#with a name that could racially profile me

[grim-has-issues]

Me: I can’t be neurodivergent. I don’t have a lot of the traits needed, like being upset when your routine is thrown off. I never get upset when I mess up a routine. I am shit at keeping up with routines.

Also me when I woke up too late to go to the farmers’ market: I am going to kill myself/hj

[vasito-de-leche]

;R1999 DIKKE - General Headcanons

Compilation of headcanons and analysis on Dikke as a character and other related things.

as promised, here's the Dikke post where I go deranged talking about her, since it was one of the two with the most votes in the poll <3

the other popular result was to talk about the parallels and use of racial issues within the story, how the game replaces actual racism for fantasy racism (arcanists vs humans) - so that one will deffo take me some time!

On the subject of justice and Dikke's inspirations.

I've seen some people say that Dikke is based on Joan of Arc, given her righteousness and religious themes - but there are so many more details about her design that point toward other figures!

Like, really. A lot of references to law and deities of justice all throughout history and different cultures.

The most obvious one is Dike, "goddess of justice and the spirit of moral order and fair judgement". In Dikke's interview with Pandora Wilson, they literally address her as "the goddess of justice". And a small statue of Lady Justice, the personification of justice that originates from Justitia (roman equivalent of Dike) can be seen in her insight 2 garment.

It goes without saying that Dikke's sword is another symbol representative of the previously mentioned figures - but to have only the sword and not the scales could have some implications about her way of imparting justice.

I would like to point out that Dikke's sword has these two dangling pieces that allude to the scales she's missing in her design. And sure, it might be a reach, but given how much detail and thought goes into the characters of the game and their designs, I really believe this is the case!

On Dikke's items, we also get the name and description for the sword.

The name alone leads me to believe that Dikke's weapon and its design represents both the sword and the scales of Lady Justice, it's the totality of justice itself. Dikke WIELDS justice, she ENFORCES justice, she IS justice. You're going to get really tired of me repeating the word justice in this post, but bear with me!

On the subject of swords, there are two swords mentioned all throughout Dikke's in-game profile and information. Her insight 2 garment is titled "Sword of Hamurabi".

This is evocative of something called the "Code of Hammurabi", one of the longest legal texts dating back to the first dynasty of Babylon. According to wikipedia, this stele it also depicts yet another deity of justice, Shamash. Wikipedia also makes note of the prologue within the Code of Hammurabi, in which the author - Hammurabi - claims to have been given these rules "to prevent the strong from oppressing the weak". This is extremely relevant to Dikke, as someone who fought hard for the rights of arcanists.

Pandora Wilson: I have heard many legends about you. The violent ghost of punishment, the crime-slaying sword of execution, the goddess of justice, the people's savior... Dikke: The desperate always need hope.

The stele of the Code of Hammurabi is ALSO relevant, because the artifact that follows Dikke around explicitly "belongs to some ancient stele". Yet another object that embodies justice and law.

I won't pretend I know anything about Babylonian culture or history in general, so anyone with more insight on this is welcome to add on to details and corrections!

The second sword mentioned can be found in the title for her 02 Story - "The Sword of Damocles".

This excerpt seems to be written by one of Dikke's coworkers, perhaps someone in a higher position of power since they mention being able to give others a day off. Overall, we're reading the thoughts of someone who is abusing their power and who does not think highly of Dikke.

"The story of Damocles is but a story" is something that Dikke herself says. At the end, there's a different phrase written and crossed out - "But the story of justice is not just a story".

Now, the anecdote of Damocles talks about how positions of authority and power are double-edged swords - a king may have all the riches and fortune in the world, but also be burdened with the anxiety of knowing there might be someone plotting against him. In the story, Damocles switches places with king Dionysus, to know what it's like to be a king, but to really make Damocles understand the position of king, a sword is placed above him - one that can fall and kill him at any moment.

With this in mind, Dikke's 02 Story becomes more clear - the first phrase is a warning given by Dikke herself to those in positions of power. The story of Damocles is a story, because not everyone will understand the consequences of being in a position of power. Not everyone will be given the opportunity to even reach such a position.

The author of the 02 Story is not a good person, only considering the idea of giving people HALF a day off, excluding those who work on the fields who will get nothing, refusing to lower taxes for the poor, and imprisoning someone who "interfered with the lord's land acquisition".

The sword of Damocles is also used to allude to the impending tragedy for those in positions of power, caused by the smallest of catalysts. So it makes sense to me that the final phrase, the one crossed out at the end, was either written by Dikke or alludes to the demise of this author at her hand.

And while we're at it, might as well talk about the last remaining item - her robes. Judges are required to wear these when working on trials, but Dikke is specifically stated to wear them outside of them - because she's always imparting justice. She's the opposite of Oliver Fog, she's always on the clock.

We haven't even gotten to another big aspect of Dikke's character - the fact that she's part of the Inquisition.

Without getting too much into actual historical events, the Inquisition as we know it focused on heresy and the conversion and persecution of Jews and Muslims. Within the game, this is recontextualized as a focus for arcanists instead. It's worth noting that her 01 and 02 Stories are written from the perspective of those who are in support of the Inquisition and its practices, or who profit from abusing their own power - hence the wording of "the Inquisition has been abused and considered evil by the ignorant."

There is an emphasis on how the Inquisition seeks power, while Dikke's final goal is justice.

This whole thing and yet another part from her interview with Pandora Wilson, is related to how Dikke associates herself with the corrupt and allows people to view her as a needlessly violent person for the sake of setting things right. On one hand, she could associate with the Inquisition and become a bishop to destroy corruption from inside out - on the other, she could acknowledge that to impart justice, one needs power because they're things that go hand in hand. The Inquisition is only able to have this much influence over trials for arcanists because of the common hatred towards arcanists throughout history.

The interview revolves around all the rumours surrounding Dikke, and we can see her showing distaste at the idea of cooperating with "what [she] shouldn't allow for the sake of justice" while at the same time, not denying her involvement with them. All the things she does are a means to an end.

Pandora Wilson: Does that mean you will cooperate with what you shouldn't allow for the sake of "justice"? Dikke: Fie. Pandora Wilson: Is that supposed to be a secret? Dikke: It sounds like we are talking about a conspiracy, yet it is but a means.

As for Dikke's own relationship with justice and her personal views outside of all the historical references used to create her character, I think this voiceline she has pretty much sums things up nicely.

Everything I doth… is so I may enjoy this calm wind on nights like this, rather than hear the sorrowful cries and moans of unhappiness.

She's a character that is strict in her ways and doesn't shy away from the darker aspects of life, such as the injustice arcanists have been subjected to for centuries. This extreme focus she has for upholding justice does cause Dikke to appear cold, and yet her ideals are almost childish, pure even - a world in which all misdeeds are punished and all good people are heard. Hell, her Ultimate literally purifies all negative statuses.

Dikke could easily lean towards righteous characters who exclusively see things as black or white, yet many of her voicelines and the origin of her devotion, show a very gentle heart. This is made clear by the fact that she's a healer.

Her two attacks and their names speak volumes about her own ways of thinking. Power is violent, power is not something that a judge should have so carelessly, but it is allowed in the name of "justice". Justice in quotations.

And then, actual justice is a rare occurrence, being merciful is not something that rules and the law take into account, but it's needed for those who cannot defend themselves.

On the subject of Dikke's backstory.

There's no resolution to this point, it just came up randomly while writing the previous one, because it just hit me that Dikke's Cover profile does not list where she was born. And that got me thinking about the fact that before settling down, she traveled all around Europe.

First of all, the Roman Catholic Diocese of Pamiers is an extremely specific location - one that has ties to the Inquisition, as a very important document regarding the Inquisition's procedures during a very specific trial was found there, as far as I know with my surface level research into history references. This document also talked about how, within this trial, the inquisitor and the bishop had "almost equal responsibility".

We can assume that this is the place where Dikke became bishop officially, if this was her final destination.

This starts to fall within headcanon territory, since it's mostly speculation, but I feel that the 02 Story takes place before she becomes bishop and settles in Pamiers - as a member of the inquisiton, she must've traveled all over Europe to do her job.

There might also be something related to the name mentioned, "Murville", but I don't have time nor the brain to start connecting the dots with actual french history. All in all, I like to think that Dikke was given the position of bishop as an attempt to distance her from, you know, killing every single corrupt person in a position of power by keeping her in a single place.

None of her voicelines give away anything about her life prior her entire journey of justice, as far as I can tell.

If we take Dikke's ties with Joan of Arc, maybe she was a common girl roped into things beyond her control. But I personally don't like the interpretation of Dikke's ideals being born from divine intervention instead of her own experiences, seeing the crimes committed against arcanists and realizing that she would like to do something about it.

Another option I'd like to explore about her background - maybe Dikke did have a relatively safe and normal childhood, away from the stigma and persecution. A nice, gentle life that she willingly gave up after she was confronted with the reality of the state of the world, without Jean of Arc's holy realization. To me, there needs to be an emphasis on Dikke's choice and decision to fight corruption. Making this dedication a result of "God told me to do this" would render her a little shallow - not to say religion cannot be part of her character, but in my opinion, Dikke is best when the focus of her moral compass is a genuinely care for the weak and the defenseless.

On the subject of Dikke and the loss of humanity.

Yes, that's THREE characters in a row that I analyze and that have themes of loss of humanity. There's just so many characters who've lost or given up their own humanity for the sake of something greater or something wicked.

Pavia's was a result of how he was mistreated and as a way to reclaim power, Forget Me Not's was a self-imposed torture originating from his inability to take responsibility. Dikke's seems to be self-imposed as well, but unlike the previous two, her loss of humanity is more of a sacrifice she makes for the greater good.

In her voicelines, we see that she leads a very strict schedule - she's straightforward and curt (but never impolite!) with Vertin, alluding to how simple justice is (if one commits a crime or abuses power, they shall be dealt with regardless of their social status) and how her body is "a representation of justice". Dikke has become a symbol for an idea, the concept of a fair system - she is no longer an individual but a savior, an executioner, a violent ghost, a witch, a threat, etc etc.

The loss of humanity is obvious in the way we do not get to know Dikke outside of any themes regarding justice. It's extremely hard to gleam any information about her childhood, her family, her interests and so on because they've all been displaced by this identity as justice itself. To me, this speaks about how power and responsibility on this scale will inevitably separate you from the people, THIS is the Sword of Damocles, now applied to Dikke as much as it applies to those in line for her judgement.

And yet, there are still very small hints of humanity left within her (still related, in a way, to her goals) in her care for the weak. Dikke's quote on her hobbies in a way reminds me of Sonetto.

The idle chatter of the people is entertaining, but 'tis more entertaining that they are always the first to know about the corrupt behavior of nobles.

Sonetto is a character that is similar to Dikke, in the sense that they both became the embodiment of concepts that ultimately stripped them off their individuality. Sonetto by fulfilling her training at the Foundation and becoming the PERFECT example of a military dog, a child martyr who struggles to connect with others because she was only taught how to exist FOR the Foundation. And Dikke, by all the things mentioned before.

But both of them have very endearing hobbies. Sonetto reads newspapers and collects them to find TYPOS IN THEM. Dikke's hobby is to listen to people talk as they go on about their day, not gossiping but to just listen to people exist.

In the main story, Sonetto's upbringing causes her to have a barrier with the people she truly wants to connect to (Vertin, namely) and Dikke's goal causes her life to revolve around a single thing, now only able to engage in mundane things from an outsider's perspective. She listens to people, she doesn't talk to them. She protects people, she doesn't live among them.

I like to think that, even so, this is when Dikke is most at peace. That she enjoys people watching, knowing they're safe and sound - because it validates all her efforts, it means that what she's doing is, in the end, worth it. This might also be why Dikke tells Vertin that they might be on the same path - Vertin, slowly figuring out the truth behind the Foundation and Manus Vindictae and acting as a saviour for those stuck in the middle.

As for headcanons, here's a couple I have!

Dikke has such a dry and deadpan sense of humour that only Vertin can understand it.

Sometimes, very rarely, Dikke will chime in with the most outlandish reply - straight out of the blue, spoken in the most serious and monotone voice. Those who aren't close to her will most likely brush it off as yet another intimidating thing they can't understand about her, but those close to her like Vertin?

It's THE funniest shit in the world and Dikke, who is very aware of the image and respect she commands, knows it.

Dikke and the artifact that follows her are friends.

Quite literally, that thing is the hand of justice. I like to think that Dikke can communicate with it non-verbally, even though it's implied that the artifact is not created by her arcanum.

Part of me likes to think that Dikke insists on said artifact being just her partner in her long journey of bringing justice to the world, but due to all the years spent together and all, the artifact itself (and whatever entity that shows up in her Ultimate) have come to see Dikke as their protégé.

[itsthestutterforme]

Protect You (Rafe Cameron Drabble)

Summary: You always made sure that Rafe felt safe around you. It was important to Rafe that you felt the same way with him.

Prompt credit @cosmophoriia : “You’re more family to me than my real family,”

Notes: GIF is not mine, all mistakes are my own, sensitive themes related to police (implicit racism, racial profiling, racial stereotypes), protective Rafe

**

“Baby, what do you think of this?” Rafe rushes to show you a lingerie set on Amazon, bumping the dining room table when he past.

He stops in his tracks when he hears glass shattering behind him.

Peering over his shoulder, his eyes fell to the shards of glass from the flower vase collecting on the floor.

“Rafe, are you okay?” His eyes widen when he hears your footsteps padding into the dining area of the apartment you shared.

You called his name when you neared him and he immediately tensed.

“I-I’m so sorry. I should’ve paid attention to where I was going. I should’ve- fuck, I’m sorry.” He frantically looks for a broom.

“Watch out for the glass. I don’t want you getting hurt,” you tell him.

“No, I deserve it for fucking up. I’ll get you new flowers and a new vase and I’ll-“ you went around the mess and stood in front of Rafe to stop him in his tracks.

His averts his gaze from you and you gently took the broom from his hands. “Rafe,” “I’m sorry,” he whispers, flinching when you go to touch his hand.

“Rafe, it’s just a vase. I can always buy a new one.”

He relaxed when you stood closer to him and took his hands into yours. “It’s just a vase,” you reassure.

“It’s just a vase?” He repeats, his crystal green eyes searching yours for any micro expressions to tell him otherwise. “It’s just a vase, baby.”

“So you’re not mad?” “I’ve done a lot worse than break a vase.” You said with a chuckle.

The two of you took a deep breath and you pressed a warm kiss on his lips.

You reach for the broom but he picked you up to set you on the kitchen counter. “I broke it, I can at least clean it up.” He reasons, sweeping up the glass shards and dumping it in the trash.

“Rafe?” “Hm?” “You’re not a failure. Not to me.” He freezes at your confession, slowly turning to face you.

Sliding between your legs, he places a hand on either side of you. “You’re more family to me than my real family,” he captures your lips in a slow kiss.

“Look at you turning me into a sap,” he taunts, bumping his nose to yours.

**

Rafe’s gears have been turning in his head since he got the text from his dad saying that he needed to talk.

You suggested to meet him in a public place if he didn’t feel comfortable going to Tannyhill or Ward coming to the apartment.

You offered to run some errands in the meantime so he could have some privacy but Rafe insisted you to come with him.

Just your presence alone calms his nerves.

But his anxiety couldn’t help by spike at the thought of meeting his father. His condescending, manipulative father.

You dragged him with you to take a walk around the Square so he could get his mind off things.

He aimlessly followed wherever you were pulling him until he felt you stop in your tracks, yanking his arm back a little.

Pulling himself out of his thoughts, he glanced at you to ask why you stopped.

Your grip on his hand tightened and he followed your gaze to a cop that was parked by the curb, calling you over.

You took a step back, pressing your back against Rafe’s side.

Naturally, he noticed you were uncomfortable and stood in front of you. “Is there a problem, officer?” Rafe questioned.

“No, not at all. We’re just looking for a perp. His name is Ivan Sparks. I was wondering if your girlfriend has seen or heard of him?” The cop asks, his hands wrapping around his belt as he stepped closer to you and Rafe.

“No, sir. I haven’t heard of him.” You answered. “And why exactly would she know him? What, you think all black people know each other?” You squeezed Rafe’s hand in warning and he looked at you for a moment.

You shook your head at him. “You mind if I see some identification, hun? Just as a precaution.”

You inhaled sharply and slowly reached for your purse, a breath hitched in your throat when you heard the keys on his belt jingle.

“Absolutely the fuck not. You have no probable cause to ask for identification. She didn’t do anything wrong.” Rafe snaps, putting a hand over yours to stop your movements.

“Let’s just calm down, son.” The officer mediates.

“You’re the one that needs to calm down. We were just walking and minding our business until you started to racially profile my girlfriend.”

“No one’s racially profiling anyone, son.”

“Right,” the officer’s gaze fell to you a moment and your palms grew slick.

“You don’t have to look at me like that, hun. I’m not gonna hurt you. I just wanted to ask you a question.” He explains.

“A question she already answered.” Rafe defends, staring down the cop until he let out a sigh.

“You’re free to go. Sorry for the misunderstanding.” He climbed back to his cruiser and drove off.

Rafe waited until the officer was a safe distance away before turning to you.

“Are you okay, sweetheart?” He asks you but your gaze fixated on the light the cop made a turn at.

Rafe noticed your breathing starting to pick up and stood in front of you to block your vision. He took off his jacket and draped it over your trembling frame.

“There she is,” he says when you finally met his gaze. “He had no right to ask you anything. And I’m sure me arguing with him didn’t help your nerves. I’m sorry, baby.”

“I..” your mouth started to feel dry.

“Let’s go home, yeah? I can raincheck with my Dad.” “N-no, you don’t have to do that Rafe. It could be something important.”

“You are something important,” “I can just wait in the car-“

“I’m not leaving you alone. We’re going home.” Taking your hand into his, you followed him down the sidewalk.

Neither of you said anything until you reached his car. He opened your door and watched you climbed in, hesitating to close the door.

“Hey,” he starts, wiping some tears that began to fall down your cheeks.

“Look at me,” he waits for you to listen to him before continuing. “I will never let anything happen to you. Not if I’m still breathing, okay?”

You nodded, closing your eyes when he kissed your temple. “I love you,” you said softly when he slid into the drivers seat.

Linking his hand with yours, he kissed the back of your hand, murmuring I love you too against the skin.

He rested your interlinked hands in his lap as you looked out your window replaying the events over and over again.

