Easier and harder than you'd expect!

A number of years back, I had written a guide of sorts for a clean Fedora Silverblue install on the then-current generation Dell XPS 13. I covered the basic installation steps I took, packages I stripped and/or layered, Flatpak repositories, and some fixes for driver issues. Now, I’m doing the same for the current generation XPS 13, and it seems not much has changed! Installation is easier than it’s ever been and honestly not the important part. That being said, let’s dig in…

Installation

Prerequisites

There’s a few important steps we want to do before popping in that USB stick and proceeding with the installation. The first, clearing the internal SSD and configuring the appropriate Secure Boot settings. By default, the XPS 13 ships Windows 11 and only accepts Windows’ Secure Boot keys. I use the secure erase function via the system UEFI menu. This ensures that there’s no data on the internal SSD, though this isn’t strictly necessary, it makes it easy not to worry about potential errors when the installer tries to read partitions on the drive. As for the Secure Boot settings, enable “custom settings” and enable “Microsoft UEFI CA”. This will allow the system to recognize the keys that Fedora will provide/use. I spent a looong time troubleshooting this, and some distributions will just not work at all, but Fedora seems to have things dialed in properly! The actual Installation

Plug that USB drive into the system and power it on. It should boot into the right device as there’s no longer an operating system on the internal SSD. Alternatively, you can always smack the F12 button to get to the boot device menu! Select “Install Fedora 45” at the top, and hit Enter. After a few moments, the system should eventually boot into the new web-based installer. It’s nice, clean, and fairly self-explanatory. Most of it is just a matter of hitting next/continue until it’s done. The only settings I really advice paying attention to are the disk encryption option (ENCRYPT YOUR INSTALL, THERE IS ZERO REASON YOU SHOULD BE SKIPPING THIS!) and setting the system hostname, which by default just tries to guess based on what your network assigns to it. Continue until the last step, wait until the system finishes installation, and hit that beautiful blue “Reboot” button!

The actually interesting and opinionated part!

Creating an account and installing updates

The first thing you should be greeted with is a popup window that allows you to choose some basic system settings including creating a user account and setting a password. This is all fairly straightforward and I can’t really tell you what your username should be, but I’m partial to ‘schykle’ for pretty obvious reasons!

From there, you’ll be tossed into your actual GNOME session! Skip the tour because you’re clearly too cool for that, and open up GNOME Software. Ignore the popup to install additional third-party repositories and head straight for that Updates tab.

By now, the system should already be processing an update in the background. In this instance, you really do just have to wait a bit. You should eventually see two categories for updates. One is going to be a Secure Boot database update, and the other is going to be updates for your operating system and its components. Do both! Then use the restart and install/restart and update option to reboot your system.

Yoinking out Fedora Flatpaks and Firefox

There’s a lot of heavy opinions about Fedora including and defaulting to their own Flatpak builds with Silverblue. We can skip the details there because my opinions have already been documented! Pop open a terminal and let’s clean it up. Here’s what I typically do to resolve this and remove the existing filtered Flathub repo:

rpm-ostree override remove firefox firefox-langpacks fedora-flathub-remote && flatpak uninstall org.fedoraproject.MediaWriter org.gnome.Calculator org.gnome.Calendar org.gnome.Characters org.gnome.Connections org.gnome.Contacts org.gnome.Decibels org.gnome.Extensions org.gnome.Logs org.gnome.Loupe org.gnome.Maps org.gnome.Papers org.gnome.Snapshot org.gnome.TextEditor org.gnome.Weather org.gnome.baobab org.gnome.clocks org.gnome.font-viewer && flatpak remote-delete flathub

From there, restart your system!

In the past, I used to just remove the Fedora Flatpak repository entirely, but there are some provided libraries and resources that are worth keeping it for, even if we’re going to install all of our actual apps using Flathub.

Other extraneous packages I remove...

If you’d like, there’s a few other things I remove as someone who does not use GNOME extensions or the classic session. I also remove the Fedora Bookmarks package, among a couple of other things. Similar to the initial section of the previous command block, these would be removed with rpm-ostree override remove.

Packages I remove:

fedora-bookmarks fedora-chromium-config fedora-chromium-config-gnome gnome-shell-extension-apps-menu gnome-classic-session gnome-shell-extension-window-list gnome-shell-extension-common gnome-shell-extension-places-menu gnome-shell-extension-launch-new-instance gnome-shell-extension-background-logo gnome-system-monitor gnome-tour yelp

My reasoning for removing the GNOME System Monitor and Yelp are that I prefer the Resources Flatpak instead of GNOME System Monitor, and I never really use the Yelp/Help application.

Re-adding the real Flathub

Pop open a terminal and run this command to re-add the Flathub repository:

flatpak remote-add flathub https://flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo

From there, Flathub should now be available in GNOME Software, and when you search for apps to install, whether it be Firefox, Calculator, etc., you’ll have the option between the Fedora Linux Flatpak repository or the Flathub repository. It is almost always beneficial to just use the Flathub repository.

Should you decide you actually don’t care for the Fedora repo at all and want to remove it so Software always uses Flathub, run this command:

flatpak remote-delete fedora

This will remove the Fedora Flatpak repository and any of the packages installed from it.

Uh-oh! My system keeps hanging!

Driver issues with Intel Xe graphics? I’ve got you.

One of the fixes I’ve had to apply to my system is disabling a couple of power saving features for the display. Namely, self refresh and panel powersaving state. To do this, you need to enable a couple of boot arguments using our old friend, rpm-ostree! Pop open a terminal and enter the following:

rpm-ostree kargs --append="xe.enable_dc=0" --append="xe.enable_psr=0"

From there, reboot your system and enjoy stability!

Some tweaks I recommend!

Shutdown on lid close

One of my favorite tweaks is setting my laptop to shut down when I close the lid. I do this for two main reasons. The first is just the peace of mind that when I close my laptop, it’s in a state where it’s most secure: powered off and encrypted. The second is that I’m far less likely to have closed it and forgotten it in sleep mode for extended periods of time. There’s very few instances where what I’m doing can’t be easily picked back up by opening closed tabs, or just whatever apps I typically use anyway. Here’s how to do it!

Edit or create the file /etc/systemd/logind.conf using nano (because it’s the best), and ensure the following contents are present:

[Login]
HandleLidSwitch=poweroff
HandleLidSwitchDocked=ignore
HandleLidSwitchExternalPower=poweroff
LidSwitchIgnoreInhibited=no

Save the file and restart. These settings mean that if the lid is closed when on battery or plugged in, it will shut down. However, when docked, it will not, in case you’re plugged into external displays and accessories where you’d likely not want it to be open while using it! It also includes a line that tells it not to ignore processes that typically stop shutdown (like background updates).

You might be wondering… “But, what if I ever want to put it to sleep?” Fear not… You can still put the laptop to sleep by typing “Sleep” or “Suspend” into GNOME search, or by pressing the power button (just make sure you set that to trigger suspend in GNOME Settings!). You can safely close the lid when the device is asleep and it will remain in sleep state and resume when opened. Poweroff will only be triggered if the device is awake.

Recommended apps

I have some recommendations on apps that you should probably have and are available from Flathub! 1) Resources — A modern system monitor 2) Pika Backup — A backup application using Borg on the backend 3) Apostrophe — A simple yet powerful markdown editor 4) GNOME Weather — Integrates into the notifications center for forecasts 5) GNOME Clocks — If you’re someone who manages things across time zones, setting world clocks lets you see them in the notifications center at any given time

Aside from these, some of the best apps for Linux and GNOME in particular are on the Apps for GNOME website!

