#pure idiocy across this country

[bokettochild]

Febuwhump Day 5 - Rope Burn

Well this took forever! I actualy finished last ight but then I wasn't sure if I hated it or not, so I had to sleep on it. If you see any typos, no you do not.

Wordcount: 9,300

Rating: Teen

Summary: After Twilight reveals some information about his past, Four tries to use it as a learning opportunity for all of them. It does not go as expected.

-

  “There is no way a military leader was that incompetent.”  

  Wild pauses in his story, much to Wind’s frustration, because he really did want to hear the end of it, which he’s about to say, only the vet’s voice raises, a smirk touching the other’s face as he settles down at the fire with the rest of them after coming back from doing rounds. “Sounds about right to me.”  

  “Too competent,” Warriors challenges, dropping his head to thoroughly tousle his hair, “half my men couldn’t do that.” That’s fair, Wind decides, he remembers the captain’s men as all being somewhat... stupid. 

  The champion stares at them, openly astounded. “How,” he begins, glancing between the vet and captain “are your kingdoms still standing? If the leaders of your defenses are less capable than Master I-killed-myself-on-accident-with-my-own-power Kohga?” 

  “Spoilers!” That’s how the story ends? Wild had only just begun to get to the part where he fought Kohga, but now the ending has been well and truly ruined! Although, it seems they’re getting derailed, so it’s quite likely he won’t even get to hear said ending, considering the champion is too busy looking between captain and veteran for answers. 

  The vet just snorts, unknowing of what he’s missed, and of Wind’s ire, and simply crossing his legs and focusing on the fire. “Where do you think I got the title of veteran? I don’t just sit on my fanny all day, champ.” 

  When the champion’s eyes turn to Warriors, the captain just shakes his head. “I have no clue.” It‘s more sigh than anything, as though the captain’s long since given up hopes for competency among his people. “I’d say Impa, but even she can’t hold the country together by herself, so I’m assuming it’s pure dumb luck.” 

  Across camp, Sky, who’d been the first one to say anything after the champion’s insane story, stares. “You’re saying I brought down the knights of Skyloft just so they could devolve into idiotic half-competent protectors of the country and leave kids to be the ones to save the world?” It’s harsh, but it’s fair as well, although not everyone seems to think so. Wind can’t say anything on the matter though because the closest to military groups they have in his world are pirates, and pirates don’t exactly serve the people. 

  The group as a whole gives each other considering looks, although Legend and Warriors are too busy talking with their eyes- Legend raising a brow and Warriors sighing, rolling his own eyes and earning a smirk in answer- to really care about what everyone else thinks. He thinks Legend asked a question, but how either of them can read each other that well, considering how rarely they even interact, he’s not sure.  

  “The knights in my era are half-competent,” Four assures, “easily manipulated by magic, but they’re just people, so I can’t really blame them. They’re good at their work though.” 

  “Lucky,” Legend scoffs. 

  Time also seems confident in the soldiers of his era, but Twilight adds that his own are cowards and pathetic, so it seems they’re split. Wind, Wild, and Hyrule can’t add anything, due to the lack of military forces in their eras, the soldier is in agreement with their farm boys on the idiocy of his own people, and only their first two and the old man seem to have any faith whatsoever in those set to guard their era. He wonders if maybe there was a decline, after one of them, that led to the army of Hyrule falling, but he doesn’t ask, since it’s unlikely they can say for sure anyway. 

  “How often do you interact with knights though?” Sky challenges, glancing between them. Most haven’t been around them often, but those who’ve got only ill to say all scoff, almost simultaneously, which startles them as much as it does the rest of the group. 

  “I live with them,” the captain starts slowly, glancing between Twilight and Legend with a curious half-smile as though he’s actively trying to figure out what on earth could tie them to the people whom they so frequently scorn. “Spent the last five or six years in the army.” 

  The vet’s a bit more hesitant with his answer, staring between them warily, guarded. “My sister is a knight commander, and our family has ties with the army, so I end up around them a lot more than I’d like, even when they aren’t actively hunting me down.” And Wind wants to stop the conversation there and ask about the fact that Legend apparently has a family and also a reason for the army to be up his ass about something, but he doesn’t get a chance because once more, someone else speaks first. 

  “I grew up on a military base,” Twilight snorts, “trust me, soldiers are as dumb as rocks.” 

  And well, Legend having a family isn’t that crazy in comparison to that. 

  Warriors starts, staring at the rancher, blinking slowly as though still trying to process the words of the other. “I’m sorry- you what?” 

  “I thought you grew up in Ordon?” Wild questions, turning to his mentor, confusion on clear display. 

  Yeah, Wind has a feeling that Wild’s story is well and truly over now, but he supposes it’s worth it. Learning something about their rancher is, he supposes, better than hearing the rest of the story the cook had already spoiled the ending too, especially as the limit of their knowledge about the rancher at this point is that he’s from Ordon, used to work as a ranch hand, and is descended from Time and Malon somehow. The fact that he’s a hero goes without saying, but the ranch hand nearly never shares anything about himself, even though he seems to love talking about his hometown and all the people in it, to the point where some of them feel they know the village and its residents already, despite still not having been there yet. 

  Yet, the rancher is grinning as he leans back, the sprig of hylian rice between his teeth bouncing some as he flashes a wolfish grin at them. “Well, yeah, sort of.” 

  “Sort of?” Time nudges his pup, looking thoroughly unimpressed. Their leader isn’t keen on them being cryptic with him, even though he frequently does so himself. The hypocrite. “Explain.” 

  The rancher chuckles, a nervous little thing, but obediently pulls himself up, resting his weight over his knees as he looks around the fire at all of them, eyes glinting slightly. “Well, y’see, I a’tually grew up in a citadel on the edge of Hyrule.” 

  Warriors jaw drops so fast. “Holy Hylia you’re a military brat.” 

  He can’t help it; he bursts into laughter. Yes, objectively, it’s funny to see Warriors so shocked, but from an outsider's perspective it is so, so much funnier because he’s met Warriors parents and sisters, and he’s seen for himself the proof that the captain is anything but the sissy city boy Twilight likes to accuse him of being. No, the captain was born in Hebra, so far out from cities that he thought Kakariko was huge. Meanwhile, it turns out their “country boy” actually grew up in a military base? Not the country? It turns out Twilight is the military brat and Warriors was the hill-billy? How the turn tables have turned! 

  The rest of the heroes stare at him, confused, but the captain just rolls blue eyes, pinching the tip of his ear to make him shut up. “Ignore him.” 

  Twilight’s dark gaze flicks between them, but apparently, he determines to listen to the captain for once. “Right, so, my dad was a’tually a knight from some family o’ knights or summat, an’ my mom comes from desert folk, so I grew up on the border studyin’ with other knights’ kids to take on our fathers’ duties ’n protect Hyrule one day.” 

  The stares are very, very evident by now, although Legend’s in particular is strangely intense, studying the other with his mouth half open like he’s got a question about the rancher’s words.  

 Broad shoulders shrug, a bit awkward as the rancher grins at them. “My friends growin’ up were dumber’n rocks, an’ every knight I’ve met since is the same, so yeah. Knights ‘re stupid.” 

  “Just a question,” and it seems the vet decided to actually ask whatever’s in his head, “but your knight family, they Hyrulian Knights?” 

  “Yeah?” 

  The vet nods, slowly, lips pursed like he’s sucking on a lemon. “Oh.” 

 “Why?” 

  A shake of pink hair, eyes turning back to the fire. “Same hat is all.” 

  “You too?” 

  “Born and raised, but never followed. Your folks drag you to Snowpeak every winter too?” 

  The rancher shakes his head. “Naw, yeti’s took the place over some time ago. I’d heard it used to be ours though, never thought much of it though. You’ve been?” 

 “Yeah.” 

  “Hold up,” Watrriors interrupts the, frankly unexpected, moment between their rancher and vet to stare between both of them “You’re both military brats, you both hate soldiers, and you both neglected to say anything until freaking now? Also, Hyrulian Knights? You’re talking about the fabled family that sealed back Ganon here, right? Produced the Savior of Labrynna, may or may not be the family of the Hero of Time?” That has their old man looking up, startled, for a moment. It’s only a moment though, because that one wide eye promptly shoots down to Twilight and then, as though on second thought, Legend too, Time’s stare growing ever more startled and shaken, ears twitching like they used too when he was particularly confused or trying to work something out in his head. 

  Legend snorts. “Yes.” 

  “Heads up,” Hyrule chuckles, “Legend is the Hero of Labrynna, so keep your hero worship at a minimum there, Wars.” 

  He thinks that the captain’s face flickers through all five stages of grief for a moment there before the man gets up and simply...walks away, leaving Hyrule rocking in his seat from laughter and Sky looking thoroughly befuddled. “Is he okay?” 

  “Big hero worship,” Wind says, like the snitch he is. He’s no traitor in most senses, but if he can give Warriors a little grief, tease him a bit, he will. He’s fine with sharing some of the things he’d learned under the care of the other. “Apparently he views that guy like I did with Time, wanted to be like him and everything.” 

  Rather than flush or falter, Legend’s lemon-sucking face gets even more pronounced. “Why?” 

  “Because apparently the stories all say you were such an inspiring leader to Labrynna’s army that soldiers and generals emulated both your tactics and speeches for decades after Ganon’s defeat.” It’s amazing to watch the vet’s entire world-view shatter at the words, the man apparently not sure if he should look off towards their captain who’s flopped on his bedroll to contemplate his whole life all over again or down at the ground to contemplate his own. Like the problem child he usually chooses not to be, Wind decides to make it worse. “His Hyrule considers you the greatest knight that ever lived.” 

  Ringed hands bury in pink hair, violet eyes blowing wide as the other hunches over, mind clearly blown. Beside the vet, Twilight gently (and by gently, Wind means very cautiously) claps his brother’s back, his own face a bit tense. 

 Wind is loving watching this. This is better than listening to Wild explain his exploits against the Yiga! Although, he’s also curious. “Did you really grow up in a citadel, Twi?” 

  “Yeah,” a brief nod, dark eyes lingering on their malfunctioning veteran, “I only traveled up Ordon way around your age, when the citadel fell.” 

  Okay, not touching that bomb. “What was it like?” 

  His question earns a grin. “What you’d expect, I s’pose. We were monsters as kids, an’ I s’pose growin’ up military gave us a twisted view of the world. Or, rather, of what was normal any’ays.” 

  “Like how?” Sky, who grew up in a knight’s academy and seems entirely normal by what standards Wind has, asks. 

  “Our main games usually centered around pretendin’ to be knights an’ capturin’ each other or doin’ what we saw our dads doin’ most of the time.” 

  “Like?” Time prods again. 

 Twilight grins, and then falters, looking suddenly alarmed as he glances over the rest of them. “Okay, in hindsight, it was messed up.”   

  Now he really wants to know. “What did you do?”  

  The others all stare; those who aren’t, like Warriors and Legend, currently questioning their existence. Their concern is steadily growing the more Twilight falters and flushes, and Wind is now very much dying to know what sort of shenanigans the rancher used to get up to as a kid. Whatever it was, it can’t be worse than what Time used to put him through during the war, although the idea of their sweet and warm rancher being related to the gremlin he remembers from back then is now not so insane a concept anymore. 

  “Alright,” The (apparently not from Ordon) Ordonian starts at last, and Wind’s not sure if the rancher is aware that he’s moved his hand up to be toying with the vet’s hair now, a nervous sort of stroking, but the vet hasn’t snapped at him for it yet, although maybe that’s because he’s just too lost in his own head to notice, “don’t judge.” 

  “I will reserve my judgement,” Four answers, slowly, “but no promises.” 

  “I grew up on the edge of the desert, an’ most of what our folks did was hunt Gerudo thieves an’ protect traders in an’ outta the desert.” Which makes sense, but he feels like Twilight’s getting at something less than what his parents did for a living. “Nowadays, my hairs a fair bit darker, but it was purdy red back then an’ the other kids kind of figured it meant that when we played, I had to be the evil Gerudo thief, since, y’know, red hair.” 

  Ah, racism in children, now Wind sees it. Not what he was hoping for but he’s not sure what he was expecting. 

  “So,” Twilight clears his throat awkwardly, “when we played, I’d be the bad guy an’ they’d chase me down and ‘capture’ me. In hindsight, it probably was less play an’ more bullyin’ since I wasn’t too well liked at first an’ they weren’t very nice about it.” 

  “But?” Sky asks, maybe too hopefully. 

  “But,” the rancher accepts, because apparently there's something good in this after all, or at least something that makes the man smile, “part of the ‘game’ involved them tryin’ to tie me up. Unfortunately for them, I got mighty good at escapin’ bein’ tied up. I think I must’ve impressed ‘em, because they started makin’ a game of if I could escape various crazy things, an’ sometimes would ask me to help ‘em tie each other up so they could try a hand at it too.” Sharp teeth glint in a fond smile. “Got a reputation for bein’ slippery as a snake and sly as a fox, an’ t’others all started treatin’ me like some sorta genius. We became friends awful fast after.” 

  An awkward silence settles over camp after that, the rancher’s words sinking in and the rest of them processing what was said. Surprisingly, it’s Legend who breaks it, lifting his head from his own hands, apparently having decided to shelf whatever feelings he’s having, but also apparently missing the hand still tangled in his hair. “So, in other words, you earned the respect of your bullies and made their bullying into what sounds like a perfectly normal childhood game.” 

  “What sort of a childhood did you have again?” Sky deadpans. “Didn’t you start adventuring at like, eight?” 

  “And?” The vet returns, looking actually, genuinely confused as to what that has to do with anything. 

  Their chosen hero sighs, shaking his head, apparently already giving up on trying to explain the flaw in the vet’s logic. Honestly, Wind can’t see it, whatever it is, but he’s getting the impression that kids on Skyloft and kids in Hyrule have very, very different experiences.  

- 

  It’s about a week later that someone brings it up again, and surprisingly, it’s Four. 

  They’re sitting around the main room of the smithy’s house, keeping warm after spending the last day out in the middle of a strange mix of fog and rain while hunting monsters. The smithy’s parents have been very welcoming towards their guests, and all of them are savoring the chance to fully relax for the first time in a good while. Well, most of them, Legend and Hyrule don’t seem particularly capable of fully relaxing, so Four’s mother has roped them into helping her in the little garden out back, which seems to be quite to the vet’s tastes and, while foreign to Hyrule, a new experience the traveler doesn't seem keen on passing up. 

  That leaves the rest of them free in the otherwise empty house, left to their own devices while the smithy’s father attends to his work at the castle. Twilight is trying (and failing) to teach Warriors how to play chess, and Wind and Wild are busy playing with Four’s cat, Tongs, when the smithy suddenly walks into the room again after coming downstairs and addresses the rancher. “Do you think you could still escape being tied up?” 

  Time, who was sitting on the couch, looking halfway towards dozing off, suddenly starts awake again and stares, as do the rest of them. 

  “Pardon?” The rancher asks, sighing in defeat as Warriors knocks all the pieces off the chess board with an agitated scowl, signifying his disinterest in continuing to try and learn the “stupid” game. 

  “The game you mentioned,” Four reminds them, crossing the room to perch on the couch arm closest to the rancher, although why he doesn’t just sit on the couch, Wind’s not sure. “You said your friends were really impressed by your ability to escape all the time. Do you think you could still do that?” 

  Twilight shrugs, scooping up the fallen chess pieces to put back in their box, all while Warriors glares at one of the rooks like it’s personally offended him. Wind wasn’t watching close enough to know if it had or not. “I mean, I might, haven’t tried in a while. Why?” 

  The smithy kicks his feet, well off the floor, and frowns, a thoughtful frown like he’s slowly piecing his words together. “I was curious. I’ve never been good at that sort of thing, and I wanted to know if you’d be willing to show us so I could get better.” 

  “And why do you need to get better at escaping being tied up?” The captain interjects, tossing the white rook into the box with a twitch of a frown. 

  “So sure you want to ask that?” Sky snorts, moseying in from the kitchen where Four’s mother had given them free access to make tea and grab food. The face the captain makes at him is scandalized but their chosen hero just slurps his tea, staring over the rim of his cup with raised brows. 

  Wind doesn’t get the joke. He’s not sure if he wants to. 

  Four huffs, slightly red in the cheeks, but presses on. “During my adventure, I made...some mistakes. It resulted in my capture, and I couldn’t exactly escape. I don’t want that to happen again.” It’s a simple enough answer, glazing over anything and everything other than the smithy getting captured, but it still raises questions, although not the ones the smithy was likely trying to avoid. 

  “I thought you were a knight?” Warriors picks up the queen piece, not dropping it yet but not staring at it either, instead focusing his narrowed eyes on their smithy. “All soldiers are trained on what to do in the case of capture, torture, and questioning. Did you not recieve that training?” 

  It’s Twilight’s turn to shift about to stare at the captain. “How would they train that sort of thing?” 

  The captain’s face screws up, “Am I the only one who was taught this? Sky,” the man drops the queen and it goes rolling across the table, “did you or did you not receive-” 

  “No,” the chosen hero doesn’t even wait for the other to finish. “Who on earth would even interrogate us? Skyloftian knights fight monsters, not men.” A long sip follows the words before Sky frowns and turns to look down at the seated soldier. “Do they seriously teach you about torture?” 

  “Yes?” Warriors glances around, but all of them look back at him with confusion. “All common soldiers learn this? You have to in order to progress through the ranks?” 

  “Not ringing a bell,” Time deadpans, staring at the captain with both eyes. 

  Warriors blinks, like the idea that his experience with knighthood not being universal is, in fact, a surprise to him. Wind can’t blame him though, considering based off of what he knows about the other, Warriors had gone through most of his experiences beside dozens of other young men, including his own childhood friends, in order to reach the rank he was at before the war started and he’d been suddenly promoted to captain. 

  “Well,” Four shifts, crossing his legs, “that’s a can of worms to be addressed later, but back to my question: Twilight, can you teach me escape tricks?” 

  “Correction,” Time sits up and turns around, eyes lingering on the captain a moment more before turning on his pup, “Twilight, Warriors, would both of you two be willing to help the rest of us learn escape methods and-” a vague hand motion is made at the soldier, “-whatever sort of training you received that all the rest of the knights here haven’t.” 

  The request seems to make the captain extremely uncomfortable and Wind doesn't miss the way royal blue eyes dart to him, hesitant. “Not the torture part.” 

  “What does that entail?” Sky asks, stare sharp and heavy in ways the man usually never is. 

  “Doesn’t matter,” Warriors is already moving to stand, leaving Twilight to clean up the rest of their game by himself. “I’m not teaching that to kids.” 

 “I am not a child!” It feels like the thousandth time he’s said that, but the look in the captain’s eyes.... yeah, he’ll let the man have this one. He's not sure he wants to see what it is that Warriors is trying to protect them from, especially after he saw everything that happened to the man during the war. 

  - 

  They have to recruit Legend and Hyrule from the garden, which Four does, and in the meantime Wind produces a length of rope for them to use for the exercise. The captain and Twilight are speaking in hushed whispers in the corner when Four returns with the others, and Legend shoots them a curious look as he heads over to where Wind is uncoiling all the rope he had in his bag. 

  “What’s going on?” 

  “Training exercise.” He answers, handing off the rope to the vet, who starts slightly at the contact but then helps him in re-coiling the loose chord.  

  “Why is the captain so tense?” 

  Those words make him look up, staring for a moment. Twilight seems perfectly at ease, but their soldier’s shoulders are tense, jaw set in a way he usually only has during a battle or shortly after one. Even the captain’s hands are still; devoid of their typical tremor, and if that’s not a sign to make him worry, he’s not sure what is. That said, he’s a bit surprised Legend had picked up on that. “I think he’s got bad memories of doing this before, he was pretty firm with Time about what he was and wasn’t willing to teach us.” 

  “Which is?” 

  “What to do if you’re captured or otherwise held against your will,” Time seems to materialize out of nowhere to answer the question, making Legend start slightly and scowl at the man. “Apparently most knights are trained to handle it, and I think you boys could benefit from having that knowledge too.” 

  “Yeah,” Legend snips, “because the shadow is totally gonna tie us to a chair and demand to know all our secrets.” 

  The conversation in the corner breaks off, Warriors running both hands through his hair in an agitated way while Twilight moves over to join the rest of them. “Maybe not, but the shadow ain’t the only threat out there, vet. You know that.” 

  The point is conceded, and the rest of them move in close, following their rancher’s example and watching as the man settles down into a kitchen chair Four had provided for their use. Twilight is not the one to start though, instead \turning his own attention, and thus the others do as well, towards the captain, who’s looking a little less like his normal self. It takes a moment, but Wind finally decides it’s the mess the man’s hair is in, that and the way all his emotions seem to have been wiped away cleanly as he stalks towards where the rancher is sitting.  

 “Twilight has agreed to show you all how to handle this, meanwhile, as I have the training, I will be instructing.” His breathing is off. “In some cases- most actually, the likelihood of being captured and watched by a large group is rare. Most of you don’t look like a major threat and few of you have a rank worth exploiting by your enemies, so your chances of being captured and tortured are low. The chances of questioning is also low, although possible, but considering how well you all keep your own secrets, I don’t think I have to teach you how to keep your mouths shut.” There’s the slightest quirk of a smile at that, and a few smile back. 

  Wind doesn’t. Wind is too busy watching the way too-steady hands reach out to take the rope Legend is still holding. 

  “I don’t need to teach you all how to watch the enemy, or how to be cautious, sneaky, how to move about without being seen- you know these things already.” The rope snaps in what he knows is a purposeful motion by the soldier to unsettle them, and that, if anything, is assurance that Warriors is still in there, and not entirely overwhelmed. Come to think of it, he may even be purposefully throwing them off with his behavior and appearance in order to better convey what it’s like to be held captive by a stranger. The thought actually makes him start and stare, watching closely. The hand thing can’t be faked, so maybe there’s some truth to the terrifying mask the captain is pulling; cold, harsh, calculating and seeking a reaction, but he genuinely hopes most of it really is just put on. “But how do you escape binds of different kinds? How do you quickly turn the tables to take yourself from prisoner to captor?” A twist of the hands and Warriors has made knot dangerously close to a noose. “Let’s try that, shall we?” 

  At his side, Legend tenses, eyes fixed on the captain as the man wraps the noose quickly around one of Twilight’s wrists, the rancher allowing himself to be manipulated as needed for the time being while Warriors twists and pulls and ties the rope this way and that. It's genuinely impressive, the kinds of knots and the effort put into them, far more than most enemies are likely to bother using, but the man still uses them, calling their attention to the different kinds and showing how some give way with a tug and others tighten, informing them that feeling the sort of knot used can be a huge step in escaping it, as it provides clues on how to manipulate your bindings to your own will. 

  Once the captain is finished, Twilight’s wrists and ankles are both quite effectively restrained, the rancher sitting quietly as he allows the rest of them to look over the bonds and Warriors to explain further about why certain knots are used and which ones to be on the lookout for. They are allowed to touch, encouraged even, to see how the rope feels, because- as the captain instructs them, clipped and cold- the likelihood of being granted sight is very low indeed when held captive. 

  “Everyone got all that?” At their nods, Warriors turns to Twilight. “Go nuts.” 

  Watching Twilight escape is very nearly as interesting as watching him get tied up. The rancher doesn’t explain nearly anything at all, focusing instead on getting out, but Warriors fills the blanks, pointing out that shifting, tugging and rolling your limbs can help loosen most bonds, even if it does tend to tighten the knots. “You don’t want to untie each knot, just get out of them. Most escapes need to be quick so as to actually be able to get out, but some circumstances give you time enough to pick over the knots later if you need the rope for something else. Getting a read on your situation at all times is crucial, but you have to rely on your own judgement much of the time in order to know what skills to employ and what to set aside.” 

  By the time the man is done speaking, Twilight is springing up out of the chair and making a grab at the captain. Almost without breathing, Warriors catches the other in a headlock. It's like watching a snake strike, one moment it looks like Twilight has him, and the next, the rancher is doubled over with their captain’s arms around his neck. 

  “Good try.” 

  Twi grins. “Woudla had’ja if I’d had time to slip my feet free.” 

  “Or if I’d been paying less attention,” the captain smiles, but it’s cold, thin, and very much not like their brother. The man’s hands let loose the other, leaving Twilight free to tug loose his feet while he turns back to the rest of them. “A key point is to watch for opening at all times. If your enemy turns their back or drops their guard, they give you a chance to over-power, injure, or kill them.” It’s said too coldly, too clinically, as though Warriors isn’t even talking about a life at all. He's beginning to see why the man spoke about this sort of training like he did; Warriors will be dumbing it down for them, making it something they can process, but with soldiers, commanders who didn’t give a shit about the innocence of their students, he can only imagine how this sort of thing would have been, especially paired with the knowledge that Warriors had also withstood training for torture and interrogation, so the mental strain would have been far worse then. 

  Honestly, maybe it’s not an act. Maybe Warriors is just used to shutting his emotions off when it comes to issues like this. 

  “Any questions?” 

 “Yeah,” it’s a new voice, one he doesn't know yet, which speaks, and it has all the heroes turning about abruptly at the sound of it, except the captain, who seems unsurprised, unlike them, to see Four’s father standing in the doorway “What on earth is going on here?” 