[crash-and-cure]

Would it be a Sin? (Yandere! Austin!Elvis x Reader)

Gif credit to @troubleinapinksuit​

Summary: Your Husband will forever keep you safe, no matter the cost.

A/N: Full disclosure, I am a Latina, specifically my family is from Mexico. When I first got this request from @ilovehobi101​ I worried as to how I could frame the conflict that some members felt comfortable bullying reader (y’know aside from casual 60’s misogyny) but also why reader wouldn’t really speak up about it. And then I saw my profile picture and was reminded of the serious lack of Latin!reader fics in this fandom, and voila. Also I understand the utter swaglessness of having a latin!reader that starts off as a maid, but trust me the occupation has relevance to the plot. Reader does speak spanish and I will acknowledge that some of the spanish spoken is very specific to the Mexican dialect. Also I love how I was asked for soft!yandere and my thoughts immeadiately went to murder. I got in right under the wire to was able to post this on Elvis’ birthday.

Warnings: Smut, though more towards the end, and not while reader is pregnant (but does include depictions of Hand kink, cockwarming, vaginal fingering. Pregnant!reader. Implied murder, hiding and burying of a body featured. Period-typical xenophobia, racism, and microagressions galore toward a poc!reader as well as the use of some racial slurs. Sexual harassment depicted, though not from Elvis. Yandere!Elvis themes of obsessive, manipulative, and gaslighting behavior, as well as some controlling and isolating tendencies as well, though, softer and not as overt as I have written before. Traumatic birth is described and as well as descriptions of a pre-mature baby. ANGST galore here. Blood and Injuries from a fall depicted. Symptoms of PTSD.

Word Count: 14.5k

My Masterlist

You love Elvis Presley. And you were lucky enough to be the woman that he loves back.

There was no doubt in your mind. 

It almost plays out like a fairy tale. The King that fell for the maid. 

When you were just a maid that cleaned up after him and his friends in Beverly Hills, you didn’t expect this house to be much different from the other houses you’d worked at. You’d been working working as a maid for a few years now, so you knew the deal. Rich people liked their big houses to be clean, but didn’t want to actually think about it being clean, so you were to be seen not heard. They rarely ever spoke to you, mostly they handed a list to one of the girls, and left the house for the day, and you would leave before they returned. When you did on occasion actually see them it would mostly be them calling for you, usually by the wrong name, and pointing to a mess, before leaving the room, truly thinking you were stupid and could only take the simplest of commands (you would on occasion meet these people again after you and Elvis became official, and they never remembered you).

Elvis at the very beginning proved to be no different. You were in his house constantly and yet you didn’t even see him in person until maybe a month or two after you started. As you understood it he was a busy man, especially as he was trying to make a movie career happen, after being gone for so long. 

You wouldn’t exactly call the first time you met him magical, or even anything really special for you. You and a few other girls had entered the house and immediately you saw evidence of a party from last night and you could also hear some pretty explicit sounds coming from where you knew the master bedroom to be, one voice pretty distinct even if you had never heard it in person, the other a mystery to you. You and some of the girls got a little giggly, while the others seemed pretty annoyed by this whole thing.

Your tía was on the annoyed side of this situation, which grew even more when one of the tasks was cleaning the stairs and polishing the railing. You're the one that ends up volunteering to do it seeing everyone else was too embarrassed to even try to get near there. 

“Suena como si estuviera puliendo la baranda también,” your friend Linda would snicker.

You smacked her arm, and said “pinche puta,” between laughs. Though you can’t say you were any better because you couldn’t help but be very curious as to whether or not the girl upstairs is someone famous or not. Not because you plan on sharing that information with the others, you’re just very curious by nature and always have been. It’s gotten you in trouble in a few places, but you’ve been able to pull the “no hablo ingles” card and it’s usually enough. 

And that’s how you met your future husband, crouched down to get to a hard to reach place on the bannister pretending you’re not interested in what’s going on in the other room, as he walked out of his bedroom in only his boxers, hair a mess, scratching his ass while yawning. It throws you a little how handsome you still think he is in person, even in this less than glamorous situation you find yourself in.

“Hola señor,” you said, trying to hide your embarrassment as you got right back to work to get a particularly stubborn spot. You’re also praying he’s not so uptight as to have you fired for seeing him like this, and your hope is that if you act like nothing's wrong he’ll barely even notice you.

“Um… uh… I-I,” you hear him stutter out. You turn around, prepared to either be given a task or be fired on the spot, but to your surprise you find one of the most desired men in the world stuttering over his words while his ears turn a bright red. That color transfers almost entirely to his whole face when you both hear a feminine yawn coming from his room. That manages to shake him out of his stupor as he scrambles back toward his bedroom and closes the door.

Well… I’m fired, which you’re actually sad about, because of all the houses you work he definitely gives the best tips. You know that girls have been let go at other houses for less than this, so you quietly make your way closer to the door, still near the bannister, hoping at the least your curiosity won’t be in vain and you’ll be able to see if it's someone famous.

“...you said I could stay awhile longer,” the girl says. Her voice isn’t so breathy, so you doubt it’s Marilyn or Jayne, but not so posh sounding that you think it’s a Debbie or Audrey. 

“I-I know darlin’, but somethin’ came up,” you hear him say. He sounds guilty, as though he was just caught doing something he wasn't supposed to be doing. 

“Are we still going to that place you were telling me about later?”

“Mmm…” is all you hear from him in response. English may have been your second language, but even you recognize a non-answer when you hear one. You can’t help but cringe at that and for her sake, you hope, for her sake, she drove herself here. 

Down below you hear Linda calling and asking you to bring down the duster, but as you grab it intending to make a quick exit from the situation, you realize you neglected to finish the job you were sent to do and you lose your balance at the very top of the stairs when your grip fails you from all of the polish. 

There isn’t really anytime for your life to flash before your eyes as someone snatches your wrist and brings you upright again. “You alright there darlin’?” Elvis would ask as he guides you away from the stairs sounding genuinely worried for you while you try to catch your breath. Your heart skips a beat when you see how blue his eyes are, and you quickly try to gather yourself.

“Thank you,” you say. You notice he’s wearing a robe now and also how he’s gazing at you, not saying anything. “You want me to clean in there?” you say to break the tension a bit, which works as you see his cheeks redden a bit as he looks back at his bedroom.

“No, no, I-I uh…” he stutters, before clearing his throat. “If you don’t mind, my uh gir-lady… friend, needs to leave and she uhh…” 

“You want me to distract the others while she leaves?” 

“Y-you don’t mind?” 

“Well you just saved my life so I think I owe you.” you say to him as you lean over the bannister and confirm that they were all in the living room. You go to grab the railing, but quickly snatch your hand back. “Not falling for that one again.” you say looking back at him, and you see that gets a half smile out of him.

“Wait,” he says as you’re halfway down the stairs. “What’s your name sweetheart?”

It’s rare that you’re ever asked that on the job, so for perhaps the first time on the job, your smile is genuine as you tell him.

“Y/N” he repeats, apparently liking the way it rolls off his tongue. And surprisingly enough so do you.

So you make your way down to the room you know they’re cleaning and let them know that the boss wants all of you to clean the kitchen right now. They’re annoyed but nonetheless comply and once you make sure they’re all out you look back up the stairs and give him the thumbs up. He gives you a dopey smile as he gives one back.

Rather than being fired over the incident, he surprises you by actually giving you and the others even more hours. And the hours you worked for him, he so happens to be home. Your tía warns you to be on your best behavior, because typically this means that they think that one of you stole something so they’re keeping an eye on you. With the way one of his friends kept looking at you when you were in the same room as him you figured she was right. But the way Elvis was acting around you, was what threw away this notion.

He was always going out of his way to talk to you, always finding excuses to be in the same room as you, even offering little gifts in the form of sweets. Mix in the fact that you also became the only one who was allowed within places that not even his friends could go into like his bedroom, this all told you that he liked you, but you didn’t want to jump to conclusions as to what way.

After he finished shooting his movie he would ask you to house sit for him while he was back in Memphis, stating he felt he could trust you to keep the house clean and to be responsible with it unlike his other friends. Even after you saw what he was willing to pay you for essentially living alone in his mansion for a month, you hesitated because who just offers that to someone they just met and your tía’s warnings about men like him didn’t help either. You eventually caved when he promised to consider you for a full-time/live-in maid if you did a good job. 

Then two days after he left, you got a late night call from him. You were honestly happy for it, because the house felt too big and too empty with just you there. It didn’t help that the room he left for you was far too nice, and you missed sharing your bed with your little sisters. Suffice to say, being all alone was unsettling for you

“Sorry if I woke ya’ Y/N, I-I just…” he said, nervousness clear in his voice. “I-I just been lookin’ for somethin’ and I think I forgot to pack it.”

“You want me to look for it?”

“If you could be a doll,” he says, relieved. “Ju-just take a look in my room, and see if you can find it there. It’s a black cowboy hat, and I think it was in a white box in the closet.”

You set the phone aside and made your way up there. When you do find it you let him know as much, but decide to have a little fun with it now that you’re up. “I found it Mr. Presley. But there is a problem.”

“What’s wrong?”

“It looks better on me,” you say as you look at yourself wearing it in the mirror. 

“I bet it does,'' he says between laughs. This does create a bit of a pause between you two as you recognize that you’re essentially flirting with your boss, and to your horror he’s flirting right back. 

“So is this for a movie or are you just going to run away to become a cowboy?” You say in an effort to change the subject. 

You hear the smile in his voice as he says, “Much as I wish it was the last one, it’s for my next movie. Dolores del Rio’s gon’ be in it.” 

You’re floored at that. “¡No manches! She’s my favorite actress. I thought she wasn’t ever coming back to Hollywood.”

That gets the two of you talking about movies for hours. It was easy to forget that you’re talking to one of the most sought after stars in Hollywood right now as he gushes about his favorite actors the same way you do. What surprises you most is when he asks you who you’ve met while working in LA. 

“I’ll never tell,” you tease. 

“What, you hate ‘em that much Darlin”?” he laughs.

“Yes,” you jokingly agree, ignoring the way your heart skipped at that nickname.

“I ain’t surprised though,” he says. “There’s some crazies livin’ out there. Ones that’ll ya’ call in the middle of the night ‘bout a cowboy hat, and have you on the phone ‘til… wow 3 in the morning.”

“And some maids are crazy enough to lay in their bed and let them,” you counter, only to clamp up and realize how bad that sounded from the strangled noise he makes on the other side of the phone. You quickly try to backtrack and promise you didn’t mean it that way. 

He reassures you that he takes no offense from that, but he does sound like he’s breathing heavier now, and you worry that you accidentally took the harmless flirting with him too far. You quickly give an excuse to leave, “I have a busy day of sitting on your house tomorrow.” You're glad he laughs at that but it does sound a little stiffer than the other one he’s so freely given. After you hang up you tidy up what you can, and make your way back to your room, hoping to pray some dangerous thoughts away.

The next day you try to act like nothing happened, but that’s all thrown out the window that night as Elvis calls again with a similar request to find a pair of his boots that he couldn’t find, and it proceeds much like the previous call. Eventually after the second week of nightly calls he drops the act entirely and calls just so he can talk to you. And you welcome them, because it made the house feel less empty when he did.

When he got back to LA you didn’t know what to expect from him anymore as the late night calls turned into late night talks in the kitchen. That turned into daylight jokes and conversations between the two of you. And honestly even more open flirting between the two of you, but it all came to a head one day as the two of you were walking down the stairs. 

“So wait? Your character hears a song on the radio that you, Elvis, sang, and he doesn’t talk about the fact that you look exactly like him.” 

“It ain’t Shakespeare, but it’s gettin’ me back out there,” he says sheepishly rubbing the back of his neck. 

“That’s too bad,” you say as you reach the bottom of the stairs. “I think you would make a great Romeo.”

“Oh…” he says, his voice going low for a moment, as in the next moment you find yourself trapped between him and the railing. “Tell me Satnin, what ‘bout me reminds you a Romeo.” 

Your heart is pounding in your chest and your breathing is a little heavier than it was before. The smirk on his stupidly plush lips tell you he no doubt wanted this reaction, so you decide to show him what it was that reminded you of Romeo, and kiss him fully on the mouth. It was a quick peck on the lips but you could still see the faint traces of your lipstick on him. “Those are what remind me of Romeo.” 

He’s stunned at your boldness but no less welcoming as he brings a hand to your face to bring you back, but you use that opportunity to step on to the bottom step and away from him. You leave him on that staircase, your face warm at what you just did, biting your lip to keep from fully laughing at Elvis’ frozen state on the steps. 

Later that same day, he would tell you how his upcoming movie was going to be shot in Hawaii, and how coincidentally, he felt that you were in desperate need of a vacation. The rest was history for the two of you. 

You love Elvis Presley.

You love everything about Elvis Presley, save for one thing. 

His friends.

You will admit you like a few of them. Most of the others are fine, but indifferent towards you. Some of them get on your nerves but otherwise you can live with them, like when they tease you over your accent or snicker under their breath when you forget words. You don’t like it, but you put up with it. 

One of them you absolutely hated, with all of your being: Eric. 

He’s the one that has been around the longest with Elvis. He went on tour with him in the early days, went to Germany with him, and now he’s here in Hollywood with him. He even brags he was the one to give Elvis the final push he needed to get on stage. Yes he was more partial to the party lifestyle than the others, and had a tendency to speak without much thought, but Elvis reassured you that he was deep down a good guy.

You find that hard to believe, because you don’t know what it is about you that Eric finds so offensive, but whatever it is, it’s apparently unforgivable in his mind. 

Even though you spoke it just as well as Spanish, most people assumed you didn’t speak English at all. You let this slide mostly because you’re nosy and people are a lot freer with their words around you when they think you can’t understand them. You begin to regret that decision when Eric got comfortable enough to tell you how badly he wanted to fuck you and what he would do when he did. Usually your go to tactic was to start speaking rapid Spanish, which like most white people, made him confused and very uncomfortable, pick up a cleaning tool and walk into a different room, usually one where you knew Elvis was.

“You’re a lil’ fuckin’ whore you know that?” he would seethe while you cleaned the kitchen the night you were all set to leave for Hawaii. “Just like the rest of ‘em. He’s only taking you because he wants to fuck you.” The foul smell coming from him tells you that he’s been drinking, so you’re on edge right now. Everything about this is setting you off right now, and you know you have to get out of here right now. 

…But not before you got the last word in.

You look him right in the eyes, and as he sees the understanding in your eyes, you can also see him realize before you speak your first word to him, that you knew this whole time what he had been saying to you.

“Probably,” you say, and then you turn right around and make you way to Elvis that night.

You don’t if it’s embarrassment for what you heard him say to you, shame that you heard what he said or fear that you could and would tell Elvis at any moment what he’s like to you when no one was around. Whatever the case may be he would spend the next few years making comments under his breath about you, passive aggressively handing you plates to and glasses to clean, so on and so forth.

As did a lot of his friends, as they didn’t take you seriously at first, thinking you were going to eventually be replaced, that was until the argument that had his former manager walk away. When the press had learned about you, they had called you Elvis’ “Hot Tamale,” which you didn’t love, but what you loved even less was the threat that this story posed to his career.

But that’s also when you know you fell for him completely. Even you had fully expected him to drop you the moment the press got wind of you, because celebrities as big as him simply don’t end up with the maid, let alone a maid that looks and sounds like you. But he didn’t. He didn’t flinch at any of the things they threw at him: Not when his manager walked, not when the studio threatened to pull his contract, not even when a veritable mob stood outside the gates of his home demanding he be arrested for “indecency.” He took all of it, all so that you two could be together. 

Colonel Tom Parker wanted you gone, and forgotten. The last time you ever saw him he was saying shit like how he didn’t want Elvis to be so “controversial,” and how he would ruin his image as a “good American boy,” over quote “some little wetback.” You got the pleasure of seeing his face turn from angry to murderous as those words left that man's vile mouth, and the way every other face in that room drained of color as he went off on him had you breathing a little heavier by the end of it.

Though it all worked out for the better in the end as Elvis had ten new offers from people who worked with Brando and Dean before he was even out of the gate (all asking for a lot less than what he was paying the Colonel). None of them were afraid to take such a “scandalous” client, and were even able to work it in his favor to get more serious roles he had always been after.

Eventually most people seemed to get over it, and you became the new “it” girl, as magazines went from criticizing you for every little thing that was “unamerican” about you to praising how “exotic” and “spicy” you were. It doesn’t matter what they think, so long as you were with Elvis, you were untouchable, you believed. 

That is why you put up with his friends, it felt like after all that he does for you, the least you could do was fight your own battles. 

You had woken up today well-rested and your baby moving beneath your heart. You would have labeled it a perfect morning if it weren’t for the fact that your husband was absent, as he was currently doing reshoots for his movie half a world away right now. 

He had been furious at the studio for this, and tried everything he could to delay shooting because he wanted to be with you as much as he could right now. He had made it no secret how he wanted a big family, and having grown up in one you couldn’t help but agree eagerly. You were engaged for about a month in total, he was so impatient to start trying for a baby, but you were no better in all honesty.

It eventually took when you were with him in Hawaii for the original shoot of the movie. As appealing as being with him there right before your baby is due sounds, you can’t think of anything worse than a more than ten hour flight. You barely survived the flight back home when you were just barely into your pregnancy, you doubt you would be able to make it this late. Besides, you're saving your patience for flying for your upcoming stay in LA, as you had made plans to have your baby there. 

Graceland has become home to you, but Memphis has not. You’ve known since the moment that Elvis decided you were it, that the two of you would be toeing the line. Because being latin, the law here didn’t technically make it illegal for you two to be married, but certain people here made it very clear that they take your marriage as some cardinal sin. As a result, when you are here, you never leave Graceland without him. 

Usually you loved being here. When the house is filled with friends and family it actually does feel like a home, and even when it’s just the two of you, neither of you ever feel lonely. But without him, you now feel the way you did when you were just house sitting for him.

This is why, when you learned about the reshoots, you insisted on being in LA, so you at least wouldn’t be as cooped up there as you were in Graceland and you would have your family nearby. That was one of the biggest fights you’ve had in all the years you’ve been together, as you hated the idea of being in Graceland without him, and he hated the idea of you being in LA without him.

