from feeling that defines the conflict between masculine and feminine, is that disarticulations of language and body also occur within the frame of reference of the body whose corporate nature is always called into question by the body without firm borders. For Brennan, the divorce of affective feeling from the masculine needs correction, since disarticulate communication corresponds with disarticulate psyches. For me, the same is true; however, to Brennan’s emphasis on masculinity’s rejection and displacement of affective feeling, I would add rejection and displacement of the body that wastes, and propose that the wasting body is any body that does not exhibit the cultural symptoms of health, including ill health associated with being the weaker sex, race, age group, or shape.

While I agree with and admire Brennan’s bold move to read flesh in tension with our fears about essentialism, arguing that this scruple has kept us from really theorizing the body, I remain suspicious of psychoanalytic insights that involve prerational subjects, and see these models as not necessarily phylogenetic and infant developmental absolutes, but as figures or narratives that allow us to enter into a critical dialogue about the displacement of the abject body onto women. The question is how to reconfigure these biological mechanisms in thought and representation so that social life does not mirror their meaning in fixed terms, so that woman does not internalize as her obligation the imprint of masculinity’s desire and demand to abandon its fleshly nature.

Transgression, Identification, and Community

Through this discussion of Kristeva, Bakan, and Brennan, I recognize abjection—both as it originates with Kristeva and as it is implied in the other theorists’ focus on the problem of the disarticulate body—as part of an intensely personal state of being. At the same time that abjection is part of the individual’s struggle to live as a pain-free self, it is also, as I have stated at several points, a metaphor for the process of maintaining the social body. Kristeva’s counterposition of the abject against the Symbolic, with the Symbolic understood as the articulate social order, indicates that the individual in a struggle against her own dissolution is also in a struggle against social alienation.

Kristeva’s consistent focus on the individual’s struggle against abjection has provoked some criticism of her as apolitical (c.f., Leland), and it is the case that Kristeva is more interested in the self than in selves. Therefore, relocating Kristevan abjection as a social and communal process requires some measure of adaptation, so that we are able to see the body in society as the corporate and collective social body, and understand the psychobiological struggle against dissolution as analogous to the struggle for social and communal identity.

Those who have attempted to adapt Kristevan abjection to social action have focused on the struggle against social and communal identity, and adapted the abject body as a figure of transgression. This approach is fully warranted, since, in her monstrosity, the abject woman stands apart from both those who are oppressed by the beauty ideal and those who strategically conform to it. She has informed feminist typologies at least since the advent of Cixous’s 1975 “Laugh of the Medusa.” Countering Freud’s conspicuous display of gynophobia and its parent neurosis, androcentrism, Cixous recasts Medusa as a smiling and powerful woman, and rings in a postmodern pantheon of new embodiments, for instance, Heilbrun’s androgyne, Daly’s crone, Haraway’s cyborg. These contend with traditional constructions of the female body as a weak and beautiful ornament disqualified from intellectual and plastic distinction, and offer visions of prodigious bodies with subversive minds, aesthetic hybrids whose nonconformity with feminine ideals betokens their power.

Patricia Yaeger and Mary Russo10 focus explicitly on aesthetic transgression by envisioning abject women who violate two of the principal categories of philosophical aesthetics, the sublime and the grotesque. Abjection enters their work largely as the Kristevan concept describing body waste and leakage (menstrual blood, withering flesh, excrement), with emphasis on the social positions of those outside the borders of what is “clean and proper.” Though Yaeger and Russo do not write explicitly about aesthetic surgery, they are thinking about conformity with the cultural beauty ideals to which the contemporary aesthetic surgical clinic is highly responsive. For both, the abject woman becomes a subversive trope of female liberation: she speaks an alternative, disruptive language, immersing herself in the significances of the flesh, becoming willfully monstrous as she defies the symbolic order. She abandons her oppressive confinement to the category of the beautiful, reforms her association with the grotesque, and contests her expulsion from the sublime. Yaeger and Russo conceive of an aesthetic—unlike the aesthetic surgical imaginary—that revels in abjection, viewing its pressures on the body as symbols of a womanist power, and reforming an aesthetic of the body that issues from misogyny and somatophobia.

Yaeger’s 1992 essay on the “maternal sublime” proposes that women refuse the weak category of the beautiful, and look, instead, to the grotesque and the sublime to serve a feminist aesthetic. Observing that “the world of the beautiful can be treacherous for women” (5), Yaeger notes that this measure of women’s value is instrumental in keeping them in invisibility, paralysis, and confinement.11 In traditional aesthetics, the sublime is more powerful than the beautiful, tied up with ecstasy, force, and movement. Sublimity bespeaks “the noumenal power of the once-inferiorized [self ]” (9), but is “unavailable to the spatially constricted woman” (6).12 But the sublime woman can involve herself in “joy and vaunting,” a self-glorying that refuses “constriction and miniaturization” (6). Women refuse the beautiful and embrace the sublime by emphasizing their own powers of generation, specifically their maternal power. Asking whether “there is room for women’s reproductive labor in the smoke- filled rooms” of the Romantic sublime (9)—associated with conversion, spatiality, and personal power—Yaeger argues that maternity, despite its traditional connection with the grotesque, can belong also to a sublime poetics. She adapts Edmund Burke’s view that terror is the whole basis of sublimity, positing the birthing woman as a type of grotesque that sublimely terrifies. Yaeger notes that the mother’s body has often been defined as defiled, ruptured, and unclean—abject in Kristevan terms—and thus argues that the mother’s body registers the dread prerequisite to sublimity: abjection conditions the embodiment of robust motion and gore.

