#like that trial the Hulk had way back where it was argued that it would be wrong to kill the Hulk because that would also mean killing Bruce

[daydreamerdrew]

The Hulk! (1978) #14

[whetstonefires]

mcu ethics bad

The thing is that, while I was angry at Tony during Age of Ultron, particularly when he rode over Bruce’s compunctions about building a giant combat super-robot and pressured him into the project like a very very bad friend who happened to also be wrong...

...and when he equipped Hulkbuster armor and fought the Hulk in the middle of a city rather than attempting de-escalation or attempting to haul the Hulk out into the giant adjacent desert....

(And my suspension of disbelief snapped like a frayed cable when he brought down a skyscraper that had had no time to be evacuated on a street full of fleeing people and the only reason we were given to believe he hadn’t just cold-bloodedly created massive civilian casualties was that he told his AI to find the impossible magic angle where doing this wouldn’t kill anyone...)

While I was angry with him then, and unspeakably relieved that he recognized his own damage and retired at the end, haha psych, I was revolted by him during Civil War.

It’s supposed to make us sympathize with a character more, spending so much time with them, getting into their heads, being shown their emotional drives and reactions to things, and we spent so much time with Tony during that film, understanding his point of view. And...I did understand him. He’s not complicated. I even sympathized with his emotional state.

But in the context of his actions, throughout the film, I gazed into that understanding the way I did into Kylo Ren’s face in the seconds after he first unmasked. I see you, I know you, everything you are is written here, and the lines of your shame and self-revulsion are so thick upon you, and you should be ashamed but your self-destruction does not expiate or justify one jot of the harm you do.

Because everything Tony did in Civil War came from a place of selfishness. He was selfish all throughout that movie down to his very spine.

And selfishness isn’t itself necessarily bad--you need a little, to get through life, you have the right to your own portion of it. Your boundaries and your needs. But the type of selfishness that is forcing other people pay dearly for your emotional comfort and sense of control: no.

That is tyranny. That is not acceptable.

And you know how I know he was being selfish? Because his motive for pushing the Sokovia Accords was his personal guilt for the destruction of Sokovia.

But the Accords didn’t address that at all! They were tangential to the issue! None of the terms of the Accords would have saved Sokovia--in fact, the existence of them could easily have prevented the evacuation and harm-reduction the Avengers managed there, without saving a single soul.

The Ultron crisis was something Tony did, not as Iron Man but as Tony Stark, with Bruce Banner’s help, and which Wanda as criminal fugitive later helped exacerbate, and which all the other Avengers were involved in only to mitigate harm.

Legislation, or...treaties, idk, the UN isn’t actually empowered to pass laws so who knows what this thing was...aimed at preventing another Sokovia would mandate constant ethical oversight of billionaire science man’s mad science. At the very least! He never has to run things by ethics boards because he’s self-funded, at the very least let’s invent a mechanism to make up for that.

That would address the actual Sokovia issue, both in terms of risks and in terms of Tony’s personal guilt feelings.

But no one suggests that! It’s not even on the table! Because no one, certainly not any government, can tell Tony Stark what to do unless he lets them, that’s been a clear matter of record since Iron Man 2.

And because no one writing this legal instrument of whatever description was actually motivated by wanting to avoid another Sokovia, or even another ‘Wanda tries to neutralize a suicide bomber but merely gives him a different, smaller victim pool’ incident.

They didn’t care! They blatantly didn’t care! The entire thing was a ghoulish use of the dead to gain enough political leverage over the Avengers to put a leash on them!

(Which might not be a bad thing in principle, everything needs its checks, but when the last quasi-governmental organization you worked for turned out to be Nazis who were only prevented from staging a mass slaughter of undesireables by the skin of your teeth, I think you’re well within your rights to be very choosy about who you agree to obey, and to be firmly against pledging your honor to follow people whose first move was dishonest coercive tactics.

Actually you’re well within your rights to demand to negotiate the terms of even a much less sweeping contract, even without the Nazis. The whole approach to this thing stank to high heaven.

The fact that it was written by the UN like a treaty, expected to be signed by private individuals like a contract, and then enforced like a law except not because 1) laws are for everyone 2) if you break a law you get a trial not extrajudicial incarceration and 3) being pressured to consent to a restriction and then punished for refusing consent is hypocritical circular logic and in fact police corruption at its finest, all continues to show it was a bullshit nonsense franken-document.)

The whole movie is people ghoulishly using the dead to manipulate Tony into making bad decisions in response to his emotional pain. That’s. The plot of the film.

Then Zemo staged T’Chaka’s assassination and framed Bucky for it to raise the tension, ramp up the pressure, and prevent any sitting-down and talking reasonably through this, which might have allowed for the recognition of how extremely bullshit the entire concept was.

Tony was being used. Tony was a tool of bad people for most of that movie, and while Zemo banked on using his wrath for it, the politicos were leaning on his guilt.

And there’s honestly little I hold in deeper scorn than going out and hurting other people to assuage your own guilt and treating this as having the moral high ground. No. You don’t have the moral high ground on account of your guilt motivation. You have it if the actions you took were just, or at least could reasonably be assumed to have been so at the time.

And Tony fucking knew they weren’t. He didn’t even last to the end of the movie before recognizing that he’d been manipulated and fucked up, and doubling back.

That he then walked into a different manipulation, turned on a dime, and had to be stopped from doing a murder doesn’t unwrite that.

And it drives me nuts that people will say Tony was acting out of principle while Steve was acting out of personal attachment. Because sure, the Bucky thing was important, was the reason he was walking forward against all opposition instead of standing still to argue, but it wasn’t the reason Steve said no, while...

Tony wasn’t acting out of principle. Tony isn’t...very good at having principles. That’s not even a criticism or condemnation, it’s just how he functions. Since Iron Man he’s been substituting good intentions and emotional investment, which has worked out to varying degrees. It works best for huge, difficult, very straightforward decisions like ‘ride the nuke through the portal and save my hometown.’ It works less well for nuanced situations.

Tony was, as usual, acting out of emotion. And some awful shitheads who’d figured out where his levers were had calculated how to jiggle his emotion switches in the right places to make him do exactly what they wanted.

And you can tell he wasn’t acting out of principle because, for example, someone who was trying to get the superhero community under outside control for the sake of harm mitigation...

...well, firstly wouldn’t have chosen to stage a massive battle? But it’s possible someone in the UN specifically told him to do that, and in theory they at the very least signed off on it, presumably for its PR value of making Captain America look deranged and violent since it’s a deranged decision from every other angle, so yay, he can pass that responsibility up the chain and not have to angst about it, as promised.

But I was going to say would not have approached a minor who (this timeline takes pains to show us) had no prior experience of battle or even, somehow, serious violent crime, to recruit him to go be a government child soldier on another continent, without his guardian’s knowledge or consent. There were overtones of blackmail in Tony’s approach, before it turned out Peter was such a big fan he didn’t need that. What the fuck frankly.

That is not the action of someone who wants to start doing things by the letter, scaling the violence down, keeping within the law and putting the power of decisionmaking in other people’s hands because he’s realized he can’t trust his own.

And frankly even if he did act like that I wouldn’t necessarily support his choices, in particular his snap decision to behave coercively toward other Avengers with vastly less social power and security than he has.

And that’s the other thing! Everything about ‘Tony + Accords BFFs’ rings so hollow because he has never thought rules applied to him, and he knows perfectly well the entire time he’s fighting to force this surrender of agency down other people’s throats that he is going to be practically immune.

This man was technically a terrorist, proabably the most prolific single terrorist in world history until his rogue android exceeded his body count, but he was immune to prosecution because he was in tight with the United States military-industrial complex and basically untouchable due to his status within capitalism, and pursuing their international goals anyway. In the time between Iron Man and Iron Man II he was basically a one-man upgrade of the US drone program, and so good at it that the crest of blood he carved through the Middle East allowed him to announce he had ‘privatized world peace.’

(You are never going to get a world peace worth anything on the basis of a giant flying gun, okay.)

He went to war as a private individual, against non-state actors who were not directly threatening him, which is very much defined as ‘mass murder’ in all domestic and international law, and the US army in response sued him for control of his weapon. And lost! Lost.

No one attempted to press charges. No one. Because Tony Stark is above all that. And he knows it.

And like. I’m willing to accept the mass murder under the heading of ‘superheroing’ within the terms of this setting! Even if, after his vengeance rampage on his specific kidnappers, this violence was kept strictly off-screen for a reason. I did that! I bent that far! Genre convention!

But this history is kind of vitally important to any analysis of what he thought he was doing, and what he actually was doing, when he decided to become the iron gauntlet of the Sokovia Accords.

The currently active member of the Avengers who needed muzzling most was very manifestly Iron Man, and he knew even as he jammed the muzzle on all his comrades to make himself feel better that it would affect him the least, even if he didn’t finally retire for real this time. You don’t force Tony Stark. Not if you want anything out of it but blown up. You persuade him.

And once you have...oh, look at what he can do.

[jaskiers-sweetkiss]

Worth It

Pairings: Dousy, background Pepperony, FitzSimmons, Philinda, Mackelana, and Huntingbird  

Word Count: 2.8K

Warnings: mentions of violence, mentions of gun use, mentions of ptsd, light swearing

a/n: Here’s my soulmate au for day 6 of @aosficnet2 ‘s AoS AU August! It’s got Modern Man!Daniel Sousa based on Enver’s appearance as a police officer in The Avengers. 

___

Daisy “Quake” Johnson - Inhuman, hacker, Agent of SHIELD, and now she could add “Avenger” to her list of descriptors. The agent hadn’t been entirely surprised when she’d received an impromptu meeting with Director Nick Fury about her powers. At the time he had told her he was putting together a team, a group of people with super-human abilities that would work together to defend the world if the threat arose. She had signed on, she was already a SHIELD agent and she’d had plenty of training with her ability from her mom growing up at Afterlife, but she never met the team. Well, until about 24 hours ago. They were a bit of a nightmare (a complete shitshow if she was being blunt), none of them had worked together before so it was no surprise that they were butting heads. Daisy got along just fine with Natasha Romanoff aka the Black Widow as the two of them had crossed paths from time to time within SHIELD, but she couldn’t say the same for scientist Bruce Banner (the Hulk), billionaire Tony Stark (Iron Man), or the first-ever superhero Steve Rogers (Captain America). Of course, now they were also dealing with a Norse god of thunder who was supposedly good and his brother who was apparently bad. Thor, Stark, and Rogers: three massive egos in one aircraft. 

Judging by the footage they were streaming from the museum Loki was more than just bad. Daisy had always been wary of powers, her mom had taught her that. Power was extremely dangerous when put in the wrong hands, that’s why Afterlife was so selective in choosing who got to go through terrigenesis. Loki was clearly the wrong hands and even though she really hated the men she was surrounded with, if they were the world’s only hope then she’d put up with them. 

“So you expect me to believe there is life on other planets?” 

Daisy sighed, trying not to get too frustrated. The man had been in the ice for seventy years, he missed a lot and probably had no reason to expect that “aliens” existed. Of course, she had known the truth since she was a child: not only was it highly probable that life existed elsewhere in the galaxy, but she was part-alien herself. Of course, no one else knew that. Inhumans were a secret from the rest of the world and it would need to stay that way. 

“Oh, I’m sorry Seismic Activity, did you know that already?” Stark asked sarcastically, raising a brow at her and she rolled her eyes. 

“It’s Quake, actually, and yeah, I knew that, statistically, it was highly probable that alien life exists,” she bit back, glaring at the man, “Just about everyone in this century knows that.” 

“Agent Johnson if you have some sort of issue with when I was born then you should just come out and say it,” Cap said, a frown on his face as he sat up in his chair. 

“Look, I couldn’t give two shits whether you were born yesterday or a thousand years ago, I just don’t think we really have time to be debating extraterrestrial life right now,” Daisy said, fighting the urge to roll her eyes again as she gestured to the holoscreen displaying Loki’s cell.  

“She’s right, gear up.” Director Fury said. Daisy wasn’t sure when he had entered but she was glad he was taking her side. “We’re under attack.” 

Daisy nodded, rushing out of the room to find her gauntlets and her weapons. It wasn’t a great idea to quake on a giant helicarrier so she’d probably be fighting old school. 

“Woah, what the hell is that Johnson?” Natasha Romanoff was sneakier than Fury and Daisy hadn’t even known she was in the room until her wrist was tightly in the woman’s grasp. 

She sighed, tugging her arm out of the redhead’s grip and slipping on her gauntlet to cover the writing. The marks weren’t uncommon, most of the world had them. They developed at age 16 and were usually the first words your soulmate said to you. However, not everyone got one or soulmates died and SHIELD specialized in utilizing the soulmark-less. That’s not to say there weren’t agents with soul marks in the organization, for ordinary agents SHIELD held a mostly don’t ask, don’t tell policy. Typically the only way to get into high-risk assignments like the Avengers was to prove the lack of a soulmate, but of course, the Avengers were less than typical. 

“They make exceptions for people with powers.” She brushed it off, slipping on her other gauntlet. 

“That doesn’t change the fact that you’re connected to someone,” Natasha argued and Daisy huffed, turning away. 

“Stark’s got a mark, and he’s actually met his soulmate. If something happens to me mine’ll never know what they missed.” 

Daisy quickly slid her various knives and guns into place in their holsters before leaving, effectively putting an end to one of the worst conversations she’d had in a while. She didn’t need the Black Widow to guilt-trip her, she had herself for that. She’d heard the stories about the pain people felt when their soulmate died and it often kept her up at night, but right now she had a job to do and she’d be damned if she sacrificed the world for one person she hadn’t even met. 

Of course, her dedication to the cause hadn’t mattered much, she still wound up on the floor of the helicarrier with Phil Coulson bleeding out. She didn’t know the man super well, but he was usually the agent present whenever an 0-8-4 was discovered and since Daisy was something of an 0-8-4 herself, they crossed paths pretty frequently. She knew he was an upstanding and kind man, she knew he was a good agent, and she knew he didn’t deserve to die like this. 

It wasn’t long until Fury came and swept him away and Hill ushered her back into the briefing room where some of the others were gathered. They all looked worse for wear and apparently they were about ready to give up. The Hulk was gone, Loki had jettisoned Thor from the airship, and he has the tesseract and would likely be taking over earth shortly. Daisy couldn’t believe it. 

“I just watched several good agents die, and you want to throw in the towel? Do you have any respect for yourselves?” She questioned, glaring at Rogers and Stark. 

She stormed out when she was met with silence, passing Fury in the hallway. She wanted desperately to change out of her skintight Quake suit and get cleaned up, but she wasn’t ready to give up the fight yet, opting instead to unzip the top half, tying the sleeves around her waist. She wandered around the ship like that, her sports bra the only thing covering her torso, before finding herself on the top deck, leaning over a railing. 

“Have you met them yet?” 

Daisy turned to see Rogers gesturing to her wrist where the words “Who the hell are you?” were written in a neat script. 

“Nah,” she shook her head, barely concealing her disappointment with a smile. 

“You’ll find them eventually, or they’ll find you.” He gave her a tight-lipped smile.

“Thanks for not berating me for risking my life while my soulmate is out there somewhere.” 

“Hey, I hid my makr to join a highly experimental drug trial and enlist in World War Two so I don’t have much room for judgment.” He joked and Daisy laughed, feeling a little better.

___

Daniel Sousa had been sure this would be another day at the station as he slipped his uniform over his shoulders, covering the soulmark on the back of his shoulder. Soulmarks appeared when a person turned 16, appearing at the place where their soulmate would first come in contact with them. The combination of the location of his mark and the words (“Probably your only chance at survival now let me go”) had always been a mystery to him though he hoped he would solve it soon. 

He took the subway to the station, just like he did every morning. Daniel was a police officer for the 99th precinct in NYC which was about a fifteen-minute subway ride away from his apartment. Despite its obvious flaws (thanks MTA), he liked taking the subway - it was more environmentally friendly than driving himself, it was much faster than trying to make it through New York traffic or walk (though sometimes he did walk when it was nice and his leg wasn’t bugging him as much), and the crowds increased the probability that he’d come across his soulmate. 

She wasn’t on the subway today again and so Daniel resigned himself to daydreams of how they might meet. He hoped it would be romantic, that she’d bump into him accidentally (it was the best way he could explain the back of his shoulder), maybe he’d catch her as she tripped over him and they’d lock eyes and she’d take his breath away. He pushed away the fears that she would be freaked out by his prosthetic or the fact that her words on his shoulder didn’t fit that scenario at all. He wanted their meeting to be perfect for her. 

He was ripped away from his thoughts by his partner, Jack Thompson, telling him they had to go check out a call downtown. There weren’t any detectives involved so it likely wasn’t anything serious- probably a noise complaint or something equally mundane.

Daniel had been right, the call was a typical noise complaint, easily solved and probably ignored as soon as they left the building (Jack bet they’d be back in 24 hours, Daniel gave it 32). However, he never could’ve guessed that when they went to climb back into the squad car a portal would open up in the sky and a bunch of space creatures would attack earth. Thompson grabbed the radio to inform the station of the situation. It took a few minutes of convincing (he didn’t blame them, he only believed it because he was seeing it) and a few more to figure out what to do (there really isn’t an official protocol for Hostile Alien Invasion) before they were told to stay put and that backup was on the way. 

Daniel reached for his gun, steeling himself for the fight he was sure he was about to be involved in. An alien invasion would be a really bad time for his crippling ptsd. Still, he was sure his hand would shake if he had to actually lift his gun, his finger would hesitate on the trigger, he’d have to fight to keep his eyes open because if he closed them all he’d see was Afghanistan. 

“Sousa you with me?” Thompson asked, snapping him from his thoughts. 

He nodded, letting out a shaky breath, when had he stopped breathing? 

Thompson nodded, more to himself than to Daniel, “Good, cause we’re going to get through this.” 

___

If she had been really thinking at all, she might’ve wondered if she was having an out-of-body experience as she moved through the streets of Manhattan with the purpose of a woman on a mission. The Avengers were scattered across the borough trying to fight the Chitauri with mixed success. It seemed like no matter how many they blasted, quaked, shot, or struck with lightning more kept coming through the portal. Daisy was taking out as many of the aliens as she could while trying to command the local police forces- badges or not, they were purely human and severely underprepared to fight this threat. Their services were more equipped to evacuate and protect the civilians. 

She hadn’t been paying attention when she knocked into someone’s shoulder. It was a police officer, she noticed, though where most of the officers she’d seen seemed ready to take on the Chitauri head-on, he looked terrified. 

“Who the hell are you?” The man questioned, quickly grabbing her wrist before she could run off. 

“Probably your only chance at survival now let me go.” Daisy bit back angrily and the man gasped, dropping her arm and backing away like she had burned him. 

“You’re- we’re-” The man stuttered and even though he could’ve been about to say anything (maybe “you’re Quake!” or “We’re gonna die!”) Daisy knew exactly what he meant. She knew from the burning sensation on the wrist he had been holding. He was her soulmate. 

“Oh my god, I don’t have time for this!” Daisy yelled angrily, quaking the alien that had appeared behind the man. 

She silently cursed fate or destiny or whatever was behind this for planning her soulmate meeting during a literal alien invasion. 

“Listen, I need you to leave the frontlines- spread the word: all officers are to evacuate as many civilians as possible. Focus on protecting them.” She ordered making an effort to put the world-altering event before the life-altering event she had accidentally just stumbled upon. 

“Who’s going to be there to fight?” 

Daisy quaked another approaching Chitauri soldier. “Leave that to the people with powers.” 

The officer nodded mutely, seemingly stunned into silence. 

“Sousa!” Another officer called out, “Quit chatting we have a job to do!” 

The dark-haired officer, her soulmate, nodded to the man and started to move away. 

“Officer Sousa!” Daisy called, taking steps backward herself, “Maybe we can get some coffee when this is all done?” 

“Sure but how’ll I find you?” He asked, turning back to stare at her hopefully. 

Daisy’s steps were picking up speed, the urgency of the day not lost on her. “Don’t worry about it, I’ll find you!” 

And with that she was off, turning on her heels and sprinting towards Stark Tower. 

___

Daisy stared at the computer monitor in front of her. It had been a few days since the Chitauri attack and while New York and her mental state was still a disaster, she needed to do this. The file she had found in SHIELD’s database was a welcome distraction, as was the handsome face staring back at her from the screen. 

Daniel Jordan Sousa. Born 1984 in Twin Falls, Idaho. Served one tour in Afghanistan before being discharged due to an injury resulting in the amputation of his left leg. 

She scrolled down to the contact information. 

Cellphone: (xxx)xxx-xxxx 

Bingo. 

Daisy: Hi, it’s Daisy Johnson, your soulmate? I was wondering if we could get that coffee?

She was surprised by how quickly he responded. 

Daniel: I’d love to! 

Daniel: btw how did you get my number? 

Daisy: It’s a bit of a story, mind if I tell you over that coffee?

Daniel: does 1:00 work? Maybe we could grab a bite to eat while we’re at it?

Daisy smiled before checking the time, 11 o’clock. She had two hours to get ready. 

Daisy: 1:00 sounds great. I know a cute place off 12th ave 

___

Daniel had no intention of pulling his soulmate from the field, he knew it was where she wanted to be and he’d never dream of taking it from her. However, he’d be damned if he wasn’t out there to watch her back. So, he joined SHIELD not long after they met. Despite his prosthetic, he climbed the ranks relatively quickly though Daisy wasn’t surprised. She had seen his record both in the military and the police force, Daniel Sousa was a damn fine agent. 

The two weren’t in any hurry relationship-wise. They had moved in together fairly quickly but even two years later they had yet to get engaged. It was a bit of an anomaly - soulmates were usually hitched within a year of meeting each other but Daisy didn’t really hold much stock in a piece of paper declaring their relationship valid and Daniel decided he really didn’t need that paper either as long as he still had Daisy. Besides, with their separate jobs at SHIELD, they didn’t really have much time to plan engagements or weddings. 

In 2014 the pair were recruited to an elite team by Phil Coulson, the man Daisy could’ve sworn had died in her arms, the man the Avengers were told had died. She had shaken her head at Fury when she found out. “You manipulative son of a bitch,” she had said though she had meant it fondly. Who knows what would’ve happened when the Chitauri invaded if he hadn’t done what he had. 

Daisy and Daniel joined scientist duo and soulmates Jemma Simmons and Leopold Fitz as well as Coulson’s soulmate Melinda May on the Bus, a giant plane Fury had given Coulson as reparations for his death. The team had its bumps in its initial missions but they quickly became a tightly knit family that only grew when Coulson took over as Director of SHIELD after the Hydra takeover. 

When Daniel finally proposed Jemma had been her maid of honor and Bobbi and Elena had been her bridesmaids. Likewise, Fitz had been Daniel’s best man and Mack and Hunter had filled out the rest of the groomsmen roles. It had been a small but beautiful wedding, Daisy’s mom had allowed them to have the ceremony at Afterlife and Coulson and May had been their officiants. 

Daisy had cursed fate when they met, but looking back she realized it was all worth it for this. 

