22 Hours And A Couple Of Jet Lags Later…

Febuwhump Day 19: Death Wish (Captain America)

“So why did you decide to crash the plane into the ice? Wasn’t there another option?”

The breath froze in Steve’s lungs. He blinked at the interviewer, who was leaning over his desk with concerned eyebrows and a wicked glint in his eyes.

That question hadn’t been on the approved list.

They’d promised they would stick to the list. It was the only reason Steve had agreed to a live interview, his first since being thawed out, his first since coming into this new world where he was a piece of history, not a person.

And now they asked him this, on live TV.

Steve cleared his throat, clasped and unclasped his hands between his khaki-clad knees. “I’m not sure I understand the question,” he said quietly, hoping that would be enough to re-route the interviewer back to the list.

The interviewer didn’t take the hint. Instead, he unfolded a piece of paper, tapping it with one manicured finger. “Your decision to ground the plane has been studied by experts since the records were declassified,” he said, flashing perfect teeth in a predatory grin. “They estimate there were at least six other ways out of the situation without taking it down. So why was that the route you took? Was it a death wish?”

Steve’s throat closed. For a moment, he could only see the glaring white of the ice through the windshield, hear the static of the radio, the shriek of the wind…

He kept his jaw set, measuring each breath until his vision cleared and he could see the room again. The studio audience waited in breathless anticipation; the interviewer had arranged his face into an expression of polite concern. Somewhere behind him, Steve could hear the furiously whispered argument as SHIELD’s PR rep urged the television crew to go to a commercial break.

“Your experts are misinformed. There was no other option,” Steve said quietly, once he was sure he could keep his voice steady. Then he got to his feet, moving quickly enough that nobody expected the movement until he was shaking the surprised interviewer’s immaculately-manicured hand, squeezing hard enough that the bones creaked under his fingers. “Thank you for having me today,” he said loudly, speaking over the interviewer’s gasp of pain.

The exits were blocked—there was no easy way off the stage. That didn’t bother Steve. He locked eyes with the first kid in the audience he saw, and pulled a pen out of his pocket as he stepped over the camera cables and into the studio audience, leaving the stammering interviewer, cradling his hand, alone on the stage.

Within seconds he was safely surrounded by a delighted crowd seeking autographs. The audience door was a few yards away, and beyond that was freedom.

This interview was over.

But even as Steve smiled and worked his way towards the door, signing hats and hands and t-shirts as he went, the only thing he could hear was the whistle of the wind through the desolate cockpit, and the tremble in Peggy’s voice as she bravely talked him through those last few minutes.

No, there had been no death wish. In that final moment, Steve had wanted to live more than he ever had before.

It had made his choice all the harder.

And now, stranded in this new world, where people analyzed his decisions, dissected and pulled him apart like some grotesque thought experiment, he found himself more isolated even than he had been on that doomed plane.

Because then, at least, he’d had someone who cared.

————

Written for @febuwhump

Hamiathes's Gift Exchange 2025: Schedule Announcement!

The schedule is here, and well ahead of time this year! We're kicking off in about three months, and the schedule will be relatively close to last year's. This exchange is open to anyone with an AO3 account who wants to write a fic or make a piece of QT art. For more details on length, size, and logistics of the exchange, check out the FAQ linked at the bottom of this post.

2025 Schedule

Character/relationship/worldbuilding nominations: Thursday, July 17 - Thursday, July 24

Signups: Friday, July 25 - Sunday, August 3

Assignments sent out: Tuesday, August 5

Fanworks due: Friday, September 12

Fanworks revealed: Friday, September 18

Artists/authors revealed: Friday, September 26

All deadlines are at 8pm EDT

Note: If you don't have an AO3 account, you can request an invite here. There is currently a 3 week waiting list to get an invite, so please make sure you request one soon if you're considering participating!

If you have any questions about how the exchange works you can find last year's FAQ here. Check out past HGE works here! If you want a reminder when signups open, dm me!

Okay, today I used the phrase “we don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater” in a meeting, and my coworker (who is older than I) started laughing because he’d never heard it before.

Now I’m confused. I thought it was an admittedly old-fashioned but generally understood figure of speech. Am I wrong?

Feel free to reblog so this reaches people with different linguistic backgrounds from my own!

Sometimes, I can't believe Daisy x Sousa is a ship that exists and is canon. It's just SO beautiful, that we have a relationship that is explicitly just "I cherish her in all her fierceness, if she's committed to protecting everyone else, then I will help her and protect her at the same time. I will be her shield" and "I trust him to carry my passion with me, and for me when I'm too tired. I trust him to keep watch when I rest. I trust him enough to let him catch me when I fall."