  As though of one mind, they all turn on the smithy. 

  “Training?” 

  “What kind?” The man leans in the door, one brow raised. He doesn’t look upset, maybe bemused, but Wind still feels Legend draw up stiff beside him. 

  “Escape training, sir,” Warriors clips, stepping forwards to address the man, “your son tells me he hasn't had a chance to undergo such training previously.” 

  “No.” It’s a very loaded word, “he hasn’t.” Guarded, wary, maybe even pained. Wind’s not sure, but he supposes maybe Four’s father doesn’t like the idea of his son undergoing whatever this training entails. 

  The captain doesn’t let the other knight’s tone bother him though. “All due respect sir, he requested that the Hero of Twilight and I instruct him, and the rest, in order that he might have some knowledge of what to do in the case of capture, sir.” Oh, Warriors is falling into soldier mode for real now. Shit. 

  Sir Smith notices too, apparently, face softening some as he looks at the younger soldier. “As ease, captain.” 

  Warriors does not relax in the slightest. 

  “Well,” their smithy’s father turns to look over them and the room in general, “I suppose it’s good knowledge to have, and about time you had it. Is there anything I can do to assist?” 

The offer is accepted eagerly by their smithy, and while Warriors still looks somewhat tense, Wind’s quite sure it’s the nature of the training and not the man offering to help with it. No, the captain and this world’s army commander had got on like a housefire last night, and he knows Warriors likes the man. It’s fine, his brother is just uncomfortable and thus falling into familiar patterns and behaviors in order to not betray that. Given time after, and Warriors will slowly drop those and return to his normal self once he’s ready. He’ll be okay. 

 “Escapin’ is like pretty boy said,” Twilight tells them, standing up again now that he’s free, “it’s a matter of gettin’ the ropes loose enough t’slip out. Amateurs tend to go too loose, an’ they keep it quick an’ easy. ‘pparently soldiers cover all the bases though.” The last part is added with a snort and a light nudge at their captain. 

  Time nods, slowly. “Four minutes and seventeen seconds. Quite impressive, pup.” 

  The words have the rancher beaming. 

  “Right,” Warriors plows ahead, ignoring the moment and looking over each of them. “Legend, you said you’d been trained, how about you show the rest how a smaller individual can handle this?”  

  The vet glares at the implications but doesn’t say anything. It’s fact that most of them aren’t nearly as big as Twilight and, considering few of them possess his brute strength either, having a few examples will probably give them more to work off of in the long run. Still, there’s something wary about the way the vet approaches the chair, hands already fisted as he stands in front of it, rather than deliberately sitting as the rancher had done. 

 “Commander,” Warriors turns over to Four’s father (he’s introduced himself as Leon, right?) and motions to the vet. “I believe you have more experience than I.” 

  The elder soldier nods, in one motion both conveying respect and also submitting himself to the command of the younger soldier for the time being, which Wind thinks is very grand of him considering it’s the older man’s own house they’re in, and his son they’re teaching. Then again though, Four had said that his dad is the sort of person who isn’t afraid to let a younger person take the lead if they know what they’re doing. 

  He wonders how Four knows that to be able to say it so confidently. What on earth does he get up to on his own? 

  A question for later, he guesses. Right now, it’s time to pay attention, because even if he hopes to grow as big as Twilight, Legend and he are pretty close in size now, so this will be more useful for him than watching the rancher. 

  Unlike Twilight, Legend doesn’t go easily, making Leon actually have to fight against him in order to continue. That, apparently, it is good though, as Warriors makes it a teaching point, “Generally speaking,” one large hand catches the vet’s dominant one, “you don’t want to let the enemy tie you down in the first place. Honor is all well and good, but when it comes to surviving, no one’s blaming you for fighting dirty.” Something Legend is notorious for. “Watch how the vet handles this, then we’ll discuss after. Sir Leon-” that is the right name then, great! “-will probably approach it differently than I do as well, so be aware that all captors are not the same.” 

  And the smithy’s father definitely doesn’t handle things the way Warriors did, nor does Legend. Where Twilight had let Warriors shift and move him as needed, Legend fights, and where Warriors had given little vocal cues to his “prisoner” and guided his motions carefully, well aware that a wrong move from the rancher at close proximity could do damage, Leon isn’t nearly as careful, instead grabbing, holding, and forcing the vet’s arms behind his back before slinging a rope around them with all the speed of a sailor in a storm. Also, unlike Warriors, Leon doesn’t use a variety of knots, rather keeping it quick and tight. 

  “He’s got thin wrists, so a tighter bind is needed. Some tie it tight enough to harm, but that’s not the goal here. Know it happens though.” The elder soldier tells them, yanking back on the vet who makes to push away. He doesn’t try to force the vet into the chair, instead catching the younger by the collar while his free hand works, hissing, “stay still, you wriggly thing!” 

  Wind’s not sure what exactly about the situation is wrong, but he swears he hears the vet’s breath catch, stutter, and then with a truly terrific show of strength, Legend rips himself free of the man’s hold, kicking back against the knight and propelling himself forwards hard enough that his collar slips free from the man’s hands and the vet can stumble very quickly away. Rather than stage an “attack” though, the hero just spins about, and the whole room freezes. 

  Legend’s stance is too tightly wound, breath too sharp, too harsh, but most obvious is the utter and complete terror shining in blown out violet eyes.  

  “Shit,” Warriors is moving before any of them have a clue what to do, and all aggression, put on though it was, immediately disappears from Leon’s own stance as both knights recognize what Wind himself has as well. He doesn't know how, and he doesn’t know why, but something about the situation has acted as enough to trigger the vet into some sort of panic, and what to them is a training exercise, has become, to his mind, very, very real. 

  “Lad-” Leon’s motion towards the vet earns a start back, one that is made even worse when Four jumps up from where he’d been watching. Wind can’t imagine why the sight of Four, of all of the people in the room, would make Legend stumble so far back that he falls flat on his ass, but it happens. It happens and none of them, especially the smithy, miss it. 

  “Vet?” They’re all worried, and several of them step forwards, reaching out, ready to help, wanting to help, only for both Hyrule and Wild to grab those closest to them and pull them back, something Wind does himself, catching ahold of the smithy. The last thing the vet needs is people crowding in and leaving him no space to breathe. Being surrounded when you’re vulnerable is bad, very bad, and if watching out for Mask and watching the captain taught him anything, it’s that letting an experienced adult handle it and keeping everyone else away is the best course of action. 

  “Is he-” again, Leon’s voice is cut off, this time though by a strangled sound from the vet. 

  “Leon,” and it’s the first time that the soldier’s voice has dropped titles to use anything else, “leave.” 

  “Excuse me?” Four hisses, but that also seems to have a very negative effect, one that has the captain turning, slowly, voice low and soft but cold enough to freeze.  

 “You too, smithy.” 

  Whatever is about to be said in return is cut off by Leon hefting his son over his shoulder and quickly leaving the room, although both he and Four look after the others even as they exit the door. If the situation were any different, Wind thinks he might have laughed at Four’s easy acceptance of being carried like a potato sack by his father, but right now dealing with the vet takes precedence. Luckily for all at hand, even if Warriors isn’t the most qualified to run a training simulation, there’s no one better at handing panic attacks. 

  Despite being downed, Legend’s still managed to shift enough that the ropes Leon was working to be decently tight have been mostly ripped off, although they’ve left a nasty burn across the hero’s skin, one that’s bleeding slightly in the worst areas along the inside of his wrists. No one stops him freeing himself though, and while the performance is definitely over, there’s also a part of all of them that notes how quickly Legend pulls himself free, the sailor even hears Time whisper a soft “two minutes, fourteen seconds” to himself, slightly awed. 

  “Hey,” Warriors’ voice has lost every amount of edge, ice, or stiffness as he settles down in front of their felled brother, now as full of warmth as if he’s back on the field, talking Mask out of his own head after the younger hero’s namesake was put away again. “You with me?” 

  Ragged breathing would indicate that no, Legend is not. He’s very much not, just staring after the door where Four and his father had disappeared, eyes still wide and breath too shallow. 

  The captain reaches out; slow, deliberate motions, easy to track as he reaches for the other hero. “You’re okay, alright? You’re safe. We were training, but it’s over. There is no threat here.” 

  The vet flinches away from the hand, inches from his arm, back slamming against a cabinet and making whatever’s inside clatter loudly, which just sees to further unsettled the shaken hero, who jumps at the sound, whipping his head around to look back, only to flick unseeing eyes back towards the captain. 

  Warriors doesn’t so much as falter, using his lifted hand to slowly push shaggy hair out of where it’d been over his eyes for the last while, messy and just slightly wavy at the ends, like he’s not had time to straighten it in a while. “Hey, it’s me. It’s Warriors, you in there, Link?” 

  Violet eyes flicker across the older man’s face, and this time, when Warriors reaches out, Legend doesn’t start away again, although he watches the hand reaching for him like it’ll produce a knife at any second. Luckily for all, the captain’s not capable of that sort of a trick, and all his hand does is catch one of Legend’s own, not by the wrist as Leon had done, but gently catching fingers in his own and guiding them towards himself, pulling the vet’s hand to settle over his chest, eyes locking with the other’s as he breathes a long, purposeful, breath. 

 Just like Mask used to, Legend mimics the action, although his own breath catches some. It doesn’t stop the captain from trying again though, and slowly, steadily, Legend’s breathing evens out again, clarity returning to his eyes like stars coming out at dusk. 

  “There you are,” their brother breathes, soft and warm and gentle and everything that eases tension and doesn’t spark it further, “keep breathing, you’re okay.” 

 Just because he says it though, doesn't mean it works, because the next breath that escapes their brother sounds more like a strangled sob. 

  Warriors doesn’t so much as falter. “You’re okay. It’s alright,” the hand that lifts is flinched back from, so the captain drops it again, resting it only over the hand still pressed to his own chest. “Keep breathing- there we go. You’re okay, you’re safe.” 

 The dart of dark eyes to the door betrays that Legend doesn’t believe him for a moment, but the vet shudders only a bit, focusing on Warriors again as he pulls away from the cabinets, although not so much to be closer to the captain as to not longer be shrinking away. It’s a sign of some recognition though, which is far better than nothing, and apparently a cue for the soldier to find out what is going on. 

  “That escalated a bit quick, wanna tell me what went wrong?” 

  Legend opens his mouth to answer, but a hitching breath is all that comes out, face twisting and screwing up again enough to warn that a repeat is very much in the cards. 

  Warriors counters quickly. “Was it the ropes? Too tight? Too many people?” He keeps the questions far enough apart to give time for a signal one way or another, but Legend doesn't do much more than force shaking breathes out as his hands reach to tangle in his wild hair. His hat fell off in the scuffle, and currently lies at Time’s feet. “Was Leon too-” 

  The strangled sound at the man’s name cuts Warriors off, and recognition shines in blue eyes. 

  “Leon.” Warriors repeats. 

  Legend’s eyes squeeze closed; face pinched up and shattered. 

  The soldier sighs. “Can I touch you?” 

  “No.” The fact that it’s verbalized is a huge step, and Wind sighs a breath of relief. 

  Warriors, likewise, accepts the boundary, shifting back a bit to grant their vet more space, but not so much as to seem like he’s leaving. “Okay, this is related to Leon. Was it how he handled you?” 

  Nothing. 

  “Was it something one of us said?” 

  A hitch in the vet’s breath, the captain opens his mouth to try again, to press, but Legend answers aloud again this time, voice a wreck. “I- he-” a desperate gasp for air as ringed fingers tug at messy hair, “he’s sounds-”  

  No doubt recognizing Mask’s same struggle with words in the other, Warriors offers his own, soft and quiet, but not yet a whisper. “Did he sound like someone you know?” 

  A nod. A fervent, desperate, nod as violet eyes squeeze shut again. “Sorry...” 

  Hearing the vet apologize has never sounded like such an awful thing. He hates it. 

  The captain clearly does too, but he says nothing to that effect, although the brief flick of his ears and flash of his eyes says it for him. “It’s not your fault. It happens to the best of us.” 

 A scoff. Yeah, Legend’s still in there. 

  Warriors presses on. “No really, it does. It sucks, but it happens.” 

  Dark eyes peek open, fixing on the captain. 

  “Yes, even with me.” The smile there is pained, strained, but real, despite all, and the flick down of the vet’s eyes to still outheld hands prompts the captain to reach out once more. “Would you like me to touch now?”  

 There’s a pause, nothing said, and nothing done, just a stillness as Legend considers the offer. He’s wary about touch even on good days, but usually only when it’s expressly offered or pointed out. When no one says anything, it’s usually met with acceptance as long as it’s not demeaning in any way.  

  As though catching onto a similar train of thought, Warriors changes his offer. “I could lend you my scarf?” 

  A glare. Okay, rude, it’s not that demeaning! Wind likes the scarf! Mask adored the scarf! Enough to throw fits when it wasn't his turn with it! Legend doesn’t have to want it, but there’s no need to make faces like that! It earns a laugh from their captain though, eyes creasing the way they rarely do, and only when he really means it, hand falling to rest gently on the foot of the other. Legend doesn’t shake him off, just stares, then lifts his gaze back up to search the captain’s face again. 

  Warriors meets it, smile fading back to the sad one again. 

 The vet’s gaze drops, arms falling to wrap around himself rather than digging his fingers into his scalp. “He looks-” a breath, harsh and strained, angry as it whishes between clenched teeth, brows drawing low with inward turned frustration, “the- our-” 

  “He looks like someone you know?” At yet another, hesitant, nod, Warriors presses further. “Someone who hurt you? Maybe someone you used to trust?” 

  A sigh. A slow nod before the vet’s head drops to rest against his raised knees. He's still shaking. 

  It’s clear as day that Warriors wants nothing more than to wrap an arm around their brother, pull hm close and assure, but he doesn’t. No, the captain respects the established boundary and doesn’t move any closer, hand just resting on one ankle as he crouches in front of their brother. “I get that.” his voice is softer now, bittersweet, “it sucks, I know. There's someone you trust and then you can’t trust them anymore, and it’s hard, especially when you meet someone who reminds you of them.” 

  Shit. Wind knows he shouldn’t, knows both he and Time know better, but neither can help it as they turn their focus on the captain, wary and watching. That is never a good subject to talk about, but the fact that Warriors is the one broaching it for the first time in forever is frankly shocking. 

  “You too?” Legend’s trying to pass off a tired smile of his own, but it just looks like he’s trying not to cry. 

 The captain nods, lifting his hand (definitely noticing how Legend’s breath catches at the loss of contact) and instead turning to lean his own back against the china cabinet, settling in beside their shaken brother, eyes falling closed in what’s both an open sign of trust, but also an obvious bid to ignore the sharp stares of both his boys on him. “Yeah, me too. It sucks, doesn’t it?” 

 “Sounds just like him,” Legend says, the first full sentence since he’d gone down, and Wind doesn't miss the way the other hero leans a bit closer into the captain’s space, although he doesn't touch him. “Looks like ‘im too.” 

  Blue eyes open again, turning past all their curious and worried ones to watch the vet, warm and gentle, that same look that he’d turn on Mask, and Wind doesn't doubt it was turned on him too, when Warriors thought they weren't looking. 

  The vet shudders, steeling himself up again, walls visibly reconstructing before their eyes. “He used to visit, when I was small. I saw him like a grandfather-” and they crumble again, the vet blinking violently, voice small. “He has granddaughters my age.” 

  “What happened?” Wind doesn’t mean to let the words slip, but they do. 

  Legend’s head hits the cabinet doors. “Corrupted.” 

 The captain nods. He knows. Wind knows that he knows. “I’m sorry.” 

  “He sounded just like him.” 

  “I know,” it’s a hysterical sort of laughter that escapes the older hero this time, “trust me, I get it. Every time I hear an Ordon accent, any time someone suggests playing chess,” the captain’s eyes roll upwards, and Wind’s kind of shocked when he realizes there’s tears there. “It sucks. Gods it sucks, but you live with it. I wish I could say it gets better, but I’m not there yet.” 

  Pink hair drops, settling against faintly shaking shoulders. “You were close?” 

Suddenly the moment before them feels too private to witness anymore. Suddenly, being there feels wrong, hearing Legend ask things that everyone at home in Warriors’ world knows better than to speak of. He doesn't know why Warriors answers, maybe out of guilt for pulling the vet into the exercise, maybe out of a need to set an example or assure, maybe out of his own sort of desperation, but an answer is given. 

  “Yeah. Grew up together. He teased me for my accent, I teased him for his. We ran our mothers to worry and our commanders to madness. I hauled his ass out of prison, he watched mine on the field. Heck,” a smile, bittersweet as the captain settles a cheek in rosy hair, “we went through our trailing- kinda like what I was trying to show the others- we did that together too.” A soft scoff, not a sob, but close, “I think he’s the only reason I made it through training t’all. Would’ve gone mad wit’out ‘im.” 

  “What happened?” Twilight dares speak up, and Wind doesn’t miss the way the man’s thick accent is held in check, nearly gone altogether. So, Twi did hear the comment about Ordon. 

  The captain sighs, lifting his head and staring out at the rest of them, eyes fixing on the rancher last of all. “Ganon. As with most things.” 

  Twilight winces. 

  Warriors chuckles. “Some days it’s like he never left though. He’s still on my ass, still callin’ me ‘pretty boy and tryin’ to get a rise outta me.” Wind doesn’t miss how Twilight’s face crumbles when he realizes blue eyes are still fixed on his. The captain doesn’t either, smile twitching alive again. “It’s nice, sometimes, like seeing what he’d be like if nothing happened. Other days, it’s difficult, and it makes it hard to get through the day.” 

  “How do you handle us?” Legend breathes, half scoff and half awe, eyes trying for a smile again and doing much better. It’s not happy, but it’s kind. 

  The captain doesn’t miss it. “Hylia only knows,” he teases, knocking his shoulder against the one still pressed against it, and then, more serious, “I draw back if I need. Sure, Twilight reminds me of him a lot, some days, but then he does something Gassun would never, or does something so stupid only a hero would do it, and then I remember again and I’m fine.” 

 “Really?” The Stare of Disappointment was definitely something Time learned from the captain, so Wind can’t fathom why the man tries to use it on their brother, but here he is, doing just that. “You expect us to believe that?” 

  “Have faith in me,” Warriors snorts, “I don’t wander around in my own head all day. If I did, you’d’ve burned the world down already!” 

  It sort of ends like that. Warriors redirecting their attention and Legend rolling his eyes at their antics, slowly uncurling again until Four’s mother comes back inside and requests access to her kitchen again. They scatter after, Warriors throwing an arm around the vet and guiding him upstairs so they can have a talk, Time going off in search of the smithy and his father, Wild joining in dinner preparations, and the rest of them cleaning up their mess before leaving. 

 Hyrule still has questions for Twilight about escaping, but Sky heads upstairs after the others, worry creasing his brow in ways it rarely does, but Wind stays behind, scooping up Tongs to keep him company in the wake of his brothers all leaving. Even so, he makes a note to ask the others how they are later. 

  Of course, later, Twilight also asks about what Warriors said, and the captain, to the shock of both his charges, explains himself. Thinking back, it’s no wonder Warriors sees a resemblance; Twilight may have spent his last few years in Ordon, but the military haircut is still very present, a mirror of the captain's own and quite similar to said captain's old friend. Granted, Twilight is darker, hair redder and eyes bright blue, but the accent is the same, rough manner so similar, and the nicknames definitely finish the picture. He doesn’t like the implications of that, not for either of the two, but Twilight walks out of the conversation only looking someone thoughtful, rather than upset, and Warriors seems normal enough, although still quiet for the rest of their time in the smithy’s Hyrule. 

 Collectively, they agree to abandon the escape training. If they want tips, they’ll go to Twilight, but the emotional toll taken on both the vet and the captain isn’t worth it to any of them. Not a second time. Not when they all regret the first one. 

[mordenheim]

Fictober 2023 14: “If you don’t stop now —”

“Okay Robert, you need to calm down.” Victor was across the room from his former co-worker, trying to talk him down from the idiocy he was about to commit.

The badger growled at the zebra, gripping the flask filled with a bubbling, fizzy purple liquid. “Calm down, CALM DOWN?! She FIRED me, Victor! Do you know how hard it is to find work with a degree in Macrobiology? There's nothing else in this country except Trivial Matters and Party Time Industries!” “And you were fired from there, too.” Victor clapped a hand over his muzzle as he realized he said that out loud.

Robert's jaw dropped at that statement before he grit his teeth, snapping, “That's RIGHT! I'll have to leave the COUNTRY to find work in our field. Well, if I have to go...” He held the flask aloft, ginning maniacally, “I'm taking this whole building with me!”

The zebra rolls his eye as he folds his arms. “Really? You're going to risk taking an untested, purely theoretical growth formula..”

“That's right!”

“To destroy this building, that's been destroyed multiple times before...”

“Uh... YEAH!”

“That you know is heavily insured and will likely be rebuilt in mere weeks.”

His arm faltered a little, “Y.. yeah... I...”

“You really are an idiot, aren't you?”

“HEY! I..!”

“If you don’t stop now —”

Snarling, the badger doesn't say another word. The first thing he's planning on doing is smashing the smug look off of his former coworker's face. He downs the entire flask of formula in a single throat-stretching gulp!

Victor sighs and polishes the backs of his hoof-like fingertips on his lab coat, ignoring the badger for a moment as he drones out a monotone, “No, stop... please don't...”

Robert looks down at himself as he feels the power surging though his veins. His entire body takes on the deep purple hue of the formula as muscle starts to bulge and swell under his fur. Cloth shreds apart as his clothes start to burst from his body as he surges in height! The hulking beast of a badger takes a threatening, room-shaking step towards Victor as he continues to grow.

“You know the proper dose for that was just a drop, right?”

“Whuh?” the beast uttered as he doubled over. His gut bulged out massively, followed by one of his arms, then the muscles in his face as he cried out, “What? WAIT, TOO MUCH! MAKE IT ST..”

There was a loud explosion as the badger literally blew apart, purple goo covering everything in the room, including a very grossed-out zebra. Grabbing the bottom edge of his lab coat, he used the inside of it to wipe off his hands and muzzle, careful not to get any of the sludge in his mouth.

Sliding through the mess on the floor, he makes his way over to the spot where the poor fool had been standing and plucked a tiny, raging purple badger out of the goo.

“Well, you're probably gonna be stuck like this for a while. You'll be lucky if Miss Drom doesn't press charges on you. Maybe next time you'll listen when I'm trying to help you.”

[rowanhoney]

politics genuinely feels so hopeless

[blankdblank]

Poke Pt 7 - Yacht Party

…

Whistling in the exit of your closet Eddie took in your own toga reminiscent style dress the bright white sheer layered skirt was slit up to the upper thigh and met the golden belt that separated the base from the lace top. With thick straps in white and a low dip in the cleavage almost to the belly button that flowed out to reveal the golden glittery heels you had chosen for the event. “Wow. You need a sign to remind gentlemen to pick their jaws up off the floor.”

“Funny,” you teased, folding a stretchy pair of shorts to cover the thigh holsters for a couple of your daggers for worst case scenario that also would help keep guys from peeking up your skirt if the wind blew the slit back too widely. “I’m sure no one will care about my dress as I death grip the wall.”

“I can skip the trip to prison if you need me there.”

“I’m ok. If I feel bad I am not above fainting or breaking into hysterics to have Tony himself fly me home. Or maybe Prince Thor, I think he can fly if he has his hammer.”

“You can beat this evening. I know you can.”

After a hug for him you said, “You’ll miss visiting hours.” And he chuckled hugging you back and kissed you on your cheek taking notice of the one side of your hair braided back so you could flip the rest over to your left side knowing the boat would drive it wild no matter what you tried to do with it.

The ride didn’t calm things and from the concrete pathway to the wooden docks your focus shifted in a means to calm yourself on the pelicans and gulls who watched your stroll beyond the guards at the entrance who took your invitation shared the lit pathway would guide you to the proper ship. At the base of the plank bridge to get onto the yacht you paused hearing the guests already aboard.

Mid stare at a gull hovering above the boat in a try to focus on anything but the fact you would be out on the open ocean for who knows how long you flinched to look at Sam in his step up to your side with an impressed whistle. “My sister would die of envy seeing this ship. She loves to sail.” His eyes landed on you asking, “Ever been on a boat like this?”

“I’ve been on ferries, but I haven’t been over the open ocean yet.”

“You’ll be okay. Stark’s probably built this thing himself. Bound to be unsinkable.”

“Well, there’s a history of unsinkable ships that beg to differ when it comes to that claim.”

He chuckled and said, “We’ll be just fine. Just in case,” he said showing his duffel bag at his side holding his metal wings, “Brought my wings, things go south The Falcon’s got you.” To yourself you grinned and followed him up into the monstrosity of a boat.

Surely one that would make your ancestors weep, not just for the luxurious ability to have food storage, running clean water and plumbing but for the fact that nothing of the earth other than the single fallen tree stump of an end table was here. The wood was fake same as the faux leather seats and imitation marble finish on the metal surfaces. Nothing of this boat showed the respect boat makers used to put into building sea faring vessels to keep from displeasing the Gods in crossing the tumultuous open ocean and you guessed that might be why they always bothered you.