___

a/n: I had no idea how to end this. Also, I have no clue where the 99th precinct operates in NYC (if it even exists) I just wanted to make a Brooklyn 99 reference. Though I’m realizing belatedly that B99 takes place in Brooklyn and probably doesn’t operate in manhattan but oh well.  

[melancholicumsomnia]

[FIC] A Little Miracle In The Volume Part 2

A/N: Here’s the second part of my fic contribution to PEDRO PASCAL APPRECIATION WEEK 2021! Part 2 focuses on the #ppaw2021 theme of the day, Favorite TV show Pedro starred in. Obviously, I still loved Pedro best in The Mandalorian, but his performance as Oberyn Martell in Game of Thrones was absolutely exquisite!

Thank you to @pedrohub​ for the incentive to write this little fic. To @pedrocentric​, here is Part 2!

PREVIOUS PARTS

Part 1

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A Little Miracle In The Volume

By

Rory

Part Two

Pedro was limping back to his trailer, struggling against the urge to massage his aching groin. He had just come from the Volume to film a scene with Gina Carano, who plays Cara Dune, and Misty Rosas, who was playing the Ugnaught Kuiil. It was a simple scene actually, requiring their characters to ride through the rugged terrain of Nevarro in order to make their rendezvous with Carl Weather’s Greef Karga. In the pre-vis, they were going to ride blurrgs. In reality, the blurrgs turned out to be mechanical bulls, but with a wider girth. 

Brendan and Lateef had seen the dubious looks he was throwing at the machine and they couldn’t help laughing.

“Come on, man!” Lateef said in between wheezes. “There’s nothing to worry about. That thing won’t buck.”

“Hey! You can’t be Mando just by wearing the armor,” Brendan then goaded him. “You must ride the blurrg. Both Lateef and I have done it, so can you.”

Pedro let out a groan and gritted his teeth at that memory. Even his back was starting to ache in sympathy with his groin. “I guess I’m starting to feel my age. I really need to work out more.”

With his trailer looming not so far from him at last, he quickened his pace, wanting that ice pack he had his assistant prepare for him in the fridge. 

Before he could reach it, however, Pedro’s eyes were drawn to Werner Herzog’s trailer nearby. The German director was seated in front of his trailer beneath a beach umbrella, the Child on his lap. He was watching something on his iPad, which was propped up on its stand on top of a small table. Pedro heard snickers and he whirled to see the puppeteers Tamara Woodard, Kan, and Trevor with remote controls in their hands, hiding behind the crates. 

Deb Chow happened to be passing by and, when she saw the trio, she remarked, “You guys are the worst! You should really stop feeding that old man’s fantasies!”

“We just want to keep him happy,” Kan answered, flicking a knob so that Pedro saw Grogu’s ears go up. Sagely, he added, “We all know the stories about him and Klaus Kinski. We’re not taking any chances.” The others nodded in grim agreement, causing Deb to roll her eyes, mutter “I give up!” under her breath, and march off.

Curiosity getting the better of him in the end, Pedro cautiously approached that imperious figure. “Hi, what are you guys watching?”

Werner glanced briefly back at him and said dryly, “Oh, it’s you.” Going back to the TV show playing on his iPad, he replied, “Since you are playing our stoic bounty hunter, I thought I should explore your previous works. The Child and I were going to watch Narcos, but since it’s about Pablo Escobar, it might be too violent for the little one. So I figured the best option would be your episode in Game of Thrones.”

“Uhm, I don’t think Game of Thrones is also appropriate viewing for a kid that young,” Pedro commented in turn, only to realize what he just said. Wait! I’m talking about a puppet, not a real kid. Oh my God! This delusion is contagious! Grogu looked up then and gave him a sweet smile. But, then again, he’s so cute! Awww!

Werner’s lips pursed in a disapproving pout. “Yes, I know. I was pouring myself some iced tea when that scene of you in the brothel came on. I couldn’t cover the baby’s eyes fast enough, so he was able to catch an eyeful of ample bosoms and buttocks.” He glanced down at the baby sitting on his lap, wagging a finger. “Remember what Grandpa Werner told you. When you see a scene like that, you must never watch, you must never listen.”

Great! Pedro couldn’t stop himself from rolling his eyes, just as Deb had done. Now, you’re quoting Grizzly Man at him. 

At Werner’s remark, Grogu gazed up at Pedro again. There was no mistaking the now lecherous, toothy grin on his little face and the enthusiastic bobbing up and down of his brows.

Scowling, Pedro turned to the mischievous puppeteers. He mouthed out to them, “Guys! What the fuck?”

In reply, the puppeteers gave him thumbs up and wide, conniving smirks. 

“I should say though,” Werner then began thoughtfully, “I am very impressed with your performance here. Oberyn Martell, a proud, head-strong, and seductive prince desiring revenge for his poor sister… In other actors, the arrogance would overwhelm their performance, making him a figure to be detested or, worse, a caricature of similar characters in past films. But, no, behind that façade is kindness and gentleness. It’s because of your eyes, I think, and your voice. You’re speaking with a Latino accent in this one. You are from Mexico?”

“No, Chile actually.”

“You have a splendid way of expressing your emotions through tone of voice. Very few actors can do that. Brilliant performance, young man,” Werner gave that reluctant praise. “I can see why they chose you to play the Mandalorian. Even if you are not wearing the armor, you can still carry the character on your voice alone. How old were you when you did this?” “

“Uh, 38, 39, I guess.”

“And how old are you now?”

“I’m 43.” Pedro was not sure where this line of questioning was going.

“And it is only now that Hollywood has taken notice of your talent.” The German director shook his head ruefully. “Hollywood has become too reliant on the so-called ‘star power.’ I dread to think about the other precious little stars who are going unnoticed.”

Pedro was touched by Werner’s words. “It’s okay, sir. I’ve paid my dues, done my share of waiting on tables as a struggling actor. In fact, after working on Game of Thrones, I couldn’t find a single job. It took months before I got a recurring role on another TV show, The Mentalist.”

“Now, you have made it at last.”

“I’m not letting this current success get to my head. I know just how fickle Hollywood can be. To be very honest, I still don’t have that confidence. All this…” He raised his hands to the media campus surrounding them. “…All the work that I’ve been doing in the past few months, it still seems like a dream to me.”

“And that’s a very good attitude to have. Always be true to yourself. Show people who you truly are.” A wry, fond smile formed on Werner’s lips. “I suddenly remembered Klaus Kinski. He had been extremely difficult. He was a man with serious mental health problems. But he never sought to disguise his true self. It made it very hard for people like me, his family, and other people around him. Despite his foul temper, his brutality, it is that frank, straight-in-your-face honesty, I think that’s what I admired most about him.” 

Pedro chuckled. “At least, I’m not hot-tempered like Klaus Kinski.”

A towering hulk of a man marched onscreen on the iPad and Werner gasped. “That is no man! That’s a grizzly bear!”

“That’s Hafþór Júlíus Björnsson, one of the world’s strongest men. He played Ser Gregor Clegane, aka ‘The Mountain Who Rides’, in Game of Thrones.”

At that moment, a bright idea suddenly came into Pedro’s head. Should I dare ask him now? He did just praise me after all. Maybe he is already starting to accept me. Okay, I will!

“Uhm, Mr. Herzog?” Pedro began shyly. “Since you liked my past performances and appreciate my worth as an actor, may you please allow me to spend more time with the baby?”

Werner turned to him sharply, his eyes flashing like daggers. “I appreciate your worth as an actor, true. But it absolutely has nothing to do with caring for this baby.”

Pedro was crestfallen. Still, he persisted, “Sir, please. I promise you that I will and can take good care of the baby. My sister Javiera…she often entrusts the care of her kids to me.”

“But they are not your children! You are a bachelor.” Werner looked him straight in the eye. “How could you be a father to this Child when you aren’t one?”

“In case you haven’t noticed, sir, this Child is a puppet.”

“Then how can you commit to playing a father when you cannot immerse yourself in the fantasy?”

“But how can I commit when you’re keeping the Child all to yourself?”

“I have only three episodes to do in this TV show. I want to make the most of this time I have with him. We have just started filming. You have an entire season to bond with him!”

“No, I don’t! I still have to finish my commitments with Wonder Woman 1984. I only have a single episode with the Child this season, so my time here is short!”

Because the two men were arguing heatedly, none of them noticed that the Child was still watching the episode on the iPad. He was staring enrapt as the trial by combat between Oberyn Martell and the Mountain commenced. Many times, Grogu would look closely at Oberyn’s face and then gaze up admiringly at Pedro.

But then, the Mountain struck back with a vicious blow, knocking out Oberyn’s teeth. As the Child watched in growing horror, the Mountain placed his fingers over Oberyn’s eyes and pressed down.

Both Pedro and Werner were shocked when Grogu let out a high-pitched scream, his eyes wide and waving his little arms frantically. A quick glance at the iPad and Pedro realized why Grogu was in a state of mortal terror.

Before Werner could stop him, Pedro scooped the distraught Child up and started rocking him, patting his back. Grogu kept shaking his little head, rubbing his brow over the soft cloth of the cape hanging above Pedro’s collarbone.

“Sssh! Don’t cry, Grogu,” Pedro whispered soothingly in his ear, being careful that Werner did not hear the Child’s name. “It’s just a TV show. As you can see, I’m okay. He never hurt me.” To his relief, his gentle reassurances gradually calmed the Child down.

Still stunned to silence, Werner could only watch with mouth agape as Pedro placed Grogu back on his lap. To his credit, the Child raised his arms to him, wanting more hugs. Despite his longing, Pedro just gave the little one a gentle smile and a pat on the head.

“Stop watching my past works with the Child,” Pedro scolded the German filmmaker. “None of them are appropriate for kids, except for that one Touched By An Angel episode. I wouldn’t even recommend The Great Wall because he might get scared of the Tao Tei monsters.”

Having given the final word, Pedro limped off to his trailer to get that ice pack and some much-needed rest.

Neither man noticed the perplexed group of puppeteers behind them, all of them staring down at their remote controls. Kan even took to giving his controls little shakes.

When their fellow puppeteer Jason Matthews came over, Trevor asked him, “Hey, Jason! Were you controlling the puppet just now?”

“No, I was in a meeting with Dave.”

Tamara interrupted, “Did you install a mic on the kid because we just heard him scream?”

Jason stared back at them. “What mic? You know that any baby noises will be added by the sound guys later.”

Kan gripped a startled Jason’s arms. “We saw the Child move…by itself! And he also screamed, like a real baby!”

Jason grabbed Kan’s hands and slowly lowered them. “Get a grip, will ya? It’s probably just a minor malfunction. Get the puppet from Mr. Herzog and we’ll check it out.”

“But…but…”

“No buts! You shouldn’t have been playing with it to begin with. You AND Mr. Herzog.”

The puppeteers then walked off, leaving his confused crew behind. 

“But…but…we did see the Child move by itself!” they argued back feebly.

TO BE CONTINUED

[freudensteins-monster]

A Banner Reunion

A WinterShock follow up to A Banner Day. Set post Age of Ultron and Ragnarok, not really Civil War compliant, and there’s no Thanos or looming Infinity War. Also posted on AO3.

The first person Bucky Barnes met as he stepped off the last quinjet out of Wakanda was Darcy Lewis. She looked more uptight than her file photo would suggest (Bucky had read the files of all facility staff on the flight over, and Darcy’s maybe twice), and seemed to have taken Pepper Potts as her style icon. The wavy brown hair from her file photo was pulled back in a tight bun, and the colourful sweaters and jeans had been replaced by a sharp business suit and sharper heels. 

“Good morning, Sergeant Barnes. I’m Darcy Lewis. I manage the upstate facility and act as the team’s PR manager. I’ll also be acting as a liaison between the facility, your legal team, and other interested parties. If you have any questions, day or night, please don’t hesitate to contact me.”

She handed him a crisp white business card. Bucky took it with his shiny new Wakandan arm, noting a complete lack of reaction from Miss Lewis.

“Science Wrangler?” he read aloud.

“I have new ones on order,” she replied with a long-suffering sigh. 

“Thank you, Miss Lewis,” he smiled, tucking the business card into his jacket pocket. “But all I really want to know right now is which way to the mess hall?”

Miss Lewis smiled, but before she could respond Steve clapped him on the shoulder and led him away for a second breakfast. 

Over the next couple of weeks he received dozens of updates via Miss Lewis from his legal team about their attempts to have him cleared of all charges relating to the crimes he committed as the Winter Soldier (and the few he committed after), but he never saw her outside of their meetings. Not in the mess hall, not at team movie nights, not even in passing. According to Steve she was drowning in work and pretty much lived in her office. She needed help but had refused to hire assistants, not trusting the vetting process with all the enemies the Avengers had accumulated.

Feeling guilty, and just a little too curious for his own good, Bucky went in search of her office. He heard her before he saw her. It sounded like she was having the argument of the century with a disgruntled voice that reminded him of his old drill instructor. He was going to leave her to it and try again later when he heard his name being thrown about. He crept closer, keeping out of sight of Darcy and the holograph she was arguing with.

“How can you stand there denying the dangers posed by enhanced individuals when you’re harbouring the fugitive James Buchanan Barnes, the most prolific assassin in living memory?”

Bucky winced but Darcy narrowed her eyes at the hologram and stood her ground.

“Sergeant Barnes’ location is not a secret, nor is he a fugitive. He surrendered himself to the Wakandan authorities and per the agreement his legal representation made with the US government - which you’re well aware of, I remember how much you bitched about it in the press - he is on house arrest at this facility until his trial commences, if it ends up going ahead at all. And if you think he’s going to give up what little freedom he has now and could have in the future and sign this joke of a document, you’ve got another thing coming.”

Her opponent sneered. “Last I checked, Miss Lewis, you weren’t a lawyer.”

“Not yet, anyway. But I did pass my Civics 101 class, and I watched a lot of SchoolHouse Rock! as a kid: This is not a bill, or a law, or an official policy of the US Government. Even if it gets ratified by the UN, you cannot enforce it as it goes against the Constitution and violates a US citizen’s 4th, 5th, 6th, and 8th Amendment rights.”

“Wanda Maximoff-“

“-is a dual Sokovian-US citizen; I made sure of it. And if you can somehow round up a bunch of asshole commandos willing to enforce this PR nightmare to appease your bruised ego, the governor of New York - who gifted this land to the Avengers - and all his friends on Capitol Hill are going to have something to say about it. Especially after the so-called World Security Council tried to nuke his hometown while the Avengers were risking their lives to save his constituents from aliens. So,” she continued, tossing the intimidated stack of paper aside and waiting for it to hit her desk with a satisfying thump before continuing, “until you can put together something less offensive than this pile of crap, we don’t have anything more to talk about.”

“Listen here you little-“

“Sorry Thad, you’re breaking up. I think your country club is going through a tunnel.”

Darcy disconnected the holographic video call with a wave of her hand and fell into the closest chair with a dramatic groan.

“Wow…” Bucky remarked, stepping into her office. “I take it we don’t like that guy.” 

“We really don’t like that guy,” Darcy concurred, tossing her heels across the room in irritation.

“What’s his deal?”

“General Ross’ deal is that he wants all the power. And since superheroes have lots of power he wants them, preferably conscripted into service of the US government or locked up in a submersible military black site paid for with taxpayer dollars that he thinks I don’t know about. He’s been this way ever since Bruce’s accident.” At Bucky’s lack of recognition she continued, “Bruce was trying to replicate the supersoldier serum for the US Military, reporting to General Ross. Things went boom, Bruce turned into the Hulk, escaped Ross’ clutches and went on the run. Under the guise of bringing the Hulk in, Ross approved another human trial of the supersoldier serum. He ended up creating what the media dubbed as “the Abomination” – twice the rage of the Hulk, none of the ability to reconnect with his humanity. And while Bruce was forced to go back into hiding for the next five years for his part in destroying Harlem, General Ross didn’t even get knocked down a rank. The bastard shouldn’t be able to breathe in DC’s direction, let alone have a hand in policing “enhanced individuals,” so naturally he makes a perfect choice for Secretary of State,” she scoffed.

Bucky watched her for a moment before reaching out to help her up from her chair. “You look like you could use a drink. C’mon, I’m buying.”

“Dude, it’s like 10am,” Darcy argued, but took his hand regardless. 

Two floors down and one building over in the facility cafeteria Bucky watched on with barely disguised amusement as Darcy made love to her Mocha Frappuccino.

“Oh, yeah, that’s the stuff.”

She’d put on some flats and discarded her jacket before leaving her office, and once they were seated and waiting for their drinks she set her glasses down on the table and took down her hair. 

Bucky loved the way she smiled when she was able to let go of the stress of her job, even if it was only for a moment, so he did what he could to give her more of them. Tuesday morning coffee breaks became a regular occurrence, and if she missed dinner Bucky would check in on her to make sure she took a break and ate something. Eventually he asked her to schedule all their meetings and anything to do with his legal issues as her last tasks of the day, that way if she was snowed under and running late he had an excuse to invite her to join him for dinner afterwards. He was working up the nerve to ask her to dinner without the pretense of work when the Asgardians arrived.

Steve stood beside him, watching as the huge ship landed just beyond the facility's - and Bucky’s - boundaries. 

“So it’s true?” Darcy asked, out of breath from the short run from the administration building. “He’s really back?”

“Yeah, Thor’s back. You were there when he crash landed the first time, right?” Steve asked.

“She tased him,” Bucky informed him with a smirk. “I read the report.”

“Yeah, I totally tased him. And introduced him to Pop-Tarts. But I also lost him in the breakup – it’s been, like, almost two years since I last saw him.”

It didn’t stop her waving like a lunatic the moment Thor ambled down the spaceship’s ramp, a small village worth of people following close behind him.

“Oh, this is going to be so much paperwork…” Darcy muttered as the god caught sight of them.

“My friends! Lady Darcy!!”

“Thor! What the hell happened to your eye?” she asked when he wrapped her up in one of his godly hugs.

“It’s a long story, lightning sister.”

“Did you bring all of Asgard with you?” Steve asked as he and Bucky watched the strangely dressed visitors make the most of the sunshine and soft grass.

“As many as we could save,” Thor admitted somberly. “I know that their arrival will cause some problems for your world’s governments but any aid you could provide my people in our time of need would be gratefully appreciated. A new homeland, perhaps?” he added, managing to do pretty decent puppy dog eyes even with only one good one.

“I’ll make some calls,” Darcy offered, flashing Thor an indulgent smile.

“Thank you, my lightning sister. And for your efforts, I have brought you a souvenir.”

“Space souvenir? Cool!”

“Aye, very cool,” he smirked, putting a hand around her shoulders and directing her gaze to where a man wearing psychedelic monk robes was trying to make his way through the crowd of Asgardians. 

Darcy’s expression fell and Bucky almost rushed to her side.

“Bruce?”

At the sound of his name the man looked up and regarded Darcy sheepishly.

“Hey, bunny.”

“Bruce!!” Darcy was off like a shot, shoes abandoned in the grass as she all but threw herself on the new arrival. “What the hell happened to you? I hacked everyone trying to find you but not even Phil had eyes on you. Why didn’t you call me!” she cried, hugging him so tightly Bucky was worried the guy might not be able to breathe.

“I’m so sorry Darcy. I was stuck in Hulk mode up until a couple of days ago. He was like a gladiator on this trash planet in the outer reaches of the universe. It was crazy.”

“Not as crazy as these clothes, dude,” she teased with a sniffle, tugging on the gold vestments.

“Yeah, they’re a lot. But I had to Hulk out again on Asgard and these were the only spare clothes lying around on the spaceship. Oh, I gotta introduce you to some new friends,” he exclaimed excitedly, leading Darcy back towards the spaceship. 

Bucky watched her go, his heart breaking at the sight of her reuniting with her fella. She’d mentioned Bruce a few times, but he hadn’t realised they had been an item. Maybe, since he’d apparently disappeared on her, it had been too painful for her to talk about. Bucky left Steve and Thor to organise the SHIELD agents that had descended to deal with the alien incursion, and left Darcy to her reunion. 

In the weeks that followed Bucky hardly saw Darcy at all. She was spearheading talks with the Norwergian government to establish New Asgard within their borders and spent the rest of her time managing the needs of the refugees who had set up a temporary camp in the field where they landed. She was also fending off demands for the arrest of Thor’s brother, who apparently was more hated and feared than the Winter Soldier was. 

In an effort to reduce her workload Bucky had offered to deal with his legal team directly, even though he hated how they talked down to him when giving him updates. But it made Darcy’s life easier so he took it on, often bringing Steve in on their conference calls to act as a buffer when he felt he was close to snapping at one of his condescending but very, very good lawyers.

Now that he had no reason to bother Darcy he saw her even less than when he first arrived, though he did hear that Bruce had dragged her out of her office once or twice for a late dinner. They never seemed as touchy feely as they had when they were first reunited and they hadn’t spent any time alone together behind closed doors (not that he’d checked security footage). Maybe they weren’t together any more - a lot can happen in two years, Bucky mused. Maybe Bruce had moved on - he was always gushing about that intimidating and frequently drunk Valkyrie woman. Or maybe, Bucky hoped against hope, Darcy had. The question was keeping him up at night, and since Darcy was too busy to be bothered with his insecurities he sought out the famous Dr Bruce Banner. 

Bucky found him a few days later, after another postponed coffee date, in one of the facilities labs, looking over some holographic schematics. 

“Sergeant Barnes, it’s nice to see you again. What can I do for you?” Bruce greeted with a smile. 

“I’m not interrupting?” he asked, gesturing at the complicated calculations.

“Not at all. It’s just a project Tony wants a second opinion on. It’s his way of saying “I missed you too,” he jested. 

Bucky bit the bullet. “It’s about Darcy.”

“What about her?” 

“I just… I feel like a real shitheel asking, but I gotta know; are you and Darcy together?”

“Together like…”

“Dating. Are you dating?”

Bruce’s eyes almost bugged out of his skull. “Did Tony put you up to this?”

“Stark and I aren’t exactly on speaking terms,” Bucky admitted.

“And Darcy never mentioned me? She said you two had been hanging out a lot before she got sidetracked with all the Asgardian refugee drama.”

“She mentioned you plenty. She just never mentioned that two of you were an item.”

“And she also never mentioned that I’m her father, I take it,” Bruce replied with a smirk.

“...What?”

“I’m her biological father. I am not dating her,” Bruce reiterated. “But I take it you want to?” he teased. 

“Uh… yes?” he winced after his brain came back online after processing this new information. “Did you not want me to? I would understand,” he murmured, gesturing vaguely at his shiny new arm as though his bloody history was written on the metal plates.

“I don’t get to have a say in the matter,” Bruce remarked, not unkindly, as he returned most of his attention back to the glowing calculations. “and I’m kind of the last guy who should be giving you grief over things you did when you weren’t in full control of yourself. Besides, you’ve probably known her longer than I have at this point.” He smiled sadly at Bucky’s confused expression. “The first time I met Darcy was when she and Jane moved into Tony’s tower. She told me I was her biological father about two weeks later. Before that moment, I hadn’t even known I had a daughter. We had maybe three months of getting to know each other, eating takeout in my lab once a week, and then Ultron happened. I quite literally disappeared off the face of the earth. I come back, and she’s all grown up and practically running the world,” he laughed. “She’s also crushing pretty hard on a certain supersoldier, in case you were wondering.”