The conclusion you’ve all been waiting for!

Look, I’m not going to tell you that there’s only one way to set things up, I’m just going to tell you the best way. (Just kidding… unless…) These are just the steps I’ve taken to have a really clean and suitable install for my needs. Getting Secure Boot working properly was actually the biggest hurdle for me. This laptop does not seem to play nicely with third-party certificates, and thankfully Fedora seems to have been blessed because it works the way it should! Getting just about everything installed as a Flatpak is honestly the way to go. Rely on Toolbox, the built in container system, for software that you need to run that isn’t installed on the core operating system, and limit the number of packages you layer on the core operating system as much as possible. For all things good and true, do not layer Steam, use the dang Flatpak!

Enjoy!

I’m pleased to see the UK holding some of its sexual predator celebrities accountable. They’re definitely ahead of the US, where we only hold sexual predator celebrities accountable if they’re Black. (Or more accurately, only the Black ones face legal proceedings. Okay, Harvey Weinstein. Name another.)

But Russell Brand’s imprisonment and David Walliams’ exposure (definitely the most exposure he’s ever had here in the USA, where if they ain’t on Taskmaster, Derry Girls, or Great British Bakeoff, we don’t know ‘em) has me thinking about all the people who enabled them.

Brand has faced legal consequences and Walliams has faced career consequences, but what about all the many, many people who knew and never did anything about it. Now I’ve seen the Katherine Ryan video, and I understand that you can’t just go denouncing people with a ton of money lest they sue you for defamation. BUT. You don’t have to work with them. You don’t have to hire them. And you don’t have to hang out with them.

Which brings me to Matt Lucas, David Walliams’ longtime comedy partner and Great British Bakeoff co-host and Taskmaster Contestant. (See, this is why I know who he is!). I’ve seen the comedy awards video too, where a guy who’s never been on Taskmaster makes a joke about “these awards are 15 years old and drunk! They’re going home with David Walliams!” Ha! Oh, is there a richer comedy vein to mine than the sexual abuse of children?

Anyway, Matt Lucas is right next to David Walliams in that clip. He knew. Why did he continue to work with him? Has anyone asked? Do we still want to watch him on Bakeoff (disclaimer: I do not enjoy that show, but it’s on in my house a lot) being the kind, cuddly host knowing he looked the other way while his friend was being a sexual predator?

Kenneth Branagh put Russell Brand in a movie in 2022. Granted nobody saw it, possibly because it also featured alleged cannibal and sexual predator Armie Hammer, but everybody knew what Russell Brand was about by 2022. And Kenneth Branagh chose to employ him. Now, you can look at someone down the cast list—say James Schofield, who played “German Soldier #1” and go, “well, that guy really can’t control who he’s in a movie with,” but Kenneth Branagh sure as shit can. Ridley Scott produced that movie. Do you think he doesn’t have the juice to blackball a rapist? Of course he does. He just didn’t care.

We need to start asking people who associate with predators the hard questions about what they knew and when they knew it. And, furthermore, we need to stop giving them a pass for looking the other way at bad behavior. I was doing some research about celebrity bad behavior and came across this disturbing account of a child actor being at the home of Justin Long and Jonathan Togo and being assaulted by Jonah Hill. (And said child star also says her friend was raped by Togo). Now, Justin Long hasn’t been accused of anything except for giving alcohol to underage girls. Which, BTW, is a crime, but more importantly, he knew what was going on. He knew the kind of danger those girls were in. The child actor also says that some other celebrities at the party took her aside and warned her to be careful, and I’m sorry, but that’s not nearly good enough. If you are a grown adult and see a drunk 16-year-old at your party, you put them in a cab. You tell them they need to leave, and if they refuse, go to the host and tell him to make them leave. And start taking pictures and videos. “Oh, but then you might not get to hang out with Justin Long anymore!” Wow, yeah, that’s a terrible consequence. I can see why you wouldn’t want to risk that.

For the record, Long says he didn’t know about all the creepy sex stuff, which strains credulity, but he did know he had drunk underage girls at his party, and he had a responsibility as a human being to take care of people more vulnerable than him.

And so, for that matter, do we all. I could go on listing celebrities who have enabled other bad celebrities (Okay, okay, one more: Judd Apatow worked with James Franco, Jonah Hill, AND Russell Brand. He’s either dangerously oblivious or else a piece of shit.) (And people KNEW Neil Gaiman was creepy. For YEARS), but sadly this shit is not limited to celebrities.

If you know more than four men, you probably know one who has sexually assaulted someone. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but those one in four women aren’t sexually assaulting themselves.

Aside: something that gets lost in the conversation about men protecting other men who are predators is that the kind of men who like to exercise non-consensual power over women’s bodies as adults were very likely the kind of boys who liked to exercise non-consensual power over other boys’ bodies by beating them up. Boy culture is shockingly violent, and boys learn at a young age that calling bad boys out gets you beaten. The same rules may or may not apply to adults, but that aversion response is coded very deep for people who grew up as boys. We need to find the courage to overcome it, to say, “well, I’d rather get punched in the face than have that woman get raped,” but it’s not easy to silence the reptile brain telling you to flee.

Anyway, we all of us need to be more discerning about the company we keep. I’ve written about this before, but let us remember that there is no legal standard for declaring someone a piece of shit that you don’t want to hang out with. Women are better at this than men. So, like, if you identify as a man, imagine this scenario: a man and woman you know just got divorced, and she’s made it clear that he was abusive. But he was your friend first. He calls you up—do you wanna hang out?

I think I know what most men would do in that situation. I know from experience that it’s not easy to cut off a friend who behaves in a problematic way. But if you don’t, then you’re enabling the bad behavior. Forget legal proceedings for a minute—people need to see creepy men facing social consequences in their own lives. Will this stop men being creepy? Probably not, but it will, hopefully, convince men who have creepy impulses that being creepy is not worth the risk. Clearly none of the above celebrity predators ever thought, “I better not do this, or I could lose everything.” But they should. And administering the social consequences is up to us.

I’m a big fan of Linux-based operating systems and I have been since I first started using Linux on the desktop back in 2015 with Xubuntu. Over the years, I’ve bounced back and forth between various distributions, spending the largest amounts of time with Solus, elementary OS, Fedora, openSUSE, and Ubuntu. In recent years, convenience and lifestyle changes have put a halt on my interests in Linux and open source as a whole. Until now.

About that purple rat… I actually think it may be a raccoon of some sort? Either way, I quite like it! I’ve started using Linux again after spending a short amount of time trying to find a suitable Windows laptop I would be capable of running Overwatch on since it doesn’t run on mac OS due to software compatibility limitations. And as usual, I’ve rediscovered the massively disappointing first-start experience of any Windows machine. Over an hour of setup and reboots just to apply a list of updates that continued to grow instead of shrink with each boot. Uninstalling a plethora of apps and services Microsoft and the OEM (in this case, Dell and HP as I tried a couple of laptops) decided would be in my best interest to have.

I’ve come to the conclusion that my desire to play a single game is far lower than my desire to use an operating system that doesn’t feel like it actually hates me. I quickly shifted my focus from debloating and reinstalling clean versions of Windows, to installing an operating system I have very fond memories of: Ubuntu. Knowing that I wouldn’t be pleased with using a gaming laptop for normal tasks, I ditched the clunky Alienware laptop I had purchased and went down a rabbit hole of attempting to use multiple laptops from multiple OEMs. Not everything went as smoothly as I had hoped, but to some extent, much of this was my fault. Here’s a short and sweet recap that omits a few attempts…

Firstly, the laptop I genuinely wanted the most; a Dell XPS 13 (model DX13260). I was thrilled to have found a really thin and light laptop that was well-built and had a modern Intel processor. I assumed that I would have the smoothest experience with it and Linux, particularly when it comes to features like Secure Boot and TPM-backed encryption. I was wrong. After multiple attempts to get this working by disabling, re-enabling, clearing, restoring the relevant settings in the UEFI, this feature was consistently unavailable for enablement in the Ubuntu installer. I really wanted this feature to be available and functional, so despite loving the hardware, I ditched the XPS and moved on to an HP laptop.