With legs crossed you sat with eyes fixed on the open ocean in your second level seat unable to keep on your feet to mingle in the crowded floor below. “Thirsty?” the voice at your side brought the sudden place of Prince Loki there with two drinks in hand, one of which with a pacifier band around the stem of the fruity blended drink he offered to you. “The bartender insisted I offer you this one.”

Unable to help it you chuckled and accepted the drink, “It’s a virgin margarita. Thank you.”

“What would maidenhood have to do with drink offers?” he asked and you glanced away to keep from spitting your sip of the drink on him. “Is it repulsive? I shall demand a new drink to replace it.”

You shook your head and giggled in catching his eye to say, “Virgin, when related to drinks means alcohol free.” And his eyes narrowed, “It’s illegal for people under 21 years old to drink alcohol in this country. Others it ranges from 14 to 18 depending on their culture.”

“Why would they have such variation?”

“Because hardly any of the countries share the same faiths, histories, cultures or beliefs on how they should be governed. So just stubbornness and idiocy.”

“I had hoped the drink would aid in a welcome of my company, you seemed troubled when I arrived.”

Softly you chuckled and replied, “Quite humorously for my bloodline I have a fear of open ocean outside of wooden boats.” His eyes locked onto yours in a moment of shock, “There’s no earth in this boat. Vikings paid homage to the Gods for smooth sailing across the oceans. Might just be me.”

And he grinned your way stating, “Not only you. Those who can hear Yggdrasil have higher expectations when it comes to vessels. Your ancestors would be proud you wish to honor their traditions, the ocean is not a fair mistress, she is an insurmountable warrior, she demands respect.”

“How have your candles and soaps been?” You asked to change the subject, uncertain of what meaning his lingering stare into your eyes meant.

“Quite exquisite. Thank you again for your care in crafting the mixtures for us to our likings. Your customers have been favorable of temperament?”

“For the most part. Before the shoes Natasha and Steve bought me I got shunned a bit because of my clearly worn name brand shoes, but the new ones have helped to give me a bit of credit to my image. Used to be called an immigrant and now people are asking if I’m paying my dues in the entertainment or beauty world until I get my big break. When Stark came in I almost thought he would just order enough to use that as a means to force me to accept the money he offered.”

“What should it matter what shoes you wear when you are working?”

“The shop has an image to uphold for their most superficial of clientele.”

“Should they ever release you from employment alert my brother and myself and we shall raze the building to cinders.” That had you giggle around your next sip and he said, “You doubt my loyalty.”

“Not at all, Prince Loki. Merely I question how Stark would handle the discovery of who was behind the attack after he’s vetted you both as Heroes.”

“Not one person in my lifetime has been foolish enough to dub me a Hero. I am the God of Mischief and Deceit.”

His eyes lowered to the hand you offered him that his rose palm up to accept, “Fool, right here, pleasure to meet you.” To himself he chuckled and smiled in a glance away. “See, that smile,” he glanced back and chuckled again as you said, “Pure sunshine. You can’t convince me there’s evil in there no matter how many times you stab your brother.”

“I unleashed an army on New  York,”

“Oh who hasn’t unleashed havoc on New York. Havoc is the new pink pumps of the season, everybody has to have some. New York, Washington, California, your brother leveled a town in New  Mexico. Now you go and attack Rhode Island or someplace small like that then we can talk crossing into unthinkable territory, which is seven miles below evil. You have to earn evil.”

He smirked and at the notice he was still holding your hand he released it to take hold of his drink for a sip to break his stare only to look down at that hand resting on his knee when the boat began to pull away from the dock. “I murdered my birth father.” He blurted out as if to try and not lie to you or make you believe he was anything but evil as most from his planet thought.

“Did he raise you?”

“No.”

“Were you close or just a birthday card once a year type of situation?”

“He abandoned me at birth in a frozen tundra in the midst of a battle between the Jotuns and Asgardians and never acknowledged me as his child or that I even existed.”

You nodded and said, “Selfish quim had it coming then.” Throatily to your sip of your drink he chuckled and bubbled into a few moments of unforgiving laughter. “I’d pick Frigg as a mother any day over that bastard.”

“King Laufey of the Jotuns, or Frost Giants, as some nations dub them.”

“Odin’s half Frost Giant in the legends. They knew each other?”

“Odin,” his eyes fell on you, “Father is half Frost Giant in the legends?” You nodded and he said, “He never speaks of this if it is true.”

“Well he’s probably jealous.” You said and his brow twitched up, “If it was between me and you to be Jotun I’d stay mum simply because you have to be the peak example of Jotun prowess.”

“Asgardians tell bedtime stories of Jotuns to terrify their children and frighten them to behave or they will be eaten.” He said mournfully and looked out at the sea.

“I’d start biting people then.” You said and in the spread of his smile you said, “Always a monster till you’re necessary. How the universe works. The odd one, the new one, that one who doesn’t belong. Till they need you, till they’re scared. So much easier to be scared of the new than to trust it. Well I trust you,” you said and he caught your eye again, “And you can’t stop me. I’m stark raving mad with power and will cackle in their disbelieving faces for not trusting pure sunshine.” You said with a wide smile making him chuckle again.

“Are you certain there is no alcohol in that drink?” He teased.

“Just tons of sugar.” You said taking another giggle laced sip as he took a sip of his own drink. “I heard you’re over seventeen hundred years old? How does that line up to our age progression? If that isn’t too personal.”

“Roughly similar to your age I would presume. Young adulthood.”

You gasped and said, “And they gave you alcohol, someone get this man a pacifier.” You said teasingly turning your head to call it out making him chuckle and simply use his arm closest to you to prop himself up to scoot closer.

“Shh,” he whispered through a chuckle by your ear and you giggled again. “There is little substance on this planet able to inebriate myself and my brother.” He said with his eyes focused on yours when you turned your head slightly to catch his bright gaze and smile.

The ship took a wide turn and your joking mood waned and his hand covered yours at the returned grip of his knee to lace his fingers under your palm, and next to your ear he asked, “How would you like to play a game?” You caught his gaze and he grinned nodding his head at the crowd stating, “Say a name.” He watched your eyes dance over the women in toga influenced gowns surrounded by men in both togas and white and golden suits and you chose one from the back that with a flash of green in his eyes had the man start to dance absurdly awkward luring out your smile and giggle again.

Innocent fun, insignificant playful pranks that had Prince Thor search for his brother in the crowds until he spotted him at your side with his hand on yours. Loki would never have openly chosen such a public display with anyone he dared to imagine courtship until proper tasks of approval had been sought for and by the clear try to not let you have a break to focus on anything but his magic. And the game upon his knowing Thor was looking his way had the Prince conjuring fables and joking tales in front of the possibly distressed young Shieldmaiden he would never dream of damaging her honor. Something was bothering their young respected friend and his brother while Thor saw to his sea wary Mate was distracting his chosen companion for the evening in a far more acceptable use of his magic at this party.

Some food was sampled from the migrating attendees made from faceless drones that somehow had you more weirded out than the ship. One of which that had Peter hanging on his back while it held a bucket and led him to lie down on the couch beside the pair of you. The move had you inch closer to the Prince and had his gaze drop to the thigh pressed against his to something hard he felt tap the side of his leg. He felt himself unable to help but smirk at the clear hilt of a dagger poking out from underneath the shorts that blended into your skirt from afar in its same brilliant white shade. And in a low purr beside your ear as you handed over your empty glass to a drone to free a hand so you could check Peter’s temperature the Prince asked, “Please tell me that’s a dagger on your thigh.”

With a blush to the green mist that eased the hilt of two coiled snakes in bright silver into view widening his grin as he caught sight of the full design. And he could imagine the blade in his mind by the hint of metal beneath the hilt his mist hid away again as Pepper hurried over with some sea sickness medicine. “Where else would I keep it?” you whispered back widening his grin to the point he nipped at his lip to keep from grinning like an idiot.

Pepper in her trot up to Peter’s side offered him a fizzing drink he accepted and took your help to prop himself up to sip on it, “Here you go Peter.” And her eyes rose to you asking, “Are you sea sick too? I haven’t seen you on the main floor since we took off.”

“I’ve got a thing with metal boats in open ocean,” her lips parted, “I’m good sitting. Body just prefers wood boats it seems. Prince Loki’s been distracting me.”

“Well if you need anything let us know.”

“Does he make a lot of these drones?”

Pepper sighed saying, “It’s a new thing. He said he’d make them faceless since I thought fake humanoid ones might bother me, but these aren’t any better, sadly.”

“Because he does know about all the evidence on making AI’s and how devastatingly bad that could go?”

“I remind him daily. Only, seems he forgets, daily. Progress,” she said shaking her head and rising to her feet to go check on another person muttering, “This party is the stuff of nightmares with these waves.”

In a glance at Loki you asked, “If Stark builds AI’s can I plead asylum on Asgard?”

He smirked asking, “AI?”

“Robots with free will. Always turns out that they want to destroy the human race. Borderline Ragnarok for our race.”

“Should there be any danger to this planet we will grant you asylum. I give you my word.”

“How important are potatoes on your planet? Because if they don’t grow there I will be smuggling some there. My ancestors didn’t get to enjoy them in the older generations, but I know they look down on me in envy. Even broke I eat like a King.” Making him chuckle again. “I’m serious, one of the best foods discovered on this planet is the potato.”

“Potatoes are amazing,” Peter sighed after finishing his drink and laying flat again. “I would bring lemons. My aunt gets this big smile when she sees lemons. I don’t get it, but it makes her happy. And I’d have to bring her too of course.”

Loki smiled saying, “We have six variations of potatoes and four lemon breeds. The pair of you and young Peter’s aunt would be amply pleased.”

“Could I have a sheep? My parents promised to get me a sheep when I was bigger. Or is it mainly city spaces without any room for cottages?”

“We have a mixture of both. A quaint cottage could be arranged, or a plot of garden and field to keep your sheep in should you prefer an apartment in the Palace. With ample workers to help train you in treatment and sheering of your sheep when necessary.”

In a giggle you replied, “I would need sheep lessons.” Making him chuckle as well.

At their sides save for a trip to the bathroom you remained until the boat docked again and Loki rose to gently help you up and lead both you and still unsteady Peter to the dock. The assigned car to drive you back however found him reluctantly in release of the hand his had been fixed in for hours now. “Thank you, for the asylum and the sheep,” you said in words that muffled in the ears of the Prince whose cheek you had left a peck upon. “Sleep well, Sunshine.” You said and in a lower to sit inside the car.

“Sleep well and safe on the earth, Shieldmaiden Pear.”

.

Vision. The newest Avenger had his face plastered across the internet and all you could think of was the promise the Asgardian Prince had made you and it just made your stomach turn. He was so polite and out of everybody he could have spent his time with he seemed to gravitate to your company. Even when a long train ride let you take a long stroll in Central Park that had you run into the Super Soldiers and Sam on a run. When the Zoo was mentioned the Princes seemed to appear in mid air and as if to counter Bucky’s time with your attention another animal would be pointed to and his questions would arise all aimed your direction.

End to end between your fingers your Mate button box was flipped to tap against the counter easing the slide of your fingers to the bottom to aid the lift and flip of the box to do it again. No matter why he was focusing on you there had to be a line and you couldn’t stop hiding from your fears of finding out who your Mate was by humoring the attentions of the Avengers. Onto the counter you settled the button box and gave the button a single tap that almost an hour away had Loki’s eyes twitch off his book confirming he was alone in his gifted apartment followed by an irritated grumble and nestle back into his spot to ignore the unhelpful poke of his Mate from this infuriating planet.

Several taps more in a notice of the muffin bag you had gotten from a café earlier that had you murmur, “Let’s meet for coffee at the Blue Bird Café. Nine AM.” Your fingers tapped before you could think it through just how many could understand Morse Code this day and age, you just had to try and see if anyone would turn up.

And just like you knew it deep down, no one did, at nine or ten when you had finished off pretending to write out something in your pocket journal after you’d finished your first cider and just wanted to go anywhere but there.

 *

Glaring as he made his way to the group lunch after a much needed breakfast alone Loki plopped into his seat and turned his gaze to Natasha at her asking, “Couldn’t sleep?”

“Ten minutes my Mate poked me last night, ten minutes. All in some absurd pattern,” Loki repeated the pattern with the tip of his finger on the table and had her, Bucky and Bruce listening to the meanings of the taps.

Bucky however asked the question the others didn’t, “So did you meet your Mate for coffee?”

Loki glared at him, “I beg your pardon?”

Bruce, “That’s Morse Code. Old school. Must have been eager to meet you rarely hear of people using it these days outside of military or science families.”

Loki asked in a slightly panicked tone, “Where would I meet them?”

Bucky said, “Blue Bird Café, nine am.”

Loki didn’t have to look at the clock but said in his rush from the table, “It’s half past noon!”

He didn’t know where that was but he knew who to talk to to get into Stark’s system. Knowing fully he had links to cameras everywhere. “Red Man, I require your assistance.”

“I am Vision, Green Noble.” The Prince led the way to one of the public labs that linked to his system that Loki linked into the simple online page of the only Blue Bird Café in New York that was located in Queens.

“I need you to help me use Stark’s system to see who was in this café this morning.”

“Are we searching for a culprit in a crime you are aware of?” Vision asked in his hover beside the Prince.

“My Mate used Morse Code to send me a message I did not understand last night and I missed the meeting they tried to arrange. I wish to know who I have spurned to offer my apologies and win back their favor.”

“Oh, very admirable then.” He said lowering as he said, “I am under the understanding that a Mate is the strongest bond you might find in your lifetime. I anxiously await my eighteenth year to have earned my own chance to meet mine.” Raising his hand to link to the system that began to shift the screen windows to delve through the system to first link into the café’s security and the street cameras to watch every person from eight am onwards.

“Pluto,” Loki muttered in the sight of you wearing an anxious expression and a slightly less casual dress entering the café, ordering a drink and muffin with glances at the door to every entrance in a clearly sinking mood as Vision continued to run facial recognition through a database while the video played.

Vision said, “From the 47 customers 24 are legally married and another 17 have announced themselves as engaged on their social media accounts.”

“Pluto Pear, that woman. When did she leave exactly?” Visio read back the time stamp and he said, “I need a print out of this list, I’m going to start with her.”

Vision asked to the print of the page behind him, “Does the young lady hold a certain physical appeal for you to begin with her?”

“I know her. I would never wish for her to believe I have left her there alone. As if I had refused to meet her on the grounds of being my Mate.”

Vision said, “Ah. Then yes, begin with the young Miss Pear.” He said offering the printed sheet that Loki accepted and hurried with rushed thanks in his race out to go and the whole while his mind raced with a single repetition, it had to be you.

Truly for months now any excuse to cross paths was taken including a laughable amount of candles and soap with films, trips out between your shifts and group meals he always made certain to be chaperoned for everyone’s comfort and for your honor the Prince searched. You were the one to make him laugh and find some sense of ease on this planet with a person who seemed to genuinely care about his comfort and tried to keep him from growing too homesick or thoughts on his lineage to spoil his wishes to ever return. If you weren’t his Mate he never desired to meet the person who dared to poke him. He didn’t want to be forced onto anyone else, he had subconsciously chosen you for a while now and would continue to do so.

 *

Three knocks soon bled to five and before the sixth could land you had opened your front door to the wide eyed Prince who rapidly opened his fist to an awkward wave. “Miss Pear. Might I come in?”

“Sure,” you said letting him inside closing the door behind him in his awkward check of the single room apartment with a lingering gaze at the boat shaped bed he pointed to mid amused smirk. “My first year here there was a play they used that as a prop in and put it up cheap for sale after it closed. Really comfy.” You looked him over and asked, “You have to go on another mission? Only seen you twitchy like this when you had to leave town.”

“No,” he replied and moved closer offering the cider in his hand you hadn’t noticed. “I owe you a drink.”

In the narrow of your eyes you accepted the still warm cup saying, “Thank you. Don’t recall how, but thank you.”

“I don’t know Morse Code.”

Your lips parted to ask over the thunder of your heart in your ears, “Did you want me to teach you.”

“Not today, thank you.” He inhaled sharply and said, “I know you went to the Blue Bird Café this morning and I know that you didn’t meet the person you had hoped to.”

“I-,”

In a step closer he cut you off saying, “Because I don’t know Morse Code and it took me repeating the lengthy set of taps that kept me up last night to those amongst the team who do.”

“Oh,” you squeaked out in realization of what you guessed and halfway hoped he might be saying.

“So I came here to ask you to poke me again,” his eyes lowered to the finger that rose to tap him in the center of his chest that had him let out a breathy chuckle and scan his eyes over your face that was still devoid of anything readable but uncertainty and shock. “No, with your button, do you have it?”

“Oh, button,” sharply your head turned setting the drink down and gingerly he shadowed you in your circle of your bed to the near burrow under the fake fur blanket you had to do to grab the button that seemed to try and keep it hidden for itself. When you stood again you eased your fingers around the sides of the box with its mint colored button now a deep green that with a press of your thumb had him exhale shakily to the poke he felt.

He didn’t know what to do or say and yet all on its own it seemed his body acted to first cradle your cheek then lean in to press his lips to yours in a blind hope that however possible he could seal this bond to never break. Just as loudly as yours his heart thundered in his chest for the action his body had taken without permission.

And when your eyes met again his breath hitched hearing you whisper at the sight of the swirls of green mist that had filled the room with sparkling veins of gold to glimmer around the both of you. His skin now blue with raised ridges trailing across his skin in snowflake like unique markings to just him from his Jotun blood paired with his crimson eyes. “Was that supposed to happen or was it on accident.”

“The mist was unintentional.” He hummed back lowly and in his lean forward to brush his nose to yours his body melted forward at the toe top lift to kiss him again. With the close of your eyes covering his shift back after his notice of the color of his hand still on your cheek. An action and pose he lingered in to savor every second of it.

“Blue is a good color on you, Sunshine.” You said and his lips parted only for the growl of his stomach to make you grin and claim his hand and say, “Let’s feed you and that angry rhino you swallowed.”

Out of your slow cooker some jambalaya was served for the both of you to go with the cheesy mashed potatoes you topped with bacon bits he amusedly poked with his spoon as if it was possibly toxic. “I’m not going to poison you,” you giggled out.

“No, there is a topping like these pebbles on Asgard and it is merely awful.”

“Well this is tiny bits of bacon.”

“Bacon,” he said in an intrigued tone and took a bite he hummed around making you giggle to yourself.

“Midgard isn’t so bad, we’ve done amazing things with bacon.”

“That you have,” he said filling his spoon again with some of the jambalaya that while he chewed it his eyes scanned over your face in your downwards gaze, “Are you pleased?” he managed to ask when he swallowed lifting your eyes again to his.

“Could use more sausage. They’re so stingy on the weight per cent these days.”

“With me?” He asked in a near squeak afraid of the answer.

“As my Mate?” you asked and he nodded, “You are indescribable. You can do magic, I mean come on, I started magic when I was a kid and dreamed to have someone who would be so much more spectacularly talented than myself. Need I say, the essence of pure sunshine in your veins. You accept my Norse roots. Some people would just label me a witch on that alone. And you tolerate my weirdness, major plusses there.”

“I would assume, my title-,”

“Psh,” you said lifting his gaze from his bowls. “I would be honored to be bound to you if you ran a button stand.” You said triggering an awkward grin across his face at the compliment. “If anything the expectations of your possible requirement to take up after Odin on what I would only assume to be a possibly uncomfortable looking golden throne in that floating golden Palace would trouble me for the increase of scowls that would develop from the stress and drive that smile of yours away. Not to mention the heightened risk of stress on the heart from a job of that level.” After a moment of his amused grin your way you asked, “Do you really live forever?”

“Roughly 5071 years.”

“Well Bucky’s close to a century and he hasn’t seemed to age much, Steve was frozen for most of his. So I suppose logically, I can’t say how long I would be around.”

His brow inched up and he said, “I would find you. No matter where in Hel they settle you to spend your afterlife.”

You nodded and asked in a rather embarrassed tone, “No possible way I could get to Valhalla then?”

“You most certainly could well earn place there. Few Midgardians are welcomed, I did not mean to worry you or offer insult.”

You shook your head, “It’s just all different than how I was taught. You’re Frigga’s son, and Thor isn’t a redhead, no telling what else could be different. I mean did you at least give birth to a eight legged horse Odin rides around on?”

“Did I what?” he chuckled out with a widening smile.

“I mean who wouldn’t be able to learn to love a guy who gave birth to Hel, the Goddess of Death; Jörmungand, the serpent that surrounds the world; and Fenrir or Fenrisúlfr, the wolf; and Sleipnir, Odin's eight-legged horse.”

“Thor did advise us the mortals had warped our tales, yet I had no imagination it could be that vastly different.” He paused and asked, “Hel, is she prominent in my life in the tales? I have never heard of a Goddess of that name.”

You said, “Those you had with the female giant Angerboda. You seem to love her in the tales. Though most of your tales I prefer include your other wife, Sigyn. You had a son with her, named Nari or Narfi.” His lips parted, “Odin uses your son’s intestines to chain you to a rock where snakes drip their venom on you and she sits beside you with a bowl to collect it. Though when she dumps it out and the venom drips on your face you thrash around causing the earth to quake. It’s quite the tale of devotion in Norse Mythology. There’s actually quite a tale for how you got married, she was betrothed to another and on the wedding day you kill him and take his shape and then reveal yourself after and she tells Odin she will honor the marriage. Sigyn’s basically known only for her devotion to you.”

“I have never wed, nor know of a Sigyn. I could never imagine my father able to bind anyone with the innards of their own child.”

“I didn’t mean to upset you.”

He shook his head, “No, you have not upset me. Although I am curious to ponder on when the tales stretched so far from the truth. Perhaps an exceptionally harsh winter with little to distract from boredom.”

“Well that’s the thing about legends. Everyone who first heard or saw them happen is dead. Kind of like the phone tree game,” his brows furrowed a moment in confusion to the name, “One person in a circle whispers to another, it can be a word or funnier a phrase and gradually through the circle the words change. Sometimes for the worse. Known a few to end in fist fights when they made us do it in schools in some mock trial to stomp out bullying as a sort of way to display how gossip explodes like wild fire. Then again it could be a testament to hearing loss rather than weak attention spans on trading whispers.” As you eyed his grin after a glance away to fill your spoon you said, “Sorry, got away from me there.”

“You did not wander far. Often I find people who ramble show great promise of intellect. Brains that are rapid to focus on new topics are very welcome amongst our scientists.”

“It must be amazing, your home.”

“My people are brilliant compared to yours, however very gullible. Hence my prowess in mischief.”

“Well, if you assume to have all the answers why would you bother looking for more?” making him smirk proudly at your words. “They’ll learn, with enough shoves in the right direction, or enough books to hurl at them. Sometimes you need a bit of mischief to open some eyes.”

“Thor has been working up the nerve to request a trip for his Mate Jane Foster to Asgard. I imagine her introduction to our scientists would be less productive than to hear from one who has crafted a rainbow portal on her own with only supplies from Midgard. Even our best crafters alive today could not tap into that technology. When Thor broke the rainbow bridge that aids in the control of the Bifrost Mother had to travel to Hel to consult with one of our scientists we had lost a thousand years prior.”

“That must have been fun for you to experience.”

“I wasn’t there,” he whispered in a downward glance then cleared his throat and drew in a deep breath, “Perhaps I should share something else, other than my race with you.” When his eyes did rise he almost flinched seeing yours on his, “There’s a, being, a Titan.”

“Like in Greek Mythology?”

“I’m, not aware of their history.”

“Sorry, Titan?”

“Thanos. I fell from the bridge when Thor broke it. Through the open void of the universe I faded to, I don’t know where. There, Thanos found me. His henchman tortured me.”

“Loki,” you said reaching out to rest a hand on his forearm that had his hand turn over to wrap around the underside of yours welcoming the contact and sadness not pity in your gaze.

“I was gone, for so very long, time is, difficult in varied realms to compare.” He wet his lips and continued shakily, “I managed to escape, with a deal. He sent me with the scepter to bring him the tesseract. There are these stones, with different powers to control parts of the universe, he wants them all and has others to locate them for him. That was why, I opened that portal. Why I killed people. To let them know something bigger is out there, and that it’s coming.”

“Okay.”

“He wouldn’t have come on his own, but I lied to him. And my Father can’t protect this planet, or won’t. I won’t let him hurt you though. I swear. I won’t let anyone hurt you again.”

“That’s a tall order in this city. Plus even doors are a danger to me when I’m in a hurry.”

“I’m being serious, he has decimated civilizations before and enslaved millions he allowed to survive.” His eyes scanned yours finding an expression he couldn’t decipher and he asked, “What is that look for?”

“I have secrets, terrible things I should tell my Mate, for fair playing field since you’ve been so open with me. I do trust you, I just,”

“I understand.”

“It’s just been mine, for so long. Nearly my whole life now, and Eddie, he found me at and back again from my lowest point,” Loki nodded and bit the inside of his lip at the tear that rolled down your cheek all of a sudden. “He was the first person who cared since I got here, and I just had to tell someone. It was breaking me, and he got me help with his therapist, which has helped. I just, I don’t know why, but even with you being able to rain aliens down upon us, I’m scared to tell you everything.” Another tear down your cheek had him lean in closer to your side. “Because if you knew, what I am, you would hate me. I don’t know why Eddie hasn’t left yet. He should have left me by now.”