“Yeah, well, Steve is pretty cute I guess,” Bucky mused, ducking his head to hide the blush in his cheeks behind his hair. 

Bruce smiled. “Ask her out, Sergeant.”

Bucky delivered a Mocha Frappuccino to Darcy’s office that night and asked her to have dinner with him whenever she found the time. She blushed something fierce as she said yes, and Bucky committed the image to memory. 

A month later they were officially a couple, but with Darcy’s crazy workload and his looming trial they were taking things slow. He’d only kissed her goodnight a couple of times but he’d stopped resisting the urge he had to wrap Darcy up in his arms the second she was off the clock. 

He was indulging in said urge the night of the Asgardian farewell party - the Norwegian deal had gone through pretty quickly all things considered, and Thor and the last of the Asgardians were heading out to New Asgard in the morning - when Tony Stark made his trademarked grand entrance. He had barely taken two steps out of his latest Iron Man suit when he pointed a finger in their direction. 

“What’s the murderbot doing with his murderarm around my niece?” 

“I’m not your niece, Tony,” Darcy called over everyone else's scolding.

“What are you talking about? Bruce is your bio dad, I’m his science bro; you’re totally my science niece.”

Darcy giggled. “That’s not a thing, Tony. And to answer your totally offensive question; we’re dating.”

“No, I forbid it.”

“You don’t get to have an opinion.”

“Of course I do. Everyone loves hearing my opinions.”

“We really don’t,” Bucky heard Steve mutter into his beer. 

“I don’t want to hear them, Tony. I’m a big girl and I make my own choices.”

“You make terrible choices,” Tony mumbled petulantly. 

“I tell Pepper the same thing all the time,” she teased.

“How dare you!” Tony gasped, feigning offence. “Do I at least get to give the Russian menace the shovel talk?”

“No, no shovel talks. I don’t want you scaring him off.”

“If the Hulk didn’t scare me off, doll, nothing will.”

“Awww.” 

“That’s not the way I remember it,” Bruce chimed in.

“Shut up,” Bucky retorted over Bruce’s chuckles. “Besides, I already got the shovel talk from Valkyrie. She takes her role as angry-mom very seriously.”

“Who’s Valkyrie? Wait, did you say mom?!” Tony squawked, turning to demand answers from Bruce. 

“Hulk like angry girl,” Thor teased.

“Where is she? Is she here? I have to meet her.”

“Tony! Tony, stop. She went to New Asgard two days ago. No! Step away from the suit!”

As everyone one laughed at Bruce trying to keep Tony away from his suit Darcy leant in close, sending a shiver down Bucky’s spine as she whispered in his ear. 

“How about I say goodbye to Thor and you walk me back to my room, Sergeant?”

Bucky smiled. “Whatever you want, doll.”

[a-world-in-grey]

Take My Breath au - Roadtrip (Cleigne I)

This is broken into two parts because the last part decided to run off in a completely different direction than I originally planned. And got stupidly long while it was at it.

Also, @swiftyue - tissue warning!

.

-Returning to Lestallum and discovering Niflheim came and took Jared... Sola wishes she killed Ravus when she had the chance. And Ardyn too.

-Talcott is inconsolable. Axis takes one look at the kid, and Sola feels the man soften. She’s not surprised. Axis has kids of his own about Talcott’s age. Axis tells them that he’ll take Talcott to his family. They’ll take care of him. Gladiolus frowns, opening his mouth to argue on behalf of his family’s retainers, but Sola tells Axis to stay safe.

-Gladio is not pleased. He knows they can’t take Talcott with them, the kid’s even younger than Iris and doesn’t have any combat training. It would be too dangerous. But Gladio doesn’t know Axis, and the Hestor family has served the Amicitias for generations. Gladio is responsible for Talcott. Axis catches Gladio’s expression, and the way Iris is biting her lip as she glances between them. Axis sighs and tells Sola in Galahdian that if she could explain... Sola nods, and Axis bows to Noctis and Sola before leaving to join Pelna in packing Talcott’s things.

-Sola tells Gladio that Galahdians are protective of children. Talcott will be well cared for. As for the rest, well, that can wait until they get to Cape Caem.

-Iris rides in the Regalia. Gladio only tries once to get answers out of her, but the fierce glare she levels at him as she all but growls, saying that she promised, means he doesn’t try again.

-The journey to Cape Caem is interrupted by the sight of Fort Vaulleny. Iris is ordered to stay in the car. Prompto, Gladio, and Sola cause one hell of a distraction while Ignis and Noctis infiltrate. Sola and Aranea face off, glaive against spear, half the fight in the air before Sola forces Aranea to flee.

-Cid is waiting for them at Cape Caem. Iris settles in and the others hear of the lingering issues with the ship. Then Gladio sits Sola and Iris down and demands that explanation from Sola.

-Sola doesn’t know how to break it gently, and with everything weighing on her shoulders she doesn’t have the energy to try. So she tells him flat out. Axis’s identity as Clarus’ bastard, when Sola found out and why she never said anything. Why Axis didn’t want to acknowledge his Amicitia blood. And why Axis chose to become her Shield when he never wanted that duty. Gladio turns to Iris and says that she knew. Iris sniffs and says that she has eyes, and Axis looks like Grandmother. Her eyes light up and she says that they have nieces and nephews! She’s an Aunt!

-Sola watches with no little amusement as Gladio reels from the information. She tells Gladio that at least no one will try to insist on Iris being Sola’s Shield. Though Sola supposes Iris still could be a Shield if they end up finding a wayward LC bastard. Gladio twitches, horror spiking through him, likely at the thought of trying to run herd on another royal. Gladio glares at Sola and tells her not to tempt fate, before getting up and searching for a drink. Sola winks at Iris and states that is a tactical retreat. Iris giggles.

-Dinner that night starts out somber, until Cid and Sola break out the stories from her months in Hammerhead, throwing out lightning bolts with every Six-cursed sneeze. Sola and Cid snark back and forth until the others are practically on the floor laughing - and Prompto actually is on the floor wheezing through tears.

-Sola isn’t surprised when she finds Cid waiting for her in the kitchen, when she ghosts down the stairs late that night. Everyone else is asleep - but it’s been a while since Sola truly needed a full night of rest. And Uncle Cid knows when she’s keeping secrets. After all, he was there for her hanahaki.

-No, she’s not surprised that Uncle Cid is waiting up, two steaming mugs on the table. She simply asks what tipped him off, and Cid snorts. He tells her that she never wears her sleeves long. No, always pushed or rolled up above her elbows, jackets included, and Cid can’t remember Sola ever closing her jackets or shirts. He eyes Sola’s oversized shirt - one of Libertus’ old flannels, Galahdians hated Insomnian winters with a passion - with the buttons done up to the collar and the sleeves falling past her fingers, and extends a hand with a demand to see what Sola’s gone and done now.

-Sola sighs, but shimmies out of the shirt, letting Cid see the black lines threading up her arms and stretching up to brush her shoulders. She’d hoped if she gave herself time, her magic would beat it back. But it’s only gotten worse. Sola puts her shirt back on, but tells Cid what she knows. Including the increasing likelihood that she will die. Probably in a matter of weeks.

-Cid hugs her, calling her a dumb self-sacrificing idiot of a Lucis Caelum and entirely too much like Reggie. Sola chokes out a sound that is half a laugh and half a sob, ignoring the wet patch growing on her shoulder. If she doesn’t mention it, Uncle Cid won’t mention the wet patch on his shoulder.

-She’s dying. Sola knew, but realizing just how little time she has left... it makes it so much more real. And it hurts. Because she remembers what it felt like, losing Mama to illness, to something she couldn’t fix, helpless as she wasted away. And Papa’s death is still a gaping wound in her heart.

-She’s going to inflict that same grief on her brother. Her uncles. Her Clan. There’s nothing she can do and she hates it.

-Sola stares into her mug, before she asks Cid for a favor. Because if Sola is going to die, she wants to die without regrets. Which isn’t possible, there are too many things she’ll regret, but if she can resolve some of them...

-Well, there’s no time like the present.

-When the Chocobros and Iris wake, Sola is gone. Cid tells them that she has business to take care of that can’t wait, and if needed to sail to Altissia without her. Cid tells that Sola is leaving everyone in Gladio’s care as the next most experienced warrior. Noctis frowns, because... sure, that sounds like Sola, but there’s something off about this whole situation. But he doesn’t say anything as they make plans to head out to find the mythril they need to repair the boat.

-Gladio firmly pushes away his insecurities about being able to protect Noctis. Sola is counting on him, and he can’t leave everyone when Sola is already gone.

-Sola meets Cor near Taelpar Crag, infection hidden beneath her leather jacket and gloves. She demands that spar from him, because if she wins this is the only time she’ll have to fight Gilgamesh. Cor nods before he unsheathes his katana, and Sola summons her glaive. The fight is fierce, and the two go at each other with lethal intent. It’s only their own skill that allows them to avoid serious injury, though Sola loses a chunk of her hair - not her braid, she’d probably break down crying right there - and Cor gains a magnificent broken nose even as he opens a cut on Sola’s outer thigh. But Sola wins, barely managing to disarm Uncle Cor and leveling her glaive at his throat.

-Even so, Uncle Cor lingers at the door to the Trials, and he gives her a fierce hug and tells her that he’ll see her when she’s done. Sola smirks at him and wonders how much that fanboy of his will pay for Genji. Cor swats at her head but Sola ducks it with a cackle even as she steps past the doors and they close behind her with a heavy and final thud.

-The spar with Uncle Cor was one thing. Against the undead that rise to face her, Sola uses everything and anything. Magic, weapons, and every dirty trick she ever learned from her Clan. She pushes up her sleeves and opens her jacket, uncaring of the infection. Not when there are no living souls to see. She carves her way through and emerges into the wide cavern Uncle Cor described so many years ago, and the massive hulking figure at the other end is impossible to mistake.

-Gilgamesh rises, and Sola’s eyes lock on Genji held in his only hand. But then Gilgamesh is speaking, calling her another challenger. Sola steps forward, senses and magic pricked for any warning of an attack, and introduces herself as Sola Lucis Caelum, the Ardent, Sword of Noctis Lucis Caelum the Chosen King, Chief of Clan Astrum, Captain of the Kingsglaive, and Princess of Lucis. And Sola will never admit that she’s glad for the protocol lessons her tutors once crammed into her head, because Gilgamesh actually pauses, head tilting in a way that can only be thoughtful.

-Gilgamesh replies, simply with his name and title of Shield to the Mystic and Founder King. And Gilgamesh asks Sola what brings her to challenge him. Sola simply states that she made a promise. And she moves.

-Her glaive screeches as it clashes against Genji. The spar with Uncle Cor was difficult. The fight against Gilgamesh is terrifying. Magic and steel clash, and Sola cannot count the number of times she escapes death. But Gilgamesh is Immortal, and Sola... is not. Exhaustion catches up with Sola despite the adrenaline coursing through her veins. And Sola wonders... if dying here would be preferable to wasting away.

-Gilgamesh’s blade whistles by her hair. Sola retreats, heart hammering as she raises a hand to feel what she already knows she’ll find.

-Libertus’ braid-joiner, hanging from one braid and clasping the bottom half of the other, sliced clean through.

-Gilgamesh watches her with emotionless glowing eyes. Sola... is numb. Because that was a targeted strike and she doesn’t know of Gilgamesh knows the significance of Galahdian braids. Sola finds she doesn’t care.

-She pockets the bead where she won’t lose it, drops the jacket on the ground, then lunges for Gilgamesh’s throat. This time though, she speaks, coldly furious even as she heaves from exertion. Sola states that she is disappointed. Gilgamesh’s descendants are highly honorable and here their founder shames their name. No Amicitia would ever serve a Kinslayer, and yet that is exactly what Gilgamesh did.

-Gilgamesh’s arm catches Sola in the chest and sends her across the cavern. He demands to know how Sola knows that, appearing in the blink of an eye to loom over Sola. Sola laughs, bitter and resigned even as she warps away from Gilgamesh’s decapitating strike. She didn’t, Sola tells Gilgamesh, but she’s not surprised. After all, when she reached for the Crystal to protect her people, her King’s people, her dear grandfather’s response was to put his sword through her heart. Sola wonders when Somnus stopped caring for his family and his people. Did he ever care? Or did he only ever concern himself with power and authority?

-Gilgamesh flinches. Sola takes the split second opening to cleave Gilgamesh from shoulder to hip, nearly severing his physical arm. The immortal Shield staggers, but doesn’t fall. And yet, he does not continue to attack. He stands there, Genji in his ghostly grasp and... shoulders hunched?

-He asks if Sola loves her king. Sola is nonplussed, but she answers that yes, she does, more than anyone else. He’s her little brother. Gilgamesh asks if her brother returns her love. Sola doesn’t know where this is going, but every second talking is another second spent healing so she’ll take it. She tells Gilgamesh that he does. Gilgamesh bitterly states that once, Somnus had an elder brother, a brother he loved dearly and who loved him in return. But the Astrals set them to fight the Starscourge, and over time... that bond was forgotten. And when they met again, it was not as brothers but as enemies, for while the scourge had infected the Healer’s body, resentment had infected his king’s heart. And so Somnus cut down the daemon with his brother’s face, and locked it away from light and warmth when it would not die.

-Sola knows she’s gaping. But there’s so much... She says that the scourge turns people to daemons?! Gilgamesh nods and Sola thinks back to Ardyn’s passing comment about how she’ll go. Gilgamesh says that Bahamut declared the Chosen King would come from Somnus’s line, to destroy the Accursed and free the world from the Starscourge. And Bahamut cursed Somnus for his Kinslaying and the slaying of the first Oracle. For his line would end as it began, with a sword to the heart.

-Sola cannot breathe. Because the parallels are weaving themselves before her eyes. She chokes out that she is the red-haired healer with golden magic, and Noctis is the dark-haired warrior with blue. Gilgamesh nods, and says that Sola is even named after the Healer, and already the scourge infects her flesh. Sola asks why Gilgamesh is telling her this?! Gilgamesh is silent, radiating sorrow and regret, and he tells Sola that in cutting down the Accursed, Somnus cut out his own heart. And it was Gilgamesh who pushed Somnus to such a course. Gilgamesh bears equal guilt for the curse upon his king’s descendants, for the cruel fate requiring them to slay their own kin. He cannot change the past. He cannot regain his honor. But he can do this one small thing for them, and hope that if he joins his king in death Somnus will forgive him.

-She stares at Gilgamesh, who has gone from a terrifying unstoppable force to... a grieving and tired man. A giant of a man, but Sola cannot help but see the same grief in Gilgamesh’s shoulders that she’s seen in Uncle Cor’s ever since Insomnia fell. Since Papa died. Only, Gilgamesh has shouldered his grief for two thousand years.

-Sola lets her glaive disappear into her armiger and strides over to Gilgamesh. She tells him to kneel, even as she gently takes Genji from his grasp. She tells Gilgamesh that he betrayed his oath to protect his king, and betrayed the royal family through his actions. Gilgamesh says nothing, head bowed so she cannot see his face. Sola says that as one of those he betrayed, as Sword of the Chosen King granted with his authority to act in his stead, she declares his immortality nullified and sentences him to immediate execution. Sola lifts Genji and asks what Gilgamesh’s last words are. He lifts his head, eyes no longer glowing, and simply thanks her. Sola brings Genji down in one swift strike.

-Gilgamesh’s head hits the ground with a dull thud. His body collapses and does not rise.

-Sola falls to her knees and weeps.

[toshootforthestars]

Yes!

Via Tom Ley, posted 10 Sept 2020:

This site exists because of the events of Oct. 29, 2019, when we all still worked at Deadspin.

That was the day that Barry Petchesky, who had been a writer and editor at the site for over 10 years, and was at that point the site’s acting editor-in-chief, was fired. He was marched back to his desk by G/O Media CFO Tom Callahan, who made Petchesky hand over his keycard and collect his things while I and a handful of my colleagues demanded to know why he had just been fired. We’d all sprung up from our chairs and started barking half-formed questions, to which Callahan responded by pointing at one of our computers and sneering, "Just look at the home page.”

At that moment, Deadspin’s home page featured stories about wedding dresses, three good dogs I recently met, a pumpkin thief—and no stories about sports. This was purposeful, the staff’s response to a memo sent by the company’s executive editor a day earlier that forbade us from covering topics not related directly to sports. Jim Spanfeller, who had been installed by the private equity firm Great Hill Partners as CEO of our company all of seven months before, responded to this act of insubordination by calling Petchesky into his office, firing him, and then telling him to “get the fuck out.”

I spent the rest of that day and most of the next huddled in an empty corner office with my colleagues 27 floors above the 45th and Broadway intersection of Times Square. The conversations we had in that room eventually led to all of us making the decision to quit in solidarity with Petchesky.

At this point the staff was used to navigating various workplace crises. We’d had similar meetings before, following resignations, sales of the company, layoffs, collective-bargaining sessions, and even a bankruptcy. We used to joke about how no new Deadspin employee ever made it through their first few months at the site without some kind of company-wide crisis.

This meeting felt different, though. Through all the other troubles we had been able to determine that no matter what was crumbling around us, Deadspin was still ours, and the ability to go to work every day and make the website we loved was worth holding onto for as long as possible. But suddenly we were confronted with a vision of Deadspin’s future—one without Petchesky and without the editorial freedom our site depended on—that we simply couldn’t accept.

One colleague, vaguely recalling all the other existential threats we’d survived through the years, summed up our situation neatly, saying through his tears, “They got us this time.”

Within 48 hours the entire remaining staff of Deadspin, 20 people, had resigned. Now, 10 months later, we are ready to start something new.

That’s the story of how we arrived at this point, but if you want to truly understand why we are doing this, you need to widen the scope a little bit. The full story is about more than just an irascible staff of writers reacting flippantly to a memo they didn’t like. It’s a story about what will and won’t be tolerated, both by those with the power to shape the present and future of the media industry, and by those who bear the consequences of how that power is wielded.

The version of Deadspin we walked away from was an immensely popular one. Every day, millions of people visited our site—by the end, a good month saw us bringing in around 20 million unique visitors—to see what we had to show them. You could log on in the morning to read analysis of a hockey game, come back a few hours later to a perfectly crafted headline about Lions fans copulating in a parking lot, and then return in the evening to find out that Manti Te’o’s dead girlfriend was a hoax, or why Greg Hardy was arrested, or what kind of person NBA All-Star Kevin Johnson really is.

Every day offered Deadspin an opportunity—to joke, to argue, to critique, and to uncover. The tenacity with which we seized that opportunity is what electrified the site.

Deadspin didn’t acquire all those readers by accident, and the skills its writers and editors needed to run the site every day didn’t spring from nothing. The site grew and became a better version of itself every day because of how seriously those who were entrusted with it guarded and improved upon the folkways and traditions that had been handed down by previous iterations.

Will Leitch launched the site in 2005, and from the very start gifted Deadspin with a clarity of purpose that persisted right up until our departure. The site’s motto from its 2005 launch until our last day: “Sports news without access, favor, or discretion.” In one of his first posts Leitch explained, “There’s a whole side of sports that, because of either corporate obligations or just plain laziness, never makes it into the public consciousness. We specialize in that side.”

After Leitch came A.J. Daulerio, who understood that the more Deadspin burrowed itself into the negative space created by traditional sports media institutions, the more vital the site became. Deadspin looked at ESPN and newspapers and other legacy publications the way raiding Vikings must have looked at the shores of Britain, dedicating an entire section to exposing workplace harassment at ESPN, revealing sports media stars like Jay Mariotti and Sean Salisbury as frauds and hacks, and routinely securing stories in ways that would make a journalism professor faint.

Those infamous pictures of Brett Favre? Exchanged for a paper bag stuffed with cash.

Tommy Craggs succeeded Daulerio, and during his tenure Deadspin’s already venomous bite was imbued with a political sensibility. The scope and ambition of the site also began to expand during Craggs’s tenure, and eventually the site that had started with a staff of one accumulated a stable of editors and writers, reporters with dedicated beats, as well as the budget and appetite needed to publish the sort of reported scoops and features that rivaled anything you’d expect to find in a prestigious newspaper or magazine. The site also established culture and lifestyle sections, which brought Deadspin’s voice and point of view to bear on all manner of topics, like Gamergate and Wile E. Coyote.

A funny thing started happening around this time: The site that had stood itself up by throwing bombs at various institutions was becoming something of an institution itself. This transformation continued under the stewardship of subsequent editors Tim Marchman and Megan Greenwell, both of whom worked to diversify the staff, further expand Deadspin’s coverage areas, and continue landing the sort of big, industry-leading stories that made the site an indispensable daily read.

After a while it was no longer accurate to describe Deadspin as just a sports site (though the vast majority of its coverage remained sports-related) or as a place to find rude headlines about sports columnists. What Deadspin became, what it was on the day its entire staff resigned, was a full-bodied publication. It married muckraking with a 27-word blog post headlined Tony Dungy Doesn’t Think Michael Vick Is Being Haunted By Dog Ghosts.

To an uncommon extent, readers wanted to know what Deadspin had to say. When other people in the industry would hear about how much of our traffic came directly through the homepage (as opposed to social media or search), they would stare in disbelief. Whenever someone left the site to go work at another outlet, they would invariably send a grim dispatch about how much they missed Deadspin’s built-in audience.

What was apparent to those of us who had spent years reading and creating Deadspin was that the site wasn’t defined by what it covered, but by its sensibility.

People liked reading a site that refused to condescend or patronize, that was comfortable telling ugly truths about sports and the world at large, that was rude, that was mean (usually in ways that were more illuminating than gratuitous), and that was whimsical in ways that were never insufferable. Readers didn’t come to Deadspin every day just to get their sports news or find out who won last night. They came because they liked reading Deadspin.

Where did it all go wrong, then?

There are perhaps too many points on the timeline to discuss. Maybe it was when infamous venture capitalist and Donald Trump confidant Peter Thiel, angered over sister site Gawker’s antagonistic coverage of him, secretly funded a lawsuit against Gawker Media from ex-wrestler Hulk Hogan and structured it to cause maximum damage to the company. (A loss at trial in Florida state court in March 2016 resulted in a $140 million judgment and Gawker Media’s bankruptcy.) Maybe it was when debt-laden broadcaster Univision bought the company at auction that August and then spent the next few years failing to figure out exactly what it wanted to do with us. (To wit, Univision seemed to be under the impression that Gawker Media’s sites would somehow be able to create television shows that would prop up their failing cable channel, Fusion.)  

Even if the dominoes started falling years ago, I never felt the end was in sight until Great Hill purchased the company in April of 2019. They got to work quickly, changing our name to G/O Media, and installing Spanfeller, a veteran of Forbes.com and content mills like The Daily Meal, as CEO. During his introductory meeting with the whole staff, he revealed that though he’d spent his career on the business side of digital media, his true ambition was to publish the next great American novel.