Russo’s 1995 Female Grotesque also conjoins grotesque and abject in the development of a new aesthetic. Emphasizing “grotesque performance” for women, Russo admires Amelia Earhart’s aerobatic stunting for its refusal of conventional femininity. The history of literary and artistic representation, as well as the history of public and political discourses, reflects and reinforces the imperative that women keep themselves small and unseen, that they neither take up too much space in the world, nor make spectacles of themselves. As a subversive alternative, Russo prefers that women make themselves prodigious and visible, that they seek majesty, and so disrupt long-standing definitions of the ideal woman as restrained and diminutive. A grotesque performer like Earhart practices philobatism, or the will to be suspended in mid-air, defying her groundedness within and through traditional femininity. The grotesque performer, because ugly and aberrant according to conventional culture, refuses the imperative that she stay beautiful and domesticated, and seeks the heights of self-fashioning with reference to a body that does not obey prescribed limits. For Russo, Earhart’s stunting is both a model of female exceptionalism and an instance of woman as sideshow object, simultaneously demonstrating and rebuking her cultural status as a monstrous body.

Noting that the grotesque body is always a social body, Russo rehabilitates the identification of the grotesque, noted by Bakhtin, with “the lower bodily stratum and its associations with degradation, filth, death, and rebirth” (8). She argues that traditional aesthetics has devalued the grotesque body, preferring the classical body, which is “transcendent and monumental, closed, static, self-contained, symmetrical, and sleek . . . identified with the ‘high’ or official culture of the Renaissance and later, with the rationalism, individualism, and normalizing aspirations of the bourgeoisie” (8). By contrast, she identifies the grotesque body, “open, protruding, irregular, secreting, multiple, and changing,” with the social rebirth and reformation called for by “the non- official ‘low’ culture or the carnivalesque” (8). Russo suggests that the ideals upon which Western subjectivity has relied for the construction of its values and knowledge—normalcy, purity, transcendence—constructs itself in opposition to the qualities with which the grotesque is associated: the abnormal or perverse, the filthy or tainted, and the earthly or grounded. The grotesque is also the Freudian uncanny, because Western subjectivity refuses through its ideals precisely what cannot be refused: the mortal corporeality that incites human fears.

Russo argues that the female grotesque and the abject woman are related, since the maternal body has long been associated with the grotesque. The “cave—the grotto-esque” (1) she notes, may be compared to the cavernous anatomical female body. Russo makes this connection through Bakhtin’s “senile, pregnant hag,” and through “a vein of nonacademic ‘cultural feminism’” that valorizes the earth mother, witch, crone, and vampire, arguing that these figures “posit a natural connection between the female body (itself naturalized) and the ‘primal’ elements, especially the earth” (1). In addition, she maintains that the locating of the grotesque in art “as superficial and to the margins” suggests “a certain construction of the feminine” as equally devalued and disenfranchised (6). The maternal partakes of the uncanny to the extent that it threatens “always to monstrously reproduce,” to double as conjoined self and other (18); the philobatic imagination, too, “operates, at different stages, both within and away from the maternal body” to the extent that subjectivity is formed through the simultaneous love and repudiation of the mother (36). Russo recognizes that “it is an easy and perilous slide from these archaic tropes [woman as earth, cave, witch, and vampire] to misogyny [since] all the detritus of the body that is separated out and placed with terror and revulsion (predominantly, though not exclusively) on the side of the femiinine—are down there in that cave of abjection” (20). However, she would exploit the association in the direction of a liberation strategy: the woman as “monstrous” defier of social norms.

The association of physical and cultural disfigurement with power remains, in the visions of Yaeger and Russo, and related celebrations of the monstrous in Daly, Haraway, and Cixous, largely an intellectual and figurative process, calling for a reconstituted female aesthetic imagination that may, to the extent that concepts form practice, activate actual social change. As I have noted, Kathryn Pauly Morgan calls for more direct intervention when she proposes that we have aesthetic surgery as a form of protest. She calls for a corps of feminist radicals who go under the knife to make their noses bigger, have fat injected into rather than sucked out of the body, add facial wrinkles, and create more pendulous breasts. Like body piercing and tattooing, which were once identifiers of protest and refusal, uglifying aesthetic change could become subversive, undermining “the power dynamic built into the dependence on surgical experts who define themselves as aestheticians of women’s bodies” (162). However, Morgan recognizes that her proposal is utopian, and that “refusal and revolt exact a high price” (163) within the aesthetic surgical imaginary. Thus, she blunts the general criticism that Lynn Segal gives in Why Feminism, proposing that formulations of the feminine “in terms of its seditious ‘Otherness’” (50) can seem pitifully oblivious to current social and political realities.

It is those realities to which I will turn in chapter 2, which offers an introduction to the global influence and ideals of the aesthetic surgical imaginary, which normalize our conceptions of the clean and proper body. I will return to the monstrous feminine toward the end of this study, to affirm the power of what I call “inspired abjection” to maintain the possibility of radical alternatives in the midst of these powerful normalizing forces. But my primary interest in the following chapters will be the role of abjection in social and socializing processes, rather than as the mark of the anti-social. In this connection, it is the case, as Kenneth Burke and others have pointed out, that the creation of society is largely a rhetorical process, enacted through identification. For Althusser, identification is the recognition of oneself as hailed, as an interpellated object. Notwithstanding his value to our critical lexicon for understanding the operation of the aesthetic-surgical imaginary, Althusser’s stress on the power of the hailing ideology encourages the stress on objectification that also characterizes feminist top-down models of the persuasive power of commercial beauty advertisement. The Althusserian model does provide us a representative anecdote for how the appeal of the imaginary is operationalized, but does not—as much Marxist theory does not—under- stand people who accede to the appeal as much more than dumb objects.