“He is not going to leave, and no matter what pain that lies in your past, I will not leave you. And I will wait until you welcome me into the fold. No matter how long it takes.”

The rest of the meal he remained at your side and moved with you to your couch to inch closer to cuddling through a film that allowed you both to a comfortable silence. Droops of your eyes however had him excise himself to allow you to rest. When you were on your feet however with sight of his back his body went rigid to the poke he felt that had him turn to see you with your button in hand say, “Double checking.”

Gently he claimed your free hand and raised it to his lips to kiss your knuckles on the hand he cradled after, “Get some rest. Tomorrow should Stark not interfere, hopefully I could arrange a lunch to make up for my misstep this morning.”

“Not your misstep. I shouldn’t have assumed anyone else would know Morse Code.”

“I will learn, there is no fault on your part. Only imagination.”

“You get some sleep too, Sunshine.” His grin widened, “Keep that stress on your heart down.”

“I shall try my hardest with Stark in the same tower.” He said stealing another press of his lips to your hand before he released it and led the way to the door you closed and locked behind your unbelievable Mate you secretly wished would have tried to kiss more than just your hand the second time.

Pt 8

All –

@sherala007​, @mariannetora​​, @jesgisborne​, @knitastically​, @catthefearless​​, @theincaprincess​, ggbbhehe4455, @lilith15000​​, @alishlieb​​,

Not nsfw(smut) - @otakumultimuse-hiddlewhore​

X Loki - @pastelhexmaniac

[picsofsannyas]

OSHO, IN THE PAST ALL FAMOUS ARTISTS HAVE BEEN WELL-KNOWN FOR THEIR BOHEMIAN SIDE OF LIFE. OSHO, PLEASE CAN YOU SAY SOMETHING ABOUT CREATIVITY AND DISCIPLINE?

Santosh Sneh, the bohemian life is the only life worth living! All other kinds of lives are only lukewarm; they are more ways of committing slow suicide than ways of living life passionately and intensely. In the past it was inevitable that the artist had to live in rebellion, because creativity is the greatest rebellion in existence. If you want to create you have to get rid of all conditionings, otherwise your creativity will be nothing but copying, it will be just a carbon copy. You can be creative only if you are an individual, you cannot create as a part of the mob psychology. The mob psychology is uncreative; it lives a life of drag, it knows no dance, no song, no joy; it is mechanical.

Of course, there are a few things you will get from the society only if you are mechanical: respectability you will get, honors you will get. Universities will confer D.Litts on you, countries will give you gold medals, you may finally become a Nobel laureate, but this whole thing is ugly.

A real man of genius will discard all this nonsense, because this is bribery. Giving the Nobel prize to a person simply means that your services to the establishment are respected, that you are honored because you have been a good slave, obedient, tha

The creator cannot follow the well-trodden path, he has to search out his own way, he has to inquire in the jungles of life, he has to go alone, he has to be a dropout from the mob mind, from the collective psychology. The collective mind is the lowest mind in the world; even the so-called idiots are a little more superior than the collective idiocy. But the collectivity has its own bribes: it respects people, honors people, if they go on insisting that the way of the collective mind is the only right way.

It was out of sheer necessity that in the past, creators of all kinds -- the painters, the dancers, the musicians, the poets, the sculptors -- had to renounce respectability. They had to live a kind of bohemian life, the life of a vagabond; that was the only possibility for them to be creative. This need not be so in the future. If you understand me, if you feel what I am saying has truth in it, then in the future everybody should live individually and there will be no need for a bohemian life. The bohemian life is the by-product of a fixed, orthodox, conventional, respectable life.

My effort is to destroy the collective mind and to make each individual free to be himself or herself. Then there is no problem; then you can live as you want to live. In fact, humanity will really only be born the day the individual is respected in his rebellion. Humanity has still not been born; it is still in the womb. What you see as humanity is only a very hocus-pocus phenomenon. Unless we give individual freedom to each person, absolute freedom to each person to be himself, to exist in his own way.... And, of course, he has not to interfere with anybody -- that is part of freedom. Nobody should interfere with anybody. But in the past everybody has been poking his nose into everybody else's affairs -- even into things which are absolutely private, which have nothing to do with the society. For example, you fall in love with a woman -- what has that got to do with the society? It is purely a personal phenomenon, it is not of the marketplace. If two persons are agreeing to commune in love, the society should not come into it, but the society comes into it with all its paraphernalia, in direct ways, in indirect ways. The policeman will stand between the lovers; the magistrate will stand between the lovers; and if that is not enough then the societies have created a super-policeman, God, who will take care of you. The idea of God is that of a peeping Tom who does not even allow you privacy in your bathroom, who goes on looking through the keyhole, watching what you are doing. This is ugly. All the religions of the world say God continuously watches you -- this is ugly. What kind of God is this? Has he got no other business but to watch everybody, follow everybody? Seems to be the supreme-most detective! Humanity needs a new soil -- the soil of freedom. Bohemianism was a reaction, a necessary reaction, but if my vision succeeds then there will be no bohemianism because there will be no so-called collective mind trying to dominate people. Then everybody will be at ease with himself. Of course, you have not to interfere with anybody, but as far as your life is concerned you have to live it on your own terms. Then only is there creativity. Creativity is the fragrance of individual freedom.

You ask me, Sneh:

OSHO, PLEASE CAN YOU SAY SOMETHING ABOUT CREATIVITY AND DISCIPLINE?

"Discipline" is a beautiful word, but it has been misused as all other beautiful words have been misused in the past. The word "discipline" comes from the same root as the word "disciple"; the root meaning of the word is "a process of learning." One who is ready to learn is a disciple, and the process of being ready to learn is discipline.

The knowledgeable person is never ready to learn, because he already thinks he knows; he is very centered in his so-called knowledge. His knowledge is nothing but a nourishment for his ego. He cannot be a disciple, he cannot be in true discipline.

Socrates says: "I know only one thing, that I know nothing." That is the beginning of discipline. When you don't know anything, of course, a great longing to inquire, explore, investigate arises. And the moment you start learning, another factor follows inevitably: whatsoever you have learned has to be dropped continuously, otherwise it will become knowledge and knowledge will prevent further learning.

The real man of discipline never accumulates; each moment he dies to whatsoever he has come to know and again becomes ignorant. That ignorance is really luminous. I agree with Dionysius when he calls ignorance luminous. It is one of the most beautiful experiences in existence to be in a state of luminous not-knowing. When you are in that state of not-knowing you are open, there is no barrier, you are ready to explore. The Hindus cannot do it -- they are already knowledgeable. The Mohammedans cannot do it, the Christians cannot do it. My sannyasins CAN do it.

Hence it happens every day.... Every day I receive many letters, many questions. One friend has come from the West. He says, for three, four years he has been reading my books and he was so excited, he was in such great love with me, that he wanted to come somehow as quickly as possible. Now he has been able to manage to come, but here he feels frustrated. For four years he was in deep love with me, and now he says, "I cannot say the same because you are so shocking to me. You irritate me, you annoy me; you go on hammering on my cherished ideas."

It is easy to read a book because the book is in your hands. I am not in your hands! You can interpret the book according to your ideas, you cannot interpret me according to your ideas -- I will make so much trouble for you! He was not in love with me, he was in love with his own ideas, and because he was finding support from my books he lived in an illusion.

But with me illusions are bound to be shattered. I am here to shatter all illusions. Yes, it will irritate you, it will annoy you -- that's my way of functioning and working. I will sabotage you from your very roots! Unless you are totally destroyed as a mind, there is no hope for you.

Discipline has been misinterpreted. People have been telling others to discipline their life, to do this, not to do that. Thousands of shoulds and should-nots have been imposed on man, and when a man lives with thousands of shoulds and should-nots he cannot be creative. He is a prisoner; everywhere he will come across a wall.

The creative person has to dissolve all shoulds and should-nots. He needs freedom and space, vast space, he needs the whole sky and all the stars, only then can his innermost spontaneity start growing.

So remember, my meaning of discipline is not that of any Ten Commandments; I am not giving you any discipline; I am simply giving you an insight how to remain learning and never become knowledgeable. Your discipline has to come from your very heart, it has to be YOURS -- and there is a great difference. When somebody else gives you the discipline it can never fit you; it will be like wearing somebody else's clothes. Either they will be too loose or too tight, and you will always feel a little bit silly in them.

Mohammed has given a discipline to the Mohammedans; it may have been good for him, but it cannot be good for anybody else. Buddha has given a discipline to millions of Buddhists; it may have been good for him, but it cannot be good for anybody else. A discipline is an individual phenomenon; whenever you borrow it you start living according to set principles, dead principles. And life is never dead; life is constantly changing each moment. Life is a flux.

Heraclitus is right: you cannot step in the same river twice. In fact, I myself would like to say you cannot step in the same river even once, the river is so fast-moving! One has to be alert to, watchful of, each situation and its nuances, and one has to respond to the situation according to the moment, not according to any readymade answers given by others.

Do you see the stupidity of humanity? Five thousand years ago, Manu gave a discipline to the Hindus and they are still following it. Three thousand years ago Moses gave a discipline to the Jews and they are still following it. Five thousand years ago Adinatha gave his discipline to the Jainas and they are still following it. The whole world is being driven crazy by these disciplines! They are out of date, they should have been buried long long ago. You are carrying corpses and those corpses are stinking. And when you live surrounded by corpses, what kind of life can you have?

I teach you the moment and the freedom of the moment and the responsibility of the moment. One thing may be right this moment and may become wrong the next moment. Don't try to be consistent, otherwise you will be dead. Only dead people are consistent. Try to be alive, with all its inconsistencies, and live each moment without any reference to the past, without any reference to the future either. Live the moment in the context of the moment, and your response will be total. And that totality has beauty and that totality is creativity. Then whatsoever you do will have a beauty of its own.

Osho.

The Goose is Out Chapter #9 Chapter title: Rejoice to abandon!

[ataswegianabroad]

Alone Amongst the Gum Trees Part 3 - It Was Murdoch All Along

NOTE - this article has been migrated to Medium. As of 2021, A Taswegian Abroad will be closed down, and all of my writing will be published on my Medium profile.

“For some time, Australia’s democracy has been slowly sliding into disrepair. The nation’s major policy challenges go unaddressed, our economic future is uncertain and political corruption is becoming normalised. We can’t understand the current predicament of our democracy without recognising the central role of Murdoch’s national media monopoly. 

There is no longer a level playing field in Australian politics. We won’t see another progressive government in Canberra until we deal with this cancer in our democracy.”

- Kevin Rudd - THE CASE FOR COURAGE

Foreword

I started this as a brain dump on July 25th, 2016 just before I flew back to Australia for 4 weeks. I decided to wait to finish it as an “Alone Amongst the Gum Trees” piece after the 2016 US election as it would have directly impacted the outcome. 

That was the plan, anyway. I forgot entirely that I had written this draft for almost 5 years. The next thing you know: it’s early 2021, I’m married, have a dog, a car, and my first child is due in August. 

My last political opinion piece was from April 11, 2016: a piece on how Bernie Sanders was being treated in the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election.

So what happened from mid-2016 to early 2021? I didn’t jump back down the political commentary rabbit hole. No more rants on Tumblr blogs. No angry posts on Facebook. The odd spicy tweet about the current election happening between my old home (Australia), my new home (Canada) and the messed up cousin next door (United States). I instead chose to divert my love of writing to sports (see https://thefiftyfooty.com/), technology, and music.

From a political standpoint I chose to mostly stop talking, and to listen. Now don’t become misconstrued: I did not ignore it. I was very active over the Provincial and Federal Canadian elections of 2015 and 2019, I followed the unprecedented US political climate very closely given our proximity to the United States (and learned a lot in the process), and I voted in the most recent 2019 Australian election (my third from Toronto since leaving in 2012).

If I take a step back - I still need to be self-critical: I was defeated and I surrendered to the tidal-wave of the far-right. I was watching the US tear itself in two over race, alternative facts, and radical ideology. I was watching the UK go down a similar path with Brexit and Boris Johnson. I was watching my beloved homeland of Australia continue to confusingly elect damaging conservative governments despite the polls, trends, movements and more indicating it was time for a change.

As I matured into my late 20′s and now early 30′s (*gulp*) I was asking myself: was this how it was going to be? Did the western world just decide “we’re done with progressive views, let stick it in reverse for a bit and see how we go”? If that was true, then why did Canada buck this trend with Trudeau in 2015 & 2019? Why was New Zealand thriving under Arden after 2017 and 2020?

I went to a dark place on this. 

But then something amazing happened. Enter former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd talking about wanting a royal commission into Rupert Murdoch and his News Corp empire who control 70% of print media in Australia.

Did he say 70% of all print media in Australia?

I STRONGLY recommend taking 15 minutes to watch this video. It will do a much better job of painting the scene than I ever could. If not, you can still read on through.

After doing some looking into this: all I can say is that I didn’t have to dig very far to have my fire reignited. All I can think about now is this #MurdochRoyalCommission

My world view has changed, and what I am about to write next will explain a few things that I hope will change yours too.

This is not a left vs right piece. This is not a blame, shame, or complain piece either. I won’t curse or abuse, because this is a self reflection, a cry of encouragement, and a call to action to all who live in and want to protect the political integrity of democracy around the world.

I am here to explain my thought patterns with the goal of having at least one more person under the thumb of Murdoch’s “beast” realise just what’s going on, and to encourage that person to make more informed decisions knowing the facts.

The Path to En-frightened-ment

February 2014 was the last time I updated the long-form political arm of my blog. Back then as a young man exposed to his first bout of political and social disappointment after the 2013 Australian election - I felt the need to get it all out and I did in a little more linguistically brash Part 2 of “Alone Amongst the Gum Trees”.

I was in an interesting position then. I was a 23 year old finding his place in the world - personally, politically, spiritually, environmentally. I was mostly deciding whether or not I was done with Toronto and it if was time to stay home permanently after spending 3 months back in Australia.

I chose no. I left. I came back to Toronto and the rest is history.

Then one day a couple of years later I got us flights back to Australia for a visit. After nearly 3 years avoiding it (mostly because of my post-election distaste for Australian ignorance), it was time to bite the bullet and go home for a bit.

In 2014 I mentioned:

...let’s talk about Australia, how things changed, how it looked from outside the huge wall that the government apparently has built around the country now, and how it looks from a bloke who literally can not wait to leave again.

I had been anxious about that trip for a while. Not because I hadn’t seen everyone for so long or because it was my wife’s (then girlfriend who became my fiance on that trip) first time visiting, it was because Australia had a chance to move away from the “ignorance, inequality, narrow-minded idiocy, and over-conservatism” I mentioned in 2014. 

But we didn’t. Turnbull won the 2016 election. I was so angry at the Australian people. I was so scared of that ignorant, greedy, racist, xenophobic, homophobic, narrow minded, privileged, climate denying creature that seems to be slowly devouring the planet.

From that point in time, all I could think about was some sort of big right-wing populist shift happening across the globe. Outside of the obvious ones: Trump in the USA, Johnson in the UK and Abbott/Turnbull/Morrison in Australia, there were a few more extreme cases: Putin in Russia, Marine Le Pen in France, Viktor Orban in Hungary. Then there’s Cambodia, Brazil, Turkey, Egypt etc who saw this as a huge advantage as well. It may not be the end of a progressive vision of the world but it definitely seemed like the beginning of a big switch.

One thing I learned during my political writing hiatus while serving my self-induced “exile” to Canada is that this country was one of the few blips in this trend. Why did Canada choose to elect Justin Trudeau in 2015, a left wing liberal, after 9 years of Harper’s conservative government? Was it simply because Canadians were good and fair people? Did they just fundamentally understand that you need both conservative and progressive governments to advance society? Perhaps they do, and Canadians are most definitely good and fair people regardless of election results. I am even set to become a Canadian citizen myself (and a dual-citizen overall) in 2021.

So where is this all coming from? Why are the United States, Australia and the United Kingdom on a continued path to segregation, protectionism, populism and division while Canada and New Zealand show basically zero of these tendencies?

The News Corp cancer that is Rupert Murdoch’s media empire is the deciding factor.

So What Does Kevin Rudd Have To Do With It?

Mr. Rudd has been living in the USA for the last 5 years and is firmly spearheading the charge in that Rupert Murdoch’s media behemoth “News Corp” has been unlawfully influencing Australian opinion and undermining elections in Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States for close to 3 decades (more predominantly in the last 8 years). 

Before you read any further I have to be transparent about my opinions of Kevin Rudd. I accredit his “Kevin 07″ campaign as the catalyst for my interest in politics, my decision to study economics at university, and my ongoing support for progressive policies in every federal and state election since 2007. His work has played a big part in shaping me into the person I am today.

Despite my positive position on Mr. Rudd, I am also disappointed he did not action this during his time as prime minister. However, I am “all in” when it comes to what he is standing for, and that is:

Eradicating monopolies in all forms (be it political, business, journalism, etc)

Improving media literacy to encourage fair and unbiased journalism

Avoiding the pitfalls of Murdoch's divisive influence on the USA happening to Australia

There’s a few key factoids to his claims of mass-media bias:

70% of print media in Australia is owned by ONE MAN: Rupert Murdoch (100% owned in Queensland)

Print media influences the national conversation on a daily basis

Rupert Murdoch owns the biggest YouTube channel in Australia (news.com.au)

The line between fact-based and opinion-based reporting continues to blur, resembling that of CNN (Democrats) and Fox (Republican) extreme partisanship in the USA

All of Murdoch’s papers have backed the Liberal/National party in all 19 out of the last 19 federal and state elections 

The ABC is breaching the Australian Broadcasting Act of 1983 by not standing up to Murdoch media purely out of fear

Politicians are not standing up out of fear of character assassination

Whether or not Murdoch is backing left or right, Labor or Liberal, the question still remains:

Do you think it is healthy for a FOREIGN PRIVATE ENTITY to own a monopoly level of influence on a sovereign country’s political system for that private entity to use for their own personal gain through targeted media attacks and character assassinations? 

Watch This Space...

There are utter mountains of evidence to accompany these claims, and to make sure you can digest what I am trying to say, I recommend that you sink your teeth into the following videos to validate and truly comprehend the size of the tumour we are dealing with:

Feb 20, 2020 - 1h - Friendlyjordies informal interview with Kevin Rudd

This is right before the Covid outbreak in March, which delayed Mr. Rudd’s ability to move for a formal commission into media bias

Provides excellent insight into the ABC’s lack of action, the opportunism of the Green party, and the complete absence of unbiased reporting in Australia

Feb 18, 2021 - 1h 30m - Kevin Rudd Officially Requesting Royal Commission to Australian Senate

The first 20-30 minutes provide Mr. Rudd’s summary of the situation

The remainder of the video consists of questions from both Labor and Liberal senators about Mr. Rudd’s claims

Mar 1, 2021 - 2m - Kevin Rudd speaks to Sunrise about the Murdoch monopoly

Mr. Rudd went on a national flagship morning show to discuss his concerns regarding News Corp

LISTEN to the questions being asked of him: completely disregarding his valid points and dismissing him as “sour grapes”

Channel 7 is not News Corp, so why try to discredit Mr. Rudd? Fear of being targeted by News Corp

Mar 9, 2021 - 1h - National Press Club: The Case for Courage

Mr. Rudd stands up in front of The National Press Club of Australia to promote the four big challenges facing Australia in his upcoming book “The Case for Courage” 

He takes questions from journalists from both Murdoch and non-Murdoch media outlets

As I start to conclude this piece, for action to happen, an independent royal commission is required to get to the facts. Mr. Rudd already gathered over 500,000 signatures that were recently sent to Prime Minister Scott Morrison asking for the royal commission to take place, but this is not enough.

Even former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, a friend of Rupert Murdoch and political opposite to Mr. Rudd, signed the petition and said the following:

Mr Turnbull, a former Liberal prime minister, said the Murdoch media used to be a group of traditional right-leaning outlets but has now become "a vehicle of propaganda."

He told ABC television's Insiders program on Sunday that Australian democracy was suffering for allowing the "crazy, bitter partisanship" of social media to creep into the mainstream.

"We have to work out what price we're paying, as a society, for the hyper-partisanship of the media," Mr Turnbull said.

"Look at the United States and the terrible, divided state of affairs that they're in, exacerbated, as Kevin was saying, by Fox News and other right-wing media."

I recently sent a (somewhat long) letter to Mr. Rudd expressing my concern for the state of Australia’s media landscape, with it culminating in the following questions:

I am deeply moved and inspired by your bravery to take on "the beast" as you so aptly name it, and I want to boldly ask: how can I help? How can I get involved? 

I am yet to hear back from Mr. Rudd himself - but I think if you’ve gotten this far, you know what I am about to say next.

I want to help, learn more, or get involved.

That’s amazing. We’re not asking for money, just action. Here’s some ways you can help is stop the rot:

SUBSCRIBE TO and FOLLOW direct updates from Kevin Rudd:

Website / Newsletters

https://newsroyalcommission.com/ 

https://kevinrudd.com/

Social media alongside the #MurdochRoyalCommission hashtag on all platforms:

Twitter

Instagram

Facebook

YouTube

Boycott News Corp media sites, publications, and channels

I’ve linked a list of all assets by News Corp above

This includes steering clear of ALL mediums of news owned by these publications and outlets including the respective:

Social media channels and pages

Television and radio news channels 

Print and online newspapers and articles

SHARE and spread the word of this cancer affecting our democracy

Talk TO your friends and family (not AT them) and LISTEN to their views - people are not dumb: this will make sense if given time to digest

WATCH the videos posted above as a start, alongside a few more recommendations:

This interview between Friendly Jordies and former Labor Leader Bill Shorten from earlier in March 2021

I learned more about Bill Shorten in the last 20 minutes of this interview than I did in his entire run as opposition leader. 

This just goes to show you how utterly mistreated he was by Murdoch media

For a laugh - every episode of Kevin Rudd: PM from Rove McManus’ late night show

I want Australia to remain a safe, secure, and lucky country to raise my family in someday. I care about this very much and plan to ramp up my content around this until we are free from the Murdoch beast and its lies.

Thank you so much for reading, as always, I am happy to discuss.

List of Murdoch (News Corp) Owned Outlets [Expanded Below]

Television

Foxtel (65%)

Australian News Channel

Fox Sports Australia

Streamotion

Fox Sports News

Fox Cricket

Fox Footy

Fox League

Kayo Sports

Binge

Sky News Australia

Sky News Weather

Sky News Extra

Sky After Dark

Australia Channel (News Streaming channel)

Sky News New Zealand

Sky News on WIN

Internet

Punters.com.au — Australian horse racing and bookmaker affiliate.