I applied the same logic with this attempt, opting for a high-end HP laptop (model D3KN6U) that was relatively standard and featured an Intel processor. In the past, I’ve had the most seamless experiences with Intel processors running Linux. Again, swing and a miss! This time, I just could not get it to boot consistently with any Secure Boot features enabled. But what if maybe this model was fine, I just needed to try another processor? So that’s exactly what I did!

Here I go, fresh USB stick, fresh download of the latest Ubuntu release and some hopes that AMD may just be my savior here! I power on my wonderful new HP laptop (model D3KU2UA) and go through the UEFI to configure the proper settings. Clearing, restoring, disabling, enabling all of the relevant keys and settings multiple times to no avail. Nothing worked the way it should! At this point, I was genuinely becoming quite frustrated because I remember this being so much easier when I daily drove Linux in the past. Incidentally, I experienced a quirk where I could boot Ubuntu 26.04.1 just fine, but without Secure Boot ever working or being visible to the OS. and 26.10 wouldn’t boot at all… until I unplugged the laptop? At that point, 26.10 would boot but alas, no Secure Boot.

By then, a new week rolled around and a new set of retail sales were live at my local Best Buy. I figured since I was already this far down the rabbit hole, I may as well try one more! Off I go to make the swap and I brought home a Dell laptop (model DS14265) that I had been eyeing anyway. I wasn’t expecting anything to work at this point, so I just popped in my Ubuntu 26.04.1 install media, went through the UEFI to tweak the appropriate settings as I usually do, and restarted the machine.

Great success! Bingo! Voilà! Presto! (insert any other number of phrases that you see fit…) It worked. Secure Boot was visible to the system. Not only that, the Ubuntu installer also allowed me to select TPM-backed encryption during my installation and gave me absolutely zero trouble! It just worked as it should. No fuss, no muss. Which concludes the “short and sweet” recap of devices I tried (and failed) to use and begins my praise of a wonderful little raccoon I may only be able to describe as “resolute”!

I cannot express enthusiastically enough just how refreshing the Ubuntu first-run experience is, especially after coming from a Windows device. Logging into my system for the first time, I was greeted with a “welcome” application that served me a few important options like whether or not to enable location services, device telemetry, and the option to enroll in Ubuntu Pro (a service that is free for personal use and includes some pretty awesome features). Aside from that, just a quick mention of where to get apps and that’s it! I wasn’t forced to sign in or create an account, nor was I required to have internet access at any point during setup. As with any system, one of the first things you should do is update it. On Windows, this is a process that could take up to an hour to complete. On Ubuntu, it was as simple as opening the software updater and hitting install. The process took less than two minutes and a single reboot. That’s all.

The next thing I did was get my apps installed. What good is a computer without the software you want to use? There was a period of time in the past where Snaps could be a point of friction in regards to the speed of app opening, or fairly common functions breaking due to confinement. Now? I opened up the App Center and installed a bunch of apps I needed like Signal, Discord, Tailscale, Telegram, etc. All of them installed without a hitch and opened exactly the way you’d expect. No awkward pause as an app icon bounces after you click on it… Firefox opened instantly and may I just say is far smoother and more beautiful than it has ever been for me in the past (great work, Firefox folks!). Aside from a few quirks like Taildrop only allowing me to send or push files from within the ~/snap/tailscale/ directory, every one of my apps has been working remarkably.

It has been a remarkable experience to open up my laptop and have it work exactly like it’s supposed to. I haven’t been spammed with advertisements about gaming subscriptions, cloud storage offers, office suite subscriptions, or had “sponsored” apps and games show up in my launcher. The only downside I’ve really experienced is that I have not been able to get my audio output to work at all. I currently have a “Dummy Output”, which I believe is just a placeholder when there isn’t an audio device available. Something I’ll try to work on at some point, but will manage without since I rely on my AirPods for listening anyway. Another thing which as worked wonderfully, by the way. Bluetooth connection and playback via my AirPods has been flawless including volume and playback controls. Even performance controls have worked wonderfully and my battery life has been wonderful. Brightness, keyboard backlight, resolution and scaling are all working perfectly.

These may seem like fairly simple things to get excited about, but mind you, the Linux experience is often claimed to be terminal-first hackery and yet I’ve not had to touch it once. That’s not to say I don’t have some critiques… My desire to use TPM-backed encryption is an oddly specific one, but one that should work reliably for people as it is effectively the new standard for how people use their machines. It’s a far more elegant solution than typing in two passwords with every login and certainly more desirable for the everyday user. There’s clearly work to be done on making sure that gets better moving forward. In the meantime, standard installations pretty much work in most situations. Unencrypted and LUKS encrypted installs worked just fine for me (I had done this on multiple machines just to see if I could at least get that going, even if Secure Boot failed) and would still provide the same, clean experience that puts Windows to shame.

This is the first time I can ever remember choosing to use an LTS version of Ubuntu when a new standard release is available as I typically chase the newest of the new. Now I don’t even feel like I need to. Things have been fast, reliable, and so gosh darn easy. I think if I was in the mood for deep and involved tinkering, I totally would think about getting on the interim release, but that’s for future me to deal with! There’s a reason I’ve chosen to type this all up on my laptop rather than hopping on my Mac to do it. The fact that unlike every piece of commercial software in deployment right now, this operating system is made by a talented group of thousands of contributors from around the world, many of which are unpaid volunteers, and yet they choose to contribute code and testing time to making it all work together. I love my Mac, but I certainly wouldn’t say it excites me in quite the same way, and Windows is in such a state of disrepair that it isn’t even worth considering.

Installing Ubuntu on this laptop has been a real treat. No doubt I’d do it all again if I was starting fresh!

I want to give a massive shoutout to the folks I’ve met and made friends with over the years of me dipping my toes into the Linux world as they’ve been a source of assistance, inspiration, and camaraderie. In every community there is disagreement, but the passion in the open source community has ultimately also been its strength and the glue that has held it together across the globe. Thank you!

A door full of sand, a forbidden book, and onion rings.

We go to a meeting in Russia. No car. No money. Grey and dusty. Is this Chernobyl?

I manage to get a car I found running. I have to hide it (and us) in an old concrete plant.

The first place I find, we access by taking an elevator. Sarah Tvedt is there, bitchily snooping. She doesn't want us to have a car. She wants us to suffer like she does.

Bitch.

I hide it deeper, under this iris thing. It's cool, like the Batcave. Rusty and industrial.

Now that I have a car, I go out adventuring.

I find a bookstore or library. The sign is garbled, like it was designed by the same AI that made spaghetti-eating Will Smith.

It's an upstairs-downstairs situation. Upstairs, you sit, eat, and read your books. I notice everyone has big, glorious stacks of books, but I only have my one.

I ask another patron, and she tells me there is another level, but it's only for Chinese.

“Not for you,” she says, eating pizza and gesturing at her eyes.

I go down the stairs.

It's yellow and wood, with shag carpet, like the '70s.

The clerks downstairs are helping another customer, and I approach the door in the small room as if I belong there.

