#they delivered a strong message concerning the normalization of violence at home and at school

[braceletofteeth]

You know a drama that would have been better if a beloved character had actually died?

Weak Hero Class 1.

[misspandalily]

update! - Immortal Love (Ch8)

ANOTHER CHAPTER. FINALLY. 

Disclaimer: I don’t own anything, and I am certainly not excellent with brain anatomy/functioning. 

AO3 | FFN

I take a tentative step forwards, praying that the shrieking will die away and the phantom figure from yesterday will dissipate.

Blink.

The piercing noise stops, to my relief. And then there's a blissful silence, save for the panting of late students running into school with their bags bobbing up and down behind them. I recognise Moegi streaming past and sending a brief wave before disappearing into another hallway.

Snap out of it, Tenten, you're just hearing things.

I swivel around for extra measure, skimming the immediate corridor for any signs of red paint or creepy messages. None. My breathing starts slowing down to a normal pace as I lean against the door of Umino's classroom, chest rising and falling with each intake and outtake of breath. The distinct smell of cleaning liquid and sweat flows into my nostrils the moment I calm down enough to start registering the other events transpiring around me, like the outline of Gai running to the beat of his exercise music in the school gym, and the disturbing notion that not one person passing by seems to have heard a thing. Which leads to two different, yet equally harrowing hypotheses:

One, my auditory cortex is acting up and everything unusual I've been hearing over the past two days is absolute bogus. (Rebuttal: But that doesn't explain why everything feels and sounds so real.)

Two, only I can hear the noises.

And, honestly, as bad as it sounds, I would take cranial dysfunction over the second option any day.

If training with Lee for three straight years has taught anyone anything, it's that exercise is the best aphrodisiac in the world. So, for the first time in days, and during first period no less (undoubtedly, Umino will be stamping a cold, hard detention next to my record), my feet carry themselves over to the dojo for some hearty frustration-venting, stress-relieving, one-sided violence.

Fun fact: it really doesn't hurt that no teacher ever ventures into the dojo unless they're immune to the scent of sweat, like Gai, who advocates for fitness and body positivity so fervently that he wouldn't kick me out even if he had to, "legal action be damned".

The pungent smell of perspiration diffuses throughout the centre with increasing rapidity when I start sinking my fists into the bag and round housing it into oblivion. Bend, twist, release. The bag swings up higher from the impact and creaks as it whooshes down like a pendulum. Breathe, Tennie. You're not going crazy. There's a perfectly logical explanation for everything - the weird noises, the raid, the paint, the threats.

It's just a stupid prank.

Please be a stupid prank.

"Fancy seeing you here," Temari angles a not-so-subtle glance at the flushed cheeks and sopping wet hair that is indicative of a post-exercise shower and frowns, "Where have you been?"

"In the dojo," I shrug, settling my tray onto the designated cafeteria table. "I didn't feel like going to class."

Which isn't exactly a lie, so to speak, as much as it is veiled truth.

She watches me carefully when I sit down and then turns away. "I heard something interesting from Hinata," she says with a tone of nonchalance.

"Oh?"

"She tells me that Neji told her that he's visiting your place tonight, at seven."

"So, does she also tell you that I told Neji that his visitation was pending approval, and from not-me?"

Temari lets the corners of her lips droop dramatically. "No. But I am glad that you two are on speaking terms again."

"Yeah, me too," I take a moment to breathe. "But, just curious. Did Neji happen to say anything else to Hinata...before she told you?"

"HA," Temari shouts, slamming her palms onto the hard plastic of the table as she stands up, chair legs scraping deafening against the floor. The sound echoes throughout the cafeteria and draws some startled glances from nearby patrons. "Not really," she shrugs, feigning disinterest and seating herself again. "Just that he wouldn't be home for dinner at Buckingham Palace again."

"I thought he lived with his mother?"

"Really?" She responds, genuinely incredulous.

"That's what he told me," I bite into a sandwich, letting its contents slide down my throat. Of course, right after that, he'd invited himself to my house for the night. And then my stalker decided to make themself known - at school. So clearly, they were a student, or someone who was skilled enough to disappear at a moment's notice. But seriously, that noise.

"Hm," she hums contemplatively, giving me a funny look.

"What?"

"I just had no idea he lived with her, is all. In fact, none of us did. Except you, now." Neji suddenly makes an appearance in the cafeteria with Naruto on one side and a grouchy Sasuke on the other. Temari eyes them thoughtfully. "Fascinating."