SuperCoach

Australia Best Recipes

hipages

odds.com.au

Mogo

One Big Switch

Knewz, a news aggregator

Realestate.com.au

Advertising, Branding & Tech

Global

Storyful

News UK

bridge studio

wireless Group

wireless studios

urban media

First Radio

Switchdigital

TIBUS

ZESTY

News Corp Australia

SUDDENLY - Content Agency

Medium Rare Content Agency

HT&E (Here, There & Everywhere)

News Xtend

Radio

News UK & Ireland

wireless Group

talkSPORT

talkSPORT 2

talkRADIO

Virgin Radio

FM104

Q102

96FM

c103

Live 95FM

LMFM

U105

Scottish Sun 80s

Scottish Sun Hits

Scottish Sun Greatest Hits

Times Radio

Magazines and Inserts (digital and print)

News Corp Australia

Big League

body+soul

Broncos

Business Daily

delicious

Escape

Foxtel

GQ Australia

Hit

Kidspot

Mansion Australia

Motoring

Sportsman

Super Food Ideas

taste.com.au

The Deal

The Weekend Australian Magazine

Vogue Australia

Vogue Living

Whimn

Wish

News & Magazines (digital and print)

News UK

The Sun

The Times

The Sunday Times

Press Association (part owned, News UK is one of 26 shareholders)

The TLS (Times Literary Supplement)

News Corp Australia

The Australian including weekly insert magazine The Deal and monthly insert magazine (wish)

The Weekend Australian

Australian Associated Press

news.com.au

New South Wales

The Daily Telegraph

The Sunday Telegraph including insert magazine sundaymagazine

Victoria

Herald Sun

Sunday Herald Sun including insert magazine sundaymagazine

Lions Raw

Samizdat

Queensland

The Courier-Mail including weekly insert magazine QWeekend

The Sunday Mail

Brisbane News

South Australia

The Advertiser including the monthly insert The Adelaide magazine

Sunday Mail

Tasmania

The Mercury

The Sunday Tasmanian

Northern Territory

Northern Territory News

Sunday Territorian

Community suburban newspapers

Cumberland/Courier (NSW) newspapers

Blacktown Advocate

Canterbury-Bankstown Express

Central

Central Coast Express Advocate

Fairfield Advance

Hills Shire Times

Hornsby and Upper North Shore Advocate

Inner West Courier

Liverpool Leader

Macarthur Chronicle

Mt Druitt-St Marys Standard

NINETOFIVE

North Shore Times

Northern District Times

NORTHSIDE

Parramatta Advertiser

Penrith Press

Rouse Hill Times

Southern Courier

The Manly Daily

The Mosman Daily

Village Voice Balmain

Wentworth Courier

Leader (Vic) newspapers

Bayside Leader

Berwick/Pakenham Cardinia Leader

Brimbank Leader

Caulfield Glen Eira/Port Philip Leader

Cranbourne Leader

Dandenong/Springvale Dandenong Leader

Diamond Valley Leader

Frankston Standard/Hastings Leader

Free Press Leader

Heidelberg Leader

Hobsons Bay Leader

Hume Leader

Knox Leader

Lilydale & Yarra Valley Leader

Manningham Leader

Maribyrnong Leader

Maroondah Leader

Melbourne Leader

Melton/Moorabool Leader

Moonee Valley Leader

Moorabbin Kingston/Moorabbin Glen Eira Leader

Mordialloc Chelsea Leader

Moreland Leader

Mornington Peninsula Leader

Northcote Leader

Preston Leader

Progress Leader

Stonnington Leader

Sunbury/Macedon Ranges Leader

Waverley/Oakleigh Monash Leader

Whitehorse Leader

Whittlesea Leader

Wyndham Leader

Quest (QLD) newspapers

Albert & Logan News (Fri)

Albert & Logan News (Wed)

Caboolture Shire Herald

Caloundra Journal

City News

City North News

City South News

Ipswich News

Logan West Leader

Maroochy Journal

North-West News

Northern Times

Northside Chronicle

Pine Rivers Press/North Lakes Times

Redcliffe and Bayside Herald

South-East Advertiser

South-West News/Springfield News

Southern Star

The Noosa Journal

weekender

Westside News

Wynnum Herald

Weekender Essential Sunshine Coast

Messenger (SA) newspapers

Adelaide Matters

City Messenger

City North Messenger

East Torrens Messenger

Eastern Courier Messenger

Guardian Messenger

Hills & Valley Messenger

Leader Messenger

News Review Messenger

Portside Messenger

Southern Times Messenger

Weekly Times Messenger

Community (WA) newspapers

(50.1%) (Formerly)

Advocate

Canning Times

Comment News

Eastern Reporter

Fremantle-Cockburn Gazette

Guardian Express

Hills-Avon Valley Gazette

Joondalup-Wanneroo Times

Mandurah Coastal / Pinjarra Murray Times

Melville Times

Midland-Kalamunda Reporter

North Coast Times

Southern Gazette

Stirling Times

Weekend-Kwinana Courier

Weekender

Western Suburbs Weekly

Sun (NT) newspapers

Darwin Sun

Litchfield Sun

Palmerston Sun

Regional and rural newspapers

New South Wales

Tweed Sun

Tweed Daily News

Victoria

Echo

Geelong Advertiser

GeelongNEWS

The Weekly Times

Queensland

Bowen Independent

Burdekin Advocate

Cairns Sun

Gold Coast Bulletin

Gold Coast Sun

Herbert River Express

Home Hill Observer

Innisfail Advocate

Northern Miner

Port Douglas & Mossman Gazette

Tablelander – Atherton

Tablelands Advertiser

The Cairns Post

The Noosa News

The Sunshine Coast Daily

Townsville Bulletin

Toowoomba Chronicle

Townsville Sun

weekender

Daily Mercury (Mackay)

Tasmania

Derwent Valley Gazette

Tasmanian Country

Northern Territory

Centralian Advocate

International

Papua New Guinea

Papua New Guinea Post-Courier (63%)

United States

New York Post

Wall Street Journal

realtor.com

Move (80%)

Dow Jones & Company

Consumer Media Group

The Wall Street Journal – the leading US financial newspaper

Wall Street Journal Europe closed

The Wall Street Journal Asia closed

Barron's – weekly financial markets magazine

Marketwatch – financial news and information website

Financial News

Heat Street - news and opinion website

Mansion Global - global luxury property website

Enterprise Media Group

Dow Jones Newswires – global, real-time news and information provider.

Factiva – provides business news and information together with content delivery tools and services.

Dow Jones Indexes – stock market indexes and indicators, including the Dow Jones Industrial Average. (10% ownership)

Dow Jones Financial Information Services – produces databases, electronic media, newsletters, conferences, directories, and other information services on specialised markets and industry sectors.

Betten Financial News – leading Dutch language financial and economic news service.

Strategic Alliances

STOXX (33%) – joint venture with Deutsche Boerse and SWG Group for the development and distribution of Dow Jones STOXX indices.

Wireless Group

Talksport

TalkRadio

Books

HarperCollins

4th Estate

Collins

Ecco Press

Harlequin Enterprises

Harper Perennial

Harper Voyager

Kappa Books

Modern Publishing

Unisystems Inc.

Zondervan Publishing

Christian publishing company taken over by HarperCollins in 1988

Inspirio – religious gift production

[johnnymundano]

Prom Night (2008)

Directed by Nelson McCormick Screenplay by J.S. Cardone Music by Paul Haslinger Country: Canada, United States Running time: 88 minutes CAST Brittany Snow as Donna Keppel Scott Porter as Bobby Jessica Stroup as Claire Davis Dana Davis as Lisa Hines Collins Pennie as Ronnie Heflin Kelly Blatz as Michael Allen James Ransone as Detective Nash Brianne Davis as Crissy Lynn Kellan Lutz as Rick Leland Mary Mara as Mrs. Waters Ming-Na Wen as Dr. Elisha Crowe Johnathon Schaech as Richard Fenton Idris Elba as Detective Winn Jessalyn Gilsig as Aunt Karen Linden Ashby as Uncle Jack

Theft Alert: All images from IMDB

Donna Keppel (Brittany Snow; working hard here, bless) is the only survivor of a family massacre perpetrated by Richard Fenton (Johnathon Schaech; looking very Sean William Scott), a creepy teacher with a boner for her. Tonight Donna’s Prom Night is being held at a swanky hotel,  but tonight is also the night Richard escapes from The Home For Creepy Teachers With Wayward Boners. Everything you expect to happen happens, just a lot less interestingly than you would expect for a slasher movie, certainly for one that cost $20 million. Prom Night (2008) is like an experiment see if it possible to make a slasher flick so inoffensive and dumb it could be screened at tea time on The Disney®©™ Channel. It turns out it is in fact possible to make such a thing, but unfortunately no one would want to watch it. It actually makes you hanker for Prom Night (1980), as low-budget and timeworn as that disco slasher may well be.  

For starters, Prom Night (2008) is not a remake of Prom Night (1980) despite what anyone says. Fuck that noise, someone obviously just wanted to use the title. End. Of. They are both slasher movies which take place on Prom Night, but that’s it. I know this because I watched Prom Night (1980) recently for the first time, and last night I watched Prom Night (2008) for the last time. Prom Night (1980) has a mystery surrounding the identity of the killer, which keeps you awake and which also has a surprisingly strong emotional pay off, whereas in Prom Night (2008) we know who the killer is from the off, which is boring and has no pay off at all. Essentially then, this is the difference between the two, one is a bit amateurish but very entertaining, while the other is slick as snot on a door handle and as dull as ditch water. 

Ultimately only one Prom Night successfully evokes the youthful exuberance of the night in question, which is important as I am 50 and English, so I have no personal experience whatsoever of a Prom Night. Also: get off my lawn! Prom Night (1980) makes it look like a fantastically enjoyable event at which hormonally crazed kids dance enthusiastically to fantastically simplistic disco. Apparently the movie was shot with the cast dancing to real, popular disco hits until the makers realised you have to actually pay to use other people’s music (?!who knew!?). Being a bit strapped for cash they had the soundtrack composer Carl Zittrer cook up some home-made disco beats at roughly the same tempo so the visuals and sound would still gel. Carl Zitterer did an excellent job.  A bit too excellent in fact, since the similarity was still so pronounced a $10 million lawsuit was brought against the movie (and settled for $50,000 – phew!). A small price to pay for one of the most cheerful and fun dance sequences I’ve ever seen, particularly as I didn’t pay it. Prom Night (1980) is a decent slasher flick but the dance floor sequence is just pure joy.  Prom Night (2008) makes Prom Night look like a shit night club where nobody knows anyone else there; seriously, the interaction of the core group with everyone else, who they apparently have known for years, is ridiculously minimal. And the songs are the kind of heatedly sexual nursery rhymes I am generationally disposed to dislike. I just don’t get it, basically. You crazy kids! “Who’s your daddy? And is he rich like me?” isn’t so much a song lyric to me as a reason to call the sex police. And while technically the dancing in Prom Night (2008) is smoother, the dancing in Prom Night (1980) is more realistically ramshackle and energetic. 

Also, in Prom Night (1980) the killer, whoever they are, is refreshingly human (they slip on the slippery floor at one point, etc) but in Prom Night (2008) the killer is a tediously efficient killer; which is odd because he’s just a school teacher with a creepy boner for one of his female students, which explains none of his killing efficacy. By rights he should just be crying while wanking over the school yearbook, as I imagine most creepy schoolteachers with boners for their female students do. Maybe creepy schoolteachers with boners for their female students find that reductive and a little offensive of me, and that’s a real crying shame there, because the last thing I want to do is offend creepy teachers with boners for their female students. Every school has that one teacher who dates his female students “secretly”, and as the female student ages out of school he replaces her with a new female student. Maybe you are that guy. In which case you need to hear this: Dude, you are creepy. No one is impressed; they are creeped out. Preying on children is not cool. And if they are in school they are children, I don’t care how developed their chest is. A light prison sentence or some intensive therapy are what you need, creepy teacher dude, not high fives and Budweiser with the bros. (I do apologise for the fact I went to school in the 1970s leading to my not acknowledging that creepy schoolteachers can also be female, and the students being creeped on can be both female and male; with any combination of gender being creeper and creeped upon. I guess everyone sex creeping on everyone else, well, that’s progress? Well done, everyone. Personally I would have tried to phase out the whole creepy-schoolteacher-with-a-boner-for-their-student thing but I guess expanding it across the gender spectrum is certainly one way to go.)

In terms of cast Prom Night (1980) only really has Jamie Lee Curtis and Leslie Nielsen as “names” but everyone is okay, and the characters are all quite quirky and sympathetic. Prom Night (2008) might not have many “names” but it has a far more professional level of acting, which is a win for it. But, alas, while there are real actors in Prom Night (2008) and they all try hard with what they are given, what they are given is so lacklustre and generic it is dismaying how much effort they probably had to put in just to make the characters seem as bland as they do. There’s the black couple; he’s good at sports, she’s a bit sassy. There’s the co-dependant bickering couple; he’s controlling and drinks too much, she’s whiny and, well, she’s just whiny. The gym teacher is sparky and enthusiastic like absolutely no gym teacher I’ve ever met in my half a decade existence, but very like every gym teacher in American high school set shows on Nickleodeon. The most interesting character is Detective Nash, and that’s only because James Ransone appears amusingly miscast; unless a cop who resembles Christian Bale if he was a candleblogger is your idea of a movie cop.  Obviously that’s nobody’s idea of a movie cop, luckily though Idris Elba knows what everyone expects from a Movie Cop and delivers it with lightly self-parodic gusto. Of course   Idris Elba is unarguably a charismatic screen presence; I know that because most of the things I’ve seen him in are godawful but he is always a pleasure. Maybe it’s just unfortunate choices on my part and I’m actually missing a string of entertainment pearls starring Idris Elba, even so Prom Night (2008) would come in on the poopy side of the mark sheet. But, again, even in something as poopy as Prom Night (2008) Idris Elba is fun. Here he’s The Big City Cop so he walks like he’s prolapsed and rasps his dialogue like he regularly gargles lava-hot cawfee. The enthusiasm Elba invests in playing this poorly written part makes up a bit for the utter idiocy of the character. Ultimately though nothing could distract from Detective Winn’s stupidity, so colossally boneheaded are his actions in the movie.

Prom Night (2008) seems to take place in an alternate universe where every authority figure is a moron. In a better slasher flick this might be a genuine attempt at a point, but here it’s just bad writing. Sure, you might think that everyone in authority in the universe we actually inhabit is a moron, and at this point in history you would have a strong case, counsellor. Exhibit one being our current lying coward of a Prime Minister (I write this in the year 2020). But the authority figures in Prom Night (2008) are actually more excessive in their cretinous obliviousness than even that lying shyster. Having (eventually) realised that the killer is loose Idris Elba visits Donna’s guardians, who decide not to bring her home immediately or have her placed in police custody for her own protection, because it might “embarrass her” in front of her friends and put a big downer on this magical night of awful dresses, terrible music and light fingerbanging. Idris Elba, a policeman remember, goes along with this, which is kind of epically dumb, but then he raises the dumbness stakes by going to the Hotel Swank to keep an eye on Donna. Literally. He actually stands by a bit of silver scaffold in the dance hall for hours, and stares at the back of her head, occasionally rubbing the top of his own head and pursing his lips. Incredibly this does nothing to locate and apprehend the killer, who is merrily killing staff and guest alike at his own convenience. Idris Elba even asks at the desk if they have seen the killer, even showing them a picture (which is some amazing police work for Prom Night (2008)). But when asked by the desk clerk if he should be concerned Idris Elba says ”no”. Later when the fact that the killer is in the hotel killing people can’t even be avoided by Idris Elba he pulls the fire alarm and the entire hotel decants chaotically onto the street. Because there’s absolutely no way the killer could get out unnoticed during that, right? Absolutely no way at all. Nu-uh! Essentially most of the people in Prom Night (2008) who die do so because Idris Elba’s character has all the brains of a shoe.

And a lot of people do die in Prom Night (2008), but don’t get too excited slasher flick fans, because it doesn’t really feel like it because the kills are largely inoffensive stuff; which in a slasher movie is kind of offensive in itself. Prom Night (2008)  tries to distract from the lack of splatter with sudden bursts of convulsive editing which just makes it look like the killer is over amorously cuddling people to the floor, or re-enacting his favourite Super Bowl tackles. The only clue that his victims are dead comes later when we get to see the body with some dainty little red marks on their clothes. So averse is Prom Night (2008) to actually getting bloody that one character has their throat slashed and so little claret splashes it’s preposterous. If you were asleep next to somebody with their throat cut you’d wake up sodden in the red stuff, you wouldn’t have to turn them over to discover they were dead. Maybe Prom Night (2008) should have invested some of that $20 million in a medical professional acting as a consultant to tell them that throat wounds tend to, you know, bleed profusely since it’s all the blood inside you coming out of that new hole that kills you. Okay, sometimes it’s the shock of blood loss that offs you but, whatever, there’s a lot of blood involved. There is, I admit, one artfully shot kill where an arc of blood spatters a sheet of plastic but mostly the effects in Prom Night (2008) are less Tom Savini and more Tom and Jerry.

Sadly then, when it comes to this particular Prom Night (2008) you’re better off staying at home and washing your hair.

[saccharii]

How to Win Back Your (Villain) Ex Boyfriend

A guide by Hawks

Fandom: My Hero Academia

Summary:  Arresting Dabi and putting him in prison has put quite a big of strain on his and Hawks’ relationship, but Hawks is determined to work through it.

AO3 Link

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“Hey,” Hawks says and sits down at the table that Dabi — no, not Dabi; his real name is Touya, Todoroki Touya, and hadn’t that been a ride? — is handcuffed to. “It’s been a long time, huh?”

Dabi (Touya?) glares at him flatly, his head propped up on his hand. His orange prison jumpsuit clashes with his purple scars and now red hair. His hollow cheeks and pale skin serve to make him look more sickly than usual.

That’s fair. Hawks probably wouldn’t be very friendly towards the guy that arrested him either.

“So... what have you been up to?”

Dabi’s expression doesn’t change. Hawks winces. God, why is he so awkward? What has he been up to? Prison. Prison is what he’s been up to.

In front of a camera Hawks is as smooth as silk, but sit him down across from his (ex?) boyfriend that he’d arrested and all of a sudden everything that comes out of his mouth is pure idiocy.

“I’ve been good. Doing hero stuff,” he forges on, bravely or stupidly, he doesn’t know. “Arresting bad guys, posing for pictures, the usual.”

Dabi’s glare sharpens.

“I’ll cut to the chase. Are we still dating?”

“No.”

“Cool, cool. Totally understandable. Do you want to get back together?”

“No.”

Hawks clasps his hands in front of his face and braces his elbows on the table, giving his best puppy dog eyes.

“C’mon, please?”

“No.”

“How about friends with benefits? They have conjugal visits at this prison. I checked.”

He wants more than friends with benefits, but it’s a start. He can work from there. That’s how it happened the first time, after all.

Ex boyfriends to friends with benefits, back to boyfriends, then in a few years when Dabi’s out on parole: Boom. Marriage. Maybe they can buy a house with an actual, walled off yard. It’ll be expensive as hell in this area, but between Hawks’ salary and Dabi’s trust fund they can pull it off. Married with a dog, not a cat. Cats always try to attack Hawks’ wings.

His plan is foolproof. This sort of thing happens all the time; he’s seen it on those rom-coms that Rumi hates but agrees to watch with him anyway because he’s her only friend.

Dabi’s mouth drops open slightly, and he furrows his eyebrows. “Hawks, what the fuck.”

“That’s the idea. Us the fuck.”

Haha. Why did he say that? ‘Us the fuck’? That doesn’t even make sense.

“Do you proposition every villain you arrest?”

“Only the hot ones — both literally and figuratively.” Hawks winks and shoots finger guns.

Finger guns. Why. Why did he do that? Holy fuck, he has to get out of here before he humiliates himself further. Lesson learned. Next time he’ll practice what he’s going to say in front of the mirror.

Dabi says nothing, presumably stunned into silence by Hawks’ finger guns. (Why finger guns? Why is he like this?)

“Anyway,” Hawks says quickly. “I gotta get going. Want me to bring some of that strawberry shortcake you like so much next time?”

Dabi mouths the words ‘next time’ with an incredulous look on his face.

“What the fuck, Hawks? You fucking tricked me and arrested me. Now you’re here asking me out and offering me cake? Why do you think I even want you here?”

“I’ll take that as a yes.” Hawks raps his knuckles on the table and stands up. “I’ll bring some cards next time, too.”

He signals the guard who escorts him stiffly from the room. As they pass through the heavily armored door he gives Hawks some serious side-eye before he realizes Hawks saw him and looks away.

Oh yeah. He just witnessed the whole ‘begging his felon ex boyfriend to take him back’ debacle. Complete with finger guns. (That’s something that’s going to haunt him for the rest of his life, isn’t it? He’ll be eighty and lying in bed and it’ll pop into his head. He won’t be able to remember what day it is but he’ll remember the goddamn finger gun incident from when he was twenty three.)

“So, uh, I don’t suppose I could pay you not to ever tell anyone about that?”

“We are bound with a strict confidentiality clause,” the guard says, staring straight ahead, determinedly looking anywhere but at Hawks. “Nothing you do or say here will be released to the public.”

Hawks nods. “Gotcha.”

Confidentiality clauses don’t do much from Hawks’ experience. Sure, the guard won’t run to the presses or blab on his blog, but once he gets home there is no doubt that he’ll immediately tell his spouse or call up his best friend or someone, and who knows who’ll find out after that. Before you know it one of Hawks’ sidekicks will pull him aside and ask him if it’s true that he shot finger guns.

Hawks claps his hand on the guard’s shoulder. “Good to know.” He looks at the guard’s name tag. “Officer Naya. I’m trusting you.”

Lay the guilt on thick enough and maybe he won’t tell anyone.

“Right, right,” Hawks mutters. He grips the edge of the sink until his knuckles turn white. “I can do this.”

Dried toothpaste flakes under his hands. The sink hasn’t been cleaned since Dabi last scrubbed it months ago, before Hawks arrested him. Hawks’ lackadaisical attitude towards wiping down counters drove Dabi nuts. Who knew someone who looks so much like an unwashed hobo would be such a clean freak?

Yet every night Dabi would put on thick rubber gloves, wipe down the bathroom, wash the dishes, clean the kitchen, pick up the living room and bedroom, and vacuum the carpets, complaining the whole time.

Hawks was shocked by how domestic Dabi is, nothing like the twenty something disaster he expected him to be. (Well, he was a twenty something human disaster, just not when it came to chores.) Hell, Dabi had even packed Hawks’ (very delicious) lunch everyday. Damn, he misses that. KFC has nothing on Dabi’s homemade chicken karaage.

It probably has something to do with his scars. Dirty sheets and open wounds do not go well together. Every day Dabi disinfected the entire apartment, and every night he doused himself with antiseptic and bandaged along his seams with sterile gauze. Hawks hopes they’re taking good care of his scars in prison.

He takes a deep breath, holds it for four seconds, then breathes out to quell the anxiety twisting in his gut. It doesn’t work. He’s such a disaster without Dabi here. He was a disaster with Dabi here too, but he was a disaster with a clean apartment and home cooked food.

He slicks his hair back with water. He can do this. Hero monthly voted him the hottest single hero in the country; he can seduce his ex boyfriend back.

(Dabi had grinned and waved the magazine in his face, then proceeded to prove just how single Hawks wasn’t.)

He can do this. He runs his fingers through his hair one more time. “Hey,” he says to the mirror in his most seductive voice.

He can’t do this.

“Goddamnit, why am I so bad at this?”

He slaps his cheeks and stares at himself in the mirror.

“Let’s try this again.” He smiles his best TV smile. “Hey Dabi,” he says. “I just want to talk more about what we discussed last week. You know, things didn’t end well between us. Honestly they ended terribly, so, uh, I want to fix that. I think we had something good going on, before I arrested you and you set yourself on fire trying to get away.”

Shit. This isn’t Hawks. He isn’t the planning type. He’s more of the ‘winging it’ type. (Heh. Winging it. That’s a good one.) Alright. One more time.

“Hey! I’m back. I, um, brought you flowers.” Hawks grabs a toothbrush from the holder and mimes giving it to the mirror. “I don’t know if you like flowers, since I’ve never given you flowers. I’ve never given anyone flowers.

“I know that things ended badly between us, but I’ve never felt this way about anyone else before. So I was thinking, maybe, we could try again? God this is so stupid it’s never going to work.”

Hawks rubs his face, almost accidentally stabbing himself in the eye with the toothbrush. Okay, maybe he should start small. He said he was going to bring cake next time, so he’ll start with that.

“I brought that cake you like so much, just like I promised.”

Hawks groans. He has no idea what to say. Looks like he’ll be an awkward mess, but  he’ll be an awkward mess with flowers and cake.

At least his makeup is on point. You can’t even tell he has bags under his eyes and a stress pimple coming in. His eyeliner is amazing. Wings sharp enough to kill a man. He looks good.

He checks his phone. He’s got an hour until he needs to be at the prison. That’s just enough time to run to the bakery and the florist. He takes a deep, fortifying breath.

He can do this.

He lied. He can’t do this

The flower shop is so small that every time Hawks turns around he nearly knocks everything off the shelf, and that’s with his wings tucked close. The overwhelming fragrance makes his head spin.

He doesn’t know anything about flowers. Apparently some have certain meanings and others have different meanings and if you choose the wrong ones you accidentally end up saying ‘I wish you were dead’ instead of ‘I like you.’

“Can I help you, sir?”

Hawks starts and spins, knocking vases off the shelves. Only two feathers and quick reflexes prevent disaster. How did some florist sneak up on him? He’s the number two hero, for god’s sake.

“Yes, thank you,” he says with practiced, disarming charm. “I don’t know anything about flowers. Maybe you could recommend something?”

“Of course.” The florist’s voice wobbles. Ah, she recognizes him. “What do you need them for?”

He scratches his chin.

“Hypothetically, if you were a spy,” he says slowly, “and you fell in love with your mark, then arrested him, what kind of flowers would you give him to apologize and ask him back out?”

“Oh,” the girl says, her eyes wide and her mouth open in a perfect ‘o’. “Um. I... I’ve never encountered that, uh, exact situation before. Maybe some sort of apology bouquet? Or something to indicate, that, uh, you’ll wait for him? To get out of jail?”

“I like that second one. I kinda had to arrest him, and I’m sorry, but not really sorry, You know?”

She nods, her eyes wide and glazed. “I understand completely.”

What a trooper. Hawks is pretty sure she doesn’t understand, but he appreciates her putting up with him anyway. It’s not everyday the number two strolls into your shop and makes such a bizarre request.

This is going to be all over the tabloids tomorrow, if not tonight, isn’t it? His PR team is going to kill him. Oh well, it’s bound to get out eventually. No way is he going to be able to marry a convicted felon without someone cottoning on.

After a half hour of back and forth over the pros and cons of what various flowers mean and how they would look together in a bouquet, they finally decide on a bouquet of forget-me-not (for true love), white anemones (for sincerity), and camellias (for waiting) tied together with a blue ribbon the color of Dabi’s eyes. It looks kinda like a bridal bouquet. Hopefully it isn’t coming on too strong. He doesn’t want to seem as desperate as he actually is.

“These flowers look nice,” Hawks says idly as the florist lady (Okumura, he found out. Her quirk is making no noise when she moves which is how she snuck up on him. Thank god he isn’t losing his edge.) rings him up. “Maybe I’ll get some of them next time.”