Kathy Davis has moved us toward a fuller recognition of aesthetic surgical patients as willful and intelligent agents, but has not provided a full explanation of the motivating desire that would explain why, as chapter 2 will show, so many millions are amending their bodies. Developing this explanation means explicating the relationships among objectification, abjection, and identification as elements in the process of creating and maintaining one’s social life. In this process, objectification refers to the commodifying of the body, not only in the sense that Faludi and Wolf develop, of women reduced to the objects of male desire, but also as self-objectification that identifies—in complicity with the aesthetic surgical imaginary—the parts of the body that should be amended, its abject objects. Identification is most usefully under- stood in the terms established by Kenneth Burke, as motivated by the desire for consubstantiality, or “shared substance.” Consubstantiality is, for Burke, a “compensatory” motive that arises out of the human aversion to division. We would, for Burke, rather act together than apart, “and in acting together, [people] have common sensations, concepts, images, ideas, attitudes that make them consubstantial” (Rhetoric 21). Feminist rhetoricians have pointed out that Burke’s stress on identification and on the human aversion to division can lead to the valorizing of social cohesion and the discouragement of protest and nonconformity (Ratcliffe). This is, indeed, a problem that we cannot ignore, especially insofar as identification may be the central motive for acceding to universal beauty ideals. At the same time, identification (as the desire for consubstantiality) has the explanatory power required to move us away from an overly simple conception of the aesthetic surgical patient as an object. Instead, we can come to see this patient as embedded in a vast network of industry appeals that are largely visual, and which bring into view the clean and proper bodies that are purported to result once abjection is complete, once those features and parts that are not consubstantial with an emerging universal ideal are amended.13

[lbat1901]

Eddsworld: UTFTF Chapter 2

The Sounds of Sorrow - (Chapter 2)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

At the Red Army base, Future Tom and Matt were seen looking through a couple of things in a storage room. “Ooh…look at what I found” said Future Matt. “What is it Matt?” asked Future Tom. “I found a fancy wristwatch” said Future Matt as he held it up. “Uh, that’s not any wristwatch. It’s a time traveling wristband which brings in the thought of Edd stealing parts in order to make it function properly and you see where he’s at” said Future Tom. “Oh yeah. That reminds me, it’s the anniversary where he went back in time” said Future Matt.

“Yeah, it is. I can’t get over the fact that he wanted to kill his past self over cola being banned. I will also never forget seeing the anger in his eyes on the day when he discovered that his favorite drink got banned” said Future Tom. “Neither would I. I hope he’s calm now. Remember when we captured him and when we were trying to get him in a cell?” asked Future Matt. “Yeah I do. However, we didn’t bother to help those soldiers since Edd was not in the right mood or place for it. Besides, he’s taller than us which makes it extra scary” said Future Tom. “Well that’s true” said Future Matt. “Hold whatever thought you have, I’m getting a message on my visor” said Future Tom. “You got it” said Future Matt.

Future Tom takes the moment to use his visor to see the message while making a face of concern before shortly dropping it. “Okay I’m done” said Future Tom. “Who sent you the message?” asked Future Matt. “It was from Zhong Wei. Apparently he was doing his mission on protecting both Jon and Mark from anything that might stop their protesting against the dictatorship under the wishes of Red Leader, Tord” said Future Tom. “I see. Was he successful?” asked Future Matt. “Yes he was. It wasn’t till he encountered Killmonger and fought them until their fight suddenly stopped” said Future Tom.

“Killmonger? You mean that assassin? What were they doing?” asked Future Matt. “I’m not sure exactly, but whatever it was, it wasn’t good” said Future Tom. “Oh I see” said Future Matt. “Anyway….we should probably be getting Edd’s food ready” said Future Tom. “Yay! Does that mean that we get to see him finally?” asked Future Matt. “I guess so. I think we’ve gave him enough time for him to not drag us by the face like we’re rag dolls” said Future Tom.

“Great! I get to use that anniversary cake that I’ve been saving” said Future Matt. “Anniversary cake? Where did you get- never mind, let’s just go” said Future Tom. As Future Tom and Matt went to prepare the food for Future Edd. Meanwhile down in the darken tunnels and corridors below ground level, there was a hallway with many sections that contained prisoners. Not just any prisoners, but those who opposed the laws of the Red Leader and were captured by Red Army soldiers. At the end of it all was a special cell that held one of the most well known prisoners who was responsible for killing off many and broke into many bases.

Zhong Wei was seen walking towards this particular prisoner’s cell, carrying something in his hands. Once reaching to the cell, there was a slight glance of light that showed what Zhong Wei was carrying. It turns out that he was carrying a tray and on that tray was a chocolate cake that had red streaks of frosting covering it. Zhong Wei gets down to carefully slide the tray through a small comportment door to the cell. As he got up, he realized that he forget something before quickly checking his pockets. Aha! Zhong Wei pulls out a can of cola before getting down again just so he can quietly sneak it through the bars of the cell.

As Zhong Wei was close enough to get the can next to the tray, he suddenly got jumpscared as a hand grabs him by the wrist. Zhong Wei looks to see that the hand slowly took the can of cola from him as he recoils back. He then hears the sounds of small sobs before hearing the can being opened just before he heard someone sipping it. There was a small burp before the can rolled back to him. “Umm….you do know that was supposed to go with the cake, right? It’s fine though. Here take another one” said Zhong Wei. Zhong Wei takes out another can and puts it right next to the tray.

