#not to mention volunteer contributions ugh

[countingnothings]

“people* who benefit from our service feel bad if you remind them that the service can’t exist without their contributions!”

well, they’ll feel worse if they can no longer access the service. and the people who make sure the service continues feel bad when their salaries and operating costs aren’t being met. so. who’s to say whether we should talk about needing money.

*in this case, almost entirely very wealthy retirees

[forthesanityofstorytellers]

Granola Bites

Basically I told my sister late one night that I wanted a snack and all I could remember about them was 'granola bites'

She decided that this sounded like a story about a crunchy vampire.

And then I short story about one.

____________________________________________________________

WC: 2,405

Day-In-The-Life narrative.

tw: mentions of blood (in packets)

Summary: Trevor's a pretty normal guy that's decided to live a crunchy lifestyle; home garden, vegetarian, makes his own meals, a little stall at the local outdoor market, a book that he's working on and a complimentary blog. Oh. And he's a vampire.

Sunlight. It streamed over the land and covered the garden, stretching its fingers over the small cabin-like house in the middle of the suburbs. The golden fingers slipped through the closed shutters, over the couch, and began flicking at my nose. I woke up with a thunderous sneeze that catapulted me to the floor, and found myself struggling with an oddly-confining jacket under the redwood table. After a moment of sleep-deprived panic, I won the confrontation and peeked around at the clock pressed against the wall.

Shoot. It was a bit past feeding time.

I wormed my way to a standing position, left the villainous outerwear to sulk on the floor until tomorrow morning, and made my way out to the garden.

The green plants celebrated the sun, and I joined them for a moment. The sun was warm on my skin as I stood, breathing in the morning air before going about my day. The bell peppers were finally ready, the tomatoes juicy red, and the ears of corn seemed to wave like volunteers for harvest. Gathering them into small bundles, I brought them into the kitchen to rest and went out for a second round. Going straight to the back of my garden, I took a moment to talk to my beanstalks, admired them for their growth and thanked them for their contribution. Then I knelt and began to dig them up by the roots.

Escorting the bundles back into my kitchen -- and trying to ignore the giant dirty boot prints smearing dark mud across the linoleum tile -- I set to stripping the roots from each beanstalk, cleaning all my products, and getting them ready for both farmer’s markets I was to attend later in the day. Hunger began to set in as I worked, so I grabbed a couple of spare roots I kept in the freezer and began to chow down.

Ugh, the taste wasn’t exactly what I wanted. Metallic yet smooth, with a tiny bit of sweetness as an aftertaste. I needed something to drown it with. Another trip to the fridge produced a large cup full of green chalky liquid, and I downed it in just a few gulps. Sweet, sweet chlorophyll. The smooth taste was welcome after the metallic hemoglobin, and it went down easily thanks to the coconut water mixed in. The pairing of chlorophyll and coconut water was a great substitute for blood.

Oh, right. I’ve been living with it so long, I often forget not everyone knows about us.

Hi. The name’s Trevor. I’m a chlorophyre which, at its core, is a ‘vampire’ that lives on chlorophyll instead of hemoglobin. I used to be a vampire, but ever since I found out there were other, healthier ways of living, I decided to take a more natural approach to life.

I finished cleaning the greens, packaged them in little baskets, and stacked them in brown paper bags which then made it into my Hybrid car. I took the few veggies and beans to my stall out at the local farmers market and set up shop.

The humans were nice, as usual. A good number of lookie-loos, a handful of loyal buyers, and I even managed to convince one or two new faces to buy a basket of beans. It was a long day, made even longer with the knowledge I had committed to this booth for the next two days as well. I may have technically been a member of the ‘un-dead’ but that didn’t mean I enjoyed derelict houses or used familiars to do my work for me. The weekends at the farmer’s market helped pay my bills.

When time was up, I began cleaning my booth and storing things away while my neighbors did the same. We swapped stories about harvesting, soil prep, and the latest news on governmental damage in relation to agriculture and the environment. We traded farewells, knowing we’d see each other the next morning, packed the last of our unsold wares into our cars and drove off.

I made sure my veggies were safely stored away at home before going about my day; buying new seeds, working home-made compost into my soil, looking up the latest in natural pesticides. I couldn’t take too long, as I only had a few hours between markets. My second booth was scheduled to be set up right after sundown, and by the time I finished my daily chores, the sun was starting to drop below the horizon. I had to hurry.

I gathered up all the leaves and stalks of my plants and worked them, getting out all the chlorophyll I could manage and dividing the results between green-tinted eight ounce glass bottles. Then I removed the fresh root clusters from the fridge and bundled them, the fraying hemp rope scratching at my fingers. The cabinets above the sink held generous supplies of coconut water, which I removed and mixed with half of the chlorophyll bottles. Gotta create a good example of each product, after all.

The last step was to make sure all my pamphlets were in order, each one printed on eco-friendly paper with biodegradable ink. They contained information regarding a plant-based alternative to blood, and explained it in more detail than I could manage in the short time I was at my booth. It was definitely better than it sounded, but most vampires wouldn’t understand why green was better if it wasn’t explained properly. I had my work cut out for me, to be sure, but I deeply believed in chlorophyrism and wanted to get the word out to as many as I could.

Packing up my nightly wares, I got back in my Hybrid and took off for the Night-Market, a farmer’s market for nocturnal-based creatures. Parking in my regular spot, I gathered my things and began down the secret forest trail leading to the bridge where the market was held. Apparently, even under the cover of darkness, our gatherings must be veiled in secrecy and subterfuge.

I set up shop like normal, putting out my pamphlets and products and ignoring the jokes at my expense. I’d been doing this long enough to know responding in kind got me nowhere. The other vendors knew my product and knew where I stood on the matter, and so long as they didn’t upturn my booth or break my stuff, I wouldn’t burn their coffins in the middle of the day.

Instead of sinking to their level, I waved to the werewolf across the bridge selling distilled Wolfsbane pills. Apparently she had managed to figure out a formula able to reverse the werewolf curse for a limited time. I’d never seen it work in person, but she had plenty of regulars. The she-wolf must have been doing something right.

The market opened. Night-creatures began to pour in from all sides. Blood-suckers bought packets from the vampire vendors. The she-wolf’s regulars padded in, panting for her antidote. There were bottled nightmares, brain samples, animal parts, and a couple of the booths even sold ‘deals’. I was never quite sure what ‘deals’ were sold, but I didn’t try to find out.

A couple of curious vampires stopped by my booth. “What’s up with this?” one of them asked while sucking on a sample packet. “Is this a joke?”

The other one leaned in and whispered, “Vampire-hippie. Walk away slowly.”

“It’s nothing like that,” I said with a forced smile, sliding one of the pamphlets across to them. “Vampirism has its place in the world, I guess, but have you ever wondered if there was a better way?”

One of them looked like she couldn’t care less, but the other peered at the pamphlet and seemed to be listening.

“I mean, sure: drinking the blood of others has sustained us for a good long while. I’m not saying it hasn’t. But the world was...different back then. Less chemicals in the blood, less preservatives in the food.” I gestured towards the shrinking blood sample, which was now leaking in the corner. “Do you know how much more monoxide is in human blood these days thanks to burning gasoline and oil, as opposed to 100 years ago?”

The packet-drinker shrugged. “Nope. But if that’s true, why not just drink animal blood?”

“They’re inhaling the same air, for one thing,” I stated. “But if we all switched to drinking animals, do you know how badly that would impact the environment? It would take years to breed enough animals for them to be a sustainable alternative for all of our kind...not to mention there’d be competition from all sides.” In answer to the sarcastically-quirked eyebrow, I gestured around to a few of the other booths. “Vampires aren’t the only ones that feed on animals.”

The one reading the pamphlet finally spoke up. “So how is this any different?” she asked. “What’s the catch?”

“Ah, that’s the best thing,” I said, holding up a small glass bottle. “There is no catch. Drinking from plants instead of people is a much more sustainable alternative; you can grow your own food, so you don’t have to worry about things like cameras and cell phones tracking your movements. There’s more than enough soil to use, either out in a garden or in a potted plant, and you don’t have to worry about soil erosion so long as you rotate and feed the plants properly. And best of all, you know exactly what’s going into your food: because you’re putting it there.” I gestured to the ever-shrinking blood packet. “Do you have any idea what kind of life your food was living? How much blood-poisoning might have happened?” I looked back to the other one. “Using plants, you don’t ever have to worry about it again.”

The two glanced at each other. The blood-sucker shrugged her shoulders. “It’s not like I’d catch any of their diseases. Plus, this sounds like a lot more work.”

But the other one had picked up a bottle and was looking it over. “It’s not any more work than hunting down human prey in this digital age,” I said. “Plus, the switch is easier than ever with our root bundles.”

The blood-sucker was looking away, her packet nearly empty. She was clearly debating if she wanted to go back to the vendor a few booths down and purchase a couple packs for the fridge. But the other one looked up at me. “Root bundles?”

I nodded. “Did you know that the legume plant has nodules that produce the exact same substance as blood?” She peered at the bundle of roots, fingering one of the small gnarled ends. I could see she was interested, but unsure what her companion would say. I nudged her a little more and told her that the movement I was a part of had a small online presence. If she wanted to give me her general whereabouts or territory, I could have a representative stop by and give her more information. She shrugged and wasn’t sure, so I suggested she take my card and come back the next night to take another look at the nodules. I offered her a small sample root bundle as compensation for her listening ear, and as a little something to snack on when she had the time.

She seemed grateful for the offer and accepted, slipping the small bundle into her coat along with my card before spinning around to join her companion. They loudly mocked the chlorophyre movement as they left, and I later spied the two buying a generous supply of packets from the vampire two booths down.

I didn’t mind. I may not have gotten a chance to tell them about the side-effects, how drinking chlorophyll was like drinking a natural sunscreen, how it converted sunlight into energy like the plants, but that was something I saved for customers showing a genuine interest. Vampires generally don’t believe that part of the deal, and I can’t blame them. The first chlorophyre I saw was met with equal cynicism, and I didn’t believe the movement until I tried it for myself. Anyway, it isn’t easy to make the switch from ‘acceptable’ to healthy, especially when clan pressure is involved. Said pressure is one of the reasons I now lived on my own.

A few more vampires came over during the night. A few more mocked my products openly or over their shoulders. Another couple passed by and stopped, familiar faces that wanted to purchase another bundle and learn more about growing their own. We talked while I gathered their order, and I found out that they prowled an alley a couple streets down from where I lived. With a smile, I offered them to stay at my place for a bit. They could learn more about growing their own food, and my house was definitely safer than the streets.

Soon the sun was on its way up, and all the booths were dismantled. I packed up what I had left and headed to my Hybrid, wondering if that couple had made their way to my house yet. I wondered if the two vampiresses from earlier in the night would come back. I loved talking to an open mind, something startling hard to find in the underworld. I got behind the wheel and drove, wondering once again what the she-wolf’s Wolfbane pills actually did for werewolves, or why they’d take an antidote in the first place.

I got back home and brought everything inside. I grabbed from my personal stash of chlorophyll, drinking it down as I laid out on the couch and enjoyed the slight tinge of rum added to the mix. It may not have had the same effect on me as it once did, but the flavor was still a nice addition. I stared at the ceiling, the full moon making silver tracks through the darkness, and contemplated the night. There was still some gardening I could do, but there was also online marketing to work on, a seminar on Essential Oils to watch, and more information to gather for the book I was planning on self-publishing later this year. One of the added benefits to being a healthy chlorophyre meant working in the day and the night, as my body no longer required sleep to function. I stared at the ceiling, sipped my drink, and wondered which of my projects to work on next.

[sendaidivision]

Kotono's Thoughts on Setagaya Division

Mina Nakayama

Kotono takes a long look at the photo of the Student Council president, an curious look on her face. "Mina-chan... to say that I am curious about her would be an understatement. I'm almost certain I've seen her before. More than likely, it was back when I was working for Chuohku. ...I don't want to make any assumptions without knowing all of the facts, but... I believe that she may have been subjected to what I volunteered for: a process that makes you something... "more" than human. I thought that I disrupted all that data back when I left, but apparently, I missed a few details.

"Those Chuohku fools... they put her through that horrid experiment without establishing any sort of failsafe. When I did the experiment, I knew just how far to go to make sure I didn't... become more than what I wanted to be. But apparently, those fools went too far with the experiment, and now look at what they've done." Kotono sighs. "I'm glad I made the decision to leave that place when I did.

"Aside from that, Mina-chan, as Ryūzō stated, is a good student. She keeps mainly to herself, which is no surprise, but she is friendly and nice with her teammates and those close to her. When the time comes, I should try to have a talk with her about her... issues."

Elliot Shimizu

"I truly like Elliot-kun! He's one of the best students that I've had the pleasure of teaching. Even though he's quiet and doesn't get involved much, I can tell from the look on his face that he is positively enthralled with the class material. I know he has dreams of being a zoologist, which is why it's no surprise that he often comes to me, either after class or in the nurse's office, with questions. I try to answer them as best as I can, but unfortunately, my work extends only to humans.

"Besides that, I've noticed Elliot-kun is a frequent target of bullying by his peers. I often allow him to come sit with me in the nurse's office until he feels comfortable going back out. He especially does this during physical education class with Takumi-san (not that I blame the poor kid). Like Ryūzō stated, I'll have to talk with the Headmaster about doing something about those idiots who continually torment him. The last thing I want is another issue like the one with Jyushi-kun."

Yorii Sakuma

"Ugh, Yorii-kun. I see a lot of Ren-kun and Kaiji-kun in him. Unlike them, however, he is far lazier. When he isn't flirting with his classmates, I often see him either sleeping in class, or playing with his phone. I have to wonder why Elliot-kun vouches for him so much. I know the two of them are friends, but Elliot-kun seems to contribute more out of their friendship than Yorii-kun does. Maybe Mr. Singer is training young Elliot to be more confident in himself. I don't know...

"Besides that... there is something about this young boy that doesn't sit right with me. It only happened once, but I saw him arguing with another student once, and his appearance changed, making him look somewhat like a familiar fashion designer. Of course, I didn't bring that up, but... I know I've seen him in Chuohku before. I should keep a close eye on him..."

ENIGMA

"Like Ryūzō mentioned, I wondered, at first, why this group was calling themselves 'ENIGMA'. But after the appearance of Mina-chan and Yorii-kun, I can only surmise that the three of them may have been unfortunate victims in Chuohku's experiments. I can easily deduce what they've done to Mina-chan, and Yorii-kun's origins are obvious. The only one I'm not so sure about is Elliot-kun. Besides the fact that he isn't fully Japanese, there's little about him in the record books.

"It would probably be best if I communicate with the three of them as quickly as possible to learn more about them. If they are suffering from memory blocks, which I surmise is the reason they chose their name, then I may be able to help them. No promises, but I'll do what I can."

[dragonseattofu]

School Days (TWEWY Fanfiction)

Summary

As the gang prepares for the annual school cultural festival, Shiki's not hiding in Eri's shadow anymore, and other people are starting to take notice. At the same time, Neku learns that the line between more than friends yet less than lovers is starting to blur.

Notes:

So to try and somewhat contribute to the very smol neshiki twewy fandom, I wrote this self-indulgent piece. It might come off as OOC, but at the end of the day I hope it’s enjoyable to at least one person out there (even if that’s just me). Dedicated to @altorav​ and @trashcan-of-a, in their efforts to show the world how wholesome neshiki is, you’ve inspired me. I hope you like it! (Plus we needed some fluff post episode 3 angst).

Preview:

It was that time of year again, the annual school cultural festival. A time of ostentatious costumes, overly enthusiastic maid/butler cafe hosts/hostesses, and even more unnecessary social interactions that Neku would rather just avoid school all together.

What a drag, the teen thought as he drowned out his classmate’s debate on what theme they should do.

Looking at the window from his seat, Neku was grateful he listened to his mother this morning and grabbed an umbrella. The cumulus clouds hung low, their edges tinged grey.

“Okay everyone, that’s it for today. Make sure to sign up for your roles before the end of the day!”

Pulled out of his reverie by chairs scratching against the worn linoleum and erupting chatter, Neku stood up from his seat and walked over to the bespeckled girl two rows down.

“You weren’t paying attention, were you?” The petite girl asked before he even got out his greeting.

He picked at one of his spiked out strands of hair, “is it that obvious? Festivals are such a bore.”

“They are not! And this year we have Beat and Eri to celebrate it with. Even Rhyme’s coming! It’s going to be fun!” She was really enthusiastic about this, and not the false happiness she tried to pull during their time in the Reaper’s Game, but genuine excitement. He couldn’t help but mirror her smile.

“Yeah well, what are we even doing?” He turned his attention to the board and shuttered.

“Seriously? A play … Cinderella? Cliche much? Yep, this is going to be torture.”

“Oh come on, it’s not going to be that bad! Eri and I are going to be in charge of costumes, you could help us—“

“Hey Sakuraba!” Yuji shouted from the front of the classroom, “thanks for signing up for props and set, man! We’ll have a meeting after classes in the auditorium at 3!”

Neku looked at the class president as if he had sprouted reaper wings, “what the?”

“You signed up for set-up?” Shiki asked him, getting up with her books and supplies all gathered neatly in her bag.

“Hell no, who signed me up?”

“I did.” A streak of pink wandered over to the pair. Before the young boy could protest the predicament she put him in, the girl placed her arm around Shiki’s shoulders protectively.

“I found some of your sketches in Shiki’s notebook and I figured you’d be really good at making the sets. Plus, this way you can walk Shiki home after school when it gets late. Kill two birds with one stone, right? Eri ended her explanation with a wink, much to Neku’s chagrin.

Just as quickly as Eri appeared, in a blink she was gone, yelling over her shoulder, “see you later guys! Shiki, let’s get started on the costume designs after school today!”

“Come back here Pinkie!” The boy hissed at her retreating shadow.

Shiki laughed at their antics. She grasped Neku’s fist he was shaking at her best friend gently and smiled at him before repeating, “hey, it’ll be fun, okay?”

A slight pause and resigned sigh were her only responses.

“This never reaches my mother’s ears. I’ll never hear the end of it.” He threatens, knowing full well that Shiki and his mother had each other's numbers saved as favorites.

~~~~~

Reluctantly, Neku made his way to the auditorium after school. To his surprise, he learned that the play was going to be a parody of sorts, a “Cinderella in Shibuya” story. The sets would be modeled after iconic spots in their neighborhood, one of which would be inspired by CAT’s mural in Udagawa! Even though Neku was still sulking in his seat for having to stay after school, he didn’t hate the concept.

“So gang, we’ll need a couple of supplies to start with constructing the sets and painting them.” Yuji started speaking as he walked up the steps leading to the stage.

“Takeda-sensei mentioned that we have some spray paints left over that we could use to save on budget.” Taking a seat at the edge of the stage, the class president looked into the crowd of faces and asked, “Has anyone used spray paints before?”

The answer was quite clear from the deafening silence. Neku could just sit quietly in his seat, admire the ugly clock above the stage, ticking away at the wasted minutes he could be spending with his friends if he wasn’t stuck here…

Or he could take a page out of Mr. H’s book and expand his world. Push his horizons out as far as they'll go. If Shiki was trying to overcome her insecurities and expand her world beyond Eri’s, then maybe he should too. Plus, he could use the practice.

“... I have,” Neku hesitantly muttered, not used to voluntarily bringing attention to himself. The room suddenly felt ten degrees warmer as all the eyes in the auditorium turned to him.

Yuji’s surprised expression was replaced with a huge grin, “Sweet man, thanks for volunteering! You good with the Udagawa set? It’s the only one that would look wild spray painted.”

Like he needed to ask, “yeah.”

“Cool!” Yuji said, “now let’s move on to the Hachiko set. Anyone good with sculpting?”

The remainder of the meeting was spent dividing up the work. They’d start assembling the sets tomorrow, and painting would start in a couple of weeks depending on how long it took to build everything. Satisfied that he could finally go home and relax, Neku sauntered out of the auditorium, flipping open his phone to see if he had any messages. None from Shiki, huh, I wonder if she went home already?

He didn’t get a chance to dwell on why he thought of Shiki just now because he spotted the girl in question sitting outside under one of the awnings at the main entrance.

“What are you still doing here?” Neku asked, slowly approaching the brunette. Shiki turned to the sound of her name, recognition dawning in her eyes and she waved at him.

“Eri forgot she had a doctor’s appointment today, so she had to leave right after classes. I had to stay late with Mina and Ai for the costume supply list, and I wasn’t sure if you had left already.” Shiki looked up at the sky, watching the rain fall around the bench she was sitting on. “I’m waiting for the storm to let up before heading home.”

He had to stop himself from admiring her, she looked stunning surrounded by the falling rain, the setting sun reflecting off of the droplets that shimmered like jewels falling from the sky around her.

“You forgot your umbrella didn’t you?” He asked, seeing her flinch at the accusation confirmed his suspicions. With a sheepish smile, she nodded.

Neku pulled out the folded umbrella from his knapsack and opened it up, leaving room on his left. “Let’s go?”

“Yeah,” she replied, getting up to join her companion as the sounds of two pairs of footsteps splashing in a nearby puddle reverberated off the school buildings.

After a couple of blocks of comfortable silence, Shiki asked, “So how did your meeting go?”

He adjusted the umbrella before muttering, “Boring.”

“Oh.” Shiki wasn’t entirely surprised. The festival seemed like more of a nuisance to him.

“... The play’s going to be a parody in Shibuya?”

“Yeah! Isn’t it interesting? Eri and I decided to do a fusion of victorian punk for the costumes!” Neku could practically see the stars shining in her eyes, “fairytale gold with midnight navy, flowing dresses with chains and netting! It’s going to look awesome —“

So enthusiastic about the creations in her mind, Shiki didn’t see that she stepped into the bicycle lane beside her, with a cyclist approaching at an alarming speed. Neku tossed the umbrella from his left hand to his right and grabbed Shiki’s shoulder from behind, pulling her into his chest in one swift motion. Not a second later did the wind pick up next to the two teens, the bicyclist flipping the middle finger as he passed them.

“Watch where you’re going!” Neku shouted.

“You watch it kid!”

As his senses started the return to normal from the brush of danger, Neku asked Shiki if she was alright. He didn’t move away from her, only bringing the umbrella over to shield the rain that started to drip on his hand holding her shoulder. The rhythmic pattering of droplets hitting the umbrella slowed her heartbeat enough to reply.

“Yeah, a little shaken though. Thanks for the save,” Shiki said, their eyes meeting. The proximity of their faces caused their already flushed cheeks to redden a deeper hue, both quickly turning away in embarrassment. Shiki reluctantly removed her hands from his chest, and with a little hesitation, Neku released his hold on her.

Confined to the edges of his seemingly small umbrella, Neku cleared his throat and offered the girl his arm, “I-I think you should hold on to me, you know, in case I need to save you again.”

This time she pouted, “I saved you a couple of times too, you know,” Shiki commented, her nose held high defiantly. Without hesitation, she accepted the arm that extended out to her, cheeks dusted pink from frustration because he was teasing her, and that she was holding onto the person she may or may not have feelings for. With their arms now linked, the two continued their walk home as the rain started to get heavier.

“Yeah, you’re right. I’ll be sure to thank Piggy when I see him next time.”

“Ugh, gosh Neku, Mr. Mew is a cat!” She pulled the black stuffed animal out of her bag and shoved him in the boy’s face for good measure.

“Hey there Piggy, thanks for saving me back in the UG. Think you can save me from your master’s death glare?” Neku chuckled while guiding Shiki across the street. She was getting more annoyed with him by the second, but he couldn’t help himself. As they waited for the crossing signal to change, Neku took the time to admire the way she crinkles her nose when she’s arguing with him, and how she tightens her grip on his arm when they can proceed across the street. He’s staring too long at her, he realizes and he blushes because may or may not have feelings for her.

They were dancing around where they stood with each other for months now. Definitely more than friends, but a little less than lovers. Neku couldn’t deny that if he ever would be with someone, it would be Shiki, but they were both still learning how to be themselves. That was more important than being branded as something they weren’t yet ready for just to satisfy other people. Shiki was important to Neku, and vice versa because they were partners, and if anything was going to happen beyond that, would just happen on its own. Right now, Neku enjoyed having Shiki this close to him, talking about what the next couple of weeks would be like as they walked home together, and that was good enough for him.