When I turn the handle, it's firm and refuses to turn. I try to turn it with my mind, visualizing the parts inside the lock, but all I can see are rocks and sand.

The clerk gets my attention and tells me the door is for employees only.

I ask for a different color book, and she says I cannot read it.

And I tell her how hungry I am.

“You want onion rings?” she asks.

I answer in the affirmative.

Then a little man comes out and gives me the biggest plate of onion rings I've ever seen.

They are glistening and warm, fresh out of the fryer.

As I carry them up the stairs, I'm back in the garage of the concrete plant where the car is stored.

Then I wake up to the sun making the room glow a golden yellow.

---

#dream

I've noticed a troubling trend lately. RSS feeds seem to be disappearing from a lot of business, news, and even personal websites, and the trend seems to be accelerating. Now Reddit is pulling its RSS feeds. This isn't a new trend. Twitter (now X, and I hate that name) discontinued its official RSS feeds back in 2013. Years later, services like Nitter and XCancel came along, offering alternative ways to follow Twitter/X content. These were great services, but they have since been discontinued following legal threats from Elon Musk's X.

Earlier in 2026 I was noticing RSS was making a comeback. I was reading about Dave Winer, one of the inventors of RSS, doing things with it (namely his rss.chat). I use RSS to read the sites I want to follow without having a lot of browser tabs. When I find a site that interests me, I subscribe so I have an easy way to follow all the sites I want in one place. I will visit sites again via the RSS feed if the full post is not there. RSS seemed to be enjoying a resurgence, only to suddenly appear to be going out of vogue again, especially business-related ones.

For some business examples, there is Samsung Community, where the RSS feeds I used to follow are no longer available after its recent platform upgrade. I used them to keep up with trends and other information that might affect my phones and laptops. Another one was Food.com. Its RSS feed stopped working in the same month, October 2026.

A few personal bloggers I follow have stopped offering RSS feeds. I'm not going to mention them because I don't know whether it was their choice or the result of a platform or hosting change that no longer supports RSS or has it turned off by default and it isn't my place to question how they run their sites. I did ask one person I follow about it, and they hadn't really thought about it. They ended up adding a native RSS feed. You can use OpenRSS.org to follow sites that don't offer RSS, but OpenRSS has limited resources.

And apparently, I'm not imagining the broader problem. A recent study by RSSLY found that only 24% of the websites it examined had a discoverable, working RSS feed. It also found that 57% of the websites in its historical comparison that advertised feeds in 2016 no longer advertised them in 2026.^[1] Another study by Mark Nottingham identified more than half a million RSS and Atom feeds, but found that only 38.1% had evidence of being updated within the preceding year.^[2]

I just wish more websites would remember that RSS is a simple way for people who actually want to follow them to keep coming back. Hopefully, this isn't really a trend, and it's just me coming across sites whose owners, for one reason or another, didn't realize their RSS feeds were gone. And for businesses, please stop. You generate more goodwill by keeping RSS feeds than by removing them and becoming totally closed off, and it can't be costing you that much in business or resources to provide a feed.

Footnotes

1. Vlad Fedoniuk, "The State of RSS in 2026: We Checked the 10,000 Most Popular Websites," RSSLY, November 4, 2026. Researchers attempted to examine 10,000 popular domains and successfully analyzed 6,459 websites. They found that 24% had discoverable, working RSS feeds. Their historical comparison also found that 57% of websites advertising RSS feeds in 2016 no longer advertised them in 2026, although some feeds may still function without being publicly advertised. Source

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2. Mark Nottingham, "Web Feeds in 2026: A Survey," May 10, 2026. Using Common Crawl data, Nottingham identified 534,195 parseable RSS and Atom feeds. Only 38.1% showed evidence of freshness within the preceding year, although some feeds may lack reliable date information. Source

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#opinion #rss #technology

A Year Without You

In Loving Memory of My Brother, Aaron

---

A year ago today, you left this world.

And somehow, the world kept turning.

The sun continued to rise. Seasons changed. People went to work, children kept on playing, and life carried on with the quiet indifference of time.

But somewhere in that continuing world, there was an empty place where you had once been.

And nothing can ever fill it.

I've been thinking about what it means to lose someone.

Not simply the moment of their passing, or the sorrow that follows, but the strange realization that life continues to unfold without them.

There have been changes in my life this past year, Aaron.

Doors have closed. Others have opened.

I've walked away from things I once thought would always be part of my life. I've found new beginnings in places I never expected.

I've experienced moments of sadness, moments of uncertainty, moments of joy, and moments when I wished I could share what was happening in my life with you.

And through it all, you've remained my brother.

Death didn't change that.

It changed what was possible between us.

There will be no new conversations. No unexpected phone calls. No opportunity to make another memory together.

But there is still a lifetime of memories that death cannot reach.

And there is still love.

I've come to understand something about grief.

It isn't always loud.

Sometimes it is simply the quiet recognition that someone is missing from a world that continues to move forward.

Sometimes it's remembering a face.

A voice.

A moment that seemed ordinary when it happened, but became precious because there would never be another quite like it.

And sometimes grief is simply speaking a name.

Aaron.

A name that belongs to a life.

A life that mattered.

A life that cannot be reduced to the day it ended.

I don't know what I would say if I could sit with you one more time.

Perhaps that I bought a house and when I picked up the phone to tell you, it broke my heart that I couldn't make that call.

Perhaps we'd simply talk about ordinary things, the way brothers do, without realizing how extraordinary those moments really are.

But I know this much.

I'm grateful you were here.

I'm grateful that somewhere in the story of my life, our paths were joined not by chance, but by blood, by history, and by the simple truth that you were my brother.

And although this past year has taught me that life does not wait for grief to finish its work, it has also taught me that moving forward does not mean leaving everyone behind.

Some people travel with us in ways the world cannot see.

In our memories.

In the stories we tell.

In the love that remains after goodbye.

So today, I won't measure your life by the year you've been gone.

I'll remember the years you were here.

The person you were.

The place you held.

And the brother you will always be.

Rest peacefully, Aaron.

One year has passed.

You are remembered.

You are deeply loved.

And there will always be space for you in my home.

With love,

Your brother.

#ArchitectureOfGrief

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© SilentSentinel, 2025. All rights reserved. Excerpts may be shared with attribution.

I celebrated Diwali for the first time today. It feels weird because it doesn’t feel like my culture, but at the same time I understand that it’s not like I’m white. I’m at this weird middle ground of a race, but I always think about how I do have my culture of growing up online that I go with and I do value.

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photo “Herbst auf Asphalt” by @brigeh@pixelfed.de, licensed under CC BY

Money is leveraged into power, and power is stored as money. Remember this. It is the autopoietic cycle of domination within capitalism.

If we want to break the fascist machine, we need to choke the engine of power by draining the fuel. In their scramble to consolidate power, the fascists have left a lot of victims. They have broken families, injured people, and murdered them, directly and through stochastic terrorism. Their terror has been helped along the way by those who are enthusiastic about the cause of injustice, and by those who have more greed than morals.

While I don't believe that punitive “justice” works to prevent most humans from doing bad things, since humans aren't really rational actors, there absolutely is a group for which the fear of retribution does work. Companies do make cold financial calculations when they decide to carry out evil or not. The ultra-rich tend to be rich because they use those same calculations.

This is why a key part of de-Nazification in Germany (which, as we can see, should have been far more aggressive) involved fines. Companies and rich people make decisions based on risk calculations. Certain people looked at Trumpism, and they saw an opportunity to make money, others bent the knee because they thought that the risk of not doing so was greater than the reward of resisting. If we don't want this to happen again in our life times, we have to make the consequences of collaboration with fascists so dire that no one ever considers doing it again.

