#would be the opposite and unwilling/unable to sacrifice anyone for these things do when said guy does neither 🤷‍♀️

[frodo-of-the-nine-fingers]

i think the actual disconnect between nie mingjue and jin guangyao is that nie mingjue is dying and knows he's dying and has to stick so so so closely to his morals and virtues or else it'll have been for nothing and then he'll have to come to terms with the fact that maybe he didn't actually have to die after all vs jin guangyao who wants to live, he wants to live and be safe and have all the things he was told he could never have-was told he was never good enough to have-and will do almost anything to make it so. and these are two like irreconcilable point of views right (and both Correct and Wrong at the same time) and so they can't understand each other because they aren't even having the same argument and neither of them can see that

[zippers-flowers-and-wine]

I have a request! another mer short- reader mer gets separated from their pod and meets/get adopted into a jojo pod

👀👀👀 I am Looking...

(I was so conflicted on what JoJo to write for, but I eventually just rolled a d8 lmao.)

(Also, this is what I imagine mermaid/man tails to be shaped like except with two long spines growing from were the dorsal meets the rest of the tail:

Orcas were awful beasts.

They way they clicked was terrifying, they were coloured in a freaky way, and they were just so damn big. Your pod's fighters always said that it wasn't that scary to be chased by them, that orcas were slow enough that a mer could outpace them as long as they kept going in a straight line...

But you wanted to call bullshit on that.

Because you were going top speed, putting all of your body into swimming away from these damned things and they were keeping up.

They'd ambushed your pod in open waters on one of your annual migrations, interrupting all of you as you'd travelled along the shore, following it down towards the cooler waters were you all lived until breeding time.

Usually, the migration path would have kept your pod over one large coral reef. It made it nearly impossible for large whales, be they False Dolphins, or Orcas, to hunt you. But the presence of human fishing nets in the area made the elders worried about the newborn mers, and it was decided that the pod would go cut across to the other path of coral reefs.

Halfway across, chaos had broken out. One particularly large orca had cut directly into the middle of the pod from below. It sent the mothers racing back towards the Coloured Path - the name bestowed upon the coral your pod usually travelled - while most of the larger mers of your pod immediately went defensive, hissing and snapping at the 3 others that started circling.

You were one of the unfortunate ones, caught up in the whirlwind of panicking gups and scared mothers. With the force of them shoving, and kicking out, you were thrown downwards; a lone mermaid, thrown out as an accidental sacrifice.

Naturally, the orcas locked onto you and here you were.

Swimming for your life as a whole pod chased after you.

You were too scared to look over your shoulder, unwilling to see the teeth that would be a few scant inches behind you, probably excited to tear into your- oh fuck!

Another orca, a younger one based one his size, lurched closer on your right, managing to land a punishing nip on your shoulder. It jerks you to a halt, ripping the wound open wider so you whip around, scratching just beneath it's eye. It squeals in pain, and you veer left squealing and ducking under another that had been waiting on you.

It's teeth snap around nothing, slick belly brushing against your flared spine, and you felt like crying out for your bearer. It was huge, easily 3x your width, and 4x as long as you.

The one that had injured you slammed into its friend with a mighty crash. Glancing back, you can see the two floating in place, clearly dazed from the impact. In your moment of distraction, another orca - also young - darts up from below, its dark body upon you before you can stop. It's teeth lock around your hips, pinning your fins down as it breaches and flings its weight back.

You screech, flailing as you're thrown into a wild somersault, launched out of the water several feet upwards as if you were a simple plaything. While airborne, your tail thrashes in some vain attempt to right you, unfortunately only succeeding in flipping you on your back mere milliseconds before you slam back into the water.

It stuns you, leaving you frozen and unable to pull in a breath as your own weight slowly pulls you down.

The anticipation hits you all at once, and you wait for the teeth. The pain of being torn apart and snapped in half by a whole pod yet...

It doesn't happen.

You can feel them around you: your earfins were designed to feel minor shifts in the water, feel how it gets warmer as bodies brush pass, and how it gets disrupted with every flick of a tail... But the pain never happens.

Peeling open your eye, you look around.

The orcas are a little farther away now, and there's more of them.

Two, no... Three adults, with four adolescents and their clicking makes your head hurt. Two of the adults are circling your still body, the final one - the one that had disrupted your pod in the first place - swimming around one of the unmoving adolescents.

The other three seem anxious, nudging and bumping against their sibling. The adult clicks, swims around him again, then makes a louder squeal that brings over one of the circling adults. They all start making sounds, the adult pulling away from the body with a neon tipped spine in its mouth. It wiggles side to side with it, almost as if...

Your tail fin twitches, and you have to clench your teeth to not cry out in agony.

That was your spine...

Beginning to shake, you've come to a chilling conclusion: They were using you for practice. Your venom spine had just killed the one that threw you out of the water, and the adult was using it to teach a fucking lesson.

Flexing a little, you realize your muscles have relaxed, no longer stiff from impact induced paralysis. Without really thinking - you bolt.

The orca that had been circling you squeals, but it - along with the others - isn't fast enough to react. You've already got several tail lengths ahead of them, and it would be unwise to expend their energy chasing you down, especially now that they were down one podmate.

Keeping up the breakneck pace, you don't stop until you feel well and truly alone.

Slowing, you pant for several long seconds, drifting with the currents.

Your gills are flared as much as possible, the pink slits sucking in water and jetting it out as you slowly turn on the spot.

Dark blue, dark blue, dark blue, dark blue...

Darkness stretched for miles in every direction.

Endless.

Directionless.

Thick, viscous tears well up in your eyes, floating towards surface.

For the first time since you were a guppy, you were alone. The currents pull at your body, pulling at your fins in a taunting manner, giggling and dancing about. All alone, they sang. Little mermaid, all alone, such easy prey.

Wrapping your arms loosely around your belly, feeling too exposed, you look up and sob brokenly. It's dusk, meaning you had been chased by those... Beasts for nearly two hours.

More tears gather in your eyes, floating away like the physical embodiment of your hopes and dreams, drifting out of reach.

You were fucked.

At the speed you'd been swimming, it was very likely that you were miles away from your pod, so all you could do now was pick a direction and start swimming.

You had to eventually run into something... Right?

___

It was completely black when you spotted somewhere to sleep for the night.

A cave, the bottom of which was covered in sand and rotting sea vegetation. Not the most glamorous place you've slept, but it was rather hidden from a distance, and deep enough that your bright colours would be muted to anyone passing by. The mouth of it was also surprisingly small, so anything larger than a shark would have some trouble wiggling in.

You, luckily, were smaller than a shark.

Pressing in head first, you wiggle your tail through, hissing when the sensitive flesh where your missing spine was rubs against the rocky cave mouth. Sliding through, you take a mental note of another entrance opposite of where you're settled as you curl up against the soft sand of the floor, folding all of your fins in tight and staring out into the blackened water beyond.

The stress of the day presses onto your shoulders, more tears well up, and you sob.

This loneliness, the separation... This was your new reality.

___

"Dude!" Okuyasu hisses, reaching out to snag his larger podmate by his shoulder. With a careful flick of his tail, he's leaning over Josuke, ears strained forward with a confused crease to his eyebrows.

Josuke flicks an ear, grumbling as he's used as a lookout post. "What dude? I'm too tired for-"

"Hush, Hishigataka." The young leader bares his teeth over his shoulder, immediately puffing up. Rohan doesn't look over, also staring intently at the neatly hidden entrance to their den. Josuke pauses, immediately losing all fight when he takes note of how restless the cecealia is. His arms are writhing around on another, bristling into various shades of darker green, and sickly yellows as his fins flare slowly.

"Someone is in our den."

Rohan's voice was deadly calm, yet it had an exciting effect on the others of his pod.

Okuyasu shivered, his spinal fin flexing excitedly as a near maniac grin started to twitch across his face. The large mer practically lived to brawl, all too happy to jump headfirst into a fight so he coiled his tail in close, ready pounce down the hidden entrance.

Mikitaka began pacing along side Koichi, the new cecealia anxious about the possible confrontation. Miki didn't exactly like any sort of violent interactions, and would always be the first of his podmates to shy away from any situations that looked like they may end badly, which was odd considering that his new form was well adapted to physical combat. Koichi was much the same, though his siren status made it a bit more understandable, since he wasn't physically capable of becoming as bulky as the other three. It also made him slower moving than them, his tail was really only meant to be flashy to attract any unsuspecting humans closer to him.