~~~~~

A couple of days had passed since the shared umbrella incident, and yet again, Neku found himself staying after school, moving one of the newly constructed sets into the west wing of the auditorium. It wouldn’t be long before he could take the massive blank mural outside and start spray painting the design he had been ruminating on. With the last of the sets neatly tucked away, Neku silently nodded at Yuji to signal his leave, before picking up his things and heading out. The fluorescent “20:35” shined on his phone as he tapped it to life, lighting up the shadowed hallway as he walked further into the school.

Neku heard her voice on his way to the classroom. He knew she was probably still working, oftentimes the last person in her group to leave, but what surprised him was the presence of another, more masculine voice in response to her quiry.

“Most people don’t know about that collection, it sold out within a couple of hours after release.”

“Wow, did you manage to get anything? Oh, lift your neck a little higher.”

“Sure thing.” There was a pause and Neku took the opportunity to peer into the classroom through the silt in the door. He could see Shiki standing on a stool, intently working on the collar of their classmate’s costume. The voice belonged to Hiroshi Minaru. He was casted as the prince in their festival play, and it looked like most of his costume was complete, sans a couple details Neku knew Shiki would never overlook. She was so deep in thought that her face was barely inches from the boy’s neck. “It was a bloodbath at 5 in the morning, but I grabbed the limited edition mint polo before this other dude and I thought I was going to die!”

Neku heard Shiki giggle, and he subconsciously clenched his fists. He felt like he shouldn’t be there, eavesdropping on her. With another guy… She’s clearly still busy, and it’s not like they had planned to leave together. He debated whether he should just go, make up an excuse as to why he didn’t wait. He felt uncomfortable, and he didn’t know why.

“All done! How does it feel, too constricting?”

“No, It’s perfect Misaki-chan, you’re so amazing with a needle and thread! You really have a talent for sewing.”

“Thanks,” she said bashfully, “now, give me a good turn!”

The boy took a step back and spun around, his cape flowing around him, “how do I look?” He put his hand to his chin, and smirked at her with a lifted brow.

“Like a dashing prince charming.” Shiki replied with a friendly smile, the ones Neku had seen time and time again.

“I’m really glad we got to work together like this for the festival, it’s nice to talk to someone about fashion with an eye for clothes making.”

“Yeah, me too. Most of the time it’s just Eri and I…” Shiki looked down, steadying herself to step down from the stool. Hiroshi offered her a hand, which she gladly took.

“M-Maybe ... sometime I could show you some photos of my Mus Rattus collection?” Hiroshi said, looking up at her from below, their faces mere centimeters away.

The pair made eye contact and the next thing Neku knew, he saw her pitch forward.

“Misaki-chan!” “Shiki!”

Thankfully, she landed on her feet, still holding Hiroshi’s hand. Both heads turned to the door that was forcibly ripped open, leaving the orange haired teen standing alone, concern written on his face.

“Shiki, are you okay?” Neku asked, walking toward the pair. He saw her slide her hand out of Hiroshi’s as she redirected her attention to him.

“Yeah, a little shaken but I’m alright.” She turned to Hiroshi, “Thanks for catching my fall Hiroshi-kun.”

“No problem Misaki-chan. You sure you’re okay?”

“Yeah, I’m fine,” she beamed at Neku, “while you’re here, what do you think?” She asked, gesturing toward Hiroshi, to which their classmate posed with a smile.

After a second or two, “I think I see a button loose.”

“WHAT, where?!” She scurried to Hiroshi, who stiffened at the sudden scrutiny.

“...made you look…”

“Neku, jeez!” Shiki puffed her cheeks. He just smiled as she attacked him with a series of punches to the arm.

Clearing his throat, Hiroshi excused himself. It was quite late already, and he felt like he was intruding on what seemed to be a private moment.

“See you later, Misaki-chan, Sakuraba-kun.”

A comfortable silence soon fell upon them. Shiki moved to gather her belongings, tidying up her projects neatly to be continued tomorrow.

“Let’s go?” She asked, holding her bag behind her back.