Fishy, is more like it. Hyuga heiress goes haywire over truffle advocacy, Hyuga poster boy pops in with a haircut - which, going by the rest of the Hyugas in their mansion, is uncommon to the point of unspeakable - and a determination to expose...something...tonight, Uchiha exchange student happens to move into the apartment next door, and right after making up with aforementioned Hyuga heiress, the apartment gets ransacked and creep-stamped, and said creep comes to school and disappears. Note to self: target Naruto to find out what happened at home; alternatively, ask Hinata herself. And avoid Sasuke.

Even if he has amazing cheekbones.

And the dreams. The first few are few enough to be dismissed as an overactive imagination. But, afterwards, it's coincidental. Almost real.

"-right, Tenten?"

"What?"

Temari looks over, mildly affronted that I didn't hear what she just said, and exchanges a Look with an apple-toting Ino, who responds with a suspicious glare.

"You were thinking about Neji, weren't you?"

"No," I say quickly, noticing said boy being pushed to the taekwondo team's table by Naruto. "Shut up. And I wasn't, for your information."

She folds her hands together and places her chin on top of her fingers. "Then what, pray tell, were you thinking about so deeply that prevented you from listening to the dulcet tones of my voice?"

"They weren't dulcet-"

"Yeah, that's great Temari," Ino waves her right hand dismissively, using the other to bring the apple to her mouth and bite it. "So, in all seriousness. Are you alright, Tenten?"

"Why? Why wouldn't I be?"

"You've just been a little...off. Lately. I mean, more so than usual."

"Wow. And I'm fine," I lie, but stress the last word anyway - because who in their right mind would believe my recounts of the past few days? Definitely not her, or Temari, or anyone except my grandparents. There simply isn't any point, at this moment in time, in venting about something that seems more likely to be happening in my mind as the days pass. "I'm tired, is all. From the dojo practice."

They see through the lie, clearly, and send each other another cryptic glance before resuming their meals.

"All I'm saying," Ino continues airily, "Is that if you're feeling bothered by anything at all, we're your friends and we're here to help."

"I'm fine," I respond sharply. Because, on top of everything that's been happening lately, there's still that big, gaping question of where my mother is. Where she had been, when Asuma Sarutobi died in a car crash. Why she hadn't been in that dinky little apartment next to Ichiraku's that she'd left behind right after his death. Why, when I'd been staying in it for months in the hopes that she'd come back and pull me into her arms and tell me that it's alright, you don't have to deal with this without me anymore, she hadn't shown up.

No calls, no texts, no emails. Not even a letter, or a word to her mother.

"I'm fine," I repeat in a softer tone. They spot the lie again, but choose to shrug it off. "Thank you."

You are no stranger to gilded finery. You live in a world where golden dragons line hallways, beads of jade crafted by the finest workers hang down the necks of court women, and food served on plates of gold are placed at your dinner table.

A delicate box of jewels delivered to your bedroom has no effect on you, in contrast to the letter accompanying it. Your husband, despite being a man of war, writes with elegant calligraphy.

He has been away for far longer than the expected time, but you are a patient woman. You spend your days preparing for your child's arrival, making small talk with the palace maids and busying yourself enough to collapse onto your bed in a state of fatigue every night.

And one day, the letters stop arriving. The ones you send out never find their home in the hands of a man with pale, white hands. You don't need to see the messenger arriving at the Palatial Court, scroll in hand and grim expression in place, to know what Fate has had in store for your husband. With great effort, you try to bar yourself from crying.

"Lord Hyuga has bestowed the greatest honour upon our country."

The Emperor - your father - sends him away with a flick of his wrist, eyes unwaveringly staring at the space where the messenger had been standing. There is a sudden kick from the inside of your belly. You lurch forwards, wincing at the pain but smiling sadly. Your mother looks to the side in concern.

"The child will be strong, like his father."

Another kick. The bottom of your robes begin to wet at a rapid pace. You lurch forward again, this time in unbearable pain.

The maids rush forward, hands frantically touching your shoulders, and then you hear your father roaring for the Royal Physician to arrive immediately.

It is time.

"A boy." The Physician beckons for the maids to wash the infant as soon as you feel them separate your baby from the cord. Some rush over with wet towels, while others hurriedly clean up the bloody mess on your bedsheets.

You feel weak, your throat sore and hoarse from the screaming. Suddenly, you realise why so many women dread childbirth.

But you are inexplicably, uncontrollably curious. "Let me see him," you order. Does he have his father's eyes? Or your brown hair? Will he speak like his father, write in fluid script and poetic verse? Or will he be more akin to you, with a sharp tongue and desire to escape? A desire to run away? The nurse carries your child over to you with a bright smile, announcing that the Emperor and Empress are pleased with the news.