And I just??? Sob???

Happy Good Friday ✝️

“And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.”-Genesis 3:15 KJV

Even as far back as the book of Genesis, God revealed His plan of salvation for mankind. That even though the devil (the serpent) would decieve and manipulate to bring sin into the world, and have Christ crucified (bruise His heal), it would all be in vain! Christ would arise the third day, defeating death and the devil! (bruise his head)

New ask game:

Reblog if you want your followers to tell you what your trademark ™️ is. Like, what’s that thing that really identifies you.

This reminds me of my creative writing professor's reaction. One of my friends brought a D&D book to class. This was at a Christian school where D&D was pretty popular, so he teased her about it being satanic and she teased him right back. Later while we were working on peer feedback, our professor asked if he could look at the book since he'd never really seen anything D&D related.

Several minutes later, he asked, "Why was everyone panicking about this? It's just imagination."

My friend told him yeah, it was just imagination and math rocks, and I think we actually changed his mind about it.

Found that over at mastodon

Edit: link to original post: https://mastodon.social/@senatormeow/100908678269940898

[Image ID: a Toot from User "Senator Meow":
 "when I first ran D&D, my grandmother, who had bought fully into the IT'S SATANISM hype, insisted on sitting and watching the first session. about an hour in, she threw her hands up and yelled 'THIS IS JUST MATH' and stormed off"/END ID]

I’ve been wanting for a while to do a comparison of Dante’s Divine Comedy with CS Lewis’ The Great Divorce, since the latter is very much modelled after the former (with George MacDonald in the place of Virgil) and they deal with very similar concepts.

My first inpression of the difference between them is that Dante develops a very specific and granular categorization and hierarchy on sins throughout the Inferno and Purgatorio, whereas to me all of the ones that Lewis showed were variations on a commonn theme of pride, the choice of one’s own opinions and preconceptions and self-image over heaven. In Lewis’ words, “There is always something they prefer to joy.” But as I think about it more closely, I think there are more specific correspondences between the two.

As Dorothy L. Sayers discusses in the introduction to her translation of the Commedia, there are two types of allegories: ones where all the characters are representations of specific concepts (such as in Spencer’s The Fairie Queen or Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress), or one where characters with their own names and identities can stand in for specific concepts: Virgil is Virgil, but he also represents Human Reason, Ciacco is an actual Florentine who existed, but he also represents gluttony, and so forth. This makes the characters more real and alive than the first type of allegories usually feel, and also allows the work to show nuances in its concepts by having multiple characters representing the same concept and so showing different nuances of it. Both the Commedia and The Last Divorce are the latter types, but they differ in how they design their characters: in the Commedia they are specific, named characters from Dante’s time, or from history, mythology, or the Bible. Lewis doesn’t do this (probably wisely; in an age of mass media, if he was sending MPs to Hell, any conversation about the books would be about that, and not about the book’s themes); instead he gives them epithets like the Big Ghost, and Hard-bitten Ghost, and Ghost in a Bowler; I will sometimes give them other names in this post. One of the thinfs this lets Lewis do is to deliberately subvert the prominence of famous religious and historical figures in the Comedy by having his celebrated and beloved ‘great saint’ in Heaven be not a figure from the Bible or later Christian history, but an ordinary woman named Sarah Smith with an ordinary life who was good, kind, and loving to everyone she met.

As an example of how Dante and Lewis work similarly and yet differently: the concept of Avarice. Dante shows it in both Hell and Purgatory, in different forms - people who ‘getting and spending, laid waste their powers’ (the Ciardi translation actually puts it similarly to that’. Lewis has no one who rejects Heaven based on desire for personal possessions; what he has instead is the character I’ll call the Economist, who says that the reason everyone in Hell spreads out (because they quarrel all the time) is because there are no commodities to drive them to live closer together, and tries futilely to bring back one of the - extraordinarily heavy, to him - apples of Heaven as such as commodity. (Is Lewis deliberately recalling the heavy rocks rolled by the Avaricious? Probably a stretch.) His problem is not a personal desire for riches, but the need to see the world in exclusively material terms and the only solution to problems as material ones.