Spanfeller moved through the office like a blunt object, always more interested in how to further monetize the G/O Media sites than in the sites themselves. In an early meeting Spanfeller had with the editorial staff, he told us that his plan was to more than double G/O Media’s annual revenue within a year.

He went about executing his plan by firing the company’s top two editorial leaders, wiping out the investigations desk, and installing a coterie of former colleagues in high-level positions across the company. As Spanfeller molded the company to fit his vision, we at Deadspin found ourselves in a heated confrontation with him.

[…]

Soon it became clear that his plan for juicing G/O Media’s revenue involved turning Deadspin into the kind of site it was never supposed to be. He liked to talk about the site’s position in the “sports category,” kvetching about how poorly our revenue and traffic numbers stacked up against those of ESPN.com and SB Nation.

It didn’t seem to matter to him that sports fans would visit ESPN.com and Deadspin for entirely different reasons, or that every site ahead of us in the “sports category” had exponentially larger staffs, or that some of those same sites relied on hundreds of underpaid and unpaid bloggers to hit their traffic numbers, or that Deadspin was one of the few sites that earned its traffic without resorting to SEO plays designed to capture clicks from people searching things like “Mayweather vs. McGregor livestream.”

None of that seemed to matter to Spanfeller, because he didn’t see Deadspin the way its staff and its readers saw it. To him it was just a valuable brand name within the sports category, and with that brand name came unlimited potential for growth and profit.

[…]

Lately I’ve been thinking of Deadspin as a strange machine. For more than a decade, the people charged with the maintenance of that machine were allowed to tinker with it according to their whims and idiosyncratic tastes. The result of all that tinkering was a machine which, for all its apparent wonkiness, worked brilliantly.

The problem with a machine like that is that it’s difficult for anyone who didn’t build it, or doesn’t respect those who did, to understand exactly how or why it works. When Deadspin’s staffers and readers looked at the machine, they saw a wonderful and whirring contraption, but all Spanfeller and Great Hill saw was an odd collection of valves and pistons. They saw parts, but not the whole.

Spanfeller’s disdain for his own newsroom, the “stick to sports” memo, Petchesky being fired, and the cascade of oppressive ads—they were all signaling the same thing: Spanfeller and Great Hill weren’t really interested in preserving what we had spent the last decade building. Maybe a few components would remain to keep up appearances, but Deadspin’s demolition was coming, and we couldn’t stop it. What we could do was refuse to participate in its destruction.

What happened at Deadspin, what’s still happening at G/O Media, isn’t unique. It’s just a particular version of the same slow-motion, industry-wide disaster that’s been unfolding for years.

[emphasis mine]

Everything’s fucked now.

Newspapers have been destroyed by raiding private equity firms, alt-weeklies and blogs are financially unsustainable relics, and Google and Facebook have spent the last decade or so hollowing out the digital ad market. What survives among all this wreckage are websites and publications that are mostly bad. There’s plenty to read, the trouble is that so much of it is undergirded by a growing disregard (and in some cases even disdain) for the people doing the actual reading.

What readers are being served when a sports blog leverages its technological innovations in order to create a legion of untrained and unpaid writers? Who benefits when a media company cripples its own user experience and launches a campaign to drive away some of its best writers and editors? Whose interests are being served when a magazine masthead is gutted and replaced by a loose collection of amateurish contractors? Who ultimately wins when publications start acting less like purpose-driven institutions and more like profit drivers, primarily tasked with achieving exponential scale at any cost? What material good is produced when private equity goons go on cashing their checks while simultaneously slashing payroll throughout their newsrooms?

Things have gotten so bad that even publications that get away with defining themselves as anti-establishment are in fact servile to authority in all forms, and exist for the sole purpose of turning their readers into a captive source of profit extraction.

The truth is that nobody who matters—the readers—ever asked for any of this shit. Every bad decision that has diminished media—every pivot to video, every injection of venture capital funds, every round of layoffs, every outright destruction of a publication—was only deemed necessary by the constraints of capitalism and dull minds.

This is an industry being run by people who, having been betrayed by the promise of exponential scale and IPOs, now see cheapening and eventually destroying their own products as the only way to escape with whatever money there is left to grab.

The ability of Defector to escape these constraints will depend not only on the quality of our work, but on our ability to avoid feebly chasing dollars through a collapsing digital ad economy. We want the freedom to provide you with a site, custom-built by our partners at Alley Interactive, that isn’t clogged with pop-up ads, banner ads, video ads, and chum boxes full of spammy headlines explaining how That One Girl From Full House Looks Like A Damn Snack Now.

Me:

Nothing lasts forever, not even tumblr, and probably not even Defector.  I gave ‘em a lousy $8 this month. Hopefully I can continue to do so.

Defector’s prospects are grim, not at least because of ALL THE OTHER sporps blergs out there plus the Second Great Depression now underway. How will it end? Sued into oblivion like gawker was? Unable to find enough subscribers or advertisers to fund operations? No search traffic from google? Buried by the algorithm on facebook?  The worrying starts IF defector is viable (ie: people have money to give) and churns out not just great stories and thinkpieces but also good #content to goose the Google and Facebook algorithms. Who knows where things will be in a year.

Here’s the thing IMO: The business elite, the billionaire class, social conservatives from every income bracket, GOP acolytes, and our reviled gatekeepers at facebook & google, all are in unison on the notion that what’s posted online must be controlled.

What’s posted online should never impinge upon their collective dominance.  Authority, especially THEIR authority, must never be questioned. Even one’s inclination to question authority must be countered by intimidation and fear.  We, you and I, can have some left-ish “capitulzm sux” schtick, as a treat, but any and all critical writings on the powers that be and the way things work, anything that raises deeply pertinent and uncomfortable questions on the people who have accumulated outsize power and control over the course of our lives, that must be clamped down upon post-haste.

Peter Thiel and crew successfully went after gawker’s survival, and its select shitty posts from shitty people were a conveniently compelling argument that the website needed to go (not just the shitty people).  Later revelations made the case that much more was at play, somewhat vindicating the suspicions of Gawker’s good writers.

As Gawker has noted over the past decade:

[Thiel’s] vaunted hedge fund Clarium Capital was an abject failure, losing more than 90% of its $7 billion in assets, a decline that Valleywag assiduously chronicled.

He is an arch libertarian who believes that central mechanisms of contemporary society—including representative democracy, universal suffrage, and formalized education—are either outdated or incompatible with human freedom.

He is a loud proponent of “seasteading,” the movement to establish sovereign communities on permanent ocean vessels for the purpose of developing legal systems unencumbered by taxes or any other kind of traditional government policies.

He believes death itself can and should be cheated, and even intends to be cryogenically frozen after he passes away, in hopes that science will one day be capable of reviving him. He literally wants to live forever.

He has backed efforts to question the legitimacy of climate change science as well as political groups opposed to immigration—even though the industry that minted him as a billionaire is heavily dependent on immigrant labor.

Gizmodo’s recent coverage of Facebook, in which Thiel was an early investor and on which he has a board seat, launched a congressional investigation into the company’s news curation practices, and inspired a national conversation about the vast amount of power the company wields—with no transparency and minimal accountability—over who reads what.

These stories, which are only a small sample of those Gawker has published about Peter Thiel, largely concern his professional life: Business ventures, political positions, and public statements. But as he noted to the Times, it was concern for his “friends” that Gawker had covered that motivated his secret legal assault: “One of my friends convinced me that if I didn’t do something, nobody would.”

Hm.

The news business is indeed in dire straits right now.  As noted above in the defector blerg post, it’s definitely true that:

“Every bad decision that has diminished media—every pivot to video, every injection of venture capital funds, every round of layoffs, every outright destruction of a publication—was only deemed necessary by the constraints of capitalism and dull minds. This is an industry being run by people who, having been betrayed by the promise of exponential scale and IPOs, now see cheapening and eventually destroying their own products as the only way to escape with whatever money there is left to grab.”

I contend that THIS IS THE PLAN.  No news, after all, is good news.  Money of course is made, “profit extraction” and/or “value extraction” happens, but these companies are one part cynical profiteers but also one part ideologues: an informed electorate is BAD. Fuck this, the public doesn’t need to know jack shit about anything.

Via The New Republic, posted Oct 2019:

This is not to further pan for lamentations over the demise of a website. Splinter and its parent company was already something of a distressed asset—its status as such, in fact, likely played no small role in attracting the attention of Great Hill in the first place. But the wider world of mass media is filled with other such distressed assets, from the websites spawned in the heyday of venture capital media mavens, to long-standing local and regional newspapers, straining to balance their journalistic mission with an ever decreasing supply of capital.

It feels increasingly like the terms of journalism—which kinds of outlets get to do it, who gets paid enough to live doing it, which communities get coverage—are set by the rich.

The best case scenario is that journalists become part of a billionaire’s patronage network.

When Splinter shuttered, former Gawker writer Brendan O’Connor wrote that “the workplace under capitalism is a dictatorship, and the dictatorship of private equity is an especially arbitrary one.” It’s a shame that journalism—something with such obvious broad societal value, and that should be wholly antagonistic to the rich and powerful—should be mostly done for private profit, with all the compromises that come with that. But the sad fact of journalism’s dependence on profit-making becomes far more grotesque and dangerous when the profiteers in question are financial sector wheeler-dealers.

This particular flavor of profiteers seek a higher yield, faster, with no regard for the long-term sustainability of the business.

Alden Global Capital, which owns Digital First Media (DFM) and its publications like The Denver Post, drained hundreds of millions of dollars from DFM for their own gain. It can be confounding to contemplate: How can a hedge fund profit from destroying the value of what it just bought? Remarkably, they can.

As The American Prospect explainedin detail last year, private equity can make big bucks off destroying local papers if it “strips staffing and siphons off cash flow.” Papers continue to make money off local advertisers who still value them, even as the quality of the journalism collapses; cutting costs by laying off staff or centralizing production can speed it up. Essentially, the long-term consequences to profits don’t catch up fast enough to prevent the hedge fund owners from stripping the assets, who then flip the carcass.

That’s how you end up with instances in which Alden executives “rewarded themselves with tens of millions of dollars’ worth of prime real estate in Florida and the Hamptons for their personal enjoyment.”

The “War on Journalism” isn’t a myth, it’s a bone fide pursuit. There has never been a “liberal media” and the corporations that own news organizations very much prefer it stay that way.  Facebook and google siphoning away ad dollars helps immensely to this end.

Take Advance Publications and the Newhouse family!

Via the CJR, posted Dec 2013:

Often represented to employees as an extraordinary worker benefit, The Pledge, in fact, had its roots in the antipathy of the late Advance founder S.I. “Sam” Newhouse, Sr. toward organized labor.

“I refuse to stand by passively and allow any union to ‘bust’ me,” he wrote in A Memo to My Children, a thin, self-published memoir that is apparently the only personally penned record of his life and career.

After acrimonious and sometimes violent contract negotiations and strikes at Advance-owned newspapers in New York, Oregon, Missouri, and Ohio in the 1930s through the mid-1960s, Sam Newhouse, apparently in consultation with his son, Donald, is believed to have crafted the Pledge. (The Newhouses have declined to talk to reporters and authors about the Pledge, including me when I was researching my recently released book about the “digital first” changes at the Times-Picayune and other Advance newspapers.)

Over the years, the Pledge became “so well-known throughout the newspaper industry that it was almost considered legendary,” according to a 2009 lawsuit by former Mobile, AL, Press-Register Publisher Howard Bronson, who sued after he was dismissed from his $745,000-a-year post at the Advance paper while The Pledge was still in force. (The suit was settled for an undisclosed amount in April 2011.)

When originally instituted in the mid-1960s, The Pledge explicitly promised employees that they would not lose their jobs “because of technological changes or economic conditions so long as the newspaper continues to publish and [employees] are willing to retrain for another job, if necessary.”

It was modified in 2008 to cover only permanent, non-union employees of Advance’s daily newspapers “published in newsprint form.” The addition of this fine print set the stage for the arrival of the digital initiative, which began in 2009 at the Newhouse-owned Ann Arbor News in Michigan. Layoffs were now technically permissible under the still-in-force Pledge because that newspaper went from daily to twice-weekly. And in July 2009, 214 jobs were eliminated at the Ann Arbor News.

Advance rescinded The Pledge altogether in February 2010, when the newspaper industry was deep into its long and ugly nosedive.

“We felt that it was the right thing to communicate to people that we could no longer afford not having the flexibility to do something if the revenue challenges continue,” Steven Newhouse told The New York Times in August 2009. “I think the policy was meant for a time when the newspaper business had ups and downs, but was relatively stable. It was not meant for a time when our newspapers, like others, are struggling to survive.”

…

Deadspin, amongst its furious shitposting, and kinda like gawker (when it wasn’t fucking shitty), spoke truth to power.

There is a concerted effort to end that, online and elsewhere.

There’s a concerted effort to control what’s posted online and what information can be freely accessed.

(my bad and shitty theory: The overarching, unifying reasons are power, control & domination. Conservatives want far-left views that threaten them to be vanquished, businesses want preferential treatment to do whatever the fuck they want, the billionaire class want their wealth protected from the guillotines of the working class, the GOP wants political power in perpetuity, Facebook & Google are run by rapacious ghouls and ideologues.  ALL OF THEM want control over what becomes public information and #content just for their individual safety from the rebellious unwashed masses, as recent advances in AI will mean a lot less people employed anywhere, and that + climate change = guillotines for the rich.)

TL;DR: Corporate media sucks. Check out Defector.

[captain-yeet]

Oh No, He’s Hot - Part 4

Pairing: Felix x Reader

Summary: Half a year has passed, and Y/N and her Volturi lover boy are still going strong despite the distance… but the betrayal of a close friend of the Cullens may divide them. I live on angst.

Masterlist here 

Laying down on your bed, you took a deep breath and sighed.

It has been six months since the day of the Newborn attack, and a lot has happened within that time.

First off, Bella and Edward got married. Then proceeded to have a hybrid vampire/human child. Now she’s a vampire, and her and Edward’s daughter was growing at an alarming rate. Second, you and Felix were going steady. The Cullens were wary, the newly wed parents especially. Which you couldn’t fault them for; who knows what the Volturi would do if they found out about their daughter? If it were you, you’d want to keep your child secret as well. But, you were an adult and fully consenting in this relationship and they respected your wish to stay with him.

Dating Felix was interesting. For one, your communication was primarily through phone calls and letters. You missed seeing him terribly, and the feeling was mutual on his side too. Despite his reputation as the Volturi’s hulking, menacing executioner, he was quite a kind lover. Every phone call he would ask about your day and respond with interest when you talked to him about things that happened.

You didn’t tell him of Bella and Edward’s child. It wasn’t your place, and Renesmee herself was a sweet kid - you didn’t want to see any harm come to her.

The third and final development over the past few months has been your powers.

It seemed like the more you practiced, the stronger you became. Carlisle had been in contact with a few individuals that had similar abilities to you, trying to help you figure yourself out. One was Kate, a vampire from the Denali coven, with the power to electrocute anyone she touches at will. The second was a young man from an Egyptian coven, who could control the elements. Despite some similarities between yours and their abilities, even they could quite place their fingers on what exactly your powers were. The Egyptian vampire summed it up as a power similar to his; very potent, but for the most part, a mystery.

Regardless of the stress of trying to figure out what exactly your powers were, you enjoyed them.

You found that you could even travel via a chain of lightning summoned from the sky at will. The day you found out about it was not the best of times, but you found some slight amusement in it.

You were sitting on a log in the same snow covered meadow you fought alongside vampires in months ago, watching the little half-vampire girl leap high into the air to catch snowflakes. Her wolf protector - who you found out later was her “imprint”, a wolf version of vampire’s mating - standing somewhat near you. Renesmee excitedly showed her mother who was also present the perfectly shaped snowflake she caught, grinning gleefully.

It would have been a sweet, family moment, if not for the nearby vampire who witnessed it all.

Her name was Irina. You remembered her furious glare as she watched your group, before running away. Bella tried calling out to her, but no luck.

“She must be upset about Jacob,” she concluded, gesturing to the wolf who was hovering over Renesmee.

“We should head back, let the others know,” you replied breathlessly.

As you all got ready to travel, something unexpected happened. You began running back in the direction of the Cullen’s home, and then a burst of light appeared in the clearing. You felt yourself instinctively leap, feeling the cold winter wind against your face. Then, with a crack of thunder, you landed right on the Cullen’s driveway, surprising a shocked young wolf boy named Seth, who dropped a sandwich he was eating in shock. Your sudden appearance made all the vampires in the house run out to investigate.

Looking back through Seth memories, Edward informed everyone that you seemed to have teleported via a chain of lightning. From the singe marks on the ground surrounding where you landed, no one argued this conclusion.

Shortly after Bella and co. arrived back, Alice had her vision; the Volturi were coming. And they wanted to kill Renesmee on the suspicion she was an immortal child.

So now here you were, stressed and even more confused, blankly staring at the ceiling as you waited for Felix to call you.

Life here sure is interesting, you thought lamely, a small chuckle coming from you.

The phone laying beside you on the bed began to ring, and you took a deep breath. Was he aware of everything? He had to be. There’s no way he wouldn’t be.

Summoning your remaining courage, you picked up the phone and pressed the answer button. “Hey,” you said breathlessly.

“Hello Y/N,” Felix’s deep voice replied on the other end. There was a slightly formal tone to his voice, which added to your fear of him knowing everything.

You let out a heavy sigh. “So, things have gotten rather… complicated here.”

“So I’ve gathered,” he replied, “your surrogate family has made an immortal child, it seems. That’s not exactly a pardonable offense.”

You rolled on your side, pressing the phone to your ear a little tighter. “But that’s the thing, Lex. The kid isn’t immortal! She’s a… living, breathing thing.”

You heard an exasperated sigh. “Why did you not tell me any of this?”

“I didn’t feel like it was my place to,” you spoke earnestly, really trying to convince him. “I know I kept this from you, it’s true, and I’m so sorry for doing that. But please trust me that what I’m telling you no is the truth; there’s no immortal children here.”

There was a long pause on Felix’s end. You almost thought he’d put the phone down and left until he responded. “Then tell me your side of things,” he asked in a low voice. “Things here are very… hostile. I have Aro in my ear telling me not to believe you if you try to convince me otherwise. And now I don’t know what to believe.”

A pit of anger began to form in your chest at the news of his “master” trying to convince him that you weren’t to be trusted. “Okay love, I’ll tell you everything.”

And so you did. You told him of when Bella came back from her and Edward’s honeymoon sick and already with a baby bump. You told him of the details of the pregnancy, and the delivery - at least, what you witnessed. As soon as she went into “labour”, you stood there in shock. You followed them all into the delivery room Carlisle had set up. You saw Rosalie lose her cool at Bella’s blood. And you saw Edward use his teeth to get to the baby. That part of the story drew a shocked noise from Felix on the other end of the line.

You also explained how she aged quickly, and that she had a heartbeat. “And that’s everything I haven’t told you,” you concluded your story, anxious to hear his reaction.

It took a while for Felix to respond. “If… if what you’re saying is true, then this changes everything about what’s going to happen,” he spoke in a low, urgent voice. “Y/N, I’ll probably get Jane’s torture treatment for telling you this but… the Volturi aren’t coming to hear the Cullen’s side of the story. They’re - we, are coming for an execution.”

Your hands started shaking as you sat up straight. “But there was no crime committed!” you almost shouted, voice wavering.

“That doesn’t matter; my coven has had it out for the Cullens for quite some time now. Any excuse, any slight reason will do.”

You felt sick. You felt like you needed to run to the nearest bathroom soon. Or cry. Or scream. Or do all of those things in that exact order. “So there’s no hope, then?” you asked feebly.

“I don’t know what’s going to happen, mia cara,” he answered honestly, his tone now sad.

“I really am sorry for not telling you about all of this.”

“Hey now,” Felix began shooshing you over the phone. “I understand why you did it, and you’re being honest with me now.”

The two of you were silent for a moment, you taking a moment to steady yourself. I have to be strong, you thought firmly. Crying won’t get me anywhere, even if it’s a totally reasonable reaction to all of this. “So what happens now?”

“Now… I don’t know. I guess the next time I’ll be seeing you is at the trial, then we’ll know what exactly the truth is.”

“Wait…” you paused before continuing. “You do believe me, right?”

There was a pause on Felix’s end.

Too long of a pause for your liking.

You let out a humorless laugh. “You don’t,” you breathed, grinning bitterly.

“Y/N…” he began slowly.

“Don’t you trust me?”

“I do, of course I do!” you heard Felix curse away from the phone under his breath. Another voice could be heard faintly on the other line. “I just… I can’t think of a reason Aro would lie to us. I’ve been under his service for decades… I just cannot wrap my head around the possibility of even him stooping so low as to deceive us all, even with his grudge against the Cullens.”

Closing your eyes, you drew a deep breathe to calm yourself before replying. “But do you believe me?”

“I believe you’re telling me the truth now, I really do,” he said, being careful to choose his words.

The other voice in the background was louder now. You could hear them say, “We have to go now!”

“I’m sorry, I need to go. We’re preparing to leave soon,” his tone was apologetic.

Shaken, you nodded even though he couldn’t see it. “Felix?”

“Yes?”

“I care about you,” you said softly.

A small sigh could be heard from him. “I care about you too, more than you know. Whatever happens, that will never change.”

The line went dead. You flopped back down onto the bed, your chest tight with anxiety. You felt strongly for Felix - part of you even began to conclude that you even loved him. But you’ve never said it, preferring to save that for when you come face to face again.

But now, you wondered if you’ll ever get the chance to.

[robininthelabyrinth]

Fic: An Internal Affair - Chapter 21 (Ao3 link)

Fandom: The Flash Pairing: Leonard Snart/Barry Allen

Summary: Leonard Snart, the CCPD Captain of Internal Affairs, is known as Captain Cold for a very good reason: He hates corrupt cops with a merciless vengeance, and once you’re on his list, you’re in serious trouble.

His next target?

A CCPD lab tech named Barry Allen who’s developed a suspicious habit of disappearing at random intervals.

—————————————————————————————————

"Again, Lenny?" old Mad Magpie cackles when Len limps up to her at her usual post near the CCPD. Most members of the cardboard brigade wouldn't care to be so close to so many cops, or wouldn't dare, but Magpie is an old homeless veteran who lived in Gotham before coming to haunt the streets of Central, and she doesn't fear much of anything. Len's been sending Danvers over with hot chocolate on a regular basis, though, so Magpie's usually willing to talk to him. "Don't you have any self-preservation?"

"Don't mention it," Len says. "Really. Don't."

"You can fool that secretary of yours -"

"Admin assistant," Len interjects.

"- and you can fool that new boytoy of yours, but you can't fool old Magpie," she says. "You've ripped those stitches again."

"Like I said," Len says, suppressing the wince of pain at the mere mention. He's pretty sure he's bleeding - getting thrown around by a murderous speedster was definitely not on his physical therapist's list of approved activities - but he's wearing enough layers and stayed in lurching forward movement enough that no one has had a chance to notice it yet. "Don't mention it."