This time Zhong Wei watches as he saw the hand come out of the shadows to grab the can. Zhong Wei notices that there was a shackle around the wrist as he heard chains rattling. “You’re quite social for someone that spends their time in the shadows. The many times that I came down here, I just put the can through the bars and set it down before leaving. The first time we had a conversation was when you gave out these sounds of sadness and anger” said Zhong Wei. “So you really are the person who’s been giving me cola after all. I was right the entire time” said the person. “Holy……I was totally not expecting that. I never heard your actual voice before. This is…..this is nice” said Zhong Wei. “I have many questions that I need to ask you. Who are you? What is the meaning behind of you giving me cola? Plus where did you even get them from?” asked the person.

“Oh that? Well my name is Zhong Wei, but many people call me Jeff. It doesn’t matter which one you address me as. Now onto the cola, I got it those cans from a entire supply within the Red Army base. All I know is that cola, along with any other soda, makes people happy despite it being banned” said Zhong Wei. “COLA ISN’T BANNED!!!” yelled the person. Zhong Wei jumps a little at how loud that was before hearing the person muttering the phrase several times while crying softly. “Hey now, it’s okay. There’s no reason for you to cry. Not like this” said Zhong Wei. “Oh, but there is. Ever since the day that cola got a nationwide and probably a worldwide ban, everything in my life fell apart. I’ve lost everything. I’ve lost my home, I’ve lost my cat Ringo, I’ve lost any sense of who I am as a well known good person, and to top it all off, I’ve lost my two best friends and I am never going to get it all back” said the person. “Oh yes you will. Trust me. I’m sure you will meet up with them one day” said Zhong Wei.

“Yeah right. How could I? They’re working with the Red Army and they’re basically slaves to the Red Leader whom I personally want to kill” said the person. “Slaves? What are you talking about? Tom and Matt, are good people to be around with. They even shared their stories especially during the time where they were trying to find you. They’ve mentioned you by name, but I want to make sure that it’s true. So will you be willing to come out into the light?” asked Zhong Wei. “Well alright…” said the person. There was a brief moment before the sounds of chains came up again as Zhong Wei watched as the person slowly and fully came out of the shadows. “Woah….awesome! So the story is true. You really are the one and only Edd who was responsible for so much. You look a little….uh….depressed…? …..Tired? And my lord, you’re tall. Cool shirt! Smeg Head, I like it” said Zhong Wei. “Yeah……let’s not get onto too many details about it” said Future Edd. “Anyway…I want to hear your side of the story on how everything went down” said Zhomg Wei. “Very well then. We might want to sit down for this” said Future Edd.

[A Few Minutes]

“You actually wanted to kill your past self for that reason?” asked Zhong Wei. “Yes. I didn’t want him to see a future of betrayal and not being able to trust anyone ever again” said Future Edd. “If you were given the chance to go back in time once more, what would you do?” asked Zhong Wei. “I would spend a lot of time there while enjoying things that I’ve lost. I want to make things up with Tom and Matt, but I’m afraid that I’ve did a lot of damage” said Future Edd. “That is truly understandable. Now back to the cake, there’s a key in it. You can visit them if you want” said Zhong Wei. Future Edd’s eyes light up before digging through the cake only to pull out a golden key as he smiled a bit.

Future Edd then uses the key to unlock the shackles that were around his wrists before unlocking the large shackle that was around his neck. “I’m free. I’m finally free!” said Future Edd. “Well technically not since you’re still behind bars. Here allow me” said Zhong Wei. Zhong Wei takes out another key as he walked up to the cell. He then places the key through the keyhole which opens the cell door. Zhong Wei watches as Future Edd slowly walks out, looking happy.

However this moment ends when Future Edd walks away leaving Zhong Wei following till he saw Future Edd grabbing a nearby soldier by the shoulders as he kicked them right in the gut before throwing them against a wall. “Why would you do that for!?” asked Zhong Wei. “It’s because that this soldier right here was responsible for trying to get me right into a cell” said Future Edd. “You could’ve just wanted for me so I can reason with them” said Zhing Wei. “I know, but I wanted to get my revenge. Now if you excuse me, I have some unfinished business to do” said Future Edd as he took the soldier’s keys. Future Edd walked down the hallway with Zhong Wei following right behind him as they stopped at a door leading to somewhere.

Future Edd punches a hole through the door as he turns the knob to open it. It turns out that Future Edd punched the door that lead to a storage room. “What are we doing in here?” asked Zhing Wei. “This is the same storage room where I had my stuff taken from me” said Future Edd. “Well I have to admit that this a lot of stuff that they took away from many other prisoners” said Zhong Wei. “Indeed it is. You might want to go outside and keep watch. We don’t want any attention, not yet at least” said Future Edd. Zhong Wei heads out of the room as Future Edd opens up a locker.

Future Edd uses the keys that he stole to open it up revealing a box that seemed to contain stuff. He takes out the box and sets it down on a table before going through it. The box actually held his possessions such as his sunglasses, his laser pistol, his time traveling wristwatch, his lucky can, and of course his black jacket and green hoodie. Future Edd then takes the time to put on his hoodie and jacket along with his lucky can which goes around his neck. “Oh this brings back memories. It feels good to be back” said Future Edd. As Future Edd was about ready to put the box back, his eyes suddenly landed on a photo which had him, Tom, Matt, and Tord smiling together. He couldn’t help but to stare at Tord before letting out a small growl before putting the photo into his pocket that was inside his jacket.