Another example. Lewis, like Dante, has an example of heresy, and the connection between them came to me because of Sayers’ line in her commentary, quoting Charles Williams, that “the heretic accepted the Church, but preferred his own judgement to that of the church…an obduracy of mind, an intellectual obstinacy.” All of those traits are seen in one of Lewis’ ghosts, a self-identified Christian who denies the Resurrection and insists that one cannot know any spiritual truths for certain and that he wouldn’t want to, because it would prevent free inquiry and intellectual broadness. (In opposition to the heavenly spirit he is speaking to, who insists that the point of intellectual inquiry is to learn what is true.) This ghost has another particular trait that recurs in different forms a few times in The Great Divorce: he expresses the, on the surface laudable, sentiment that he’s not of any use in heaven whereas in hell he can help people. The recurrent sentiment - from him, from the Tragedian, from the Economist, from an artist (sort of), from a variety of planners and improvers who are mentioned in passing - is the need to be needed, and the two former of these are explicitly told that they are not needed, though they are certainly wanted and welcomed. The very gratuitousness of heaven leads some to reject it.

As a further example: the Sullen, in Dante, are one of the more problematic aspects of Hell, as their fate seems rather excessively harsh just for being grumpy (or melancholy, in you like). Lewis takes a bit of a different tack that sheds some light on it. There’s an elderly ghost in Heaven who we only see complaining to heavenly friend about how dreadful her life was. George MacDonald explains to Lewis that if she’s simply an old lady with a bad habit of grumbling, she’ll accept heaven and be well in the end; but if there’s nothing left of her but grumbling, there’s nothing to be done. The sullenness that Dante depicts is here shown as a person who is looking joy in the face, who is standing in the midst of joy, but is unable to see it in their focus in dwelling on past wrongs.

Curiously, Lewis - unlike Dante in the eighth and ninth circles - spends very little time on those who are deeply evil, beyond saying “Those that hate goodness are sometimes nearer it than those that know nothing at all about it and think they have it already.” Rather than Malice, the characteristic of the lowest levels of Dante’s hell, Lewis focuses on a range of forms of distorted love that, I think, we do not see equivalents to in the Commedia. The Commedia’s characterization of the roots of evil in forms of distorted or ill-governed love (or desire) is very helpful to this concept. Virgil (via Aristotle?) characterizes it in three classes: love of thy neighbour’s ill (Pride, Envy, and Wrath: desire to put someone down for your own aggradizement, resentment of someone’s rise because it dininishes you in comparison, and immoderate anger in response to wrongs), insufficient love (Sloth - which in Lewis would likely be represented by those who don’t get on the bus at all) and excessive love of earthly things (Avarice, Gluttony, and Lust).

Lewis takes his critique well beyond that to various forms of non-sexual love for people that are nonetheless harmful to them or others. (This gets into his idea, expressed in Till We Have Faces, that in the absence of grace all human loves are ultimately selfish.) There’s a woman, who in a determination to “improve” her husband socioeconomically and culturally, drove away all his friends and pushed him into a career that made him miserable until he ultimately died of sheer unhappiness, and on her visit to Heaven can speak of nothing but all the thankless work she did on his behalf, and futilely demand to be allowed to ‘manage’ him again. There’s a woman who loved her son so all-consumingly that she neglected everyone else in her life, and made them miserable after his death by reorienting her life and theirs entirely around mourning him.

B2MEM - "Hope"

@spring-into-arda (301 words; a continuation of my earlier AU where Finarfin arrives in Beleriand to find nothing but ruins)

There was someone outside the camp.

Finarfin should mention this to someone, probably, but he couldn’t prove it; there was no movement in the endless fields of high, stinging grass, no rustle in the dead limbs of the trees. No noise. No perceptible hint.

But there was an itch at the back of his mind that insisted someone was here.

Madness, probably. A manifestation of desperate hope after weeks of marching through Beleriand and finding nothing, nothing, nothing. Failing that, surely it was the Enemy, at last showing himself.

Surely.

But the itch at the back of his mind felt . . . not like the hunts he had never particularly enjoyed, but that he had gone on for his children’s sakes. It felt like the games they had played when they were small, and he would walk into his office and know they were there even before he had spotted a tiny foot peeking out from behind his desk.

The madness of hope.

Even if Artanis was still alive, was still free, surely she would approach the hosts her father was leading openly, not creep around the edges of his camp like a thief.

He shot one last look at the dead emptiness of the woods before nodding to the guards and letting himself back into the command tent. 

The flap fell behind him. The itch intensified.

He turned.

A gaunt figure was sitting at his desk. There was barely an ounce of flesh left on the figure waiting, in dead stillness, in the chair; just bruised and bloodied skin stretched across knife sharp bone. 

The only hint of life was in the eyes: dark and haunted with more horror than Arafinwe could even now imagine, but still burning with a hint of dread fire.

“Hello, uncle,” rasped Makalaure. “I’ve come to bargain.”