She laughs. "I knew it," she says. "Can't fool an old bird of prey like me! I don't tell people things till they ask. But if anyone asks, I ain't promising nothing. Now, I see you're back to your wicked old ways, hanging around with that Allen boy - back together now, are we?"

"Yeah."

"Oh, good on you. He's cute. And I bet he goes pretty fast, if you know what I mean."

Len arches his eyebrows. He knows exactly what she means, and she's not advising him on how long it'll take to get Barry into bed. "You selling that info?"

"Hell no," Magpie cackles. "Like I said - he's cute!"

"Good. Lemme know if anyone does start selling that, will you?"

"You'll get first word, Lenny. You've been a good enough customer to us all these years, paying more than your fair share and never turning us in for vagrancy; we can do you that much."

"Much obliged," Len says. "Hey, if I manage to surprise even you, do I get a bonus going forward?"

She arches her eyebrows at him. "I'm listening," she allows.

"Mick's better."

"I already heard that he's awake," she sniffs.

"Not awake. Better. See?"

She squints around him in the direction he's gesturing at. Len can see the exact moment she spots Mick standing there, looking healthy as a horse (well, with some nasty burn scars, but those look years old already) and arguing cheerfully with Iris and Danvers about something or another.

"Well, I'll be," she marvels. "Yeah, Lenny, you get a bonus for that - assuming that being healthy means he's gonna be cooking up his usual free-for-all July 4th bash this year. News of that getting uncanceled'll buy quite a lot."

"It's definitely on," he assures her. "Assuming we haven't all been murdered by the Families, of course."

"True that," she sniggers. "Now, what're you going to do to stop them?"

"As much as I can," Len says honestly. "But for that I need help - you remember when I was looking for intel on speedster stuff?"

"Yeah?"

"I need to find a speedster. The bad one, in yellow; he was at STAR Labs, but we don't know where he is now -" Danvers checked STAR Labs and reported no success. "- and we need to put him down if we're gonna put any of this down."

"He's the one doing the disappearances?"

"He's the one doing the hits," Len agrees, since technically Barry caused some of the disappearances. Though he supposes that if you think about it a certain way, Wells was behind those, too, in an indirect sort of way... "Can you yank your chain and get me an answer?"

"Don't need to ring up the community, Lenny," she says, grinning. "You know they used to call me the Oracle, back in Gotham? Always knew what was going on, I did, and it's the same now: I already know where he is."

"And I'm guessing I won't like the answer?"

"Come now, you robbed him of his revenge or whatever; where else is he gonna go other than Central’s home away from home for the criminally inclined?" she asks, amused. "The place where everyone knows your name - and record."

Len experiences a distinct sinking feeling in his stomach. "Ah," he says. "Iron Heights."

Central City's one and only maximum security prison.

Len's been in a few times, to ensure his cover was appropriately legit. He doesn't remember it very fondly.

"He's getting jealous, he is," Magpie says complacently. "You've got an army, the Families've got an army, who doesn't got an army? He doesn't. But he can fix that."

No kidding.

Especially since - and Len is remembering this with a wince - the metas from Barry's secret prison have just been transferred there pending trial, along with the specifications of the Accelerator needed to maintain the anti-meta-powers effect of their cells.

They'd even recruited Ramon to advise on the process of transferring the tech, with the recommendation that his cooperation in converting one of the wings (now dubbed the Metahuman Wing) would go some significant distance to reducing his eventual sentence.

Len hadn't been involved with that personally, being busy with Mick's recovery at the time, but he'd set one of the DAs he'd always liked - an ardent prisoners' rights advocate in her previous life - on the task of making sure Ramon gave adequate thought to how what they already had in place in STAR Labs could be expanded such that the metas could enjoy their constitutional rights, however limited.

Len’s not entirely clear on the details, but whatever it was, it was only a temporary solution. Ramon is reportedly working furiously on developing some sort of meta-dampening cuffs that seem significantly more humane.

All well and good in theory, yes, but it's now occurring to Len that what he saw as a grotesque human rights' violation, and the so-called Team Flash saw as a temporary convenience, Wells saw as more of -

Well, as a useful storage container.

As in, where you store things for later use.

(The image of tiny metahumans being placed into a pantry and pulled out at need by a giant Wells is deeply disturbing. Len sure is glad that no one's invented some sort of shrink ray...)

"Thanks, Magpie," Len says, shaking his head to help him get rid of the unwanted mental images. "Appreciated as always."

"I'll let my people in Iron Heights know to expect you," Magpie offers. "There's always a few old cardboards in there for some reason or another. If you need something pulled, you just ask. You've got that bonus to spend now."

"Hopefully not necessary," Len assures her. "But thanks."

The resources of Len's task force, as they stand, are quite few in number, but fairly decent nonetheless: Len himself (mostly useful for tactics given the current state of his body), Mick (and his heat gun), Barry (and his powers), Danvers (and her powers), Detective Thawne (who Wells won’t kill), Iris, Snow and Ramon.

Of the latter four, Thawne and Iris are trained in conventional weapons, and Ramon has invented some sort of vibration-based gun he claims can stun people in a humane matter (he emphasized that three times over - whatever that DA told him has clearly stuck). Snow doesn't have any offensive capabilities, but she's a doctor with some emergency care training, and Len's not about to turn that down.

Especially given the fact that if his side doesn't stop bleeding soon, he's going to need some of that training to be employed on him.

"You good?" Barry asks when Len rejoins them.

"Peachy," Len tells him, and ignores the way Mick suddenly focuses in on him. Stupid tell, using a word he only uses when things are not, in fact, good; he should've remembered not to use it around Mick. "We have a location for Wells: he was last seen in the vicinity of Iron Heights."

"Wait," Ramon says. "Where we just put all our metas?"

"He was keeping them on purpose," Snow exclaims, realizing. She's not slow, that one; just a bit naïve. "They were always going to be Plan B - except now they're in Iron Heights, not STAR Labs, so he needs to go get them."

"And the rest of Iron Heights if he can," Len confirms, shifting a little bit to a more comfortable position on his crutches. "Barry, Danvers - can you take us all to the little hill right outside the Heights? One-by-one should be fine."

"Boss and I go first," Mick suddenly says. "Then the rest. Let's go."

Before Len can say anything, they're in sudden transit.

It takes about twenty seconds to reach their destination, which Len suspects is a polite attempt to go nice and slow by the speedsters but which only makes his side and leg throb.

Then he and Mick are alone, standing in the overarching shadow cast by the hulking hexagonal pit of despair that is Iron Heights.

Everything seems quiet from here, but that could be an illusion.

"Mick -" Len starts.

"You're injured but don't want to sit out the fight," Mick says. "I know."

Mick always does. Best partner ever.

"S'not why I wanted to talk to you, since I know I won't be able to change your stubborn-ass mind on it," Mick continues. "I wanted to check in on what I said earlier."

"What part?"

"About us still being partners. I mean, now that you're a cop and all that."

"Mick, as long as you still want to be partners, we're partners," Len says firmly. "I wasn't kidding about not picking the job over you again. If you don't wanna be partners with a pig, I get it. It's fine. I'll just quit my job."

Mick snorts. "Twenty years undercover and you'll just quit? Now?"

"Hey, it means I've got a decent resume, don't it?"

"Ex-thief, ex-cop, please hire me -"

"I'm sure that set of skills appeals to someone -"

Mick's laughing.

Len likes it when Mick laughs. He's missed it.

"Nah," Mick says. "Don't quit, not unless you want to. Hunting down bad cops is perfect for you. And I'll figure out some way that I can still be your partner."

Len grins at him. "Sounds like a plan, partner."

"Just do me a favor and don't die, boss."

"Says the guy who just woke up from a coma?"

"Hey, I got magic-future-tech-healed by the bad guy, I'm fine. You, on the other hand, are doing your healing the good old fashioned way, except you keep tearing your stitches."

"Shut up before anyone else gets here and hears you."

"I heard him," Danvers says, floating a few inches above them and still holding a dangling Ramon in one hand. "And I'm very disappointed in you."

"Crap," Len says. "Listen, Snow can give me a patch job, but there's no way I'm letting you guys go into Iron Heights without me, got it?"

Snow gets dropped off next. By Barry. Without another word.

"You're in trouble now," Mick crows. "Skirt's got moxie."

"Traitor," Len says, but it turns out Snow can in fact patch him up pretty quickly - a staple gun, some bandages, and a dermaplastic seal, plus instructions to keep from twisting too much if possible so that his back brace can try to keep his spine from popping out of place or something - so it turns out all right in the end.

While they're doing that, though, the rest of the team stares at Iron Heights.

"God, I hate this place," Mick says.

"It's - quieter than I thought it'd be," Danvers says.

"Have you never been?" Barry asks. "I - well, you know, with my dad - I've been plenty of times."

"Hate to break it to you, but you're the odd one there, Barry," Ramon says. "I'd never been here before I came to help install the meta dampening tech."

"Really? You invented…?"

"No, no," Ramon says, looking embarrassed. "I haven’t had time to come up with something new. What we did was basically just port over a mini-Accelerator, looping around the walls of the place – luckily the hexagonal hallways around the outside that the guards use for patrols is close enough to being round to work. It works on the same set of principles as the Particle Accelerator in STAR Labs does."

"Any chance that it'll block Wells' powers, too?" Iris asks.

"No, not unless he goes into one of the cells and closes the door. The entire system's not even noticeable until everyone's locked away - not enough energy. We're just running electrical energy through it, not accelerated particles, so it doesn't quite have the same effect."

"Probably for the best," Thawne says. "One Particle Accelerator explosion is more than enough."

"Yeah, that's true..."

“Does Wells know about what you’ve done?” Danvers asks curiously. “With the mini-Accelerator, I mean?”

Ramon frowns, considering it. “No, I don’t think so,” he says slowly. “This was after the whole chest-in-hand – er, that is, hand-in-chest –”

“Her eyes are up here, buddy,” Iris jokes.

Ramon flushes. “It was just a slip of the tongue!”

“I bet you want to slip someone some tongue –”

“Iris, leave him alone,” Barry says, hiding a smile. “Be nice. You’re making poor Kara blush.”

“He’s not my type,” Danvers says primly. “Sorry, Cisco.”

“I’m not actually interested,” he says crossly. “I like my women a bit more – dangerous.”

“You know Kara can lift cars, right? And fly? And probably crush your head like a nut? How is she not dangerous?”

“An aura of danger, you know what I mean…wait, how’d we get on this subject?”

“I don’t know, but I want off,” Thawne says dryly. “You were saying about whether Wells knows about the mini-Accelerator?”

“Yeah, right. No, I don’t think so. When the police showed up to STAR Labs, he wasn’t there, and they had me shut off the surveillance system before we started moving tech around. I certainly didn’t tell him, and I don’t think Caitlin did –”

“Wasn’t even aware of it,” Snow says, still focusing on Len.

“Right. So, yeah, no. I don’t think so."

"Okay, you're as good as I can get you," Snow tells Len. "Now up you go; we need you to tell us what the plan is."

"There is no 'plan'," Len says, getting back up. The painkillers Snow had brought with her are amazing. "We've gone well into the stage of the plan where everything goes off the rails."

"Len," Barry says, mildly censorious.

"What?" Len asks. "It's true. You want a plan? Okay. Plan is: we go inside, find Wells, subdue Wells. If necessary, fight other people in the process."

"I think I was happier without knowing that that was the plan," Ramon mutters.

"Second door forward?" Mick asks, focusing on practicalities. "That's the least guarded - though I gotta admit I never thought I'd be using that to break in."

"Yeah," Len says wryly. "We live in interesting times."

Getting into Iron Height isn't hard - they know where the door is, they know how it's opened, and Len can pop it in under thirty seconds (how's that for "out of practice", Danvers?) - but the lack of any security on the inside is a very bad sign.

"Dead?" Thawne asks, his face set. He's taking this ancestor stuff very seriously.

"Maybe, maybe not," Ramon says. "He's got superspeed and this is a prison, right? He might've just put the guards in the cells."

"Probably the only way they're going to survive a massive prison riot," Mick says. "Speaking of, I hear noise - main hall's this way."

"Is that the riot?" Iris asks. "Not to borrow Kara's words from earlier, but that's a lot quieter than I expected."

"It is," Len says, equally puzzled. "Let's go find out why."

Sure enough, the main hall was full to bursting with prisoners - far more than get let out in any one shift - but they're not really rioting. More like milling around confusedly.

Len and Mick share a perturbed look.

Still, there's only one way to find out what's up, so Len hobbles over to the first prisoner he even vaguely recognizes and smacks him on the leg with his crutch to get his attention. "What's going on?" he demands.

"Snart?" the guy - a con called Joey Monteleone, but mostly nicknamed Tarpit for reasons Len has never wanted to learn - asks, blinking at him. "Ain't you a cop now?"

"One with no sense of self-preservation," Mick growls. He might be right; Len'd totally forgotten that he can't just ask people (well, criminals) things anymore. "That a problem?"

Tarpit considers for a second. "It true you got a job fucking up corrupt cops for a living? Instead of snagging cons?"

"Yeah, it's true," Len says cautiously. That doesn't sound like the prelude to a call for lynching. "Not really interested in a job snagging cons, not unless they're doing something real bad where I can see 'em. Same rules as before, really."

"Cool," Tarpit says, then suddenly turns around and shouts, "Hey, everyone! Snart's here! He'll know what's up!"

And suddenly everyone is turning to look at him, the room breaking out into whispers.

Len sees Barry and Danvers both tense up, ready to run him away, but he waves at them to hold off. No one seems violent - yet.

In fact, most of the whispers that Len can hear don't concern the fact that he is (and was) a cop; they're more focused on his career as a very good freelance thief.

A very good thief that was pretty well known for not being affiliated with the Families.

"Listen, Snart, it true what they're saying about the Families taking over?" one of the cons asks.

"I mean," Len says, nearly falling over with surprise when Tarpit pushes him up onto one of the tables so as to better see and be seen, "I don't plan on letting 'em, but they’re certainly trying their best."

"And there's riots in the streets?" another one asks. "Anti-Family riots?"

"Well, yeah -"

"And they're calling in their cards? All of 'em?"

"Whatever they can, sure. But there's an amnesty -"

"An amnesty?"

"Only for anyone manipulated by the Families in the lead-up to this," Len warns. "Or, I guess, involved in the riots afterwards."

He's a little bewildered by the fact that everyone keeps looking to him for answers in this impromptu little Q+A.

Luckily, in his time of need, Mick is there for him.

"Hey, assholes!" he bellows. "You know what that means? That means no extra sentences for anyone fighting against the Families, and the Families too busy to call in any cards they have on you. So tell me - who wants to go fuck up some Families?"

The roar of enthusiasm is very near enough to flatten Len backwards.

Ah, Central City.

Where even the criminal underworld hates organized crime.

Len's never felt more at home.

It helps that the whispers (not really whispers, now) are about Len's recognized skill at prison escapes that don't end badly.

There are also, here and there, some comments about not wanting to work for that, quote, "yellow Family fucker".

Right.

"Can someone point me to where the asshole in yellow is?" Len calls. "And in the meantime, let's get you guys outta here - we've popped one door, but let's try to avoid a riot - nice and orderly exit, that's the trick of it - and while we're at it, does anyone know where the guards have gone..?"

The guards, it turns out, are in fact locked into the same cells the prisoners have been liberated from, in what Len assumes was meant as a cruel bit of irony but which probably ensured that they weren't murdered by vengeful criminals.

The rest of the exodus is pretty swiftly organized - Len makes them pair up in the buddy system, using their cellies as buddies, in order to make it a bit less chaotic, and it works like a charm - and before anyone really understands what's happening, he's being helped off the table and whisked off back to his task force to focus on their Wells problem as the criminals file out of the prison.

"We've been discussing the issue," Iris tells Len when he rejoins them. "The prisoners don't know where Wells is, but we're pretty sure we do."

"Oh? Where? The meta wing?"

"No," Ramon says. "We figure he won't want to risk being stuck in any of those cells, just in case; he probably got the metas out of there and took them with him."

"Took them with him - where?"

"Wing C," Barry says, voice unusually grim. "The low-security wing."

Len frowns.

"That's where Barry's dad is," Iris says, equally grim.

Ah.

Old Doc Allen. The good man, who was framed and sentenced to prison for a crime he did not commit - by Wells.

Who is obsessed with Barry.

Not good.

"Right," Len says. "So this is probably a trap, but we're going to have no choice but to spring it. All agreed?"

"With any luck, Wells won't be expecting all of us, and not this fast," Thawne says. "He's a planner, but we've thrown his plans off the rails; he's playing it all by ear now."

"Just means he's desperate," Mick says. "Desperate men are dangerous."

"Still, I don't see that we have a choice," Len says. "Let's go - er, in the interests of speed, Danvers, could you..?"

He ends up getting a piggyback ride from her while Mick carries his crutches.

It's humiliating.

"I could probably carry you bridal style," Barry offers oh-so-innocently. "If you wanted."

"Just because Mick has my weapons -"

"Crutches aren't weapons," Ramon objects.

"You'd be surprised," Danvers and Iris chorus.

"- doesn't mean I'm taking any lip from you," Len finishes, ignoring them. "So shut it."

Barry proceeds to mime zipping his mouth shut, though that doesn't get rid of the grin.

Getting close to their destination does that.

"His cell is this way," Barry says, looking down a deserted corridor. "Supposedly. But -"

"He's definitely not there," Danvers says. "Sorry, Barry. The only people here are in the main hall."

"How do you know that?" Ramon asks.

"Uh," Danvers says. "Would you believe me if I said X-ray vision?"

"What," Len, who knows what Danvers sounds like when she's being evasive, says. "Really?"

"As it happens..."

"We talking medical level x-rays," Mick asks interestedly, "or can you peep under peoples' clothing -?"

"No!"

"Quick denial," Mick says wisely. "You know what that means, right, boss?"

"Boss! Make him stop!"

"It means 'leave off teasing until we’re not in the middle of a firefight', Mick," Len says mildly. "We're checking the main hall next. Everyone got weapons out?"

"Except you," Snow says. "You're not fighting - no, not even on the crutches!"

"I'll keep that in mind in the event I have a choice," Len says dryly, getting off of Danvers' back and leaning back on his crutches. "But I'll try to stick to the back. We ready?"

"Ready," they chorus.

And then they walk into a trap.

Wells is lounging on an impromptu throne constructed shoddily out of prison tables, smirking at them, and all around him are the metas Len vaguely recognizes as being part of Barry's kidnapping.

They probably all bear a grudge.

A very reasonable grudge, but perhaps a less-than-timely one.

All but one of the current inhabitants of the main hall are metas. Only one exception: a cage, constructed out of twisted cell bars, placed immediately to Wells' left, and in that cage sits a terrified but defiant-looking Doc Allen.

Definitely a trap.

"Welcome, my friends, to my little hell on earth," Wells says. His smirk fades. "Kill them! Kill them all!"

The metas charge forward.

As the guy bringing up the rear, Len can see the battlefield unfolding almost immediately.

Barry disappears, replaced by a streak of yellow lightning, and a second later Wells, too, disappears, and the yellow and red lightning bolts zip around the room in perfect tandem.

Mardon - Len recognizes him - summons balls of ice into his hands, grinning meanly and throwing them at Thawne. Not a surprise, really; Thawne's Joe West's partner, and Mardon would know that. Unlike Iris, Thawne's a policeman; Mardon would consider him fair game. Thawne ducks away, shouting something about them not meaning any harm and coming in peace, but Len doesn't lay high odds on that approach actually working.

One of the metas turns into poison gas - Len remembers hearing about him - and flows forward, gaseous tentacles reaching out to strangle them all, but Danvers takes a deep breath and literally blows him back away from the others, flying forward to confront him one-on-one. It's still a little discordant, seeing his secretary (admin assistant) floating a few inches off the ground, still wearing her red skirt and mesh leggings and that ridiculous puppy-getting-ice-cream sweater she likes so much, her hands balled into fists and a fierce expression on her face, but Len can't help but grin in pride.

A second later, Mick steps up to join her, shouting, "I got this guy, go help the others!" and aiming a burst of his heat gun at Nimbus.

"But -"

"My gun only kills, Skirt, and the boss wouldn't want me to murder prisoners. But this guy's got a death sentence, so he's fair game for me."

Danvers nods her understanding and backs off, turning back to the fight just in time to snag Ramon out of the way of the guy shooting lasers out of his eyes.

Len wonders what name Ramon gave him.

"Deathbolt coming in hot!" Ramon shouts, solving that mystery. "Caitlin, watch out -!"

Snow, who was 'Deathbolt's next target, disappears.

Literally disappears - Baez, the only female-presenting meta (Len hadn't noticed the gender disparity before, he wonders why that is), appears next to Snow in a burst of smoke, grabs her around the waist, and they both disappear and reappear elsewhere, out of the line of fire.

"You saved me!" Snow exclaims.

"You gave me all your old medical textbooks and talked to me while I was stuck in the Accelerator," Baez says. "I'm still pissed at you, but you don't deserve to be - wait, Deathbolt? Why does he get 'Deathbolt' and I get 'Peek-a-Boo'?! What the hell, Ramon?!"

"He has laser eyes!" Ramon shouts back from where Danvers has dropped him off and where he's aiming his vibration gun at Deathbolt. He shoots off a burst, which Deathbolt ducks. "What was I supposed to call him?!"

"I don't care what you call him," Baez says indignantly. "I care what you call me! Peek-a-boo is a kid's game! Or a stripper name! I want a badass name!"

"Is now really the time -" Snow starts.

They seem to have Baez well in hand, and Ramon is now exchanging vibration blasts with Mr. Laser Bolts in a game of stalemate.

Iris -

Iris is fine. She has her hands on her hips and she's scolding a guy three heads taller than her, with steel skin, and much to Len's surprise it's working surprisingly well.

It helps that she clearly tasered him first - he still looks groggy.

Danvers, meanwhile, has flown over to confront the last meta, a relatively non-descript man in black with sunglasses; Len's not sure what his powers are, but he has no doubt Danvers can handle him.

That's all the metas handled.

Barry -

Barry's still not winning. He's keeping pace, barely, and he's keeping Wells' attention on him, but that's it.

Wells is still faster. Wells is still stronger.

Wells is still going to win, and then he's going to murder everyone else in the room at a speed that ensures no one but Barry and maybe Danvers even knows it's happening.

They won't be able to stop him.

This isn't a television show, where Barry could use the power of romantic love (Len), familial love (Iris, Doc Allen), or even platonic love (everyone else) to inspire him to greater speeds to squeak out a win.

Even Danvers' help can only do so much - she's admitted that she's out of practice, and now that Wells is anticipating her, he'll have thought of something.

They have to find another way to stop him.

They need something creative.

They need something out of the box.

They need -

What the hell is Charlie doing here?

He's peeking in through the door, barely visible, but to someone who knows him as well as Len does, he’s unmistakable.

Len hobbles himself over as quick as possible. "What the fuck, Charlie?" he hisses. "Get outta here! Get - why are you even in here?"