You didn’t relent until you found out why he was so reluctant to have you there. He didn’t want to scare you, but he had learned a while ago that someone had broken into the Hillcrest house. Nothing was taken, but it scared him nonetheless, and he wanted you to stay in Graceland just so he could have the peace of mind. And for all that it made you feel restrained, you can’t help but agree that Graceland is safe so long as you stay within. Red and Pat as Elvis didn’t want you without protection and Pat was pregnant too, so you didn’t have to feel so alone in the house. But Pat, unlike you, was free to leave at any time she pleased and you can’t begrudge her for doing so.

Of course Elvis has been trying to make your confinement easier by calling you every night. He missed you just as much as you did, and didn’t want to go a day without at least hearing your voice. Some calls are sweet, where he asks you to hold the phone to your belly so that he can talk to the baby, and funnily enough you notice that when he does the baby kicks like crazy. There are of course less than sweet calls, the ones that have you be as vocal as possible as you grind down onto his pillow.

Last night's call was different though, just from how much of a mood he had been in already. He had called to tell you that Eric and Joe were on their way back early, and with the venom dripping from his voice, you knew it had to be bad. He didn’t go into detail, but from what you understood is that Eric had been “fucking around” and now Elvis wants nothing to do with him. So much so that he was sent back to Memphis a week earlier than the rest of them, all so that he can get all of his things from Graceland before Elvis’ return. Joe’s only coming to keep an eye on him and make sure he doesn’t do anything stupid. With Red already here you figure that the two of them should be able to take him, but you doubt he’ll try anything now of all times when Elvis is so mad at him already. 

Eric had been like a looming black cloud over this whole experience, making jabs that he now understood the rush to get married so quickly and how Elvis is now trapped. Elvis was able to deflect these comments by joking how if anything he trapped you. Though in the few times he’s gotten you alone, the comments turned into how Elvis should best make sure you’re having a baby, to how he better make sure it’s his baby. You didn’t like what he was implying but you also knew that he was just saying shit to see what stuck, and you didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of a response.

Most of the other men had taken the hint when you and Elvis were gushing about how big of a family you wanted and had quietly moved their things out of their designated rooms, and into their own houses, while Eric seemed to dig himself in like a tick. You know Elvis is never about to ask someone to leave, and much as you would like to see this man off for the last time you decided it would be best not to counter him and to just stay upstairs for the time being.

The uppermost floor was your and Elvis’ own little world, where you two were just a young married couple awaiting the arrival of the first addition to your family. This is where the two of you could retreat away from everyone and just be. But with one of you gone it felt wrong, and you find yourself restlessly cleaning and organizing the floor above trying to make everything absolutely perfect for his return.

Though being roughly a little over seven months, you’re almost immediately exhausted and you find yourself resting your feet in what will become the baby’s room. It’s quickly become your favorite room in all of Graceland, with the little stuffed animals everywhere and the music notes painting the wall. You have no idea if the baby is going to be a boy or girl, but Elvis swears that he’s ready to pull the trigger on a theme the moment you figure it out. 

“¿Qué piensas?” you say to your bump, enjoying the breeze from the open balcony door. “Una patada para los vaqueros o dos para las princesas.” The baby kicks three times, and you laugh while rubbing your belly. Later on you would recognize this to truly be your last moment of peace. 

“How precious,” a vile voice sneers at you. 

Your smile instantly drops and rather than acknowledge him, you look out the window with your hand protectively over your baby. They're kicking up a storm, almost beat for beat matching your heart rate. “Elvis says, you’re not allowed to be up here,” you say curtly.

"He also says to keep the dogs outside, but I see a little bitch right in front a me." 

"I think big bitch would be more appropriate," you say, all the while rubbing your belly. He's always hated not being able to get a reaction out of you, or how you've never gone to Elvis about what he does as though he's not worth the air it would take to do so. Counter to what people believe about people like you, you’re very capable of keeping your cool and you save your passion for your love not your hatred. And you have no love for Eric.

“You must be so goddamn proud a yourself, being able to get your claws in him like you did,” he spits out. “Struttin’ around here with that little bastard in your belly like the cat that ate the canary.”

“Wait, I thought I was a dog?”

“...What?” 

“I’m confused because you said I was a dog and now you’re saying I’m a cat.” you say coyle while sarcastically throwing your hands in the air. “Tell me Eric, what am I?”

“You’re a little fuckin’ whore is what you are!” he shouts. “You know damn well that there wasn’t no break-in at Hillcrest. He just doesn’t want you in LA because he don’t want you fuckin’ around behind his back! I tried tellin’ him as much, but he didn’t want to hear none of it.”

You stand up and walk out of the room, not willing to hear anymore lies of a sad miserable man that has been digging his own grave for years. You weren’t even there, so he cannot seriously blame you for whatever he did to get himself fired. You know better than most how hot Elvis can run, but you also know how quick he is to forgive, so whatever he said or did to get Elvis this way, must have truly been something. 

You make your way to the office, hoping to lock yourself in there and that his outburst caused enough of a commotion to get the other men’s attention. He’s still spewing vile at you, but you’re simply blocking it out until you feel a hand yank your head back hard. 

Everything happens quick after that, as you feel the back of your being yanked away from your intended destination and being led to a different direction. You try your best to scratch at the hand that holds your hair, but his grip is too tight and suddenly you’re flying. 

And then you’re not.

You’re frozen at the landing, not wanting to believe what had just happened. Your heart is pounding in your ears, you feel your face get wet, and most horrifyingly, your baby is not moving. The carpet on the floor begins to be dotted with red but you don’t understand where it’s coming from until a little blood makes its way into your eye. As you hear the heavy footfalls coming down the stairs you start hyperventilating, trying to get a hold of the bannister and praying that he’ll stop. 

Getting to the railing you hear someone shouting what was that!?!? And someone else shouting where’d he go!?!? You see the others finally at the bottom of the stairs and for a moment the nightmare is over and you think he wouldn’t be so stupid as to continue now, but then you feel a foot firmly place itself on your back. You’re thrown off balance and you’re plummeting down once again. You’re abruptly put to a stop as Red and Joe meet you halfway up the stairs, and they share a worried look at you. You feel fine now, but you will admit that the slick feeling coming from between your legs is uncomfortable. 

You’re confused as to what’s going on, Red rushes his way up the stairs to your tormentor who only gives you a cold look as he’s being restrained. Joe is helping you to your feet and rushing you out the front door while Pat grabs your purse and yells at Mary to call Elvis. 

They’re taking you to the cars and you’re not sure why, you just need to clean the blood off of yourself and you’ll be fine. It isn’t until you look down and see the dark red that stains your blue dress do you realize what’s happening. 

Joe was able to get you to the hospital without issue, but your journey didn’t get any easier from there. The whole experience was nothing but a nightmare for you. Your accented English and skin tone has the nurses trying to direct you to, quote, a more “appropriate,” hospital for you. Even the blood staining the front of your dress and the clear pain you’re in doesn’t seem to sway them. You’re ignored by the staff, as you beg to be seen by a doctor and it’s not until you slap your driver's license on the counter and they see your married name do they suddenly care very much about you and your baby. Or at the least they don’t want to be known as the hospital that turned away Elvis Presley’s wife.

They get you in a wheelchair, and as they take you to the maternity ward, they repeatedly ask you questions and you’re positive you’re speaking English, but none of them seem to understand you. Not even three hours ago you were complaining to Mary how the baby was giving you heartburn, and now you’re in a hospital, with not a single familiar face in sight, begging incoherently for someone to save your baby. 

This is why you had wanted to be in California, where you would have a better chance of having a doctor that spoke Spanish with you. But now here in Memphis, you’re more likely to get a unicorn to deliver your baby, than a doctor that can speak your first language. 

Your legs are held apart by nurses, who don’t care to be gentle with you, as you desperately cling to the rails of your hospital bed, feeling like you’re going to crack your teeth as you desperately push the baby out of you. The pain you feel from the rest of your injuries is nothing compared to this, but you feel like you're seconds away from passing out after each push. But you know you have to keep going because every second that the baby is still in there, the less likely they are to make it. 

And with one final push it’s all over. Amá told you how long the whole thing could be, but your baby came into the world quick and so quiet. You can feel yourself bleeding out more and more, but you still want to see your baby and you ask as much before you pass out. 

When you come to, you don’t know where you are, you don’t know how long you’ve been there, and all the staff is willing to tell you is that you're restricted to bed rest due to the fact that you nearly died from a hemorrhage, and that your baby girl is alive. That’s how you find out you have a daughter, and all you know about her is that she’s alive and you can’t see her. 

You allow for visitors, and the only ones who do come to see you are Pat and Joan, Joe’s wife. Despite your wish to not be alone, seeing Pat’s baby bump only gave you an empty feeling. They let you know that you had been given birth two days ago, that Red and Joe are holding down Graceland, and most importantly Elvis is going to be here soon. 

You don’t ask about Eric. 

You’re glad they’re here even if all you can do at the moment is cry, and feel hollow on the inside.

He looks awful, is your first thought when you see your husband for the first time in almost a month. His eyes are bloodshot, his outfit is wrinkled, and you can see a hint of stubble even from where you're sitting. The girls quickly make their way out as Elvis makes his way over to your side, his chest heaving and his breathing ragged. 

Elvis is not one for tears, but you can only watch helplessly as the love of your life falls apart in your arms. You thought you'd cried yourself dry at this point, but even now you find yourself holding back even more tears as you try to wipe his tears away. 

“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, Y/N,” he whimpers against your palm. Your heart is  in your throat at this point, knowing he only ever calls you by your name when it’s serious. “I shoulda been here for ya’, this is all my fault.”

“Amor… Amor, please look at me,” you beg. “This isn’t your fault.”

“Y/N, please tell me what happened,” he pleads. 

“They didn’t tell you?” 

“They did… I-I just,” he takes a deep breath to steady himself. “I need to hear it from you.”

You’re trying to get your breathing under control, but finally you whisper to him what happened. You’re saddened and humiliated as you tell him how your own pride got you into this mess. The pride that liked to frustrate and rile up Eric, because you thought it was funny. The pride that prevented you from telling Elvis, because you wanted to feel like you were the one handling it. The pride that made you turn your back on a man you knew to be dangerous, because you thought he would never do anything to you. And now people are suffering because of you.

You beg him for forgiveness in the part you played in this, and you’re honestly surprised when he sticks by you and you bury your face in his chest. He tells you there is nothing to forgive, but you can see the dangerous gleam in his eyes as he asks if you want to press charges against him, and you shoot that down just as quickly. 

You don’t trust the police, something that has been with you since your earliest memory, Apá telling you about his scars that he got for having the audacity to wear a Zoot Suit as a young man. Navy men had beaten and stripped him in the streets and then afterwards policemen who saw the whole thing arrested him as though he were the problem. It was a scary thing to tell a little girl, but the older you got the clearer the story became: the police aren’t there to help people like you. 

That’s why you told Elvis not to take it to the police, just to have Eric leave Graceland and never come back. It’s going to be a hassle getting the state to acknowledge your daughter as his, let alone getting them to recognize that anything bad happened to you. You just want to put this whole thing behind you and never have to think about this again. Elvis frowns at that, but you doubt after everything you went through he’s gonna deny you this. 

After things have settled, the doctors make their way to your room, now that Elvis is here, they’ve decided now is a good time to tell you what’s happened. They tell you that the fall caused something called placental abruption and as a result you went into labor prematurely. It also caused internal hemorrhaging that caused you to pass out. None of that mattered to you really, you simply wanted your baby with you, and you let them know as much.

The doctors share a look, but they allow you to leave the bed and Elvis wheels you to where they’re keeping your baby. There is a whole team of doctors and nurses to greet you and tell you how you can see her, and what to prepare for. They escort the two of you to a private room farther away and with private security guarding it.

And then you see her… Your baby girl. 

You never thought babies could be so small.

She lies there, wires attached to her and tubes up her nose. She’s too small to even know how to eat and they have to use a tube in her mouth and a needle in her hand. Her little feet kick at the air, her tiny fists are clenched, and her eyes are shut tight, but you're glad to see it all, to know that your baby is still fighting, still daring to live. 

You want to be able to hold her, to let her know her mamá is there with her, but they tell you she’s not ready to be outside of her box yet, and they warn you of how delicate she is right now, and that the slightest change in her environment could be devastating, so touch is to be limited. The doctors told you that they had almost lost her in the beginning, but she’s a fighter and things are looking up. 

They leave the two of you alone with her, when one of the nurses playfully suggests Erica as a first name on her way out. All at once it hits you like a freight train, why your baby is the way she is now and who is to blame. You weep silently, so she can’t hear your grief over the situation: your baby is weak, so you have to be strong for her now. 

“I hate him. I hate him so much.” You sob, your hand pressing on to the warm glass that separated you and your child. Elvis wraps his arms around you, he doesn’t need to ask who you’re talking about. 

All this time Elvis has been so quiet, and he swiftly wraps you in his arms as he promises to take care of everything, and as he wipes the tears from your face he swears that he will make everything better again. 

You know, in spite of the horror that it was to get her here, you’re both overjoyed to finally be able to meet her. But all too soon the both of you are escorted out and away from her. They explain that once you’re discharged, you and only you will be able to stay with her on a long-term basis, but policy prevents Elvis from being able to do so as well. No amount of money or argument will change that. 

The next few days you vaguely register the visitors Elvis brings to see you, but you can’t bring yourself to care about any of it. They all come with well wishes and promises to do anything the two of you need during this time. The men look haunted to see you in such a state and they promise you that they’ll personally make sure Eric never does anything like this again. It’s little consolation to you considering it already happened once.

Finally you’re discharged and you walk yourself straight to the NICU. You visited her as often as you could, as did Elvis, and getting to be with her throughout the day is a step in the right direction. Being there with him makes it easier, but soon Elvis has to leave and your heart breaks all over again. You part with a long sorrowful kiss and you save your tears, knowing that of all times, this is the moment you need to be strong, for both him and your daughter. It was a hard, sleepless night for you and one look at the bags under his eyes and the bruises on his knuckles when you see him the next morning, tells you that Elvis had a similar night to you. 

He smoothes out your brow, as he softly pleads with you not to worry about him and instead to focus on your daughter, as she’s the one who needs you the most. And as he gives you a kiss on your forehead and you wonder what you did to deserve such a loving husband. 

You begged Amá to stay home, not wanting to have to worry about her being this down south without you. She’s apparently been praying everyday for you and the baby, and she’s begging you for the name. You want to tell her so badly, but you can’t risk telling her fearing it will somehow get back to the world at large.

You and Elvis had thought long and hard about the perfect name for your first-born and with everyone seemingly wanting to have a say in it, it was a little overwhelming (with how easy your pregnancy was going you stupidly thought that this was going to be your biggest hurdle to overcome. You wish you could go back to those days).

Eventually though you were able to come to some agreement born from your mutual love of I Love Lucy, though the names mostly stemmed from a joke when some of the magazines started calling you two the new Lucy and Desi. Neither of you could figure out who was supposed to be Lucy and who was supposed to be Desi. And as a play on that, the two of you ultimately decided on Lucía for a girl and Richard for a boy, as a fun little reversal. 

You had been so eager to tell the world about your beautiful baby not even a week ago and now it feels like the last piece of this whole ordeal that you can control. Even the hospital staff only know her as “Baby Presley,” promising that you would only name her once she was discharged. Someone had snuck into the hospital and was able to get a picture of your baby in a box attached to wires and fighting for her life, while the newspapers excitedly announced “It’s Girl!” to all of America. Your husband saw his own daughter for the first time on the front of a newspaper walking into the hospital before he could see her in person or even know if you were dead or alive. It felt like the whole world saw your baby before you did and that hurts you in a way that you fail to find words for in either language you speak. 

That entire stay, you didn’t leave the hospital once, and you rarely ever left her side, and even then it was only when Elvis could be in there with her in your stead. The days all seemed to blend together for you, you would eat so she could eat, you would sleep when she slept, singing and telling her stories everywhere in between, and touching her as frequently as you’re allowed to do so. 

Early when you tried to speak Spanish to her in front of the doctors, they immediately shut you down, “warning” you that doing so has the potential to hold her back if she has to learn another language in the long run. You internally roll your eyes at that, having grown up speaking both, but nonetheless you comply, but save it for when you’re alone with her. On the list of things you absolutely do not need right now is the media turning on you for being a bad mother by not complying with doctors orders. They already make comments on how you should have been more careful in the situation, because as far as anyone outside of Graceland knows, you simply fell down the stairs.

You wouldn’t say it was all bad, you love the moments you’re all together. Moments where you both hold her hands at the same time and feel her delicate skin, where you hear her gurgle as she’s being tickled, and especially the way she wiggles her arms and feet as Elvis sings to her, are ll moments you would never trade trade regardless of the fact that you’re in a cold sterile room and not in your warm home. Elvis even brought a record player and the nights became a little more bearable as now you’re both able to hear him when he’s not there. 

Finally you’re able to get the all clear from the doctor and Lucía finally gets to experience the world outside of her little clear box for the first time in short bursts. You’ll be able to hold your baby fully and not be limited to just holding her hand. In many ways you were not ready to lose being so close to her so fast, and this was only made worse by the fact of how limited you were in touching your own baby during this whole time. And still you worry that maybe she’s still not ready, as you’re still roughly a month away from your original due date.

But as you’re finally able to hold her and you feel her latch on and nurse from you, these doubts and fears all fall silent. Your baby was almost completely ripped away from you, by someone who only had cruelty and spite in their heart for you. But now as she rests in your arms and feeds from you getting stronger, and your husband holds the two of you close to him everything feels as it should be now. 

Not too long after that, Lucía is finally able to be discharged and you can finally take her home. Elvis was nervous no doubt, from all the times he questioned the doctor if he was sure that she was ready and if she couldn’t stay a little longer just to be sure. You have similar thoughts but you’re trying to think on the brighter side of the situation, for the both of you.

Of course you and Elvis still have to do that photoshoot for the press. You hate this, but also recognize that getting this out of the way now will sate their curiosity about your baby and get them to leave you alone, at least for now. You and Elvis recognized this would be the case when you saw them go into a near frenzy the moment you stepped off that plane from Hawaii with an obvious baby bump months ago. 

Ironically enough the only thing that has gone according to plan was this aspect, as you were able to get photographers you’re familiar with and Elvis brought the outfits you picked out months ago. His fans were also willing to give the two of you a wide berth so that you could leave the hospital. You are far too enamored with Lucía to really take notice of any of it, until the two of you are already in front of home. 