At the very least, he will be loved by his grandparents. Still shaking and weak, you watch your baby being lowered into your arms, the blanket wrapped around him a brilliant blue. The moment he makes contact with your fingertips, however, results in another painful lurch. You gasp, eyes widening, desperately looking up at the Physician and nurses, who rush back to the end of your bed and lift up the blankets.

"There is another one!" One of them shouts, to your horror, "I can see the head!"

Your baby begins to cry, and you beg for him to be close to you. The nurses smile at you sympathetically. "After you are finished, you will be seeing both at the same time."

Your lower lip quivers, ready to outright demand to see your son, at the very least his face, but then your body jerks again and you scream.

You feel blood oozing down your legs, onto the mattress, and a sudden pain in your back. You breathe heavily, black spots flooding your vision, then look towards the baby in the adjacent cot and see his pale face and dark, dark hair. The nurses are patting a wet cloth over your forehead, begging you to keep pushing. Your body is screaming for you to rest, to stop, but it is your mind - fatigued from the simultaneous loss of a husband, elated from the birth of a son - that pushes you.

Hours later, the scream can be heard on the other end of the bed, a piercing shriek and the sensation of another mass leaving your body, is both relieving excruciatingly painful. 

"A girl," the nurses note, with a less enthused tone. You nod, feeling yourself losing consciousness. The speech in the background is becoming nothing more than a soft hum. Your vision fades in and out intermittently. When you look up, the Physician is congratulating you, and then your husband is there, smiling softly and reaching for your cheek.

And then you know.

"Wait for me." You say. He smiles gently.

"I'm coming."

[viralhottopics]

Turkey in grip of fear as Erdoan steps up post-terror attack crackdown

Critics believe presidents intolerant approach to civil society may have fostered conditions in which atrocity was possible

Turkeys strongman president, Recep Tayyip Erdoan, rarely goes on the defensive. Yet in his first public appearance since the New Years Eve massacre in an Istanbul nightclub, he felt obliged to publicly reject the notion that his governments intolerant approach to civil society could possibly have encouraged the attack claimed by Islamic State that left 39 people dead.

Erdoan was speaking before a regular gathering of elected community leaders, an opportunity he usually uses to glad-hand political support.

However, the shock of the attack has further rent an already divided country. While no one believes that the government is directly responsible, it is accused of creating an atmosphere in which a religious fanatic could get away with murder.

Nobody should be forced to share the same kind of lifestyle, said Erdoan, adding that if anyone had come under pressure to conform to an alien way of life it had been this brother meaning himself.

Erdoans rise from street urchin to inhabiting a palace that architects estimate to have cost more than 1bn has indeed been hardscrabble. In 1998 he was removed from office as mayor of Istanbul and briefly imprisoned for reciting a well-known nationalist poem which the prosecutor deemed an incitement to violence and religious hatred.

However, greater obstacles might lie ahead. The difficulties that are already facing Erdoans Turkey hardly need rehearsing. A civil war across the Syrian border has led to an influx of what may be as many as three million refugees. A once booming economy is now ailing. In 2015 in order to woo the nationalist vote the government shredded its attempt to secure an agreement with dissident Kurds. On top of this, there is the debilitating drip, drip of terrorist incidents.

On Thursday, a courthouse in the Aegean city of Izmir came under attack, leaving two people dead along with two assailants who were believed to be Kurdish militants. A rocket assault on a police station in the Kurdish south-east of the country, also on New Years Eve, was sufficiently commonplace to go unreported.

The killing spree in the Reina nightclub, by contrast, is not something that Turkish society is likely to forget. Whether by chance or by design, the gunman, who is still at large, managed to aggravate the us and them faultline in Turkish society. Despite the presidents assurances, many Turks feel that their lifestyle is under siege.

Are they going to carry on until we are all in little pieces? asked the owner of one fashionable restaurant who, like many people in the public eye, now prefers to remain anonymous.

Reina is located in the shadow of the first Bosphorus bridge, the pinch point of last Julys failed military coup. Since then, Turkey has been under emergency rule in an attempt to root out what politicians describe as terrorist infiltration into the state. The government blames the followers of Fethullah Glen, an Islamic preacher living in self-imposed exile in Pennsylvania.

While exact figures are hard to come by, there have been at least 120,000 dismissals of civil servants, and a third of these may now be under some form of detention including two constitutional court judges.

After the Reina shootings, many are beginning to suspect that the government has been chasing the wrong enemy, or at least wonder whether those in charge of the purges are themselves to be trusted. The point was driven home in December when an off-duty policeman working as a presidential guard shot dead the Russian ambassador to Turkey in what he said was revenge for the brutal reconquest of Aleppo.