"Attempted assault," Charlie says, unperturbed. "Someone I invited home overreacted."

"You tried to eat them, didn't you."

"They didn't say no until we got there," Charlie replies, as if that makes any sense at all. "Anyway, I've got a message for you, from the cardboard brigade. Magpie said it's your bonus."

Len's eyebrows go up. "I'm listening."

"Magpie says to tell you that while most of what the Accelerator did was give people powers, but that there's a few people - joined the brigade recently - that seem to react badly. Like something's been taken away."

"Well, yeah," Len says. "That makes sense, I guess; you win some, you lose some -"

"She also said to tell you that Hartley Rathaway did or reviewed almost all of the construction on STAR Labs' version," Charlie continues. "Along with Francisco Ramon. All the hardware and tech, they knew it all in and out, just the two of them."

Len's about to ask why he cares when it suddenly hits him.

You win some, you lose some.

There's a mini-Accelerator built into Iron Heights. They already know that it dampens meta powers. If they get both Rathaway and Ramon on it, could they jury-rig it to try to undo the grant of powers it gave before?

Len has no idea if that's even remotely possible, but what the hell, it's worth a shot.

"Thanks, Charlie," he says. "Now go away, get somewhere safe."

Charlie disappears down the hallway.

Len turns back, but before he can do or say anything, a giant dining table comes crashing into the wall only a few feet away from him.

Danvers is standing there, her eyes bright red, her expression furious and deadly and aimed at -

Well, mostly aimed at the guy currently cowering at Len's feet.

Non-descript meta man of the unknown powers, now no longer wearing sunglasses indoors like an idiot.

"What did you do?" Len asks the guy.

"My powers," the guy squeaks. "I cause people to become enraged, which distracts them."

"You...you realize there's nothing else here for her to get distracted by, right? And that the major target of her rage would be you?"

"I realize that now!"

"Well, stop it! I need her for something."

"I can't stop it! She'll kill me!"

"At this rate, she's gonna kill you anyway," Len says dryly. "Here, listen, how about this: you undo it and I'll arrest you. Nice, safe police custody pending trial -"

"Deal! Deal!" the guy yelps as Danvers tears another table - longer than she is tall - off the ground, where it had previously been screwed down hard enough to resist the strongest felons' joint attempts to lift it up.

A few seconds later, Danvers is bright red with embarrassment, but not with metahuman-inspired rage. An improvement.

"Can you take him and that Deathbolt guy back to STAR Labs for the time being?" Len asks her. "And then bring me Hartley Rathaway. The cardboard brigade will know where he is."

"Sure," Danvers says, then flies up behind Deathbolt to pop him one on the head - rough, but effective - and disappears a second later.

"I had him on the ropes," Ramon, who most definitely did not, protests.

"Whatever," Len says, gesturing for him to come closer. "Listen, question: can we use the Accelerator here to create another dark matter pulse? Preferably reversed or something, to try to drain people's powers?"

"It doesn't work that way," Ramon objects. "This isn't Back to the Future, you can't just reverse the polarities and -"

He pauses.

"What?" Len asks.

"I mean, you can't do that," Ramon says slowly. "But you can cause another pulse, if you had enough energy. As much as I hate admitting it, Wells built the original Accelerator with the intention of it blowing up with dark matter the second it had enough power, and we didn't have any choice but to use that same design here."

"Wouldn't that just give them more powers?"

"It might," Ramon says. "But the original explosion put Barry into a coma for months, remember? That dark matter's a real shock to the system. Even if it would be giving him more powers rather than cancelling them out - which it might, who knows, dark matter's weird - it still might disable Wells for the time being. That's what you're thinking, right?"

"It is, yeah."

"Good idea, in theory, but two problems. A, I don't know everything about the system -"

"Danvers is going to get Hartley Rathaway," Len tells him, and has the amused pleasure of seeing Ramon pull a face.

"Yeah, that'll work," Ramon says through gritted teeth. "That guy was a total jerk, but he did know his stuff. Stupid, pretentious -"

"You can sue someone for torture and kidnapping, you know."

"- extremely intelligent person whom I'm going to be very nice to and work well with?" Ramon tries.

"That's better," Len says, suppressing a laugh. Now's not the time. "You said two problems - what's the second one?"

"We don't have enough energy to cause a pulse," Ramon says. "It's like I said earlier, we're only running electricity through the system, not -"

"Extremely fast-moving particles?" Len asks archly. "Like, say, those?"

He jabs a finger at the streaks of lightning still bouncing around the room.

One of which is his boyfriend.

"Oh," Ramon says. "Uh, yeah. That'd work. I - wait, wasn't that Wells' plan all along, though? For Barry to run through the Accelerator and power it for him to time travel with?"

"I have no idea," Len says, because the technical aspects of Wells' time travel plan mystify him. "But even if so, he was planning on STAR Labs, not the mini version you installed at Iron Heights - which, according to you, he doesn't even know about."

"Okay, that makes sense," Ramon says. "But - if they're both running through the system to power it, then there won't be any way to stop both of them from getting hit by whatever new pulse we create. Whatever happens to Wells will happen to Barry: they might both lose their powers, or get hurt."

"Yeah," Len says, all humor fading. "I know."

He swallows.

He doesn't want to say it, but he knows it's true.

"That's a risk Barry's just going to have to take," he says. "You know he'd agree, if we asked him. If it meant saving the city -"

"And stopping Wells," Ramon says. "Yeah. You're right."

He squares his shoulders.

"I'll do it."

[phoenixfire-thewizardgoddess]

why doesn’t the current employment system work?

easy, it’s a half-assed one-solution-fits-all approach made by rich people who have NEVER used the employment search system.

-

How does it work?

You want centrelink? You get assigned a job-search centre, there’s always 4-5 in even small towns now. It’s a lucrative business.

You’re told ‘search for 20-40 jobs per month’ based on your area. They have to be jobs you could reasonably do (one or two assholes made sure the whole system was tightened bc they’d apply for things they had no qualifications for). 

These are entered online, on a special governmental site. Failure to locate the right amount gets you a strike, or more than one.

Which is hard because there are only so many jobs in smaller towns, right?

So let’s say you have no luck, you hand in the 20 for that fortnight, and ‘report’ online to centrelink that you are following the rules.

They also make you do mandatory courses such as the 2-day ‘Resume Writing Course’ that you can do up to twice in 6 months. It’s as stupid as it sounds, and you learn nothing but that you hate the place.

Also, 3-day mandatory ‘Communication with People’. How to talk to people. Literally. 3 days of your life gone. Gee, wish I’d done some sort of degree around literally talking to people and using analysis... hmmm... 

They do not Recognise Prior Learning, at all. Because each person they make attend gets them more and more money.

-

New rules allow for them to identify a job you HAVE to apply for -even if you must write a new resume and cover letter. Which, in some cases, is a little fair.  Maybe you’re using one from years ago.

New rules can make them demand you call the HR of a certain place in front of them, to prove your resume went in, and to ask about the position. Of course, this will slap you on the Hell No list, but at least they’re satisfied.

New rules allow them to make you change your existing resume -e.g. they can demand you remove your degree/qualifications to make you more attractive to retail employers (always wary of taking on someone who might move on quickly).

That only works for 6 months these days.

- - - 

After 6 months, they send you on a Work-for-the-Dole assignment to a local charity.

They’re supposed to do risk assessments, and follow up on allegations of groping weirdoes and pedophilia (looking at you, Salvation Army*). But they don’t. [ *that person who did it was literally the Community Member of the Year until the truth of what the local SA was covering up came to light. Fucking creep of a man, so many flags that Jesus absolved him of.]

That nonsense injured two members of my family directly, as well as others; at the same place, at different times, and both were deemed ‘our fault’. Despite that the first incident involved an unqualified asshole making a teenage boy hold a fridge, then deliberately dropping the truck tray fast so it yanked the ligaments in the kid’s shoulder so badly it took 6-12 months to heal with physiotherapy.

And the second time, a bookshelf held up with STICKY-tape was broken by a customer, and fell off slamming into my knees and feet, causing untold agony... resulting in a fractured patella in one knee and severe bruising/clicking/weird shit that persists even a year and a half later... but that was my fault.

-----------------------

In short, each person is assigned up to 55 hours per fortnight that they have to undertake with a charity of some formation. OR ROADWORK - they can also make you do roadwork. Like they tried to do to the just-healed teenage boy the minute his medical exemption period was up, even though he couldn’t raise his arm all the way yet. It’s Making Money, not Helping People Find Jobs.

They also made an app, that the person attending MUST download (even if you have to delete just about every single other thing on the cheap phone to make room for it).

It’s called Jobapp or some shit. Basically, when you get there the manager or head volunteer (often tech illiterate) HAS to print a QR code for you, and only you.

You sign into the app, this takes a while bc it’s not well designed and cuts out often. Finally, you find the hard-to-locate-and-ambiguously-named part where you can ‘sign in’ as being at your ‘activity’.

If you’re there all day, and you will be, there are Two Codes.

You scan them to separate locations in the app. And boom, you’re registered as there. It only takes one missed QR code or app failure to land you in shit, though.

And then you spend all day cleaning, on the till, arguing with people over op shop items bc they feel certain prices are too high even if it’s less than a third the real price. And you’re not allowed to sit or chill or anything... unless you’re a volunteer. They can get away with murder.

So that goes on for six months, slowly draining the will to live from your bones.

All the while, you still have to do the 20-40 jobs things and find time for their Training Modules that you already did but hey, you’re a moneymaker. Sometimes they will NOT count the training days towards your Total 55hours per fortnight, so you lose the one free day a week you had...

---------------

It sucks... but I think the other thing we should mention is that this doesn’t really exclude any jobseekers.

Disabled? Elderly? Medical Issues? Can’t speak english very well? Other issue?

Get in there. We get paid to supervise your activity!

Like, there are a lot of people doing job seeking activities who are unfit for the position they are forced into. For many reasons.

-----------------

The thing I found laughable was that they could apply for you, without your knowledge, and if that resulted in an interview you HAD to go. If they feel you tanked the interview, they can penalise you...

There are ways to tank an interview, though. Trust me.  Especially for telemarketer interviews, just have an awkward phone manner, like you’re trying but it’s Weird. And boom, no. [Not that there’s anything wrong with that job, but they signed me up for it without my permission and some dangerous clients worked there, I would not have been safe, they didn’t care tho].

Also, you can’t apply for certain positions for someone with a degree. Our ability is measured in the way we respond to the questions and assessment requests... you can force us to apply to them, but trying to write in for us is just ridiculous. 

They might also call and call and call anyone on your applied-for list that they directed you to apply for... which of course, can tank your chances. Very annoying.

And if you get a job, on your own merit, they take credit for it immediately. I assume there’s a bonus or something.

- - - - - 

The agency I was sent to, MaxEmployment, was actually THROWN OUT OF ANOTHER STATE FOR COMMITTING FRAUD AGAINST THE GOVERNMENT.

So naturally, QLD said ‘yeah, let’s have that one’.

M.E. allegedly used to claim they had held mass training events with 80+ people every few weeks, doing those awful little courses listed above.  Except, on inspection by confused governmental officials..,. they discovered the room would barely hold 5-6 people including a trainer. Therefore, fraud.

Also, M.E. has failed to catch fake-ads (resulting in free 2-hour work ‘trials’ for a certain cafe that went over a year, fraud) and even sent an unaccompanied 15 year old girl to a fucking BROTHEL after identifying a clearly-not-for-an-admin ad for ‘an admin’ at that location.

IT’s always MONEY.

--------------------

If you are in charge of the poor, the ill, the desperate... then it should not be for money incentives. You should get a flat wage and that’s it.

Why? Because then people who are actually able to do the job, and willing to help people, will do it. Not just people who see dollar signs when they look at the tired, the unemployed and the ill.

And they need to actually fire bad people.

Let me tell you about this woman I had to deal with in a 6 month break from my fucking uni degree due to illness. Automatically, they threw me into job seeking.  I didn’t have a voice for like 2 months, but that didn’t matter.

This huge, hulking, rotund potato of a woman, balding ranga and a face as mean as a bulldog’s arsehole... was my caseworker person. She was a nightmare.

I would find 20 jobs, and hand in the sheet, she would yell at me, that I was being smart and she wouldn’t accept that. I once applied for nearly 65 jobs in one fortnight out of desperation, because she kept having my centrelink cut off without warning if I refused to complete another sheet.

The other caseworkers never stopped her. The manager would not hear my complaints or concerns. She could do what she wanted.

And she knew I could not stop her. The one thing about the situation that kept me apart form others there was that, if I absolutely couldn’t take it, my parental unit said we would ‘manage’ until I went back to uni the next year. Others were unable to do that, and so, this absolute cunt of a woman... held sway.

She had no class, no charm and no people skills. She screamed at the top of her lungs at a tiny asian lady who a) didn’t have a great grasp on english at the time, and b) did not understand all the big words this self-important ranga was using just to sound intelligent.

Apparently the solution to ‘I do not understand’ is raise your voice, to screaming, and get angry. NONE of her colleagues even looked up at her.  Jesus, if one of my colleagues was yelling like that I’d have dragged them out of the room by their fucking hair, like what the HELL was that about.

Was she stopped or fired? No. Was she transferred to some unsuspecting town? Yeah.

I don’t trust organisations who will not admit they hired the wrong person, and fire them. It means they’re hiding shit.

--------------

TL;DR - The whole system is a disaster.

They claim more people are employed, but they also count people on those mandatory work-for-the-dole things, which skews the unemployment number to less than it is.

It is exhausting to deal with and its no wonder so many fucking people are so depressed death seems like the only solution.

And it was all thanks to a handful of people rorting the system; the idiots up top went into red-alert levels of panic and upended the system to punish people.

AND THAT’S NOT EVEN FUCKING TALKING ABOUT THE NEW BASICS CARD SYSTEM

which is nonsense

sure, limit what people can get to groceries and certain stores, including op shops or whatevs. can’t get smokes or alcohol on the cards...

have to have ID for the cards...

but like, you think people won’t find ways to get the smokes, drugs and alcohol they want? you’ve just ensured that they either pawn their things, or do degrading acts to get those things...

so give yourselves a moralistic high-five, people who decided this system was a great idea (primarily bc they and their family/social circle will never need to use it), because you’ve cause d so many more problems than you solved...

[regrettablewritings]

Okay so I got asked earlier about elaborating on my feelings towards Fantastic Beasts 2...

Disclaimer: These ramblings are my personal feelings on the most recent addition to the HP franchise, Fantastic Beasts 2: Crimes of Grindelwald. You needn’t agree with them, but I have a right to express my feelings concerning the film and how it handled its story, its editing, characterization, and motivations. If you liked the movie, great! I didn’t. And here is where I will dispense why. Also, as if it bears mentioning, spoilers.

So...There’s a lot to unpack here. And, unfortunately, most of it is not fantastic beasts – mainly because aside from a few creatures that only exist as trailer fuel, the story’s pretty much departed from the importance of creatures and the allegories they can potentially offer. I mean, on one hand, I understand that it must be difficult to make five films revolve continuously around weird creatures and Newt’s efforts to utilize them and be the magical Crocodile Hunter. But on the other, they’ve made, like, five films centered around people reviving dinosaurs so this frankly isn’t impossible if done with good planning.

This, in my opinion, was not done with good planning. Rather than be done with the intention of being a suitable continuation to the promising first film, CoG wound up being a jumble of poor editing, nonsense twists, and character bastardizing to name a few.

But before I get into that, let me make it clear that I didn’t hate everything about it. The movie had some good qualities about it such as:

Theseus is actually a good brother. For years, we were kinda inched towards the idea that because he was the socially favored Scamander brother, that he must be a golden boy and even a bit arrogant. Newt’s impressions of him didn’t exactly help, either. But what we wound up with was a well-meaning if a bit primmer guy who’s affectionate (“a hugger” according to Newt), controlled, and ultimately does love his younger brother even if he doesn’t necessarily see eye to eye with him. I was talking with a friend about him and their relationship makes a bit more sense and even gains more points if you consider how Newt is coded as autistic: Theseus doesn’t get his brother and admittedly does wish he’d calm down, but he clearly isn’t comfortable with others looking down on Newt for his oddities.

Plus, Newt stepping out of his comfort zone to give Theseus a hug in his time of need is especially heartwarming even if in the face of something tragic.

Leta Lestrange being an example of how Slytherins aren’t all prejudiced assholes, rather they are characterized by their ambition and cleverness rather than the evils that can result from those traits going untamed.

Newton Scamander is the only person to make “your eyes look like salamander eyes” romantic.

“WALK WITH ME!”

Niffler babies!!

And, uh . . . yeah, that’s it. Everything else either left a bad taste in my mouth or punched me in the brain. So without any further ado or necessary order, let me just air my grievances and get this one-ton pain off my chest:

Too many storylines. I know this was a common complaint directed at the first installment of the series, but here, it’s really evident because we’re following Newt and Jacob following Tina who’s following Credence who’s following a trail and eventually following Grindelwald and Yusuf who’s following Tina to follow Credence and Grindelwald who’s not exactly following Credence but whatever then we got Leta who’s not necessarily following anyone but holy shit that’s without delving into the respective meat of all of the A, B, C, D, E, and so on plots

Queenie. Just. Queenie. What did they do to our favorite blonde Goldstein sister?! In the first movie, Queenie was established as being the more openly soft sister. Yes, she was more emotional than Tina, but it was never to the point of her actually making stupid decisions – especially because it was proven that the airheadedness was all a ploy and that Queenie’s actually pretty smart and intuitive (you know, when not reading minds). Which makes her decision to bewitch Jacob into marriage the first sign that something was wrong. The thing that made their attraction to one another in the previous film unusual yet still enjoyable was that it signified that not all magic-doers in America were against interacting with No-Majs and a potential allegory for interracial marriage, given how her initial intrigue towards Jacob as a No-Maj quickly evolved into genuine intrigue for him as a person.

By the time of CoG, however, this care has evolved into obsession wherein Jacob’s treated more like a commodity rather than an actual person. Yes, he does return Queenie’s feelings, but robbing him of his consent regardless is just an awful thing to have done to him. Jacob’s unwillingness to marry Queenie isn’t one born of fearing commitment; it’s because as much as he loves her, he hates the idea of her suffering for his lack of magic even more. Unfortunately, to Queenie’s now apparently rapid mind, this translates as him being too afraid and that it’s up to her to make any moves – moves that are highly concerning for everyone, let alone somebody who displayed such consideration in the previous film.

Going off of this, her decision to join Grindelwald is just . . .? The man will literally have people like the one you claim to love killed. Maybe not all, but the ones that do survive will likely not live well. This includes Jacob. So what sense is there to this?! And this is without considering she can read minds

Credence. I mean, I think everyone was sort of prepared for him to do what he did in the end, but actually watching it honestly made me realize how stupid it was for him to do that. I mean, you could argue that as far as he’s concerned, Graves and Grindelwald are two different people, as whatever was left of him managed to wisp away before the big Scooby Doo reveal. So as far as he may know, Graves did him wrong; Grindelwald is only trying to help. But even still, I hate what they’re doing to this guy.

Going off this . . . The whole Aurelius thing. I’ll admit that by that point, I was dead in my seat so I wasn’t sure if I heard the specifics, but did Grindelwald specify that Aurelius was Albus’ brother? Because if not, he’s just a relative in the Dumbledore family. Which kinda defeats the previous claim of Credence’s importance to the wizarding world imo.

Newt’s sudden infatuation with Tina comes off as clumsy. Yeah, it’s cute, but it seems so out of place. Sure, we can assume during the time skip that they kept in touch decently, but I sincerely doubt that in that amount of time, Newt managed to fall for her, let alone to the extent that he displays. I know I keep referencing the first film, but considering they’re, you know, supposed to be part of the same franchise, it’s key. But in the first film, the attraction is hinted at in the lightest of ways. We know they’ll get married, but that doesn’t mean they need to be immediately into one another, much less to the extent wherein Tina displays jealous tendencies and Newt is full of Freudian slips about how attractive he finds her. This wouldn’t seem too out of place later down the line, but to have that already just seems misplaced.

The situation regarding Yusuf and Leta’s mother and Corvus Lestrange . . . If this was supposed to be a sort of reference to the r@pe of black women from white men, yeah, it happened, but I’m not so sure how I feel about it being used here, mainly because it winds up contributing to Leta’s “tragic mulatto” trope. However, it also makes me wonder if it would be as intensely questionable if Leta’s mother had been white but that doesn’t really make it any better considering that the marriage was nonconsensual and resulted in death by childbirth.

This is more of a nitpick, but it bothered me how a lot of important exposition seemed to come from the mouths of those bearing hard-to-decipher accents.

This is just what I remember and what I condensed by the by. There’s probably a few other gripes I have rattling around up in the old noggin but I’m already exhausting myself here and this is already a pretty damn long list as is. But I the thing is, I don’t think I would’ve been this frustrated if they had just waited to do some of these things in a later film.

Some of these motivations and whatnot would’ve made more sense a little ways down the line after putting the characters through situations that pushed them to do the things they do. For example, Queenie’s nonsense decision to join a man who’d rather her lover’s kind mostly die doesn’t make sense in a movie that we acknowledge has had a timeskip, but doesn’t show what occurred within the timeskip. Choosing to join Grindelwald should be what happens after the audience sees her struggle to maintain the relationship. We need to have a reason to understand her dive into a darker mindset. The audience needs to see a woman who has been through trial after trial and snuck high and low to little success just to be with the one she loves, not a yandere flapper girl in the making.

Likewise, we need to see how Credence put himself back together. If the sequel to Fantastic Beasts couldn’t showcase that, they needed to at least dedicate time to Credence familiarizing himself with the magic world. The dude was a stranger to it all before, how did he wind up finding a magical circus? They’re not exactly lying about, especially in America, so who did he find or who found him and brought him into the wizarding world? I wanna see that, not him suddenly knowing how stuff works. (Going off of that, how did a mind and body-consuming form of dark magic go from a means of death to basically an Overwatch Ultimate? An Obscurus isn’t like a Hulk serum you can whip out and reel back in, that shit is deadly and nearly wiped out half of Manhattan.)

Anyway, by showing Credence’s further involvement in the magical world, he can be introduced to further situations that may arguably make him more pushed toward Grindelwald (even though it’d still be kind of dumb no matter what way you slice it). Having him suddenly join to find out who his parents were just feels . . . weak. Even for Credence, who’s in a constant state of vulnerability.

Like, Jo. Joanne. JK. Ms. Rowling. Please: I get that you’re trying to live up to the hype or what have you, but try not trying. Your stuff flowed better when you were just trying to tell a story, not hash out a story with intent on it becoming famous. I get wanting it to thrive from a business standpoint (anyone who pretends they wouldn’t want their shit to make beaucoup money is a damn lie), but it just doesn’t work when you’re forcing it.

So . . . yeah, that’s the gist. There’s definitely people who can say it more eloquently but whatever, you chose to read my take on it, so you got it. Like I said before, if you liked Crimes of Grindelwald, that’s fine. I like quite a few films others find trouble enjoying. I just didn’t like this one.