He nodded as she walked out of the classroom, shutting the light, and closing the door behind them.

~~~~~

The evening air whistled in his ear, a chill nipping at his nose. The weather was getting colder, the days shorter, and staying in school longer for the festival meant commuting home when the sun was either gone or disappearing beyond the horizon. He pulled his scarf tighter around his neck in a feeble attempt to fight the shivers moving up his spine. He looked at Shiki to see how she was fairing.

He saw that her cheeks were pink, from the cold or something else he didn’t know. He moved to look at her eyes, surprised when his eyes locked onto hers. Shortly after both teens looked away in different directions, a little more flushed than before.

“So Hiroshi-kun’s costume is coming together really well. The gold accents Eri wanted really worked out better than I imagined,” Shiki said.

“That’s because you brought it to life.”

Shiki looked at him with wide eyes. Neku’s always been blunt to a “T,” never sugarcoating his thoughts regardless if they were well-received or not. When he says things like this, Shiki can’t help but feel elated. He believed in her and her abilities, it was just a simple truth.

“Thanks Neku.”

She heard a muffled mhmm from his scarf.

A couple steps later, “... what were you and Hiroshi talking about?”

She gave him a thoughtful look. “Hiroshi-kun is really into Mus Rattus’ recent fall collection. Some of the pieces had some pretty neat fabrics and we started talking about textiles and fashion. I didn’t know there would be someone else that liked fashion as much as Eri and I.”

Neku grunted a reply. Realizing that he was a few steps ahead of her, Shiki quickened her pace to match his.

“Is something … bothering you?” Shiki questioned the boy, subconsciously giving him the doe-eyed look he found both irritating and endearing.

Neku felt agitated; more so frustrated because he didn’t exactly know why he was agitated. Flashbacks from that rainy day came to mind, Shiki holding onto his arm under a shared umbrella, walking home side by side, more closely than before. The memories made him feel warm and excited. Then he remembered the princely-dressed Hiroshi holding Shiki’s hand as if she was his princess he had come to rescue, and he grunted in displeasure. He came to a stop, trying to sort out his emotions. It showed on his face enough for Shiki to raise an eyebrow in concern.

“Let me in,” Shiki said quietly, “trust me?” She placed a hand on his arm delicately.

It’s not that he didn’t trust her, it was more like he didn’t trust what would come out of his mouth coherently. He looked at her hands, and with great care, took her hands into his own, slightly larger ones.

“I … ugh … want to … hold your hands.” Neku mummered, so low and into his scarf she barely caught it. But after a couple of months of getting to know her partner, she knew how to really listen when he verbally or wordlessly communicated something.

Not exactly sure where this was coming from, Shiki just replied with the first thing that came to mind, “I want to hold your hands too,” she said with a soft smile.

That was a good sign, right? Neku was nervous, but an excited kind of nervous. They were going into a very delicate topic, one that they had been carefully tiptoeing around since they came back to the RG. He didn’t know if he was ready to take the next steps, but now’s a better time than never he reasoned. He slowly realized that he didn’t want to wait any longer.

“Can we talk about…this, us?” He said, looking down at their joined hands, giving hers a light squeeze.

A pregnant pause ascended, and Neku didn’t realize he was holding this breath before he heard her speak.

“Well, I like hanging out with you, being with just you.” She closed her eyes in thought, “and I like when you walk me home.” She gestured to their hands, “this is nice too, I would like to do this more often.”

Shiki opened one eye to gauge her companion’s reaction and took a leap of faith, “I guess I’ve kind of had feelings for you for a while now, since the first time you saw me in the RG, the real me. I was super embarrassed when you told me that I was prettier than Eri. I thought you were just trying to cheer me up so that Beat and Rhyme wouldn't worry, but then I remembered that you don’t say needless things, that you really believed it, so I started to believe it too.”

Looking him straight in the eyes, Shiki continued, “I like the way you make me feel, like I’m a better person than I think I am, and I want to be the person that you see in me…”

He still hadn’t uttered a word, slowly processing what he was hoping wasn’t a dream. His silence continued and Shiki was beginning to lose her nerve, “and you should say something now because this is super embarrassing with you just looking at me like that!” Gosh, she wanted to pry her hands away so she can bury her face in them!

So the feeling was mutual all along, Neku thought, and he couldn’t stop the goofiest smile that emerged on his face.

“Well … you were my entry fee,” he replied, trying to look everywhere but her. Neku had told Shiki and the gang about his three week experience immediately after they returned to the RG. He was so apologetic for dragging her back into the game again that he didn’t see her embarrassment about what being his entry fee really meant. If he didn’t want to dwell on it, neither would she. However his comment had greater weight now, and she blushed knowing what he was implying, but she still wasn’t satisfied.

“Geez, I just gave you a whole monologue! I want something more than that. Say it!”

“Alright, alright, geez stalker don’t get your undies in a bunch,” he chuckled, and with a little bit more confidence said, “Shiki, I like you too.”

It felt like a veil had lifted, like the metaphoric waltz they were dancing finally concluded and they just stood there, hand in hand. Neku swore he heard music in his ears, the Shibuya’s metropolitan sounds harmonizing with Shiki’s melody into a rhapsody only he could hear. One day he would tell her about it, her song that was playing in his mind when she told him that she liked him. But for today he would just burn her smile into his memory, the smile she had when he told her that he liked her.

Neku didn’t know what the near future would hold, neither of them doing well under the pressure of their friends that had been right about them this whole time, but he wanted to do this right, and take it slow. For now, all he just wanted was to be with her, and hold her hand a little longer.

“Let’s take the long way home, through the park?” Neku suggested, bringing her knuckles to his lips.

“Y-yeah.” She stuttered as he boldly gave them a chaste kiss.

So into their own world, hands laced together, setting a different course home, did the young couple not realize the chuckle in the wind at the bet he just won on who would confess first.

[wisteria-lodge]

lion or badger primary + lightly burned lion secondary (& intense badger model)

Hello there! I've been diving into the Sorting Hat Chats system lately, which has led me to your blog. I love reading how you type characters (Umbrella Academy and Anakin and Obi Wan were some of my favorites, with Scooby Doo getting an honorable mention), and I saw that you had been helping some people figure out their own sorting. I was hoping you might do the same for me, if you have the time/mental energy? 

I'm pretty confident in my secondary. I'm not charge-y like a Lion (but I can be bossy and relentlessly pursue my goal once I've decided on something). 

I dunno friend, that sounds kinda liony to me. “Charging” is a misleading term.

I do take time to analyze and organize things, so I guess that could be a point in favor of a Bird secondary? 

Or a Bird secondary model. 

And I'm not the adaptive Snake, I'm pretty much myself around everyone (unless previously burned by a person, then I'll retreat into myself and keep my distance). 

That’s REALLY lion. 

The reason I think I'm a Badger secondary is because my first instinct is to help. If I walk into the kitchen and see dishes in the sink, I do them. If someone at the store drops an item, I pick it up. I save the comfy chairs at the cinema for my friends because they're always late. That's how I make friends, really! Consistent acts of service, volunteering to help. Some on the outside looking in say that I'm smart, or that school is so easy for me, but they don't see all the work I do. Anyway, that was a long way of saying that the hardworking, community building Badger definitely suits me.

Interesting. Because yeah, that does sound very Badger. You’re either a Lion or a Badger secondary, and whichever one you don’t have you model. My guess is that you are probably a Lion who models Badger, just because I honestly cannot picture a Badger secondary saying “I'm pretty much myself around everyone (unless previously burned by a person, then I'll retreat into myself and keep my distance).” That is so distinctively Lion.

Now I'll dig into the primary, which is where I get stuck. The Sorting Hat Chats quiz usually narrows the choice down to Lion or Badger. I think that my morality is too "felt" to be a Bird, but it encompasses too many people to be a Snake.

Just a reminder that Snakes with huge inner circles absolutely exist.

Which, as previously stated, leaves me with Lion and Badger. For Lion... I like the idea of it. I always wanted to be a Lion (they were the main characters in the books, after all), but I don't feel brave enough.

Ugh, “brave” is such a nebulous concept. Annoying.

When the quiz asks me to choose between my family and the world, I choose the world, because my family is part of the world. And other people's families, just as important as mine, are part of the world too. So, I could be a Lion? Maybe I just don't have a cause yet.  

That’s either Badger or Paragon Lion (which looks super Badger a lot of the time.) 

There have been a few real life scenarios where I've had to choose between the community I'm part of and the right thing. When I was in public school, I ended up losing my entire friend group because I stood up to the girl who was gossiping and backstabbing people. In an experience much closer to home, I've lost an entire side of my family because I learned a secret. And once I learned it, I couldn't go back. I couldn't look at that family member the same way again, couldn't be silent. I couldn't keep my head down. So when they asked me to choose-- my reality, or theirs-- I chose mine. I chose the truth. I wouldn't go back and change it, but it still hurts. These situations and choices all feel kind of Lion, don't they? 

They sure do. Very publish-and-be-dammed. Actually it’s so Lion that I’m counting it as another point for a Lion secondary. 

But I only make decisions, walk away, etc. when I'm extremely pressed. Most of the time, I'm too indecisive

This could be evidence of a little bit of secondary burning. And if you have an extremely strong Badger secondary model (as I suspect you do) I would actually be surprised if you didn’t build it to augment a slightly charred secondary.

 or the issue isn't important enough to say anything. 

Ah. The Morally Bored Lion. Also known as the Chill Lion. Totally a thing. Some Lions get an intense gut response about pretty much everything they go up against, and some just... don’t.

Moving to Badger now (I apologize for how long this is). 

An apology. But a small one, quite a long ways down. A burned secondary, but you know. Just a little bit burned.  

I kind of like the idea of being all soft and sweet and dreamy, though I'm aware that this is definitely a Badger stereotype. 

Yep. Badgers are scary. 

I think that it's important to contribute to my community and volunteer to do service, give donations, clean up litter, etc. Sorting Hat Chats says that Badgers tie their self worth up in their communities, which might be true for me. I do hang some of my worth on being a good friend, so the fact that my friendships are limited right now due to circumstance does make me feel like a failure/loser a lot of the time. I wouldn't say that I'm loyal to tradition, however. Badgers prioritize the people who need them most, right? And I like helping people, I feel guilty when I don't have money to give beggars on street corners. 

This all Badger secondary stuff, and we know that you have one hell of a Badger secondary [model]

My goal in life is to help people and bring peace, which seems Badger? 

Or Paragon Lion.

Again, I'm sorry for how long this is, and if you're not in the headspace to answer it, I totally understand. Any insight you can give would be fantastic, I'd love to hear your thoughts! Happy New Year, wish you the best :)

[mimi-cee-hq]

It’s Blue - Kuroo x Reader

[Masterlist]

I guess this is my contribution to all of the Kuroo writing out there with this cute match-up oneshot. lol.

Request from @jessie4098:

hi, I’m jessie, could I please have a matchup? I have long dirty blonde hair, that I constantly braid, I’m pale with freckles on my nose. I’m not that tall, I’m only 5'2" but that doesn’t stope me from playing volleyball. I’m a libero for my volleyball teams, I play for three teams, and just for fun I play beach volleyball with friends. I do well in school, and I volunteer a lot I am the grandma of the friend group, i know many weird home remedies, I love hard candy, I give good advice, I can sew, cook, I love books, and I’m always cold. I love both old music and new music. I have pretty bad insomnia, when I can’t sleep I will practice volleyball till ungodly hours. I’m a hard worker, and stubborn. I can make friends with anyone. I’m caring and loyal to my friends. I love affection and playing with peoples hair. Im a bubbly girl, who loves volleyball.Thank you!

Summary:

During Kuroo’s first year, a petite libero volunteers to cook at the training camp. She didn’t expect to leave with a crush on him. Kuroo noticed her feelings but is hesitant to accept them because of something blue during his childhood.

AO3 Link if you want to read there

I removed a part of what Jessie wrote in her request because it’ll actually spoil the story for everyone else. I’ll add it at the end. I also changed a tiny detail and didn’t hit every single thing listed for plot reasons.

Match-up stories taglist: @nagichi-deku, @nxlx96

It’s Blue - Kuroo x Reader

Words: 2,697

“You should be our manager, Y/n,” laughed Kai as he watched the brown-eyed girl chop onions with Nanako.

“What? Are you kidding me?” replied Y/n to her classmate. “I wouldn’t be able to play volleyball then.”

Y/n and Nanako were both on the girl’s volleyball team. Nanako was their third year setter and captain of their team. She only came with Y/n because she had forced her to. Y/n told Nanako that she needed to learn how to cook, especially if she wanted to survive after graduating high school. So Y/n volunteered to help with the boy’s training camp during Golden week to teach her.

That wasn’t the only reason she had offered to help cook. The girl’s team didn’t get their own camp because their coach always visited family out of town during Golden week. But Y/n loved volleyball a little too much, so she told the boys’ coach that she’d help with the food if she could sneak in some practice during their training camp.

“Seriously,” said Nanako, “this girl works too hard.”

“How else would I get better?” asked Y/n.

“You already receive our serves and spikes really well,” commented Nanako. “Well, I guess we don’t have a lot of strong spikers in the first place.”

“By the way, Y/n,” noted Kai. “How are you not crying right now?”

Nanako had been tearing up and sniffing the entire time from chopping onions. Y/n, on the other hand, seemed fine. “Oh, that’s because…,” she started to say. “I just have a secret remedy for that,” she said with a grin.

“Pfft,” Nanako laughed. “There you go with your home remedies again, Grandma.”

“This one actually isn’t a home remedy,” she replied. “But it’s a secret.”

“Grandma?” asked Kai. “But you’re in the same year as me.” Nanako laughed at Kai’s comment. She explained that even though she was the captain of the team, Y/n would ‘mother’ her enough that she would call her mom. But the other first years thought of Nanako as the mom of the team. As a result, Y/n got the name grandma instead.

Kuroo and Yaku entered the kitchen to mix some more of their sports drink. But when Kuroo noticed Y/n, he stopped walking and stared at her. “Do I know you?” Kuroo asked Y/n.

“Seriously?” asked Yaku with a laugh. “Already using pick up lines? That one’s a lame one.”

“No?” replied Y/n. She wasn’t sure why Kuroo was looking into her eyes so intently. “I don’t think I know you.”

Kuroo sighed, rubbed his hair and walked away with his sports drink. When Yaku joined him, Y/n heard Kuroo telling him to remember to eat his veggies. She laughed at their dynamic as she continued to teach Nanako how to cook.

Y/n later learned that Kuroo was the only one on the team who knew how to do a jump serve. She was impressed that he was able to do one even though he was only a first year like herself. None of the girls on her team could do one either. So when the boys had free practice, she took the opportunity to pull him aside and ask him to practise with her.

“Are you sure?” asked Kuroo. “Yaku is the only one who can receive my serve well right now.”

“Yes!” she said eagerly. “We might go against other teams with strong serves so I need to get better.”

During that week, she asked him to practise with her every chance she got. Kuroo would scold her for overworking herself. She’d retort that he’d been practising a lot more than she had been because she would have to go and cook. But one night, Kuroo saw her up late, practising her receives by herself. He snatched the ball from her and held it above her head.

“You’re only allowed to have the ball back if you’re able to take it from me,” Kuroo sneered at her. Of course, she wouldn’t be able to because she was only 5 feet and 2 inches tall.

Y/n, getting frustrated, couldn’t think of a witty comeback. Then, she gave him a smirk, “It’s not like your receives are any good anyway.”

“Ha?”

“Why is the one who’s bad at receives preventing the one who good at receives from practising?” she giggled.

“Why, you…”

The two of them laughed as they continued to bicker with each other. When they settled down, she did end up encouraging him to practise his receives more. “I know that attacks look a lot cooler in volleyball, but even the small and seemingly unimportant parts of a body are actually really important,” she told him. “It’s like how we never notice how much we use our fingers during the day. But once we get a paper cut, it’s like it affects the rest of the body.” She smiled and continued, “It’s like a team. When one member of the team isn’t doing well, the whole team is affected. The opponents are always looking for holes to pick at.”

“Ugh…,” complained Kuroo. “I guess that means I have to practise receiving more.” The two of them sat inside the gym against the wall. “Kenma was telling me otherwise because I’m tall and a middle blocker. He said that magic users in RPG games need to put their skill points in intelligence. So similarly, I should be focusing my skills on blocks and quick attacks. That’s why we practised our time difference attack a lot.” He smiled at the memory of practising with him. “But I guess you’re right too.”

“Who knows,” she said with a giggle, “Practising your receives might come in handy one day.”

He smirked at her, “You’re pretty smart.” He rubbed the dirty blonde hair on her head as he got up from the gym floor. “Here’s my jacket,” he said as he gave it to her. “You look cold.”

She was surprised he had noticed that. But then again, it was rare for her to not be cold, even though it was the beginning of May. She blushed as he scolded for her to go to sleep. With the rub in her hair, the jacket, and even the scolding, it was hard to not interpret these actions as being affectionate. She got a bit frustrated with herself because she had just met him earlier that week. She already knew that she was starting to have a crush on him.

*****

After Golden week, the two of them continued to be close friends. Although they were in different classes, they would greet each other and chat whenever they saw each other in the hallway. She was in Kai’s class and Kuroo and Yaku would come and meet up with him before practise. One day, as Kai wrapped up his notes, Kuroo and Yaku sat down as they waited for him.

“I still don’t understand why you like dogs,” mentioned Yaku.

“I don’t have to like cats just because I go to ‘Neko’-ma,” answered Kuroo. But he froze when he started to feel someone playing with his hair.

“How does your hair even get like this?” asked Y/n. “It just sticks up without any product at all!”

Kuroo started to feel a blush form on his cheeks. With a sigh, Kuroo asked her in a serious tone, “Y/n, can you stop playing with my hair?”

Y/n quickly pulled her hands away and apologized. When her teammate called her to go to practise, she left the classroom, leaving Kuroo, Yaku and Kai behind.

“Is she on the volleyball team?” asked Yaku.

“Yeah, she’s the libero,” replied Kai.

“Really?” Yaku said, suddenly more curious about her.

“Oy! You’re not allowed to be interested in her!” said Kuroo.

“What? Why not?”

“B- Because she has long hair,” replied Kuroo. When the two of them looked unconvinced, he added, “Didn’t you think that other girl was cute anyway?”

Yaku and Kai laughed at his pathetic attempt to cover up his crush on her. “You obviously like her,” commented Kai. “And it looks like she likes you too. What’s holding you back?”

Kuroo sighed. “I don’t like her okay?”

“What? Are you not over your first love or something?” Yaku asked sarcastically.

For a moment, Kuroo didn’t reply. He got up and told them, “Let’s just go to practice.” As they walked to the gym, Kai asked Yaku if he had tried to talk to the girl in his class yet. Yaku got flustered at the thought of talking to her. Kuroo strolled beside them, trying to remember something from his childhood days. “I’m pretty sure it was blue,” he thought to himself as he sighed.

*****

Several summers ago, Kuroo’s dad was preparing food that they had brought to the beach. So Kuroo was sitting at the picnic table near the barbeque grill his dad was using. Looking around, he saw a group of people playing beach volleyball. Before he realized it, he had wandered away from his dad and stood beside the court to watch.

A volleyball rolled over to him. “Mikasa?” he thought to himself as he read the brand name of the ball.

A young girl with a long braid ran over to him, presumably to retrieve the ball. But as she approached him, he looked away, trying not to make eye contact with her. He still wasn’t very comfortable around other people.

But she still tried to look at his face and told him that she had seen him watching them. “Did you want to join?” she asked with a smile. When he didn’t answer, she said, “You don’t have to be shy. Even though we’re both just kids, my parents will make sure we get an opportunity to hit the ball.”

Kuroo finally looked up and saw her face. His mouth was open as he stared into her eyes. “Y- You look like my dog!” he exclaimed.

She burst out in laughter. “What?” she said. She wasn’t expecting that to be his first impression of her. “Is that a good thing?”

After that day, Kuroo kept asking his parents to go to the beach. He had fun playing volleyball with her family. They made him feel welcome even though he wasn’t very good at volleyball. Her dad even pulled him aside from the game and took the time to teach him the basics. “Place your feet shoulder length apart. Bend your knees,” he instructed. “Put your arms in front. Turn them slightly out to make a flat surface with your forearms.”

But those days had to end when Kuroo told them that he was moving to Tokyo. “What? You’re moving?” she said with tears in her eyes.

“Yeah,” he responded. “That’s where my grandparents are.”

She gave him one last hug before he had to leave. But she clung on him tightly and didn’t want to let go. Kuroo blushed at her gesture. He didn’t have many friends but she made it easy.

He was thankful that he met Kenma after he moved. Without him, he wouldn’t have tried volleyball again and would have stuck to watching volleyball videos instead. Kuroo wondered if he would be able to see her again if he kept playing volleyball. He thought that it shouldn’t be too hard to find her if their paths crossed again. After all, she had a very distinctive trait.

*****

Kuroo arrived at school one day to see Y/n being scolded by the principal. “You’re not allowed to wear sunglasses in school,” he told her. After she bowed to him in apology, she turned to walk down the hall. Kuroo found it odd that she was covering her right eye with her hand. He chuckled when she almost walked into a wall.

“You know you don’t get any depth perception when you walk around like that,” he teased her.

“Oh! Hi, Kuroo,” she said as she smiled at him. But her right hand didn’t move from her face.

“Are you seriously going to walk around like that all day?” he asked.

“Well, I can try, can’t I?” she replied with a giggle. But when Kuroo saw that she was going to hurt herself if she did, he attempted to pry her hand off her face. She was relentless though.

“Why are you being so stubborn?”

“Gah! Stop it Kuroo!”

He stopped - only because she had used both of her hands to push him away. Y/n stood a few feet from him and glared at him as she caught her breath.

Kuroo’s eyes grew wide as he stared at her. “It’s blue,” Kuroo commented to himself. Y/n quickly covered her eye again. “It’s blue,” he repeated in disbelief.

Kuroo took a step back until his back hit the wall and stared at her. He then started to laugh at himself at how ridiculous the situation was if he had understood it correctly.

“Has your right eye always been blue?” he asked, trying to process everything.

“Yeah,” she simply replied.

“I’m guessing you’ve been wearing colored contacts to cover your heterochromia iridium?”

“Yeah.”

“Why?”

“Because someone made fun of me,” she said. “Having different colored eyes isn’t exactly common.”

Kuroo vigorously rubbed his hair out of frustration. “So you mean if it wasn’t for some jerk, I would have asked you out a while ago?” he muttered to himself.

“Huh?”

“What?”

It took Kuroo a moment to realize that he just admitted to liking Y/n out loud. He started to panic and think of an explanation, but Y/n quickly latched on to what he had just said.

“Wait, what?! What do you mean?” she exclaimed as she freaked out. “Explain right now!” she demanded.

“Explain what?!” he yelled back. “That you’re my first love and that I’ve been looking for you for who knows how long?!”

Y/n was speechless. Kuroo knew she had a crush on him. But he had been so hung up over his childhood crush that it prevented him from allowing himself to fully like her back.

“I was worried that I only started liking you because you reminded me of my first love,” he explained. “But I guess I don’t have to worry about that anymore.” He then smiled at her, knowing that they had some catching up to do.

It took Y/n a while to fully process what had just happened. She didn’t remember Kuroo initially, but as he explained, she started to remember bits and pieces. Kuroo told her not to worry about it. She just left a big impression on him. She blushed in response. She never knew that what she thought were just small gestures of kindness would make a big impact on someone’s life.

But it wasn’t until Kuroo told their story to Kai and Yaku how big of a difference it really was.

“So wait a minute. She has long, braided hair…”

“She has a Mikasa beach volleyball…”

“Your dog also has different colored eyes…”

“And the two of you met at a beach during the summer”

“…”

Kuroo tried not to show his embarrassment, but they had totally seen right through him.

“That’s 4 out of the 7 things you like,” Kai chuckled at him.

“And I thought that you kept choosing what I didn’t like just to spite me,” Yaku laughed.

“Oh! But, he started playing volleyball because of her, so wouldn’t that be 5 out of 8?”

“What are they talking about?” asked Y/n.

“Nothing,” he said, as he quickly pushed her away from them.

“Hey Y/n! Do you like eating sweet curry?”

“Fish?”

“Japanese cuisine?”

“Shut up!”

*****

Extras

Y/n didn’t cry while chopping onions because she was wearing contacts. I don’t know if this actually works in real life, but just pretend it does for this story.

Kuroo is still concerned about his bedhead but doesn’t mind as much because she likes playing with his hair.

Their teams call them grandma and grandpa. :D It’s not surprising because Yaku called Kuroo an old man in first year and Kuroo considers everyone younger than him as youth or kids.