I'm not going to pretend it wouldn't be gratifying to see Trump, Musk, and the whole group up against the wall or hanging upside-down. Sure, it might actually put the fear back in the fascists. But, from a strategic perspective, there's something far better. When you kill a fascist, you remove one fascist. In the long run, they are replaceable. You haven't taught them to stop. You've taught them to be more careful. If you actually want to destroy fascism, as an ideology, you have to interrupt Its cycle of reproduction. You have to interrupt that autopoietic cycle of money to power and power to money. You do that by taking the fucking money.

Fascists, like Trump, Musk, and Thiel are relying on the American capitalist ratchet. That is, it only turns one way. Once you turn power into money, the money is safe. It's the way Neoliberalism works too. Once you privative something, the 5th amendment keeps it from being returned to the people. When fascists loot the coffers, they protect their loot with that clause of the 5th amendment:

nor shall any person […] be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

But this looting, from Trump and others, has been carried out largely by hurting people. Those people should be compensated. Congress has the power to create a reparations fund for victims, and to use it's power to fill that fund by seizing the assets of the perpetrators. Not only does this remove power from fascists and change the calculus for future collaborators, it directly shits power (in the form of money) to those most directly harmed by Trumpism.

Many of the Trump deportations were illegal under international laws and treaties that are also codified in US law. Deportation in spite of a withholding of removal order is illegal. Everyone involved in that crime can be held financially accountable (meaning that shit isn't protected by the 5th, motherfuckers). This includes everyone from the President, with all his billions in crypto bribes, down to every penny paid to CBP and ICE agents who hunted people down. Every massive signing bonus taken by every ICE agent belongs in the pockets of the families of the survivors of their victims.

A lot of ICE agents are Nazis. I don't mean this as a derogatory term; I mean it as a technical description. Patriot Front is a Nazi organization that can be traced back to Vanguard America through various re-brandings. Why did they re-brand? Because the Nazi who murdered Heather Heyer was a member of Vanguard America. Patriot Front had this tactic that might be familiar. See, they'd load into a moving van so they could get somewhere without being noticed, and load out for a sunrise march. Oh, that's an ICE tactic? Yeah, after the big ICE recruitment push Patriot Front stopped doing that and ICE started. Weird coincidence, isn't it?

ICE recruiting Nazis isn't just about ethnic cleansing. It was about power. It was about transferring public money into the pockets of small-time fascists. Those fascists can then turn that money back into power. There it is, the autopoietic cycle again. Fascists helping fascists, the circle of life.

Congress has the power to break that cycle. There needs to be an immediate investigation into deportation, freezing as many as possible, getting as many people back as possible, and compensating the families of those who have been tortured and killed during these illegal deportations. American citizens have been deported. People with withholding of removal orders have been deported. People have been murdered by ICE agents. This all needs to be investigated. ICE, as an agency, needs to be abolished and every single person employed by ICE should be forced to repay their last two years of compensation.

But this machine was also supported by tech. Just like IBM was forced to pay for their collaboration with the Nazis, so should the tech companies that materially supported ethnic cleansing in the US under both Trump administrations. But the IBM fines obviously failed. They failed because they were too small. A company can simply calculate the potential losses versus gains and, like IBM, decide that the risk is worth the reward. They lost that gamble, but it didn't ultimately hurt them. No, we must make a real example today. We must make sure no company ever makes that calculation again. We must liquidate all companies that were complicit in America's ethnic cleansing. Size the stock, nationalize them, strip them and sell them for parts. Make the investors scream until they vote responsibly. (And when it comes time, we do the same for those complicit in the genocide in Gaza, to pay the survivors and the displaced.) I'm talking about Palantir. No fines, simply the corporate death penalty. Expose all internal documents, open source any software worth saving, sell off all the hardware, and fine their infrastructure vendors every penny they've made by working with such a company.

And let's go back to that stochastic terror. I was shot by a fascist who was radicalized by far right media. I'm not alone. I've met dozens of people, and know of dozens more, shot, stabbed, and run over by unstable people who consumed fascist media. Sure, Tucker Carlson should flee to Russia while all the assets he can't physically carry are seized and sold to pay survivors of right wing terror. But, like so many other terrorists, my shooter was radicalized on Facebook. Facebook has been complicit in genocide in multiple countries. It's not enough to fine them. Meta must be liquidated. All company stock must be seized, the company dismembered, and all assets sold to pay the victims (not only American victims, but international victims).

Fascist tech is a reservoir of power, both in terms of capital and simply as it is. Twitter is a tool of Nazi radicalization and a place for Nazis to organize. Seize it and liquidate it. DOGE was a criminal enterprise organized and run by Musk. Cuts to USAID alone are calculated to have killed almost a million people already, with millions more to die over the few years. Elon Musk must be forced to pay, out of pocket, to fix everything he broke. No amount of money can bring back the dead, so every single penny that can be squeezed out of him should go to those he's killed and to preventing more deaths. Liquidate Twitter, liquidate Tesla, seize SpaceX, nationalize it, and give the whole thing directly to Ukraine. Size every crypto asset he has and sell it for pennies.

The cryptocurrency industry has been a big supporter of the fascist cause for a long time. The fun thing about blockchain is that it's not really as anonymous as it seems. You can trace transactions from wallet to wallet. If you seize someone's computer and can get access to their files, you know their wallet iD and therefore every wallet they've paid and been paid by. When fascists use cryptocurrency to launder money, you know who has been involved.

Any asset directly owned by Musk can be seized, if he can be captured. But if you can capture enough people linked to him, you will eventually get that wallet ID anyway. From there, you trace the money. Any wallet with a transaction that has come from a wallet associated Musk, Trump, or any of the fascist looters can be identified. Wallet IDs can be advertised with associated funds amounts, and anyone with the wallets can either pay back the funds or have the wallets deemed illegal. Anyone caught with an illegal wallet can be fined the value of the ill-gotten property, and their assets can also be liquidated to pay for their complicity.

Congress doesn't need a super majority to begin this process. They can begin setting up the commission to investigate, to calculate the harm, to codify the actions that need to be taken, and to figure out the strategy. They will need a super majority to remove every supreme court justice who ruled in favor of Trump in Trump v. United States.

But that may well be possible, and becomes more possible if the investigation focuses on the involvement of remaining right wing congress people have been complicit in Trump's corruption. Investigate each of them personally, and expose their financial crimes. Expose how many were invested in Geo Group when they voted to give money to ICE. Find out how many of them have made money off of Trump's crypto scams. Make it public record, so that it's available to their challengers in two years. Identify those who could be removed earlier to push closer to that 2/3s majority. (I bet you can find 11 House Republicans who could be impeached, for which failure to do so would put the other 33 in a challenging place next cycle.)

But you can start the whole thing with individual ICE agents, sizing all their assets to pay for their crimes. Bring Jesus Ochoa and Raymundo Gutierrez before congress and hold them accountable for the murder of Alex Pretti. Take their money, all of it, sell everything they have, and give it to Pretti's family. And then, do it again for Renee Goode. Then Salgado Araujo. Then Joan Sebastian Guerrero. And keep going. Investigate the illegal deportations, and hold the officers personally, individually, liable for their crimes. Fire them all. Liquidate their assets, give the money to the victims. Find the people who enforced the “Zero Tolerance” policy in 2017, and hold them accountable. Individually. Personally.