[mythlokisuggestion-blog]

What do you think of Tom Hiddleston and mcu!Loki?

I’m technically not allowed to watch any marvel movies according to one main-clause (followed by a very vulgar relative clause) in Idris Elba’s restraining order against me so obviously I watched them and while I obviously missed some of the major plot-details because Idris Elba wouldn’t let my eyes go I will say this:

Tom Hiddleston is clearly a great actor with a really great range and the entire journey of him losing his eyebrow-pencil but finding that Jeff Goldblum loves him nevertheless is very dramatic and gripping, but even for someone whose spectrum does indeed cover the range his does, it’s still visibly difficult for him to keep up with the inconsistencies of the movies and this is something that really affects the character of Loki strongly. Personally, I’d go so far as to say that there are only two movies out of the five that give Loki actually inherent development (as in: force them to make a decision of their own instead of just being thrown at the plot like a forgotten towel into the wind) and those are Thor I and Thor: Ragnarok. Obviously, I can see you argue that Thor: Dark World is about Loki re-joining forces with Thor to avenge their mother, but that’s just man-pain. Loki never makes their own decision to work with Thor but there is no doubt that even at their deepest, darkest moments they would have gone after the murderer of their mother. That’s not development. It’s just putting the character in a position where there’s only one obvious solution anyway. Character development puts a character in a position where we don’t know how they’d act and we either see them make a decision and learn it was the wrong one or we see previous character development come to fruition with them choosing something one wouldn’t have initially expected like I did when I first heard about Dirty Chai which immediately meant I wanted to drink Dirty Chai except I noticed I don’t like it so now when people offer to offer me “A Beverage Mixed Out Of Two Beverages That Clearly Shouldn’t Be Mixed?” I say no which is not what I would have said three hours ago. That’s growth. Asking me if I’d murder a giant who wants to eat children on the other hand. I would always have given the same answer at any point in my life.

The other protest you’ll make is Infinity War. But that has no development either, it’s just a solution to the development we’ve seen in Ragnarok and I almost feel like the script was written before Waititi had written his or maybe they hadn’t bothered to read it or maybe they simply didn’t care or they weren’t sure their audience would have seen that and just wanted to make sure that we’re all caught up and I found it really cringy for some reason? I dunno, I feel it could have been handled more delicately than just ticking off every aspect of Loki’s struggle that a series of inconsistent movies had thrown at them. Especially, and I know it’s an unpopular opinion, the whole: “We have a Hulk line.” Like. That’s the last relationship I cared about.

Things that would have interested me:

Loki and Thor talking about Jötunheim

Valkyrie and Loki fixing things up after their intrusion of her mind in Ragnarök

Bruce and Loki talking about the invasion of Earth and maybe resolving what had happened between them and Thanos to make them do that.

Loki reconciling their love for fruit-y cocktails with the overreliance on artificial sweetener on the Grandmaster’s ship

Maybe it’s especially the ‘of Jötunheim’ line that bothered me. Obviously, me being of Jötunheim the first Thor movie wasn’t a mere warning about the consequences of climate change (you thought Day After Tomorrow scared you lol?) but as you know there’s a not-so-ancient law of your people to abandon the children you do not wish to keep. (usually children with disabilities) and this actually ancient Loki has an actual ancient law that says Finder’s Keepers and Finder’s Raisers and Finder’s Cherishers of Babies Forever so obviously the whole storyline about Loki being abandoned by their parents did resonate with me deeply and that’s why it bothered me that it was the most poorly handed in the five movies. It’s not that I mind that I see the subject addressed although I wished they had gone out of their way to show that this was an actual practice of the ancient Norse cultures (and many others) instead of just making it a plot-point because I feel like it would have given their movie more relevance, considering that there were actual terms and practices surrounding it. Also, with Odin being a very unreliable narrator, it would have given the viewers a better context for what is true and what isn’t because many aspects of the adoption remain really obscure. It’s never really dealt with. I mean, the first movie explicitly makes the adoption the stepping stone of Loki’s story-arc with Odin handling multi-racial adoption so poorly that they grow up groomed to detest their own race to the point where even for little children the idea of genocide is acceptable and glorified. And obviously, the first movie ends with them throwing themself to their death off the Bifröst so in a storyline encompassing five movies that would make a good cliffhanger or maybe bridge-over-black-hole-hanger in which the next logical step of the narrative would be the confrontation with Thor about Loki being of the race they’ve been raised to detest.

And that’s where we get to the inconsistencies of the movies and how the affect Loki’s characterisation so much. We never see Thor actually learn about this. We take his word – nay, Loki’s assumption for it that Odin, a proven unreliable narrator, has told Thor. We don’t know how that went, we don’t know how Thor coped with that knowledge, whether he questioned his own behaviour, how it affected his view of their sibling etc.  We don’t even know for sure Frigga knows where Loki is from and who their parent is – in fact, her relationship to that secret is one of the poorest handled plot-points in the entire series but you didn’t ask about that so back on topic. I will later say something on the subject of between movies vs. in movies but what matters is: We never have that confrontation. We never see Loki deal with their Jötun form in the Avengers and you’re like: ok cut them some slack, they had to force a lot of plot between Tony Stark’s one-liners so actual characterisation of one of the like four interesting villains that give the MCU such a giant head start over the DCU (two of which they don’t even really own). And you say to yourself: Ok they’re going to pick it up in the Dark World. And I’m not going to go into the misogynist implications of killing Frigga, but just say we get a lot of narrative nonsense that is a) Fridging her to further Loki’s man-pain and b) leaving the main-motivator of Loki’s as a villain (the struggle with their adoption) at that dungeon shouting match, unresolved. It absolutely robs avenging Frigga as Loki’s supposed main-motivation for redemption of any and all meaning or at least makes it so obscure that we can’t tell its exact meaning. Especially because their sacrifice (and I will not get into the annoying idea that a villain must die to be redeemed bc I’m a villain and find it offensive) was also spontaneously changed long after the filming had actually ended.

And there again, next inconsistency. We don’t know whether they faked their death on purpose (and if they did how long they had been planning it and whether it was all a big escape-and-take-over-Asgard-attempt) or whether they thought they were dying which means that their sacrifice was meaningful after all but it’s once again not resolved. And I mean, I’d prefer to think it was, but still. Remember when I said I was going to get back to the idea of between the movies vs. in the movies? I get back to that now because I’m not a Marvel writer: The most interesting things happen to Loki between movies and not in them. I’m bolding this because I’m a bold person but it’s also the main-issue I have with the Thor-movies despite me generally standing on the side that they’re actually among the better Marvel movies, no matter what edgy Youtubers say on the subject, but just fall flat on the perceived intended audience (male fanboys who feel they could do and say anything if only they had the power to force people to put up with it which is technically true without consequences which is not true) because Thor’s main-character arc is about him overcoming the issues and character-traits as flaws that make many other MCU-characters so ‘cool’ and ‘funny’.

We get the same with Loki dealing with their heritage-issues. At the beginning of Ragnarök they’ve magically resolved them. Or have they? Or are they just weaponizing Odin ‘outing’ them at their fucking trial (which was also filmed after the movie was made) I mean, in a way I like that Taika Waititi focussed Thor’s and Loki’s reconciliation on them overcoming their main-problem of all movies – trust – and not the initial problem that had set them apart - Loki’s jealousy when they realised that they never had a place in their own world - that had been abandoned for so long now. Especially considering that what sparked even the revelation of Loki’s true heritage was their distrust for Thor whom they didn’t trust to be a good king – and were justified. All that is, for once, resolved with Thor becoming a good king and Loki trusting them.

So personally. If you had just ended their storyline there it would have been fine. Maybe give us the damn hug and some talk about the Jötun issue and leave it at that. But then Infinity War rolled around and I’m not going to get into the can of political worms that is killing of half a ship of refugees in the current social climate because it was a movie about killing off people at random for others to survive and that’s an entire swimming pool of worms that the can is just swimming in slowly drifting into the distance, but it was just. Frigga’s death x10. We didn’t need it, it addressed a new thing about Loki’s storyline that will never be developed – their relationship with Thanos and the actual factors motivated by it – and as always left it unresolved. Thor, being the supposed centrum of these movies – will never know about it, most likely. I mean, we’ll apparently get some flashback and time-travel in Avengers 4 but I don’t have high hopes that something will be resolved then and I hope we at least get a good moping scene from Thor. It’s almost ironically that while Thor doesn’t know about the exact background of Loki working with Thanos and just maybe knows we-don’t-know-how-much about his sibling’s actual heritage, he seems to know exactly how dead they are. Because these movies are so inconsistent that he got to straight-up tell the audience that Loki is dead when it makes no sense because obviously choking on a grape kills them and not being stabbed through the heart. Which brings me to the next topic:

Their powers. Me being an avid magic-user who can do everything but turn into birds I’m very interested in that. Of course, we’ve got this big difference between comics-Loki and movies-Loki with MCU-Loki being significantly weaker and significantly more knife-focussed. And that’s fine. But their powers are also so fucking inconsistent. As a baby they can pull off a full-conversion into an Aesir but as a grown-up they can’t even make a solid copy of themselves? Sometimes illusions dissolve at mere contact but when they cover themself with it they can hold for four years are you telling me that no one ever brushed against them for four years? What about their clothes are they solid? Also, Loki when he’s visiting Thor when he’s under arrest by SHIELD seems to shift between visible and invisible and solid and not-solid which is something that would have come in handy at various other places in the movies but wasn’t used. We know that Loki can turn themself and others into animals but again we only hear that talked about but never actually see it employed when it would be useful. Also being Jötun can they employ ice-magic because that shit looks useful or only with the Casket and why didn’t they take the Casket is it because they resolved the issue and don’t want to revisit it or because the wound is still open or any of the other thousands of things you didn’t resolve??? The aspect about this handwave-y magic stuff isn’t so much that it bothers me, particularly because we know that Frigga, the most relevant relationship they have aside from Thor, is the one who taught them magic so it’s not like there isn’t an interesting basis for this subject to build upon.

I mean this all sounds like a lot of complaining but it’s also because I really liked the character that I can actually be bothered to get upset about these things. And the thing is, sometimes I feel like the things that annoy me are the things the writers do on purpose and the aspects I like are purely circumstantial. Like that scene about them standing on a street yelling stuff about submission all-dressed in leather in a reputed to be rather homophobic part of a country? Iconic stuff. The fact that they wear as many layers at all times and cover up as much as they can? Obviously a common villain trope and a common decision but for a character feeling so at odds with their own body (a storyline you couldn’t be bothered with for four movies in case you remember MCU) just fuel for headcanons. That fancy leather get-up clearly hand-crafted with golden pieces added paired…with THAT wig? Iconic. Tbh reason for concern too. Like I see that Loki like 3 times a day when they go to that Lush right beside my favourite spot for arguing with pigeons and my hair still looks better than theirs even with the pigeons nesting in it. I’m not 90% sure that the whole sweaty Christmas Tree look Loki had in Avengers was all to make them seem more villainous or at least to be attributed to how ‘manic’ and ‘insane’ they are but actually gave people material to be super-detailed in their ideas about how they were tortured by Thanos which would actually be interesting. There are also a lot of characters that it would be interesting to see Loki interact with that they don’t ever share a scene with in the Bravest Crossover Event Of All Times.

That’s not to say that I don’t like their interpretation, I do, but I just feel like if they had focussed on fewer subjects and stuck with them through the movies instead of throwing new pain at them (and at Thor) with every installation the whole thing would have been more interesting and satisfying in the end. This way they just forced the fans to figure out stuff for themselves. I notice that I only spoke of Tom Hiddleston as an actor and not as a person and I want to assure you his restraining order is very effective too.

[i-love-marvel3000]

Traveler Chapter 2: Trial run

Bucky Barnes X Reader (female)

A/N: Italicized words are words spoken to yourself, in your head. The story was inspired by a prompt list post from @super-marvel-imaginesxoxx and i’m trying to wright every saying somewhere into the story. Hope you guys like it. Id also like to recognize @hood-rogers21 my best friend who let me bounce ideas off of and edited these. Also I added some new powers you have, which you will find out about in this chapter (i kinda based the powers off a show called the magicians, but tweaked them to be my own). Also if you’d like to be tagged in future chapters just send me an ask, PLEASE LEAVE FEEDBACK :)

Summary: Your a mutant with the power of astroprojecting and have y/e/c cat eyes. You work at a pizzeria and are given a delivery to the Stark Tower where Tony ends up giving you his card and saying he’d be in touch.

Warnings:  none, language? (changes per chapter)

Word Count: 1608

You had been practicing astroprojecting since you woke up, which was about 3 hours ago, since you didn’t have to go into work today. You continued to try and pick up the book on the edge of your table, concentrating as much as you can but your fingers keep going straight through it. You sigh in frustration and punched the table, causing the book to fall of the table and onto the group. You gasp in excitement that you actually caused something to happen. You go to try and pick up the book when you start hearing a ringing sound. You glance around before realizing its your phone in the real world. You close your eyes and in seconds your back into your body sitting criss-cross on the floor, opening your eyes. You quickly answer the phone and bring it up to your ear, “hello?” “yes, hello, is this miss y/l/n?” You nod then internally laugh at yourself for nodding since she cant see you nod through the phone, “yes, are you Pepper?” “Yes I am, I’m calling you to discuss a meeting time for a trial exercise.” “I’m free today if we can do it now, if not I can talk to my boss and get another day off.” You here some muffled words through the phone, as if she’s asking someone else a question then you hear her voice again, “Today is fine, can you be here in 15 minutes?” “Yes, totally,” you say as you get up. “excellent, we’ll see you in 15 minutes then, come to the training room.” The phone call ends and you quickly put your shoes on then grab your keys to your car and are about to head out when you have an idea.

You head back into your apartment, sit back down and concentrate on were your wanting to go, picturing the kitchen of the Stark Tower, and in an instant your sitting criss-cross on top of the table in the Stark Tower. You hear a grumble, “uhh not you again.” You open your eyes and see Bucky sitting at the table right in front of you, “sorry,” you say as you climb off the table. “How did you do that?” Bucky grudgingly asks, curiosity getting the better of him. You shrug, “I teleported here, I’m a Traveler.” You glance around then ask, “Can you direct me to the training room? I don’t remember were it is.” Bucky doesn’t answer you, wanting you to just leave, regretting asking the question. You roll your eyes and as you walk out of the kitchen you turn back and say, “I understand you’re giving me the cold shoulder and I just wanted to inform you it’s very effective.”

You start heading down the direction of were you headed the other day you were here and end up seeing Peter walking down the hall towards your direction. “Peter, hey, can you direct me to the training room is, i’m kinda lost.” Peter nods, “totally y/n, I’ll just take you there, its not that far.” Peter turns around the way he was coming from and you follow him, “thank you.” You both turn down another hall, “Ya, no problem y/n.” Once at the end of the hall Peter opens the doors to his left, “here we are, the training room.” As he looks inside he notices Tony, Pepper, and Steve all in there then he turns to you, “do you have a trial exercise?” You nod as you start to enter the room, “ooh, can I watch?” You shrug, “sure.” He smiles excitedly and enters the room with you, closing the door behind him.

You walk over to Tony, Pepper, and Steve. “Hello miss y/l/n, I’m Pepper, we spoke on the phone yesterday, thank you for coming. Tony has told me a little bit about you and we’ve asked you here today to see the extent of your abilities. We know you can teleport, can you display that for us?” You nod then turn to Peter and he looks at you questionable, “do you trust me?” you ask him as you extend your hand to him, as he nods and hesitantly puts his hand in yours you, you can instantly feel all his emotions but you push them away as you concentrate on envisioning being on the roof of the building and within seconds you and Peter are gone. Peter looks around and you laugh at his freaked out wanting to puke expression, “sorry, should have warned you, first couple times make you nauseous. Ready to go back?” He quickly lets go off your hand, “I wasn’t prepared for this, so i’m actually good, I’ll get myself back there.” You shrug with a smile, “suit yourself,” and a second later you were gone and back into the training room. You look at the six eyes looking at you questionably, Steve speaks up, “wheres Peter?” You let out a little chuckle, “oh, he’s on the roof, he decided not to be teleported back, I forgot to mention teleporting can make you nauseous your first couple of times.” Steve and Pepper nod while Tony asks Friday where Peter was to double check, Friday replied back, “he’s on the roof ser.”

Pepper looks at you impressed then asks, “Sam and Clint are in the other room next to us discussing something, Tony can here then through a bluetooth in his ear and we know what there wearing, but can you tell us what they are wearing and what they are saying?” You nod then ask, “are you wanting me to astroproject or just look throw there eyes?” Pepper looks at Tony and he shrugs then looks back at you, “you can look through other peoples eyes?” You shrug, “ya.” “okay, astroproject into the other room for now while I tell Steve to go somewhere and when your done i’ll have you look through Steves eyes.” You nod and close your eyes as you leave your body. You look at everyone the walk over to a wall and walk straight through it, you laugh as you listen to what Clint and Sam are arguing about, you quickly take in what there wearing then close your eyes and when you open your eyes your back in your body. “Clint is wearing a plain white t-shirt with black jean and a neckless and Sam is wearing an olive v-neck t-shirt and dark jeans. Oh and they’re arguing about who would win in an arm wrestle, Thor or Hulk, Sam says Hulk and Clint says Thor.” Tony nods his head as Pepper looks at him to see if that was correct.

“Okay, now tell us wear Steve is by looking through his eyes.” Pepper says as Peter walks back into the training room standing back and watching. You look at him as he enters then back at Pepper and nod. You close your eyes and as your eyes open you are looking at a new scenery. You start saying everything your seeing, “It looks like he’s in someones room, I see the Winter Soldier in front of him on his bed. He just threw a bunch at Steve. Steve has him pin—ahhhh!” You fall to your knees and grab your head as pain shoots through it but just as fast as it came its gone.

You look up to everyone huddled around you with concerned looks on there face. “You alright y/n” Peter asks holding out his hand to help you up. You don’t take it and push yourself up from off the ground. Tony looked at you questioning, “what happened? What did you do?” You shrug unsure what happened, never having something like that happen to you before, “i’m not sure, nothing like that has ever happened to me before but I think when Steve touched the Winter Soldier I felt his pain, fear, and guilt since I’m able to feel what people are feeling when I touch them if its a strong feeling.” “You alright now? Are you able to continue?” “Ya i’m good now.” “Okay good, is that everything you can do or is there more?” “I can read people’s thoughts but I try not to. Thats the extent of all my abilities that I know of, but I don’t really sit around all day exploring them so I wouldn’t know if I was capable of doing more.”

Tony nods, “can you demonstrate, read Peter’s mind.” You look over to Peter who as started to blush and open your mind to his to read it, “oh he’s thinking about how my eyes were glowing when I was looking through Steve’s eyes.” Tony looks at Peter for reassurance and Peter nods then looks at you with a smile, “i think that should conclude your trial exercises. We will all discuss you joining the team and then Pepper will give you a call giving you an answer if your in or not.” You nod, “okay, thank you.”

“Can I walk you out?” Peter asks shyly. As your about to say sure Tony speaks up, “Peter I’d actually like you to go see if Steve and Bucky are alright.” ‘Who’s Bucky?” you ask questionably. “He’s the Winter Soldier.” You nod thinking it weird that you didn’t figure that the Winter Soldier had a name but he was a person after all so why wouldn’t he have an alter ego. You walk with Peter out of the training room but then part ways at the door as he heads left and you head right to exit the Stark Tower.

Tag list: @mallyallyandra 

[darknessfactor]

Avocadon’t, Maybe?

A/N: I hAD TO

Based on this quote.  Ignores the Ragnarok post-credits scene.

They were aiming for Norway.  They didn’t hit Norway.

Or at least, that’s what Thor cheerfully tells him when Hulk finally cedes control back to Bruce.  Apparently it’s only be three days this time, and Hulk was mostly content to spar with Valkyrie when he got bored.  Then their ship had started to hurtle towards Earth, and then they’d crashed, and Hulk claimed boredom before shrinking back down to Bruce.

“If we didn’t get to Norway,” and Bruce doesn’t even know why they’d wanted to go to Norway in the first place, “then where are we?”

Korg pops out of nowhere, and Bruce nearly jumps out of his skin - one, because what the hell, and two, because the only other person he knew who was capable of that was definitely not a tall rock person - and says, “The nice fella I just talked to said we’re in some place called New Zee-land.”  

Bruce drops his forehead onto his knees and starts laughing.

Thor isn’t very thrilled when he sees exactly where New Zealand is in relation to Norway, but he cheers up slightly when Bruce explains that it’s where Lord of the Rings was filmed.  

“An excellent tale of your people,” Thor praises.  “Except the elves, they’re pretentious pricks.”

Bruce catches Valkyrie’s eye, and gives a very deliberate cough.  Valkyrie hiccups.

At any rate, their crash won’t have gone unnoticed.  They need to figure out where in New Zealand they are, and they need to find out where civilization is.  For now, they seem to be out in the jungle, and while they have plenty of food on the ship, it won’t last forever.

Bruce immediately volunteers to try to find a town.  Korg got vague instructions from the guy he’d talked to, but looking at a map, Bruce thinks he can pinpoint where it is.  Valkyrie volunteers as well, claiming that she’ll be protecting Bruce, but as soon as they’re on the road, Bruce gives her the side-eye.

“You just want a drink,” he accuses.

“What?  Noooo,” Valkyrie says.  “Well, yeah, but not just that.”

Bruce shrugs.  “’S okay.  It’s refreshing, to be honest.  You’re one of the few people who doesn’t treat me like a ticking time bomb.”

Valkyrie startles him by laughing.  “What?  You and Hulk, a ticking time bomb?  Yeah, right.  You’re both fucking teddy bears, you are.  Hulk’s just a bit of a bigger teddy bear.”

Bruce raises an eyebrow, unsure what to do with that mental image.  “Thanks, I guess?  You should probably realize that humans are a bit more, uh... fragile.”

“Yeah, I guessed that after you broke your neck to get Hulk to switch with you.”

Bruce snorts, but concedes the point to her.

There’s a goat, tied to one of the posts holding up the town’s sign.  It’s called Ono.  It seems appropriate.

There are a few stores, and a few places to eat.  Valkyrie makes a beeline for the liquor store, in her Sakaar leather-clad regalia.  No one gives her a second glance.  It’s Bruce who draws more confused looks, probably because he’s once again dressed in Tony’s clothes and really wishing he wasn’t.

He ends up following Valkyrie into the liquor store, only to find her arguing with the owner over prices.  That’s when he remembers that none of them exactly have any human money, and he sighs.

“Val,” he calls, and she spins around, looking confused.  “C’mon, we’ve seen what we needed to.  We should head back.”

She opens her mouth to argue, but something about his expression must convince her, because she follows him back out the liquor store and into an Internet cafe where he can use the phone that Thor gave him.  He breathes a sigh of relief when he discovers that Tony has kept his account open, and manages to get some cash from the disgruntled teller at the bank.

“Here,” he says, shoving half at Valkyrie.  “Don’t go too nuts over it, okay?”

“Sure,” she answers, thumbing through it with a frown.  “By the way - ‘Val’?”