Your mood drops once you see where you are, and Elvis takes notice of that. He squeezes your hand and reassures you that everything's been cleaned and that the trash’s been taken out. Still, walking through the front door, you held onto his arm for dear life and your hands were shaking so bad you had him hold Lucía, as you were afraid you would drop her. You're greeted inside by a few friends and his family, but your eyes immediately narrow in on the stairs and you're relieved to see that it’s completely clean. Without the bloodstains, it’s easier to forget that anything terrible happened here. 

Everyone wants to get to see her and the two of you are immediately, but a squeeze to his arm from you and the subsequent single look he gives them has them back up a little. You’re able to sit down in the living room, and hold your baby in your home for the first time, but not all is right in the world. No one has said anything about the big Eric shaped elephant in the room, as they all no doubt know why you went into labor so early.

The women do their best to distract you from it, talking about their own experiences being a new mother, and how this has been a stressful time for everyone, especially the men who’ve been jumpy for weeks now. But no matter what your attention keeps being drawn back to the stairs, as though any minute Eric’s going to be trotting down to finish the job any moment now. You try to distract yourself with anything else in the room, and that’s when you notice something off about the carpet. You figured that the carpet would have been replaced but what’s odd is the fact that you remember going straight from the staircase to the car as you were bleeding, so you don’t understand why the carpet in the den had to have been replaced too. 

You shake these concerns from your head and begin to make your way outside to get some air, because the walls are making you feel like you’re going to suffocate. That’s where you find the men, as all smoking within Graceland had been banned for the foreseeable future, and Elvis still insisted on finally using those cigars he got for the occasion. What’s weird is that they don’t surround the patio or even the pool area. No, you find them more out towards the field, surrounding a large unsightly hole in the ground.

“Amor, what did you do to the backyard?” You question your husband when he makes his way back to where you’re sitting.

Some of the men tense up at your question, but seeing Elvis not really react to the question other than a slightly nervous laugh, makes you disregard anything’s amiss.

“Well…” he says rubbing the back of his neck, “after I got done with the nursery. I-I wanted to add something to the backyard so it wasn’t so empty to look at.”

“... and you decided the best way to make it less empty was to dig a hole?”

“It ain’t gon’ stay a hole, Darlin’,” he laughs, wrapping an arm around you. “I was plannin’ on puttin’ in one a them Gazebos in the back for our little princess here. It… It kept me busy the nights I couldn't sleep.”

You soften at that answer, knowing that with his sleep issues, the nights must have been torture for him. He was always the first visitor to arrive at the ward and the last one to leave, and only once did you ever dare ask what he did when he went home at night. You worried about him, how could you not? And so one day you gathered the courage to ask him how he was handling the nights?

All he said was that he “keeps busy.” At the time you didn’t want to know what he meant, as it was a stressful time for the both of you, so digging holes in the backyard is far from the worst thing he could have been doing.

You give an amused sigh saying, “Next time, get professionals to do it.”

He grins at that, “Don’t worry baby, we got a crew comin’ in to fill the hole in a few days. I wanted to have it done before you and the lil’ one got back home.” You shake your head at him and kiss him on the cheek. You don’t really notice the way most of the men take a simultaneous sigh of relief at your acceptance of Elvis’ answer. 

Later on you’re putting Lucía down in a little bassinet Elvis had set by your bed (you’re both reluctant to be away from her), and you feel him make his way behind you. The both of you lay beside each other and watch her sleep, and now, not having to be obscured by tubes or glass, you get to really see your beautiful baby girl. She’s sleeping with her arms straight up, her little chest rising and falling on its own, and the two of you nearly melt as she yawns and rubs her little mitten covered hands over her face. 

“You ready to sleep yet?” he whispers to you. 

“No, I just want to look at her some more.”

“Me too,” he hums. 

You sit with your husband and bask in this perfect moment.

You didn’t really notice the off-atmosphere that surrounded Graceland in those days, until you noticed that a trunk of yours was missing. You think you had packed some old baby things your mother had given you the last time you had been in LA. It had been with you in Graceland before you left the hospital, and it had also been where you were storing the outfit you wore when you left the hospital, so the fact that it’s gone is odd to say the least. Considering Elvis was the one that brought the outfit to you, he’s the one you end up asking. 

“What trunk?” he asks. 

“The big white one,” you say to him as you change Lucía into her pajamas. She’s trying to eat her fist and you’re trying to get her to smile by nibbling on her fingers a little. “The one you got me the first time in Hawaii.” 

“Oh that one,” he responds. “Didn’t you leave it at Hillcrest?”

“No, I know I brought it here.” you say confused. “I asked you to look in it to find the pink outfit I wore at the hospital. It’s gotta be here somewhere.”

He furrows his brow at that and he looks deep in thought, “Didn’tcha say that you didn’t want to pack clothes that don’t fit no more?” He says as he brings Lucía to rest on his bare chest. 

You do vaguely remember saying something along those lines when you were packing, but still you remember having it here with you. “Maybe… but I did bring it here,” you say, though not as sure as you once were.

“Y/N, why you wanna know so bad?” he says, as he gently pats Lucia on the back trying to get her to fall asleep. This question throws you a bit, not for the words themselves, but the way he said it, as there was a severe lack of humor or warmth in his tone as he said that, that you weren’t used to. 

“I-I was looking for a few baby things that Amá gave me last time I saw her.” you say, suddenly feeling guilty for pushing the topic. 

His eyes soften at your answer, realizing he scared you. He holds up your chin and gives a quick kiss to your forehead. 

“I-I think, I saw ‘em when I I was lookin’ for the little pink get up a yours,” you see him jump a little. “Though you might wanna save the lookin’ for tomorrow,” he says, a slight grimace on his face, as he looks down at your baby girl. “‘Cuz lil’ one here is trying to tap a dry well.” You burst out laughing as you see that Lucía has a good grip on one of his nipples and is trying desperately to bring it to her mouth. 

“Esos son para mamá, chula,” you jokingly scold her, as you bring her close to you so she can latch onto you, and Elvis tickles your side in reprimand. Still even with that moment of levity, you still can’t let go of what just happened. If it were anything else you would have written it off but that trunk was special to you because of the fact that Elvis had given it to you on that fateful trip to Hawaii. He had insisted you pack light, which confused you until about a week later when by that point he had already gifted you twice as many dresses as you had come with. By the end of the trip he gave you this trunk just to pack everything he had given you. (Smooth operator that he was, when the trunk found its way into his room when you got back home, he insisted it would be easier for you to move into his room, rather than moving the trunk into yours).

It has been a pretty constant presence in your relationship with him, as it went where you went, and you went where he went. But… you didn't go with him to Hawaii, and you did leave a lot of old clothes back in LA… maybe it is just baby brain, and you’re overthinking this.

Things only really seem to click that something is off a few days later when you caught Charlie staring out into the backyard. If it were anybody else from the group you wouldn’t have noticed or cared too much, but you liked Charlie. He seemed to be one of the more genuine ones of them all, and he’s also one of the few of them who's at least picked up on some of the more common Spanish phrases in all the years you’ve known him.

But now Charlie seems distant, as though he’s somewhere else in his head. He’s staring off into the same direction as where that pit is now. 

“Charlie, ¿qué pasa?” you ask, and he seems to jump ten feet in the air. 

“Y/N, hi-hello… um…I-I, d-do ya’ need something?” he manages to stutter out. 

“Yes umm…” you say slightly embarrassed about what you’re about to ask. “I want to put Lucía down for a nap, but I need someone else to help carry her up there with me.” You would have asked Elvis, but he’s upstairs already and you’re not about to leave her alone to go get him.

“Sure, but… why do you need help,” he asks, genuinely confused over the request. 

“I… well, since the fall, I… I don’t trust myself to hold her on the stairs,” you say, your eyes going a bit glassy. You shake your head to gather yourself, “I ju-just need someone else to carry her on the stairs. I’m fine on my own.” If by fine you meant having to have both feet on each step going up and down, and never letting go of the railing, then yes very fine. Elvis was heartbroken when he saw this the first time, but didn’t say anything about it, just offered you his arm and let you take your time. 

Charlie has the same reaction and wordlessly helps you with her. Though you do trail behind him you eventually are able to make it up to the landing, where you see Elvis whispering something to him. You think he says something to the effect, you understand now? Charlie would give a small nod in response as he hands Lucía to him and makes his way down the stairs after giving you a quick hug. 

You’re about to ask what that was about, when you see something on one of the steps that knocks the wind out of your lungs. You see a familiar looking rust colored spot on one step, and you force yourself to sit down, feeling unsteady on your feet and your eyes welling up all of a sudden. 

“Baby what's wrong?” Elvis says trotting down the steps, Lucía still in his arms. Your hands are shaking and your breathing quicker than you should, and you're filled with the same dread that you felt as Eric walked down those same steps. “Goddamnit, I thought they got all of it” he whispers when he sees where your eyes are fixated. He crouches down beside you and takes you in his arms as he whispers in your “You’re okay sweetheart,” he says, “You and Lucía are okay.” 

Gradually you feel yourself steady as you breathe in the scent of his cologne, and feel the way Lucía clutches around your finger. That brings you back down and you’re able to stop your weeping as you focus solely on the two most important people in your life.

You wouldn’t know this, but at the bottom of the steps, just beyond your view several men would come to the same understanding as Charlie did in that moment.

What did he mean about understanding? You would ask yourself later after Lucia had been fed and put down for a nap. You’re laying down in his arms, having tired yourself out from that episode, and just wanting to rest, but this question that rings in your ear, still eats at you making you unable to do so. 

These thoughts are halted as you feel him run a finger down your spine and you on reflex push your chest into his. You also feel as he brings his hips closer to yours, and he hooks your leg around his waist, lightly trailing his hand back up your skirt to rest comfortably on your ass, as you let out a shuddering breath against him, making as little noise as possible, as not to wake your baby.

He’s gentle with you, you just had his baby after all. There was no tearing so you’re healed physically, but you're glad nonetheless as you become reacquainted with his touch again. His fingers lightly trace the edge of your panties, as he nibbles on your bottom lip the way you like. 

You’re reminded of your first time with him. He had been having trouble with one particular scene in Blue Hawaii, and he asked you to come on to the set that night. He had you sit as an extra behind Joan Blackman and he kept stealing glances at you as he sang. As the scene cut there was not a dry eye on set and Elvis was heaped with praise for his best take yet, but what he was more interested in was your reaction to his song. 

He was gentle with you then as well. You confided in him before that you were untouched, and he made sure to make it as tender as possible. Careful, as he learned (as did you) what made you whimper, what made you moan, what made you scream. 

Knowing he’s gone just as long without it as you have, you want to. God, do you want to, but as you grind yourself onto his still clothed length, he makes the mistake of tugging your hair back and suddenly you're paralyzed with an overwhelming sense of dread as he kisses your neck. It takes him a second to realize that this is bad heavy breathing, but he stops the moment he realizes it. 

“Y/N, what’s wrong?” His worried look only makes you feel more guilty, while you try to even out your breathing. This feeling only made worse as you watch his heartbreak all over again when you tell him why you freaked out when he tugged at your hair like he did.

“I’m always gon’ protect ya’ Satnin,” he whispers to you, mindful of your baby sleeping a few feet away. “Nothin’s ever gon’ hurthcha again.”

You want to believe him. You really do.

It all comes to a head when the day before they’re set to fill the hole in the backyard, you finally find your trunk. Embarrassed at your reaction to being on some stairs, you decided to try to break this habit by confronting your fears. So one day as Lucía slept, you made your way to the attic stairs, but your fears were quickly forgotten as you stared at the previously missing trunk. It’s hard to comprehend its presence as it’s supposed to be on the other side of the country right now. Or… at least that’s what Elvis had told you. 

Whatever the case may be you can’t exactly leave it alone, and you go to inspect it a little closer. It won’t open and a brief brush on the keyhole tells you that it had been locked and the key lodged inside. You also see some dents and dings here and there, but the most noticeable change were some rust colored stains dotting the outside of it. You don’t immediately recognize what they could be, but even as your mind conjures up similar looking stains that are still on the stairs, you can’t really accept what it is.

“Whatcha doin’ up here baby?” a familiar voice behind you says, startling you for a moment. You turn to see your husband, but something is … off. His smile is a little too big, his eyes a little too wide, and if his jaw was clenched any tighter he would have cracked his teeth. It’s all far too unsettling

“I-I was practicing with the stairs, and I found this,” you say, pointing to the trunk.

Somehow he’s able to clench his teeth even tighter as he sees what you found, “I didn’t want you to find out like this, sweetheart. But I,”  he says , pausing to think on his next words. “I-I… Forget it you caught me. I broke the lock on it.” he says with a guilty look on his face. 

“...That’s it?”

“That’s all, baby. I wanted to try to fix it, but I just made it worse and now it won’t open.”

Maybe… maybe he is telling the truth and he just broke the lock… but that wouldn't explain why everything kept in there was taken out or why it was up in the attic, or why it’s covered in blood. Why is he hiding this from you?

“C’mon Satnin, it ain’t nothin’ to get so worked up about? I’ll getcha another one soon,” he says as he wraps an arm around you.

You don’t have time to really question what is going on as you hear Lucía below and you're able to stamp down that curious part of yourself. You make your way back, your feet feeling so unsteady that you clutch onto him with both hands. 

But it still eats at you, the fact that he was able to lie so easily to you, and convince you of that lie when he knew full well it was up here. And why hide it from you? These are all questions you ask yourself as you lay in bed with him, you wonder who exactly you are sharing it with. 

Your blood goes cold as you feel the bed shift right next to you, and you slam your eyes shut, genuinely fearing your husband for the first time. But these feelings of fear dissipate as feel the  quick kiss he gives your forehead before whispering to you, so low you barely hear it, “No one’s ever gon’ hurtcha and get away with it.” You’re paralyzed with fear, and have to remind yourself to breathe lest you give away that you're not actually asleep as he makes his way to the bathroom. 

You open your eyes and stare at the door and the longer you listen the clearer it becomes that he’s not using the bathroom. You also hear as several feet try to quietly make their way up the stairs and then you hear the tell-tale creak of the attic door. You silently make your way to the door and listen against it as you hear them 

You stare off into darkness as the noise gradually lessens until you’re left hearing nothing but the crickets outside and your baby’s steady breathing. You stay there frozen in place, debating internally whether you should follow them. You know in your heart that something is wrong, but you don’t want to confront it. Still after some time you find yourself in the kitchen making your way outside.

As you round the corner, you're hit with the pungent scent of cigar smoke in the air mixed with the unmistakable smell of a campfire, and you see him and all the other men stripped down to their underwear. You crouch down out of sight and you see they are all surrounding the fire pit in the backyard, piles of clothes sit next to each of them, and on occasion one of them will throw something into the fire. All of them seem to be shaking from the cold or from nervousness you can’t quite tell. All of them… except for Elvis. You know he’s prone to getting jittery when he’s nervous, but here, you’ve never seen him so collected. 

“Eric was one a my oldest buddies, and he threw that all away ‘cause he had to be a shithead to the most important person in the world to me.” Those words, cold as a grave, mixed with that vacant look in his eyes, sent shivers down your spine. “There’s a lotta things I can forgive, but what he did sure as hell ain’t one a them.” 

“EP…” Jerry says. “You don’t gotta explain yourself, we-we all woulda done the same thing.”

“I’m goin’ ta hell because that sack a shit, and I look forward to seein’ him again, just so I can beat the crap outta him again.” You can hear the smile in his voice as he says these words, as he seems to rub his knuckle, the ones you remember seeing so badly bruised when you were in the hospital.

It’s unsettling how similar this is to when you met Elvis for the first time, you crouched down, being nosy, him in his boxers trying to hide someone from you. It would be funny if you weren’t one hundred percent sure that your husband wasn’t admitting to murder right now. You don’t stick around for much longer, your curiosity is sated, but you don’t feel any better knowing. 

You don’t know when or how you end up there, but you find yourself on the stairway landing. Once upon a time you thought of Graceland as a safe haven surrounded by shark infested waters, but now you realize that that couldn’t be further from the truth. You’re swimming in it, but the biggest shark had decided that you were never to be harmed. 

You want to say that there was some internal debate on that landing, where you contemplated leaving and never looking back. How you wanted to do the morally right thing and report them for all the good it would do. How there was a part of you that stared longingly at the door feeling the desire to leave from the love that has driven him to do this for you.

You would say that… but you would be lying. 

No. You sit there taking in the new reality that the man who has repeatedly physically and emotionally hurt you is gone and it was at the hands of the man you loved the most. You feel something at this moment. A feeling that has eluded you for a while now. You feel… safe. 

It’s an odd feeling to have again. It was something you had always felt with Elvis, but not something you were ever able to verbalize. But now looking back you were always safe with him, when people got too close, when their words hurt, when their stares burned, you could always retreat into him and feel protected from the world. 

There’s a lot of conflicting emotions running through you all at once, pain and sadness at what Eric had done and all the subsequent heartache his actions brought clashing with the almost euphoric relief that is knowing he’s gone for good and it’s all due to how loved you are by a single man. If anybody were to see you right now, they would see a woman with tears streaming down her face while simultaneously giggling like a maniac. You’re only broken from this manic episode when you hear the shrill cry of your baby girl.

You feel lighter as you make your way up the stairs, so light you don’t bother to hold the railing as you usually do and you find your baby right where you left her. Your husband would return later while she’s still suckling at you, and he would make his way to sit behind you, his chin resting on your shoulder, neither of you acknowledge how long he’s been gone. No, in the soft light of the room you both bask in each other watching the little wonder you both made get a little bigger and a little stronger by the moment resting in the bassinet by your bed.

“I just realized something,” you say. You feel him go rigid behind you, but you quickly break the tension by lightly running a finger along the ridge of his nose. “She got this from you.” 

“No, she didn’t,” he says with an amused huff. 

“No, it’s the same shape, just smaller. Look,” you insist. You take one of his hands to show him, careful not to wake her. 

He concedes to your point with a soft, tender kiss to your lips, while his other hand rubs circles on your hip bone. 

You should be disturbed at where his mind is at right now, and you would be if you weren’t just as hungry for him as he was for you. It’s been too long without him, and as he runs a finger along your jaw bringing your faces closer together, you welcome him back home. 

With the straps already falling off of your shoulders, you shiver as he uses a single finger to drag the silky material over your nipples, already begging for his attention that he’s all too willing to give. He languidly laves at them, using the occasional scrape of his teeth to get you to jump, all the while pressing down on your clit through your panties, before removing them.