“For all these years, I’ve can’t believed that it the Red Army’s fault for banning cola. I can’t believe that I went back in time to kill my past self when I knew that one person is to be killed by me” said Future Edd. As the image of Tord’s face was still fresh in Future Edd’s mind, he began plotting on a plan that’s even better than killing his past self as he walked out of the room. The thought kept getting larger and larger as an evil smirk formed on Future Edd’s face as he lets out a chuckle. It wasn’t till his thoughts were interrupted by Zhong Wei. “Is everything okay?” asked Zhong Wei. “Yes it is. I know what I must do now” said Future Edd.

“Great! Let’s go see Tom and Matt” said Zhong Wei. “Actually I have a better idea. I’m going to travel back in time once again, but things will be different” said Future Edd. “What are you going on about? Don’t tell me that you’re going to kill the past versions of Tom and Matt” said Zhong Wei. Future Edd turns to face Zhong Wei with a tint of madness in his eyes which slightly scared Zhong Wei. “Oh, I’m not going to kill their past versions. I’m going to to kill past Tord. You see, after he blew up my own house, I never believed that he would be a cruel person, but he is. He is responsible for so much misery, but I don’t believe that he banned cola since I don’t know the Red Leader’s true identity and I don’t care about it” said Future Edd. “I see. I’m going to stop you” said Zhong Wei.

“Ha, I knew you’d say that. So that’s why you’re staying here in case if Tom and Matt come looking for me. If they do, it would be too late since past Tord will be dead seconds before they even step foot back in time. Do we have a deal?” asked Future Edd as he offered his hand for Zhong Wei to shake. Zhong Wei takes a moment to process on what was said before nodding his head while shaking hands with Future Edd. Suddenly a soldier appears while noticing Future Edd out of his cell. The soldier takes out his gun before meeting eyes with Future Edd’s laser pistol. Without any hesitation, Future Edd pulls the trigger which fires out a large green bean that ended up completely obliterating the soldier into nothing. “Out of sight, out of mind. I’ll be back shortly and I promise that this won’t take long” said Future Edd.

Future Edd walks away from Zhong Wei as he pressed a button on his wristwatch making him vanish. Not long afterwards, Future Tom and Matt came. “Where’s Edd? Did you see him come by or broke himself free, Zhong Wei?” asked Future Tom. “Uhh…..ehehehe….” said Zhong Wei as he laughed nervously. “What’s with the nervous laugh?” asked Future Matt. “Hold on Matt, I think Zhong Wei’s hiding something” said Future Tom.

Future Tom presses a button on his visor that activates a special scanning feature which analyzes Zhong Wei for a moment before flashing red. “You actually helped Edd break free? Why would you do that?” asked Future Tom. “Calm down Tom. Promise me that you won’t flip when I tell you what happened, okay? You see, I gave Edd a key that would unlocked the shackles that were around him along with using a different key to open up his cell. What I didn’t expect for him to do was attack a solider just so he can get inside a room which contained his stuff. He then told me that he’ll be traveling back in time to not kill his past self, but to kill past Tord” said Zhong Wei. “WHAT!?” yelled Future Tom. “I thought you said that you wouldn’t freak out!” said Zhong Wei. “Yeah I did, but Edd wants to kill past Tord when he doesn’t know that the Tord in this current day and age is actually the Red Leader? Oh heck no!” said Future Tom.

“Anyway….we need to stop Edd once again so he doesn’t screw anything up. We need to tell him that truth even when he clearly hates us” said Future Tom. “About that…..it turns out that Edd wants to make things up with you two, but he’s afraid that you won’t give him a chance” said Zhong Wei. “He actually said that?” asked Future Matt. “Yeah he did” said Zhong Wei. “Look, we’d love to talk more about ththis s, but we to go. We found Edd the first time and it wouldn’t be that hard to find him again. Besides, I don’t think he’ll go that far” said Future Tom. “Right! Good luck you two” said Zhong Wei. “Thanks. Be seeing you” said Future Matt. Without any more distractions, Future Tom pulls out a time traveling device and sets its coordinates before pressing a button causing both him and Future Matt to vanish.

[bryanfaganlaw]

Estate planning, marriage and divorce: What you need to know

If you have need a best suitable service your Child Law experience, Estate planning, marriage and divorce: What you need to know with the great process!

Family Law Attorney Houston: The word “adulting” has been added to our lexicon in recent years in referencing to activities that are thought to display the qualities of being an adult. Things like waking up early for work, staying in to complete a project instead of going out, doing your taxes on time and any other ordinary task that shows self restraint are those sort of undertakings that generally thought of as adulting. I think the term is pretty harmless and may even add some fun to the everyday tasks that we do in order to fulfill whatever obligations we have to ourselves and our families.

Working as an attorney means that we do quite a bit of adulting- for ourselves and for our clients. One of those adulting type subjects that we family law attorneys work in is that of helping clients going through a divorce plan for their lives once the divorce completes. It is sometimes a difficult thing to do since these folks don’t know exactly where they will be in terms of finances, location or other factors once their divorce has completed. However, it is a benefit to be able to think ahead to this stage.

Today’s blog post from the Law Office of Bryan Fagan, PLLC will center around the subject of estate planning after a divorce. Over the next few days we will get into some subtopics that touch on this subject as well. Issues like what to think about when your marriage is heading towards divorce and how to plan for your life after the divorce once your divorce is close to wrapping up. Today, though, we will begin by discussing what to do from a planning vantage point if you are considering divorce or anticipating that a divorce is on the horizon.

Planning for your financial future prior to your marriage

Houston Divorce Attorney: Prenuptial agreements are a great planning tool for you and your spouse to be if you choose to utilize one. Despite their semi-bad reputation that these contracts have in the media and our culture at large, premarital agreements can and should be mutually beneficial. These agreements set forth a statement of the parties as to what will be considered separate and community property and can also set the standard for what degree (if any) spousal maintenance is to be paid from one spouse to the other after the divorce.