Ordinary people, including many government supporters, took to the streets last summer to persuade those behind the coup to step down. Even government opponents were outraged that some still believed you could take control of a G20 nation and Nato member by occupying a radio station. Within hours of the putsch, Istanbuls Atatrk airport was open for commercial flights.

But if the country quickly returned to normal, it has been a new normal in which the president is much stronger but the country over which he rules has been weakened in ways that are still being played out. One consequence feared by many is that Erdoan now relies entirely on his core supporters and has given up all pretence of being a one nation leader.

Turkey no longer thinks in terms of left and right but secularist and Islamicist, says Aye nc, professor emeritus of sociology at Istanbuls Sabanci University.

The head of Turkeys state-funded Presidency of Religious Affairs took the lead from the pulpit in demonising the celebration of new year and social media buzzed with staged lynchings of Father New Year the Turkish equivalent of Santa Claus. When one German language school in Istanbul was forced to cancel its festivities, the daily Die Welt responded with a caricature of Erdoan on its front page as the Grinch who stole Christmas.

One of those injured in the nightclub attack in Istanbul is rushed to hospital. Photograph: AP

For a Turkish newspaper to do the same would have been a reckless act of bravery. Underlying secularists concerns is the governments eagerness to criminalise dissent. At least 140 journalists and writers are now behind bars amid a crackdown on the media since the coup. Prison conditions are dire and no evidence of involvement in the coup has been provided against those held in pre-trial detention, either publicly or in private, says Katie Morris, head of Europe and Central Asia for Article 19, the London-based freedom of expression advocates.

With little hope of redress in local courts, it is not surprising that victims are now applying to the European court of human rights, Morris says. One such applicant, the editor and novelist Ahmet Altan, has accused the government not of arresting people involved in the coup but those trying to investigate what really happened. He himself was arrested nearly four months ago but, according to his lawyers, so far there has been no indictment.

Whether European disapproval will have an impact is unclear. When the Justice and Development party (AKP) which Erdoan helped to found came to power in the early 2000s, it advertised itself as proof that Islamic politics could come in from the cold. Rather than lead Turkey away from the west, it would make the country more democratic, more European, and better able to exercise a moderate leadership role on the world stage.

Fifteen years later Turkey seems more isolated than ever. This is partly a result of vacillations over Syria. At first Turkey was at loggerheads with Russia over Moscows support for President Bashar al-Assad, even coming under an economic embargo when, in 2015, a Turkish F-16 shot down a Russian jet. Now it argues with the US over a lack of air support in Syria as Turkish troops try to capture Islamic State strongholds before Syrian Kurdish fighters get there first. In a round of diplomatic sabre-rattling last week, it threatened to expel Nato forces from the key Mediterranean airbase in ncirlik.

An increasingly dire human rights record has weakened the countrys international standing and diluted the sympathy which the government might have expected as victim of an attempted coup. As its influence wanes, Turkey has become a breeding ground for conjecture and conspiracy theories where everyone else is to blame.

One pro-government newspaper morphed the mugshot of the man suspected of the nightclub assault into a photograph of Barack Obama.

Cold weather and bottlenecks in Turkeys supply of natural gas forced power cuts at the end of 2016, but many secular Turks chose to believe the explanation that a spiteful government was trying to sabotage new year celebrations. Yet on Friday the minister of energy (and the presidents son-in-law) announced that the electrical grid had come under cyber-attacks originating in America.

Unlike Russia, which Erdoan now courts, Turkey has no oil or natural resource which it can use to keep supporters loyal. Until now the AKP has relied on consumer confidence and building tunnels, bridges or a third Istanbul airport to keep its cronies happy and the economy well oiled. The shopping mall, as much as the mosque, has been the symbol of its era in power.

Now the streets are eerily empty. Even before the Reina massacre, the lira was under attack. The inflation rate is rising, growth is slowing and the markets are pushing up interest rates. These are times when investors look for a strong policy response, but the political environment means that this is proving hard to deliver, says Murat er, economist at consultancy Global Source Partners.

Ever since the coup attempt, Turkey has been under a form of emergency law where the government can rule by decree. The president is now pressing for constitutional changes that would make these powers permanent.

A democratic presidential system has checks and balances this would be one-man rule, says Ergun zbudun, a professor of constitutional law who was asked by Erdoan, then prime minister, to draw up a constitution in 2007.

However beleaguered Erdoan might be, few expect him to back down. You may dislike a thing while it is good for you, and you may love a thing while it is evil for you, he said in a New Year message to his people the implication being that, though they may view the new authoritarianism as a bitter pill, they will grow to love the taste.

Read more: http://bit.ly/2iSACeE

from Turkey in grip of fear as Erdoan steps up post-terror attack crackdown