You're laid on your back and you feel as he spreads the delicate petals of your pussy and even you’re taken aback as to how wet you are right now. You hiss slightly as you feel him probe lightly at your entrance, and he rips his hands back afraid he had hurt you. 

You take his hand in yours and bring his fingers to your mouth, tasting yourself on him, only to bring him closer to you as you whisper against his mouth “not bad, just slower papi.” You think, in a way, you both need this: to be reminded that his hands can do more than hurt. You’re not scared of him or what he’s capable of. 

He rolls so that you're on top of him and you bite your lip at his straining cock within his boxers. You run a single finger up his length and he bites down on his knuckle as you circle around the damp spot already forming. As you spread kisses along his length, he quietly pleads to be inside you, and after all he’s done for you, you won’t deny him.

Finally you sink down on him, and a long, satisfied moan escapes from your mouth and you chance a look at your baby relieved that she’s still asleep. He gives a cheeky grin, biting down on his bottom lip to keep quiet, and you grind down on him in retaliation, though that quickly backfires on you as it feels way too good and you have to concentrate on not doing that again, as you don’t want this to end so soon.

Neither of you are in a hurry at the moment, just choosing to indulge in the connection that circumstances had denied the two of you for so long, sharing lazy kisses and secret jokes in equal measure until you can’t take it anymore. You set the pace for yourself and he is all too willing to oblige and let you chase your peak, as he’s not too far behind. You may very well be in bed with a monster, and yet you’ve never felt safer.

The next day you watch from the Balcony as the men fill the platform with concrete and you get one last look at that trunk, and hope to never see it again. Elvis joins you there, watching and holding you and your daughter, both secure in the knowledge that he’ll always be able to protect you.

You don’t end up thinking about him as much as you thought you would have. In those early days after construction had finished you had feared that the slightest slip up and everybody would know. You felt you could hardly breathe when you looked at it those months, and you were surprised and more than a little disturbed that Elvis had no such reaction to it. 

Though eventually a good memory would come to almost completely scrub out the sour taste that the Gazebo leaves you in the form of Lucía’s baptism. Even over a year later she was still so small compared to other babies her age and the doctors warned you to expect some developmental delays, but you still worried over the fact she still has yet to crawl. Most times she seems content enough to sit where she’s put and play with the toys within her reach and getting someone’s attention to get her what she wants. It’s almost as though she’s aware that Elvis is called The King, making her a princess and so she expects to be treated like one. 

Recently she’s taken to standing up using whatever’s closest, bouncing up and down on her little legs for a bit then sitting back down. You sat there letting Lucía hold your hands and do her thing, while you talked to some of the other women. Your husband on the other side of the platform, surrounded by Lucía’s godfathers (they helped him hide a body after all, this felt like the least the two of you could do to honor them), talking business.

When you felt her let go your immediate instinct was to grab her, but you stop yourself when you see that she’s not only standing on her own but shakily taking her first steps forward. You and the other women go dead silent as you watch her make a slow but sure beeline, her eyes set on her Daddy. You hold your breath so afraid that she’ll fall, but all of your muscles are tensed ready to dive in and catch her if she so much as stumbled.

Elvis was looking away, not noticing what was happening until she finally got to him and wrapped herself around his leg. Seeing her next to him throws you for a loop, as over a year ago, she was so tiny that she fit almost entirely in one of his hands, and now she stands on her own at his knee, and you really do see how much she has grown. Elvis finally turns around and sees her looking up at him, but with no one around to have helped her he doesn’t put it together until he sees your mile wide grin, and it finally dawns on him what just happened. 

You and Elvis would later joke that she, just like him, wouldn’t do something so big without an audience. And for that entire day you didn’t think once about Eric. Your little girl's first steps were over a grave, and you couldn’t be happier about it. 

When she was four, you had explained to Lucía that her father had had it built after she was brought home in celebration that the two of you had pulled through. After that she started calling it hers, and it just stuck, even when your other children were born it was always Lucía’s Gazebo. Birthday’s, barbeques, family dinners, many of them were held underneath that gazebo, and only occasionally would you even spare a thought toward Eric. 

And now as you watch your daughter dance with your husband underneath the gazebo, celebrating her quinceañera you’re glad Elvis did what he did. If that man had had his way you wouldn’t have any of this, and you refuse to feel anything close to guilt or sympathy for him.

Eventually Elvis breaks away from her to stand next to you as she now embarks on the arduous journey of dancing with her many, many padrinos. You welcome him with a tender kiss, and he holds you from behind as the two of you watch your little girl who is now becoming a woman.

“I swear she was this small yesterday,” he says while rubbing your two-year old son’s back as he rests on your shoulder right now. Elvis had been close to tears all day, with the doll ceremony nearly doing it for him as he always loved spoiling her with toys, so the idea that this would be the last one was very bittersweet for him.

For you it was the shoe ceremony that did bring you to tears, as you held her hand as she took a few shaky steps in her new heels, not so much for the first steps she took as a baby, but the painful reminder of all the things you thought you wouldn’t get to have with your little baby that couldn’t leave her box. You refuse to let that man ruin anything special for you again, and over his grave you whisper in the love of your life’s ear how it’s not too late to have another one. His eyes widen at that for a moment before he gives that devastating grin of his that won you over years ago and agrees to later.

You love Elvis Presley. And you were lucky enough to be the woman that he loves back.

@venus-haze @djsjs13949 @ilovehobi101 @butlerslut @richardslady121 @giabelia @sydneyyyya @meetme0614 @tacozebra051 @myradiaz  @thelifes-world @maythesunshineagain @rakitirakiti @lostteenagetale @j-v-9-2  @eliseinmemphis @dkayfixates  @immi547 @thatbanditqueen   @marriedtoeddie @cuteejeno @itlover8000​ @isthlsfate​ @mgparker​

[zukadiary]

Hi! I hope you're well! I wanted to ask something I was curious about. I recently saw a DVD of Me and My Girl with Yuzuka Rei as Jacqueline. I’m impressed by her versatility, I usually know her for otokoyaku roles. Could you explain how casting decisions are made when otokoyaku are given female roles or vice versa? Are there specific criteria for this? Also, any other notable performances of this kind you'd recommend? Thank you so much for making this blog btw! I've learned so much from it. ^_^

Hi! I don't think there are any hard and fast rules about this, but there are definitely patterns.

First off, there are certain female roles in big-name, frequently restaged shows that are either always or usually played by otokoyaku. Off the top of my head, some include:

Jacqueline in MeMy, as you mentioned

Scarlett in Gone with the Wind

Anita in West Side Story

Rafaela in Grand Hotel

Then sometimes they are just one-off casting decisions (Towaki Sea in Liszt, Ayanagi Shou in Hikarifuru Michi, etc). Regardless of the situation, it's usually for one or a combination of these reasons:

It's a "spunky," or more mature, or canonically cross-dressing role, that would break the mold of the musumeyaku-otokoyaku relationship

It's an incredibly high profile role, but the troupe has no top musumeyaku—e.g. Sena Jun as Elisabeth in '05, Nagina Ruumi in '09—and a secondary musumeyaku would not be nearly as much of a draw to the audience as a higher ranked otokoyaku

Or it's a really high profile role, and otokoyaku just bring in more money than musumeyaku, so a heavy supporting female role goes to an otokoyaku rather than a secondary musumeyaku

Fan service!

Here are some of my recommendations from most to least recent:

Grand Hotel - lots good about it, but cw for egregious racial makeup in supporting characters

Soragumi's Anastasia, for both Kazuki Sora and Kotobuki Tsukasa in female roles

All for One, which is quite fun, and features Saou Kurama as the Duchess of Montpensier

Ok this is pretty Tamaki Ryou heavy for some reason, but Legend of King Arthur for Miya Rurika's Morgane

Shall we Dance, one of my all time favorite shows, featuring Sagiri Seina as the female lead

A Song for Kingdoms, the 2003 Hoshigumi version, featuring Aran Kei as Aida (also cw for some racial makeup)

There's a lot of other great stuff too!

EDIT: HOW COULD I FORGET ADELAIDE??? Highly recommend thanks for the comment!

[absolxguardian]

The new book Rise And Fall of the Galactic Empire, which is an in-universe history book, provides some lore that I think provides very interesting background context to that Tay'lor Spiff post. (I know there's a Republic era pop-star that was a Taylor Swift easter egg in the last issue of the Jango Fett comic series, but the fact she's a Twi'lek makes me feel like she can't be a full Taylor Swift expy- because she wouldn't be a part of the dominant racial group.)

Set alongside the SAGroup was the Coalition for Progress, which in many ways fulfilled similar roles and responsibilities relating to the adult population of the galaxy. Initially one of the smallest groups within COMPNOR, Progress—as the name was often shortened to—was sometimes greeted with a degree of trepidation by Imperial citizens and planetary governors. Much of this stemmed from the actions of the group within Progress designated to deal with art and culture. Progress created a very narrow definition regarding acceptable art, music, or performances that could be held or showcased in public. The result was a funding collapse in artistic pursuits and the blacklisting of some extremely high-profile artists, performers, and musicians who fell afoul of the new regulations. This included some of the leading gonk-rock groups of Bormea sector, who regularly had their venues closed or raided, and the overtly anti-Imperial band Red Shift Limit. Furthermore a musician from Naboo named Palo Jemabie was imprisoned at a labor camp by the Empire for a musical performance described—without detail—by his criminal record as “deviant.” This situation was particularly complicated as various planetary governors had previously been patrons and supporters of those who were now banned and could no longer enjoy their work.

[...]

The SAGRecreation group in particular was highly adept at identifying potential role models within various spheres of sport and culture who might appeal to younger citizens. Grav-ball already had an existing widespread appeal in the galaxy, but the Empire took the extra step of incorporating it into various military academies and recruiting some of its most famous stars as examples of what both physical prowess and loyalty to the Empire could mean. Broadcasts of grav-ball tournaments on the holonet were often accompanied by recruitment messages that featured popular players, and Grand Moff Tarkin was sometimes seen in the crowd for games that took place on Coruscant, though it remains unclear whether he actually had any interest in the sport.

This is clearly inspired by how sports and the arts were treated within real life fascist regimes- grav ball is space American football, there's an entire middle grade book about that. Given the position the kind of country pop Taylor Swift makes in our current cultural hegemony- the Empire isn't considering it "degenerate music". So Spiffies (specifically young people from wealthy Core families who'd be the only ones able to get away with posting stuff like that on the Holonet) insistence that Tay'lor is actual a force sensitive rebel sympathizer is even more ridiculous, when her boyfriend is actually part of Imperial propaganda. However at the same time I feel like there does have to be some poor ISB agent who has to check all of Spiff's lyrics to make sure there aren't actually secret messages like some of her fans claim.

[cherlockgomes]

Bridgerton: A romantic poem about Indian culture.

As an Indian, Desi representation in the media can be difficult. It dances precariously between romanticism and downright insulting. It stands to change the world’s view on those with an ethnic background, often pushing the “white saviour” agenda forward. Speaking from personal experience, I can attest that it creates an internal battle. Growing up, I watched shows like Phineas and Ferb, where characters like Balgeet or Ravi from Jessie were portrayed as kooky, with exaggerated accents and quirks. While I agree stereotypes can often aid the comedy in a show, repeatedly watching the Desi characters be used as comic punching bags created an air of displeasure within me. I found myself wanting more and more to be like Hannah Montana, with her blue eyes and blonde hair, rather than one of the Patil Twins from Harry Potter. It took years to unlearn the racism I had internalised and finally see the beauty in my culture. 

It is possible to argue that the growing number of comedies starring racial minorities has facilitated racial tolerance. Take, for instance, the second season of the popular Netflix show Bridgerton, which centres around the romance between a viscount and a character of Indian descent, Kate Sharma. I liked the show's appreciation of my culture through romanticism. Three unique scenes stand out to me in particular—the hair oiling, tea brewing, and Haldi.

In the hair-oiling scene, Kate comforts her younger sister by running oil through her dark tresses. Sitting at your mother/grandmother’s feet while she oils your hair is a canon event in every Indian girl’s life. It is an intimate act of devotion and love in Desi culture, as the person takes great pains to massage the oil into every crevice of your scalp as it stimulates hair growth. In Western culture, oily hair is often looked down upon. While I grew up in India and thus had no first-hand experience of the same, I’ve read multiple stories about how brown girls were bullied and belittled for having oil in their hair. Therefore, seeing something as trivial as oiling a loved one's hair being romanticised in a popular show could change people’s perspective on Indian culture, enabling the rest of the world to see it as we do. 

A quintessential experience in a desi household is watching the chai (tea) being brewed as the aromas of its spices fill the air. Desi tea is more than just milky dishwater. It's a delicate blend of floral notes and spice that warms the back of your throat, only to be soothed by the creaminess of the milk. Making it is an art you’re forced to pick up as you watch your family members painstakingly observe the handi (pot) to ensure it doesn’t boil over. Like the hair-oiling scene, Bridgerton brings out this tradition quaintly. In an episode, Kate removes a few spices from a richly decorated pouch and adds them to a strainer suspended above a teacup, along with a handful of tea leaves. She then pours hot water over the mixture before adding milk to it. It is a scene shot in solidarity with close-ups of Kate’s actions to create an almost Wordsworthian romanticism of an activity nearly second nature to my people. Indian food is often criticised for being too smelly or having a flavour profile that’s too strong. Like the hair oil, Desi children are frequently belittled or bullied for bringing cultural dishes to school. Therefore, watching the precision and complexity that goes into making something as simple as masala chai (spiced tea) can change people’s opinions on the cuisine. 

As Indians, Haldi, or turmeric, is a spice that’s ever-present in our lives. It’s used in our dishes and is an answer to almost every disease and injury. As children, we’re urged to drink Haldi Doodh, or, as it’s better known by its gentrified name, golden latte. For centuries, it’s been used to treat injuries. When we get injured, the yellow powder is usually pressed to the wound as it is believed to hold natural healing powers. Thus, it comes as no surprise that we’ve even found a way to include the marvellous spice in our marriage ceremonies. The Haldi Ceremony is performed a day before the wedding. It takes place in the couple’s parental home, where a mixture of Haldi, oil and water is usually rubbed onto the face and upper body by the couple’s close friends and family. In Bridgerton, we see a similar practice carried out by Kate and their mother the night before Edwina’s wedding. The scene is portrayed in an intimate manner compared to the grandiose version you might see in a traditional Indian wedding. Nonetheless, seeing a critical Desi tradition integrated so well into a mainstream show was quite a surprise and a good one at that. I loved that they paid such close attention to detail, going so far as to drape the characters in yellow clothes, which are considered auspicious during a Haldi. 

I watched a beautiful Indian woman cast as the main character in a Netflix show instead of some caricature, and it healed something inside me. I loved that my culture was finally getting the appreciation and exposure it deserves. The way the show’s creators integrated age-old traditions into the storyline instead of repeating harmful stereotypes like with Apu from The Simpsons, made me appreciate the show and its gradual shift to accurate inclusivity.

The entire point of the Romanticism movement was to take seemingly mundane things and describe them in such a way that makes them seem extraordinary. It aims to change the person’s view on the subject by painting it in a remarkable light. Take, for example, the poem “The Orange” by Wendy Cope. It describes the simple joys in life, like sharing a fruit that graces almost every fruit bowl. It changes the way you look at things, and that’s why the romanticism of the Indian culture in something as mainstream as Bridgerton is so essential. It has the power to change how people view Indians and how we view ourselves. 

[nhaneh]

One of the things that really get me with this huge "AI" fad is how for all their talk of Artificial General Intelligence and whatnot, they've really only recreated the Chinese Room thought experiment and declared it the solution to all of the world's problems.

The Chinese Room, if you're unfamiliar, is this hypothetical about the difference between understanding and the mere appearance of it, and basically goes like this: imagine a room with a man and a book. The room has a tiny slot on one end where one can communicate with the man via written letters in traditional Chinese*. The man himself does not actually know a single character of any of these languages, but the book contains an exhaustive list of possible messages he can recieve along with appropriate responses and instructions on how to write them. Now imagine that this book is so well constructed that in spite of not understanding any of the communication he is receiving, nor any of the replies he is giving, the man and his book are still able to effectively pass the Turing test and convincingly appear a fluent speaker to anyone knowing a traditional Chinese language: can we realistically say anything within that room has any actual understanding of either Chinese or any of the communication it has participated in? The man clearly has none - does the book? Does the room as a whole system?

While I personally tend to think the thought experiment isn't necessarily all that useful due to underestimating the necessary complexity of the book and also the sheer extents to which humans showcase Competence Without Comprehension, it's not lost on me how the recent proliferation of Large Language Model systems and the forced attempts to insert it into just about anything and everything no matter whether it makes any sense or not is basically a straight up example of the Chinese Room on an industry-wide scale.

We have entire throngs of techbros falling over themselves in praise and wonder of these fancy little rooms they've constructed and the free market capitalism that purportedly has created it - even though OpenAI, the organisation that kicked off the AI gold rush with ChatGPT, is technically a non-profit organization, supposedly with the explicit goal to keep AI research available to the public and not left purely in the hands of grubby venture capitalists and profiteering CEOs.

Honestly it's kind of hard to shake the feeling that the whole AI rush is basically the same hypercapitalist tech cult that previously worshipped the blockchain turned to a new golden cow so they don't have to think about their own culpability in the current late stage capitalism hellhole we find ourselves in, even as their latest toy tech god already indulges freely in misinformation, rampant fraud, and good old racial profiling - just to name a few.

And honestly don't get me wrong - I think LLMs as a technology likely have far more actual practical applications than the blockchain ever did, but it's pretty inescapable that most examples we're being shown aren't particularly practical - if anything, I'd argue most of what I see is just spam, spam, spam.

(* the hypothetical scenario of the Chinese Room was proposed by an English-speaking American, and the choice of traditional Chinese as the example is one made purely on the basis of its perceived illegibility to many westerners. The thought experiment does not depend on any particular characteristics of traditional Chinese languages beyond their distance to English, and can easily be exchanged for any written language you personally find utterly incomprehensible - or even some generic form of encryption if you prefer, so long as the information in the notes exchanged is never presented to the person inside the room in a form that they could possibly understand)

[total-feminism-takes]

Lesbian Courtney anon here!

Courntey and Duncan are so much more than toxic exes... they are human to me.

They are both sides of the same coin that am aware of is my own soul.

Basically, this ship not all that to you but to me, Courtney is just like me in the need of PERFECT!