For a premarital agreement to be valid, it must be in writing and agreed to without fraud or duress. This means that if you or your fiancé has purposefully and knowingly withheld information from the other or pressured the other to sign the agreement then these are defenses to the validity and enforceability of the agreement. Part and parcel with this is the full extent of your financial state: debts, property, income, assets, etc. must be disclosed to your finance, and vice versa.

Another factor that I will need to mention is that your premarital agreement cannot be unconscionable. This means that the agreement cannot be so one-sided in favoring you or your finance that no judge could reasonably determine to be equitable or fair to both parties. Finally- you and your finance must have given one another sufficient time to consider the terms of the agreement before singing the document. I always give folks an example that involves people signing a premarital agreement one day prior to their wedding. The timing of this indicates to me (and I believe that it would to a judge, as well) that one side or the other coerced an agreement. This is especially true if the agreement was presented only a day or two prior to the agreement being signed.

All in all, the best advice I can give you if you are planning to negotiate a premarital agreement is to have an attorney negotiating on your behalf. If you and your fiancé both have attorneys this will greatly increase the likelihood that a judge would determine the agreement to be enforceable. Keep in mind that you both should hire your own attorneys because your interests, although you are engaged, will not be the same when it comes to negotiating the terms of your premarital agreement.

What are some issues that you should consider including in a premarital agreement?

Houston Family Lawyer: A lot can change in your life and the life of your fiancé after the agreement is signed, so in my opinion it would be wise to include a provision in your premarital agreement that the agreement applies no matter what happens to either of you after the marriage takes place. As I’m sure you could imagine, your life would look a lot different if you or your spouse were to become disabled, ill or unable to work for any other reason.

Secondly, suppose that your spouse owns a home that is their separate property and that is distinguished in your premarital agreement. What happens when and if your spouse passes away during your marriage? Will you be given any kind of use that property during your life? That is a question that is very much up in the air if you do not include some sort of provision for it in your premarital agreement.

Finally- and this is a point connected to our initial point on the change in status of your health or income earning ability- have you considered whether or not you or your finance should be obligated under the premarital agreement to apply for life insurance? Term life insurance for relatively young and health people is very affordable, even for people on a budget. Naming your spouse as the beneficiary under that policy is a great protection that you can offer with little cost to either of you.

What issues should you be aware of when deciding to sign a premarital agreement?

Divorce Lawyer Houston: One of the benefits to having a family law attorney help you in negotiating the terms of your premarital agreement is that we are able to anticipate issues that could confront you in an effort to avoid them down the road. Let’s take some time to discuss those type of issues that you can see what I mean.

A feature of premarital agreements that many people take advantage of is that you and your fiancé are able to designate various pieces of property in ways that do not coincide with the community property laws of Texas. In this way you can control the designation of property and see to it that you and your finance are able to plan for how property will be dissolved in the event of death or divorce.

Can you take separate property and turn it into community property, however? Let’s consider money (property) that was included in your separate property as a result of the premarital agreement. Subsequent to signing the agreement you utilized that money to buy a home and titled it in both you and your spouse’s names. This means that you have likely taken that separate property asset and converted it into a community property asset without even knowing it.

Another issue that you and your family should be aware of is the general rule about gifts made during a marriage being considered to be separate property. While a gift made from a family member or other person to you is a law contained within our statutes on community property it is safer for your gift giver to place their gift into a trust in order to protect that gift from any subsequent divorce proceedings that you become a part of.

More information to be posted tomorrow on financial planning and divorce in our blog

Houston Divorce: Stay tuned tomorrow as we continue to discuss methods to help plan your estate both before, during and after a divorce. If you have any questions regarding this subject please contact the attorneys with the Law Office of Bryan Fagan, PLLC. We offer free of charge consultations with one of our licensed family law attorneys six days a week. It would be our honor to meet with you to answer your questions and to discuss the services that we can provide to you as a client of ours ... Continue Reading

[freelancesumandas]

Estate planning, marriage and divorce: What you need to know

Houston Family Lawyer: The word “adulting” has been added to our lexicon in recent years in referencing to activities that are thought to display the qualities of being an adult. Things like waking up early for work, staying in to complete a project instead of going out, doing your taxes on time and any other ordinary task that shows self restraint are those sort of undertakings that generally thought of as adulting. I think the term is pretty harmless and may even add some fun to the everyday tasks that we do in order to fulfill whatever obligations we have to ourselves and our families.

Working as an attorney means that we do quite a bit of adulting- for ourselves and for our clients. One of those adulting type subjects that we family law attorneys work in is that of helping clients going through a divorce plan for their lives once the divorce completes. It is sometimes a difficult thing to do since these folks don’t know exactly where they will be in terms of finances, location or other factors once their divorce has completed. However, it is a benefit to be able to think ahead to this stage.

Today’s blog post from the Law Office of Bryan Fagan, PLLC will center around the subject of estate planning after a divorce. Over the next few days we will get into some subtopics that touch on this subject as well. Issues like what to think about when your marriage is heading towards divorce and how to plan for your life after the divorce once your divorce is close to wrapping up. Today, though, we will begin by discussing what to do from a planning vantage point if you are considering divorce or anticipating that a divorce is on the horizon.