Coach Nekomata returns from retirement around their second or third year and is pleasantly surprised that the players are still good receivers even when he wasn’t around. It’s all thanks to her and Kuroo. (I haven’t read the manga. Just going by the wiki.)

Her advice about a team being like a body gave Kuroo the inspiration for his mantra - much to Kenma’s dismay.

@jessie4098‘s full request:

(½) hi, I’m jessie, could I please have a matchup? I have long dirty blonde hair, that I constantly braid, I’m pale with freckles on my nose. I have one blue eye and one brown eye, I usually wear sunglasses, I used to get made fun of because of my eyes. I’m not that tall, I’m only 5’2” but that doesn’t stope me from playing volleyball. I’m a libero for my volleyball teams, I play for three teams, and just for fun I play beach volleyball with friends. I do well in school, and I volunteer a lot

(2/2) I am the grandma of the friend group, i know many weird home remedies, I love hard candy, I give good advice, I can sew, cook, I love books, and I’m always cold. I love both old music and new music. I have pretty bad insomnia, when I can’t sleep I will practice volleyball till ungodly hours. I’m a hard worker, and stubborn. I can make friends with anyone. I’m caring and loyal to my friends. I love affection and playing with peoples hair. Im a bubbly girl, who loves volleyball.Thank you!

I hope you enjoyed it. If you did, please like, reblog or send me a message. :) Let me know if you want to be tagged for the next match-up (whenever I actually do that.) Check out my other stories too. :)

[Masterlist]

[johnrossbowie]

LEAVING TWITTER

I wrote this earlier in the fall, before the election, after dissolving my Twitter account. I wasn’t sure where to put it (“try up your ass!” – someone, I’m sure) and then I remembered I have a tumblr I never use. Anyway, here tis.

How do you shame someone who thinks Trumps’ half-baked policies and quarter-baked messaging put him in the pantheon of great Presidents? How do you shame someone so lacking in introspection that they will call Obama arrogant while praising Trump’s decisiveness and yet at the same time vehemently deny that they’re racist? How do you shame someone for whom that racism is endearing and maybe long overdue?

You don’t. It’s silly to think otherwise.

Twitter is an addiction of mine, and true to form, my dependence on it grew more serious after I quit drinking in 2010. At first it was a chance to mouth off, make jokes both stupid and erudite and occasionally stick my foot in my mouth (I owe New Yorker writer Tad Friend an apology. He knows why, or (God willing) he’s forgotten. Either way. Sorry.) I blew off steam, steam that was accumulating without booze to dampen the flames. Not always constructive venting, but I also met new friends, and connected with people whose work I’ve admired for literal decades and ended up seeing plays with Lin-Manuel Miranda and hanging backstage with Jane Wiedlin after a Go-Go’s show and exchanging sober thoughts with Mike Doughty. When my mom passed in 2018, a lot of people reached out to tell me they were thinking of me. This was nice. For a while, Twitter was a huge help when I needed it.

I used to hate going to parties and really hated dancing and mingling, but a couple of drinks would fix that. Point is, for a while, booze was a huge help, too.

But my engagement with Twitter changed, and I started calling people my ‘friends’ even though I’d never once met them or even heard their voices. These weren’t even penpals, these were people whose jokes or stances I enjoyed, so with Arthurian benevolence I clicked on a little heart icon, liked their tweet, and assumed therefore that we had signed some sort of blood oath.

We had not. I got glib, and cheap, and a little lazy. And then to make matters much worse, Trump came along and extended his reach with the medium.

There was a while there where I thought I could be a sort of voice for the voiceless, and I thought I was doing that. I tried very hard to only contribute things that I felt were not being said – It wasn’t accomplishing anything to notice “Haha Trump looks like he’s bullshitting his way through an oral report” – such things were self-evident. I tried to point out very specific inconsistencies in his policies, like the Muslim ban meant to curb terrorism that still favored the country that brought forth 13 of the 9/11 hijackers. Like his full-throated cries against media bias performed while he suckled at Roger Ailes’ wrinkly teat.  Like his fondness for evangelical votes that coincided with a scriptural knowledge that lagged far behind mine, even though I’m a lapsed Episcopalian, and there is no one less religiously observant than a lapsed Episcopalian. But that eventually gave way to unleashing ad hominem attacks against his higher profile supporters, who I felt weren’t being questioned enough, who I felt were in turn being fawned over by theirdim supporters. If you’re one of these guys, and you think I’m talking about you, you’re probably right, but don’t mistake this for an apology. You suck, and you support someone who sucks, and your idolatry is hurting our country and its standing in the world. Fuck you entirely, but that’s not the point. The point is that me screaming into the toilet of Twitter helps no one – it doesn’t help a family stuck at the border because they’re trying to secure a better life for their kids. It doesn’t help a poor teenager who can’t get an abortion because the party of ‘small government’ has squeezed their tiny jurisdiction into her uterus. It doesn’t help the coal miner who’s staking all his hopes on a dying industry and a President’s empty promises to resurrect it. I was born in New York City, and I currently live in Los Angeles. Those are the only two places I’ve ever lived, if you don’t count the 4 years I spent in Ithaca[1]. So, yes, I live in a liberal bubble, and while I’ve driven across the country a couple of times and did a few weeks in a touring band and am as crushed as any heartlander about the demise of Waffle House, you have me dead to rights if you call me a coastal elitist. And with that in mind, I offer few surprises. A guy who grew up in the theater district and was vehemently opposed to same-sex marriage or felt you should own an AR-15? THAT would be newsworthy. I am not newsworthy. I can preach to the choir, I can confirm people’s biases, but I will likely not sway anyone who is eager to dismiss a Native New Yorker who lives in Hollywood. I grew up in the New York of the 1970s, and that part of my identity did shape my politics. My mom’s boss was gay and the Son of Sam posed a realistic threat. As such, gays are job creators[2] and guns are used for homicide much more often than they are used for self-defense[3]. I have found this to be generally true over the years, and there’s even data to back it up.

“But Mr. Bowie,” you might say, though I insist you call me John - “those studies are conducted by elitist institutions and those institutions suck!” And again, I am not going to reason with people who will dismiss anything that doesn’t fit their limited world view as elitist or, God Help Us, fake news. But the studies above are peer-reviewed, convincing, and there are more where those came from.

“But John,” you might say, and I am soothed that we’re one a first name basis - “Can’t you just stay on Twitter for the jokes?” Ugh. A) apparently not and B) the jokes are few and far between, and I am 100% part of that problem.

I have stuff to offer, but Twitter is not the place from which to offer it.

After years of academically understanding that Twitter is not the real world, Super Tuesday 2020 made the abstract pretty fucking concrete. If you had looked at my feed on the Monday beforehand – my feed which is admittedly curated towards the left, but not monolithic (Hi, Rich Lowry!) – you’d have felt that a solid Bernie surge was imminent, but also that your candidate was going surprise her more vocal critics. When the Biden sweep swept, when Bernie was diminished and when Warren was defeated, I realized that Twitter is not only not the real world, it’s almost some sort of Phillip K. Dickian alternate timeline, untethered to anything we’re actually experiencing in our day to day life. This is both good news and bad news – one, we’re not heading towards a utopia of single payer health care and the eradication of American medical debt any time soon, but two, we’re also not being increasingly governed by diaper-clad jungen like Charlie Kirk. Clouds and their linings. Leaving Twitter may look like ceding ground to the assclowns but get this – the ground. Is not. There.

It’s just air.

There are tangible things I can do with my time - volunteer with a local organization called Food On Foot, who provide food and job training for people experiencing homelessness here in my adopted Los Angeles. I can give money to candidates and causes I support, and I can occasionally even drop by social media to boost a project or an issue and then vanish, like a sort of Caucasian Zorro who doesn’t read his mentions. I can also model good behavior for my kids (ages 10 and 13) who don’t need to see their father glued to his phone, arguing about Trumps incompetence with Constitutional scholars who have a misspelled Bible verse in their bio (three s’ in Ecclesiastes, folks).

So farewell Twitter. I’ll miss a lot of you. Perhaps not as badly as I miss Simon Maloy and Roger Ebert and Harris Wittels and others whose deaths created an unfillable void on the platform. But I won’t miss the yelling, and the lionization of poor grammar, and anonymous trolls telling my Jewish friends that they were gonna leave the country “via chimney.” I will not miss people who think Trump is a stable genius calling me a “fucktard.” I will not miss transphobia or cancelling but I will miss hashtag games, particularly my stellar work during #mypunkmusical (Probably should have quit after that surge, I was on fire that night, real blaze of glory stuff I mean, Christ, Sunday in the Park with the Germs? Husker Du I Hear A Waltz? Fiddler on the Roof (keeping an eye out for the cops)? These are Pulitzer contenders.). Twitter makes me feel lousy, even when I’m right, and I’m often right. There’s just no point in barking bumperstickers at each other, and there are people who are speaking truth to power and doing a cleaner job of it – Aaron Rupar, Steven Pasquale, Louise Mensch, Imani Gandy and Ijeoma Oluo to name five solid mostly politically based accounts (Yes, Pasquale is a Broadway tenor. He’s also a tenacious lefty with good points and research and a dreamy voice. You think you’re straight and then you hear him sing anything from Bridges of Madison County and you want him to spoon you.). You’re probably already following those mentioned, but on the off chance you’re not, get to it. You’ll thank me, but you won’t be able to unless you actually have my email.

_______

[1] And Jesus, that’s worse – Ithaca is such a lefty enclave that they had an actual socialist mayor FOR WHOM I VOTED while I was there. And not socialist the way some people think all Democrats are socialist – I mean Ben Nichols actually ran on the socialist ticket and was re-elected twice for a total of six years.

[2] The National Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce, “America’s LGBT Economy” Jan 20th, 2017

[3] The Violence Policy Institute, Firearm Justifiable Homicides and Non-Fatal Self Defense Gun Use, July 2019.

[lovemesomesurveys]

Are you still in quarantine/under stay at home order? (if you're taking this during Covid-19, that is) The state isn’t, but I am. 

Has stuff been opening back up where you are? Yeah. Although, now dining in isn’t an option again in my area. 

What have you missed most that you haven't been able to do due to Covid-19? I didn’t do much even before all this, but I did like going grocery shopping with my mom and going to the movies, which we did quite often. And now with it being summer I’m really sad I can’t go to the beach. Beach days were the only thing I liked about summer. I could still go shopping with my mom and go to the beach, but I just don’t feel safe or comfortable going out in public and being around people right now when the number of cases are still so high and continue to rise. It makes me extremely anxious and scared. It doesn’t help that my state is a hotspot.

What state do you live in?  California.

Do you personally know anyone who has had Covid-19? Yes. She actually ended up recovering from that, testing negative later on, but she died recently from complications caused by it. She was on dialysis and after she got sick, even though she got better, it affected her kidneys and she had to stop dialysis. Once that happens, it’s not long after that you pass away. She was my grandma’s best friend, thus a very close family friend. :( She was the sweetest, caring, kindhearted person. 

Have you had it? (or think you might have?) No, not so far. Although, whenever I feel crappy or cough for any reason my mind automatically goes there. It’s not unusual for me not to feel well and have days where I’m feeling extra crappy, but nowadays I have to play the game: is it my normally crappiness or something else? :/ I also have dry mouth and my throat tends to get dry in the summer anyway and ugh again it’s something normal for me but I have to wonder about that, too.

Do you know anyone who is a healthcare worker? No. Well, apart from my doctors obviously.

Have you still been working these past few months or not? I don’t have a job. I wasn’t working prior to this either.

If you weren't working, are you still in school? No, thankfully. I graduated UC 5 years ago, so I’ve been done way before this started. What is/was your major in college?  I majored in psych.

Or if you're not in college yet, what do you want to study?

If your school closed due to Covid-19, do you miss it?

What are you most excited about when life goes (somewhat) back to normal? It’s hard for me to even see that point right now. I know people think I sound like a Negative Nancy, but I think I’m just being real. It’s goings to be a long time before we get to a point where we don’t have to have this virus looming over our heads everyday. It’s been kicking our ass. It’s never going to go away, it will likely be like the flu in that we have a covid season, but I pray we get to the point where we can get under control and managed. A point where there’s a vaccine and effective medication. But like I said, that’s going to take time. Masks may be the new way of life for many of us.

Did Covid-19 impact any major plans you had for this spring/summer?  No beach trips or birthday vacay. :( That’s not important, I know, but I am still sad about it.

Do you collect anything? Key chains and giraffe stuffed animals and knicknacks.

What's the name of your favorite restaurant? (chain or local) Wingstop. 

What is your favorite thing to order when you eat there? I get takeout, but anyway I love their boneless garlic parm and lemon pepper wings with their ranch. 

Have you still been able to get food from there during Covid-19? Yes. I always got takeout anyway, so that hasn’t been any different for me.

Are you planning on eating there anytime soon when they reopen? I’ll say it a 3rd time haha I just get it to go and eat at home.

Have you discovered any good new music during quarantine?  Yeah, but not because I’m in quarantine. That implies I’ve done so because I’ve been home and had more time to do so or only did so because I didn’t have anything to do. I’ve spent most of my time at home the past few years, not just this year.

What's a new song you've been loving lately? (not necessarily newly released, just something you've recently discovered) Lately I’ve been getting new music from TikToks. A couple recent ones are Dream Girl by Ir Sais and Summer Days by Martin Garrix ft. Macklemore and Patrick Stump.

Have you been able to keep in touch with friends during this time? I don’t have any friends, so that hasn’t been an issue. 

What is your favorite Starbucks drink? White chocolate mocha, caramel macchiato, and their fall and winter seasonal drinks. 

Do you prefer Starbucks or a local coffee shop? Just give me coffeeee.

What was your favorite TV show when you were a kid? do you still ever watch it? I had a lot of favorites. Some I still watch like Boy Meets World, Full House, Family Matters, Disney Channel shows like That’s So Raven, Lizzie McGuire, The Proud Family, Hannah Montana, etc (thanks to Disney+) and old Nick shows like Rugrats, Doug, and Hey Arnold. I recently found out Hulu has Step by Step, so I’ll be watching that again at some point.

Have you been watching a lot of movies during quarantine? >> No more than I would be usually, since my daily life didn’t change as dramatically as most people’s did. But yeah. <<< Yeah, I’ve gotten into a few new shows and binge watched a few old ones during this time, but again I wouldn’t contribute that to quarantine cause I would have been home majority of the time still anyway.

What is your favorite Disney movie? Alice in Wonderland, Winnie the Pooh, and Toy Story are among the top

Do you have Disney plus? Yep. That’s how I watch those old Disney shows I mentioned before.

Are you a fan of Hamilton? I’ve never seen it.

Are you planning to watch Hamilton on Disney plus? I have thought about checking it out, so we’ll see.

Have you seen Hamilton live? (Broadway or elsewhere) Like I said, I’ve never seen it.

What is your favorite musical? Sweeney Todd.

Have you watched any musicals online recently? No. Or ever.

What was the last live performance you went to before quarantine? I saw Phantom of the Opera 3 years ago.

What was the best concert you've ever been to? All the concerts I went to were awesome. Man, it’s been over 10 years now since my last concert I really miss ‘em.

Do you volunteer anywhere? No. I’ve volunteered at a few places in the past, though.

What is your favorite movie on Netflix? >> ??? There are... so many movies on Netflix. <<<

Did you relocate due to Covid-19? No.

What is one positive thing about the past few months for you? Uhhh.

Do you prefer streaming music or buying it? I stream it.

Do you use Spotify? Yep.

What was the last book you read? I recently started The Girl and the Deadly End by AJ Rivers. It’s the final book in a 7 book series. 

Have you been baking during quarantine? Nope.

What is your favorite thing to bake? It’s been a few years since I’ve done any baking. I used to love it during the holidays.

Do you enjoy doing crafts? I think they can be fun, but they’re not something I do very often at all. I lack the artistic ability, creativity, inspiration, motivation, and energy. 

Have you ever done crafts for money? No. 

Do you shop on Etsy? Yes. I love Etsy.

Have you ever sold anything on Etsy? Nope.

What song are you listening to right now?  I’m not listening to music, I’m listening to an ASMR video.

What genre of music is your favorite? I like a variety of music.

Can you speak any foreign languages? Not fluently, but I know some Spanish.

What is/was your favorite class in school? I always enjoyed English and then later on in college I enjoyed most of my psych classes as well. 

Who was your favorite teacher most recently? I’ve been done with school for 5 years now.

What is the lock screen and home screen on your phone? The lock screen is a photo of the ocean with a Bible verse on it and my home screen is a rose gold background.

Do you play Animal Crossing? Yeppp. 

Do you have any pets? What kind? What is/are your pet(s) name(s)? I have a 3 year old German Shepherd/Lab mix named Princess Leia. <3

what is a song lyric you love? >> Right, I’m definitely not going to think of that off the top of my head right now. <<< Haha, right. Not to mention, I have a ton of favorite lyrics.

Have you done anything recently to support Black Lives Matter? I’ve signed petitions.

Are there any songs you feel transport you to a world that doesn't exist? Jason Mraz songs were kinda like that. Haha. It seemed like he lived in some whimsical fantasyland.

What songs do that for you? “but my breath fogged up glass, and so I drew a new face and I laughed” lol okay Jason Mraz. Haha that’s the only thing coming to mind right now. It’s almost 7AM okay I can’t think.

What is your favorite ethnicity/cuisine of food? Italian.

What are some popular things that you don't like/aren't interested in? Hmm. What’s even popular right now? I’m out of the loop.

When was the last time you got a haircut? Back in February.

What was the last movie (or musical) you watched? Ferris Bueller’s Day Off the other day.

What was the last movie you saw in the theatre? The Invisible Man.

How soon are you planning on going back to work? (If you've been off) I don’t have a job, remember?

What is an item you own that means a lot to you? I’ll always cherish my giraffe stuffed animals and knickknacks.

Do you have a favorite t-shirt? All of my graphic tees.

What other proshot musicals would you love to see streaming online? You sure love musicals. I like a few musicals, sure, but I’m not super into them like you seem to be. There aren’t any right now that I want to see that I can think of. Well, apart from maybe checking out Hamilton. What is something you're looking forward to? Summer being over.

How do you plan on celebrating Covid-19 being over, whenever that is? >> The problem with this idea is that... it’s not that simple? From what I understand, it’s not like one day we’re all gonna say “that’s it! we’ve officially eradicated this virus from the earth and we will never have to worry about it again!” I’m guessing it’s going to be a slow process of reopening with a lot of false starts and rollbacks (as new waves crest and protective measures have to be re-implemented). Even that first day that I go out to a restaurant is probably going to feel really weird and even a little “wrong”. I’m not sure how much celebrating is really going to be happening. <<< All of this. Like I said earlier, it’s not ever going completely go away or be over. We’ll hopefully get it under control at some point and find an effective vaccine and medications and not have the fear of it constantly looming over us, but we got a long way to go.  And when that does happen, I’ll still be cautious. It’s sure going to feel weird when I do feel comfortable to go out again, though. It felt so weird just going outside for a bit recently one night cause it was the first time I had been out of the house at all since my doctor appointment back in May. That was really weird and scary for me. Prior to that I hadn’t gone anywhere since early March. Sooo yeah. I clearly won’t be rushing out anywhere anytime soon.

[folerdetdufoler]

ugh okay so back to blogging, yeah? i fell asleep around one, and woke up a little after five for the sunrise. a quick glance outside only gave me clouds so i went back to sleep. eventually i woke up and had breakfast, enjoyed some tea and a lighter (though still cloudy) view, and took a shower. i hadn’t planned anything for my mornings, which was a relief as i definitely needed the recovery time, so i didn’t have to leave until i messages with nadège to meet up at eleven. i strolled down to the opera house, where they were all headed because jenn and haidee were taking the tour, and took an embarrassing amount of time to climb to the roof. i mean, the lord was testing me.

luckily i arrived before nadège and could sit down in the shade and let my heart/lungs/legs/everything recover. when she got there we waited a bit more for jasmine and silvia to join, chatting up some seagulls while we did. they were maaaad friendly, y’all. super chill, camera-ready. those were birds who knew how to play the game, knew that if they were patient and still, they’d be handsomely rewarded for their photos. anyway, we gathered and walked some more, not really with any direction and quite fine with that. it’s been so long now that i can’t remember what we talked about, but you can bet your ass i mentioned “dicks” at least five times within the hour. eventually we went back toward the opera house to scoop haidee and jenn, and continued on toward sørenga. the sun had come out and we could just sit and chill.

at first i was surprised that it was quite empty but then i remembered that it was a weekday. and also the water is still fucking freezing. i dipped my feet in an attempt to soak them back to life but didn’t last very long. nadège captured the moment anyway, kerry-style, because that was the first time i had put my feet in the harbor! i’ve visited the pool many times but i think they’ve all been in the winter, which is weird. next time i’ll have to actually take a swim.

jenn, nadège, and haidee left for lunch. i stayed a bit longer at the pool with jasmine and silvia because i had had a late breakfast and i was still high from it. we talked some more (and now i’m remembering what we talked about, and i’m still rolling my eyes) and i got a little sunburn on my nose because that bitch decided to make an appearance. then we went to do some shopping for things silvia needed.

it was fun tagging along with them, listening to the kinds of conversations you have when you live in norway. most of the time i’m with people from outside of the country, but now i was just with some “locals,” and they were talking about their daily lives versus topics only related to a visit. i mean, they were doing this on wednesday too, but i guess it was just noticeable now, the subtle difference in conversations that i listened in on depending on who i was hanging out with. in general i avoid directing a conversation, since i never feel like i have the authority to do so, so i like to be aware of what i’m participating in even when it’s very passive. and thaaat was just a long way of saying “i like to listen.”

i dragged them into a convenience shop for a drink, because after all of that walking i now needed some quick sugar. jasmine introduced me to solo, which i don’t think i’ve ever experienced before, not even some kind of american version. i also bought a copy of aftenposten there, which is the newspaper i’m modeling the journalism fic on. had to do some research!

i don’t know what else we did, maybe just more walking and talking. eventually we parted at central station. i popped back to the hotel to prepare for another evening at the festival and then promptly left without the most important thing: my reusable cups! i went back, my feet already screaming at me. and perhaps it was all for naught, as i wasn’t exactly clear on the whole cup policy (like i could’ve bought another set and then returned them at the end of the festival) but whatever. i got to the park and found the girls.

i had a mild interest in seeing mitski, and we’d arrived just in time for her set, but was honestly torn between sitting down and getting close enough to see her. i sat. then i moved over to the main stage and sat there. i knew i had to stand for sigrid so i was saving myself for that. and then i stood, and danced, and sang. i’ve seen her a couple of times now (though oh my gosh not as much as haidee!) and it was so fun seeing how different she was for a norwegian crowd. same energy, of course, but a familiarity that seemed to relax her and make her more nervous at the same time. it was cute. and, like always, her set felt too short. the good stuff always ends too soon.

the crowd flowed over to vindfruen for erykah badu, and she started her set late, though i suppose if you’re erykah badu you simply start your set whenever the fuck you want. she’s just living her life, saying the shit she wants to say, and like any other artist, i don’t have any control over that.

moving on! dumplings. i bought dinner at the festival, because we had a bit of a wait before the last show. the first day i had been too overwhelmed by the choices and the norwegian to figure out what i wanted to eat, but this time the area was a little less busy and i knew i actually needed food before another couple of hours in the crowd. so i gravitated to the dumplings, and they were good! then we went back to the stage for tame impala.

at some point i was standing close enough to someone else with even’s backpack, and i took a creeper shot of it. over the past few days i’d gotten an urge to buy his backpack (just like i have his coat) but after talking with jasmine i understood it wouldn’t be right. those items were given to the volunteers who worked the festival each year, and they could wear them with pride, knowing that they contributed to a wonderful event and supported an important message. to buy one would be disingenuous. so i settled for brushing up against someone else’s bag every so often and thinking of even. i have my bracelet, just like jonas, so that should be enough.