I crashed and failed for many years to finally get I was drowning and dying to be loved and comfort by the wrong person and my family doesn't see me as human but legacy to continue.

I love them a lot.

Courtney needs help with therapy like Duncan.

Basically they made me realize my childhood up bringing and more is not my fault but it is my fault for hitting. sprialing, and losing my sense of my reality because of no one offered to help me or realizing I was getting abused at home by own flesh and blood.

The abuse can become abusers sadly.

We don't need you to deem us as crazy abusive exes, sometimes we need to be left alone to grow and health, more help understanding what we were taught was wrong.

I was a bad person I blew up things like Duncan with fire and hit others in the name of justice I said to myself like Courtney but end of the day.

I will not be seen as not a martyr. But death and the villain of itself in most people's stories!

But I will still be branded off as abusive and awful even if I was trying to defend myself or walk away from the fight.

It's hard out here especially when we love and adopt TD characters to represent ourselves out here.

I am growing slowly but surely, I used to hate the world and everything due to the unfairness of the world and hatred brought on by others to my feet.

I couldn't just turn the other cheek when someone hits you first or threatens you at time you fight back then regret.

I want many to know sometimes we are seen as monsters and have no redemption, yet you are you are own writer and person!

Sometimes we got look in mirror and go I know I am bad, toxic, and piece shite but guess what sunshine! We are still alive and live for ourselves! We can thrive for ourselves and do better from now on!

I used to be hateful bible thumping Christian because I was raised that way, every hit was because I love you, your fault is being a women, but guess what?!

I like girls and love boys!

I love girls so much my friends think I wanted to date them since high school, but I was just trying to be affectionate and their own personal cheerleaders when needed!

It is not sin to love, or be women. It is not wrong to like to like characters like Courtney or Duncan!

I am tired of it!

Let people enjoy things! That's personal opinion! Why am going tell you what's wrong with you and what's right if I am no saint myself!

Courtney my beloved and Duncan my dove, I love you even if you just a silly parody/satire teenagers of reality tv series!

I hate that made you so awful in the end of time they could punch up with the jokes and the satire but no they doom us all with brain rot of blah blah Courtney is abusive only.

You saw how they treated Leshawna as well yet many of you racially profile her still. You bestialize and fetishize my girl and carry her with shame of no growth and tie her to white man- sorry Harold, who is basically a parody of napoleon dynamite kip and lafawnduh!!!

You cowards, shame on you only smut and fetishize for my girl Leshawna yet put Courtney to the slaughter brand her a demon and abuser without remorse.

Yet you do not humanize the women in TD fandom but brand them as awful people or make them inhuman sex dolls for you pleasure without remorse but hey hehe TD fandom so silly and accepting to all.

I want smut readers and writers to understand that you can have your own piece of cake too but goddamn! LET THEM BE MORE HUMAN AND REALSTIC IN SOME WAYS!

BODY HAIR

PERIODS

BODY ISSUES

FORBBIEN ROMANCE DUE TO NOT RACE THINGS BUT SOMETHING ELSE!

I am not good person I know but I have my own brain to tell me that. I love Courtney, she did a lot for me because she wasn't perfect. I don't love because oh she must hate Gwen. No. I like Gwen but I hate that you guys think she's saint (I feel like you- most think pale skin tone people or cartoons do no wrong ever) Gwen is complex like everyone in TD. You guys just sleep on Gwen to make her your weird plaything to have someone to ship with but no growth or her own standing in some cases.

Oh to the point when I say Courtney can do nothing wrong and is saint I snort (I say that a lot my readers might think I don't see her as a bad guy ever which tbh not true) I snort because that's wrong! She's so bad and needs be better for herself not to be "FIX"

Love you guys...

XoXo

From someone who is Duncan Stan of heart and Courtney Stan in her DNA and loves Dunceny ship.

Mostly I relate to Duncan more in chaos and Courtney in cry and tantrums because I get too overwhelmed to speak with my brain goes time to scream and rage now! As a teenager I was more of mini-Duncan with a mess of Courtney Action you saw!

Yes, I am getting help now, I am being diagnosed with stuff (OH ACT SHOCK!!) and I will take therapy and pills as needed.

The point is we can spare a bit humanity along the way, F U you to your abusive partners, and I am not telling you stay with them or humanize them!

RUN AWAY AND STAY AWAY FROM THEM TOO!

From someone who barely escaped they're on and off again abusive relationship. I was the "Courtney" in the relationship but behind closed doors he was awful, I cried so much, and he told me to die often but the world only saw a teenager girl and young adult me acting like "COURTNEY" and didn't help me but blamed me for it.

Anyway, if you love Courtney or Duncan, it's not your fault others don't!

You don't need them? You don't need valid your love for anything or likes in this world!

Abuse is harsh and comes in many forms than one.

I am bad person I know- I used to be my first mantra since I was 16 years old now.

I go I was not a healed person back then just a child who didn't know better, my actions have consequences, I regret, I let go, and I relearn to grow, and I heal slowly but surely. I am not my father, I am not my abuser, I am not my abuse, it's okay to like this, it's okay they don't like this or me!

I am allowed to live and I am allowed to like this if makes me happy. Then I can block them or mute them if it really hurts me!

That's all.

I did my first session of therapy in long time and I saw post the Courtney pushed to only to the role of "crazy abusive ex" of Duncan's which is harsh especially I have to live through it still.

It's embarrassing at 24 years old people act like I chained up my ex-boyfriend to be with me and that I was the controlling abuser when they don't know the whole story or how much he threatened to off himself or me if I left him. Then he cheats on me through the whole relationship, and I have to stay in it because I loved him and feared him.

Duncan wasn't like my ex.

And Courtney wasn't like me.

But I love them because they are just silly characters and ship that I enjoy and work through my own bullshit. And say I did love a lot but no more to that, but I can love again in forms in these silly dumb cartoons and make them kiss sometimes as fanfic writer!

Anyway, love you all and sorry for ranting my nonsense again peace out girl scouts but mother nature needs to be saved with love and money these days-sadly no money, but I can clean up the beaches and feed the stray cats now!

Treat yourself with not needed valid your existence or but I love them to random haters or people that just don't give a F about anything but their own mind...

You can like things too without needing explanation, honey! You got this!

BLOCK THEM IF THEY DON'T LEAVE YOU ALONE!

- 🧡

[emdaudied]

My First Introduction. 🤍

annyeonghaseyo, i hope your days goes well as well i hope you understand me throughly my message and my first appeal on this app.💗💗💗

・┈・┈・┈・┈・┈・┈・┈・┈・・┈・┈

Me. Myself. And I.

my real life name is moon, as that can go along with my personality as i am a mainly ambivert, but a loud introvert everywhere and every time. my username is emdaudied on every social media i have, such as instagram, tiktok, twt, and discord. i go by em online or practically nameless since i only talk to my irl friends, which is like 4 people. i love every music genre, doesn't matter if it's country or disco. my main genres are jazz, rnb, k-pop, and pop. my favorite color is all shades of black, the color that was painted in my room that i lived in throughout my birthday, January 5th. by my profile, i am a BTS fan, who is a loyal army by surviving off many challenges BTS throughout the year 2015 till today. i am a known ot7, but a kim namjoon enthusiast because i believe he has went through alot of pressure being a famous group leader, and we are pretty much similar 🤍. my favorite meals are sushi, burgers, and cheese sticks. well, i guess you can call them food and not specifically 'meals', but i have a fast metabolism and my stomach gets full pretty easily. i don't eat alot because my stomach hurts so much all the time i take a bite out of something, and i don't know why. 🤷🏾‍♀️ i like to be indoors, hanging out with comfort and close friends, as some days i would like to be outdoors observing the world, and that might had sound cringey but what i mean is that i like to look and find new things that amaze me. i haven't been outside my home town, Baytown, Texas, besides going to Houston twice. i do not respect israel, genocide, rapists, pedophiles, basically every bad thing and people in the world, such as wilburt 🤢. and before i end this, please know that in the future, me and you start talking, please understand my humor and how i am jokingly racist. in reality, i'm an full on african american half korean female who jokes by saying racial slurs, slurs in any fact such as in the lgbtq community, and disabled people, like the r word. that's all for me, if you want to know specific things about me, please don't be shy and message me. it doesn't matter if it's inappropriate, awkward, something out of pocket, or politics related. i'll explain more down below. please know that i love you with all my heart and make decisions that are for your worth and health. 🫶🏾

What I Plan On Doing Here.

i will fill my account with fanfics, opinions, namjoon, and updates of my life (maybe)? i thought tumblr would be a great app for moments and humanity such as people who are open minded, such as craziness, hornyness, and speaks about on anything. i mainly wanna write anything i be requested to, or what i think about and try to make it a point as a writing platform. please correct me if i'm wrong, but if i'm able to organize threads of certain content on my account such as above, fanfics or reactions, then they would be separated or pinned, which i don't know if i could do that, but hope so.

[aresmarked]

I liked this event a lot, but it's pretty frustrating how after a whole lot of 'the Inquisition considers itself unaccountable to everyone' 'the Inquisition arrested people from Gran Faro on a purely racial basis, and never released even the ~60 people they couldn't pin any charges on and missing the non-Aegir cult members' 'Carmen thinks SOME Aegir MAYBE being involved in the Silence justifies lynchings', Irene's last word is 'it was justified and a less harsh try wouldn't have worked' (1/2)

(2/2) Girl, your CURRENT METHOD didn't work, the hard-hearted way of doing things made people like Thiago think that no good could possibly come from reporting to the Inquisition! And in her interlude Carmen assumes she's come to question how they assign guilt and she goes 'no that's all fine.' And all that after Granny Petra's speech in UT too. I know it'll probably come back for anniversary 4, and I like characters having to truly learn, but in the meantime, wow do I want to shake her a bit. (3/2, sorry)I admit some of my frustration here is just. The framing of the Inquisition as heroic warriors standing for civilization, Dario's last stand, 'the Inquisition gives people the energy to wipe the dirt from their faces' in Jordi's profile, when the real Spanish Inquisition stole and murdered thousands, tore families apart, and their targets were mainly Jews and Muslims who wanted to keep their faiths after being forced to convert. Even in a fantasy world that doesn't sit right with me.

So! I see how you got that feel from the event, but for me my impression of the event/the game’s presentation of the Inquisition was more, ‘despite the genuine desires for protection/standing for one’s beliefs that do exist in the members of the Inquisition, despite the efforts of this organisation to address threats—the Profound Silence(s), the assimiliation of all life and culture on land into oneness with the life of the Seaborn—that doesn’t justify decisions that disregard ‘the few’ the prevent the worst outcomes, as evinced by Irene’s comments on SN (and presumably also influenced by her experiences in UT) in her 100 Trust file, which is (currently for me, since I don’t yet have the Trust for her operator record) the thing closest to Irene’s ‘last word’ on this event. Plus Kal’tsit’s comments on how both the Hunters and Inquisition are working.

To me many of Arknights stories examine how it is not that the ‘Other’ is inherently dangerous, but danger exists in the instinct, rationalisation, and structuring of acts of ‘Othering’, and I do feel SN is one of those.

Wanting to shake Irene I think Is Incredibly Valid, and I do think that’s on purpose: Irene as she is in SN is akin, IMO, to Greythroat and Ch’en in the Lungmen chapters of the main story, where she’s at a point that she must reconcile personal experiences with the broader societal realities. Yes, the Iberian Scriptures have guided her through, as has her teacher and master Dario, but these are points that do not outweigh the harm that has been shown in UT/SN... and these are things it’s going to take Time for Irene to move through, having only known, really, that sort of perspective until recent.

(A great deal of me seeing it this way is because of who I am of course. Someone who also has had to examine the beliefs I was raised with, that Did teach me to be wider with my love and how to reconcile with others rather than continue cycles of harm, but was also undeniably twined with harm and continues to have effects today. Canadian Catholics baby~)

Mm... I’ll say this in conclusion. HG was, obviously, deliberate in naming the Inquisitors That. And evoking/referring certain acts of national powers—one thing I was reminded of while reading, being Canadian, was the War Measures Act, which was a statute that essentially granted the government special powers to allow for function during war, invasion, insurrection... and has been used to, among many acts, intern Ukrainians and other Eastern Europeans during and after the first WW, the Japanese in the second, and seize their property, much of which was never returned.

Folk like Carmen and Dario... of course they would be the representatives of people who said, ‘we had to do this, we had no choice, how else could we have handled potential threats’. Everyone’s actions are justified in their own minds, after all. But Irene is where we can pin hopes—and again as you said, who we want to shake—because her heart’s not so hardened yet. And we know that.

Her note from other Operators, after all, is her studiousness in Rhodes’ library.

[alphaman99]

Tommy Two-Shoes

OPINION:

Andy Rooney once said . . .

“I don't think being a minority makes you a victim of anything except numbers. The only things I can think of that are truly discriminatory are things like the United Negro College Fund, Jet Magazine, Black Entertainment Television, & Miss Black America.

Try to have things like the United Caucasian College Fund, Cloud Magazine, White Entertainment Television, or Miss White America; and see what happens......Jesse Jackson will be knocking down your door.

Guns do not make you a killer. I think killing makes you a killer. You can kill someone with a baseball bat or a car, but no one is trying to ban you from driving to the ball game.

I believe they are called the Boy Scouts for a reason, which is why there are no girls allowed. Girls belong in the Girl Scouts! ARE YOU LISTENING MARTHA BURKE?

I think that if you feel homosexuality is wrong, it is not a phobia, it is an opinion.

I have the right 'NOT' to be tolerant of others because they are different, weird, or they tick me off.

When 70% of the people who get arrested are black, in cities where 70% of the population is black, that is not racial profiling; it is the Law of Probability.

I believe that if you are selling me a milkshake, a pack of cigarettes, a newspaper or a hotel room, you must do it in English! As a matter of fact, if you want to be an American citizen, you should have to speak English!

So that my father & grandfather didn't die in vain; if you chose to leave the country you were born in to come here -- Don't disrespect our Country

I think the police should have every right to shoot you if you threaten them after they tell you to stop. If you can't understand the word 'freeze' or 'stop' in English, see the above lines.

I don't think just because you were NOT born in this country, you are qualified for any special loan programs, government sponsored bank loans or tax breaks, etc., so you can open a hotel, coffee shop, trinket store, or any other business.

We did not go to the aid of certain foreign countries and risk our lives in wars to defend their freedoms, so that decades later they could come over here and tell us our Constitution is a living document; and open to their interpretations.

I don't hate the rich; I don't pity the poor. I know pro wrestling is fake, but so are movies & television. That doesn't stop me from watching them.

I think Bill Gates has every right to keep every penny he made & continue to make more. If it ticks you off, go and invent the next operating system that's better, and put your name on the building.

It doesn't take a whole village to raise a child right, but it does take a parent to stand up to the kid; and smack their little behinds when necessary, & say 'NO!'

I think tattoos & piercing are fine if you want them, but please don't pretend they are a political statement. And, please, stay home until that new lip ring heals. I don't want to look at your ugly infected mouth as you serve me French fries!

I am sick of 'Political Correctness.' I know a lot of black people, and not a single one of them was born in Africa; so how can they be 'African-Americans'? Besides, Africa is a continent. I don't go around saying I am a European-American because my great, great, great, great, great, great grandfather was from Europe. I am proud to be from America & nowhere else, and if you don't like my point of view, tough...”.

[crisishaven]

Crisis Haven, Part 1

Vee, otherwise known as Artemis Fowl the 5th, is not as human as he appears. Returning to Haven after a decade of unfulfilling surface life, all he wants is for the fairy people to accept what he has known about himself all along: that he is truly one of them. There is a new kind of evil walking the streets of the underground city, something that lashes out in the dark and has been leaving a trail of bodies behind it. This fic plays out much like a police procedural or a detective novel that interrogates the book series’ kind of weird and binary views of race and gender. Lots of canon is ignored, almost no named characters in the original books appear in this fic. Consider this more of a spiritual sequel than a traditional fic. 

CWs for this chapter: Brief drug mention, discussions of police prejudice and racial violence in a fantasy context, brief mention of transphobia.

Part One: Winnie

He’d seen this room before, but only from the outside. Now he was the one sitting in the chair under the single halogen bulb that swung noose-like from a short chain on the low ceiling. Three grey walls and one wall made of tinted black glass. On the other side any number of eyes could be watching him, judging him, but he would have to get used to that. He straightened his back, kept facing forward, and refused to fidget. For this plan to work he would have to really sell them on his confidence, something that his ordinary behavior did not regularly inspire.

The door opened with a quiet pneumatic hiss. In stepped a figure nearly half his height, elven and cloaked in the familiar dark green suit adorned with the golden badge of an LEP officer.

“Not hungry, I take it.” She indicated the complementary bowl of hydroponically grown fruits on the interrogation table between them, none of which Vee had even so much as glanced at over the past forty minutes of his isolation. “Unless there’s something else you would prefer to eat. I understand you were surviving in those caves for quite awhile, by the time our patrol squad found you it seems you were already quite low on rations.” She swept the choppy fringe of her non-regulation blonde bob away from her face and pulled a delicate pair of reading glasses from her jacket pocket before leafing through a small folder. “Yes. Yes, here it is. This report says you had only two bottles of water and a small package of granola with you. And just how long did you think you could survive on that, Artemis?”

He didn’t recognize her, and her demeanor was… strange for an LEP officer. She was almost cordial with him. A criminal psychologist, maybe? A profiler? No, the LEP didn’t have profilers. They didn’t need them. The petty officers did their own profiling. That was the whole problem. 

And then there was the matter of his name. Anyone who knew anything about Vee knew that he would never respond to Artemis. No, this was an intentional ploy to break the ice, get him talking. He didn’t appreciate mind games or trickery, but if that was what the LEP expected of him then he would just have to play ball.

“Actually,” He started, clearing his throat, “If you don’t mind, please call me Vee.”

“My apologies then, Vee. You can call me Officer De’nan.”

“In answer to your question, officer, I didn’t plan on surviving in that cave for much longer. I knew a patrol would pick me up.”

“You knew?” She raised an eyebrow and clicked her pen, jotting something down in Gnomish on a legal pad.

“I suspected,” Vee corrected himself. “To say that I knew with 100% certainty would be inaccurate. I was guessing. And, for the sake of honesty, I think you should be aware that I can read and speak Gnomish fluently.” Her pen stopped mid-scribble. She sighed.