Josuke clicks, forcefully pulling their sudden excited agitation onto himself. The young leader keeps an eye on the small, seaweed covered entrance, but motions for them to all gather around him. "Alright, here's the plan. Me and Rohan will check it out, see if it's a pod we should really be worried ab-"

Rohan snorts, interjecting sharply, "I highly doubt it." Josuke sputters in outrage, but Koichi swiftly questions him before the larger pastel merman can freak out.

"W-what's that supposed to mean, Rohan - sensei?"

Smirking haughtily with that all too familiar look of "I know something you don't~", the cecealia points back towards the entrance with one of his thinnest arms. The tendril flicks lazily, matching his falsely carefree attitude s he drawls, "The main entrance hasn't been shoved around." He swims a little closer, with Josuke nearly right on top of him, to point at the thick vegetation growing around the well hidden entrance. "None of the seaweed has been pulled up, or ripped, and the rocks are perfectly in place. There's no scales that got caught on the opening, and the sand still has the faint imprint of the shells that Koichi brought last time."

Mikitaka clicks softly, coiling his limbs in close. "Forgive my ignorance, but what does all of that mean exactly?"

Koichi smiles at him, trying not to be too amused by his bewilderment. The guy had been turned into a cecealia by a particularly mean spirited siren a few months ago, and was still learning how to figure out life underwater.

Also seeming to take some kind of pity on him, Rohan explains, albeit with a rather haughty look. "What that means s that, while yes there is a mer in there, we don't need to be concerned about a pod." Josuke nods, a little more relaxed now that he knows Rohan isn't just disagreeing to get a rise out of him.

"Yeah. If anything, it may be a maid." Now it's Rohan's turn to look surprised, flicking his limbs as he sharply asks how Josuke figures that one. Koichi raises a brow, startled by how nonchalant he is about making that little inference. "Well, you said it yourself. There's no scales caught on the entrance, and even Koichi manages to snag some on the way in. That means it has to be either a cecealia, a guppy, or a mer smaller than Koichi."

Rohan snorts dismissively. "That's a moronic conclusion, Hishigataka."

"Eh!? How so!?"

"Because that doesn't explain how they didn't mess up the imprints of the shells, or how they managed-" Koichi's panicled wheeze cut their arguing short.

Wheeling around in unison, they follow the direction Koichi's outstretched hand. At first they don't see much, the rapidly deepening darkness impairing their vision, but eventually they do see and they want to tell various curses. Okuyasu had, at some point in their back and forth, wandered over to the entrance, slowly picking his way through the forest of green in front of it.

They could just barely see the glowing, golden tips of his venom spines weaving up and down. Josuke launches himself forward, his own bright pink and blue tail snapping as hard as possible to catch him up to his air headed friend, internally cursing his own negligence.

___

Peering into their home, Okuyasu doesn't immediately see anything.

It's dark, and the soft, sandy floor of the cave looks inviting, so he slips in. It takes a small wiggle for his hips to fit through, the fins having to lie flat as he works his tail left to right before sliding smoothly in. Glancing backwards, he wrinkles his nose at his small, dark blue and golden scales that he can see hanging off of the entrance, plucked free of his toughened hide thanks to how loose they were. "Yeesh, we gotta get a bigger den, man..."

Shhhfff...

His fins snap upright, flaring out as he twists in the dark. His pupils, having been dilated in his relaxation, immediately contract into dangerous slits.

That sounded like sand being shuffled around.

Josuke suddenly appears at the mouth of the cave, his bright blue eyes nearly glowing as he hisses, "What the hell are you doing, Okuyasu!?" He shushes him, holding a hand up while carefully swimming closer to the suspicious sound with his fins flared out. Josuke wiggles in after him, fins folded down as he slowly follows after him.

Sucking down water, Okuyasu jets out water and darts around the corner with his claws out, much to Josuke's yowling horror.

He slams into another body, very clearly a mer judging by the scaled tail that thrashes between his claws as he clamps down and sinks his teeth into their side. Another set of claws - smaller and more dainty than his own talons - rake across his back, making him hiss and flick sideways, slamming the smaller mer against the rockwall. They squeal, whipping their fluke at him as they twist. Okuyasu jerks back, twisting out of range of a poisonous spine that makes a lunge for his face. Josuke hisses somewhere to his left, but Okuyasu ignores him, reaching out for the intruder again. Startled, the mer ducks away from his talons, bolting towards the back. Josuke misses, just barely grazing the retreating fluke. The near miss makes him run, full force, against Okuyasu who had been about to give chase.

They both tumble to the sandy floor, sand flying up in great plumes that choke their gills, making both cough wildly. "G- Fuckin'- get off dude!" Okuyasu barks, shoving Josuke to the side. The small mer is frantically wiggling their way through the entrance, their panic making it harder for them to actually wiggle free.

Then they screech, tail flailing differently, now attempting to pull them back into the cave.

___

Oh go oh god oh god oh fUCK!

You're panicking, and you know it, and you know it's going to get you killed.

Being woken up by massive talons sinking into your flank wasn't the best thing to happen to you in your life, which was saying something considering the fact that you'd been chased hundreds of miles away from your pod by killer whales that only wanted some practice.

The mer that attacked you was big, scarily so, and he drove you downwards with his shoulder buried against your chest, and his teeth locked into the flesh just under your armpit. In a blind panic, you clawed at him, scratching at his back with your own, significantly smaller claws. The blood was billowing around the both of you, only barely blurring the outline of another mer pacing nearby. You couldn't see, nor register much of that one because the one attacking you didn't seem to apperciate having claws jammed into its spine. Apparently, it only served to piss it off because the bigger mer immediately used you like a battering ram, slamming your back against the nearby stone wall and stunning you for a beat.

When it backed of for a spilt second, slightly winded, you twisted away. Subconsciously, you thrashed your fluke at your assailant, momentarily forgetting about your missing spine as you made a break for an entrance opposite of where you had wiggled your way in.

The forgotten mer, a pretty streak of pink and blue, lunged for you, and you twitched just barely out of their range. They rocketed past you, ramming into the already wounded met and sending both of them to the floor.

Using that distraction, you started to attempt to wiggle free, cursing all of the inwards facing rocks that were hooking into your scales.

That's when you looked out into the ocean.

A small flicker of green movement.

Initially, you thought your mind was playing tricks on you, so you brushed it off, wincing as you made some progress.

Looking back up revealed two, very distressing details:

1. Your mind had not been fucking with you, that really was sometjing moving.

2. That moving thing turned out to be two moving things, and they were two, very large cecealia.

Freezing for a spilt second, you make eye contact with the shorter male.

His head tilts slowly, a small, razor thin smile playing at the edges of his lips.

With a shrill cry, you start thrashing backwards, deciding you'd much rather try and fight the two mers inside than the two cecealia outside. You're so busy panicking that you don't even notice that another creature has approached until he gasps, gently touching your cheek and making you flinch.

Your head turns, and you meet two big, dark blue eyes. Silvery hair wisps around his soft, childlike face, wild and untamed, just like the hammering of your heart. He seems worried about something, gently brushing your tussled, ungroomed hair back and away from your face as his eyes carefully search yours.

You hardly even notice the clawed hands that gently touch the raw flesh were your venom spine used to be, or the pasty white cecealia that glides up to your side, carefully pulling you free of the entrance, or even the hushed words shared back and forth, whispered over the badly injured flesh of your tail.

All you register are those dark blue eyes that are getting darker...and darker, and you can't...

___

Mikitaka hums when the mermaid falls limp against him, his limbs pulling her tighter to himself in an effort to keep her from harming herself upon collapsing. His eyes flick over to Koichi, who's coughing into his elbow, the younger siren unused to singing for such a long period of time. "Good thinking, Koichi."

"A-ah, yeah... Thanks!" He's grinning from ear to ear, flowy fins fluttering from flustered delight. He's so unused to such positive reinforcements from people that aren't Josuke, Okuyasu, Jotaro, or Rohan that the poor thing practically drinks up any and all positivity.

Miki smiles, mouth opening-

"You. Utter. FOOLS!"

Then closing in a small grimace.

It seems Rohan isn't quite as pleased.