(though HEY, jonas and even we’re both at øyafestivalen in 2015 so wheeeeere is the fic where isak chases even across the festival grounds for four days? and maybe they connect over a certain delillos song on saturday night? hmmmm.)

anyway, i don’t think i’ve ever purposefully listened to tame impala before. a couple of songs felt vaguely familiar, like maybe i’d heard them on the radio, or a soundtrack to something else. a commercial? but in general i had no clue what was going on. the crowd was tight again, and this time nadège was suffering next to a more boisterous dancer, but i think that was the vibe. people weren’t really watching the stage since it was just lights and lasers and smoke, but they were feeling the music and smoking and letting their bodies just do what they wanted. most of my photos are like...angled to the sky, which leads me to believe that i was standing behind a tall person and didn’t have a clear shot of the stage very often. which was fine, since i didn’t know what i was looking at anyway, but it just made me think how much i’d prefer that listening experience like, alone...in my bedroom...with no one touching me.

i do remember this one guy yelling, “i love you, kevin!” after every song and that was sweet. he was there for a good time. kevin kept commenting on the number of bras that were tossed onto the stage too, so i guess a lot of people were there for a good time. it was cute hearing him say that in his australian accent, too. bra. i know typing it means nothing, but his light drawl compared to the norwegian “bra” was interesting.

mmmmmmmm then we went home? every night ended the same way, the mass exodus out the main gate, the gathering halfway down the hill, a quick recap of the show and plans for the next day, and then separating. i always got a burst of energy from that walk home, which would keep me awake for another hour no matter how physically tired i was (maybe because i was alone at that point and knew i had to be on high alert for my own safety). but the photo of tame impala’s stage is the last one in my camera roll before friday’s sunrise so i think that’s it. i’ll probably get around to posting that recap in like, november? stay tuned.

[syngigeim]

Day 29 - Talk

Ugh. Elly’s head hurt. Too much to drink the night before. She helped to save the world again and thus party. Thankfully, she felt no body next to hers. She said a quiet prayer of thanks for that one.

There was a note on her bedstand! She bolted straight up. Thal’s balls, maybe she did take a man to bed.

Elly

I wonder how much you remember of last night.

Shiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiite. This was sounding bad already.

You kinda had a breakdown after many drinks, saying that I was a bastard who was never around. Moaned about just when you managed to find me, well, I at least stopped you from mentioning that G’raha teleported us here.

...gods this was worse. There goes Elly’s reputation with the people of the Crystarium. And she was beginning to figure out who wrote this.

So I volunteered to take you to bed. And then had the glares of everyone in the Wandering Stairs for my poor wording. Just envision Y’sthola glaring at you and that might cheer you up. Anyway, the Washi sisters took you to your room and I just offered to leave you a note. Whenever you are ready for breakfast, come meet me.

- Thancred

Okay, only half as embarrassing as a night that Thancred evidently had. That was at least somewhat welcome. Time to ignore the splitting headache and to see if he’s actually sticking around somewhere.

–

“Oh hey, you’re finally up!” Mariko said, spotting Elly walking out of the Pendants.

“How bad was I last night?” Elly asked.

“Clingy to Thancred. Like holding his arm all night. I think there was moaning about not wanting him to slip out of your grasp again.”

“GODS!” She felt her face go beat red.

Mariko gave a sly grin. “And here I thought you were getting over him.”

“I thought I was! Balls!”

She heard him laughing at her swearing. Damn you! Quit enjoying this too much! “Anyway, he’s been waiting in the Wandering Stairs for you,” Mariko said, grinning, pointing over to the bar.

She gave him a dark look as she headed on up. Sure enough, there he was, sitting patiently. He gave a small smile at her and waved her over. Gods strike her down now. She sat down, her face still red. “I was horrid last night, wasn’t I? I should stop drinking like that. What in the gods did I say to you?”

“Well I was going to ask what did you remember from last night. I guess the answer is, not much.” Thancred said.

She moaned and slumped over on the table. “I don’t even have a real good excuse this time. Other than ‘Hey! It’s a festive time! Drink until you forget everything!’” She moaned again.  She then heard the thunk of a glass being put on the table. She looked up to see a tall glass of water.

“Nothing beats a hangover more than a drink and a good meal,” Cyella said. Elly just turned her head to the side and stared at her. She was undeterred. “An order of sausages and eggs?”

“Sure.” Elly said, half-mumbling, moving her face back to rest against the table. Thankfully Cyella said nothing more as she headed back over to the bar.

Thancred chuckled at Elly’s antics. “Oh come now, it wasn’t that bad. I’ve heard worse professions and declarations before.”

Declarations?! She sat straight up at that. “Wait, did I say that I...well...liked you?”

“Well, not like that. You were acting a lot more like uh...many women who’s hearts I’ve broken before,” He said, sheepishly rubbing the back of his head.

“Great.” Elly said, this time slumping against the chair. “The perfect image for people to have of a hero.”

Thancred tilted his head. “I thought you weren’t too terribly concerned about that?”

“No it’s more that...I thought I was over you. You have different things going on than I do. You’ve got Ryne to look after and I have to well, find myself I guess?” She shrugged. “I still can’t even think of where I want to even be after...well, there’s the thing. I still can’t think of any after being the hero.”

“There might not ever be an ‘after’ Elly,” Thancred said with all seriousness. She stared at him with shock, and he smiled at that. “Life tends to keep continuing on and on and we just have to take what we can get.”

A steaming plate of eggs and sausages was suddenly placed in front of Elly. “Anything else?” Cyella asked, cheerfully.

“No thank you,” Elly replied, wondering if the former adventurer was listening in. She cut into her sausage first.

“You know, if I had actually drank last night...I might have joined you last night.”

Elly quickly put up her hand to her mouth, making sure she didn’t accidentally cough her sausage out. Well, it wouldn’t have been the first time the two took a tumble together but she just had a sudden thought with that statement. “What about Ryne?”

He looked confused at that. “What do you mean?”

“One, aren’t you like, sort of a father to her now? You need to be more responsible and like focus on her! Hells! Why aren’t you with her right now?!”

“She wanted to keep an eye on Syngigeim. Besides which, she wants me to at least work on things with you.”

“Did you tell her what I said to you before? That...I thought we were going in different paths and that while I cared, I didn’t know about any relationship?”

He nodded. “Yes, but remember, you were kinda...despondent last night. Scared that I was going to vanish on you again, I think was about what you said.”

She quickly shoved more pieces of egg white in her face. So those thoughts were what she said while drunk. It was less sadness and more anger. Anger that she could never find him after the Liberation of Ala Mhigo, right when she was done. Right when she could have talked and actually maybe started something stronger with him. The most she got was one night together before he ran off to be a spy in Garlemald. And refused her help, because she was a bloody famous Warrior of Light in the Source.

Elly poked at the yolk of the egg. Did she say anything about Minfilia? That...wait. The man was right in front of her. And wanting to sort things out. She gulped and steeled her nerves. “Did I say anything bad about Ryne? Or Minfilia?” she said softly. Elly was scared of this answer.

Thancred sighed softly at that. “You might have mentioned something about how you were never anyone’s most important person. That no one looked out for you and you alone.”

Crap, shit and fuck. “I am sorry of saying that. Really. And gods, I’ll need to find Ryne and-” She said bolting from the table but Thancred managed to grab her arm, stopping her.

“You didn’t say anything about Ryne or Minfilia.”

“But it’s what I meant. I’m jealous. And I know I shouldn’t be. They’re important to you and I always secretly felt jealous that you seemed to care more about them than anyone else.”

He held tighter onto her arm. “A lot more of your ranting was about how you didn’t feel like you deserved to be celebrating. That your contribution was nothing compared to the Warrior of Darkness. And let me tell you that that’s wrong.”

She gave a short huff and tried wriggling out of his grasp. “We all know that Syngigeim is the real hero here. I just, we all in Wanderer’s League tend to tag along. Hells, I only fought two Wardens! And I could only watch as her soul fractured and break! I couldn’t even fight Emet-Selch and that’s what we’re supposed to be good at! What purpose do I have here?!” she yelled, slipping out of his grasp...and into the table right next to her. Her arm slid across the top, as the side of the table jammed into her side. Worse, her feet slid out from underneath her and she had to cling onto the tabletop in order to attempt to stay up.

Elly felt Thancred help pick her up and onto her feet. “No. You weren’t useless here.”

“Ha. I’m one of many people who can fight.”

“Really Elly? Are we really doing this? No. Not everyone can fight as well or as skillfully as you. And I’m sick of you tearing yourself down like that!”

Elly stared at him. She wanted so badly to say No! I’m within a group of people who are all skilled as I! But he would ignore that. Instead she sat back down in front of her breakfast, stabbing her fork into a piece of sausage a bit more forcefully.

Thancred sat down across from her, his expression serious. “You know, you said you and I were going on different paths, but you never allowed me to speak. I, for one, have always loved the light and life you are. Your energy, your determination. And for the longest time, I tried not to get too attached because yes, as it turns out, I too, have a bad habit of pushing away those who care for me. Focusing on the next duty and what I needed to do, pushing feelings aside. Well, now let me say this. I will respect your feelings if they are different than mine but I for one, love you.”

“Now you say that?! Now after I gave up? Cut my losses?!” She said, slamming her hands on the table. Which hurt more than she was going to let on.

“You have every right to be mad at me for that. And trust me, it took me a long while to realize what exactly I felt towards you. And if your passions have cooled and you now can’t stand me, that’s fair.”

She sat back down in her chair. “Again...I ask, aren’t you now a father?”

“I-”

“No,” she said, raising her hand. “Listen to me. You trying to do right by Ryne. That, is the big difference between us. You are ready to take care of someone and guide her. And if there is anything I have thought of, it’s that I’m not ready for anything like that. Not yet. Maybe not ever. My answer is the same as it was on the sands. I care for you. Would like to spend nights with you. But...you will always have another obligation. Another duty. I think we both will.”

Thancred inhaled a deep breath. “I can accept that. I won’t press further.”

Elly nodded. “Thank you.” And quickly ate up the rest of her food and waved down Cyella to pay the bill.

“I’ll handle that. I asked for you anyway.”

She would have fought but any anger she had was long dissipated.

Slightly outside the Wandering Stairs, on the steps around it, was Ryne and Mariko. Ryne looked disappointed and sad after hearing Elly and Thancred’s agruement. “Sometimes things don’t work out like you hope they would,” Mariko said. “She was evidently angrier at Thancred than I thought.”

“I might have figured...but I kinda held onto that foolish hope I guess, that everything could work out,” Ryne said glumly.

“Love’s kinda hard to control and fickle like that. Trust me on that regard. Take absolute care of yourself and your heart.” Mariko said, grabbing her shoulder and squeezing it. She at least nodded at that. But there a familiar look in her eyes, one of stubbornness. This wasn’t over yet, but he sure hoped that Ryne would not hurt herself too much in the process. He’d seen enough of that.

[slow-smiles]

Killian sneaks out of the castle before he’s caught and waits for Emma to join him on his ship. Captain Duckling. A followup to My Princess, My Pirate. My first contribution to @cscocktoberfest (only like a week late, it’s fine.) ~3.9k words. No major trigger warnings apply.

Read on AO3.

almost six.

When Emma leaves him in her room, Killian briefly entertains the idea of laying out on her bed naked and waiting for her to return. Realistically, however, he knows this would only lead to disaster; despite it being her private chambers, it would hardly stay empty for the duration of the ball. There were always preparations to be made for the princess, preparing her bedclothes, turning down her bed, cleaning, and other such manner of domestic tasks done by hired help that Killian had never been privy to.

His usual entrance and exit routes had not been usable (Emma had given him a key to enter the servant passages, the ones she herself used to sneak in and out of the castle, but with a royal ball in full swing, they would hardly be a discreet way to travel this evening.)

He certainly didn’t fancy himself much of a climber, but the rough stone and thick vines across Emma’s wing of the palace certainly lent themselves well enough for the task.

(He makes a note to mention to her that they should do something about the vines--and really, about the castle protection in general. It would be entirely too easy for someone with nefarious intentions to sneak in.)

He makes his way carefully back to his ship. It’s still relatively early, the sun having not yet fully set, but towards the harbor district the sounds of revelry are already rising. He imagines his crew must already be among those out and about. He’d given them several days of shore leave, and they’d had some excellent hauls in the last few months, so their pockets were heavy and their spirits high.

The only man left aboard the Jolly is Smee, unsurprisingly. Never been a traditional pirate, Smee. Is always one to volunteer to stay with the ship when others want to go out and spend their winnings on wine and bed partners, and no one really knows what he does with his shore leave when Killian forces him off the ship.

“Captain!” his first mate calls out. “I didn’t expect you back so early.”

Killian says, “I already got exactly what I needed. The rest of the evening is entirely yours, Mr. Smee.”

“Are you sure? Do you need anything else?”

“I’m quite certain I’ll be able to handle my own ship by meself.”

“If--if you insist, Captain.”

Killian gives him a look. “I do. At least go get yourself some hot food and a bed at an inn.”

Nodding sharply, Smee doesn’t take long to vacate the ship, leaving Killian on his own in the blessed silence. Being alone has always been his natural state, and the quiet is a welcome part of that trait.

However, he would not complain if there was a certain raucous blonde stirring up trouble with him at the moment, silence be damned.

He tried to not think about all the probably handsome, witty, rich eligible bachelors that would be presented to her on a silver platter over the course of the evening.

It isn’t that Killian doubts Emma’s feelings for him. On the contrary, he knows exactly how selectively Emma gives her love, and he is a damned grateful recipient.  The only thing Killian has doubts about is his worthiness of her, and that’s a subject he’d rather not dwell on when he’s alone with rum in easy reaching distance.

Instead, he retires to his cabin and undresses for the evening, removing his long coat and vest, shucking the pants and finally making his way through the series of buckles that secure his hook to his arm. The contraption runs up his arm and over his shoulder, making an X across his back and looping around his right shoulder. There are calloused lines left behind on his skin as he removes the hook and all its trappings, two-hundred something years in the making.

He intends to read and update his logs, perhaps knock out a few navigational equations he’d hit snags with earlier in the day, but not long after he settles back in his bunk with a logbook in hand, the pull of sleep becomes too much to resist.

Killian is a naturally light sleeper, but the sound of Emma’s loud swearing could’ve awoken even the dead. He sits up immediately and sees her bent over just at the base of the ladder.

“Son of a fucking bastard. Gods bloody damnation--”

“Emma?”

“I stubbed my toe,” she grinds out between clenched teeth. “Fucking hell, that hurt. I should’ve worn shoes, gods damn it.”

His drowsiness begins to wane as he smiles at her. “If only the common people could hear their great and powerful sovereign now.”

Emma finally stands fully, wiggling her foot around a bit. She’s clearly disguised, with an overcoat thrown over her nightgown and her hair hidden under one of those ridiculous bonnets she hates wearing. Even with the sour expression because of her toe and the outfit, she’s still the most beautiful woman in all the realms, and he tells her so.

She smiles softly in response. “It’s nice to hear someone genuinely say that to me.” She begins to undress herself, shrugging out of her overcoat with a slowness that looks more born of exhaustion than seduction.

“I don’t think anyone could say that to you and not be genuine about it, darling, because it’s more of a fact than an opinion.”

She laughs softly. “I know what you think,” she says, basically tearing the bonnet off her head and letting her hair spill free. “Ugh, burn this,” she says under her breath before throwing it on the floor. She then reaches down for the hem of her gown. “I just had to hear a lot of people say it without really meaning it tonight.”

No matter how many times he’s seen her without clothing over the years of their relationship, the sight of Emma’s naked body will always be at least a little arresting. The soft, pale skin so often hidden under gowns finally free to the air, the pink nipples stiffening in the slight chill of his cabin, the way her long hair brushes over her breasts and obscuring them like the mermaids of legend, the thatch of dark blonde curls between her legs where she was wet and wanting him mere hours ago.

“I know I promised you a dance,” she says, “but can it wait until morning? I’m exhausted and my brain is absolutely fried, and I just want to hold you for a while.”

He holds out a hand in invitation, nudging over on the narrow bed so that she has room to fit next to him. “I’d wait forever for you,” he says, purposefully dramatic to put another smile on her lips.

She crawls in next to him, and the feel of her skin against his is as reassuring as it is intoxicating; but Emma’s not the only one who’s knackered. She wordlessly nudges at his shoulder, encouraging him to turn his back to her. He follows her gentle, tired instruction, and her arm wraps around his waist under his arm. He takes her hand in his and brings it up to his lips for a kiss before letting himself relax.

He feels her breath at the base of his neck, and she presses a small kiss there. “I love you,” she says softly.

“And I, you.”

With Emma surrounding him, it’s a simple matter to fall back into sleep.

He awakens with the feeling of a hand on his cock. The light through the windows is soft, grey with the promise of dawn, and it’s just light enough for him to turn his head to look at Emma, still behind him. She’s risen up on one elbow, propping her up so that she has a better angle to stroke him and can look down on him. The blankets have been since kicked down to the end of the bed, but he doesn’t feel the chill with the heat of arousal skittering over his body.

“Morning,” she says casually.

“Morning,” he responds, not as casually.

He turns slightly so that he can more easily look up at her and reaches up to pull her down for a kiss. She obliges, running her tongue boldly along the seam of his lips before he opens for her.

Her strokes on his cock become more impatient, quicker and firmer, and he’s nearly rock hard already.

“How much time do we have?” he gasps out, starting to work his hips with the timing of her hand.

“I’m not needed at all this morning, and I gave instructions to not disturb me. One of my ladies’ maids is sleeping in my bed as a stand in just in case.” She twists her hand over the head of his cock just so, and his breath catches in his throat, and he lets it out a moment later through gritted teeth. “I have time to do whatever I want to you.”

He moans softly again. “To me?” He turned fully so that he lay on his back. “What about what I want to do to you?”

Emma quirks a brow before, quicker than a blink, she swoops down and settles herself between his legs. Both of her hands run up his thighs and she leans down, her mouth just above his cock. “You can wait your turn.”

With that she runs her tongue from base to tip, pulling an ungodly groan from his lips. “Emma,” he breathes, and he runs his hand through her hair before resting at the back of her head. She moans around him in response.

She takes him as deep as she can, the warm wet of her mouth moving up and down his shaft, and her hand comes up to stroke what she can’t fit in.

Pleasure sings across his skin and up his spine, and senseless words of praise tumble from his mouth. To have the Crown Princess of Misthaven with her hand and mouth on him is something truly bewildering and wonderful to behold, but it’s also Emma. It’s the witty, stunning, clever, stubborn woman who trusts him enough to do this with him, trusts him enough to let him into this intimacy, and wants him enough that she’ll do this for him. The idea that she could want and love him enough to devote herself to the task of pleasuring him is mind-boggling and more of a turn on than anything he’d experienced previous.

“Love you so much,” he stutters out, trying in vain to keep his hips still. He has enough control to prevent him from thrusting down her throat, but his hips still twitch upwards on each of her downstrokes.

He can’t take his eyes off her, and every so often she’ll look up and meet his gaze.

She’s perfection personified and he still doesn’t know how he got so lucky. How that night at the tavern when he simply wanted to make sure a woman was safe from drunken louts had turned into this. Had turned into one of the best things that had ever happened to him.

Emma pulls off of him, sitting up and shifting so that her sex is directly over his. Before he has a chance to say anything, she sinks down on him and sighs.

“Let me just--” she says and leans forward, resting her body against his. “Let me just enjoy this for a second.” She nuzzles her face into the side of his neck, arms coming under his shoulders to embrace him as much as she can whilst he’s on his back.

He shifts to return the favor, surprised but not disappointed at the sudden change in pace. With the way she woke him up, he’d imagined something quick and dirty; perhaps she’d have sucked him off to completion, swallowed his release down. He’d have returned the favor, tasting her exquisite cunt until she’d come so hard she couldn’t walk straight.

“Are you all right?” he whispers.

She shifts a little, but doesn’t lift her head. “Yeah.” She sighs. “No.”

He’d had a feeling there was something amiss. After he’d left her the night before, she’d been playful, joking. Light. When she came to bed later that evening, the earlier lightness was gone, replaced by something more somber.

“Did something else happen at the ball?”

Emma straightens so that she can rest her hands on his chest. “Are you really trying to have a serious conversation while you’re inside me?”

Killian runs his hand along her hip and down her flank. “I can tell something is bothering you, and it’s bothering you enough that you don’t want to tell me about it.”

Emma moves her hips a little bit, a gentle rocking motion that’s a tease of what’s to come. Her breath comes a little quicker, her eyes sliding shut a moment before opening again.

She seems to try to find a good start to a sentence, and frankly he’s proud that she can think at all when the little motions of her hips are making it hard for him to concentrate on anything except her.

“Before I tell you,” she says, seeming to come to a decision, “I want you to fuck me really, really hard, okay?”

His brow furrows, confusion clouding his arousal somewhat. “Emma--”

She seals off his lips with a deep kiss; he returns it, but it doesn’t erase his concern.

“I promise I’ll tell you,” she says a breath away from his mouth, “but I want to forget for a while.”

He searches her eyes, nothing but honesty burning there. So he obliges and grasps the back of her head and pulls her mouth down to his. Their kiss can’t be described as anything but aggressive, wide mouths and sweeping tongues, teeth clicking inelegantly but neither of them seem to care.

If she wants fast and hard, he can deliver.

He sits up against her, holding her backside in his hand. It’s a bit of a hassle to switch positions in the narrow bunk, but he manages it. He pushes his hips up, and leverages himself on his wrist and twists them. Emma lands on her back with a short huff of a laugh, and he regretfully slips out of her. He settles back between her thighs, reared back on his knees so he can look down at her. His eyes travel from her face down to her core, swollen, pink, and wet.

His fingers run through her folds, and she moans softly and further parts her legs for him. He focuses on her clit without much teasing, rubbing across it in short, quick motions that have her getting louder in moments.

He dips down further, feeling the moisture gathering at her entrance, spreading it up and back to her clit.

“Fuck,” she whispers, “Killian.”

“If you want it fast and hard,” he growls, “then we need to get you ready for me first.”

She groans deeply at that, a drawn out please escaping her, back arching upwards and pushing her breasts towards him. He continues swiping over her clit with his thumb and presses two fingers inside her.

He doesn’t give her much time to adjust, her wetness making it easy to begin thrusting with his hand in earnest. The slick sound of her pussy wrapped around his fingers makes him absolutely ache with the desire to be inside of her. He adds a third finger then, gets as deep as he can get them, and begins to move his hand up and down, pressing towards that one spot deep inside her that makes her scream.

Only a few pumps of his hand and he can tell he’s found it; her eyes snap open, her thighs tense, and her sounds become louder, more drawn out. “Gods, there,” she gasps.

His balls tighten at her words, his cock so hard it fucking hurts to not be inside of her.

She presses closer to him, and he bears down, moving his hand up and down as fast as he can muster. It’s hard to maintain pressure on her clit with his thumb when he fucks her like this, so he reaches underneath her undulating hips with his left arm, pulling her hips off the bed far enough so that he can bend down and take her clit in his mouth.

He doesn’t bother with licking and teasing, but fastens his lips to her like a man starved and sucks as hard as he can.

Emma’s orgasms are always a sight to behold. She doesn’t quite scream, but her cry is loud and hoarse, and her core clenches around his fingers like a vise. “That’s it love,” he praises against her core, “come all over my fingers.”

He lets her hips fall back to the bed, still working his fingers at a steady pace inside her, and realizes in that moment exactly how he wants to fuck her.

He withdraws his hand with a sound of protest from Emma, and steps off to the side of the bunk. (They’d learned early in their courtship that it was the exact right height for him to fuck her on.) He hooks an elbow around her knee, repositioning her so that her ass nearly hangs off the side, putting her in perfect position for him to sink into her.

He can barely hold back his groan at how wet and warm she is, how perfect and beautiful. “Gods, Emma. Nothing in this world compares to being inside you.”