Over the next several years, starting as soon as possible, we must systematically take capital from powerful fascists and give that money to the marginalized people they hurt. Then we should go harder. Pardon everyone who fought Nazis in the streets. Send a clear message: if you are doing the right thing, even if it is against the law, you will be safe in the end. Anti-fascists are the immune system of a society. That immune system needs to be strong. Often that work can be done by simply exposing fascists. But occasionally, fascists need to be hit with baseball bats or bike locks. Sometimes fascists need to be afraid for their lives. Because when they aren't, millions of people die. Pardon everyone who fought fascists in the streets so they can do it again, if needed. Pardon them, and pay them for the time they spent in prison. Pay them back for their legal fees. Pay back the communities that defended them.

This is not about revenge. These are simply the steps you take to make the fascists think twice, to sear this into their memory, so no one tries this again as long as any of them are alive to tell the story. And they should be kept alive. You want the fascist to be a reservoir of terror. You want them to spread fear within their networks. You want them to warn everyone they know to not whisper a word of their beliefs to anyone, for fear of further retribution.

You want that fear in their networks, because that fear prevents them from restarting the autopoietic cycle. You want a living, speaking, warning their network to never invest in fascist power again.

Bubbles, my fish. is probably the only thing in this house that doesnt make me feel like ive ruined something just by existing near it. not just in this house, but in general. hes a funny little fish, ill give him that. anyway, my housemate came to speak to me yesterday. he’d recieved a call from the doctor. he told me everything was fine with me. Oh, is that right? so what the fuck have i been doing for the past couple of months, then? vomiting for entertainment? is that it? have i been making a hobby out of it? all the blood and pain and all that fucking weight ive lost. imaginary. brilliant. alright let me get this straight. so all of this vomiting was just a hallucination? great. the pain too? imagined the blood? imaginary. the weight ive lost? oh, come on, ive probably misplaced it somewhere. should check the cupboards. perhaps ive hallucinated the food as well. wouldnt that be something? all this time ive been convinced im eating and throwing up, when oh, what are we talking about? ive probably been just sitting around imagining the entire fucking thing. what a fucking idiot ive been am i right? maybe i should start hallucinating some money while im at it. a functioning body would be nice too. since we’re just having fun and making things up now, might as well get something useful out of it. let me just drop the sarcasm for once and get a clear answer. what the fuck do you mean everything is fine? i would like to know which part of this looks fine. seriously. which fucking part? because ive missed something. ive missed the part where losing weight, being unable to eat properly, throwing up half the things i consume and feeling like absolute shit suddenly became a sign of “excellent health!!” please. i didnt even get to hear it from the doctor himself, no. someone else got a phone call and thats it. case closed. ahmed is fine and everybody can go home.

Im just so fucking tired of this. im tired of feeling so awful then having someone to tell me theres nothing wrong. im tired of having to exlain that something is wrong. what else am i supposed to do? start vomiting in front of everyone? would that be convincing enough? whatever. ill stop complaining. wouldnt want to disurb the genral consensus that im perfectly fucking fine.

Sincerely, The imaginary patient.

I just got off the phone with my guy. I'm debating whether I want to get out of bed or go back to sleep. I'm usually a very light sleeper. I either missed his initial message or it didn't ring. I gave him the most obnoxious ringtone ever to make sure I'd hear it no matter what. We've discovered multiple times that I don't always. Luckily I did hear my alarm ten minutes later.

It's too that point where I'm starting to count the days until I will get butterflies at the airport. Long distance sucks! I'm admittedly nervous about our planned dates as so much can go wrong weather-wise. It will be a most exciting start to the year though. Then if all goes well and we decide to really go for it, 2027 will be a year of high stress and equally high joy. The logistics of it all does put me into a mild panic when I think about it. As does all of the paperwork and finances.

I'm looking forward to snuggling in our sleep. One of the best feelings in the world is being wrapped up tight in a pair of strong arms while spooning. That is home. He's a foot taller than me, so the envelopment is most blissful. On the other hand, I know from experience that he snores. My brain doesn't really ignore snoring. I will have to find some sleep pods, again. I'm not big on dampening my hearing when asleep, but we'll see.

I feel both the anxiety mentioned above, excitement, and a very comforting calm. I'm certainly nervous. We're very different in many ways while similar in many others. I jokingly tell him that he's a wee bit ocd with his routines, though I can see why he almost has to be. Where as I am much more lackadaisicle to an extent. He's very minimalistic decor ways, and I'm a libra. Enough said.

I am nervous about the space changes. Where I currently live is less than half the size of where I lived before. That took a lot of adjustment. His current place is smaller than what I currently live in. It makes me feel claustrophobic just thinking about it. Still, adjustments happen. Plus we will probably search for something else once settled. No closets is still such a peculiar thing to me. That's ok. I'm looking forward to proper public transportation and walking distances.

I guess I'm nervous about a lot, but also quite excited. It will not just be a new adventure in life, it will be me back in a place where I feel like me. It also means aspects of my personality I have placed a hard pause on will get to explode in all their glory. I'm admittedly looking forward to that quite a lot. As well as those small intimacies that occur when living with someone. And then, after we're all settled and have had a wee bit of time alone, we'll head off to the shelter to find a few cats and our family will be complete!

With both of us being over fifty, time does make me nervous. I am hoping that we will both be gifted with many more years and decent health. I look forward to discovery. Things are so much different at this age. Maturity. Wisdom. Patience. Appreciation. At least that is the hope. It is my hope to truly drink in and devour every second. There are many more hopes, but that is the biggest one. I hope that we unfurl spectacularly. Hehehe, the world should watch out!

Really, I just hope merging our lives will be less bumpy and more smooth, and that each morning we wake up smiling. Whatever it brings, I'm looking forward to it. That is where my mind is at this morning. This message may self-destruct because it feels too personal, but it is actually where my thoughts are and writing them down wraps me in peace.

Of course, it could just as easily all go up in flames along with the rest of the bloody world, but let's not think about that, shall we?

© 2026 AnOublietteofThought. All rights reserved.

Every group journey in Birmingham starts with the same small problem. There are six or seven of you, plus luggage, and no normal car takes everyone. So the group splits across two cars, leaves at different times, and spends the first half hour of the trip reassembling itself at the other end. Mercedes V-Class hire exists to remove that problem: one luxury seven-seat vehicle, one professional chauffeur, and the whole group travelling together from the first pickup to the final drop-off.

This article covers how V-Class hire works in Birmingham — what the vehicle offers, how group airport runs at BHX are handled, where it fits for events, weddings and corporate days across the West Midlands, and how it compares with self-drive hire and standard minibuses.

Why Birmingham Groups End Up in a V-Class

Birmingham journeys are rarely point-to-point for groups. A typical booking stitches together a hotel in the city centre, Birmingham Airport, the NEC, or a venue somewhere in the wider West Midlands — with people and bags collected along the way. Two cars can do that, but they double the coordination: two drivers to brief, two arrival times to gamble on, and a group split up before the day has properly started.

The V-Class solves it with capacity that is genuinely usable. It seats up to seven passengers in a proper seven-seat configuration, with leather seating throughout — not five real seats and two fold-down compromises where the luggage should be. Behind those seats there is a real luggage area, so a full group's suitcases travel in the same vehicle as the group. The chauffeur helps load the bags, the route is planned before you set off, and nobody in the car is checking directions with a full load of passengers.

It is also worth knowing what the alternatives on the same fleet look like. For four passengers or fewer, an executive saloon is usually enough. For a VIP arrival where the car itself is part of the occasion, the Mercedes S-Class chauffeur hire option sits above the V-Class. The V-Class is the group vehicle: space first, with the same chauffeur standard as the saloons.