(Okay.... Okay okay, I promise I'll finish it in the next installment, I just like?? Got really carried away 😞)

[First: You're here!] [Next: Right Here]

[inquistior-a]

@ofrevas said   :   𝙷𝙾𝚆 𝙳𝙴𝚅𝙾𝚄𝚃 𝙸𝚂 𝙷𝙰𝙻𝚆𝚈𝙽? 𝙳𝙾 𝙷𝙸𝚂 𝙱𝙴𝙻𝙸𝙴𝙵𝚂 𝙴𝚇𝚃𝙴𝙽𝙳 𝚃𝙾 𝚃𝙷𝙴 𝙻𝙴𝙶𝙸𝚃𝙸𝙼𝙰𝙲𝚈 (𝙾𝚁 𝙻𝙰𝙲𝙺) 𝙾𝙵 𝙰𝙽𝙳𝚁𝙰𝚂𝚃𝙸𝙰𝙽 𝙾𝚁𝙶𝙰𝙽𝙸𝚉𝙰𝚃𝙸𝙾𝙽𝚂 𝙰𝙽𝙳 𝙳𝙾𝙲𝚃𝚁𝙸𝙽𝙴? 𝙷𝙾𝚆 𝙳𝙾 𝙷𝙸𝚂 𝙴𝚇𝙿𝙴𝚁𝙸𝙴𝙽𝙲𝙴𝚂 𝚆𝙸𝚃𝙷 𝚃𝙷𝙴 𝙸𝙽𝚀𝚄𝙸𝚂𝙸𝚃𝙸𝙾𝙽 𝙰𝙵𝙵𝙴𝙲𝚃 𝚃𝙷𝙴𝙼?

halwn believes in the maker, and considers himself andrastian---but he is certainly not devout in the way that he understands the term from childhood. he was raised in a highly religious city-state, a member of nobility in a place where devoutness is both traditional and, at a certain level, even considered fashionable. ostwick is essentially ruled by the chantry, in the sense that its laws are ruled by chantric values and its people assert their identity  (their historic non-tevinter-ism, for lack of better term)  through andrastianism. given that it is literally a tevinter city populated by a variety of transplants, many of whom have at least a few tevinter origins, the great houses use andrastianism as a way of reinforcing their adherence to the traditions of the origins of ostwick and the andrastian rebellions. basically, all good ostwick families, all the players of note, are andrastian, and if they aren’t andrastian then they aren’t really an ostwick house. there are in fact many minor houses in oswtick who remain in good social graces only because of a strong connection to the chantry that enables them to continue to access the upper echelons of of trade and resource negotiation.

halwn’s mother is a deeply devout woman, whose faith is the central focus of her life. she is from the anderfels, where the chantry is perhaps even more influential than it is in ostwick---and the advertisable devoutness of her anders family was what made her an appealing match for halwn’s father. when he was a boy, halwn can remember both a certain jealousy and a then contingent shame that followed that jealousy over the attention his mother paid the chantry vs what she paid to him. essentially, he has always known that his mother loved the maker more than she loved him. while she wasn’t cold or cruel to her children, they were something of a distraction to her dedication to her faith. the older he became, and the more he was able to understand her, he saw that his mother /needed/ religion, needed the focus of established belief and ritual, and the connection it ran in her through her own family, in order to have both structure and meaning in her life. or, at least, to distract her from the emptiness in the rest of her life. in the end, halwn questions whether his mother has ever really thought critically about what she believes, really ever considered the alternatives, and as such he sees her faith as a blind love, and therefor empty---and since it is the greatest love she has in her life, halwn sort of mourns his mother’s religion ?? though he also, as a son, would feel it cruel to ever try to take it from her, to challenge it directly, because he knows that it would be essentially removing her gravity. she is, to him, a lukewarm woman, who only had so much love to give and chose to give it all to the ritual of organized religion rather than to other people. he thinks of that as a terrible waste.

his father, on the opposite end, preforms religion as a member of the gentry in a highly religious state---because it is simply ‘what people do’, but has never shown any indication that he genuinely believes in any of it. there are things that he has said to halwn throughout his life that lead halwn to believe that his father is not a genuinely religious man, and does not actually put any stock in the lore or moral philosophy of the chantry outside of how it informs the law and serves as a basis for tradition, and even seems to look down on those who do---including his own wife. he’s a draconian man, and his religion was always a thin veneer that painted one of two extremes for halwn when it came to understanding the ‘faithful’:  one as his mother, the fragility of the mindlessly devout and unwilling or unable to sacrifice imposed surety for genuine reflection, and the other as his father, using faith as a shield and an excuse to prop up a lack of legitimate confluence with other people. either way, halwn saw religion as something that separated people, something that dehumanized the notion of love and worship.

when halwn refused to marry, his father ‘suggested’ that he join the templars---this being the only other socially acceptable way for a noble in ostwick to avoid marriage without seeming to disregard their parents’ wishes, which is really the onus of where the stigma of not marrying is placed:  on house loyalty and participation in the practice of nobility. there was a time for him when he was a boy who still wanted to please his parents that he thought that being a templar would be a heroic occupation for him, ideal since he’d get to leave, but by his early teens his disillusionment with the chantry was complete enough that he knew he could never be happy with a life centered around formal religion. he also had no idea what templars /actually/ do until he left the city. it should be noted that ostwick is highly insular and extremely ‘traditional’ in the chantric sense. the circle at ostwick is separated from the city by a narrow landbridge, the sort meant to prevent anyone from crossing unless in single-file thus making it easy to pick them off from above. mages do not enter the city walls without templar escort, and even then rarely. as a noble child, halwn would have been instructed to ignore them / not interact with them in a sense that is very much intensely classist---though he was never told this, and wouldn’t have been unless the situation presented itself, for even discussing mages was taboo among the elite houses. halwn did not actually meet a mage or witness magic at all until he left the city at 17 to serve as a knight errant in the teyrn’s name, and even then it was in passing. magick was not discussed, and political topics revolving around mages were relegated to ‘rude’ topics that were only whispered about behind close doors. magick was evil, of course, but almost presented as a non-issue, mythical, since it was understood that no one in good society was ever going to encounter it---proof of the power of the chantry, a kind of self-rewarding and self-perpetuating tactic to avoid the possibility of uncomfortable or even remotely challenging questions.

halwn is something of a natural skeptic. he’s curious, and he loves to learn, and anything rigid or dogmatic tends to darken to him on impulse. he has always been this way, and he was quite young when he realized that he didn’t believe in the same way that the people around him seemed to believe. initially, this awareness was almost guilty. all of his education, outside of the military, was preformed by teachers involved in the clergy somehow, and the amount of shame used as an educational tool in a religious education worked on him for only so long. halwn’s natural mistrust and even animosity for those who are unfailingly dogmatic comes in part from a revulsion he has for those that try to make others feel ashamed---and this revulsion is a protective impulse rooted in the fact that he is the eldest of three children, with a large gap between him and his younger siblings, and he was nine years old when he felt he had to begin silently defending his siblings from their tutors and providing them emotional support to counteract the lack left behind by their ‘religious’ parents in a devout family.

his impulse to defend people comes from this:  from the way that always conceiving of himself as a ‘we’ makes his thinking almost inherently communal, ‘this is what we’re going to do’ / ‘this is what we need’ / etc, as a lot of eldest siblings can probably identify with. in his case, this is because he wanted to provide emotionally for his siblings. this why he’s so warm, so tender, so patient, and so gentle. it’s also why he is so driven to understand, and then forgive, because they are the opposite of what his upbringing taught him, and he never felt like a real ‘part’ of his own childhood and its methods.

he was defending his siblings from their parents absence, but also from the shame and guilt-based tactics of behavioral reinforcement used by the clergy who helped to raise them.

in many ways, halwn associates the chantry with stifling, performance, and wasted lives. he has no nostalgia for the organized religion that dominated his youth, and he was happy to leave it. leaving the city to travel as a knight was the first time he felt he had his head above water. his sexuality factors into this as well, but that’s honestly another entire meta in and of itself. living in ferelden, away from his family and away from the chantry, allowed him to breathe. it should be noted that northern ferelden is a very scattered place home to many refugees, and a lot of halwn’s neighbours and those with whom he became very close with when they formed sort of a communal group during the blight were from all over thedas, and those who were andrastian worshiped in many different ways. faith did not really rise in his mind again until the blight---when he watched people of varied backgrounds / classes / races, and varied religions, comforting one another with what he perceived to be genuine religious principles. he had witnessed a lot of violence and hideousness as a knight errant, had learned more about the world outside of ostwick that way, had suffered emotionally in his early life, but it wasn’t until the blight that halwn was actually stripped of the privilege inherent in his status, though he’d lost a lot of that after being informally disinherited he was still living comfortably by world standards, still had a farm and a house and work and freedom. the blight was the first time he felt real and genuine life-or-death responsibility for other’s lives  (outside of leading a small group of knights, but even then the danger was less dire and lacked the element of despair that thickened the danger of the blight),  he was responsible for feeding people, defending people, but also for being part of a group that just mentally had to find a way to sleep through the night. it was the first time in his life since he was very young that he felt a genuine desire to pray.