Okumura glances at the flowers in the vase next to the register. “Those are yellow tulips. They mean ‘unrequited love’ in hanakotoba.”

“Ah, I don’t want those flowers.”

“No, probably not.” She hands him the bouquet. “Three thousand yen, please.”

Hawks pays and bids Okumura goodbye. What a nice lady. She did a great job taking his ridiculous request seriously. If it was him, he would have laughed in his face.

He checks his phone and grimaces. He has less than thirty minutes to drop by the bakery and get to the prison in time for visitation. Hopefully there won’t be a line.

Shit, shit, shit. He’s late. How did this happen? He’s supposed to be the hero that moves too fast.

Hawks hops from foot to foot as the guard, a small woman with a spider web of glowing blue lines around the corner of her eyes, undoes the complicated locks on the heavy, metal prison door. He hates being late. It makes his skin itch.

He fidgets, trying not to drop the pastry box in one hand or the somewhat squashed bouquet in the other. He’s on friendly terms with the baker from his favorite bakery, and the man keeps special reinforced boxes made to withstand flight on hand, but Hawks hadn’t thought of how he would carry the flowers, so he had to stuff them down his jacket.

The prison guard yanks the thick door open with ease, and Hawks nods at her in thanks and enters. (How did she manage that? She’s so petite.)

Dabi is once more handcuffed to the table, reclining in his chair, head back and eyes closed.

“So,” he says, and opens his eyes, piercing Hawks with an intense stare. “You came back.”

Hawks shivers. That look never fails to get him. “I said I would, didn’t I?”

“Did you shave? You look like a twelve year old.”

Good to see that prison didn’t break Dabi’s lovely personality.

“I think it looks nice,” Hawks mumbles. “I brought you something.”

Hawks holds the flowers out to Dabi. He looks at them dispassionately and makes no move to take them. Hawks places the slightly squashed bouquet down carefully in front of him. Dabi looks him straight in the eyes and pushes them off the table with the back of his hand.

Yep. Same old Dabi.

“I have allergies,” he says.

“Noted. Good thing I have backup.” He puts the pastry box on the table in between them with a flourish. He picks at the thick tape, cursing. Goddamnit, why do these things have to be so difficult to open? There’s cake inside, not government secrets. Hawks sharpens one of his feathers and slices through the tape. Dabi huffs out a quiet, amused breath, and Hawks’ cheeks pinken.

He gingerly lifts the slice of cake out of the box. “Tada! I got strawberry shortcake for you and chocolate cannolis for me. And-” He pulls a thermos out of his coat. “-I remember how you feel about cake without milk.”

Dabi resists for all of two seconds before he takes the cake. Hawks tosses him a plastic fork before he can start shoveling it in his mouth with his hands like the heathen he is. Dabi doesn’t thank him, but he’s never thanked anyone for anything before, as far as Hawks is aware, so it’s not like he was expecting it.

“Here. Check this out.” Hawks unscrews the thermos and places the lid on the table. “The top doubles as a cup. Neat, huh?”

Dabi takes the thermos and drinks directly out of the container. Alongside the whole Dabi-is-a-Todoroki-holy-shit revelation was the realization that Dabi came from money and probably had a rich kid’s upbringing. Which means that Dabi knows how to use his manners, he just chooses not to. It’s such a Dabi thing that it makes Hawks smile.

Hawks snags one of the chocolate cannolis. He got two because he knows Dabi will steal one. He takes a bite and sighs with pleasure, his eyes fluttering closed. The crisp shell contrasts perfectly with the creamy filling. Watanuki’s pastries really are the best. (And the most expensive.)

He misses this. He misses eating in silence across from Dabi. He misses the comfortable stillness that comes with familiarity. He misses Dabi.

He slowly opens his eyes and his gaze meets Dabi’s. For a moment he sees his own emotions reflected in those eyes before the walls slam down again.

Dabi snorts and wipes his hands on his prison jumpsuit. “Nice try, birdy, but it’s not gonna work.”

“I brought cards, too.” Hawks slips the deck out of his pocket and takes the cards out of the box. “I thought you could use some entertainment.”

“The cake was a better bribe.”

Hawks shuffles the cards with a perfect riffle and bridge. Dabi can’t do it. Every time he tries he sends the cards flying. It drives him crazy. He pretends it doesn’t bother him, but Hawks knows.

“Do you know how to play bullshit?”

“No.”

“Damn. Neither do I. I saw some people on TV playing it and it looked fun. How about egyptian rat screw?”

“That’s a three player game.”

“Is it? Maybe guard lady can join us.” Hawks turns in his seat to face the guard. Huh. The glowing spiderwebs around her eyes are gone. “Hey guard lady, you wanna play egyptian rat screw?”

Guard lady regards him solemnly then shakes her head.

Dabi snorts. “You’re not going to get anything out of her. She’s got a giant stick up her ass. All about ‘professionalism’ and ‘protocol.’ At least the other guards will talk to you or crack a joke.”

“Fine, fine. Poker, then?”

They play the world’s most boring game of poker. With only two people and no stakes, there’s no risk or room for scheming. When Hawks suggests strip poker, guard lady finally says something for the first time — a sharp ‘no’.

The hour passes too quickly. Dabi’s parting “Fuck off and die” is less venomous than last time, but he’s still shut off. More so than before.

Hawks is going to need some outside advice.

[libralita]

Truths and Roses have Thorns About Them | Interlude (Part 1)

Beginning | Previous Chapter | Next Chapter

Summary: The Marchen Tavern draws in many strange characters from all across Angielle and beyond. While it may bring wonder and mystery to those who stop, it does make keeping staff members a challenge. However, Fella Treslyn is up to the task of being the Marchen’s new cook. But is really ready to deal with all the antics it has to offer?

Note: This chapter will show some of the events of the story from the point of view of Klaude.

Klaude had met her by accident. He had overslept that morning and when he went downstairs to go run errands for the Marchen he had run into someone.

“Oh, excuse me.” He would still never get used to this feminine—yet beautiful—voice coming out of his mouth. It would still always surprise him. He quickly righted whoever bumped into him and took in what he saw. A small young woman with red curls and a rustic blue dress.

“My apologies.” The woman said, bowing her head before quickly moving out of Klaude’s grip. So formal and a little stiff. Then he noticed this girl was not really looking at her and she had a cane. A blind girl.

He asked what her name was and introduced himself as Miss Karma. He tried to ease the anxiety away from her but she seemed on guard. “Ophella. But I go by Fella.” He walked with her to the stairs, making sure she got down okay. She seemed to know what he was trying to do. However, they both played their little game.

“An adorable name for an adorable girl. What brings you to the Marchen, Miss Fella?”

“Work.” She said in a flat tone. However, she did turn to him. “Would you help me with something?” Klaude was a gentleman through and through so he agreed. “Would you take me to the kitchen?”

The kitchen? Dinner was not to be served for a while. Regardless, Klaude gently took Fella’s hand and placed it on his arm. Her hand was rougher than to be expected. Perhaps from hard work. She seemed to have a light country accent. Perhaps she worked on a farm before this. He tried to get more information out of her. He was curious if she was actually there for work or if she was cursed.

“I am its new cook.”

“The cook?” The absolute insanity of Delora—this was obviously her idea—to allow a blind girl to be the cook. She could get hurt.

“Yes, I—”

Oh, dear. Klaude had been so wrapped up in thinking about how dangerous this was that he hadn’t been paying attention to where they were going and Fella stumbled into a chair.

Klaude apologized and then a man came to help her the rest of the way to the kitchen. Klaude was pretty sure his name was Dion and he delivered to the Marchen. Klaude did not go out of his way to talk to many people at the Marchen. If it had nothing to do with getting rid of his curse, then he did not have much interest in it. Plus he did not want anyone to get too close to him.

He could not recall Dion ever attempting to flirt—or worse propose—so Klaude did not know him.

Before they parted ways Klaude confirmed that Fella was going to cook tonight. He promised that he would come. “Then I hope you’ll enjoy it and thank you for your help.”

This response made Klaude more interested in the girl. She said it almost like a challenge—daring him to question whether she could cook or not. He found it amusing. He still thought Delora and Parfait had officially lost their minds but it was amusing. She clearly had something to prove.

He found Delora who was talking to Parfait about their plan for Princess Lucette. “What do you think you’re doing?” Klaude asked in a hushed tone.

“What are you referring to, Miss Karma?” Parfait asked.

“That new cook? She’s blind.”

“We are well aware of that.” Parfait chimed in. “But she can cook and she just…”

“I doubt we could actually get rid of her. She seems determined to sneak into the kitchen and start cooking herself.” Delora said. “She’ll only be cooking a special.”

Klaude shook his head. This was absolute madness.

~

Before Klaude had entered into the dining room of the Marchen, he had been quite annoyed. Garlan and Jurien were pestering him to teach them his sword fighting techniques. He had said yes purely to get them off his back. Now it was getting rather late. He wanted to see what this Fella had to offer.

Klaude was surprised to see so many people filled in the dining room. Often the bar was the most full but today there were barely any seats in the dining room. “Miss Karma, there’s a seat for you,” Annice said, Klaude thanked her and took a seat.

He noticed men looking at him and pointedly ignored them. Annice said there was a special tonight.

“Is that special made by the new cook?” Klaude asked.

“Yes, it’s quite popular.” The sweet girl said.

“Then I will have that and please tell it is for me,” Klaude said and once Annice left he looked around. The Marchen hadn’t been this lively since he arrived. He felt a twinge of guilt for doubting her. The only ones who looked dower were the ones who did not receive the special.

“Everyone.” Delora’s voice went over the crowd and Annice was standing next to her. “I am sorry to say that we are out of the special for tonight.”

Annice and Klaude’s eyes met, she gave him a smile. He took it to mean that had received one. Even though it was mere coincidence, he still felt a little smug that he would be the last one.

In no time at all, Annice came back with a dish. Klaude examined the dish. He was not used to salmon, his own country had more saltwater fish to offer—crab, lobster, cod—but salmon did not disagree with him. He cut it so he would get a piece of vegetable with the fish and delicate place it in his mouth.

Klaude’s eyes widen when flavor exploded his mouth. For a moment he was back in Brugantia, eating one of many of the finest meals that his country had to offer. He dabbed at his mouth, slowly chewing.

He pushed those memories away. No use thinking about them now. However, he still enjoyed this dish. This girl truly was an artist.

~

That night, while Jurien was on patrol he and Garlan practice swordfight. Garlan was not terrible but he was no match for Klaude.

Garlan said he was going to keep practicing while Klaude headed back to the Marchen. He stopped when heard a feminine voice. “Sir, please leave me alone. The Marchen is closed. Go home.”

Klaude paused for a heartbeat before racing down the path.

“Don’t touch me!” It was Fella. She whirled around and swung her cane at the large man. Making the man cry out.

Klaude was a little impressed but he continued over to them. He grabbed Fella and pressed her to him, attempting to keep her from seeing him. He briefly felt dumb for doing this because…she couldn’t see but you never knew with these bloody curses.

“A-A sword?”

“How observant.” Klaude got a good look at this man. He was sloppy and disgusting. But most of all he was attempting to harm a young woman. “I am not one to show mercy, especially to those who harm damsels in distress. So I’d advise you to leave.”

He watched as the man ran away. Then he looked down at Fella who was still pushed against him. Her small body breathed against him as she hid her face in his chest. Finally, she attempted to squirm of his grip. “Let go of me.” She said.

He kept her there and he felt wrong for doing it. “Please, I don’t you to…” The idiocy of this was hitting him again.

“I said let go.” She began to struggle, hitting Klaude.

He grunted when she smacked his chest. “Wait just a mo—” he lost his grip on her and she moved back. Before he could do anything she stepped on her cane and fell into the grass. Klaude winced.

“Fella!” He moved to try to help her up.

“Just leave me alone.” And…she started crying. He stood there stupidly. He did not know what to do in this situation. He hadn’t experienced a woman flailing about to attempt to leave his arms. Then falling on their backside and crying.

“Fella!”

It was Parfait, he watched as the two women went back into the Marchen. He stood there and waited until Parfait gave the all clear for him to come back inside.

~

A few days had passed and Klaude found himself spending more time with Fella. She had first asked to come with him to run errands. She was willing to carrying his bags for him without complaining like Waltz did so that was fine.

Klaude had to be careful about what he said to her. He tried to keep the subject away from the "Swordsman". Though he did have to defend himself a little. Though he found the nickname agreeable.

A few days later, Klaude came into the Marchen with Waltz carrying his things. Ah, another hard day of work. He thought to himself.

He entered the Marchen only to hear Delora say, “This amorous waste of space is about as useful as Karma.”

“I’ve returned!” He called his feminine voice and then gave Delora a smile. “Did you miss me?”

“Why am I carrying these?” Waltz complained.

“Because you made me run that errand for you at the toyshop the other day.” He said and then added with a wink. “And because gentlemen carry things for ladies.”

Waltz was not impressed. “I’m going to drop them now.”

Klaude glared at Waltz. “Those boxes contain very important contents!” He then noticed that a man was staring at him. I am pretty sure this is the man Garlan had found last night.

“So this is our new housemate? We have not had the opportunity to meet, I am—”

Suddenly this—this—idiot grabbed his hand.

“My life before this moment has been a depressing monochrome. Now that you have entered my bleak existence I see everything in beautiful, blazing color. And nothing shines more brightly, more vividly, than you.”

With each word, Klaude’s anger began to grow.

“I am Rumpel, my sweet. Let us talk of marriage.”

You, Rumpel, are so very lucky I do not have my sword.

“Answer, my angel. I beg of you.”

“Keep…” Remain calm, Klaude, remember father.

“Say the word and it is done!”

“…your filthy hands off of me!” Klaude hit him over the head. He had not remained calm.

“Ow!” Rumpel complained.

Waltz let out a sigh, he was now standing next to the princess. “Not again.”

You try being constantly flirted with you, little boy. “I would never be interested in the likes of you,” Klaude said as Annice came running over to make sure this loon was okay.

“Go on lass, give him a good beating! Like the one you gave to me!” Klaude grounded his teeth at the idea that men would enjoy him giving them a beating. Absolute perverts.

“My queen, there is no need for violence.”

“What did you call me?” He asked through gritted teeth. Can’t this man take a hint?!

“Please calm down, Rumpel is still recovering!” Annice’s soft, concerned voice said. He should calm down?!

“What’s going on?” Lucette asked.

Waltz quietly answered to her. “Karma is a man. Doesn’t take kindly to being flirted with. Or proposed to.”

“She…” Lucette began and their eyes met. Lucette had been mostly stone-y faced since she arrived but she gave a very confused look. “Is a man?!”

Klaude glared at her. “Not so loud.”

“But your voice, your face!” Rumpel said looking at Klaude. “Your breasts!”

Before Klaude could get another hit in Delora stepped in and gave him a well-deserved hit.

“Ow!”

“That’s what you’re focusing on? Pervert.”

Rumpel stuck his nose up in the air as if he were proud to say this next line. “I worship all aspects of the female form, but my particular favorite has always been—”

Delora gave him another hit.

“Do yourself a favor and shut up.”

Lucette and Klaude met each other’s gazes. “Don’t look at me like that. I have my reasons.” He said defensively.

“Is it because of your curse?”

“…Yes.” Klaude said quietly.

Before he could dwell on that he noticed Fella coming over. “What’s going on?” She asked, and seemed like she was trying not to smile. Klaude was concerned for a moment. Had she heard that he was a man?

“I…” the idiot began. “I am undo—”

Klaude saw him going over to Fella and take her hand. Was this absolute bell-end going to flirt with everything that isn’t nailed down to the floor?!

“This establishment is truly outstanding to have such beautiful women in it.” Klaude watched as the buffoon pressed his disgusting lips to her delicate hand. Fella blinked a few times before recognizing what he had just done. The poor girl looked absolutely paralyzed with embarrassment. “Spices…were you the angel that prepared my brilliant breakfast?”

“…yes?” She squeaked out a response, her face turning absolutely red. She looked like she did not know what to do.

Delora stepped in. “Rumpel, refrain from killing our cook. We’re pretty sure she’s crazy enough to sta—” Delora glanced to the side, meeting Klaude’s eyes and started to laugh. “Oh, Karma, I have never seen you make that face before.”

“I am merely complementing a beautiful young lady.” The joker said. “Surely I cannot be the first to tell you that your extraordinary cooking matches your beauty.”

Fella looked panicked as to what to do and so said. “I mean who’s going to tell the blind girl she’s ugly?”

Then the imbecile stared at her dumbly. “You’re…blind?”

What an idiot! Klaude thought and he could no longer take this horror show any longer. “I cannot believe you didn’t even realize she was blind.”

The dunderhead moved away, probably realizing that he was going to get hit again if he was not careful. “Do not fault me for being oblivious. It only takes one look to fall madly, irretrievably in love.”

“Ah, so love has blinded you.” Both of them laughed. Fella! Don’t encourage him!

“I guess you could say that.” The clown turned back to Fella and chuckled. “But Miss…?”

“Fella.”

“Miss Fella. May I have a look at your—” OH NO YOU DON’T! Klaude hit him on the head. “Ow!”

“Don’t even think about it!” Klaude, without thinking, grabbed Fella’s forearm. The poor girl was still redder than a tomato. “You are not going to look at her anything. Pervert.”

Rumpel glared at him. “You’re one to talk.” However, the dunce did glance at Fella and then back at Klaude. “I think I must leave. My heart will need time to heal. It has been stepped on by too many…women.”

Bonehead. Klaude dragged Fella out of the dining room. It wasn’t until he heard a quiet voice that he would stop. “Um…Miss karma, where are we going?”

Klaude huffed. “That—that buffoon.”

He saw Fella wave a hand in front of her face in an attempt to cool down her cheeks. “I am actually surprised you didn’t take a liking to him.”

Klaude balked at that idea. “Why on earth would I like such a man, Fella?”

“I thought you would like someone who thinks you are beautiful equally as much as you do.” The way she tilted her head, it signified that she was teasing. “Can you let go of me?”

Klaude looked down and realized he was still holding onto Fella. He quickly let go. That jackass. His own stupidity had completely melted his own brain. “My apologies.”

He watched as she moved to lean against the wall of the tavern. Cheeks still flushed. “What type does interest you?”

Interest me? What is she talking about? “Hmm?”

“A man.” Oh. Klaude was glad she could not see his cheek turning a little pink. “What type of man does interest you? If you do not like the flirtatious types then which do you fancy?”

“I just simply do not like when men flirt with any woman they lay their eyes on as if their feelings did not matter,” Klaude said, avoiding the question. “He certainly was making you very uncomfortable. Your face is as red as my hair.”

Klaude cringed at the expression. However, Fella simply seemed to get more flustered at the thought. “You’re making me blush!” Her face was muffled behind her small hands. “That was the first time a man kissed my hand.”

Oh, you adorable girl… He could not help but think. “Is this your first time being flirted with?”

“Yes.”

Klaude forced out a laugh. “Oh, aren’t you adorable.” He teased. Klaude bent down and moved Fella’s hands from her face. He noticed a curl out of place so tucked it back behind her ears. “Then I am sorry that your first experience was so crude.”

Fella went back to working in the kitchen, Klaude found himself sitting down and thinking about what she asked. What type of man does interest you? If you do not like the flirtatious types then which do you fancy? He was not interested in men. While he may dress like a woman he still preferred women to men. However, what type of woman did he fancy? He thought about all the women he had brief relationships with. Ones he threw away once they no longer interested him.

They were beautiful and…was there anything else about them? Could he even remember half of their names? Did he care?

His eyes were drawn to the doorway where he got a brief glimpse of Fella going out to do something.

~

Klaude was doing his usual rounds, he was not in his Miss Karma disguise so he generally kept to the shadows and alleyways to keep from being noticed. He heard footsteps and was surprised to see Fella hurrying away carrying a bag and another man following after her.

“I already have a job.” Her voice called and then there was the sound of her falling.

Klaude came out of the alleyway and in front of Fella who was still on the ground. He pointed his sword at the man.

“Hey!” The large man cried out. “Where’d you come from?”

“Don’t you know that it is impolite to chase a lady?”

“Hey now, put that thing away!” The man said, backing away as he noticed Klaude’s very deadly weapon. “No need to bring swords into this."

Klaude saw her starting to get up, there was still part of him that was worried she would see him. The idea of her eyes getting that unnatural lustful look made a shiver run down his spine. “Are you okay?” He found himself asking but tried to move away from her line of vision.

“Yeah. Just some scrapes.” She said trying to face him. It was like they were doing a strange dance.

“This is the second time I’ve had to ward off ill-intent men from you.”

“Guess I am an easy target,” Fella said, feeling for her bag on the ground and then picked it up. She still attempted to face his general direction. “Thank you for both times, sir.”

“I will always come to the aid of a damsel.” He said, seriously.

A smile played on her lips. “Are you always so dramatic?”

Dramatic? Try heroic! He did snort. “I am merely attempted to strike fear into those who would harm a lady.”

“I will take that as a yes.”

He could not help but chuckle. She was not trembling or crying like a scared girl. She seemed to let any negative thing roll off her back.

“Can you make it back to the Marchen?” He asked. They could not stay out here for too long.

“Yes…but who are you?” And how do you know me?”

“I do not know you.”

“You knew my name when we first met.” Dammit! He recalled when had rescued her the first time and he had called out her name when she fell. Idiot. “Ah, you made a mistake, huh?”

Well, the jig was up. “Perhaps you are just too smart for your own good, Fella.” He took a step toward her and said in a more serious tone. “You need to take your safety more into consideration.”

Klaude could see by the way her cheeks turned a little red and based on the frown on her face, that was a mistake to say. Did she find it condescending? She bowed her head slightly. Such a formal girl.

Klaude gently moved her chin up with his index finger. She was not a girl to have her head lowered and to be meek. Though I am not unsatisfied with that blush on her face. “Do not take this as me implying that you cannot take care of yourself, Fella. You can, but you need to be more careful.” Once he knew she would keep her head up he moved his finger. He made his voice more cheeky. “But if you need rescuing I cannot deny a lady in distress. I will be there to protect you if needed.”

Klaude was very satisfied when he saw her face start to turn even redder. He briefly thought about that idiot Rumpel. Bell-end. “And if you ever needed someone beaten by a cane, I’ll be there.” Her voice was a little bit shriller from her embarrassment but she still said response with confidence.

Klaude laughed. She was such a silly girl. “Goodnight, my lady.”

“Goodnight, Swordsman.” Is that just my nickname now? Klaude watched her go, she was close enough to the Marchen that he knew she would be safe to get back. He could not help but smile at her back.

~

Why is Fella sitting with Garlan and Lucette? Klaude found himself asking himself and then shook it away. “Am I missing the fun?” Klaude made the entire table jump in surprise.

Klaude and Garlan met each other’s eyes. “Not you, too.” He complained.

“Is this about Jurien?” Klaude asked making Garlan groan louder.

Lucette frowned at Klaude. “Wait, you knew, too?”

“Of course, I did. It is quite obvious.”

Lucette had a look on her face that she did not find it obvious. The princess looked to Garlan. “Why don’t you just tell her?”

Oh, Lucette. “She is talented and poised,” Garlan said, looking at the table. “I could never be good enough for her.”

“You’ll never win a woman’s heart if you don’t compliment her looks as well, Garlan,” Klaude said, he felt vapid just saying that.

Fella let out a snort. “Ignore her.” Though Klaude gave an offended gasp to play along. “I doubt that Jurien would go for flattery. You are a wonderful man, Garlan.”

“I can see why you wouldn’t tell her.” Lucette chimed in. Lucette!

Garlan looked even glummer. “Because she’s…better than me.”

“No.” Thank goodness you have some common sense, Princess. “Because if you told her and she refused, then it would be difficult afterwards.”

Klaude forced himself not to look at Fella.

Garlan was currently floundering because he accidentally implied that Lucette was stupid. Well, he didn’t really imply, she just took it that way. Klaude smoothed out the conversation enough for Garlan to leave the table.

“Do you think he’ll confess?” Fella asked her quietly. “You have known him longer than either of us.”

Klaude looked at her a moment. “Confessing isn’t easy, Miss Fella. Surely you must realize that the possibility of rejection is a significant deterrent.”

“But if you never ask, you will never get the answer. The stress of worrying stay with you and ruins everything.” Lucette retorted.

Fella thought for a moment, appearing to way both of their opinions. “They have both know each other for years, surely he would know that confessing his feelings won’t change anything in the relationship.”

“The scariest part of a confession is the possibility of rejection.” An imagine flashed into Klaude’s mind, the idea of Fella rejecting him. Thorns pricked his chest. Where had that come from? “Can you imagine loving someone and then finding out they don’t feel the same way about you? Can either of you?”

Something Klaude had said touched a nerve with Lucette. She quickly left the table. Klaude was about to go after her before Fella moved first. Fella then left to go talk to the princess. Klaude found himself watching her go.

~

Klaude went downstairs and glanced at the sitting room. He saw Fella let her hair down from her two tails. It was getting rather long. He went into the sitting room and said in his feminine voice. “A lovely girl like you should not frown. What’s wrong?”

“My hair is getting too long.”