“I love you,” she replies, and Killian is hit once more with how lucky he is.

Before he begins, he lifts one of her knees over his shoulder, spreading her wide open for him.

Then he goes. She’s so wet and relaxed from her orgasm that there’s no resistance as he pounds into her at a pace that would certainly leave bruises on both of them. The sounds of their coupling echo in his cabin, the slapping of skin and the wet suck of her welcoming him into her body again and again and their combined moans creating a lewd symphony.

“Fuck,” Emma cries, “don’t stop.”

“Not on your life, princess.”

He’s on the edge faster than he’d like, but he can tell Emma is too. She clenches sporadically around him, one of her hands grips the sheets in a white-knuckled grip, and the other has settled on his arm, her nails pressing none-too-gently into his skin.

“Are you close, love?” he still asks.

“Yes.”

“Touch yourself.”

Her hand that was fisted in the sheet immediately darts to her core; he can’t help but watch her fingers as they seek out her clit and rub quick, tight circles over it. He can feel her clamp down on him as she pleasures herself, and he was hoping to make sure she’d come again before he did, but he’s a hapless victim to her siren song.

His hips stutter, his hard rhythm faltering. “Fuck, love, I’m--” He comes inside her, pressing deep a handful more times before he comes back down. Emma drops her leg from his shoulder, boneless.

“Did you peak again?” he asks.

She nods. “Your face is gorgeous when you come,” she explains.

He pulls out of her with a slight wince and walks over on unsteady legs to the small pail of water and grabs a washcloth from the cabinet. He cleans himself briskly, and moves to do the same for Emma.

When they’re both as clean as they can be after vigorous lovemaking, they lie back down on the bunk, curled under the previously abandoned covers.

“What happened last night, Emma?”

Her head is resting on his chest, and she tilts her gaze up to look him in the eye. “It was…” She sighs and removes herself from his embrace, sitting up and leaning her back against the pillows, and Killian follows suit.

“I received no less than three marriage proposals and seven courtship proposals,” she says, and even though he knows she loves him, he knows exactly how painstaking it was for her to get to this point in their relationship, it still makes his breath catch, a brief flare of panic rise in his chest. “Hardly uncommon but… I don’t know. It was just different, yesterday.

“My parents are starting to push harder about me finding someone. And it’s not like they’re cruel about it. They want me to marry for love just as they did.”

“I gathered as much from what your father said last night,” Killian says.

Emma nods. “It’s not like I have difficulty rebuffing them. It was just something my mom said to me.

“I’d just turned down the last courtship proposal of the evening, and she pulled me off to the side and said something like love isn’t weakness, it’s strength, and wanting to be loved isn’t bad, opening myself up to the possibility is brave and so on and so forth. And I don’t know what it was about last night, because she’s given me that same talk dozens of times over my adult life, but I suddenly just wanted to scream at her I know! I’ve known for years how it feels to love and be loved because I’ve had you.”

Warmth flares in his heart.

Emma takes a breath. “What I’m trying to say is that I’m tired of hiding. I’m tired of you being a secret. I don’t know how we’ll make it work, I don’t know what my parents will say when they find out I’ve been consorting with a pirate for the last five years--”

“Almost six,” he corrects, mostly absent-mindedly because his mind is now spinning.

She grins and rolls her eyes. “Almost six,” she agrees. “But I know I’m asking a lot. I’ve thought about getting you on contract as a privateer for the crown, and then delivering a naval commission so that our match would be less objectionable for the court, but--” she takes his hand in hers, staring into his eyes with as much seriousness as he’s ever seen on her. “I don’t want to push you into anything and honestly, I’d give up my status as heir and take up a life of piracy if it meant having you by my side.”

It isn’t easy to render Killian Jones speechless, but Emma’s managed to do just that.

“You want to tell your parents about us?” he finally manages.

“Yes. I don’t have a single clue what they’ll say or do, but I’m tired of living my life like I don’t love you with everything I have in me.”

He leans in and kisses her, trying to gather his thoughts. When he pulls away, he asks, “So we probably don’t tell them we’ve already consummated our relationship, correct?”

Emma snorts and flicks his ear. “Remember how I said last night there was a chance you get executed if you were caught?”

“You’d protect me,” he answers.

“Of course I would, but I get my stubbornness from somewhere and believe me, my father doesn’t take kindly to people he feels have taken advantage of me.”

He raises a brow. “Oh, taken advantage of the princess, have I?”

She rolls her eyes. “You’re impossible.”

“I’d say not, because as I recall, it’s been you taking advantage of me all these years.”

“I’m about to rescind my offer,” Emma says, tauntingly moving as though she’ll get out of bed.

“No need,” Killian says. “I’ll be on my absolute best behavior. And no matter what happens,” he tugs at her hand, “I’ll be right there with you.”

[lady-alayne]

Game of Thrones: An Angry Recap

Season 7 Episode 7: The Dragon and the Wolf

Outside of King's Landing:

As Dany's troops are positioning themselves all around King's Landing, Bronn and Jaime have a deep and meaningful discussion about the construct of masculinity between the conflicting priorities of cocks and what-even-is-the-point-of-not-having-a-cock. Oh, the subtle socio-anthropological nuances of Game of Thrones, more refined each episode.

But back to Dany's troops! The Unsullied, motionless as ever, stand still as an army of Dothraki rides through their ranks making... scary noises? Where did they pick those up? I'm pretty sure the Dothraki were not yodeling like that in season 1. But, whatever, who cares about continuity? Most characters have been replaced by a caricature of themselves this season, so why not make the Dothraki more foreign and more different? Apparently it's supposed to make for some good TV instead of, you know, raising a lot of eyebrows and bordering offensiveness.

The real Team Dany, meanwhile, sails into King's Landing, and we find out that Jon is completely healed! Based on the established timelines, it took him about 10 minutes to heal and put his cothes back on, as this is approximately the time it takes to sail from the North to King's Landing. Makes sense, doesn't it?

Aaaaaaaaaand our sexist joke counter immediately goes DING! as Tyrion mentions the far superior King's Landing brothels. I mean... sure. The best brothel in show!universe was undoubtedly Littlefinger's fine establishment, which is not operating any more, so... someone else must have taken over? And how would Tyrion even know? Has he been to all the brothels? (Okay, he probably has.) Based on the show's characterization, I'd say the best brothels are in Dorne, but... who cares. Maybe D&D are contractually obligated to mention sex all the time. Or they probably just think it's worthy of all the Emmys, which, sadly, seems to be the case. Ugh.

The Dragonpit:

On the way to the dragonpit Missandei, who, if I may remind, IS THE QUEENS MOST TRUSTED ADVISOR, DOES NOT UNDERSTAND WHY IT WOULD BE A SMART MOVE TO CONTAIN A BUNCH OF GROWN UP KILLER DRAGONS. Thankfully, Jorah is there to mansplain how dangerous dragons can be. You know, to the woman who witnessed Dany's dragons torching countless flocks of innocent sheep, and eventually a child, which made Dany LOCK THEM UP. But, oh, what could the Dragonpit possibly be there for??? Tyrion then supermansplains how the last dragons died, because as soon as another male character (except for Jon) has more than 10 seconds screentime, Tyrion must be brought into the mix to remind us all how awesome he is.

Thankfully he is interrupted by Bronn, who came with Brienne and Pod for some reason, who seem to have teleported into King's Landing. Because it's Pod and there seems to be a law, Bronn makes a joke about Pod's magic cock. Sigh. Why won't D&D ever let us forget about that?

After a Brienne/Sandor and Tyrion/Bronn reunion scene, the gang finally makes it into the Dragnpit, which is FUCKING TINY. Even for one fully grown dragon it wouldn't be enough space to spread their wings and fly. But for several??? No wonder the dragons got the blues and stopped growing. Dude.

Finally Team Cersei arrives, and then—CLEGANBOWL GET HYPE!!! Or.... not, as Sandor chooses to walk away. Lame!

Dany shows up 15 minutes late without Starbucks, but on her dragon, which impresses Cersei exactly 0.00. Just as Tyrion is about to instigate a peaceful negotiation, Euron heckles him, leaving Theon... unperturbed??? What happened to your PTSD, Theon? I guess it comes and goes as the plot demands it. Realistic!

Cersei tells Euron to shut the hell up, and Team Dany finally have the chance to explain the threat beyond the wall to the Queen and even have their wight show-and-tell. Jon explains and demonstrates how to defeat them while looking like he's shooting a “How To” youtube video, which seems to convince Cersei, who accept the truce, and scare the shit out of Euron, who jumps up and yells, “SCREW YOU GUYS, I'M GOING HOME.”

By the way. Jon explicitly states that wights CANNOT SWIM. THEN HOW DID THEY GET THE DRAGON OUT OF THE WATER????

In other news, Cersei's truce comes with one condition: That the North does not take up arms against the Lannisters, even after the White Walkers have been defeated. Unfortunately Jon's compromised dick honor prevents him from accepting those terms, and Cersei storms out. Brienne then tries to reason with Jaime by yelling “Fuck loyalty!” WHICH MAKES ABSOUTELY NO SENSE AND GOES AGAINST EVERYTHING BRIENNE STANDS FOR ARE YOU KIDDING ME?!?!?!?!?!?!?!

Saint Tyrion, who knows he is protected by plot armor, volunteers to talk to Cersei again and manages to sway her mind in about 3 seconds, which seems very plausible. Don't forget, the plot demands it.

Meanwhile we are treated to Jon's cringey attempt at flirting with Dany, who tells her, “You're not like the other girls! You're, like, super special!”

By the way, isn't it insanely warm under those furs? Why is Jon still dressed in his Northern collection?

Cersei reappears to promise her armies. Which makes me wonder... WHAT ARMIES??? Weren't they all torched by Dany on their way back from Highgarden, and the ones she spared bent the knee and are fighting for her now, anyway? What was even the point of this meeting? What armies can Cersei contribute???

An hour later we find out.... None. Because Cersei lied, and she has no intention to join the fight. This does not go over too well with Jaime, who gets into a heated argument with his sister and eventually storms out to ride... somewhere, just as the first snow is falling on King's Landing.

Dragonstone:

Back in their free castle, Team Dany are figuring out how to move the troops Norths. In one of the more obvious WHICH ONE WILL SHE CHOOSE??? moments, Jorah and Jon both suggest different ways for Dany to get there, and to no one's surprise she chooses Jon. Jorah, for real. You're better than this. It's just painful. MOVE ON.

Jon and Theon later have a heart-to-heart in the throne room that LITERALLY STARTS WITH THEON SAYING “YOU ARE ALWAYS GOOD AND SMART AND PERFECT.” Oh my god. Do D&D really think we are THAT STUPID? Do they really think we would not UNDERSTAND how PERFECT Jon is if it is not REPEATED OVER AND OVER??? To “help” with Theon's identity crisis, Jon then tells him he can be both a Greyjoy and a Stark, which... doesn't really help Theon at all, but it's the thought that counts I guess? Inspired by Jon's council, Theon then decides to rescue Yara. The Ironborn are TOTALLY against that, but then Theon beats one of them to death, so they are all for that. Hooray!

Now here's the thing. Theon's arc was amazing. He was a smug little asshole who made all the wrong choices and came to pay for them dearly. Ramsay broke him, in all ways a man can be broken. Theon became Reek. But his empathy with Sansa redeemed him, and Theon fought off his Reek state. And he found that last, tiny bit of strength, and let that fuel him. He was still broken and scared, but he ignored it because, finally, he wanted to do the right thing and help Sansa. That was beautiful.

What is NOT beautiful is having Theon repeat this arc over and over and over. He has spent the last two seasons in a perpetual Theon/Reek/Theon/Reek/Theon hamster wheel, always having the personality that would fit best into the rest of the bullshit D&D are trying to sell us as coherent plot. He's triggered by all the violence and jumps overboard when Euron abducts Yara, but when he faces him again in the dragonpit he cracks jokes about Euron and doesn't give a fuck. A little while later he is broken and remorseful again and regrets his life choices, once again deciding to rescue a damsel in distress to redeem himself, and is “empowered” by killing a man. (I will talk about D&D's idea of “empowerment through violence” in a later post). Not only does this once again underline the misogyny of GoT—women are merely used as props in men's character arcs, which a few exceptions—IT ALSO MAKES NO FUCKING SENSE. What are you??? REEK OR THEON??? Stop yoyoing back and forth, for fuck's sake.

And don't even get me started on the Ironborn. Yara's crew is supposed to be the most loyal crew there is. These men are supposed to go through hell for their captain. But, no, as soon as it gets a bit inconvenient they decide to choose raping and pillaging instead, altought YARA WAS TOTALLY AGAINST THAT. And Theon beats one of them up and THEY IMMEDIATELY CHANGE THEIR MINDS AGAIN??? Honestly, if I was Theon, I would not trust these men AT ALL.

Winterfell:

Petyr Baelish is smart and wonderful. When Sansa gets a letter from Jon that must have read “Hi sis, just fyi, we're Targaryen bannermen now!” he notes that IT IS NOT EASY FOR RAVENS TO FLY IN THESE STORMS, thus proving that 1) he is the only character that somehow makes sense (despite his season 5 jetpack!) and 2) he absolutely has to die now because D&D can't have a character that's smarter than him. Thank you, thank you, thank you, Lord Baelish.

Sansa is understandably not super happy about Jon bending the knee, which makes Littlefinger suggest that she could be Queen in the North instead because IT IS HER BIRTHRIGHT ANYWAY. When Sansa notes that Arya might not be on board with that idea and murder her because of the cult she recently joined, Petyr smartly replies “I never trust godly men.” Which, you have to admit, makes him simply wonderful.

Then Sansa and Petyr discuss how likely it is that Arya wants to murder Sansa. And let's face it, based on everything that went down last episode, it seems pretty likely. Arya did threaten her WITH A DAGGER. And talk about WEARING HER FACE. So........ I REST MY CASE. IT SEEMS PRETTY LIKELY.

But who cares about logic, amirite? In the most foreseeable plot twist in the history of Game of Thrones, it turns out the Stark sister did NOT want to murder each other, but instead teamed up to take down the man whose only function had become to be an evil creeplord, so all the viewers would know that he should definitely be killed.

And once again Game of Thrones chose supposed “shock value” over consistency, logic, and good storytelling. Let me sum this up.

Petyr Baelish STARTED THE WAR OF THE FIVE KINGS because HE IS SUPER SMART. He knows everything about everyone and, more importantly, he knows how to use that knowledge to his advantage. He then used the ensuing chaos to RISE EVEN HIGHER in this world. Along the way he also RESCUED SANSA from King's Landing AND from being pushed through a moon door AND from being slaughtered during the battle of the bastards. Okay, he also sold Sansa to Ramsay, which was... stupid, and I hate D&D for making him do that. But all he did, he did for Sansa. Because he truly and genuinely LOVED HER.

But this poor, poor, unfortunate soul was not “badass” enough for D&D. They did not know what to do with this wonderful, complex character. And, frankly, they didn't care. All they cared about were the fans they were servicing. And the fans wanted to see him dead. So D&D went on tumblr and read the hate posts. And they put him on a mock trial for that. Sansa accused him of many things, things she had no reason to know, and don't tell me that Bran just KNEW THIS. We later see that Bran is not an omniscient superbrain. He merely has the power to see everything he chooses to see. That means Bran must have consciously chosen to watch Petyr Baelish throughout the decades to uncover all his crimes, so his sister could then accuse him of them. Seriously???

But who cares. Not the fans D&D are servicing. The wanted to see Petyr dead, because they, too, did not understand his character. They only see the world as black and white. Petyr was not good, so he had to be evil. And therefor he had to be killed. By three teenagers. Three kids, really. Three kids who are not evil, and therefor they had to be good, their actions reasonable, their violence justified.

This does not explain why Arya was threatening Sansa last week. Was it just a show for Petyr? Then why do it behind closed doors? Or did she actually mean it? Then when did she have a change of heart? It just makes no sense. It makes no fucking sense. 

I mourn the death of one of the last complex, morally ambiguous characters. One of the original players. He set it all in motion. He played the Game like no one else. And he looked smoking hot doing it.

Rest in peace, my Lord Protector. You deserved better than this. And know that you will be avenged. In metas, in fanfictions, in fanart... We will right the wrongs that have been done to you. And you will live on in our hearts, and, for some of us, under our skins. Fly now to your rest, my sweet mockingbird.

***

But the story does not end there for the Winterfell gang. Bran is visited by Sam, and they talk about how Jon is actually... AEGON TARGARYEN????? WHAT?!?!?!?!?! THERE ALREADY IS AN AEGON TARGARYEN??? OR DID D&D DIMISH ELIA'S CHARACTER EVEN FURTHER AND CHOSE TO ONLY GIVE HER ONE CHILD INSTEAD OF TWO??? WHAT IS THE POINT OF ALL THIS?!?!?!?! GAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

By the way... GILLY FOUND OUT THAT RHAEGAR GOT MARRIED TO LYANNA, YOU UNGRATEFUL LITTLE TOERAG. But Sam takes all the credit. THIS IS NOT OKAY.

And apparently Bran can now see everything from everywhere??? What happened to “You have to warg an animal or look out of a heart tree???” Too inconvenient for D&D?!?!?!?

Somewhere on the Narrow Sea:

Epic Boat Sex(TM) is actually a thing, y'all. I mean, it wasn't epic, more like... sweet. Until we found out Jon's banging his aunt. So... take that as you will.

Beyond the Wall:

JUST BURN THAT MOTHERFUCKING WALL TO THE GROUND AND KILL THEM ALL. I AM SO ROOTING FOR YOU. KILL THEM, BABY. KILL THEM ALL.

[no-zaku-boy]

IT’S THAT TIME AGAIN

1:What did you do in 2017 that you’d never done before? Visited Austria and went to a concert in another country, climbed a (small) mountain, did disaster relief volunteering, played on average more than one video game a month, ate natto (I guess I'm nasty because it wasn't that bad), annnnd was in a BABY/AatP con fashion show.

2:Did you keep your new year’s resolutions, and will you make more for next year? I think I did pretty well. I made mostly "keep working on it" type resolutions, and I kept up with most of them. I'll continue this trend for 2018 because it seems to be working well.

3:Did anyone close to you give birth? Nope.

4:Did anyone close to you die? Squeeze. I’m so, so sorry. I wish I’d done better by her, and I wish her last few days had maybe been easier (through the fault only of the vet), but I know she spent most of her years well-loved in a happy home and that she lived a long and good life full of lap pets from an amazing hoomin whom she adored. I may not really believe in a people afterlife, but I sure like to think she’s out there flashing her high beams on the twilight seas of wherever is next for kitties.

5:What countries did you visit? Austria and the Czech Republic.

6:What would you like to have in 2018 that you lacked in 2017? Discipline is always a good answer, and more confidence.

7:What dates from 2017 will remain etched upon your memory, and why? It's always moments rather than specific dates. Wasteland Weekend, yet again (probably forever). Despite the fact that I was terribly sick, being in Spokane with my best dudes is easily a major highlight of the year. Seeing Miyavi live and the moment he first started going wild on that guitar.

8:What was your biggest achievement of the year? Gaining more stability. Getting a steady job, engaging even more with things I have always loved like reading and video games and cosplay, and coming to terms with the fact that I shouldn't be trying to play catch up for the time I've lost in order to be impressive to other people and should instead focus on genuinely doing what makes me happy. Yeah.

9:What was your biggest failure? Not pushing myself harder.

10:Did you suffer illness or injury? I was sick as fuck this year, son. It seemed like I was constantly coughing or running a fever or SOMETHING. I'd better not be sick at all in 2018, is2g. I also had that random back injury that really messed with me for almost two weeks. Ugh.

11:What was the best thing you bought? Travel and event expenses, like the last couple years. I'm content with this trend.

12:Whose behaviour merited celebration? A lot of my friends for being kind, generous people who try to make the world better for the people around them and more.

13:Whose behaviour made you appalled? A relatively small number of atrocious customers and everyone involved in/who voted for the people at the center of the circus that is US politics.

14:Where did most of your money go? Travel and living expenses.

15:What did you get really, really, really excited about? Video games and a few potential projects I've been kicking around, travelling both abroad and domestically, Wasteland this year and MAX HYPE for next year, the three or four cosplay groups I got to be part of, and picking up Japanese again more seriously than I've done in years.

16:What song will always remind you of 2017? Ngl, Richard Spencer getting sucker punched to Born in the USA has been running through my head pretty much constantly since January. I also feel like ABBA and Neil Cici have really dominated this year for me.

17:Compared to this time last year, are you: a) happier or sadder? b) thinner or fatter? c) richer or poorer? Happier, maybe slightly thinner, poorer.

18:What do you wish you’d done more of? Studying and putting myself out there. I also wish I'd spent more time acting with authenticity rather than being concerned with external pressures (for instance, wanting recognition and, as a result, wondering if my actions are merely performative even if they do have some practical effect, or at times choosing comfort over conviction). I know I'm being hard on myself here, but in 2018 I'd like to Do More and Do Better. (And yeah, I'd like to have it be noticed, I'm only human, but I'd also like to work on caring less about that, too.)

19:What do you wish you’d done less of? Worrying and wasting time.

20:How did you spend Christmas? With family and friends, playing games, getting weird (still not sure where some of these bruises came from), and having good food, good conversation, and a good drive. <3

21:Did you fall in love in 2017? Here and there~

22:What was your favourite TV program? Of the new-to-me things I picked up, Brooklyn 99 and Boku no Hero Academia were top of the pops.

23:Do you hate anyone now that you didn’t hate this time last year? Who has that kind of time?

24:What was the best book you read? Thief of Time by Terry Pratchett was probably my fave of the year. I wish I had finished Atlas Shrugged; as much as I disagree with a lot of Ayn Rand's philosophy and the presentation thereof, she's a damn good author. Gonna finish in 2018.

25:What was your greatest musical discovery? Screaming sky cowboy. Also, I'm grateful that someone clued me into Wednesday Campanella.

26:What did you want and get? A bit of direction and focus, and the motivation to resume studying a language in the first time in a long time.

27:What did you want and not get? I'd wanted estate stuff to be over and done with completely this year, but alas.

28:What was your favourite film of this year? Get Out was so, SO good, and Thor: Ragnarok really surprised me, so probably one of those two. Special mention to Blade Runner 2049 (I still have some genre-typical beef, but I find more things I liked about the film every time I reflect on it).

29:What one thing made your year immeasurably more satisfying? Time with loved ones for sure, and gaining more confidence in my abilities and my future re: jobs. And being more "selfish" with my time and energy, to be honest. I feel guilty that I'm not there for everything or everyone like I usually pressure myself to be, but prioritizing myself more often rather than routinely making my desires secondary to pleasing others has made me a much happier person over all.

30:How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2017? I had to wear business casual most of the time (I did manage to put together some semi-stylish work outfits, though, and got a lot of compliments on the work wardrobe I built up over the year) and spent most of my free time in pajamas. I had a pretty cute but relatively basic office look going most of the time and would like to play with it a lot more in 2018, and I'd like to be less lazy fashion-wise during my days off. I'm thinking about returning to the side shave hair cut to inspire some bolder choices, but we'll see.

31:What kept you sane? Boything was patient through a lot of weird highs and lows (mostly highs) this year, which I really appreciate, and having a solid routine helped balance me and keep me on task once I adjusted to it. Frequent skype nights with my best dudes and finally building at least one more solid friendship here in Austin also helped quite a bit.

32:Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most? I guess those good, good McElboys took up a disproportionate amount of my attention span. Also, Chris Fleming, if only because I've hated my hair most of this year and every time I've looked in a mirror, I've started internally singing, "Just because I have bad hair doesn't mean that I'm polyamorous."

33:What political issue stirred you the most? I'll admit it, I got burnt out very quickly this year and only did my part in little spurts. I'd like to be more active next year. But I guess just the general trend of politics in America has had me somewhat riled, and I was probably the most outspoken about condemning white nationalism and white passivity in the face thereof.

34:Who did you miss? Everyone who was too far. ]:

35:Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2017. Having a regular sleep schedule is invaluable. Getting up fifteen minutes earlier to enjoy a cup of coffee and do some reading is always worth it. It's okay to choose yourself. More personally, I'm starting to accept the idea that people value my company and my input, and that I shouldn't shy away from sharing so often because I do have insightful/interesting things to contribute, or at the very least, I can usually get a laugh.

36:Quote a song lyric that sums up your year THE BEST (THE BEST THE BEST) PART OF WAKING UP IS FOLGERS IN YOUR CUP

[punkscowardschampions]

Rio & Buster