the transition from seeing religion as the power-based artifice of the wealthy to finally understanding it as the thing that gets the frightened and hungry through the night is what allowed halwn to accept the part of himself that still believed, and wanted to, that allowed him to let go of the stigma of religion he developed in youth. he hasn’t practiced formally since leaving ostwick, but he never did more genuine ‘believing’ than during the blight and the tumult that followed. saying prayers over the dead, and the ones who hadn’t died, and having to practice martial law based on collective morals, returned some of the private tenderness of belief that he once felt as a child, before that feeling was corrupted.

it’s difficult to exactly quantify his beliefs, as they are partly agnostic though, as i’ve said, he does consider himself andrastian. as a leader, he doesn’t act out of a sense of duty to chantric ideals or chantric laws anymore than he acts out of a sense of duty over anything other than to try to ascertain the truth and act in the most just way possible. he has his own compass, he has since he was a child, and he balances that against as many varied opinions as he can trust to be presented to him honestly. he also doesn’t particularly like being in chantric settings---you may sometimes, particularly when he’s drinking, hear him quote the chant, and hear that tired sting of sarcasm in it, the recitation of a disillusioned youth having his knuckles whipped by a tutor, but you may also hear him quote some small part in a dark time, using the words as words, genuinely hoping to draw and give comfort. there’s a tension, certainly, between his belief and his disillusionment, and it makes being the leader of what is essentially a renegade arm of the chantry both deeply ironic and deeply appropriate for him.

[schtroumpf-a-lunettes]

Smurf Village Upturned, Chapter 9

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It didn’t matter who he looked at, or how hard he searched. There was never anything about him, not even a hint. Brainy did his best to cope with the overwhelming flood of information that each smurf bestowed upon him by mere virtue of existing – he was determined to at least make it all the way through breakfast without running off again. What was the point of having new powers if you weren’t able to handle using them? He’d just have to get accustomed to it. He’d demonstrate to Roesia that he was MORE than able to look into his own essence. Who could possibly know the brilliance of Brainy Smurf better than Brainy Smurf himself? It was insulting to be denied access to his own soul. It was unfair that he could see how all the different dynamics amongst Smurf Village worked, but there was nothing about how he fit into it all. He successfully made it through breakfast with little fanfare, went to go back to his home to rest. It was taking everything out of him. He caught sight of Clumsy on the way there, and a pang of guilt went through him. He would normally confide in Clumsy, so why not this time? Hadn’t he pledged to tell Clumsy all about it? Was he unwilling… or unable? And Papa Smurf… He probably wouldn’t approve even if he hadn’t just forbid visits to Roesia. He’d probably have his new abilities taken away if Papa found out, and Brainy would never have a chance to learn more about… himself. (Not that he needed the insight to perceive of the true depth and greatness of his own potential, of course. But it would be a nice confirmation of what he already knew.) It struck Brainy that he hadn’t even had a chance to see the village leader since his return from his fateful encounter with Roesia. Hadn’t had a chance to see him… Oh, he could peer into Papa Smurf’s brilliant mind! There was so much for Brainy to learn, and he could learn it all, and then no one would ever be able to argue that he wasn’t just as wise! He’d just arrived at his own door, but he turned right back around again and headed to Papa Smurf’s lab instead. He’d been busy working away at something recently, taking his dinner late and now even his breakfast, apparently. He walked into the laboratory, prepared to announce his presence with a “Well hello, Papa Smurf!”, but seeing the much older smurf through his new vision promptly left him speechless. Well, he probably should have expected as much. Brainy had known every other smurf in the village since they were all young. When he could see into their psyches, naturally there was plenty to learn, and sometimes quite surprising revelations, but it was for the most part embedded in the familiar domain of smurfs he already knew quite well. But Papa Smurf had lived a long life, and his existence stretched back long before Brainy had ever known him. The weight of what there was to see was that much greater as a result. Brainy was suddenly being confronted with dimensions to Papa he’d never known – how he’d grown into the smurf he saw before him, each previous version of Papa leading into the next. It was terribly difficult to process. He could see Papa Smurf as a child, back when he hadn’t been called that. He could see Grandpa Smurf, several hundred years ago, as he was seen through young Papa Smurf’s eyes. It was intrusive, wasn’t it? He’d been given no kind of permission to see what he was seeing, had no right to look into Papa Smurf’s soul, someone’s soul, anyone’s soul. With the other smurfs it just felt like… like reading a secret diary, but this… “Brainy?” Papa Smurf’s voice came to him, sounding concerned. Brainy was staring at the ground now. Sitting on the ground. When had he gotten there? Brainy found his voice. “S-sorry, Papa Smurf…” (What else could he say?) “There’s nothing to be sorry for, Brainy. Is there anything I can help you with?” Papa Smurf reached out a glowing hand. Yes, Papa glowed, too. That, Brainy really didn’t understand. Why did some of the smurfs in the village glow? What could it possibly mean? It didn’t smurf any sense to him. He wanted to tell Papa Smurf everything. But he didn’t. “No, Papa Smurf,” Brainy said. He looked up at Papa again without thinking, and just like that, he was being assaulted by all of his personal information once more. He couldn’t control it – he would see when he looked at someone, whether he wanted to or not. So his eyes quickly moved to the surrounding laboratory instead. He wondered what Papa Smurf was currently working on, was ready to ask him just that – but oh, right; Papa Smurf was working on what one would call counteraction potions. It was something that required a lot of time, care and precision, as it was an attempt that Papa was currently making at trying to see if he could perfect potions that would only counteract parts of particular spells. Because if he managed to find a way to do that, it would open up a whole range of other possibilities for exploration and be able to expand his knowledge greatly. But it was also a very delicate balance – counteracting a spell as a whole was a comparatively very simple task. But parts of a spell? That was something else entire… entirely… Now he noticed, he noticed that Papa Smurf was looking at him, wide-eyed. “Well, yes. But how did you know any of that, Brainy?” Huh? “How did I…? Um.” Brainy took off his glasses, pretended to clean them. That was better. He could see nothing like that, and perhaps it was better this way. “I am your apprentice, am I not?” he laughed unconvincingly. He didn’t see Papa look him over suspiciously, didn’t stay to chat. He just turned around, slipped on his glasses and left. If he could have made it back to his house without them on, then he probably would have foregone the spectacles altogether. And even as he flopped back onto his bed, so much of the new information had already dissipated from his mind. That was another thing, wasn’t it? Much of what he’d discovered about the other smurfs refused to stay in his head, floating out with ease as it were, only to return when he saw them again… Given the sheer volume of information, it was probably no surprise. And everything was getting jumbled. It seemed like the only time he had a clear view was when a smurf was right in front of him. *** He felt ashamed, going back to Roesia so soon. So he wandered the forest aimlessly for a while, debating with himself, acting an awful lot like Flighty in the process, trying to make a decision. At least it was a lot more safer to do so these days, now that Gargamel was gone, and the other unsmurfy creatures of the forest… Well, suffice it to say that they tended not to really bother the smurfs anymore. It was probably best for Roesia to remove his Insight into the other smurfs. Surely she would understand, right? He was starting to realise that, perhaps it wasn’t right to have free access to everyone’s inner selves. Access to his own inner self, now that was another thing entirely. Wasn’t it obvious? Roesia should do the trade with him. Allow him to see into himself, but not into anyone else. This willing sacrifice may just be the proof that Roesia needed in order to grant him that. But… Roesia could see into him, and he didn’t want her to have any indication that he was having some difficulty with it, with anything. Maybe she would take it in quite an opposite manner and consider it proof that he wasn’t ready, wasn’t worthy, couldn’t handle to see his objective self. (Which made no sense, of course. He was Brainy Smurf, after all. He was more than competent at so many things.) And did he really want to lose the insight? Surely it couldn’t hurt to keep it a little longer. Just long enough to see himself through the eyes of the other smurfs! He, Brainy Smurf, with his highly analytical and objective-based mind, surely already knew himself well enough. The other smurfs, with their terribly subjective minds, however… Through what lens did they view his greatness? The glowing… he also needed to ask Roesia about the glowing. That was reason enough to pay her a visit. Was it any cause for concern? Was there cause for concern for the majority of smurfs that didn’t glow? He’d be disobeying Papa Smurf again. And he was alone this time – he didn’t fancy Vanity’s recent antisocial antics, and needing to guide him around anyway since the flower-adorned smurf no longer cared to look where he was going. Perhaps he should just go back to the village already. He laid down on the grass, exhausted. Interesting aspects of and information regarding other smurfs in the village were still bouncing around energetically in his mind, on top of everything. It was all a little bit too much. He wasn’t equipped t- “Brainy?” He sat up quickly. It was Roesia. Had he really, truly just thoughtlessly walked into her little domain without even realising it? Augh, now her eyes again would rob him of his mind’s privacy. Great. “Don’t worry about the glowing,” Roesia said. “Didn’t even say anything. It’s like you really see everything,” Brainy shot back bitterly. Roesia closed her eyes. “Oh, not everything… there are things I can’t see into.” “Like what?” Roesia smiled strangely. “Time.” Now that she was right there in front of him, Brainy wasn’t saying or asking any of the things he wanted to. What was the point? Chances were, she already knew. All of it. Just what had he smurfed himself into… *** Helping others psychologically. It was something that Roesia was very skilful at thanks to her insight into the minds of anyone around her. She could map out the best paths to take when approaching someone, whether it was to disarm, if that was what they needed, and then to gently prod them in the right directions. Well, it was not always necessarily used for helping others. But that did make up the bulk of how she put her talents to use. To help others was a very useful thing that just made things easier. Getting to know them, gaining their trust, extending connections and finding new individuals in turn… It was a largely harmless endeavour for everyone involved. In fact, the vast majority of her encounters involved people that benefited from it, from her intervention, if she were able to carefully draw an individual’s attention to an area of themselves that they needed help with, and, given that she had the time, provide some sort of guidance of how to make it better. At times, it was a sort of idle hobby of hers, one that could be woven into her career. There were always so many people at funerals who needed a little assistance. So there was no denying that she could wield her insight to help people and was quite adept at doing so, but it was not her ultimate goal. *** Ultimately, Brainy did not get the insight removed. He had been at a kind of stalemate with himself – he didn’t want to go back to the village with it, but he refused to ask Roesia to remove it. His desire to have full access, if only for a little bit, was too strong, and he didn’t want to risk jeopardising that. And so it was, with a newfound determination to prove himself and to get better at handling the power that he’d been given, that he returned to the village. Why, he’d be able to see everything about himself in the mirror in no time, just like Vanity…