Fella looked concerned. “Would you like me to give it a try?” Klaude found himself asking. Fella pursed her lips and he was a little offended.

“What? You don’t trust me?”

“I trust you…” Fella said, her voice trailing off. She was teasing him again. “Do I trust you to cut my hair?”

“Miss Fella, why do you wound me so?” He asked. She trusts me… Klaude moved closer to her and gently took one of her curls. It was so soft in Klaude’s hand. “I think I should be able to do it. You want it manageable but still, be able to pull it back when you have to work.”

Fella gave him a funny look. “Do you pay close attention to other people’s hair?” She paused, feeling at her hair, and sighed. “Fine.”

“So you do trust me, Fella.”

“Do you think either of Delora or Parfait have a hair-growing-back spell?”

Klaude was a bit indignant at the idea. He was not some brute. However, he took Fella to his room and sat her at his vanity. He went through his drawers and found a pair of scissors. Then he went behind her and started brushing her cute curls.

Then he began cutting once he found the right length that Fella would want. He asked her what she thought of it.

“Wow, you did an excellent job. Thank you so much, Miss Karma.”

“I am happy to help.” He said moving the cloth from Fella and gently wiping away any stray hairs. He glanced up at the vanity and saw both women in them. Fella was about to get up but he stopped her. “Why don’t I put some makeup on you?”

“Makeup?” Klaude saw a flash of something on her face. Worry? Panic? “I am cooking tonight, won’t it just melt off?”

“I won’t do too much. It won’t drip in the food, I promise.” Klaude to be light hearted but he was curious as to why the idea of putting on makeup was distasteful to her. However, she did not have to get her makeup done if she did not want to. “Do you not want your makeup done?”

Fella shrugged and force a smile. There was something so sad about it. Fella was full of smiles and cheer. Seeing it being force was…heartbreaking. “What’s the point? I won’t see it.”

“Despite what you might think I am not constantly looking at myself in a mirror. Makeup can make you feel good. You do not have to let me do your makeup if you do not wish.”

The girl paused and thought about it before finally raising her face to Klaude. “Okay.” There’s that confidence I know. Klaude could not help but smile. It was a bit distressing to see Fella looking uncertain. He saw her sit up straighter as if trying to challenge him.

That was more like it.

When he instructed her to turn her face she did but there was a thoughtful expression on her face. “I met Swordsman again.”

“You did?” Klaude tried to keep his tone neutral.

“He had to save me once again. He is…very dramatic.” There’s that word again! I am not dramatic. Heroic!

“Is it not expected to be dramatic? He is a dashing hero.” Klaude could not help himself from saying.

Klaude pouted a little when he saw a smile play on her lips like she was about to laugh. “He did know who I was. He tried to deny it but I caught him in a lie.” You truly are too smart for your own good. “He will not tell me who is he.”

“Perhaps he has a reason to keep it a secret.”

“He obviously has a reason otherwise he would just say it.”

Time to change the subject. “Perhaps this is a sign that you should be more careful about leaving the Marchen. This is the second time you needed to be rescued by that man.”

“I am not an invalid, Karma.”

“I know.” Calm. “I know, Fella. While there are wonderful people like that man who is willing to protect you, you also need to worry about your protection.”

Fella let out a sigh as Klaude continued to finish his makeup. He was doing it a bit on autopilot but when he really looked at it, he was almost startled at how beautiful she really was. Makeup was there to enhance beauty and Klaude had done just that.

“There we are. It’s subtle but it makes all the difference.”

Fella had a thoughtful look on her face. Klaude felt a light blush start form on his face at seeing her. I have done an excellent job…clearly.

“Miss Karma, do you think I’m attractive?” Sometimes Fella would really look at someone when she spoke to them. It was surely just a coincidence but at this moment she had and Klaude could not help the sound escaping his mouth. Thank every god known to man this girl is blind. “N-Not like that!” She was waving her hands and blushing. “I mean…like…y’know?”

Klaude felt his face turn pinker at the idea. Remain in character. He forced out a laugh and gently put his hands on Fella’s slim shoulders. He wanted to tease her but could not bring himself to do that. He had to be honest “Do not be so embarrassed, Miss Fella, I understand what you are trying to ask. I am sure that people call you pretty and doll-like. But you are not that. Dolls are lifeless and frail. You are anything but that. You are a vibrant, beautiful young woman. Any person who looks at you can see that.”

Fella bowed her head. “Thank you…I don’t even know why I asked that question but thank you.”

Klaude was about to respond before it felt like dozens of small thorns were piercing his chest. He could help the gasp of pain that escaped his lips. What made it worse was the look of concern that crossed Fella’s face. “Karma! Are you alright?”

Klaude felt Fella’s hand touch his arm wear he clutch his chest. “I’m fine, dear.” He strained to say. “I promise.”

“Are you certain? Should I get Rumpel or Annice?”

Do not speak that man’s name. Klaude push down that thought and pain worsened.

“I promise that I’m fine,” Klaude said and managed to pat Fella’s head. “I think you need to prepare for dinner. I will have to go out tonight.”

“But—”

“Fella, please, I am truly fine. I just wish to be alone.”

Fella bowed to Klaude and then quietly left his room. Once he heard she was gone he gasped in pain again. No. Not again. Never again.

~

“Wow, this food is better than the palace food,” Jurien said, eating one of Fella’s dishes.

Klaude had managed the pain and was now eating with Jurien and Garlan. The Marchen continued to become busier. Fella truly was gifted. Jurien and Garlan enjoyed the food but Klaude could not help but notice Garlan’s short glances at Jurien.

“Yes.” Klaude agreed, taking a bite of the salmon. “I cannot believe that her food just gets better and better.”

“You two have been getting pretty close, huh?” Garlan asked.

“I suppose you could say that. She accompanies me into town.” Klaude said in a nonchalant way. “She is like a puppy, always following me around.”

“Don’t tell me you make a blind girl carry your bags,” Jurien said, looking annoyed at him but he just gave her an innocent smile.

Garlan cleared his throat. “Y’know Karma…maybe you should tell her.”

Klaude put another piece of fish in his mouth to avoid responding to that.

“Yeah, you can’t keep it secret forever.” Jurien agreed.

“She could be affected by my curse,” Klaude said, dabbing at his lips but he knew that excuse was weak. “And things become messy when women see me.”

Jurien gave him a look. “She’s blind.”

“Karma if she’s your friend she’ll understand.” Garlan pointed out.

Klaude smirked at him. “How ironic coming from you.”

Garlan blushed and Jurien looked confused. “What is that supposed to mean?” He waved her off. Jurien was a smart woman but she would never figure out Garlan’s feelings for her. Every night during their sword practice, Klaude would privately ask Garlan if he had confessed yet. He had not.

And he probably never will. Klaude thought to himself and took a sip of his drink. And I probably will never tell Fella. Perhaps we are both cowards.

~

“Karma!” Klaude turned to see Garlan. “Three blocks away, some knights are taking Fella to the palace.”

Klaude was surprised, he wanted to ask why they were doing that but he did not want to lose where Fella was. Those knights must have been armored if Garlan was coming to me. Klaude thought the former knight could handle a two on one fight but not when they had armor. Klaude, however, could.

He raced off in the direction of where they went. As Klaude ran he made sure that he had the memory-erasing potion. “Miss, if it makes you feel any better, we’re risking our rank on this as well.”

Found you.

“I don’t know, I suspicious of—” The man cut off when Klaude strode up to them.

“Who goes there!” Sure enough, they were in armor.

“Gentlemen, I ask you to unhand that woman. As a knight, I would be ashamed to be seen treating a lady so terribly.”

“And who are you?”

“Her husband.” Klaude could not even believe himself for saying. What was he thinking? He almost laughed at seeing Fella’s confused expression.

“Unhand her, gentleman,” he said moving on from whatever that was, “or taste my blade.”

“Sir, we were just going to take her to the palace to—”

“I will give you on the count of three.”

One of the knights still held onto Fella but the other readied his sword, going towards Klaude as he counted. He was a man of his sword and it wasn’t until three that he unsheathed his sword and engaged in combat. Klaude defeated the first knight however he hissed when he got a cut on her back of his right hand.

“I yield, sir!” The other knight said once his friend had been defeated.

“…It seemed no matter how this situation turns out you are dishonorable,” Klaude said, feeling a pinch of sympathy for the knight.

“P-please, sir!”

“Don’t harm him! He was only doing his job.” Fella cried out just as Klaude knocked the knight out. I wasn’t going to kill either of them. I know they are merely doing their job. He went up to their knocked out bodies and put the potion in their mouths. “This is becoming a concerning pattern, Swordsman.”

He had to finish administering the potion before Fella asked if he was hurt. He looked at his hand. It had stopped bleeding.

“I got hit on the hand but it is no problem, I promise. But I thank you for the worry, my lady.”

“Then let me help you. Come with to the Marchen. I am so sorry you were hurt because of me.” Fella tugged at his arm and he looked down on her. Suddenly he felt a wave of tiredness. He had been tired a lot recently. It caused him to snap at that idiot Rumpel.

Klaude took her hand with his good hand. “I’ll take you back to the Marchen but I promise you don’t have to worry about me.” He did not want her to worry about him. Really, all he wanted to do was rest. And make sure Fella is safe. This girl really can't stay out of—

“Swordsman?” They were walking together, hand in hand as Klaude’s mind was wandering.

“Sorry, Fella, but I am not in the mood to talk.” He was always so tired lately.

“B-But, Swordsman!”

Klaude frowned, getting annoyed. “Fella, I just said that I am not in the mood to talk. Did you not hear me?”

“We’re being followed!”

Huh? Klaude turned and saw…a bunch of women staring at him. Oh no… Klaude let out a laugh. It sounds quite pathetic to his ears. He did not know how to get out of this situation. They started to move closer to him.

Then Fella tightened her grip on his hand and she started running, pulling him along. He’s startled both by the fact that they are now running together and horrid voices screaming after them. Slinging insults and threats towards Fella. The girl only ran faster.

Klaude was shaken out of his tired daze when they began running. He started leading Fella otherwise they would both end up lost. Or run into something. Klaude found himself going towards the bakery Fella and he shared a cupcake. He enjoyed the sound of the fountain. Plus not many people come around here at this time of night.

“What…on earth…was that?” Fella asked, trying to catch her breath.

Klaude kept quiet, pretending to catching his breath to come up with an excuse. When he looked over at her, he could practically see her mind working. Don’t say I’m cursed. Don’t say I’m cursed. Don’t say I’m—

“You’re cursed.” Dammit. “That’s why those women came after us.”

He chuckled softly but he felt panic rise in his chest. “You really are too smart for your own good.”

“What is your curse?”

Klaude looked at her for a moment. The rational side of his brain told him to come up with a way to change the subject. Don’t get too close to her. Not again. However, he saw that determination. She was not going to let this go.

“I suppose after you saved me, I do owe you this. I will tell you a story, my lady.” Klaude could not recall the last person he told those story to. Perhaps Parfait? The story of how he was a vain prince where he would always try to shirk any responsibility. Then one day his foolishness cost him everything. He watched her face through it all. He remembered seeing the pity on Parfait’s face. Fella just seemed…sad. He did not know if that made him feel better or not.

Fella guessed that his curse was based on Beauty and the Beast and he confirmed it.

“But if you knew who I was, then why did you worry about me seeing you. I cannot see you.”

Klaude cleared his throat, trying to keep the pout out of his voice. “I was not sure if it would or would not work on you. These curses are strange. It does not work on the cursed, fairies, or witches. You are none of those things so I could have not been sure.”

Fella blinked at him and then smirked. “How silly.” Klaude felt his face flushed and made an annoyed sound. Fella giggled but continued to have a thoughtful look on her face. “So…is the way to break the curse for a woman to fall in love with you? Like what the beast had to do in the story?”

Dammit. “I…think it is time for you to go back to the Marchen, Fella.” He stood up quickly.

“Do you live at the Marchen?”

“No.”

Liar.

“Why not?”

“Fella, please, no more questions. I have given you my story—my name—please just let it go.”

Fella pursed her lips. He knew in the back of his mind that she was never going to drop the issue. However, she bowed her head. “Please forgive me for being so rude, Prince Klaude.” Klaude's face must have matched his hair at hearing his name leave her lips. Parfait and Delora rarely used his actual name.

Fella must have noticed that saying his name made him flustered because a smile played on her lips. Stop being so satisfied with getting me flustered! Two can play at that game. He put on his most seductive voice. “First, please just Klaude is fine…or Swordsman, it is a rather endearing nickname.” He raised her face with his finger and continued. “Second, I still must thank you for saving me back there. You could have left me behind and gone on alone. I will be forever grateful.”

Fella blushed. “W-Well you’ve helped me enough times. Besides I don’t think I will get a chance to beat someone with a cane so…”

“I am sure your time will come.”

Fella chuckled softly and then frowned a little. “It truly is a terrible curse, Klaude.”

How surprising… “Hmm? Most people think it is not worth complaining about.”

Fella shook her head. “They were so…” she flinched at the memory of it, “creepy and unnatural.”

“Agreed.”  A brief thought about when he was first cursed. He remembered all the strange things those women would do. He remembered the first morning his maid crawled into bed with him. The most prudish of noblewomen would suddenly want to start touching him. One woman came at him with scissors to get a lock of his hair. He shook his head, driving away those memories.

They were heading back to the Marchen together, Klaude made sure to take a route that would keep them out of view. “I am starting to think you won’t listen to me if I tell you to stay out of trouble.”

“I swear I am not doing this on purpose.”

“Even if you were, I cannot deny a beautiful maiden in distress.”

Fella then turned away from him, embarrassed. “Goodnight, Swordsman.”

Goodnight, Fella.

~

Today was one of Klaude’s bad days. One in which he hated everything. He hated every sound that banged in his ears. He hated the Marchen. He hated his father. He hated the witch that cursed him. I hate myself.

He sat alone and glared at anyone who came near him. He noticed Garlan and Jurien coming over. Hand in hand. He had helped in part to get them together now he just felt bitter. The couple had taken one look at Klaude and took then hint to leave him alone.

And then he saw Fella. However, she did not try to come near him. Instead, she got distracted with Jurien and Garlan being disgusting. He watched their conversation. At Fella teasing them and laughing along. She propped her face up with her hands, she was short enough that her feet did not touch the ground in the tall chair she was sitting in so she swung her legs back and forth. Her nose wrinkled when she smiled as she encouraged their display.

“You can’t see it but Garlan is extremely red.” Their voices began to sound muffled as Klaude felt his anger boil. Shut up.

“Y-You were blushing just as much yesterday when I—”

Shutup. Shutup. Shutup.

“One more word Lan and I swear I’ll punch you!”

I said shut up.

And then a laugh. Fella’s laugh. Thorns piercing his heart. “You two are too cute.”

…not again…

“Could you keep it down over there?” He glared at the table and Fella was startled at hearing him. Her head wiped around, curls bouncing as she looked at him questioningly.

Jurien blushed a little. “Oh, we’re sorry.”

“Is…everything alright?” Fella asked, facing toward Klaude. Don’t look at me like that. He could tell she was trying to keep the annoyance out of her tone.

“I am just fine.”

“Well…” Jurien said, clearing her throat. “Thank you, Fella, and the princess for helping Lan confess. Last night really was great.”

I hate you.

“If you two insisted on being so affectionate, you should get a room.”

“Affectionate?” Both Fella and Jurien said at the same time. He could not tell who looked more ready for a fight Jurien or Fella.

Fella crossed her arms. “Miss Karma, why are you acting like this? Irritation or tiredness is no excuse for rudeness.”

“…Fine. I apologize. Happy?” He stared at Fella and she was not buying this apology. Stop it, Klaude. Strangely the voice in his mind was his father’s. Klaude looked away in shame. I loathe myself. “…I’m sorry.”

The Tavern had gone entirely quiet. Everyone seemed interested in their conversation. Klaude excused himself and left. The last thing he saw was Fella’s arms cross and she looked upset.

He went into his room and immediately took of his disguise. He stumbled over to his vanity, rattling some of the bottles on top. And stared at his reflection. “Calm.” He said. He chased away those evil thoughts. That anger that was not his own. Or was it his? He could not tell anymore. He clenched his teeth when he felt the pain. He did everything he could to stifle the pained cry.

~

The next few days Klaude stayed his room. He was doing one of two things: lying on his bed, feverish and sweating or staring at his reflection at the rose tattoo that was slowly being engulfed by thorns.

He was laying his bed, sweating out a fever. He raised his hand in the air. He was seeing three of his hands but they were still his.

He heard a knock at the door. “Miss Karma…?”

Leave me alone, idiot girl.

Klaude stumbled out of bed he was about to just go to the door before a small part of him told him to get the potion to disguise his voice. He downed the potion and gagged. He was almost certain he was going to throw it back up before it finally settled in his empty stomach.

Klaude went up to the door and opened it. He then grabbed her and pulled her into his room so no one would see him. “Why do you do this, Fella?” Who is speaking to her…is that me?

“I…I came to speak with you.”

“Why? Because you’ve been doing everything by yourself lately? You come to complain? Or giggle and gossip about that man?” An image of Rumpel flashed through his mind. End him.

“No, I wanted to check on you.”

Idiot girl.

“Fella, can’t you read the mood?” He moved so that his arms were on either side of her, pinning her against the wall. She looked at him in fear and the pain in his chest became worse. Her hands trembled and she crushed something in her hands but she not move. “Why? Why aren’t you struggling and attempting to run away? Or beat me with your cane?”

“You…you aren’t dangerous.”

“Then you know nothing about me!”

What have I become? I hate this. Witch, please. Come and end this. He did everything he could to push back the anger and the pain, bring himself back.

“No, I don’t…but I am your friend and I want to help you. I can’t when you keep secrets.”

“Help me?” The bitterness came back. The anger. But he felt tears burn his eyes. “Secrets are secrets for a reason, Fella. You should know that. If I could speak about them I would. But I can’t. And you trying to poke your nose into my business is only making it harder.”

Klaude’s anger and bitterness was replaced with something worse. The depressing hopelessness. The anger was a shadowy figure, always in the back of his mind ready to pounce when he showed a moment of weakness. But that depression was always wrapped around his neck, threatening to suffocate him. It was an endless blackness that tempted him to jump. To end all this misery.

“Fella, you cannot imagine what this feels like.” He started to lose himself again. An image of a beautiful woman reserving in his mind. “And that woman! I’d thought she was the one to break my curse. Her smile was as bright as the sun…” And then the look of terror when she saw what he really was. “That’s why…never again…but then you ruined everything, Fella. You—”

Fella’s face turned from fear and concern to hot anger as moved away from Klaude’s grasp. Klaude stumbled back. “I am not going to be blamed liked this. If you wish to be alone then enjoy yourself.”

“Fella, wait!” He remembered himself for a moment and reached for her. But she left before he could. He then looked down and saw something red on his arm. He briefly panicked thinking it was blood but it was not the right color. There was also orange and yellow mixed in. He looked to where Fella stood and bent down. He picked up a ruined cardboard box with some…cake in there? He noticed something green it and pulled it out.

A chameleon.

She had bought a cupcake and Klaude had ruined it. Just like he ruined everything.

[toshootforthestars]

Trump only knows how to play a few notes, but he absolutely fucking lives to make noise. And for better or worse, the sounds the man makes are distinctive, to the point where there’s both a bleak comedy and buried burlesque in his staffers’ game attempts to replicate his usual bombast and peevy rhetorical curlicues in his more overtly ghostwritten tweets.

This is what it means to elect an absolutely finished man—someone who cannot grow or care or even reconcile himself to any new thing—to a job like the presidency. Everything Trump does sounds the same, because whether it happens on Twitter or in the quintuple-byline newspaper stories about bleary behind-the-scenes White House upbraidings, it fundamentally is the same. Trump will always and only be upset about the same things in the same stupid way; he will stay mad about them even as the country shudders and cracks around him. It will never be any way but this for him, because Donald Trump will never be any way but this.

Every day unfolds in the shadow of this sour and soggy fact—that recursive and stubborn idiocy is at the heart of why the federal government has effectively and intentionally abandoned the management of a (still) rampaging pandemic because the president thinks it’s both boring and a loser of a campaign issue. This blank, militant incomprehension of the world at large is also the chief explanation for the new battalions of uniformed state agents loyal only to the president who’ve been dispatched to kidnap and gas protesters in American cities because the president saw statues being toppled on the news. Living with the knowledge that we’re being governed by a bottomly malicious dope who actively and openly wishes much of the country ill is unsettling. There is a basic presumption of good faith built into the broader American project: Presidents might be right or wrong, but they are at least supposed to try. But that is not where we are, because that is not the kind of president we have. And so all of this is still very much being worked out from one moment to the next, as Americans try to figure out how to live in a country so manifestly abandoned.

That’s not really new work for many communities, but it is also a lot to try to pick up on the fly. Trump’s presidency has long played as a vicious satire of American politics in the way that it stripped every cheesy grift and smug savagery of its familiar euphemism and disguise: All the violence that previous administrations in both parties had justified with administrative static or ideological fuzz are now scuttling and swaggering hideously in the open. The long-standing technocratic debate over whether and how well it all “worked” was answered in the most unflattering way through the exposure of how it worked. What had once seemed a flawed but extant system grounded in variously compromised institutions was suddenly visible as a series of naked and individuated deals; “working” for any other purpose, least of all a rough approximation of the common good, was simply never the point.

So, for example, what originated as a bipartisan border crackdown assiduously marketed as a smart and streamlined approach was revealed as a brutal bureaucracy feeding an archipelago of concentration camps overseen by the unaccountable dregs of the Violence Worker community. And in response to the pandemic, the Republican version of a long-standing business-positive economic policy consensus stepped forward as a regime of frank and unapologetic redistribution that exalted the interests of capital over those of workers so profoundly that the relationship between the two was no longer even identifiable; industrial giants received billions of dollars on demand and seemingly on principle while out-of-luck workers braved denuded state bureaucracies and waited on hold to see what pittance they might get. (The unfortunate jobholders deemed “essential” to the daily operation of the economy were dispatched to face a life-threatening pandemic, hymned as heroes snd, briefly, given a nominal bump in their hourly salaries. The less said about what would happen to them if they were forced to tap into their stingy and punitive health insurance plans the better.)

Through it all, Trump’s tweets and damply volatile public presence have always been just what they were; the sheer bulk of the man’s damage has always crowded out subtext. There was never any chance that he would grow with or into his important new job, and he has never even suggested otherwise.

He has had exactly the presidency that his public life would suggest—a brazen win, followed by an inevitable decline born of laziness and pure hubristic dipshittery, and finally a catastrophic and vehemently denied collapse. This is the story of his life, and the story of his presidency.

...

For decades, Trump has woken up to the chaos that his venality built for him the day before and spent his waking hours running from and denying it. It should have ruined him, but the cushion of his wealth and blithe sociopathy, combined with a culture built to protect people just as defective as him, all conspired to prevent that outcome. Now Trump’s self-imposed regimen of chaos for chaos’s sake is doing its best to ruin everything else. Of course it feels bad.

The thing to do is to fight against it, and it is heartening to see that happening all across the country; the widespread protests that began after the police murder of George Floyd are by now the largest and most sustained in the nation’s history.

Trump and the institutions loyal to him still have it in their power to deal out and evade responsibility for immense and terrifying violence. Some of the unreality of everyday life in Trump’s America stems both from how unprecedented the movement against all this is and the latent threat arrayed against it from a state that can no longer really manage to do much but inflict harm. But there is also a clue as to how things slipped so devastatingly out of joint buried in Trump’s undignified and uninterrupted normality.

Whatever is or isn’t in his still-contested tax returns, there are no secrets to reveal about Trump. Everybody knows that there is no crime he wouldn’t commit, just as a practical fact, but it’s the toxic mundanity of the “normal” Trump that does the most damage from one moment to the next.

The usual people and institutions pointed out, during the Trump family’s counteroffensive on behalf of Goya, that the advertisements the Trumps cut for the brand online were ethics violations. It felt almost quaint, given both the broader context of his presidency and the narrower one of its brutal apotheosis. In its pettiness and its criminal obtuseness, in its laziness and its latent viciousness, everything he does is transparently a violation.

Confronted with a pandemic that’s claimed the lives of 140,000 Americans, he shrugs and announces, “It is what it is,” and turns with much more interest to some new litany of culture war fabrications. And it’s for this array of self-administered inertia and delusion that the federalized corps of violence workers is now beating and gassing Navy veterans and suburban moms in the streets of Portland.

Amid the wreckage he’s made, the president goes about his business as usual, unmasked and at war with everyone who isn’t him.

Dave Roth: Donald Trump Is Devouring His Country

The New Republic  /   22 July 2020

An absolute must-read, click the link above.

(source, above, because why not)

[gibsongirlselections]

19th Century Radical Chic: The Transcendentalists’ Love Affair With John Brown

Many Americans have been aghast at violent mobs toppling statues and the widespread looting and destructive rampages that followed the killing of George Floyd. Media coverage often ignores the damage inflicted by righteous rioters and the businessmen, black and white, whose livelihoods have been destroyed. Instead, activists are portrayed as heroic because of their  political rhetoric and demands for radical changes. 