Planning for your financial future prior to your marriage

Prenuptial agreements are a great planning tool for you and your spouse to be if you choose to utilize one. Despite their semi-bad reputation that these contracts have in the media and our culture at large, premarital agreements can and should be mutually beneficial. These agreements set forth a statement of the parties as to what will be considered separate and community property and can also set the standard for what degree (if any) spousal maintenance is to be paid from one spouse to the other after the divorce.

For a premarital agreement to be valid, it must be in writing and agreed to without fraud or duress. This means that if you or your fiancé has purposefully and knowingly withheld information from the other or pressured the other to sign the agreement then these are defenses to the validity and enforceability of the agreement. Part and parcel with this is the full extent of your financial state: debts, property, income, assets, etc. must be disclosed to your finance, and vice versa.

Another factor that I will need to mention is that your premarital agreement cannot be unconscionable. This means that the agreement cannot be so one-sided in favoring you or your finance that no judge could reasonably determine to be equitable or fair to both parties. Finally- you and your finance must have given one another sufficient time to consider the terms of the agreement before singing the document. I always give folks an example that involves people signing a premarital agreement one day prior to their wedding. The timing of this indicates to me (and I believe that it would to a judge, as well) that one side or the other coerced an agreement. This is especially true if the agreement was presented only a day or two prior to the agreement being signed.

All in all, the best advice I can give you if you are planning to negotiate a premarital agreement is to have an attorney negotiating on your behalf. If you and your fiancé both have attorneys this will greatly increase the likelihood that a judge would determine the agreement to be enforceable. Keep in mind that you both should hire your own attorneys because your interests, although you are engaged, will not be the same when it comes to negotiating the terms of your premarital agreement.

What are some issues that you should consider including in a premarital agreement?

Houston Divorce Attorney: A lot can change in your life and the life of your fiancé after the agreement is signed, so in my opinion it would be wise to include a provision in your premarital agreement that the agreement applies no matter what happens to either of you after the marriage takes place. As I’m sure you could imagine, your life would look a lot different if you or your spouse were to become disabled, ill or unable to work for any other reason.

Secondly, suppose that your spouse owns a home that is their separate property and that is distinguished in your premarital agreement. What happens when and if your spouse passes away during your marriage? Will you be given any kind of use that property during your life? That is a question that is very much up in the air if you do not include some sort of provision for it in your premarital agreement.

Finally- and this is a point connected to our initial point on the change in status of your health or income earning ability- have you considered whether or not you or your finance should be obligated under the premarital agreement to apply for life insurance? Term life insurance for relatively young and health people is very affordable, even for people on a budget. Naming your spouse as the beneficiary under that policy is a great protection that you can offer with little cost to either of you.

What issues should you be aware of when deciding to sign a premarital agreement?

One of the benefits to having a family law attorney help you in negotiating the terms of your premarital agreement is that we are able to anticipate issues that could confront you in an effort to avoid them down the road. Let’s take some time to discuss those type of issues that you can see what I mean.

A feature of premarital agreements that many people take advantage of is that you and your fiancé are able to designate various pieces of property in ways that do not coincide with the community property laws of Texas. In this way you can control the designation of property and see to it that you and your finance are able to plan for how property will be dissolved in the event of death or divorce.

Can you take separate property and turn it into community property, however? Let’s consider money (property) that was included in your separate property as a result of the premarital agreement. Subsequent to signing the agreement you utilized that money to buy a home and titled it in both you and your spouse’s names. This means that you have likely taken that separate property asset and converted it into a community property asset without even knowing it.

Another issue that you and your family should be aware of is the general rule about gifts made during a marriage being considered to be separate property. While a gift made from a family member or other person to you is a law contained within our statutes on community property it is safer for your gift giver to place their gift into a trust in order to protect that gift from any subsequent divorce proceedings that you become a part of.

More information to be posted tomorrow on financial planning and divorce in our blog

Family Law Attorney Houston: Stay tuned tomorrow as we continue to discuss methods to help plan your estate both before, during and after a divorce. If you have any questions regarding this subject please contact the attorneys with the Law Office of Bryan Fagan, PLLC. We offer free of charge consultations with one of our licensed family law attorneys six days a week. It would be our honor to meet with you to answer your questions and to discuss the services that we can provide to you as a client of ours ... Continue Reading

[uahq2]

THE PRICE PAID IN BLOOD. HAN MIYOUNG, 

                                          WE ENTREAT THEE. RISE. RISE. RISE!

being in the lone presence of the high priest is an extraordinary honor and right now, you are in the thick of it. the ever so watchful eyes of ho sangchul rarely glance over to you, he does not even need a proper look to read you like an open book. busy hands with sharp fingernails skim through your file, placing an ominous scribble here and there before he finally raises his voice.

“thank you for meeting me, sister. do tell me something about yourself.”

lips part, a door opens in access to the words that form on her tongue, but miyoung says nothing. her lips meld against one another as she thinks about the words she can say. from a young age the witch had barricaded herself in libraries, devouring the testimonies that witches and warlocks before her had left behind. she is aware of how to craft a story, of how to string words together to leave a lasting impression on the young mind.

but han miyoung is not a testimony, and she has yet to learn how to perfect the self-serving propaganda that will fall off of any witch’s tongue. she takes her time on the question, taking her time with each syllable.

hands which are sitting atop her lap unfold themselves as she prepares an answer, fingers twitching, readying themselves to move with her every word.

“i was born on the twenty-second of january, i’m sure it’s there in my file but i say this because of it’s significance. my uncle tells me that the number twenty-two is the number of the master builder, and as the day of my birth it marks me as someone who can turn my dreams into reality. the number one because of the first month has to do with leadership and independence.” it’s a human thing to want to decorate one’s body with such things, and miyoung almost allowed herself one of these human indulgences.

the young witch takes a pause, and then continues. “i am the youngest of two siblings. and as any other witch or warlock i have participated in the dark baptism during my sixteenth year,” her parents and closest family had attended as was tradition ― and miyoung had pretended that she didn’t notice that attendance had been lacking in comparison to that of her older siblings. “the lupercalia and feast of autumn are mandated as part of my family.”