[thevividgreenmoss]

...Anyone who knew Eqbal in conditions of struggle knew subliminally that his loyalty and solidarity were unquestionable. He was a genius at sympathy. When he used the pronoun "we," you knew that he spoke and acted as one of us, but never at the expense either of his honesty or of his critical faculties, which reigned supreme. This is why Eqbal came as close to being a really free man as anyone can be. 

This isn't to say that he was indifferent to the problems of others, or blessed in that he didn't have problems of his own. This was very far from true. But he did give one the impression that he was always his own man, always able to think and act clearly for himself and, if asked, for others. His subcontinental origins in Bihar and Lahore steeped him both in the travails of empire and in the many wasteful tragedies of decolonization, of which sectarian hatred and violence, plus separatism and partition, are among the worst. 

Yet retrospective bitterness at what the white man wrought and at what his fellow Indians and Pakistanis did were never part of Eqbal's response. He was always more interested in creativity than in vindictiveness, in originality of spirit and method than in mere radicalism, in generosity and complexity of analysis over the tight neatness of his fellow political scientists. The title of one of his most spirited essays, on Regis Debray, was entitled "Radical but Wrong." 

When I dedicated my book Culture and Imperialism to him, it was because in his activity, life, and thinking Eqbal embodied not just the politics of empire but that whole fabric of experience expressed in human life itself, rather than in economic rules and reductive formulas. What Eqbal understood about the experience of empire was the domination of empire in all its forms, but also the creativity, originality, and vision created in resistance to it. Those words-" creativity, " "originality," "vision"-were central to his attitudes on politics and history.

Among Eqbal's earliest writings on Vietnam was a series of papers on revolutionary warfare which was intended as a refutation of standard American doctrine on the subject. U.S. counterinsurgency experts see in Vietnamese resistance a sort of conspiratorial, technically adept, communist and terrorist uprising, which can be defeated with superior weapons, clear-cut pragmatic doctrines, and the relentless deployment of overwhelming military force. What Eqbal suggested was a different paradigm: the revolutionary guerrilla as someone with a real commitment to justice who has the support of her or his people, and who is willing to sacrifice for the sake of a cause or ideology that has mobilized people. What counterinsurgency doctrine cannot admit is that the native elites whose interests are congruent not with their country's but with those of the United States are not the people to win a revolutionary war. In confronting the arch-theorist of this benighted view-none other than Samuel Huntington-Eqbal. Put it this way:

In underdeveloped countries the quiescence which followed independence is giving way to new disappointments and new demands which are unlikely to be satisfied by a politics of boundary management and selective cooptation-a fact which the United States, much like our ruling elites, is yet unable or unwilling to perceive. There is an increasingly perceptible gap between our need for social transformation and America's insistence on stability, between our impatience for change and America's obsession with order, our move toward revolution and America's belief in the plausibility of achieving reforms under the robber barons of the "third world," our longing for absolute national sovereignty and America's preference for pliable allies, our desire to see our national soil freed of foreign occupation and America's alleged need for military bases.... As the gap widens between our sorrow and America's contentment, so will, perhaps, these dichotomies of our perspectives and our priorities. Unless there is a fundamental redefinition of American interests and goals, our confrontations with the United States will be increasingly antagonistic. In the client states of Asia and Latin America it may even be tragic. In this sense Vietnam may not be so unique. It may be a warning of things to come.

What emerges in these writings is the opposition between conventional and unconventional thought and of course the even deeper opposition between justice and injustice. In his preference for what the unconventional and the just can bring peoples by way of liberation, invigorated culture, and well-being, Eqbal was firm and uncompromising. His distrust for standing armies, frozen bureaucracies, persistent oligarchies allowed no exceptions. Yet at the same time, as he showed in his great essay on Debray, it is not enough to be unconventional if that means having no regard for tradition, for the goods that women and men enjoy, for the great stabilities of human life. Eqbal was shrewd and illusionless enough to realize that overturning societies for the sake of revolution only, without sufficient attention to the fact that human beings also love and create and celebrate and commemorate, is a callous, merely destructive practice that may be radical but is profoundly wrong. 

...No one has more trenchantly summarized the various pathologies of power in the third world than Eqbal in the three summary essays he wrote for Arab Studies Quarterly in 1980 and 1981.9 Once again, unlike many of the second-thoughters and post-Marxists who populate the academic and liberal journals today, Eqbal remained true to the ideals of revolution and truer yet to its unfulfilled promise. To have heard him lecture over the years, passionately and sternly, about militarism in the Arab world, in Pakistan, in Algeria and elsewhere, was to have known the high moral position he took on matters having to do with the sanctity and potential dignity of human life either squandered or abused by strutting dictators or co-opted intellectuals. Creativity, vision, and originality of the kind appreciated by Eqbal in his great friend the Urdu poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz are the measure for political life, not the trappings of honor guards, fancy limousines, and enormously bloated and all-powerful bureaucracies. 

The measure is the human being, not the abstract law or the amoral power.

I think it must have been difficult to hold on to such ideals and principles. Most of Eqbal's written work, and indeed his activism, took place in dark times. Not only did he take full stock of the devastations of imperialism and injustice all over the globe, but in particular he more eloquently than anyone else inventoried the particular sadness and low points reached by Islamic cultures and states. Yet even then he managed to remind us that what he mourned is no mere religious or cultural fanaticism, as it is usually misrepresented in the West, but a widespread ecumenical movement. Moreover, though not an Arab himself, Eqbal reminded Arabs that Arabism, far from being a narrow-based nationalism, is quite unique in the history of nationalisms because it tried to connect itself beyond boundaries. It came close to imagining a universal community linked by word and sentiment alone. Anyone who is an Arab in his feelings, in his language and his culture, is an Arab. So a Jew is an Arab. A Christian is an Arab. A Muslim is an Arab. A Kurd is an Arab. I know of no national movement which defined itself so broadly. 

In such a situation and with such a heritage, Eqbal saw the degradation of ideas and values that grip Arabs and Muslims alike. Let me quote him again. This is in the aftermath of the Gulf Way in 1993:

We live in scoundrel times. This is the dark age of Muslim history, the age of surrender and collaboration, punctuated by madness. The decline of our civilization began in the eighteenth century when, in the intellectual embrace of orthodoxy, we skipped the age of enlightenment and the scientific revolution. In the second half of the twentieth century, it has fallen. I have been a lifelong witness to surrender, and imagined so many times-as a boy in 1948, a young man in 1967 ... and approaching middle age in 1982-that finally we have hit rock bottom, that the next time even if we go down we would manage to do so with a modicum of dignity. Fortunately, I did not entertain even so modest an illusion from Saddam Hussein's loudly proclaimed 'mother of battles."