Rio: You got no business looking that good Rio: This is a religious holiday Buster: Don't look at me like that Buster: You're being unholy yourself, like Rio: Ha, try and make me stop Rio: we're fine, everyone's too busy with their lamb, thanks da Buster: You might be fine but I'm eventually gonna have to get up from this table Rio: You want me to pass you some water, babe? Buster: Don't you dare Rio: Salt? The peas? Buster: Behave Rio: But I'm bored Rio: and you're hot Buster: Well, bored isn't the word for how you're making me feel Buster: And don't start me on how you fucking look Rio: But I need to know what you're thinking Buster: But I thought you knew everything, babe Buster: Losing your touch already, like Rio: You want me to show you I ain't here and now? Rio: Well, okay Buster: Okay Buster: Go on Rio: Damn, been a while since I had to play footsie Buster: If you aren't up to it, like Rio: Please Rio: You know I could get you off from here if I wanted to Buster: You promising or warning me? Rio: Neither Rio: 😇 naturally Rio: wish it was though Buster: I wish you were on my lap right now Rio: Baby 😩 Rio: Play nice Buster: 😇 Buster: Get me a drink, yeah? I wanna see more of you Rio: What you want? Buster: Surprise me Rio: Stick to your usual Rio: Raising enough eyebrows being civil, never mind if I get you a 🍸 Buster: 😂 Buster: I can throw it back in your face if you like Buster: Be very uncivil Rio: 😂 Rio: I know you want me on you but you want it that bad you'll settle for a fat lip Buster: I'll take it if you call me later to make up Rio: Face that cute? I could never Rio: Though makeup sex is always worth it Buster: Never say never, babe Rio: You planning to get me that mad already? Buster: Like you said, we're raising eyebrows otherwise Rio: Hmpf Buster: Don't look at me like that either Rio: I can't help it Rio: I want you Rio: I hate pretending otherwise Rio: even though we gotta, obvs Buster: I know, babe Buster: There's gotta be something this fam is running low on so I can be a gent and take you to buy more Rio: Not fucking eggs that's for sure, think they've forgotten we ain't kids anymore Rio: the haul Jay's gonna walk away with will last her 'til she's at least 2 Buster: Maybe if I leave them here Buster: Chlo ain't got the willpower or memo that she ain't a kid herself Buster: I'd offer to keep drinking so we run out but I already don't trust myself around you Rio: Wouldn't be a proper function if someone didn't get wasted and disgrace themselves Rio: Put you to bed before you properly drag us both down, don't worry babe Buster: Don't, I need you to take me to bed Buster: or anywhere else Rio: I know Rio: I'll think of something Buster: Couldn't you have worn a church look or whatever Buster: Fuck's sake Rio: This is my church look Rio: turning it out for Jesus 💁 Buster: 'Course Buster: Ready to pray, yeah? Rio: Think pretending I dropped something only works in the porn but I'm game to see if you are Buster: I'm game for everything Rio: I know Rio: Thank fuck 🙌🙏 Buster: Am I a bad person if I use my kid as an excuse to leave? Rio: Hmm Rio: Probably but church portion of the day well out the way so even the big man can't be judging Buster: Fuck I can't though, can I? She's loving all this Rio: Yeah, bless her Buster: Least she's too young to know that her mum didn't contribute to the easter basket or even wish her a happy one Buster: Too busy flirting with me, like Rio: 😒 Rio: Bitch Buster: I told her me and Erin broke up 'cause there was someone else but she only heard the first part, obviously Buster: Not even any of her business what I do but that's a whole other story Rio: That'll be fun then, thinking she's got more of a chance than she usually does Rio: How does she not die of shame, like Buster: She'll outlive everyone Buster: Just to fuck me off Rio: 😂 Rio: all those spa trips Rio: going to the fucking fountain of youth Buster: Honestly Buster: I'm gonna need a buy myself a spa if she goes through with her plan to come here and pick Jay up Rio: 😬 Rio: least I get to see her best attempt at a seduce 'em 'fit Rio: see what I'm up against, like Buster: 😂 Buster: Indie's got more game and she's a kid Rio: pass on the compliment Rio: full of the joys of spring, babe Buster: She'll love that. I've seen her looking at me when I'm trying not to look at you Rio: Can't blame her Rio: You look especially good rn Buster: Still not on your level, babe Buster: You're so fucking beautiful Rio: Don't Rio: gonna make me blush Buster: I have to Buster: You need to know Rio: Baby Rio: Come find me in 5 idc Rio: I've got to see you properly Buster: Where? Rio: The studio upstairs Rio: there's old toys and shit in there that we can be trying to find Buster: and good lighting Buster: 'cause you know I wanna see you properly too Rio: Exactly Rio: you can appreciate fully Buster: I'm really appreciating how loud this fam is right now Rio: Got their uses Buster: If Jay gets much more hype there ain't nothing I couldn't do that they'd pick up on Rio: She's stealing your thunder, it true Rio: everyone too 😍 to notice us Buster: Good Buster: I only want you to notice me anyway Buster: No offense Indie Rio: Trust, I've not been able to focus on anything else Buster: I'm not sorry Rio: Me either but still gonna make you 😏 Buster: Go Buster: I'll see you in 5 Rio: 👋 Buster: I can't believe we actually got away with that Buster: Again Rio: We're just that good Rio: or they're just really deaf Buster: I like option 1 Buster: You're so good, Rio Rio: You too baby Rio: No matter how many times you make me cum, never enough, like Rio: mad Buster: What are you doing later? Buster: Come over and I won't stop Rio: Got a shift but can probably pop 'round after and Indie won't be home yet to clock I'm not Rio: thinks I got a mans anyway so Buster: As long as you don't wake Jay you can come over when you want Buster: Yeah? What did you tell her Rio: Of course Rio: 😶😇 Rio: Oh, that I've been fucking you, obviously Buster: Cheers for making me choke on my drink like a soft cunt, babe Buster: Hilarious Buster: Grandad's looking at me like I killed a bloke Rio: 😂 sacrilege to not be able to handle your drink in this fam Rio: just can't handle my bants, soz babe Buster: He'd rather I did someone over with my glass, I know Rio: Questionable ethics for a easter egg hunt for kiddos but go off, old man Buster: 😂 Buster: Gotta keep that competitive edge Rio: Don't, this lot need a referee Rio: putting Indie and Jan on time out Buster: I volunteer Grace Buster: Imagine like Rio: Definition of lamb to the slaughter Rio: appropriate for today but poor girl 😂 Buster: I'll cut her some slack, she's good with my kid Rio: Yeah Rio: who doesn't love a cute new baby Rio: programmed to in this fam Buster: True Buster: Only reason I ain't disinherited Rio: Weren't you're 'rents basically your age anyway? Rio: Can't judge when you make the same mistakes, just be very, very disappointed on the low 😜 Buster: Different story that we're all sick of hearing though, ain't it? Buster: My dad was in love with my mum when he was like 7 Rio: 'bout to say that's a madness but did mine really mature much in those 8 years like? Rio: 🙄 mental, all of 'em Buster: This fucking fam 🙄🙄 Buster: I'd rather be like Chlo who Rio: As much as she is that forgettable, defs not gonna happen on her watch is it Buster: She's still flirting Buster: Give it up, babe Buster: But like don't Rio: Pretend to be your new crazy gf if you wanna Rio: losing her mind searching for socials that don't exist Buster: Please Rio: Easy Rio: Comforted enough of my friends when they're in the wrong to know how to go off Buster: Come through for me then Rio: Fun Rio: Lemme hit up Grace for her straighteners Buster: She'll be buzzing Rio: Forreal, always trying to come for my hair Buster: 😒 Rio: Probably does look a mess now no thanks to you Rio: like bitch, you been dragged through a hedge backwards what's good Buster: Shut up Buster: You know you look good Rio: You might've mentioned a few times 😋 Buster: I'll show you a few more times if you need me to Buster: Just say the word, like Rio: Trying to get me to say the p word Rio: Gonna have to do better Buster: If I was trying you'd have already said it Rio: Promises, promises Rio: Can have that one for free Buster: Well, can't exactly promise to bend you over the table, much as I might wanna Rio: Buster Rio: Why put that in my head when I'm here having to wash up with the mas Buster: It's been in mine since I got here Rio: ugh Rio: either come help or go away Rio: can't have you near me if you're not gonna be near enough Buster: I like you but I don't like you that much Buster: I'll go do some daddy duties like Rio: 😂 Rio: fucking cheek Rio: good luck getting her away from your ma, that manicures too expensive for our dishwater, like Buster: It's not all you, I ain't about to leave my watch lying around this lot either Rio: have your hand off for it like Rio: didn't you know you were coming to the 24 Buster: I had tunnel vision, didn't I? Rio: Good Rio: how I like it Buster: I know Rio: What else do you know Buster: I know I want to be alone with you Rio: Tonight Buster: Yeah Buster: Unless you've got a better offer all of a sudden, that is Rio: You what? Buster: What I said Rio: Yeah but Rio: No, not since you last checked in like, 10 minutes ago, we're still on babe 😂 Buster: Says you but your phone been blowing up since then Buster: So whatever Rio: It's literally Indie Rio: Told you she's Sherlocking me Rio: Was you jealous? Buster: Fuck off Buster: 'Course not Rio: Awww Rio: How cute Buster: Shut up no Rio: Yeah you were Rio: s'okay, you know you got no reason to be now and i can't tell no one anyway Buster: I always knew I had no reason to be, babe, I ain't no proper competition Buster: That's why I wasn't Rio: Oh, really? Rio: Well then, I won't make an extra special effort to show you how much you do not need to be jealous Rio: Cool with me Buster: Behave Buster: No need to go that far, babe Buster: You can still show me something Rio: Idk now Rio: catch me going through my contacts like 🤔🤔🤔 Rio: got me thinkin' Buster: Yeah you do Buster: You know you won't get better than this right here Rio: Yeah Rio: so you still gonna let me have it or are you too pouty now? Buster: Yeah 'cause you obviously need me to remind you how good you got it with me Rio: Don't but want it so Rio: Please Buster: Let's go then Buster: I'll get Jay ready and follow you out Rio: Can't yet Rio: In fact, brb for a sec Buster: Seriously? Rio: [Suitable amount of time to have a smoke later] Rio: Back Rio: Indie needed some TLC Buster: I reckon you meant THC Rio: That too Buster: You wanna go now? Rio: Reckon this party's pretty much over Rio: got the 🍫 let's ride Buster: I can say I'm giving you a ride yeah? That's just gentlemanly Buster: Otherwise you'll freeze to death waiting around the corner Rio: I appreciate you resisting the urge to make a joke about me working the corner this time, like Rio: much obliged 👍 Rio: yeah, that seems normal and not suspicious Buster: Well, don't actually want that fat lip you threatened me with earlier Buster: Even if you would kiss it better Rio: For a whitey, your lips aren't bad Rio: so I'll leave you how you are 😘 Buster: Cheers Rio: Please tell me there's no family functions for a while? Rio: Hard work not being able to be on you Buster: Christ knows with this fam that I can't make that promise Buster: But I swear you'll never have to wait long for me to come find you whenever there is Rio: Now, THAT'S a promise Buster: And you can hold me to it, babe Rio: I will

[florrickandassociates]

TGF Thoughts: 1x06-- Social Media and Its Discontents

Thoughts under the cut... 

The Kings wrote this one, which always means it’s either a big episode or it contains a topic they’re passionate about. This episode falls into the latter category.

And Jim McKay directed. He’s directed many TGW episodes (and has directed at least one episode every season), and also lots of episodes of shows ranging in style from Rectify to The Americans.

The episode kicks off with a white dude in front of a solid green screen ranting about coding and how men are inherently superior to women. He is very mad about a change in Google’s algorithm that implies that women can invent things. Like, he’s seething. Over the idea that women could invent things. His resentment—and his complete lack of logical reasoning—would be almost comical if this weren’t based on a very real online harassment problem.

We cut away from the green screen to Neil Gross slapping a sheet of paper down on the RBK conference table and explaining that’s just one offensive post made on his social platforms.

The device used to illustrate the content of the posts is reminiscent of how the writers have brought cases to life in the past. Whenever a case requires a lot of talking, the writers like to bring in these illustrations to make the plot clearer and more captivating (see 3x07 and 6x18). In this case, they may also be trying to put faces to posts that would most likely (but not necessarily) be made anonymously.

Neil presents the RBK team with 4,758 “problematic” posts. What, is he only looking at the past hour?

Neil continues to comment on how cool it is that there are black lawyers… while only addressing Diane.

He brings a gift for the RBK team (no sign of it being RBKL yet…). It’s a Chummy T-Shirt with “Team Reddick, Boseman & Kolsted” written on it. I bought the Chummy shirt the CBS store offered and it’s super soft and comfortable. If CBS made this shirt—without the typo, of course—available, I would buy it too. Hear that, CBS? I am telling you I will spend more money on your product!

Barbara’s last name is misspelled on the shirt (it’s “Kolstad,” not “Kolsted’), and she notices immediately. When she points it out to Adrian, he just notes that Neil is bringing in $86 million a year. Wasn’t it $58 million last episode?

Neil needs a new Terms of Service agreement because two of his sites have become “like the Wild West of racism and sexism.” These sites are “Chummy Friends” which is Facebook-like (a way a real life Neil Gross would literally never describe his own site, but character Neil Gross has to because how else would we know what Chummy Friends is standing in for) and Scabbit, the Reddit clone from 5x09. (In 5x09, ChumHum definitely didn’t own Scabbit. Florrick/Agos represented ChumHum at the time, but they were the ones going up against Scabbit in court. I suppose they acquired it.)

Ah, one of the trolls is played by Ophelia’s boyfriend from Sweet/Vicious, which gives me a great opportunity to tell all of you to go watch Sweet/Vicious. Especially if the case this week made you feel angry and powerless. Go watch Sweet/Vicious.

Neil wants the posts gone on moral grounds… and because they’re hurting his business by scaring off advertisers.

“I notice only eyes for Diane,” Adrian comments to Barbara. This is true.

Neil sets a deadline: a new TOS by 5 pm. He then continues to talk about how cool it is that black lawyers exist and how it gives him hope, which he seems to see as a compliment but Lucca, Adrian, and Barbara all (correctly) read as patronizing.

As soon as Neil leaves, Diane suggests splitting into groups to tackle the problem. Barbara immediately overrules her and says they are going to sort the posts instead. (Why wouldn’t ChumHum have given them a digital copy of these posts? That would be much easier to sort.)

Adrian suggests making piles for racist posts, anti-Semitic posts, and threatening posts. He forgets misogynistic, which Diane immediately realizes (and which is a weird oversight I have trouble buying, given that Neil mentioned sexism twice in his introductory speech). Is this meant to be a comment on how Adrian thinks (I mean, you know how I feel about the way he talks to Barbara!)?

Barbara also asks what’s missing, so now I’m confused, because… duh? It wouldn’t just be a white woman who’s bringing up issues of misogyny, even if I bet Diane would list misogyny as an issue before she’d list racism.

Diane calls Maia onto the project through the glass wall. Maia is currently busy, not with work (…) but with a personal phone call to her father. “Dad, I’ve been working pretty hard lately, but, um, I’ll try,” she says. STOP THE PRESSES: MAIA’S BEEN WORKING HARD? Maia hasn’t been on a case that we’ve seen in three episodes, and she’s had a seemingly endless amount of time during the workday to investigate her own problems. Is this Maia’s idea of hard work? Hahahahahahahahhahahhahahahahahahahahahhahahahaha

(Seriously though, SHOW, NOT TELL.)

“But the problem is, I’m an associate. I don’t control my own fate,” Maia says. Ah, so in her first two lines, she’s managed to announce that she’s working hard (when, obviously, she is not) and then inadvertently take my favorite Alicia theme about controlling one’s fate. I want to want your character on the show, Maia, but I kinda just want to buy you a one-way ticket to Mandyville. (To be clear, I don’t care that Maia happens to mention controlling one’s fate; Alicia doesn’t own that issue. I don’t like these lines because they remind me 1) of the ongoing issue I have with the way Maia’s being written and 2) of how much better the Kings did when they explored the same things with Alicia. I know they’re capable of writing better material than this.)

Maia agrees to go see her dad that night. She gets off the phone to go—GASP—do work.

In the conference room, Lucca’s reading a post about the abortion debate. Julius calls it “political” and I’m just wondering: what’s the difference between threats and politics? If your politics are to deprive people of their rights, and you’re stating them in the most abusive language possible, and directing it at a specific individual, how is that not a threat/harassment?

Lucca asks to call a vote on whether this is “political” or “threatening” (also, why can’t it be both?). Julius plays rank and reminds Lucca that she’s an associate and he’s a partner. Ugh. He’s just mad he’ll lose to someone he outranks. I love that Lucca always shares her opinions even when she’s not asked and she’s outranked. Some (like Julius) may not like it, but I admire her confidence. And, I love that she doesn’t speak up to show off or to prove her ideas are the best: she does it because she truly believes that what she has to say is important. (Even better: it usually is important.)

Diane calls a vote on another post, this one about rape. Barbara immediately says it’s a threat. Adrian says it’s not—he’s just making a distinction between a threat and misogyny. Lucca disagrees, vocally. Adrian says the person has to say “I am going to rape you” in order for it to be a threat, because otherwise it’s protected speech. Um, but, as Neil Gross already said, this is ChumHum’s call, not a First Amendment issue. Your right to be a dick on Chummy Friends isn’t protected by the Bill of Rights.

Diane reminds Adrian of this, and Julius goes, “Yes, but the terms have to be fair.” Do they? Legally? Or just for optics?

Maia speaks up to argue against Julius. “And if I’m attacked 50 times a day?” Maia says. Julius says that those who are the most harmed shouldn’t be judging speech. Maia takes out her phone and reads one of the abusive texts she’s been sent.

“But that’s about your parents’ scandal, right?” Julius argues, as though that makes a difference.

“My guess is yes. But sometimes they’re so busy discussing my rape that they, uh, they don’t have time to state their reasoning,” Maia retorts. Then the discussion shifts away from this.

A missed opportunity, I think, to have Maia be able to do more than say, “hey, I got a threat, and it was bad like all these others are also bad!” Has she perhaps noticed a pattern? Spoken with others who face the same threats? Read up on the issue? Picked up on other problems the TOS needs to address? Anything? This is Maia’s only contribution to the case.

Don’t get me wrong (especially since I’m always ragging on poor Maia, who hasn’t done anything other than be poorly written). I think it’s smart to bring Maia into this conversation. She has dealt with this problem personally (on Chummy sites or off), and that insight is valuable. She doesn’t need to save the day or have all the answers (she’s just a first year associate!), and I know that once they’re out of the brainstorming phase there’s not as much Maia can to do get involved. But this harassment stuff is the only thread we’ve gotten about Maia’s personal life that isn’t conspiracy drama about her parents (or the two appearances by Amy in the early episodes, #BringAmyBack), and now there’s a case about it, and the writers are only going to do the bare minimum to tie the two threads together? Maia jumps at the opportunity to help with this project. But is there more? Does she volunteer to help see it through, does it make her want to work on something else as a distraction, is she totally neutral about it to the point where people are whispering that shouldn’t she care, something, anything!?

This case doesn’t need to be a lens to develop Maia. I usually hate cases like that—the ones that only exist to parallel the main characters’ life. But if the show’s going to tackle the topic, why not loop Maia in to a greater degree? Especially after three consecutive episodes where she’s not doing any work. Just give her work to do. Tie her into the cases of the week, and not just the ones that she can relate to. Again, this was never a problem on TGW. If anything, the problem there was that Alicia was on too many important cases. That happened because TGW wasn’t an ensemble show, so, especially at first, everything had to relate to Alicia. TGF is an ensemble show, so it should be really easy for it to find the balance between “Maia’s on every case and everyone needs this one associate on every project” and “Maia never works.”

I KNOW I AM A BROKEN RECORD BUT I’LL STOP WHEN THE WRITERS DO.

Lucca gets a call from Colin and ducks out to take it. He wants to have lunch and also to know what color panties she’s wearing. She says she’s color blind—I think as a joke?

Why does “lunch” always mean “sex” on this show?

Colin goes to talk to his boss about Kresteva’s nonsense. The boss is more interested in his salad than in justice. His boss explains what Kresteva’s trying to do—scare off other firms from taking on police brutality cases by making an example out of RBK, even if that means letting Henry Rindell out on bail. Ah, this is what I suspected but at least we know the strategy for sure now.

Now Colin is “oversight head of whatever, we’ll figure out the title later.” He has no veto power, though. This boss seems fun.

Diane wants to ban every use of the n-word, which Adrian argues against because that would end up banning every rap lyric on the planet from being quoted, as well as Huckleberry Finn. Yeah, Diane. I was with you on the “adding a pile for misogynistic posts” but Adrian’s right here.

Barbara slips up and uses the word “tweets” instead of “posts.” But it’s okay; we all know we’re talking about Twitter here and not Chummy Friends.

I wonder if the writers contemplated calling it “Chummy Chums” or using the word “Chum” in it.

With no segue (deleted scene?), Julius begins talking about how there’s a problem: 50% of misogynistic tweets are sent by women. Okay, and…? How is that a problem? If women are being misogynistic and abusive, why wouldn’t they also be banned?

Lucca and Marissa chime in to say that study (which, naturally, they’ve both read) is bogus, because of how it defines misogyny.

Even Marissa is arguing against Julius. I love it. Diane taps Marissa’s arm like, “not your fight, drop off the coffee and leave” and Marissa, instead of quietly exiting, calls more attention to herself and says, “Yeah, I’m going.” Julius is all, “Who is that?!”

“I’m bored. Teach me something,” Marissa announces to Jay, who is working. People on this show have such odd ideas about their professional responsibilities. Or maybe it’s just Marissa.

Jay tells her to fuck off, I think. Marissa insists: she wants to learn how to investigate!

She asks Jay if he’s ever seen a dead body in person because he’s looking at crime scene photos. He says yes, six. “I’ve seen twelve,” Marissa replies. Jay didn’t expect that. Marissa doesn’t explain this happened during her time in the IDF. It surprises me we didn’t get more exposition there.

Anyway, this conversation makes Jay more receptive to Marissa’s questions, so he tells her she needs to get an investigator license unless she assists a licensed investigator. Marissa takes this as an invitation to join him.

Then Jax walks in and interrupts them and Marissa has to call Maia out of a meeting, because there are labor laws specifically in place for Maia Rindell that protect her from having to work for more than 15 consecutive minutes.

Maia and Jax go into a conference room to talk. There are three windows in the room’s window-wall, and there’s a great shot where Maia and Jax stand behind the window on the left and the window on the right, leaving a lot of distance between them.

Conspiracy stuff happens. Jax warns Maia against talking to her dad because he’ll be wearing a wire.

“I’ve got to get back to work,” Maia says. Do you really though?

(The answer is no, because we follow Maia through the hallways of the office and back to her desk, where she picks up her personal cell phone and phones her father to cancel their plans.)

(Rose is doing a very good job as Maia. I love the way her face changes when Henry insists that they can’t talk over the phone; it has to be in person. She takes it as an indication that Henry really might be wearing a wire, and begins to question everything she thought she knew… again.)

(I like the idea of this plot and the idea of Maia but the writing, ugh.)

More bickering about the TOS happens. I’m going to stop recapping this stuff because I think it’s pretty clear where I stand on it, and once we get to Felix… I just don’t have the time to break down why every argument he makes is wrong.

Colin texts Lucca to meet her now, so she smiles and then proposes a solution to the TOS dilemma: an appeal process. Users will be suspended after a certain number of harassing posts, a panel will review, and they’ll have a chance to appeal. I have questions about the logistics of this, but I like the idea. So does the rest of the room, Julius included. Adrian’s thrilled to have solved the problem well before the deadline.

The policy goes into effect IMMEDIATELY and without any notification (well, we don’t know that there wasn’t a new TOS agreement everyone had to click, but this would’ve been news) and begins to piss off/delight trolls. Now they get to troll lawyers!

Maia goes to meet with Elsbeth. This I’ll excuse because it seems pressing and affects the firm, so it’s kind of working.

Elsbeth doesn’t have furniture in her dentist’s office office, so there are only folding beach chairs.

I think Elsbeth’s “Ada” was designed just to fuck with me, because last week it interrupted an Alicia update and this week it’s playing a song by an artist called “Good Girl” because Elsbeth said, “Good Girl.”

Elsbeth wants Maia to feed her dad false information. Maia’s hesitant, but comes around to the idea. Elsbeth tells her to record the conversation if she does feed him the info.

Lucca and Colin are in bed together, and Colin asks Lucca out for dinner the next night. She wants to know if he means dinner or dinner dinner. The former just means “fucking” and the latter means a date (then fucking). Lucca, we deciphered this code (well, as it applies to “lunch”) during the Willicia affair, but it’s good to get confirmation.

Colin wants the date, and Lucca turns him down.

Ugh, fuck this Felix guy.

But, he reveals something interesting: Diane donated $18,860 to Hillary (which is well over the contribution limit, isn’t it? Where’s he getting this number?), and Barbara donated $23,000. Barbara donated more than Diane did. I’m surprised, but I really shouldn’t be, since a large donation lines up with what we already know about Barbara.

I don’t get how this panel works. They’re going to spend this much time on each Twitter Egg? All the name partners at RBK, for several days, hearing out every troll in person? Why did they institute a new TOS without a trial period or testing it out at all (with mock panels and etc)? This appeal system, in its current form, seems like a waste of time and money. And also weird, because… do you have to go to the RBK offices to appeal? Is there a standard procedure for who’s on the panels? For what happens during deliberations? Do you have to give up anonymity to appeal (that would make sense, tbh)? Are they a matter of public record?

For a show that comes around to the conclusion that we shouldn’t engage with trolls, it sure spends a lot of time on Felix’s antics.  

Now Diane and RBK are being harassed online. There’s a never-ending stream of hate. And somehow, in all that, Diane realizes that each account is keeping their harassment to 12 posts. This confuses me. Are their terms of service so vague they don’t tell you what would get you banned (probably; they could just say “continuous harassment” or something like that instead of revealing the exact number or that there is a number of harassing posts you can send)?

So, Adrian wonders if there’s a leak and asks Jay to investigate. Knowing that the trolls will probably talk to a white girl, he asks Marissa to help.

Lucca’s out at drinks with the dude whose ass we saw in the pilot, Zack. He’s her personal trainer. She doesn’t care about him at all, because the only reason she’s out with him at all is so that Colin can run into him and get jealous. Colin doesn’t. Awww, Lucca, you’re starting to care!