Soaring political animosity is sparking fears of much greater conflicts in the coming months. More than 160 years ago, a similar pattern paved the way for a conflict that ravaged much of the nation. Few people are aware of how one of America’s most respected philosophers helped inflame the divisions that led to the first Civil War in 1861.

In his 1849 essay, “On the Duty Of Civil Disobedience,” Henry David Thoreau boldly declared: “That government is best which governs not at all.” After a night spent in jail for refusing to pay taxes, Thoreau “saw that the State was half-witted.” He concluded, “I quietly declare war with the State,” withdrawing his allegiance as long as the government enforced unjust laws. 

But late in his life, Thoreau mutated into an apologist for bloodthirsty political fanaticism. Thoreau, following in the footsteps of his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson, believed that “our whole life is startlingly moral. There is never an instant’s truce between virtue and vice.” Thoreau was a Transcendentalist with boundless faith in absolute truth and absolute goodness. And he never doubted that he perceived those absolutes far more clearly than the vast majority of people who “lead lives of quiet desperation,” as he wrote in Walden.

Thoreau was justifiably fiercely opposed to slavery. He had initially been wary of fire-breathing Abolitionists who wanted the nation to pay any price to end slavery until he met and swooned for John Brown in 1857. Thoreau donated to Brown after hearing him make a rabble-rousing speech. Thoreau bragged that he “never read” the political columns in newspapers because “I do not wish to blunt my sense of right.” Maybe that helped explain Thoreau’s obliviousness (or lack of concern) regarding Brown’s notorious murders in Pottawatomie, Kansas, when he and his sons hacked to death five men living in a pro-slavery portion of the state. That 1856 carnage embodied one of Brown’s favorite sayings: “Without the shedding of blood, there is no remission of sin.”

In October 1859, Brown led a band of zealots attacking Harper’s Ferry, Virginia to seize the federal arsenal, part of his plan to end slavery via the mass killing of slaveowners across the South. Mount Holyoke University professor Christopher Benfey aptly characterized Brown in the New York Review of Books in 2013 as someone who was “murderous, inept, politically marginal, probably insane.” Most of the nation was horrified by Brown’s attack at Harper’s Ferry, which was speedily put down by federal troops led by Lt. Colonel Robert E. Lee. Even the nation’s foremost abolitionist newspaper, The Liberator, condemned Brown’s attack as “a misguided, wild, and apparently insane–effort.” Horace Greeley wrote in  the New York Tribune that “the way to universal emancipation lies not through insurrection, civil war, and bloodshed, but through peace, discussion, and quiet diffusion of sentiments of humanity and justice.” 

But Thoreau decided that Brown was literally Jesus—or at least that Jesus and John Brown were “two ends of a chain which I rejoice to know is not without its links.” In “A Plea for John Brown,” an oration delivered in Concord, Massachusetts two weeks after Brown’s attack, Thoreau referred to Brown as an “angel of light” and described Brown’s Harper’s Ferry accomplices as his “twelve disciples.” Thoreau hailed “the new saint who would make the gallows as glorious as the cross.”

Thoreau exalted Brown: “No man has appeared in America, as yet, who loved his fellow man so well, and treated him so tenderly.” That was balderdash on par with Stalin’s apologists gushing in the 1930s about the “peace-loving Soviet Union.” When Thoreau and Emerson met Brown in 1857, Brown told them that it would be “better for a whole generation of men, women, and children should pass away by violent death” than for the Golden Rule or Declaration of Independence to ever be violated. Rather than recognizing Brown as a lunatic seeking a pretext to slaughter much of humanity, Thoreau and Emerson hailed him as a moral visionary. But they never explained how to reconcile the Golden Rule with genocide. 

For Thoreau, Brown’s self-evident goodness made his killings irrelevant. Thoreau declared, “The question is not about the weapon, but the spirit in which you use it.” As University of Connecticut Professor Michael Meyer noted in 1980, “Thoreau’s Transcendentalism allowed him to disregard any information about Brown which might have tarnished his image as  martyr.” Thoreau focused on Brown’s “willingness to be killed—rather than Brown’s willingness to kill indiscriminately for his cause. Thoreau never mentions that the first man killed by Brown’s raiding party at Harper’s Ferry was a free black man who was shot in the back.” Similarly, Thoreau touted Brown’s fight against slavery in Kansas but never mentioned the Pottawattomie massacre. Thoreau also entitled himself to disregard any publications which vigorously criticized Brown: “they are not human enough to affect me at all.”

Thoreau and Emerson rallied northern opinion to view Brown as a martyr; Emerson also explicitly defined Brown as a “new saint” and labeled him “the rarest of heroes, a pure idealist.” David Reynolds, a CUNY professor and author of a book on how John Brown “sparked the Civil War,” wrote in 2013 that Thoreau and Emerson’s “bold, virtually solitary public support of John Brown rescued Brown from infamy.” Thoreau and Emerson swayed northerners to see Brown as a hero; Thoreau’s “plea” concluded with a call for vengeance against the South. As a result, “many Southerners viewed the raid as a larger Northern scheme to directly attack the South, leading to increased sectional distrust and accelerating the approach of secession in 1861,” as the American Battlefield Trust noted.

For Thoreau and Emerson, “trust yourself” was effectively replaced by “kill them all and let God sort them out.” Thanks in part to their efforts, “a passion for the violent solution to slavery was sweeping the abolitionist citizens of the nation,” as historian Thomas Fleming wrote in A Disease in the Public Mind: A New Understanding of Why We Fought the Civil War.

Radical Republican Congressional leaders “unanimously agreed that the integrity of the Union should be preserved, though it cost a million lives,” the New York Times reported on Christmas Day 1860. Massachusetts governor John Albion declared, “We must conquer the South.” Pro-war Bostonians urged the governor to “drive the ruffians into the Gulf of Mexico and give the country to the Negroes.” Massachusetts’ zealots were matched by fanatic South Carolina secessionists who idiotically believed that firing on Fort Sumter was a great idea. Confederate Secretary of State Robert Toombs warned Confederate President Jefferson Davis to oppose launching an attack: “The firing on that fort will inaugurate a civil war greater than any the world has yet seen … Mr. President, at this time it is suicide, murder, and you will lose us every friend in the North.” But Davis ordered Gen. P.T. Beauregard to open fire. 

Thoreau’s canonization of John Brown helped drive the nation to a Civil War that left more than 700,000 soldiers dead. With each passing year, the conflict became more unhinged from basic decency. Shortly before he launched his famous swath of destruction through Georgia in 1864, Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman telegraphed the Secretary of War that  “there is a class of people—men, women, and children—who must be killed or banished before you can hope for peace and order.” 

Though the end of slavery was a blessing, the war’s aftermath unleashed new poxes. As a result of illness, poverty, and negligence by federal officials, roughly 25 percent of freed slaves died or became gravely ill in the first years after the war, as Connecticut College Professor Jim Downs noted in his 2012 book, Sick from Freedom. 

Was it worth it? It is open to dispute whether a war was necessary to end slavery in America. Abraham Lincoln said in 1859 that he was “quite sure [slavery] would not outlast the century.” Slavery ended almost every place else in the western hemisphere without a civil war. In early 1862, Lincoln asked Congress “to consider a constitutional amendment that would guarantee compensated emancipation to any state, including those in rebellion, that would agree to abolish slavery gradually by 1900,” Fleming noted. But abolitionists torpedoed the proposal and demanded that the war continue.

John Brown was the living embodiment of the 19th century quip: “A fanatic is someone who does what the Lord would do if He knew the facts of the matter.” Similarly, the mobs in many cities that are currently unleashing violence are convinced they are doing God’s work—or at least obeying the commandments they imbibed in college sociology classes. But the idiocy of the new saviors knows no bounds, as illustrated by their attacks on statues of Frederick Douglass in New York, the monument of the 54th Massachusetts regiment (one of the most famous colored regiments in the Civil War), and their beheading of the statute of Col. Hans Christian Heg, a Union officer who helped rescue escaped slaves before 1861. The Black Student Union and the Student Inclusion Coalition of the University of Wisconsin are also demanding removal of a statute of Abraham Lincoln on their campus.

Thoreau’s deification of John Brown should be a reminder of the perils of glorifying political violence in the name of any ideal. John Brown’s legacy vivified how hatred is far easier to unleash than to control. Reasonable people can usually reach compromises or craft accommodations with happier results than mobs driven berserk by the latest Twitter hashtag.

The post 19th Century Radical Chic: The Transcendentalists’ Love Affair With John Brown appeared first on The American Conservative.

[illustir]

Highlights for Neoreaction a Basilisk

Angela Nagle’s appalling Kill All Normies, which takes the jaw-droppingly foolish methodology of simply reporting all of the alt-right’s self-justifications as self-evident truths so as to conclude that the real reason neo-nazis have been sweeping into power is because we’re too tolerant of trans people.

This brings us to our second relatively uninteresting question, which is what to do about the alt-right. In this case the answer is even easier and more obvious than the first: you smash their bases of power, with violent resistance if necessary. If you want a more general solution that also takes care of the factors that led to a bunch of idiot racists being emboldened in the first place you drag all the billionaires out of their houses and put their heads on spikes.

The lethal meme, known as Roko’s Basilisk, used the peculiarities of Yudkowskian thought to posit a future AI that would condemn to eternal torture everyone from the present who had ever imagined it if they subsequently failed to do whatever they could to bring about its existence.

I want to be clear, with all possible sincerity, that I love the braggadocio here. I want what he is selling. Yes, Mencius, savagely tear away the veil of lies with which I cope with the abject horror that is reality and reveal to me the awful, agonizing truth of being. Give me the red pill. The problem is, once we get our golf ball-sized reality distortion pill home, put on some Laibach, and settle in for an epic bout of Thanatosian psychedelia, we discover the unfortunate truth: we’re actually just huffing paint in an unhygienic gas station bathroom. Jesus, this isn’t even bat country.

By “crap,” of course, I do not mean “wrong.” Rather, I mean obvious, in the sense of sounding like the guy at the bar watching the news (probably Fox) and muttering about how “they’re all a bunch of crooks.” Liberal democracy a hopelessly inadequate and doomed system preserved by a system of continual indoctrination? You don’t say.

And this really is stunningly weird in the context of all his red pill rhetoric about the corrupt horrors of liberal democracy. Because while there are a great many obvious critiques of contemporary society, “there’s just not enough respect for profit” really doesn’t feel like one of them.

With this, we have a genuinely tricky moment, simply because of the sheer and unbridled number of unexamined assumptions going on here.

But all the same, if you’re going to talk about suppressed ideologies that oppose the interests of entrenched power, you’ve really got to talk about the original red pill: Marxism.

It is tempting to suggest that Moldbug is a failed Marxist in the sense that Jupiter is a failed star, its mass falling tantalizingly short of the tipping point whereby nuclear fusion begins. Over and over again, Moldbug asks questions much like those that Marx asked, and his answers begin with many of the same initial observations. But inevitably, a few steps in, he makes some ridiculously broad generalization or fails to consider some obvious alternative possibility, and the train of thought fizzles into characteristic idiocy.

This sort of “the world can be saved if only everyone listens to me” narcissism belongs in the genre of fiction, where it can accomplish something, and not in the visionary manifesto, where it only reveals its own impotence.

That is not to say they can get away with being wrong, at least not straightforwardly so, but it is to reiterate that the key problem with Moldbug, Yudkowsky, and Land is that they are in key regards uninteresting—that they offer dull and unsatisfying answers to their most compelling questions, of which “hang out with a bunch of racist nerdbros” is merely the worst.

Terence McKenna’s suggestion that DMT is an alien intelligence’s attempt to communicate directly with the human brain

That’s the whole point of the right to exit—a final and decisive rescue of individual liberty at all costs. But exiting requires that people stay behind; if we all go, we’ll just have to storm out again. The entire point of the project is to separate the wheat from the chaff.

He posits that in this situation the “absolute limit to our ability to adequately understand the world at all” becomes increasingly relevant, and observes that this is a frequent theme of both philosophy and horror.

The truth is that, despite Land’s evident fascination with them, the bulk of neoreactionaries are not people one would want to have a beer with, and there’s not a great case for reading their books either.

Yudkowsky isn’t just running from error; he’s running from the idea of authority. The real horror of the Basilisk is that the AI at the end of the universe is just another third grade teacher who doesn’t care if you understand the material, just if you apply the rote method being taught.

Hauntology comes from within us; the Weird from outside.

The red pill, pwnage, and for that matter the horror reading, monstrous offspring, and Satanic inversions all follow the same basic pattern—a sort of conceptual infiltration of someone’s thought in which their own methods and systems are used against them.

It is, after all, the great one-liner critique of Mencius Moldbug: he’s exactly what you’d expect to happen if you asked a software engineer to redesign political philosophy. And crucially, Moldbug basically agrees with it—he just also genuinely believes that the Silicon Valley “disruptor” crowd would be capable of running the world with no problems if only people would let them.

Which is to say, Satan opens by negging Eve, accusing her of looking at him “with disdain, Displeas’d that I approach thee thus, and gaze Insatiate, I thus single, nor have feard Thy awful brow,”112 which may be the earliest instance of telling someone they have resting bitch face.

In the face of an ecologically brutal planet, the guys with guns and tribal loyalties are a depressingly compelling bet to stick around.

With Moldbug the sense is overwhelmingly that empathy just never crossed his mind as something to factor into his design. He flat out didn’t think of it. Yudkowsky, on the other hand, thinks about it a lot and cares very deeply about it; he’s just incompetent at it.

The result of this approach is that Yudkowsky, without really meaning to, tends to look at everyone else in the world as inefficient Eliezer Yudkowskys instead of people as such.

Moldbug, Yudkowsky, and Land don’t just “do poorly” with empathy—they represent the most visible and explicit edge of a Cathedral-scaled system of values that casts the desire to listen and try to understand people who are different from you as anathema to reason itself.

This forces us to consider white culture as a set of perpetual ruins—as something that has always been lost, and that can only be apprehended as a tenuous and incomplete reconstruction.

No, what’s really notable here is Moldbug’s doe-eyed certainty that such a thing as an absolute truth service could be built; that there is a general plan of action so self-evidently compelling that if he only expressed it properly everyone would immediately flock to his side. In short, after thousands of words railing against the Cathedral for secretly being a religion, he’s accidentally reinvented religion. And then lost the holy text. You couldn’t parody it better.

They have that marvelous feature of the best gods: perfectly answering a question you didn’t know you had.

And a few, such as Ahania, are genuinely breathtaking in their scope: a pleasure goddess representing intellectual curiosity who is bound in a Persephone-like structure of death and rebirth is a metaphysical/literary construct to rival Milton’s Satan, and one Blake barely scratches the surface of.

And it’s hard not to suggest that the world would be a better place if Yudkowsky had stuck to children’s literature for adult geeks as opposed to starting a weird AI cult that derails efforts to curtail malaria.

And while Gamergate usually doesn’t have a product to sell in quite the same literal way, it’s worth noting how, for instance, two doors down from them is someone like Stefan Molyneux, whose output amounts to 30-60 minute PowerPoint presentations consisting of a by-now familiar sort of low-content dissembling, and whose business endgame is literally a cult.

The Gamergate narrative has always required a vast quasi-conspiracy to function, some story whereby feminists or SJWs or cultural Marxists exercise near-complete control over video games and video game journalism.

Not even a monoculture then—an anticulture, with Vivian James ironically its perfect representation. It’s a desire to befit their worldview, its adamance dwarfed only by its fundamental emptiness. There’s nothing there. There’s never been anything there.

And Gamergate as a whole is scarcely better. It’s always been notable for its near-complete lack of actual discussion of videogames.

More interesting is where his basic inclination towards racial stereotyping originates from: the material realities of New York real estate, its patterns of historical ethnic migrations geologically stratified across the city’s expansion.

He might have had a name. But then he literally built a six-hundred-and-sixty-six foot tower to which he offered up that name, sacrificing it upon its black altar such that the building became a titanic sigil of the sixteenth Major Arcana of the Tarot of the Golden Dawn, symbolizing destruction and ruin, with only the remnants of the man whose name it ate living within the rotting heart of its penthouse.

He sold his name, yes, but what did he get out of the deal? The answer, simply put, is what he would hereafter treat as his most valuable asset: his brand. In short, he became a creature of pure image.

But it also includes the raw allostatic load of living under his rule; the basic psychological wear and tear of waking up every morning in a post-fact world dominated by a bullying narcissist. The act of living in a world where the basic validity of your identity is contingent and perpetually imperiled, where the very definition of “fact” is in dispute, and where a brutish logic of dominance and humiliation pervades the entire social order.

Individuals can act all they want. They won’t make the end of the world go away, any more than their freedom to quit work can make them free to not starve

It helps that one can be against today’s racist wars—though not on the grounds of anti-racism, except of the most specious variety—while quietly accepting and utilising the racial inequities inherited from the racist imperialism of the past. As usual, reactionary thinking is dependant upon amnesia.

It admits that value is a mental construct, but one that is ‘real’ because it has a real social basis and real social effects. Value, for Marx, is neither a thing nor an essence, neither quality nor spirit. It is a social reality because of what humans actually do.

Theoretically detached from the objective and the material, and connected to business as a client, mainstream economics has become—to a large extent—an ideological discourse.

This is how Moldbug and Thiel’s view that democracy is incompatible with liberty arises. A democracy is a society in which the mass of the population—who are, by definition, mostly without property—can shape policy so that it curtails the freedom of the propertied to make their choices. In a free society—by their definition—the capitalists get to make their choices unfettered.

For the Austrians, democracy is to blame for capitalism going into crisis. Democracy breeds special claims by people who are not really concerned with making the choices that regulate the economy. The people without a big stake—the masses—thus destabilise the system.

This is the so-called Austrian ‘Business Cycle.’ Boiled right down: crashes and recessions happen because central banks set interest rates too low. Easy credit results, which screws up market signals. Loaners go crazy. Bubbles inflate and burst. Such lopsided production can only be remedied via letting interest rates rise to their ‘natural’ rate. In other words, the Austrian prescription is: let the crisis rip. It will be harsher but quicker. The only cure for god’s wrath is to wait for the plague to exhaust itself.

Opposition to democracy is entailed by the Austrian view of how capitalism works. Democracy is the rule of the ignorant and selfish public, and the state is their tyrannical arm. Moronic majoritarianism wields unjustifiable power over the propertied and the entrepreneurs who are, for Hayek for instance, almost promethean artists in their special sensitivity and understanding.

The logically consequent idea that emergency dictatorship may be necessary to preserve liberal society from democracy is in neoliberalism’s source code. Neoliberalism, contrary to myth, is an authoritarian ideology, committed to defending property and wealth by violence both physical and structural.

The leaders of Rothbard’s revolution would be the libertarians and the minarchists. The troops would be the masses, spurred to fight the elites. And the spurring would take the form of appeals to racism.

The disproportionate number of former-libertarians in American fascism is revealing because conservatives are far more numerous in America than libertarians, which suggests that libertarianism is statistically over-represented.

The Cultural Marxism conspiracy theory now espoused across the alt-right is a reiteration of what the (actual) Nazis called kulturbolschewismus, an idea central to Nazi dogma, about degenerate art and culture being manufactured by Jewish communists to undermine the unity of the German people. The resurrection and repackaging of this idea across a movement soaked in libertarianism is not surprising, because antagonism to socialism goes right back to the dawn of libertarianism, to the Austrian School’s foundational and self-chosen role as the intellectual foe of Marx.

People might not necessarily formulate their objections to the content of newspapers that way, but they’re nevertheless absenting themselves from daily exposure to one of the main means by which the ruling class produce ideology and public consent. This is at least as big a concern to the people running the media as the need to claw back profits.

In all of these cases, the strategy is to play on insecurities of young men in an age where there are mounting ideological challenges out there—especially on the Internet—to their untroubled social privilege. Coupled with the twin legacies of decades of neoliberalism—increasing ideological and political disorientation, and a future far less secure than that which faced their parents and grandparents at their age—such challenges can terrify the semi-privileged layer of young, white, middle class men, who enjoy all those privileges without also enjoying actual material security.

Reactionary politics once again takes advantage of having a wide batrachian mouth, both sides of which may be used for talking.

The reason actions don’t lead inevitably to goals isn’t because there are complex material structures of oppression that heavily shape people’s lives, but because we exist in linear time. Not only does Rothbard not connect time to what dominates it for most people in capitalist society—work—but hilariously, he doesn’t even bother connecting time to its ultimate horror and constraint, death.

To quote the monster directly: “Milton produced Paradise Lost in the way that a silkworm produces silk, as the expression of his own nature.” Marx would like all labour to be like that, and sees no fundamental reason why it shouldn’t.

It’s pretty clear that the Austrian School doesn’t even remotely care about this fact, but it doesn’t inherently contradict anything they say. But that is, in the end, the point, and one I’ve made before: they don’t care. That’s clear, in a sense, all the way back in the basic axiom, with its active foregrounding of the heroic individual acting upon the world, as opposed to the state of affairs that most actual people experience, which is mostly being buffeted around by various external forces, whether they be governments, history, or the class system. Indeed, “individual human beings are acted upon” would be every bit as justifiable an axiom as “individual human beings act,” if not moreso.

They have been hugging Marxism on the brink of the Reichenbach Falls for a century and a half, staring into its eyes, but have never really seen it.

Mises’ only invocation of courage is in the context of statesmen standing up to labor unions. Decency only comes up in the context of “laws of morality and decency.” And his sole mention of kindness is a complete and grotesque misunderstanding of the very concept as he declares that “the indigent has no claim to the kindness shown to him,” as if being unearned isn’t the entire fucking point of kindness. It is a conception of human action without a shred of concern for empathy – human action devoid of all humanity.

But the real reason for this is that, more than anyone else, Marx provided an alternative to the charade on which their entire philosophical edifice was constructed. He showed the need for the destruction of that which, to them, gives the world meaning—and a method by which it might be achieved.

Given that no small number of conspiracy theories are, in point of fact, anti-Semitic, any attempt to uncritically synthesize them will be as well.

Icke’s theory is much the same way. We know wealthy elites control our minds. Knowing they’re lizards (or, for that matter, Jews) doesn’t actually change anything. It is, to borrow a phrase, malignantly useless knowledge.

Not only does nothing follow from Icke’s conclusions, nothing follows within the argument itself. Icke does not so much lay out a case for the lizard people as blunder among vague associations, hoping that the aggregate of a bunch of extremely tenuous connections will somehow be persuasive instead of a discombobulated mess of shoddy research and sloppy reasoning.

The history of the world consists of a lot of wealthy assholes sleeping with each other and killing people. Changing up which assholes slept with and killed who doesn’t actually make much of a difference.

Ridiculous arguments, especially ones that recognize their absurdity, are capable of revealing things that do not follow obviously, if at all, from self-consciously serious approaches, but that are nevertheless true and valuable realizations.

So is his inclination to be skeptical of the “official” version of history. The value of this, to be clear, is not simply skepticism for its own sake (an approach that is just as likely to lead to things like climate change denial or creationism as it is to some productive insight), but rather the realization that, as the saying goes, history is written by the victors, and the standard version of history is inevitably the one that most flatters those in power.

It is not entirely clear why monstrous truth must take reptilian form, but just as the weird turns instinctively to tentacles and the hauntological inevitably drifts towards skulls, for some reason awful truth must take the form of a reptile, whether a petrifying basilisk or just a bunch of pan-dimensional aliens.

This is a leftist book, and so must engage in a circular firing squad at least once.

This set a pattern whereby trans rights were repeatedly employed by the gay rights movement as a bargaining chip—as the thing they were pointedly willing to sell out in the name of compromise, as they spectacularly did when lobbying for the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, which excluded trans people in every version that was brought to Congress prior to 2009.

Thiel’s vision of corporate success is blatantly just the Moldbug/Land vision of how authoritarian capitalism will save us from the Great Filter.

Rather, it’s that once you’re willing to question the basic fact of Thiel’s competence it rapidly becomes apparent that the only actual evidence for this competence is that he has a lot of money.

And his fascination with seasteading numbers him among the litany of people interested in micronations, which is such a rich vein of complete crackpottery that I’d hate to deprive you of the pleasure of Googling it. This borders on the investment portfolio you’d get if you gave David Icke several billion dollars.

Who would craft such a thing as the alt-right? Only a fucking idiot. What other answer were we possibly going to find? It’s been idiots all the way down. And so of course even its billionaire supervillains bankrolling world-conquering AIs, vampiric life extension, and Donald Trump are idiots. This borders on “A is A.” And yet for all its obviousness, it captures what is perhaps the key realization about the alt-right—one that’s been implicit through much of this book, but is worth making explicit as we come to a close: they’re stupid.

I do not suggest this to diminish their horror. Far from it: the essential horror of the abyss is stupidity. That’s why it’s an abyss. The unique and exquisite danger of stupidity is that by its nature, it is beyond reason. There is nothing that can be said to it, because by definition it wouldn’t understand. It is an ur-basilisk—the one terrifying possibility that haunts every single argument that has ever been made. It is a move without response, playing by no rules other than its own, which do not generally include any obligation towards consistency. It is, in its way, the only approach that can never lose an argument. And in the alt-right and its affiliates we have one of the most staggeringly vast nexuses of raw stupidity the world has ever crafted.

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