This on the one hand and on the other the multiple degradations of what he once called the fascism and separatis clearly identifiable, seemingly hostile but symbiotically linked trends, in his Pakistan. Former Pakistani prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and his family, former president General Muhammad Zia ul-Haq, and their coteries plundered the land, demoralized the population. They tried to subdue the country I s insurrectionary constituent cultures and failed, but at the price of more blood and treasure. And everywhere, as throughout the Muslim world, they provoked, if they did not actually cause, the rise of Islamism, which as a secularist Eqbal always deplored. 

But ever the fighter and activist, he did not submit in resignation. He wrote more and more in earnest and in 1994 undertook his grand project of founding a new university in Pakistan-Khaldunia, aptly named after the great Arab historian and founder of sociology, Ibn Khaldun. In this project and his enthusiasm for it, Eqbal was no Don Quixote, tilting at windmills, but like Marxist theoretician Antonio Gramsci, he took as his motto "Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will. This was part of the man's rareness, knowing how to rescue the' best available in a tradition without illusion or melodramatic self-dramatization. For him, Islam, Arabism, and American idealism were treasures to be tapped, despite tyrants like Zia ul-Haq and Henry Kissinger, whose manipulations and cold-blooded policies debase and bring down everything they touch.

Edward Said, Introduction to Eqbal Ahmad’s Confronting Empire

[thesaltydigest]

REVIEW: "The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue", or: Fetch me a couch, for I nearly swoon!

Title: The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue

Author: Mackenzi Lee

Review by: Captain Clo

Verdict: adventures of a bisexual scoundrel unable to keep his mouth shut and pathetically in love with his biracial male best friend. I had the time of my life, would totally recommend, go read it right now! 5 stars

Trigger warning for: homophobia, slight racism, parental abuse

Sometimes you just need an adventurous, fun and queer book in your life. The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue definitely fits the bill. It can look daunting with its 500 pages, but they fly by like nobody's business. An apt summary of its plot would look more or less like this:

Dramatic escapes through Europe! Highwaymen! Pirates! Alchemy! The mysteries of Venice!

And last but not least, best friends hopelessly pining for each other.

I think the official summary of the book actually sells the book short – it's so much more than just "two friends of noble station – and a little sister – go on a Grand Tour through Europe". It's actually two friends and one sister go on a Grand Tour, the dummy of the trio enrages the Prime Minister of France, then proceeds to steal something of said Minister out of pettiness, dashes out of Versailles stark naked, and then discovers what he stole isn't just a trinket, but the key to an alchemical secret. Slightly spoilerish? I guess, but it's so much more interesting put that way.

When you read "Grand Tour" maybe you think of Mary Shelley, Percy (coincidence??) Bisshe Shelley and Lord Byron going on their disastrous romp through Europe... and  A Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue is definitely not that. Unless you think of Mary Shelley as a bitter teenager snarking in disgust at her stupid male companions, and of Lord Byron as a pathetic mess trying too hard to look like a hedonist Casanova, and... well actually that kind of works, but Percy Shelley definitely wasn't a biracial violinist... with a crush on Lord Byr--- I mean, Monty... I mean I'm no expert but reliable sources told me that he was an ass! And a jerk! Percy doesn't deserve that, he's an angel.

Enter the protagonist: Henry Montague, aka Monty. He's a hot mess. A rogue, a scoundrel, a ladykiller, an unrepentant bisexual, with the good looks and the charm to get anyone he wants in his bed. Alas, he's hopelessly in love with his best friend, Percy, who is exactly the kind of level-headed, serious person who's just perfect to rein Monty in. Monty is witty, superficial and a pleasure-seeker, refusing to take anything seriously, and especially anything his father wants him to do – like being a respectable lord, studying with profit at Eton, or running a family estate, for example. Monty loathes the very idea, so what better course of action than doing every single thing his father would disapprove of?

Enter Felicity, Monty's little sister. Wicked smart and with a cutting tongue to match, she's the opposite of Monty in every way. She looks forward to the museum trips, to the scientific lectures, to the operas and the landscapes. Too bad she's a woman, and so she's not invited. Felicity loathes it, and she also loathes how Monty is so obviously unwilling to take advantage of his privilege in every way it's denied her. Felicity wants to study and to become a doctor, and she would welcome the offer to learn how to run the estates. Instead, soon she'll be shipped off to a school of good manners for young ladies, where at most she'll learn to curtsy.

Enter Percy, Monty's best friend and crush. He's the biracial son of an English member of the gentry, grudgingly accepted into the family when his father dies. He has all the things Monty doesn't have – and that he's in love with: sensitivity, artistic sense (he's a violinist and, as Monty himself notes with delight, the kind of person who loves Italian opera and can recognize an aria by its first verse), and height.

What I found most interesting about Percy is that he is actually what moves the plot along. At first, the book looks like it'll be about a hedonistic journey through Europe; but a revelation about Percy spins it in an entirely different direction – one that also challenges Monty to overcome his selfish tendencies.

I am dying to tell you what Percy's deal is because damn, I was delighted and surprised, but I can't take that away from you. Just know that it was very satisfying to see how his main problem wasn't directly linked to his race, although he does get shit for it sometimes. His relationship with Monty is the sweetest thing, but it doesn't lack thorns (read: drama), mostly because Monty is pretty clueless and it often borders on insensitive. For example, Monty always defends Percy when someone is a racist ass to him (yay!) but he doesn't see why Percy doesn't just say something witty and rude to every lord who insults him (less yay) and thinks there's really no problem, Percy is just a little darker than most, so? Which, bless him, is a very simple thing to think, and definitely not the truth. But he's also so pathetically sorry when Percy snaps at him for it, I can't really hate him.

"I could say something to your uncle."

"No."

"Why not? If he won't listen to you-"

"I know you think you're being helpful when you say things like that, and when you defend me, and I appreciate it, I really do, but please, don't. I don't need you to stand up for me – I can do that."

"But you don't-"

"You're right, sometimes I don't, because I'm not the light-skinned son of an earl so I haven't the luxury of talking back to everyone who speaks ill of me. But I don't need you to rescue me."

"I'm sorry." It comes out soft and meek, like the bleat of a lamb.

I made a very undignified noise when I first read this. Actually I just did it again.

I found the book wonderful in how it blends serious moments, scenes that tugs at the reader's heartstrings, and witty banter. On the serious side, Monty is an alcoholic, suffers from panic attacks, and although he flaunts a charming and flippant persona, he's actually consumed by self-loathing and an atavistic fear of his father. At first, it can look like Monty self-sabotaged or defied his father by getting himself kicked out of Eton, but then we learn the truth: he was kicked out because of his relationship with another boy. His relationship with Felicity is a frustrating affair where both give the worst of themselves. Monty, as mentioned, is incapable of seeing how privileged he is and how much Felicity is put down in her ambitions just because she's a woman; but Felicity has absorbed a lot of how their father treats Monty, it's hard to see her treating him like he's worthless and stupid. Every time it seems like they might get along, one or both of them revert back to old patterns, and you're just there wishing you could smack their heads together and tell them, Now love each other properly!

Then there are the moments when Monty remembers he's in love with Percy, and has the gall to get all mushy and pathetically in love like this:

"[Percy] reaches out, almost as though he can't help himself, and puts his thumb to my jawline. The tips of his fingers brush the hollow of my throat, and I feel the touch so deep I half expect that when he moves, I'll be left with an imprint there, as though I am a thing fashioned from clay in a potter's hand."

And then there's the witty banter. Everywhere. Witty banter for days. Oscar Wilde would be proud, and I'm so so happy. There's witty banter to seduce:

"She smiles, then flicks open the ivory fan hanging from her wrist and begins to work it up and down. The breeze flutters the single ringlet trailing down the back of that neck of hers that swans would envy. I have been mentally patting myself on the head for keeping my eyes on her face the whole time we've been speaking, but then the bastards betray me suddenly and dive straight down the front of her dress.

I think for a moment she may not have noticed, but then her mouth twists up and I know she's seen. But instead of slapping me or calling me a boor and storming off, she says, "My lord, would you like to see..." Telling pause. Eyelash flutter. "More or Versailles?"

"You know, I believe that I would. Though I'm short a guide."

"Perhaps you'll allow me."

"But this party seemed to be just picking up speed. I'd hate to drag you away."

"Life is filled with sacrifices."