Inside the V-Class: Space, Seats and Luggage

The reason chauffeur companies across the UK have settled on the V-Class for group work is that it was designed for exactly this job. Passengers sit upright in individual seats with room to move, rather than on a bench. Conversations can happen across the cabin, which is why corporate teams use the journey itself as working time and why wedding parties treat the transfer as part of the day rather than a gap in it.

Luggage is the second half of the story. A full group of seven brings a serious amount of baggage — seven large suitcases and hand luggage for a holiday, or instruments, kit and garment bags for an event. The V-Class carries the group and their luggage together, and a good operator will ask for your luggage load at booking stage and confirm the space in advance. Do the same: tell the company exactly what you are bringing, including anything awkward like pushchairs, golf bags or display cases for a conference, and there are no surprises at the kerbside.

For complete vehicle details, seating and booking options, the company page for Mercedes V-Class hire in Birmingham sets out what is included with the car.

Birmingham Airport Runs for Groups

The single most common V-Class booking in Birmingham is the airport run, and it works because the details are handled before the flight lands. National Executive Transfers is based at Birmingham Airport itself, and its V-Class service is built around the way groups actually arrive: on the same flight, tired, with more luggage than they remember packing.

The pickup is timed against the flight's actual landing, not the scheduled time, so a delay does not leave a chauffeur waiting at the wrong hour or a group standing outside an empty arrivals hall. The chauffeur waits inside the terminal holding a board with your name, helps the group load their luggage, and takes everyone directly to the destination — a home address, a hotel, or several drop-offs arranged in advance. The same applies in reverse for departures: one pickup point, one vehicle, and a chauffeur who already knows the flight time, so the group checks in together instead of arriving in fragments.

This is the part of the journey where a V-Class quietly outperforms two smaller cars. One vehicle means one meeting point, one journey time and one arrival — and the group that lands together leaves together. The wider service, including departures, returns and longer airport routes, is described on the Birmingham Airport chauffeur transfers page.

Events, Weddings and Corporate Days in the West Midlands

Beyond the airport, Birmingham gives the V-Class a steady diet of group work:

NEC and arena events. Exhibition days and concerts end with thousands of people heading for the same exits at the same time. A pre-booked V-Class at an agreed meeting point turns the end of the event into a short walk to a waiting car, with the whole party travelling back together.

Weddings. The V-Class is a practical wedding vehicle — not for the couple, but for everyone around them: bridesmaids, parents, and guests moving between the ceremony, the photographs and the reception. One vehicle making coordinated trips is easier for everyone than a chain of favours and borrowed cars. NET's airport transfers team also handles the out-of-town guests flying in for the day, which keeps the whole transport plan with one company.

Corporate days. A team collected from a hotel, moved between meetings, and returned in the evening is a standard V-Class day. Hourly and full-day hire keep the car with the group, so the schedule can flex without re-booking transport between every stop.

Long-distance group trips. Birmingham groups regularly travel to Heathrow, Manchester or London for flights and events. Two or three hours on the motorway is where the space earns its money: seven people sitting properly arrive in better shape than seven people folded into two smaller cars.

Chauffeur-Driven V-Class vs Self-Drive and Minibuses

Three options usually compete for a group journey, and they are not the same product:

Option	Driver	Vehicle standard	Best for
Chauffeur-driven V-Class	Professional chauffeur included	Luxury 7-seat Mercedes, leather seating	Groups who want the journey handled entirely
Self-drive V-Class rental	You drive	Same vehicle class, but insurance, deposit and parking are yours	Confident drivers who want full control
Standard minibus	Driver varies	Larger capacity, basic trim	Bigger groups where cost per head is the priority

Self-drive hire hands you the vehicle and every problem with it: the driving, the motorway traffic, the airport parking charges and the walk from the car park. A minibus carries more people but at a basic standard, and for a wedding or a corporate arrival the vehicle itself sets the wrong tone. The chauffeur-driven V-Class sits between them — group capacity with an executive standard of vehicle, and a professional responsible for everything except being a passenger.

What a V-Class Day in Birmingham Looks Like

To see how the pieces fit together, take a typical corporate booking. A team of six lands at Birmingham Airport on a morning flight, due at an NEC exhibition by midday and at a city-centre dinner in the evening. The chauffeur meets them in arrivals with a name board, loads the cases, and drives the group straight to the NEC — no taxi rank, no split cars, no colleague arriving twenty minutes after the stand opens. The V-Class stays with the group on an hourly booking, so when the exhibition closes, the same vehicle takes everyone to the restaurant, and later back to their hotel.

Nothing in that day is complicated, but every transfer in it would have been a small negotiation with two cars or a taxi app. One vehicle, one chauffeur and one plan is the entire product — and it is why the V-Class, rather than the bigger saloon cars, is the default choice for group days in Birmingham.

Booking a V-Class in Birmingham: What to Tell the Company

A V-Class booking goes well when the company has the full picture up front. When you enquire, give them:

• The passenger number — exact, not approximate, so the seat configuration is right.
• The luggage load, including anything bulky or fragile.
• Child seats, if children are travelling — these are arranged as part of the plan before the day, not improvised at pickup.
• The flight number for airport journeys, so the pickup can be timed against the real landing.
• The full stop list for hourly or full-day hire, so the route and timings are planned before you set off.
• The hire type you want: one-way, return, hourly or full day.

To book, call 01564 778080 or email sales@nationalexecutivetransfers.co.uk. Pickups can start from a home, hotel, office or Birmingham Airport — wherever the group is gathering — and every booking is planned in advance rather than worked out on the day.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: How many passengers does a Mercedes V-Class carry? A: Up to seven passengers, in a genuine seven-seat configuration with leather seating throughout.

Q: How much luggage can a V-Class take? A: With a full group of seven travelling, there is room for the group's large suitcases plus hand luggage. Declare your exact luggage load when you book so the company can confirm the space in advance.

Q: Can a V-Class meet our group at Birmingham Airport? A: Yes. The chauffeur waits in the arrivals hall with a name board, timed against your flight's actual landing, helps with the luggage, and takes the whole group to your destination in one vehicle.

Q: Can I hire a V-Class by the hour in Birmingham? A: Yes — one-way, return, hourly and full-day hire are all available, with a chauffeur included every time. A minimum period may apply to hourly hire; confirm it when you enquire.

Q: Is a V-Class better than a minibus for a wedding or corporate event? A: For groups of up to seven, generally yes: a minibus carries more people but at a basic standard, while the V-Class offers luxury seating, a quieter cabin and a professional chauffeur — a better fit for weddings and executive travel.

FICTIONAL WHAT IF: Part VI- What if MCU Frank Castle was bitten by the radioactive spider instead of Peter Parker? Volume 5

Chapter I: Return

For Karen Page there was no gap at all. She was sitting at her desk in the news service's bureau on the Rue de la Loi in Brussels at a little after five in the afternoon, with her phone in her hand and the fake name on the screen, and she had a single thought, I never told him, and then she was sitting at the same desk in the same chair with the same phone in her hand, except that the phone was dead and the screen was black and the desk was covered in dust. Thick gray dust, like a desk in an attic. The bureau was dark. The windows were filthy. The computer on her desk was an old model she did not recognize as old, and the calendar on the wall beside it was for a year that had not existed when she sat down, and there was a dead plant in a pot on the windowsill that had been alive a moment ago, a dry brown stick. People were standing up all around her in the dark, at the dusty desks, the people who had sat at those desks five years ago, staring at each other and at their dead phones and at the dust. Somebody was screaming in the corridor. Karen did not scream. She sat in her chair and looked at the dead phone in her hand and understood, slowly, the way you understand a nightmare, that something enormous had happened and she had missed all of it, and that the thought she had been thinking a moment ago, I never told him, was five years old.