“Of course you can. You’re a clever human, aren’t you?” Vee bit the inside of his cheek reflexively. This was a much more difficult conversation to have than he had anticipated. In his mind, all of this went so differently, but he realized that was all wishful thinking. Of course this was going to be difficult. He was an intruder, after all. 

“I’m not all that clever,” He insisted, “and I’m not human.” Her ears twitched. She put down her pen and folded two small manicured hands under her chin, looking him in the eye for the first time since entering the interrogation room.

“What are you then, Vee? What exactly are we doing here?” Vee tried his best to meet her eyes, but he was never the best with eye contact. Fighting his urge to look away, he tried focusing on the space between her eyes, the bridge of her nose, the way her dark skin reflected the silvery light of the halogen bulb above them.

“I don’t belong up there. I never did. I’m just trying to come home.” She took on a softer, more patronizing expression. 

“This world isn’t for you, Mister Fowl. It’s not yours to take.”

“That’s not what I mean,” He bristled defensively, “ That’s not what I was trying to say.” 

“Tell me then,” She spoke slowly, with a tinge of magic, testing his limits. “Tell me exactly why you’re here.” Vee could feel the mesmer’s influence on his thoughts. People had a lot of misconceptions about that particular fairy talent, he found. It was not a forceful touch pulling the truth out of you, hand over hand, like hauling the rope line of a bucket trapped deep inside of a well. No, the trick of a good mesmer was making the magic feel like it came from inside of you. This was your idea, this is what you wanted to say. Piece by piece, the truth floats up to the surface on its own, the magic just keeps it all buoyant. Vee didn’t fight it. He didn’t need to.

“I’ve told you the truth. I’m here because I don’t belong on the surface. I’m not a human.”

“Rather tall for an elf though, right? C’mon, there must be something else. You can tell me, Vee.” There was something else, of course, but the odds were already so stacked against him. No, he would have to wait, have to hold it down, push it far beneath the surface, send that little nugget of truth back into the depths until the time was right. He breathed deeply, diverting the magic in his mind away from that particular crevice. That was the trouble with magic; like any other force of nature, it couldn’t be stopped, only temporarily diverted. To cover one truth, another one had to come out.

“I… I needed to talk to him again. I needed to talk to Soul. I missed him, I missed him very much.” Tears began to well up in Vee’s eyes. He let them fall without shame. Officer De’nan recalled her mesmer.

“I see,” Was all she said after a long moment of silence between them. “Excuse me.” De’nan left the room, to confer with the figures behind the glass, Vee concluded. He wished that he could be confident about this, but he was afraid. If this plan didn’t work he likely would never get a second chance. He needed to build his case, a strong case, one that could be presented to the Council with complete confidence, and the only way to do that was to be down here, where he belonged in Haven City.

Vee expected to be left to his own devices for at least another hour. They’ll want to sweat me out, he thought, hoping that I’ll get nervous and slip up. They want to believe that I’m playing some kind of long game, some stupid gambit for power or money. Why is it so hard for people to just believe me? Am I really that suspicious? Am I that abhorrent? Or is all this distrust earned entirely by my name?  He took a deep breath to clear his head. The legacy of the Fowl family was a gordian knot of theft and deception, a fine inheritance indeed. Nevermind that Vee was a Fowl in name only, yet another title thrust upon him unwillingly. Fowl and Human, two terrible things to be, two terrible and cumbersome labels that seemed to require an endless debate. 

For Vee, the truth residing within himself was far simpler. He was a man with a name that he did not choose and had no connection to, and he was a changeling. Not a human, not entirely fae. Vee was himself, and that truth was concordant with his whole being. Now the trouble was getting everyone else on the same page so that he could get on with his damn life.

______________________________________________________________

“Well we can’t just let him live here!” Officer De’nan settled back into her custom faux-leather armchair that was so much more comfortable than the cold metal chairs in LEP interrogation boxes. The voice bleating in her ear belonged to Stoic Young, the LEP’s latest in a long line of research and development heads, a position that had become a perpetual revolving door in recent years. “I mean,” Continued the centaur, “He’ll just be lumbering around the city, scaring the living daylights out of old women and children, and it’s not like anyone is going to give him any work.” Stoic clopped back and forth in front of the observation window, his chestnut brown maine curling off manically in all directions. “And Nan, seriously, don’t tell me you buy that sob story about Soul.”

“Why wouldn't I buy it? He was mesmerized. And call me Officer De’nan,” the elf crossed her legs and smoothed the collar of her suit jacket, taking care to straighten the badge on her lapel. “And stop pacing about like that, you’re giving me a headache.”

“It just feels weird Nan– sorry, Officer De’nan. It feels really weird. I mean, even you must find him at least a little creepy. What kind of a human squeezes himself into a dangerous cave and lives there for almost two weeks voluntarily.”

“They used to live in caves,” she countered, “maybe it's an instinct.” Stoic stopped pacing for a moment to consider this before shaking his head and resuming his nervous canter.

“Nah. He said it himself, he was waiting for a patrol squad to come along. He knows the routes, how could he know the routes? There’s two possibilities, either we’ve got a mole or he’s bugged us.” De’nan rubbed her temples, already dreading the amount of paperwork an organized investigation into either possibility would create for her. She was the recently appointed LEP human cultural advisor, a position for which she felt woefully unqualified. Her degree was in media studies and she minored in pre-Frond religious studies, not exactly the ideal portfolio for a human cultural expert, but she was starting to realize that might have been exactly the point.

She leapt at the chance for the job; a full-time salaried position offered to her with amazing benefits straight out of school? Only an idiot would pass up an opportunity like that. The first few months on the job she considered herself so lucky to be the favorite niece of Forge Verity, the council member who essentially demanded that this specific position be created within the LEP, but soon she understood that she might actually be his least favorite niece. There was a rising concern among The People that the influence of humanity and the cultural impact that their movies and music, often illegally smuggled into the fairy world, was making on the youth. The rate of violent crimes had skyrocketed in Haven in the past ten years, and with it, or perhaps because of it, came a tidal wave of human media crazes. 

Every teenager had a phone with human apps on it, participating in human social media, watching human movies and learning human dances and listening to human music. The council first pushed fairy directors and musicians to create works in the style of popular human media, even bankrolling entire franchises before a single movie hit test audiences, but nothing could compete with the constant and unending stream of mudman content leaking into the subterranean city. So then there was the smuggling crackdown, but that only got teenagers and otherwise harmless offenders thrown into already overcrowded jails and diverted resources away from the real problem: the unprecedented rise in violent crime.

Fairies weren’t inherently malicious creatures. They were beings wholy and unequivocally connected to the earth, to nature. Yes, nature could be violent, fickle, dangerous, and unforgiving, but malice was considered to be a creation of mankind. It was men who killed men for no other reason than malice, and men who killed animals with no care for the lives they could have lived, and men who burned the ground behind them just to keep other men from surviving on it. Fairies weren’t capable of such things, not unless they were forced to, made to by some outside influence, or such was the belief of The People.

And so, to appeal to a voting bloc, Councilman Verity petitioned the sitting LEP commander to create a position within the Lower Elements Police force to analyze and address the issue of the corrupting human influence on fairy kind, and he just so happened to have a niece with some qualifications that, if you squint, might fit the bill. Problem solved. Fairy culture was saved, all thanks to Serena De’nan. The cases that found their way to her desk mostly involved first time offenders found to be in possession of human paraphernalia at the time of their arrest for petty crimes, usually teenagers with jailbroken phones or name-brand clothing from human manufacturers. At first, she didn’t understand what exactly she was meant to do with these kids. Was she supposed to… deprogram them? Did the council think they were brainwashed? She interviewed them, tried to understand their connection to human culture and how it might have influenced their criminal behavior, and kept thorough notes on each interview from which to create a report.

Technically she was her own independent department operating inside of the LEP with all of their resources but none of their oversight. She didn’t answer directly to anyone, which meant she had no one to deliver her findings or reports to, which meant she might as well chuck them in the bin and call it a day. Finally, after months of interviews and hours of reporting, it dawned on her: this wasn’t a broken bureaucratic system creating a redundant job on accident, this was a well oiled machine that was designed to create redundant jobs like this to assist in manufacturing confirmation bias. She had no power to do anything, to change anything, and that was the whole point. The citizens of Haven and their council had already decided that the human influence was strangling what remained of the fairy culture to death, she was just there to confirm what they already believed. 

Yet, despite all this, De’nan still found the will to press her work shirts and be at her desk on time every day, despite the fact she was certain nobody would notice if she came in late or not at all. No one except maybe Stoic, who was making a lot of excuses to barge into her office lately. 

“Shouldn’t you, I dunno, be in your lab? Designing a new widget or contraption or whatever?” Stoic huffed.

“Oh please, like I could concentrate on anything like that when there’s this seven foot tall abominable mudman hanging around the office.”

“He’s only, like, five foot eight.” De’nan rubbed her eyes. The commander was supposed to be here by now, he was the one who was supposed to be taking point on this, so where the hell was he? 

“Kelp’s sure taking his sweet time getting here,” Stoic grumbled, as if reading her thoughts. “When he does get here I’ll bet he orders a mind wipe and sends him back up, quick and easy.”

“I don’t know.” De’nan squinted, watching Vee through the tinted glass. There were features about him that she found questionable. The tips of his ears did have a familiar point to them, his teeth were almost sharp like a pixies, a wide elven brow that cascaded into a hooked nose. All traits that, in isolation, could be associated with a fairy, but that’s just what they were, isolated traits. 

“Did you know him when he was younger?” De’nan asked suddenly, halting Stoic’s stride.

“No,” He answered. “But I heard stories. People said he had some kind of psychic powers, that he could tell if someone was lying just by looking at them and read people’s minds. All bogus claims, obviously. He’s just a regular mudman.”

“Is he though?” Stoic turned to face the elf, searching her expression, hoping desperately that she wasn’t seriously considering the possibility. 

“Nan, don’t. I’m serious now, that’s not a road we want to go down.”

“I believe him.” She kept her eyes forward, focused on Vee. This wasn’t entirely true. In truth, she wasn’t sure what she believed, but she knew Vee’s belief in who he was to be sincere, and shouldn’t that be enough? 

“I believe this is insane,” Stoic whinnied. De’nan looked up at him from beneath her manicured fringe. “So you think I’m insane?” The centaur’s cheeks flushed. Stoic grumbled and made a big show of re-adjusting his tie and sucking in his gut.

“No, I didn’t mean, uh, I was just suggesting that maybe this isn’t, you know, the sort of thing you go along with on a hunch is all. We should run some genetic tests first, that will tell us right away if he’s a fairy.” If he’s a fairy, that means he’s already considering the possibility valid, she thought. That was too easy. Kelp will be a harder sell for sure. And, as if on cue, the man of the hour arrived.

Commander Redwood Kelp was one of the oldest still working members of the LEP and he was famously an elf of few words. In the year and a half that Den’an had been working inside of the Police Plaza offices she could count the total number of words that Commander Kelp spoke to her on one hand and none of them had more than two syllables. Kelp and Vee had a history already, so perhaps that would be a point in De’nan’s favor when she inevitably must debate the ethics of even indulging an idea like this. When the commander stepped through the threshold of the observation room door De’nan and Stoic both stood at attention.

“What’s the verdict?” Asked the commander in his usual gruff tone. De’nan was taken aback, she never expected that the commander would look to her for the final say in a matter like this, or maybe she misunderstood his question?

“I, uhm, I believe that he’s telling us the truth sir. I believe that he, somehow despite appearances, may not be entirely human.”

“Hm,” the commander nodded. He leaned against the tinted glass and taped lightly on the surface, so lightly that De’nan and Stoic could hardly hear. In the other room, Vee’s head turned suddenly toward the sound. The commander nodded once more, seemingly satisfied.

“Okay,” he said simply, “Run the tests.” No, she hadn’t misunderstood the commander. Somehow, De’nan suspected, Kelp had drawn his own conclusion on this matter years ago.

______________________________________________________________

“I believe you know what this is for,” The officer presented Vee with a cotton swab and a tube.

“For my mouth, I suspect?” 

“One for your mouth and  I have one for your nose, and I’ll be taking a hair sample as well.” Vee couldn’t be sure if this was a good sign. Obviously genetic testing would have to be the next step, but tests like that were far more fallible than most people knew. For one thing, the lab processing these samples could have a political agenda against his case and flub the results, or else throw out his sample entirely and bury the evidence. Or someone could simply interpret the data in such a way as to support whatever claims about him that they wanted to make. It was a mistake to believe that science and math existed on their own, coldly devoid of emotion or intent or politics. Everything is interpretive, everything requires context. Vee swabbed the inside of his cheek carefully, then his nose, then allowed officer De’nan to pluck a dark hair from the top of his head. Whatever the results may be, he thought, they cannot change what I already know, all they can do is change how I’ll need to frame my argument.

“Commander Kelp ordered the tests, you know.” De’nan spoke, shaking Vee from his intense concentration. “He almost seemed happy to see you, not that it’s easy to tell with him. I just thought you’d like to know.” 

“Oh,” Said Vee, unsure of what to make of this sudden display of hospitality. Was she hoping to trick him into revealing something about his past work with the LEP? Was this a ploy? “That’s good. Will I have a chance to speak with him?” The officer sealed the last of her samples into their vials and secured them inside of a temperature-controlled pouch.

“I’m not sure. It depends, I suppose.”

“Depends on what?” Vee kept his eyes trained on the table, specifically the corner where De’nan’s shadow fell. The officer considered his question for a moment.

“Not sure,” She concluded, “Probably just his mood. I heard the two of you used to work together, so I’m sure you remember how temperamental he can be.” A small smile tugged at the corners of Vee’s mouth, fond childhood memories bubbling up inside of him like a spring. For the first time since returning to Haven, he did not feel cold.

“Yes, I remember.”

Stoic squinted at the holographic screen in front of him waiting very impatient for the test results. Whoever’s big stupid idea it was to make all the screens in the Police Plaza nothing more than fancy flickering light was an idiot. Blasting blue light directly into your eyeballs all day was terrible for your sleep cycle, not to mention dangerous for anyone who might be particularly photosensitive, you know, like all dwarves? When he was brought onboard to head the R&D department, Stoic wanted so badly to recommend that a friend of his from school apply for one of the junior positions, but couldn’t in good conscious convince a dwarf that a workplace designed entirely and exclusively around the accessibility needs of elves and centaurs would be a healthy environment for him. Such a shame too, he thought, Gritty is just the kind of fairy this place needs. Decisive, responsible, with a moral bedrock of solid and unbreakable diamond. Gritty would pursue the truth, the whole truth, the truth that might challenge and even terrify him. Not like me, Stoic continued, pacing once more. I think I might seriously be a coward, he thought.

The truth was, it didn’t matter what the results of the genetic testing said, really. All humans in fact, shared common ancestral fairy DNA. This was such a commonly known fact that it was printed in every fairy elementary school’s biology textbooks. But, as the textbooks would go on to explain, the true difference between man and fairy is that fairies have thaumatic nerves which allow their nervous system to not only carry electric current through their bodies  but also allow magic to flow into and out of them. And what was the fundamental difference between thaumatic and athaumatic nerves? Perceptibly, nothing. No scientist, no warlock, no independent researcher with a trashy podcast could ever conclusively, with solid physical evidence, determine just what the difference between a thaumatic and an athaumatic nervous system was, and anyone who claimed otherwise was usually trying to sell some kind of protein powder or cultish self-help book.

But there must be a difference between us and them, Stoic fretted, chewing his fingernails to bits, there has to be. Absolutely everything, the foundations of both fairy and human societies, were built on that idea. A truth that everyone seemed to know but no one could prove. The flickering holographic screen lit up green. The tests were finished. Now it was all up to Stoic. Before he clicked on the confirmation button, he paused.

What do I believe, right now in my gut, without even looking at these results. Shouldn’t I know already? Shouldn’t I feel confident that this… thing is a human? If I don’t seriously think that there is a possibility that he’s a fairy, why am I so concerned? His shoulders fell, a new wave of dread falling over him. He knew why he was so afraid to see these results. It had nothing to do with this one particular human. One human being proven to actually be some kind of fairy was just an odd blip in the grand scheme of things, a medical curiosity for daytime talk show hosts to blather about for a couple weeks before returning to the goblin crime wave crisis. No, Stoic was afraid for the precedent this would set for the future. What if other humans discovered that they could claim fairy lineage and come seeking some stolen birthright? Fairies were already losing their culture to the mudmen, they could not stand to lose the only home that they had left on this Earth. He would be involved in this now, forever. They would write about him in a textbook one day, maybe he would even get his own chapter.

And then his mind turned to Gritty once more. As a child, Stoic fought hard to be recognized as a man when he was designated female at birth. Gritty was the only friend who stayed with him after he transitioned, even his own family still had trouble getting his pronouns right. Centuries ago, as Stoic understood it, binary gender designations didn’t even exist in Centaur or Dwarven cultures. Perhaps this was no different, he mused. Maybe I can’t solve every damn problem in this world, but I can make a difference for one person. Maybe that’s enough.

______________________________________________________________

Commander Kelp took his seat across from Vee in the interrogation box. The “hot box” they used to call it, until some LEP higher ups became aware of a very different use of that term and banned it outright. 

“Mind if I smoke?” Kelp grunted, already lighting a cigarette.

“Be my guest.” 

The commander studied Vee from below his heavy brow, his green eyes falling on the details of Vee’s hollow pallid features. Vee’s fingernails were dirty, his knuckles bruised, fingers chapped. It must have been driving him crazy, the commander was sure of it. The Vee he remembered was utterly militant about removing dirt from under his nails.

“You need a toothpick or something?” Kelp nodded to Vee’s hands folded neatly on the table in front of them. It took Vee a moment to process just what the Commander was actually implying.

“No, thank you. I can take care of them later.”

“Why not now?”

“Well, to be honest, I don’t want to look vain. Or callous. Or fidgety. Anything I do when I’m in this room will be scrutinized one way or another, so it’s best not to do anything I feel.” Kelp nodded along, taking a long drag on his fungal cigarette before blowing a perfect ring towards the tinted glass.

“I used to have the real thing,” He said, rolling the cigarette between his fingers, “Real tobacco, till some idiot decided that he could make a lot of money from the mushroom farmer barrons by convincing everyone that smoking tobacco was a human tradition.” He scoffed. “Can you believe that? Humans own tobacco now, ‘cause we let them. Cause someone made money off the idea.”

“That kind of thing has been happening down here a lot, I see.”