"Am I a sacrifice?"

"One I'm happy to make."

Witty banter when Monty shows how much of a dunce he is, and how much he cannot spy on people properly:

"Helena stopped awfully short when she realized I was listening."

"Well, you were being rude."

"I wasn't being rude!"

"You were eavesdropping."

"No eaves were dropped, I was just standing about. It's their fault they weren't speaking softer."

There's witty banter almost every time he utters a word with Percy. Or utters a word, period.

"How is it that we've landed the only bear-leader for hire who's entirely opposed to the true purpose of the Tour?"

"Which is... remind me."

"Strong spirits and loose women."

"Sounds instead like it's going to be weak wine with dinner and handling yourself in your bedroom after."

"No shame in that. If the Good Lord didn't want men to play with themselves, we'd have hooks for hands. [...] Hold on, are you keen on all this cultural thing?"

"I'm not... not keen." And then he gives me a smile that I think is supposed to be apologetic but instead looks very, very keen.

"No, no, no, you have to be on my side about this! Lockwood is tyranny and oppression and all that! Don't be seduced away by his promises of poetry and symphonies and – Dear Lord, am I to be subjected to music for the entirety of out Tour?"

"Absolutely you will. And the only thing you will hate more than listening to Lockwood's selected music will be listening to me talk about said music. Sometimes I'll walk to Lockwood about music and you will hate it. You're going to have to listen to me and Lockwood using words like atonal and chromatic scale and cadenza."

"Et tu?"

Honestly, what are you even waiting for. Go buy it right now!

[alexsmitposts]

US Withdrawing from Afghanistan? It Lies About That Too! Now we are being told that the US is finally getting out of Afghanistan, as has long been promised Maybe, just maybe, the forty years of conflict there will be over, and everyone who has had their say about that country might just care enough to make that happen. There is some concern that the US is not negotiating this withdrawal with the Afghan government, but with the once-hated Taliban, the force long regarded as the exemplar of the evils of fundamentalism and terrorism. But the withdrawal is, after all, part of a peace process. It makes sense to try and talk the opposition into laying down its arms and helping rebuild the country, particularly when the US entered Afghanistan to remove that same force from power, and presumably doesn’t want to withdraw if it would mean letting the same force get up to its old tricks. Yes, we know that the withdrawal is not being driven by the situation in Afghanistan but by domestic political considerations. But surely it would not even be contemplated if Afghanistan wasn’t capable of running its own affairs, and re-establishing itself as a stable and democratic nation? Surely there is some sort of endgame, rather than simply a withdrawal, or there wouldn’t be anything to negotiate about, would there? Afghanistan has drifted in and out of the world’s headlines since 1979. But if there is one thing these past forty years have taught us, it is this. If superpowers actually care about the people they claim to be protecting, they give us valid reasons why they want to protect them. If they don’t, you cannot believe a word they say – and this is why the Afghan conflict only makes any sense if you assume everyone involved in it is lying, and wilfully so, and for the sake of doing it rather than to achieve anything. Heap upon heap When the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979, this made some sort of sense, at least if you were a Soviet. The already Communist Afghan government had been acting increasingly independently of Moscow, in an era when there was increasing cooperation between the US and China, but not so much between the US and the Soviet Union, which saw China as an enemy. Not wanting another Yugoslavia in a country cursed with a very strategic location, the Soviets invaded to bring it back into Moscow’s orbit. No one believed the justification given at the time – that Moscow was merely upholding the Soviet-Afghan Friendship Treaty of 1978. But in this Cold War era, no one expected the Soviet Union to tell the truth about anything, so another dodgy invasion, like that of Czechoslovakia in 1968, wasn’t considered newsworthy. The problem the West had was that few had noticed the rift between Moscow and the Hafizullah Amin government in Kabul. Most commentators wondered why the Soviets had gone in to overthrow a government of the same type. The Soviet argument that Amin was alienating the population by imposing Marxism on an unwilling society cut no ice in Western corridors. According to Western Cold War rhetoric, every Communist government was hated by its people, so why should the biggest and baddest of them all care about the popularity of a fellow travelling regime? One man who did see what was coming was Sir Harold MacMillan, the former British Prime Minister who was now a doddery old man no one took much notice of, a relic of a bygone political era. He had reputedly told his successor in 1963, Sir Alec Douglas-Home, that he would be fine as long as he didn’t invade Afghanistan. This was at the time was seen as a joke rather than a lesson of history. Now MacMillan repeated his claim that Afghanistan was impossible to conquer, but was again ignored. Only when the locals dared to take on the Soviet war machine, on the grounds that it was “infidel” rather than Communist, did the US, China and other powers start pouring money into the various mujahedeen factions, claiming they were “freedom fighters” who stood the first real chance anyone had had of defeating the Soviets. Charlie Wilson’s War But the US didn’t really believe this either. How could it, when it was being seriously embarrassed by the Islamic Revolution in Iran at the same time? For the first time, Muslim equalled terrorist, because the US hadn’t seen that revolution coming, and felt foolish. Did it really think arming and funding Muslim terrorism in Afghanistan, even if it was fighting the Soviet Union, would produce a different result? To the amazement of many, the Afghans did kick out the Soviets, but not before they had started fighting amongst themselves. All the different factions, who controlled different parts of the country, were now supposed to meet and agree on the form of a new democratic system, under UN auspices. But when Mohammad Najibullah, whose faction happened to control the part of Kabul where the government buildings were, unilaterally declared himself president and the conflict started again, the US couldn’t have cared less. For many years, every Western government insisted that the Najibullah regime was a legitimate government, with some sort of democratic mandate, when it was a Muslim terrorist group like its opponents, and had taken power by violating the rules the West had set for that process. When Najibullah was forced to resign in 1992 the various Islamic factions continued their war, using their Western-supplied weapons and training, despite all being considered terrorists. Unable to resolve their internal conflicts, they fell victim to a new force, the Taliban, which conquered most of the country without a major battle by preaching a more extreme version of Islam, exactly what the West didn’t want, despite the fact it didn’t care that the others had once promised the same, and been supported. The US entered Afghanistan to kick out the Taliban, claiming it was a threat to humanity due to its links with al-Qaeda and heroin trafficking. How much the US really cares about either of these two things can be seen in other conflicts, where it fights on the same side as al-Qaeda, and the fact that it controls heroin smuggling routes by proxy. But getting rid of the Taliban, those wild and violent extremists, was worth the sacrifice of yet more Western lives – wasn’t it? Now the US wants to get out of Afghanistan, understanding history better than the Soviets did. But is it supporting the constitutional regime it put in place after the Taliban? No, it is talking to that same enemy, spitting on the graves on its own dead veterans and the victims of the Taliban and the forces it aligned itself with. If we take what the US has said about Afghanistan since 1979 at face value, this is the last thing which should happen. If we see the process as a succession of wilful lies which can only be ended by the biggest lie of the lot, it is perfectly logical – almost as logical as the fact that it is the notorious Trump White House which thinks this is not only OK, but part of some Manifest Destiny only Mr. Orange Face could fulfil. We know the rules The Afghan government has every reason to feel aggrieved that the US is holding talks in Doha with the Taliban but not with itself. Matters have hardly been helped by Imran Khan saying that an “interim government” should be set up in Afghanistan to help with these talks, as if the existing one has no mandate or responsibilities. But Imran is only telling it like it is. If the US actually wants peace with the Taliban, why is it still in the country to counter its “insurgency”? If it doesn’t, why isn’t it supporting the existing Afghan government, which it put there, and continuing to try and defeat the Taliban? Either way, the US is treating the Afghan government like a disposable toy, and Imran is simply saying that if it means what it says, creating another disposable toy is the next step. The problem is that any Afghan government installed by the West is as unacceptable to ordinary Afghans as the Soviet-backed regime was. It was often noted that the leaders of the various “Muslim” mujahideen factions were not only breaking the commandments of the Quran by waging war against fellow Muslims, but behaving in other ways which belied their self-description as “Islamic.” But each was obliged to proclaim himself more Muslim than the last because most Afghans share that faith, and expect their rulers to do the same. After the Third Anglo-Afghan war in 1919, Emir Amanullah Khan pursued a foreign policy independent of the United Kingdom. Though he did not abandon Islam, he began doing things which his enemies, and a portion of the general populace, saw as deviant, such as establishing civil legal codes and building factories. He was forced to abdicate on the grounds that he was non-Muslim, and no subsequent Afghan ruler, apart from the Communists, has dared embrace ideas the Muslim majority will not accept, despite the existence of significant indigenous Hindu and Sikh minorities, and various divisions within Islam itself. The present Afghan government is seen by many as a Western puppet regime, and is being treated like one by the West itself. But it represents about the best balance between Western and Islamic principles the West can hope for. Apparently that doesn’t matter now, and bringing back “cleansed” fundamentalists is more important. But will the population which largely accepted the first Taliban takeover do so a second time, if it appears the same US has brought it back? Tigers chase their tails The Taliban has not been defeated because ordinary Afghans don’t think the Ghani government is Muslim (and therefore authoritative) enough. Despite its past crimes, the Taliban now speaks more than anyone else for an important segment of the population. It will no longer do that if it gets into bed with the infidel to return to power. Then the Taliban will have to do as it did before – become increasingly extreme in its interpretation of Islam to regain the support of that public, and seek protection by that old Western method, sponsoring its favourite terrorists. No one will call for the Russians to ride in to rescue Afghanistan, and the international community will not allow China or Iran to do it. So that leaves the US, which still insists on being taken at its word. To save the world from terrorism, and the Islamic fundamentalism it insists breeds it, the US will have to go back to Afghanistan. As we have already seen, all the talk about getting Uncle Sam out of expensive foreign wars means nothing when set against domestic agendas, such as demonising particular immigrant groups to protect Americans in positions of power doing the same thing. With little else going for him, Trump will jump at the chance to rid the world of people like the Taliban, even though his minions are now negotiating with them to put them in the firing line once again. This is not Vietnam, where the US can leave and allow the Communists to take over because they are at least a genuine government which acts like one. The US can’t pursue its current domestic policy and then leave Afghanistan in the hands of those it blames for all its domestic troubles, and both Trump and the Taliban know that. If the US does pull all its troops out of Afghanistan, others will be sent in their place to do the same job. The governments of the countries they come from will soon baulk at working with the Taliban, and enjoy telling the US so to win their own domestic support. So the US will be in Afghanistan until it can find an even bigger lie to tell – and as it has taken forty years to get to this point, and there will be a backlash against Trumpism in the near future, that day is likely to take a very long time to come.