“Valkyrie’s more like a title than a name.”

“Val.”  She says it with the air of someone trying a new kind of food for the first time.  “Well my real name is shite, so I’ll take it.”

While Valkyrie is buying as much booze as she can (Bruce doesn’t have the heart to tell her that it probably won’t affect her), he manages to use some of his so-called ‘awkward charm’ (named by Natasha) to get information from some of the townsfolk at the local coffee place.  All their gossip centers around the jail, where their first criminal in over twenty years is being held.

“What’d they do?” Bruce asks.

Dan, who’s had a few too many shots of espresso, leans forward and half-whispers, “Stole seventeen of Harry’s avocados, would you believe it.  Seventeen!  Looked like fucking Santa Claus, she did, carrying that thing over her shoulder.”

Bruce is sorely tempted to tell the man that he’s sharing a body with Hulk, and has been spending the last two years on an alien planet.  He decides to let Dan marvel at their avocado thief, however.  

Two minutes later, the town sheriff comes into the coffee place and orders drink with three shots of espresso, before turning to Bruce with an irritable glare.

“Your friend Val’s locked up,” he says.  “Ned down at the liquor store says she assaulted him?”

Bruce sighs.

Valkyrie is in the process of becoming best friends with her cellmate by the time Bruce manages to get the teller to withdraw enough money to cover bail.  He’s pretty sure that the teller’s opinion of him has plummeted down into the negatives, and it doesn’t help that his current outfit belongs to a self-proclaimed asshole.

“I’m Tony Stark,” he mutters, and has the insane urge to giggle.

The deputy sheriff pops her chewing gum in his face when he asks to see ‘Val’, before grabbing the keys and trudging over to the cells.  Valkyrie is in the midst of howling with laughter at the story her blond cellmate is telling, thudding her fist against the ground and only making the floor shake a little.

“Someone was nice enough to post bail, Val,” the deputy says, unlocking the cell and opening the door.  

“Hey!” Valkyrie snaps, holding up a hand.  “Story’s not over, don’t interrupt.  Rude.”

“So then,” the blond continues, and Bruce’s heart nearly stops.  She’s facing away from him, so he can’t see her face, but - 

“Then, Steve turns around and looks at me and just says - completely deadpan, like, you would not believe the deadpan this guy can pull - ‘I thought there’d be more ass’.”

Valkyrie starts laughing again, hard enough that there are tears streaming down her face.  The deputy is standing at the open cell door and has taken out her phone, scrolling through what looks like Tinder.

“Well, I guess I’m off, but I’m very happy I got to meet you,” Valkyrie says.  There’s a little tilt to her voice and Bruce has to think about it for a second, but - yup, Valkyrie is definitely flirting.  “Maybe you wouldn’t mind if I came back and visited after your trial?”

Natasha - because it has to be Natasha, he’d know that voice anywhere - flirts right back.  “Mm, yeah, I wouldn’t mind.”

Valkyrie shoots her a wink before she saunters out of the cell.  “Hey, Bruce,” she says, clapping him on the back hard enough that he stumbles.  “That didn’t take long.”

That catches Natasha’s attention, and she spins around in her cell, finally giving him a good look at her face.  He’s startled by the change - she looks like she’s aged ten years instead of the two since they’re seen one another, with dark circles under her eyes and wrinkles around her mouth.  But her eyes still carry the wicked glint he’s familiar with, even when they’re round with shock.

“Bruce?” she says, her voice cracking.  Her composure returns almost immediately, and she smirks at him.  “Channeling you inner Tony, I see.”

Bruce winces.  Valkyrie’s good humor has abruptly vanished, and her gaze is moving between the two of them, assessing.  “Can we maybe not do that?” he asks.

Natasha’s smirk falls from her face.  “Alright,” she says.  She nods at Valkyrie.  “It was nice meeting you, Val.  Please, do come visit.”  Her attention turns to the deputy sheriff in a clear dismissal.  “So - what’s for lunch today, Ella?”

Bruce is half-dragged out of the station.  He and Valkyrie make their way down the street until they leave town, heading back to their ship.  He still can’t shake the whole shell-shocked feeling of seeing Natasha again.  It’s like a bucket of ice-cold water, but he can’t deny that it brings back the longing with a vengeance.

Halfway back to the ship, Valkyrie gasps.

“Shit,” she says.  “You’re hung up on her!”

Bruce would like to disappear now.  That sounds nice.

“And she’s hung up on you!  Great, there go my chances.”

“Wouldn’t discount yourself just yet,” Bruce mutters.  Natasha’s had two years to move on.  It’s the smart thing to do.

“Well, obviously there’s only one thing to do,” Valkyrie says, her voice hardening.

“Yeah, get back to the ship and figure out how we’re gonna feed thousands of hungry - “

“Break her out of prison.”

“ - Asgardians - Valkyrie, no, that is not what I said - “

As it turns out, once Valkyrie gets an idea in her head, she apparently just... doesn’t hear any protests against that idea.  She finds Thor as soon as they get back to the ship, hurrying away as Bruce asks weakly, “She could’ve broken herself out, so why hasn’t she?”

Thor, of course, is overjoyed by the prospect of seeing another teammate of his.  He’s even more excited at the idea of breaking her out of jail - never mind that the reason Natasha’s in jail could be important, Bruce knows that much at least - and in spite of the fact that New Zealand is a small country and they don’t have very far to run if they bring the local law enforcement down on their heads.

Loki takes one look at them, with their heads bowed together, and walks away, muttering to himself.

At first, Valkyrie and Thor try to come up with some kind of plan.  Bruce suggests paying Natasha’s bail.  They both dismiss his idea.

“You could just let Hulk smash the place up a bit,” Valkyrie suggests.  Bruce can practically feel Hulk perk up at the suggestion, and is reminded that Hulk missed Natasha as well.

“I don’t think that’s the best idea?” he hedges.  

“Hulk was last out for three days,” Thor says, clapping Bruce on the shoulder.  “I say Bruce should get three days as well.”

“Seems fair,” Bruce agrees.  In the back of his head, Hulk grumbles, but concedes.

In the end, Thor and Valkyrie give up on a plan.  They just decide to go into the jail, smash up stuff up, grab Natasha, and leave.  Hopefully before Ono decides to come after them with pitchforks.

The trek back into town takes half an hour, and this time all three of them draw stares.  Bruce shifts uncomfortably under the scrutiny as they make their way to the sheriff’s station, though he notices that the looks Thor gets are actually appreciative.

Of fucking course.

Thor bursts into the police station with a grin, says, “Hi, we’re here to get our friend,” then marches over to the cell and rips the door off.  The deputy blinks at them and then says to Thor, “Can I get a Snapchat with you?”

Natasha makes a show of dusting herself off as she leaves her cell.  She catches Bruce’s eye.  He mouths, “This wasn’t my idea,” at her.  Her mouth quirks in amusement.

Valkyrie looks thrilled.  “Wow,” she says, looking Natasha up and down.  “Not only are you, like, wow, but Thor says you’re one of the greatest warriors on the planet.  Nice.”

“You keep talking but all I see are biceps,” Natasha teases back, eyeing Valkyrie just as appreciatively.

Valkyrie preens.  “Yeah, I know.”

Thor finishes taking selfies with the deputy sheriff, and heads over to envelop Natasha in a hug.  Natasha hugs back just as tightly, smiling with genuine warmth at Thor.  

“Why are you in prison, anyway?” Thor asks her.

“I stole some avocados.”

“Jesus,” Bruce mutters.  “I thought they were joking.”

That’s the moment the sheriff shows up, with an actual gun this time, and starts shooting at them.

Loki takes one look at who came back from Ono with them, and promptly disappears.  Bruce almost snickers.  

Almost.  Because somehow Thor and Valkyrie have given them the slip, leaving the two of them in one of the corners of the camp so that they can... what?  Talk it out?  Bruce isn’t even sure where to start.  Ultron still feels like yesterday for him, but Natasha...

Before he can say anything, however, he finds himself wrapped up in her arms.

“I’m glad you’re safe,” she murmurs in his ear, before pulling away.  “Tony and I didn’t know... we couldn’t figure out where you were.  Less surprising, since you were on another planet, but... I was worried you’d been captured somehow.  With the Accords and everything, it’s dangerous out there.  For people like us.”

Bruce has no idea what the Accords are, but they don’t sound good.

“I’m glad you’re safe too,” he says.  “What’s with the hair?  And why were you in jail for stealing seventeen avocados?”

Natasha snorted.  “I’m on the run.  Again.  Most of the Avengers are, except Tony.  And Rhodey, I think.  A disguise seemed like my best bet.  Though this is actually the third time I’ve dyed it.”

“It looks good on you.”

“Thanks.”

They lapse into silence after that, during which time all of Bruce’s pent up feelings rise to the surface again.  He still doesn’t know where to start - it doesn’t quite feel like he missed her, but at the same time, he has missed her.  Does he say that?  Does he talk about what happened on Sakaar?

None of those things, apparently, because the first thing out of his mouth is, “You still haven’t told me why you stole a bunch of avocados.”

“Dip.”

Bruce pauses.  “...what?”

Natasha shrugs.  “I was hungry.  I wanted dip.  I was out of money.  I stole seventeen avocados so that I could make dip.”

“Bullshit.”

“Avocados are a super food.  What’s so hard to believe about that?”

Bruce shakes his head.  “And you just let them take you to prison?”

Natasha shrugs.  “This time was for a dumber reason.  It’s not as bad as last time, when I got caught spray painting buildings in Russian.  Or the time before that, when - “

“Have you just been... shuffling yourself through jails?”

“...maybe.”  Natasha pauses, thinks about it for a minute.  “I might’ve been a bit reckless.”

“You think?” Bruce mutters.

“Also, the town was called ‘Ono,’” Natasha adds, sniggering.  “Too good an opportunity to pass up.  My mug shot will be on the wall in their sheriff’s station for all eternity.  Like, ‘Ono, Natasha was here’.”

Bruce wonders if he’s fallen into some kind of fever dream, but something about the terrible pun and her casual attitude towards being in prison strikes him as definitely being Natasha.  And in that moment, the ache of missing her fades, like they’ve never been apart.

Natasha notices.  “What’s that smile?”

“Nothing.”  Bruce reaches out, pauses to give her time to move, and takes her hand.  “I’m just really happy you’re here.”

[bekaroth-reads]

Captain Salazar x reader

The sea air felt nice on your face as you looked over the railing of the ship. You had payed for a ride on a trader ship in your town to go to a few islands over to try to see the trial for a pirate that had been terrorizing the area for awhile. Now, the people you were sailing with weren't pirates, but they weren't exactly the most ethical either. They weren't dangerous by any means, but their cargo wasn't gained by the most legal means. You were actually enjoying the trip until you heard the man in the nest at the top of the ship call something. He sounded distressed, and the way the rest of the crew started to run around in a panic confirmed that something was up. "What is it? What's going on?" You asked one of the men that ran by you. "Navy ship on our tail! Not that it matters to you. You're just a passenger." The word navy made you feel almost as uneasy as the others on the ship, if not more so. "Trust me, I have my own reasons for not wanting them to catch up with us." You replied as you ran to the other side of the deck to get a better look at your pursuer. Maybe you could get whomever it was to not tell- never mind. It was actually him. You'd recognize that ship anywhere. You decided that you would go up and hide in the now empty nest. It seemed rather foolish, but you wanted to prolong facing the captain on that naval ship for as long as you could, and that would be one of the last places they would probably look. It wasn't long after you had huddled yourself in the bottom of the nest that the hulking, Spanish commissioned ship caught up with the one that you were on and it's crew started to board. There wasn't anything violent going down because the people you were sailing with weren't pirates, and therefore hadn't hurt anyone. But they were still not the cleanest when it came to trade laws, so there was still a reason for their arrest. Once the shuffles of the crew being rounded up had stopped you heard a voice that made you hope twice as hard that you wouldn't be found. "Is this all that were on the ship?" You heard the stern, deep voice of the naval captain even from where you were. "This is the whole crew." The trader captain responded quickly. "Not what I asked." The thick Spanish accent snapped at the trader, making everyone else on the ship jump out of fear. "There... there was also a passenger onboard." The interrogated man finally responded in a defeated tone. While you appreciated the gesture, you knew it was pointless. Once Captain Salazar of the Spanish Navy had his mind set on something he would never give it up. "Search the ship. Find that passenger." The captain ordered, and his men immediately started to fulfill his command. You stayed where you were for a few minutes before you heard someone climbing up the ladder that lead to your hiding spot. Soon the face of Lieutenant Lesaro came into your sight. He didn't say anything, but gave you a look to let you know he never felt more sorry for anyone in his entire life. "Lieutenant! Have you found our elusive traveler?" Salazar called out in a way that let the both of you know that he was aware that Lesaro had indeed found someone. "Sí, Capitán." Lesaro called hesitantly. He really liked you as a person, and didn't want you to get in any sort of trouble. But, at the same time the lieutenant knew that his life would turn into a living hell if he tried to lie to his captain. "Bring them down then." Salazar called up with a scene of annoyance in his voice. When Lesaro stalled once again Salazar barked, "¡Hágalo rápidamente!" The fact that Salazar switched to his native language so quickly told the two of you that he was starting to get pushed into a bad mood, and that was something that no one wanted. "Come down." The lieutenant told you reluctantly as he motioned you to follow him back down the ladder. Each step you took down the ladder felt almost as dreadful as if you were walking straight into the mouth of a kraken. When the two of you got to the deck, Salazar had his back turned to you as he was finishing up dealing with the traders. When he was done he started to turn your direction. "Would you like to tell why it took you so long to-" when he saw you his eyes narrowed, and you could tell that he was fuming. Without saying anything, he gave a nod of his head and you were escorted to Salazar's courters on The Silent Mary. You sat in the room for an agonizing twenty minutes before Salazar walked in, and he still looked as furious as he was earlier. The Butcher of the Seas started to rapidly pace the room and spout angry words so quickly that you couldn't even understand what he was saying. "That's a lot of Spanish..." you muttered under your breath as you tried to sort out what he was saying to you. Salazar stopped where he was, turned to you, and gave you a look that let you knew you should have kept your mouth shut. "A lot of Spanish, eh?" He started as he walked over to you. "Do you want to know why I'm speaking a lot of Spanish? Because the things that you do are so infuriating that most of the time I can't even think of English words that can describe them well enough!" He almost roared in frustration. You flinched a little, before you argued back, "I just wanted to see the trail." Salazar's back somehow tightened even more before he snapped back, "And I told you no! There is no guarantee that there won't be pirates crawling all over the place, planning to launch an attack!" The captain sat down next to you with a sigh of exasperation. You wrapped your arms around him, and rested your head on his shoulder. "Armando-" you started, but were cut of by him looking down at you. "Don't you, "Armando," me. I know that's what you do when you're trying to distract me from the matter at hand." He scolded, but in a lighter tone than he was talking in before. This made a grin spread across your face. "Does it work?" You asked with a slight laugh. "Usually." The feared captain groaned in defeat as he rested his forehead on yours. "¿Qué voy a hacer con usted?" Salazar mumbled before he leaned in and kissed you.

[violetsystems]

#personal

The only drama I’ve been tolerating lately is my return to reading physical comics in public.  The world has gone batshit insane and that isn’t the intro panel to Immortal Hulk.  It’s pretty much real life for me without much explanation or external plot narration.  After a year of writing here about how I feel on any number of issues nobody in real life knows any different.  It’s always been here where the act of social sharing has fifteen layers of safeguards in terms of anonymity.  The community has always been very subtle and muted in how it treats each other.  It’s intimate how you come to know a person through their curation of content.  There’s entire relationships I have with people on here that matter more to me than people I’m in daily contact with in Chicago.  I’ve been submerged in the deep web like a cybernetic dolphin in a tank for years with the rest of you.  The Tumblr fishbowl has always been much more comforting than the public eye.  The only theory I have is that people really don’t pay attention to anyone in real life.  I’ve come to know the pain of recognizing when people stop listening.  Most people just project how great they are or how much more they know.  Society in America especially under the guise of capitalism is always a competition.  You can only assess the success or value of a person by the amount they make or more importantly spend.  From there people splinter off into efficiently divided cliques, tribes and teams that people try to draft you into out of fear of isolation.  Peer pressure doesn’t ever go away unless you shut the door completely or maybe even bust it wide open.  Even then it just gets nastier and more sophisticated.  You’d have to be the Hulk to enjoy that kind of constant abuse.  My follower count has been mostly the same which has always been something I respect.  Everybody knows I try to play it safe and genuinely respect different perspectives.  I walk boundaries and I maintain layers beyond that.  Around this time last year I had made a decision in my life to focus my attention on things that made me happy.  One of those was my communications here with people.  Things had grown from this into real life in a magical way.  And then people starting hijacking the narrative for their own selfish reasons.  Putting their own spin, opinion and value on the things they thought I was “trying to say.”  That kind of thing has been happening to me since the beginning of time.  People trying to turn something I do into something that can benefit them, influence or control.  When it comes to blogging on the internet here the outside world is mostly negative towards this space.  Truthfully I am pretty excited about the recent purchase of Tumblr but everything in the press is always negative.  People are so conditioned to bad news these days that we just fixate on the drama and do nothing about it.  People crave it in almost everything.  Walk into a coffee shop and employees are trashing other coffee brands instead of focusing on their own.  People talk behind other people’s back like it’s a secret trial and never face the demon within themselves.  Sometimes these things escalate into crossing the line or threshold of your dreams overcome by some madness and zealotry.  They think they have a say in whatever it is I do in my own time.  And with me we already know how badly people have fucked up in this regard.  It is sadly comical at this point and I am the butt of a constant cosmic joke.  It would be a broken record to spend another year describing how I haven’t gotten over it.  I don’t give a fuck about any of that shit really anymore.  I changed my train route, subscribed to better coffee at home and read Hulk comics on the commute.  

With all the drama between Sony and Disney over Spider-man people forget sometimes we’re talking about movies.  Who owns the rights to the intellectual property of poor artists to bankroll their studio profits every summer is maybe important.  If you didn’t have twenty two movies linked together already.  I don’t know really I just read comics.  I’m supposed to have an opinion about every part of the world I’ve never lived in.  Within all these arguments it’s always picking a side.  Mostly because people want a battle and a chance to feel right even when they are missing a perspective totally.  We can focus on all the talking about the problems all day and never find a solution.  It’s been particularly hard for me to come to grips with being in the environment I’ve been in.  I spent five years traveling to Asia to figure out my place outside of all this.  This last year I came back and focused closer to home.  In that respect I’ve found New York to be much less pretentious than I thought it would be.  It’s truly the city where you can cry on the street and nobody cares.  That feeling of freedom is something I don’t feel lately myself in Chicago.  There’s too much manipulation and utilization of public space.  People so concerned about why you aren’t happy and never would do a thing to correct the problem.  There has to be something wrong with you for feeling that way.  In New York you kind of share the space and let things breathe.  In Chicago everybody is trying to maximize your contribution to society.  Your social obligations in the highest taxed city in America are also taxed if not just by patience and will alone.  I pay taxes and I don’t mind paying them.  But encroaching on people’s life, liberty and pursuit of happiness for the sake of a brand is a bit weird.  Unless it’s Pink.  This coming from a guy decked out fully in Nike and Undercover.  You see these shirts that say “Chicago Over Everything” and then you see me rot in silence in my street wear coffin.  I hear a lot of sentiments that don’t ever address me directly.  People project what they hope you will hear and expect you to take the bait.  Looking for a fight.  Looking for a new friend to abuse.  Looking for another cult member.  People approach inclusion by never leaving you alone and make you feel crazy for feeling claustrophobic.   I guess people have never been a victim of police entrapment.  That’s some drama I’ve already written about and left in the dust.  These days it’s ten thousand times worse and then again I’m over it.  The double standard I see in the real world is mostly about making people question their legitimacy in the face of incompetence.  I’ve been the victim of so many dumb social experiments for art’s sake and otherwise.  All it ever really amounts to is intimidation and drama and it’s boring and ineffectual.  We argue things we can’t or won’t change instead of leading by example.  And leading in public by yourself with no safety net gets old after awhile.  Especially when nobody remembers all that you’ve done.  Or at least gives you the benefit of the doubt when the court of public opinion puts you on trial for the fifth week in a row.  People who will talk about you behind you back all day but never address you to your face.  Never acknowledge your validity.  Too busy being negative to give you a chance to shine.

There’s an entire decade of my life that has been left behind and forgotten about outside of Tumblr.  Imagine the irony that the people I shared things with here knew the deeper side of me.  And we all watched me get passed over and ruminate about how I could be a better person.  How I could right all these wrongs?  How I could be the hero.  And almost eerily like the Hulk comic I’m looked upon as something else.  I haven’t really had a modern comic experience quite like reading that graphic novel.  I just ordered the next volume and get to pick it up from another school’s campus after work tomorrow.  I do have to work all day tomorrow.  I’ve done that for almost two decades.  People still treat me like a kid.  People on Tumblr of course know I don’t feel like a kid or even remotely account for one mathematically.  But I’ve learned people look for any excuse to write you off.  They do it for years and when you grow better they find another thing to drag you down with.  When they can’t find anything they just ignore you.  And here we are a year later looking back.  It’s that time of year again.  People are actually back in school.  Just like every other year really it feels like.  People can acknowledge I feel invisible but not acknowledge me personally.  That’s the whole curse of the Undercover aesthetic.  You wear it so well even the police start getting it twisted.  Nobody asks.  Nobody has the guts to approach you and treat you fairly.  And so you grow to know better than to waste you time on shit that doesn’t appreciate your value.  It’s a mind fuck for me really to understand the way forward is more of the same.  That being isolated and exiled in some way is far more safe at this point of my life.  That maybe there’s things too precious for me to share with people who can’t fathom or know the value I place on it.  Because they don’t make the sacrifices I do to keep things safe.  To be responsible and be myself at the same time.  A year ago I felt like that mad scientist locked in a lab.  I’ve done enough barbell reps to be the skinniest Hulk alive.  The title of that volume is “Or is he both?”  It’s a far different vibe from either Professor Hulk or Planet Hulk.  Bruce Banner is a transient who changes into the Hulk nightly.  He’s tracking gamma ray signatures of what he calls Walking Ghosts.  Toxic creatures exposed like a virus to gamma radiation by another scientist trying to heal his son.  Banner is trying to right a wrong and at the same time stay in control of his inner core of responsibilities.  He keeps a secret that grows out of control and finally the Hulk cannot be contained.  Interestingly enough the Hulk exacts his rage in frighteningly calculated ways.  He even speaks kindly of Banner.  He also buries the other scientist in a mountain and makes him ponder hell forever instead of ending his life.  The Hulk eventually learns about this green door through the Walking Ghosts that whisper about it in fear.  There’s no gatekeeper at that door to hold the Hulk back.  And I’m sure there’s so much more drama behind that door.  It’s only Volume two after all.  I can’t wait to find out because that’s about the only drama these days I pay attention to.  I don’t need any drama getting in the way of my love for you.  Hulk out.  <3 Tim