“before joining the academy i spent years under the tutelage of a private tutor who helped me master six ancient tongues, i have an affinity for languages it seems and i spend much of my time reading…for the sake of reading mostly, which i believe is the best reason to do so. knowledge for the sake of knowledge.” although she knew knowledge was power, she sought joy in the acquisition of knowledge and not the praise that came from acquiring it. “i think i could be an archivist or something along those lines.”

this was one of the many things that emphasized the parallel between herself and her older sibling; miyoung could amass all this knowledge and never tell a soul. if there was no one with expectations about who she should be, she would still devour the ancient scriptures with a vicious hunger.

miyoung thinks about anything she’s missed, eyes gazing up at the ceiling in search of answers before her lips form a small ‘o’. “Goethe’s Faust; when i wasn’t spending my time learning i did have acting classes, my parents insist on the extracurriculars and my aunt herself is a thespian, i’m sure she would love to see me in the play.”

“i see. now, your file contains the bare necessities about your family. i would like to hear more.”

“family is important; we are bound to his excellency and we are bound to our mothers, fathers, brothers and sisters.” from the very beginning these ideals were instilled in the young witch. her family is prestigious, and must cement that status by assuring themselves of their children’s success.

“the han family is a family of silver spoons, we are not overt in our wealth or influence, because we are aware that certain times demand silence, and if one must act you may opt to use a sleight of hand. we are devoted.” it’s not slyness that keeps the family afloat, it is their adherence to tradition, she tells herself, but miyoung and the high priest both know to read between the lines.

her mother and father were the pinnacle of the household, and she loved the two and all they had to teach her. loved them until she did not.

“my mother is a strong woman who is selfless and serves my father just as her mother did served her father and so on. my father is the benevolent head of the household, he is heavy handed and will take none of anyone scoffing at tradition. but he is loving.”

miyoung wishes she had more to say, but she fears there may be a slip of the tongue and she shows herself to be anything less than a devoted daughter.

“as i said before i am the younger of two. they like to tease me for being less driven than they are but we just express that drive in different ways.”

she loves and resents them, but she smiles and holds a hand to her breast, miyoung is a loving younger sister, devoted, “we have our differences as siblings typically do, but they are my kin, and by that bond of blood they are my everything.”

“of them all my favorite, if i may allow myself one, is my aunt gyeongri, whom i had been living with for about six years. her library was much bigger than the one we have at home, and her support endless.” it was good to live with a woman who was the helm of her own household, a woman who supported miyoung’s dreams and shared her own.

a woman on a pillar she had crafted from bone and ivory was a powerful thing.

“how very interesting. here it says you specialize in sacred geometry, ancient tongue & scriptures. what evoked your interest?”

miyoung had missed her first two years of study by accident; in her eighteenth and nineteenth years the young witch had been nothing more than a hermit, locking herself inside four walls filled with old texts. she had read the texts and scrolls in the old tongues, had memorized the words of their dark lord and could recite the history of their craft backwards and forwards.

before then she had been surrounded by historians, men and women of her family name who studied the past through the study of the decayed body or the forgotten text.

men and women who enforced the laws of the swine and the swine-herder, the witch and the warlock.

“well, those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it,” the words are airy, like music. “what is a witch who knows nothing of how she came to be, what is a witch who knows nothing of the foundations of her art? she is nothing,”

but a witch is always nothing. in the eyes of her family, in the eyes of the warlocks a witch is nothing. and yet, miyoung knows, she knows that a witch has never been nothing. who if not a witch begun the feast of autumn, who if not a witch bears life to every warlock that becomes a high priest, and every witch who must serve beneath him.

“if always believed that having this thirst for knowledge is the same as teaching a man to fish, he will be fed forever and is able to support his yearning. it only makes sense to me that i indulge and make attempts at satiating my appetite. my mother practices necromancy and my father practices poppet puppetry, but i prefer to stay away from the physical. as you are aware the body dies but the scripture lives on.”

“i am sure you will excel at it with the help of the academy. one last question, perhaps more in my own humble interest. say, the devil himself would honor you with a task only you could fulfill. how far would you go to satisfy his excellency?”

the answer to this question comes much easier than any others; it is a question she was often asked at family banquets and coven reunions. this one rolls off the tongue with ease.

“if his excellency asks that i walk through the fires of hell in order to prove my loyalty, i will do so without hesitation. in a homage to the first woman who served him, i would slay my kin, burn cities and bring forth a chaos like no other. i would even take your life if he so much as asked.”

miyoung allows the words to hang between them and remains calm, unblinking. the smile on her lips is as practiced as her words, but the fire that resides behind those eyes has always been her nature.

and there were no lies to be said; she would do all these things as she is sure anyone in her family would expect as such.

she leaves the most sinful of her tasks unsaid, one that she knows his excellency would have whispered in her own ears had he doubted her intelligence; had he doubted her ability to find his message within all the words she’s read.

for his excellency she would bring the very foundations of this coven to its knees, for his excellency she would show them that all his children were equal, for his excellency she would burn the fourth rule to the ground.

a witch was no less than a warlock.

a human was something more than swine.

the coven could only grow from shedding their old views. and for this she would even take the father’s life if his excellency so much as asked.  

“that is all i needed to hear. thank you.”