“Happens up there a lot, too,” Kelp jerked his thumb to the sky. 

“It does. You’re right.”

“Funny how that is, huh?” The commander was a hard read. Even knowing him for some years and working side by side, Vee could never quite place Kelp’s true intentions. But he needed this now, needed to feel like he was just talking to an old friend, so he let himself believe that’s all this was. I have to trust that there are people on my side, people who care about me, he decided. If I don’t make myself believe that, then what’s the damn point of it all? I want to feel like I’m home. I need to feel like I belong here. I’ll take comfort where I can find it.

“It’s good to see you, commander.” Kelp reached into his coat pocket and drew out a small silver tin. Vee recognized it, engraved with an eagle on the lid. The commander’s old tobacco tin. He flicked open the lid, and a dozen rows of toothpicks were inside.

“Been trying to quit smoking for years. Sometimes these help, just to chew on ‘em.” Vee carefully took a toothpick from the tin and got to work digging the dirt out from under his nails.

“Thank you, commander.”

“Don’t mention it.”

______________________________________________________________

“Anatomically and physiologically he appears human, but he has several genetic markers that indicate fairy heritage, however the same could be said of the entire human race.”

“Do we know who his mother is or not?”

“Well…” Stoic trailed off, rolling back and forth between various holographic screens in the lab office. De’nan and Commander Kelp stood around the lab table scattered with testing materials and printed results. “On the books it says his mother was a jazz musician from America, but Vee’s father divorced her just three months after he was born, which I’m sure our resident mudman expert can tell you is rather uncommon.”

“So maybe she had an affair, dad finds out it’s not his kid, cuts her off.” The commander took another satisfying puff of his cigarette.

“That’s what I thought, but Vee is genetically Artemis Fowl the 4th’s son, we know that for sure, his DNA is already on file.”

“Wait, let me make sure I’m following this correctly; so mom is human and dad is human, right?” De’nan interrupted, consulting her own notebook by frantically flipping through the pages.

“Yes,” Replied Stoic, pulling up the digital LEP profile on Artemis Fowl the 4th. The computer conjured an image of the man, a slender pale figure in a dark suit with sharp brown eyes and raven black hair, practically the spitting image of the man sitting in their interrogation room. “But that’s just the genetic side of things. Like I said, anatomically speaking he appears  human. He doesn’t have wings like a pixie, or the prehensile hairs of a dwarf, his ears are too short to be considered elven, and he’s obviously no centaur.”

“My ears are on the shorter side,” De’nan interjected, “I was teased about it constantly in school, that doesn’t mean I’m not an elf.”

“Right–” Stoic continued, clopping over to the lab table and rifling through the papers until he produced a particular stapled packet. “These are the current criteria for determining the racial classifications of newborns. Legally, at the moment, when a mixed-race child is born the doctors have to declare on their birth records, based on this set of criteria, what the child will be designated as for their future. Obviously there’s some, er, political bent to it.” The centaur tugged at the collar of his shirt, unsure of how to tactfully broach such a complicated subject, and so he stayed silent as the two officers leafed through the packet.

“What exactly are you getting at here, Young?”

“Well,” Stoic continued, wringing his hands, “This criteria is very old, thousands of years old at this point, and it’s never been revised. As you can see there is obvious racial bias favoring an elven or pixie designation over a goblin, dwarf, or even gnome. There’s even verbiage specifying that the financial status of the parents be considered part of the child’s racial designation. What the hell does being rich or poor have to do with whether or not your kid is more pixie or goblin?”

“Why is there not just… a third option?” De’nan interjected, musing aloud. “Or we could just drop the designation all together, I mean, why does something so personal even need to be involved in government paperwork? We’re all fairies, nothing else should matter, right?”

“Right, and these are just physical features. Plastic surgery is so common these days, if little Jimmy the pixie-goblin decides one day that he’d rather have his mom’s little nose or even a set of wings he can just buy them.”

“So, in other words, none of this shit actually matters,” the commander grumbled, falling cross-legged into a nearby armchair. “Anybody can be anything. Humans can be fairies if they want to.”

“That’s a bit of an oversimplification–” Stoic started before realizing who he was talking to, “Uhm, what I mean to say is, sir, that I don’t think humans can just decide that they’re fairies, I think we decided that they weren’t.”

“We had good reasons, of course. The legions of men ravaged the earth, slaughtered the men, killed thousands of fairies. That kind of brutality is just… not natural,” De’nan reassured herself, still hunched over the research table.

“Fairies waged wars, too. Before we were united under one banner, the clans didn’t exactly get along. And, I mean, until about a century ago Officer De’nan wouldn’t have even been allowed to work in an LEP office.” The centaur put on a mock old-timey radio announcer voice “A girl police officer? Next they’ll start wanting to wear pants, and vote!” 

“He’s a changeling then,” Kelp snubbed the ember of his cigarette, the long trail of pungent smoke still rising from the ash in the little glass bowl. “Like the old stories. We kidnapped him and made him one of us.” De’nan and Stoic looked to one another, unsure of whether or not the commander was speaking seriously. 

“I… suppose?” Stoic offered. Kelp let this idea roll around in his head for a moment, his expression ever-inscrutable. Eventually he rose from his chair, plucking a toothpick from his tin and made for the exit door. “I’ll call the council. You two get all this paperwork straightened out. It’s going to be a long meeting.”

______________________________________________________________

Vee was placed in a holding cell designed for trolls. He wasn’t sure whether this decision was made to enforce the image that he was a ferocious and untrustworthy beast, or if it was simply a decision made on the basis that he was rather tall compared to other fairies and would need the headroom. By now he was certain that the news story had broken to the major networks. The LEP was notoriously bad at upholding media blackouts, especially when it came to people with his family name. Perhaps that meant by now that Soul was waiting for him, anticipating him, maybe even hoping to see him through some grainy low-definition news clip footage. 

He was sprawled out on a metal bench covered in knicks and dents from bull trolls fighting their confinement after being detained for causing trouble in some tunnel or another. In that sense, Vee figured he was rather like a troll. If this is my last night in Haven, he thought, if this is my last night aware that Haven even exists, shouldn’t I find some way to appreciate it all? Should I scratch my name into the bench and hope at least that little piece of me stays here forever? No, they’ll replace the bench eventually. That kind of mark doesn’t matter, that’s just proof that I was here physically. What I really need is to prove that I belong here, that I always belonged here, that I’m part of Haven city no matter what anyone else might think. That is the undeniable truth of my soul. That’s the mark I need to make. He was tired, flopping over onto his side, pulling his knees to his chest for warmth. His final thought as he drifted off to a restless sleep was I’ll just have to have faith that when I wake up this won’t all be a dream to me.

______________________________________________________________

Inside of her dingey little low-street apartment, Winnie Mason basked in the warm glow of her nightly apple cider. Ever since she’d landed her first legitimate job she’d treated herself to the little luxury of buying some authentic teas and ciders from the local farmers market every weekend. Never in her life had she been able to afford the real thing before: real apple cider made with actual apples, not the synth-fruits they grew in labs and handed out in withered brown bags at the shelters or to the public school children for their lunches. Authenticity mattered to Winnie, she valued it above all things, and that’s why she was so disturbed by what she’d just seen on the news. Apparently some fancy mudman was caught trying to kidnap an LEP tunnel patrol team and now he’s claiming that he’s actually an elf or something. Ridiculous! 

The dwarf settled into her beanbag, the only piece of furniture besides the television and the stiff foam mattress that she owned at the moment, sipping thoughtfully from her warm mug. I mean, this is just insane, she thought. Nobody is going to stand for this, certainly not the LEP. 

“Just what has the world come to these days?” She tutted. She’d been struggling ever since her smuggling operation was slammed by the LEP. She and her two older brothers had been caught with two truckloads of micro video discs full of human films, a kind of media that was increasingly hard to come by with all the digital censorship and device tracking implemented throughout Haven City. People still needed to know what happened on the latest season of their favorite human soap opera. Those days were behind her, she reassured herself, she was working straight now. Landed a part-time custodial gig at an eel farm. Not glamorous work, but it beats rotting in Howler’s Peak like her brothers. They’d saved her life that day when the LEP patrol squad car blocked their trucks into a concrete ally. As soon as the blue and white headlights flashed, they all knew what would happen next.

“Go,” Chisel, her oldest brother, commanded her, “Hit the escape tunnel, cave it in behind you.”

“But I can’t leave you two!” With tears welling up in her eyes, Winnie reached for the battery powered laser pistol under the driver’s seat. Chisel stopped her.

“It’s not worth it, we’ll be out soon enough, just get the hell out of here, now!” And she did, because she’d always done what Chisel told her to. Chisel and Brock took the fall that day, even though it was Winnie at the wheel, Whinnie who took the risk making contact with their surface dwarf uncle, and Winnie who had convinced her two precious brothers that this was their ticket out of the slums.

Guilt gurgled in her stomach, the acid eating away at her. No, she had to tell herself, I’m doing good now. This is what they wanted for me, and while they’re stuck in Howler’s Peak I’m going to make a real, authentic life for myself. No shortcuts, no tricks, everything totally legit, and by the time my brothers are released I’ll be able to give them the life that they deserve. 

It was a beautiful dream, a dream that she clung to in the nights when her hands and feet were rubbed raw and sore from scrubbing eel tanks for six hours every day. A dream that kept her strong, kept her going. A dream that would never come to be. 

Something creaked behind her, but it could have been anything. The drafty apartment, the rats, the roaches. And then, by the dim glow of her television set, Winnie was strangled to death from behind.

[aphroditesanxiety]

The most amazing thing happened today

Last year I was at a protest to let an innocent black man out of jail, which he was only in because of racial profiling and racist motivations to keep him there. I can't remember the name because I suck at names but I remember the case and the story and the immensely profound day for me becoming who I am. This was a character development moment for my little subplot story.

Anyway, I was there, and one girl stood up and said thank you to all us white folks who were there to support and stand up for what was right, I had said she shouldn't have to thank us (it should be common fucking sense to have empathy and not be a jackass). One girl turned around at me and said Exactly with so much force. We were so angry and devastated, and I could only imagine how it felt in her shoes to know that this is the world she has to look forward to. We still are angry. I will never not be angry until its fixed.

I saw a girl today at the store and I didn't recognize her but she came up to me and asked to give me a hug because she was there and she said that she appreciated my being there and everything.

It just makes me think how even after all this time people will remember you for your actions. I was a nobody in high school. But I'm remembered for the right reasons. And that makes me so happy. I'm still so angry. I'm still so sad and exhausted and full of rage and tears felt for millennia before me. But things like this remind me why I should be. Because so much is wrong with our world, but we can make impacts and start helping change that simply by showing up to a gathering in support of a cause. You can do so much just by being there. The little things do so much.

[mariacallous]

In the 20 years since, there hasn’t been another Wellstone, exactly — no politician has talked like him, walked like him, wrestled like him. (A championship college wrestler, he had been inducted into the National Wrestling Hall of Fame in 2001.) Wellstone Action, the nonprofit formed to carry on his work, recently reconstituted itself as Re:Power to focus more narrowly on racial and gender justice, dropping Wellstone’s sons from its board and his name altogether. The green bus that ferried his campaigns across the state, in fits and starts, has been dragged from one farm to another around Northfield, its mercurial motor finally kaput.

Yet there has never been more Wellstone! in government. Senators Smith and Amy Klobuchar, Gov. Tim Walz and Lt. Gov Peggy Flanagan, Attorney General Keith Ellison and U.S. Attorney Andy Luger — all were inspired, at some point, by Wellstone. In the statehouse, despite high turnover, many Democrats still have a Wellstonian pedigree. State Sen. Kari Dziedzic served as his executive assistant. State Rep. Frank Hornstein volunteered on his 1982 campaign for state auditor. House Majority Leader Ryan Winkler drove Mondale around during his short-lived 2002 campaign.

“His legacy is thinking about how to build power,” says Smith, who now holds Wellstone’s seat. “By organizing, by building power around people who aren’t rich and powerful themselves. He built power not for himself—though he was ambitious about what he wanted to accomplish—but for others. It’s certainly how I approach my job. And that is a straight line to Senator Wellstone.”

—

The ghost of Wellstone is so ubiquitous as to make Minnesota seem haunted by his memory. When the New Yorker profiled Ellison a few years ago, the writer visited the Twin Cities and reported that “Wellstone is a key figure in Minnesota’s long liberal tradition; while I was there, everyone I spoke to invoked him.”

If everyone knew Wellstone, however, it’s because Wellstone knew everyone. David Wellstone, his older son, remembers his father running parade routes “from side to side, sweating profusely” to greet as many people as possible. Connie Lewis, Wellstone’s former state director, calls him “probably the most extroverted person I’ve ever known.”

“He was everywhere all the time,” says former Minneapolis Mayor Betsy Hodges, who met him shortly after moving back to Minnesota in 1998. She was impressed by how much talent he had assembled around him: “smart, good-hearted people, who, for the most part, were in it for the right reasons.”

Tom Berg, a former U.S. attorney and state legislator who ran against Wellstone for the DFL endorsement for the Senate in 1990, had watched him build support for years. “We would sit in the back of the hall at various DFL conventions, and it was clear for a long time that Paul planned to run for office,” he says. The caucus and convention system really mattered then — you didn’t run without seeking the party’s nomination — and Wellstone knew it.

“He had excellent rhetorical skills that none of us could match,” Berg says, “and a flair for entertainment.” He remembers Wellstone bringing a grogger to a convention — a noisemaker of the sort that’s spun on New Year’s Eve or Purim, the Jewish holiday — to get people’s attention. “Theatrical is a fair word, he had a sense of that, but he also had a wonderful grasp of politics.”

Ellison first met him in North Minneapolis, in a park where a housing community had been demolished (now rebuilt as Heritage Park). “I was fresh out of law school and I was asking him a challenging question,” Ellison says, “sort of like here’s Mr. Senator Man, I’m gonna see if he can answer this. And you know what? He was so kind and so patient and he took me seriously. He looked me straight in the eye and gave me a straightforward answer, and then he asked who I was and what I was up to. And I thought, ‘This guy, this is a special person.’”

Ellison thinks of politics, in some ways, as Before and After Paul. “Look, before Paul there were always people who stood up for values of inclusion and the environment,” he says, “but they usually lost. Because they didn’t really make it pragmatic. Paul made sure his message made sense to those who would benefit the most. It’s moral politics and good politics, but it’s also winning politics. And he proved that.”

Ellison won his first race for office in 2002, joining the Minnesota House, and has won every race he’s competed in since. “Wellstone is the blueprint for my political career,” he says. “We do it like he did it. It’s the Wellstone way.”

—

In January 2004, I went to Camp Wellstone, an intensive weekend workshop organized by Wellstone Action. Over the next decade, at camps across the country, tens of thousands of activists and potential candidates would be trained to win hearts and minds the Wellstone way. This one was at the University of St. Thomas, in St. Paul, a little more than a year after Wellstone’s death. Things still felt raw. I was told to mark my nametag “PRESS” so participants could avoid me if they wanted: “Some people get uncomfortable.”

You could learn to make a campaign ad or write a press release or get an “ask” — a commitment to phone bank, door knock, or whatever needed doing. A PowerPoint slide advised, “Remember: Body position, eye contact, and SMILE!” (Full disclosure: One of the students I interviewed, who had volunteered for Wellstone’s 1996 campaign while still in high school and was apparently unfazed by my press badge, would eventually become my wife.) Ellison gave a talk. Flanagan, who had volunteered for Wellstone’s 2002 campaign while a student at the University of Minnesota, was a seminar leader.

The following year, Walz took the camp’s candidate class, as did Luger and Mark Ritchie. “I came out of it thinking this is a noble profession,” Walz told me. “Politics doesn’t need to be a pejorative.” Two years later, Ritchie was Minnesota’s secretary of state and Walz was Minnesota’s 1st District congressman.

Walz was Flanagan’s student at Camp Wellstone. In a statement to MinnPost, Flanagan says, “walking by the Wellstone for Senate office my senior year of college changed the entire trajectory of my life. I would not be where I am today if not for Senator Paul Wellstone and his vision for Minnesota.” Walz says it was “Wellstone’s passion that inspired me to run for Congress in Southern Minnesota. Senator Wellstone never wavered from his convictions or his commitment to improving the lives of working people.”

Hodges, too, had never run for anything when, in October 2002, then-State Rep. Scott Dibble suggested she run for Minneapolis City Council. She demurred. Two weeks later, Wellstone died, and she changed her tune. “Paul had done so much for so many of us,” she says. “I thought if someone I respect thinks some of that work should go on my shoulders now, I should take that seriously.”

Hodges, who now lives in Washington, D.C., and consults with corporate and civic groups on racial equity, says she sometimes thinks of Wellstone as Luke Skywalker at the end of Return of the Jedi. “He doesn’t forget that Darth Vader still has good in him,” she says, “just as Paul was capable of remembering the humanity of everyone—including people whose policies were inhumane, whose behavior was repugnant. We have a thirst for that as human beings that we don’t recognize or honor nearly enough.”

I wonder if Wellstone is also like Obi-Wan Kenobi, whose end marks the beginning of something larger. Hodges says, “You know, I am so grateful for all the good that has come in the wake of Paul’s death. But I can’t say with full honesty that I would trade any of it for him.”

[despair-to-future-arcs]

I think you should be more concerned about the fact Nagi can hear Akane’s voice. Because she is one of the masterminds of the Proto Killing Game. While most will think Tsurugi is stupid for racially profiling everyone with Divine Luck, having the voice of a former mastermind who is unrepentant is a different ballpark entirely.

I got it, Akane Taira could help out!

Wait, Akane Taira? But isn't she dead...?

She is but she was able to contact me, meaning that if I try to connect to her again then I can try to get answers from her about Utsuro and figure out more about him.

But are you sure? I mean, how do we know that Akane knows anything about Utsuro...

Well remember what Rei, Tsurugi and Teruya had say? She died with Utsuro and was with him until his death, meaning that if there's anyone that understands and knows him the most; it be her.

Plus I feel she might be the only person I can figure this out and try to understand how my Divine Luck works and what I have to do to be careful of how to use it.

Right and if she does know Utsuro, then maybe we can learn his actual name and birthday, at least to get a lead at the very least.

But remember; we do need to focus on Hajime and the others as they are our top priority but if you find anything then do show me the list and we can head there and get the file.

I know, as soon as the others are taken care of; you and me should head to that hospital and find Utsuro and try to understand him.