Maia goes to meet with her dad, and I wonder if she called first (which… would be the logical thing to do if she’s worried he’s wearing a wire, since he’d need to anticipate the conversation in order to actually be wearing the wire, right?) (unless “wearing a wire” means “making an iPhone recording” in this case?) because there’s a party going on when she arrives home.

At the end of the night, Maia and Henry have a chance to talk. Unfortunately, it plays out exactly as Elsbeth suggested it might, and Maia has to feed her father the lie about RBK.

This Ada thing is a running gag now. Hmm.  

Marissa goes to investigate and finds one of the trolls in person. Marissa compliments him, and suddenly he’s let his guard down and tells her everything she needs to know—namely that Felix has their transcripts.

Adrian asks Jay to investigate Julius as the source of the leak. Neither Diane nor Barbara seem to agree with this decision, but they don’t disagree strongly enough to argue.

Ugh, Felix.

I am not the hugest fan of these definitions that pop up in the mean posts. Not sure they’re necessary, nor am I sure those terms are what would confuse a viewer who didn’t already know exactly what this episode was about. Actually, who is the intended audience of this? It seems a little too widely discussed to be these writers’ usual material.

As Lucca, Barbara, and Adrian discuss what to do, Elsbeth arrives, carrying three Vera Bradley bags and grinning. “Oh my God, when did this law firm become a circus?” Barbara wonders.

Felix warns Diane that Neil Gross may have gone to her firm for the TOS for a reason.

Elsbeth updates Barbara, Adrian, and Lucca about the story she planted with Henry.

Marissa enjoys pretending to be someone she’s not for the purposes of investigating. Anyway, turns out Marissa and Jay are investigating Felix’s boyfriend.

Annnnd it works, and turns out the leak isn’t Julius… it’s ChumHum’s offices. Diane realizes it’s a set-up.

Marissa is alerted to a new problem: instead of using the n-word, trolls are now writing “Neil Gross.” Oh, no. (So they DID ban specific words?? I DON’T UNDERSTAND)

Marissa brings this to Diane and explains that one of the trolls really likes her. Diane is confused by how Marissa would even know the troll, and Marissa says, “It’s nothing. They’re easily confused when women offer them attention.” This is her best line since she told Elfman, “God, handsome men are so weak.”  

Lucca walks into Colin’s office, angry, and tells him she hates games and to knock it off. He’s not doing anything bad… he’s just not acting jealous, and that makes Lucca mad.

Colin figures it out, and realizes that Lucca’s plan didn’t work. “Let’s go,” she says. I can’t wait until these two just decide to become a couple and stop with the games.

Ugh, I am not here for this Lucca-kisses-and-fondles-Colin-while-he-drives-down-a-dark-and-twisty-road thing. I know these writers well enough to know the car isn’t going to crash, and so it just feels weird and unnecessary until Colin finally pulls over. It also feels exactly like the Kings’ (okay, mostly Robert King’s) idea of edgy sex, and there was more than enough of that on TGW. More 3x01 Willicia type scenes and fewer scenes that remind me of season 4 Kalinda, please and thanks.

Colin lives in a giant house. Why does one person need all those rooms?

Julius notices that someone’s gone through his things and storms into Adrian’s office (or maybe it’s Barbara’s office? They’re both there). Julius, understandably, isn’t happy. He says he was the most loyal employee they had, but no more: he knows he was targeted for this, and that people think differently of him now. He quits the firm and calls Andrew Hart, the lawyer who gave him his card in 1x03.

Diane has to inform Neil Gross about how his name is being used. He’s not pleased, and now he just wants this whole TOS thing to go away as fast as possible. What a shock.

Ugh, Felix. Diane says they’ll reinstate him and he’s sad he can’t keep trolling. Boo hoo.

Diane monologues at him about how he’s a clown and how he destroys his points by being racist and misogynist and how he’s a bully. It’s satisfying, but doesn’t really solve any problems. Like, is the show saying here that harassment is hard to control so it’ll never be controlled, so just don’t feed the trolls?

Diane confronts Neil about the leak, and he responds—even though she’s right—by calling Adrian and Barbara in for another meeting, one without Diane. Barbara is pleased with this: for the first time in weeks, her power doesn’t seem like it’s slipping away from her.

Lucca isn’t wearing high heels!

Colin shows up to RBK and meets with Lucca. He warns her to stay clear of RBK’s finances. Why? Because of the story Elsbeth planted. It’s sweet that Colin warns Lucca. She thanks him, genuinely, but she’s distracted… Maia’s right there, and Lucca knows this means Maia’s world is about to be destroyed even more.

[courtneytincher]

Dubya Was Bad, but the Donald Might Be Worse: Richard Clarke

Photo Illustration by The Daily Beast/GettyFormer White House counter-terrorism czar Richard A. Clarke, who worked directly under three presidents during his 30 years in government, still believes his ex-boss George W. Bush was the worst of them all.Yet Clarke—whose new book, The Fifth Domain, chronicles the dire threats to the United States posed by cyberwarfare—says Donald Trump is very likely, in the end, to wreak even more havoc “He’s eviscerating the government.  He’s eviscerating capabilities that we need,” Clarke told The Daily Beast this week as the Los Angeles Times reported that the Trump administration had “gutted programs aimed at detecting weapons of mass destruction”—rigorous local and national training programs that Clarke had a hand in starting. “And it’s not as though if the Democrats win the 2020 election you just turn those capabilities back on. The people go away, the skill sets go away, the capabilities atrophy. And it will take years to undo the damage.”Clarke added: “You’ve got to wonder if the cumulative effect of a million bad decisions equates to the disasters caused by one big bad decision that Bush made”—namely, the ruinous military adventure in Iraq that Bush 43 sold to Congress and the American people as a justifiable response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, which Iraqi tyrant Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with. “But we’re getting there,” Clarke added, referring to Trump.Richard A. Clarke: What We’ve Learned From 9/11But couldn’t Trump just end up blundering through his presidency without inviting a catastrophe?“I think the chances of that,” Clarke answered with a mirthless laugh, “are really low.”Clarke is especially pessimistic that the Trump administration will do anything effective to combat the threats in cyberspace, especially since the president’s pugnacious national security adviser, John Bolton, last year eliminated the position of cybersecurity coordinator on the National Security Council—in part because he didn’t want any challenges to his authority.  “There are isolated pockets of career civil servants who are trying,” Clarke said. “There are some people in Homeland Security who are trying—some people at the FBI, some people at NSA, some people at Cyber Command [an agency of the Defense Department]. But what we don’t have is an executive order, a national security directive. We don’t have anybody in the White House who is a single coordinator of a response. We don’t have a request for money—in fact quite the opposite. The administration is telling [Senate Majority Leader] Mitch McConnell to oppose more money for cybersecurity in the election process.”On the bright side, however, Clarke said he was heartened recently when Trump rejected Bolton’s advice to bomb Iran to retaliate for attacks on oil tankers, and instead listened to Fox News host Tucker Carlson’s pleas to stand down.“I know John pretty well,” Clarke said, going back to their days when both worked in the State Department under Ronald Reagan and Bolton was an assistant secretary. “He’s aggressive, he’s iconoclastic, and he likes to think things up and damn the consequences. That’s OK when you’re an assistant secretary of state, but not when you’re national security adviser.”Unable to suppress a laugh, Clarke added, “I loved the fact that when Trump went to North Korea last month, he took Tucker Carlson with him and sent John Bolton to Mongolia. It was very funny.”Like Bolton, but for different reasons, Clarke is very nearly a household name. His unhappy tenure as Bush 43’s counter-terrorism adviser in the months before 9/11 earned him a portrayal by actor Michael Stuhlbarg in the Hulu miniseries The Looming Tower.“I’m probably the wrong person to ask about how he portrayed me, but everybody I know who knows me—and certainly everybody I know who worked with me in those days—said ‘you were a much stronger, louder, more bossy kind of person than he portrayed, and more in charge than he portrayed. I think that’s probably right.”A former Republican who supported Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign and later served the 44th president as an ex-officio cybersecurity expert, Clarke is backing South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg this time around.“The only candidate who I have noticed mentions cybersecurity pretty regularly is Pete,” Clarke said. “Maybe that’s because I’m advising him.”Clarke said he has been volunteering as a Buttigieg policy adviser for the past six weeks, and has already “maxed out” in his contributions (the federally allowable figure is $2,800) to the 37-year-old mayor’s Democratic primary race. “A friend said, ‘You gotta read his book,’ and I was like, ugh, fuck, I got so many goddamn books to read,” Clarke said, by way of explaining his enthusiasm for Buttigieg, whose memoir, The Shortest Way Home, was published in February. “But I read the book and I was like ‘Whoa! Did this guy actually write this?’ And I said to myself, this has got to be a ghostwriter—so let me go hear him speak.”Clarke ultimately attended a Buttigieg campaign event in Washington, D.C. “It was pretty clear he wrote the book, and pretty clear that he is a very bright fellow, and has emotional intelligence, and thinks systematically,” Clarke said, recalling his reaction. “Just on sheer intelligence alone, he’s undoubtedly in a class by himself.Clarke, who is 68, continued: “At my stage in life, I’m more concerned about who should be president than who’s gonna win. And I said that back when Obama was running in ’07, when I read his books and went to meet with him, and I was blown away.” Clarke said he pledged his support to the freshman Illinois senator as “a voice in my head said ‘but you have no chance of winning.’… It’s the same this year.”Clarke predicted that Buttigieg’s public profile as an out-gay man, who happens to be married to another man, won’t hurt his presidential prospects.“I think the country’s ready for it, but it’s more the fact that he’s a small-town mayor with no federal experience and no national experience,” he said about Buttigieg’s political handicaps. “I never heard of him before six months ago. So he’s got a much harder row to hoe than people who are senators and people who have run for president before. I think if everybody started with a clean slate equally, he’d have a helluva chance, and the fact that he’s raised more money than anybody else in the last quarter [$24.8 million] means that he still has a chance.”Clarke’s The Fifth Domain, co-authored with former Obama administration cybersecurity adviser Robert Knake, is a comprehensive survey of the threats from this country’s four most determined cyberwar adversaries—Russia, China, Iran and North Korea—and how the government and U.S. companies can successfully defend against them.The threat is more far-reaching than simply a foreign power such as Russia meddling in American democracy by hacking into private emails and balloting systems, while deploying bots to target persuadable swing-state voters with potent lies.“I rank the cyber threat right under global warming and climate change” as the nation’s most pressing challenge, Clarke said, “because it touches everything. It touches health care. It touches the economy. It touches the military. It has become a pervasive problem throughout everything we do.”Calling Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea the United States’ “Big Four” cyber enemies, Clarke said, “When you look at the annual threat briefing that the intelligence agencies give to the Congress in open session, those are the four they mention. But it’s very interesting what they said this year… They said Russia is in the controls of our power grid and could cause outages in parts of the country. China is in the controls of our gas pipeline system, and could cause outages. Iran could attack U.S. companies and wipe all data from their networks. Those are rather specific, I thought.”Meanwhile, North Korea—infamous for hacking into the emails of Sony movie executives five years ago (payback for a 2014 comedy in which a Kim Jong Un character is assassinated)—regularly invades the computer networks of banks “to steal money,” Clarke said. “The North Koreans are different from the other three in one respect: The North Korean government hacks for money—it’s a major source of revenue for them—whereas the other three hack for espionage purposes.”Clarke, who these days earns his living as a corporate cybersecurity consultant, has been a member of the national security establishment at least since 1985, when he was appointed deputy assistant secretary of state for intelligence during the Reagan administration. But he is probably best known as that rare government official who has publicly apologized for official failure—in his case, the government’s failure to prevent al Qaeda’s hijacking of commercial airliners to attack the Twin Towers and the Pentagon and kill nearly 3,000 people.Testifying before the 9/11 Commission in March 2004, Clarke famously called the public hearing “a forum where I can apologize to the loved ones of the victims of 9/11,” and added: “To them who are here in the room, to those who are watching on television, your government failed you, those entrusted with protecting you failed you, and I failed you. We tried hard, but that doesn't matter because we failed. And for that failure, I would ask—once all the facts are out—for your understanding and for your forgiveness.”Never mind that Clarke, as Bush 43’s counter-terrorism adviser, had repeatedly warned the president’s national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, that the U.S. intelligence community was picking up alarming chatter that indicated something imminent being planned in the months-long run-up to 9/11; Rice and her deputy, Stephen Hadley, who blocked Clarke’s access to the president, persistently ignored Clarke’s urgent requests for high-level meetings to respond to the threat.“It was just horrifying,” Clarke said, recalled his stint under Bush 43, “because he clearly was not too bright, and then he had such an inferiority complex. It didn’t work out very well…”Clarke, who left the Bush White House in 2003, continued: “They made enormous mistakes before and after 9/11. The mistakes after 9/11 were probably even worse. The Iraq war is an unforgivable mistake that destroyed the lives of many Iraqis and many Americans, and our children and grandchildren will be paying for it for many years to come.”As assistant secretary of state for political-military affairs, Clarke had worked closely with Bush 43’s father, President George H.W. Bush, to muster international support for the first Gulf War.“Bush 41 was a very good national security president,” Clarke said. “He knew how the machinery worked, and he was good at working inside it. He respected it, he respected the system, he respected the people. And he achieved incredible results. The way in which he ended the Cold War was perfect, spot-on. And the way in which he conducted the first Gulf War was damned-near perfect. If you were electing a president for national security alone, he would have been perfect. He didn’t care about much else, unfortunately.”Clarke voted for Bill Clinton in 1992, even though a Clinton presidency meant he’d probably lose his job. Much to his surprise, Clinton not only kept him on, he elevated Clarke to the White House, where he served on the National Security Council and enjoyed cabinet-level access to the president as Clinton’s point man for security, infrastructure protection, and counter-terrorism.“I loved Bill Clinton,” Clarke said, and Clinton has returned the favor, effusively blurbing Clarke’s latest book. “The guy was and is incredibly smart and curious—really a rare breed. He’s a lot like Pete Buttigieg in a way.”Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

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Photo Illustration by The Daily Beast/GettyFormer White House counter-terrorism czar Richard A. Clarke, who worked directly under three presidents during his 30 years in government, still believes his ex-boss George W. Bush was the worst of them all.Yet Clarke—whose new book, The Fifth Domain, chronicles the dire threats to the United States posed by cyberwarfare—says Donald Trump is very likely, in the end, to wreak even more havoc “He’s eviscerating the government.  He’s eviscerating capabilities that we need,” Clarke told The Daily Beast this week as the Los Angeles Times reported that the Trump administration had “gutted programs aimed at detecting weapons of mass destruction”—rigorous local and national training programs that Clarke had a hand in starting. “And it’s not as though if the Democrats win the 2020 election you just turn those capabilities back on. The people go away, the skill sets go away, the capabilities atrophy. And it will take years to undo the damage.”Clarke added: “You’ve got to wonder if the cumulative effect of a million bad decisions equates to the disasters caused by one big bad decision that Bush made”—namely, the ruinous military adventure in Iraq that Bush 43 sold to Congress and the American people as a justifiable response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, which Iraqi tyrant Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with. “But we’re getting there,” Clarke added, referring to Trump.Richard A. Clarke: What We’ve Learned From 9/11But couldn’t Trump just end up blundering through his presidency without inviting a catastrophe?“I think the chances of that,” Clarke answered with a mirthless laugh, “are really low.”Clarke is especially pessimistic that the Trump administration will do anything effective to combat the threats in cyberspace, especially since the president’s pugnacious national security adviser, John Bolton, last year eliminated the position of cybersecurity coordinator on the National Security Council—in part because he didn’t want any challenges to his authority.  “There are isolated pockets of career civil servants who are trying,” Clarke said. “There are some people in Homeland Security who are trying—some people at the FBI, some people at NSA, some people at Cyber Command [an agency of the Defense Department]. But what we don’t have is an executive order, a national security directive. We don’t have anybody in the White House who is a single coordinator of a response. We don’t have a request for money—in fact quite the opposite. The administration is telling [Senate Majority Leader] Mitch McConnell to oppose more money for cybersecurity in the election process.”On the bright side, however, Clarke said he was heartened recently when Trump rejected Bolton’s advice to bomb Iran to retaliate for attacks on oil tankers, and instead listened to Fox News host Tucker Carlson’s pleas to stand down.“I know John pretty well,” Clarke said, going back to their days when both worked in the State Department under Ronald Reagan and Bolton was an assistant secretary. “He’s aggressive, he’s iconoclastic, and he likes to think things up and damn the consequences. That’s OK when you’re an assistant secretary of state, but not when you’re national security adviser.”Unable to suppress a laugh, Clarke added, “I loved the fact that when Trump went to North Korea last month, he took Tucker Carlson with him and sent John Bolton to Mongolia. It was very funny.”Like Bolton, but for different reasons, Clarke is very nearly a household name. His unhappy tenure as Bush 43’s counter-terrorism adviser in the months before 9/11 earned him a portrayal by actor Michael Stuhlbarg in the Hulu miniseries The Looming Tower.“I’m probably the wrong person to ask about how he portrayed me, but everybody I know who knows me—and certainly everybody I know who worked with me in those days—said ‘you were a much stronger, louder, more bossy kind of person than he portrayed, and more in charge than he portrayed. I think that’s probably right.”A former Republican who supported Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign and later served the 44th president as an ex-officio cybersecurity expert, Clarke is backing South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg this time around.“The only candidate who I have noticed mentions cybersecurity pretty regularly is Pete,” Clarke said. “Maybe that’s because I’m advising him.”Clarke said he has been volunteering as a Buttigieg policy adviser for the past six weeks, and has already “maxed out” in his contributions (the federally allowable figure is $2,800) to the 37-year-old mayor’s Democratic primary race. “A friend said, ‘You gotta read his book,’ and I was like, ugh, fuck, I got so many goddamn books to read,” Clarke said, by way of explaining his enthusiasm for Buttigieg, whose memoir, The Shortest Way Home, was published in February. “But I read the book and I was like ‘Whoa! Did this guy actually write this?’ And I said to myself, this has got to be a ghostwriter—so let me go hear him speak.”Clarke ultimately attended a Buttigieg campaign event in Washington, D.C. “It was pretty clear he wrote the book, and pretty clear that he is a very bright fellow, and has emotional intelligence, and thinks systematically,” Clarke said, recalling his reaction. “Just on sheer intelligence alone, he’s undoubtedly in a class by himself.Clarke, who is 68, continued: “At my stage in life, I’m more concerned about who should be president than who’s gonna win. And I said that back when Obama was running in ’07, when I read his books and went to meet with him, and I was blown away.” Clarke said he pledged his support to the freshman Illinois senator as “a voice in my head said ‘but you have no chance of winning.’… It’s the same this year.”Clarke predicted that Buttigieg’s public profile as an out-gay man, who happens to be married to another man, won’t hurt his presidential prospects.“I think the country’s ready for it, but it’s more the fact that he’s a small-town mayor with no federal experience and no national experience,” he said about Buttigieg’s political handicaps. “I never heard of him before six months ago. So he’s got a much harder row to hoe than people who are senators and people who have run for president before. I think if everybody started with a clean slate equally, he’d have a helluva chance, and the fact that he’s raised more money than anybody else in the last quarter [$24.8 million] means that he still has a chance.”Clarke’s The Fifth Domain, co-authored with former Obama administration cybersecurity adviser Robert Knake, is a comprehensive survey of the threats from this country’s four most determined cyberwar adversaries—Russia, China, Iran and North Korea—and how the government and U.S. companies can successfully defend against them.The threat is more far-reaching than simply a foreign power such as Russia meddling in American democracy by hacking into private emails and balloting systems, while deploying bots to target persuadable swing-state voters with potent lies.“I rank the cyber threat right under global warming and climate change” as the nation’s most pressing challenge, Clarke said, “because it touches everything. It touches health care. It touches the economy. It touches the military. It has become a pervasive problem throughout everything we do.”Calling Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea the United States’ “Big Four” cyber enemies, Clarke said, “When you look at the annual threat briefing that the intelligence agencies give to the Congress in open session, those are the four they mention. But it’s very interesting what they said this year… They said Russia is in the controls of our power grid and could cause outages in parts of the country. China is in the controls of our gas pipeline system, and could cause outages. Iran could attack U.S. companies and wipe all data from their networks. Those are rather specific, I thought.”Meanwhile, North Korea—infamous for hacking into the emails of Sony movie executives five years ago (payback for a 2014 comedy in which a Kim Jong Un character is assassinated)—regularly invades the computer networks of banks “to steal money,” Clarke said. “The North Koreans are different from the other three in one respect: The North Korean government hacks for money—it’s a major source of revenue for them—whereas the other three hack for espionage purposes.”Clarke, who these days earns his living as a corporate cybersecurity consultant, has been a member of the national security establishment at least since 1985, when he was appointed deputy assistant secretary of state for intelligence during the Reagan administration. But he is probably best known as that rare government official who has publicly apologized for official failure—in his case, the government’s failure to prevent al Qaeda’s hijacking of commercial airliners to attack the Twin Towers and the Pentagon and kill nearly 3,000 people.Testifying before the 9/11 Commission in March 2004, Clarke famously called the public hearing “a forum where I can apologize to the loved ones of the victims of 9/11,” and added: “To them who are here in the room, to those who are watching on television, your government failed you, those entrusted with protecting you failed you, and I failed you. We tried hard, but that doesn't matter because we failed. And for that failure, I would ask—once all the facts are out—for your understanding and for your forgiveness.”Never mind that Clarke, as Bush 43’s counter-terrorism adviser, had repeatedly warned the president’s national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, that the U.S. intelligence community was picking up alarming chatter that indicated something imminent being planned in the months-long run-up to 9/11; Rice and her deputy, Stephen Hadley, who blocked Clarke’s access to the president, persistently ignored Clarke’s urgent requests for high-level meetings to respond to the threat.“It was just horrifying,” Clarke said, recalled his stint under Bush 43, “because he clearly was not too bright, and then he had such an inferiority complex. It didn’t work out very well…”Clarke, who left the Bush White House in 2003, continued: “They made enormous mistakes before and after 9/11. The mistakes after 9/11 were probably even worse. The Iraq war is an unforgivable mistake that destroyed the lives of many Iraqis and many Americans, and our children and grandchildren will be paying for it for many years to come.”As assistant secretary of state for political-military affairs, Clarke had worked closely with Bush 43’s father, President George H.W. Bush, to muster international support for the first Gulf War.“Bush 41 was a very good national security president,” Clarke said. “He knew how the machinery worked, and he was good at working inside it. He respected it, he respected the system, he respected the people. And he achieved incredible results. The way in which he ended the Cold War was perfect, spot-on. And the way in which he conducted the first Gulf War was damned-near perfect. If you were electing a president for national security alone, he would have been perfect. He didn’t care about much else, unfortunately.”Clarke voted for Bill Clinton in 1992, even though a Clinton presidency meant he’d probably lose his job. Much to his surprise, Clinton not only kept him on, he elevated Clarke to the White House, where he served on the National Security Council and enjoyed cabinet-level access to the president as Clinton’s point man for security, infrastructure protection, and counter-terrorism.“I loved Bill Clinton,” Clarke said, and Clinton has returned the favor, effusively blurbing Clarke’s latest book. “The guy was and is incredibly smart and curious—really a rare breed. He’s a lot like Pete Buttigieg in a way.”Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

July 22, 2019 at 09:55AM via IFTTT