[lawlight-week]

Title: a lie to a liar to a lie

Name of Creator: just-another-shipper

Created For: mrskandycane

Prompt: For one day, Light can only tell lies, and L tries to use this.

Characters: L and Light

Ratings, warnings, number of words: PG-13 rating, no warnings, 1,510 words

a lie to a liar to a lie

For Light Yagami, the truth had been something hanging over his head just as much as the silver handcuff glinting on his wrist. The truth was something he had been running from his whole life and the truth was something that he had conquered a long time ago.

After all, the truth is different things to different people, and when you think about it that way, what’s truth but one more lie?

Of course, there are objective truths, like the color of the sky, crime, the way it feels to try and try for your father’s approval only for him to not notice again and again and again. The loneliness of always being above your peers, of never having an equal.

Light Yagami had been lying his entire life and that’s why, on the day that he could not tell the truth, he didn’t even realize anything was wrong until halfway through the morning when he accidentally agreed with L’s ridiculous thoughts on why ice cream was a proper breakfast. He had managed to play it off as a joke, but there was no avoiding L’s blank stare that still somehow managed to make Light feel as though L saw right through his forced nonchalance and right into the heart of his increasing anxiety.

Trying to test this new snarl in his life proved difficult with a genius detective, who was looking for a way to lock him up, forever handcuffed to him. Every time that Light found he was unable to tell the truth, L would look at him and whisper an increasing percentage in his ear.

Of course, this was horribly infuriating and, of course, there was nothing Light could do about it. 

By lunch, despite having to perform his tests with L next to him, he was able to determine that he was unable to tell the truth at all. For a career liar like Light, this wasn’t as worrying as it should be.

What was worrying was that he was still able to proclaim his innocence in the face of L’s accusations.

-

If you were to ask any honest man what the opposite of the truth was, they would all say that it was a lie, but an ardent liar would laugh in the face of that common knowledge because all liars know that any great lie starts as the truth.

-

Light’s thoughts were racing. He needed to get away from L and figure out why he was able to deny his guilt.

The part of his mind that still believed that the truth existed was whispering because you are Kira, you are guilty, a Killer. But Light has been denying the existence of that voice for so long that it was barely there at all. There was no way that he was Kira, therefore, there had to be another reason that he was able to lie about it.

Light’s thoughts raced around in his head until finally L noticed a crack in his flawless façade and said, his sickly sweet breath washing over Light’s face, “Light-kun seems distracted, is something the matter?”

It was a warning and a barb all at once, it said I see you now, your face is slipping, watch out in a wrapping of friendly concern. Light was fuming.

“I think I’m just feeling a little under the weather today, Ryuzaki, thanks for your concern.”

Before L could speak again, one of the other, inconsequential officers that were in the room with them started shouting about finding a clue that both L and Light had already found and dismissed as a dead end a few hours ago. Light hated them for robbing him of the opportunity to continue this dance he and L were performing alone and unrecognized only because no one else was smart enough to realize that they were dancing in the first place.

-

One night, not long after his father pointed an empty gun at his head and pulled the trigger, Light and L found themselves on the roof of the building after everyone but Watari had left for the night.

In the moonlight and against the backdrop of the city behind him, L was a dangerous mirage. His grotesque angles and sickly pale skin turned into a thing of beauty in the dark. He had been entirely silent, his entire being focused on the problem that was Light.

And Light, still hurt and angry over his father’s fabricated betrayal, had practically preened at the attention from someone who saw more of his truth than anyone had ever seen and he was practically shaking with rage because of it.

What right did this monster of a man have to see Light-perfect, perfect Light-without his mask?

What right did L have to strip away the fabricated truths that Light wore like a second skin?

That night they had argued with subtle barbs and targeted words and then they fell into bed and created a new variation of the same game they had been playing for what had felt like months.

It was exhilarating.

-

The taskforce left around dinnertime and Light and L were left to eat a dinner of a salad and a mountain of cookies alone.

Dinner was by no means a truce, but it was a time when both of them stopped thinking about the Kira case and let their minds and mouths wander from topic to topic, only lingering on something long enough to argue a point with words that weren’t meant to sting as sharply. Unlike the day and night, evening was a time for play fighting. Evening was the perfect balance between the lie of the day and the truth of the night. Light liked evenings.

That night, the topic eventually landed on Misa.

Misa was an impossible contradiction that Light was never sure what to do with and was never sure why he still tolerated her.

She was at once a liar and one of the most honest people that Light knew. She was always observant, but purposely oblivious. Obsessive and selfish, but happy to sacrifice anything for him. She was the type of person that Light usually abhorred, but there was something that forced Light to pay attention to her in a way that he didn’t for anyone but L.

Love and hate are words that Light thought he could say anytime, because love and hate are nothing but contradictions and lies. But even those lies can be true if you believe them long and hard enough.

-

The truth loves nights the way that a child loves a beloved toy or a teenaged couple loves each other, jealous and possessive and true. There’s a certain comfort in darkness and sleeplessness that forces truth out of the unwilling and for a liar, night is the most dangerous time of day.

-

Light and L’s nights were hectic and genuine in a way that no other time of day was. They undress and shed their lies for a few hours before Light falls asleep and L goes back to working, his laptop the only source of light in the room.

That night, they were antagonistic and angry in a way that they sometimes tried not to be. Their monsters were out and it was always better to let them play than to try and rein them in. Their mouths pressed bruises into fragile skin and nails drew blood and their throats shamelessly created moans and their lungs were unable to draw in enough air and when it was over, Light pressed the words, “I love you” into L’s neck with his mouth before falling asleep.

-

Months later after the handcuffs fall off and a notebook is recovered, L and Light find themselves on the roof in the rain and Light’s blood is singing because he has won and L is oddly drawn and introspective and before the death and the detective drying him off with that white, white towel, but after L hears bells that aren’t there, Light hears the question, “Have you ever told the truth at any point since you were born?”

And he thinks about the day he couldn’t tell the truth and he thinks about the words whispered into a neck as white as sin during the night and he says, “What are you talking about Ryuzaki?”

He says, “It’s true I lie once in a while.”

He says, “I’ve been careful not to tell lies that hurt others.”

And L hunches his shoulders even more and makes a sound that almost sounds fond and defeated and says, “I thought you’d say that.”

L says, “Let’s go back.”

And in that moment, with the Light-that-was screaming in his head and Kira already laughing in victory, Light just agrees and follows the man that could have been his equal back inside and doesn’t allow himself to feel anything but triumphant when L finally collapses and dies and takes the few truths that Light still had with him.