She found out the rest the way everyone found out the rest, in pieces, over the following days, from the news and from strangers and from people weeping in the street. The Snap. The five years. The battle in the hills above the Hudson, which the world was already calling the Battle of Earth, and the man in the iron suit who had died to end it. And she found out about New York. She read about it on the plane home, on a borrowed laptop, every article she could find, for nine hours, across the Atlantic. The arrangement, which everybody knew about now and nobody had ever written down. The Congregation of Nahum, six hundred thousand strong in the five boroughs, with a cathedral in Ozone Park. The murder rate lower than 1950. The thing on the rooftops in a black suit with a white skull on its chest, that the city had a dozen names for and the government had a code name for, ORB WEAVER, which had been leaked to the press in the second year by someone at the Pentagon with a sense of humor. She looked at the photographs for a long time. Most of them were blurred, taken from far away at night by people who were very frightened. One was clear. It had been taken in Tokyo the previous autumn, by a security camera in an alley in Shinjuku, and it showed the thing in the suit standing in the rain among a great many bodies, with the black drawn back from its face, and the face was Frank's. Karen looked at it for most of an hour, somewhere over Greenland. Then she closed the laptop and sat in the dark of the airplane cabin with her hands in her lap, and she did not cry, because she did not think she had the right to. She had called the burner number from the airport in Brussels before she got on the plane. It had rung eleven times. Nobody had answered.

Asa Pilgrim came back in the middle of a sermon. He had vanished in the front row of a carpet warehouse in Ozone Park, in the middle of the third verse of the first chapter of the Book of Nahum, and he came back in the front row of a cathedral, in the same spot, on a plush red seat that had been bolted to the floor where a folding chair had once stood, under a great white skull painted on the ceiling sixty feet above him, with four thousand strangers in black around him, and his father on a stage in front of him that had become an altar, preaching. He was eleven years old. He was holding a pencil. His notebook was gone. He looked down at his empty hands, and up at the ceiling, and then at his father, and he said, “Dad?” And John Pilgrim, who had been in the middle of a sentence about the wheat and the chaff, stopped speaking, and looked down from the altar at his son, and went perfectly white. The whole cathedral had gone silent. All around the vast room, people were reappearing in the seats where their vanished had sat five years ago, and gasping, and the ones who had been sitting next to empty seats for five years were turning and seeing them, and screaming, and weeping. But in the front row it was silent. Pilgrim came down from the altar. He came down very slowly, like an old man, and knelt in front of his son on the cathedral floor, and Gideon, who was twenty now and had a beard and had been sitting in the front row beside the empty seat every Sunday for five years, was on his knees too, on the other side, and the two of them held the boy between them, and Asa said, confused, “Why is everyone crying? Dad, why are you crying? Did I do something?” And John Pilgrim held his son in front of four thousand people and wept, and some of the people in the cathedral that day said afterward that it was the most beautiful thing they had ever seen, and some of them said that in the middle of it, for a moment, he had looked up at the white skull on the ceiling, and his face had been the face of a man who was terribly afraid.

Chapter II: ORB WEAVER, Revisited

The memo was nine paragraphs long and was signed by the deputy secretary of defense on the fourth of November, three weeks after the Battle of Earth, and it was classified at a level that meant almost nobody would ever read it, and it said, in nine careful paragraphs, that the world had changed back. The Decimation had been reversed. The vanished had been restored. The strategic environment was no longer unprecedented; it was merely chaotic, which was the kind of environment the government knew how to deal with. The NYPD was at ninety-three percent strength and rising. Organized crime had not reestablished itself in the New York metropolitan area, and the assessment was that it would not, for a generation. The stabilizing presence was no longer required to stabilize anything. And therefore, the memo said, in its ninth and final paragraph, the directives regarding the detention of the subject known as ORB WEAVER, deprioritized in March of the fifth year of the Decimation pending a return to normal conditions, were hereby restored to their original priority, effective immediately, under the authority of the Sokovia Accords, which remained in force. Thaddeus Ross read the memo at his desk at the State Department on the afternoon of the fourth, and when he had finished it, he read it again. Then he opened the bottom drawer of his desk with a key from his pocket, and took out the file he had locked in it in March, and set it on the desk in front of him, and looked at the grainy photograph clipped to the cover for a long time.

He did not feel the satisfaction he had expected to feel. He had expected, for eight months, that when this day came, he would feel vindicated. He did not. He sat at his desk with the file and thought about the nine paragraphs, and about how carefully they had been written, and about what they meant, which was that the government of the United States had used a man as a weapon for five years when it needed one, and called him a stabilizing presence, and now that it no longer needed him, it would call him a fugitive again, and hunt him, and not one of the people who had signed the March memo would ever have to say out loud that they had been wrong, or that they had been right, or what they had been at all. He thought that if he were Frank Castle, he would find that very funny. Then he picked up his phone and called the director of the FBI, and the director of Homeland Security, and a man at a facility in the desert in Nevada whose name did not appear in any directory, and he began to give orders, because it was his job, and because he had always believed it was right, and because he did not know what else to do with the feeling in his chest except to work.

In the end, it would not matter. Nothing Ross did in the next two weeks would matter at all. But he did not know that yet. He spent the fourth of November and the days that followed building the largest manhunt in American history for a man who had been, until that morning, a ghost the government had agreed to leave alone, and he built it well, because he was good at it. He did not sleep much. On the seventh night, very late, sitting alone in his office with the city dark outside, he took the photograph off the cover of the file and held it up under the desk lamp and looked at it closely, the man in black on the side of the building at night, and for the first time he noticed something he had never noticed in seven years of looking at it. The man in the photograph was not climbing. He was not moving. He was simply there on the wall, very still, with his head turned, looking straight into the camera that had taken the picture, as if he had known it was there all along. As if he had waited for it. Ross looked at the photograph for a long time. Then he put it back in the file and closed the file and sat in the dark, and thought, with a chill he did not understand, that he had never once in seven years been the one hunting Frank Castle. He had only ever been the one Frank Castle had allowed to look.

Chapter III: Karen

Karen went down into the Freedom Tunnel on the ninth of November, at night, alone, the way she knew Natasha Romanoff had done it, because she had read about Natasha Romanoff on the plane, and about where she had died and why, and because she had sat in her apartment in Hell's Kitchen for three days after she landed, working up the courage, and could not think of any other way. She walked down the middle of the tracks in the dark with a flashlight, from the entrance under the park at 125th Street, and she felt the threads. She did not see them at first. She felt them across her face, her arms, her chest, fine and cool and invisible, breaking softly as she walked through them, dozens, then hundreds. She did not stop. She let them break. She wanted him to know she was coming. She walked for half a mile, and the threads got thicker, until she could see them in the flashlight, gray and silver, strung across the tunnel from wall to wall and floor to ceiling like the inside of an old attic, and she pushed through them with her hands, and then she came out onto the old abandoned platform where the murals were, and there was a van, and a camp stove, cold, and nobody there. She stood on the platform with the flashlight and waited. She did not call his name. She stood there for nearly an hour, in the dark and the silence, and at the end of it something dropped from the ceiling of the tunnel behind her without a sound, and she turned around.

He was taller than she remembered. That was the first thing. Taller, and thinner, so thin that he looked stretched, and the black of the suit covered him from head to foot, smooth and wet-looking in the flashlight, and on his chest there was a white skull, and where his face should have been there were two long white eyes and nothing else. He stood on the tracks below the edge of the platform, perfectly still. She did not step back. She had promised herself she would not step back. She stood there with the flashlight shaking in her hand and looked at the white eyes, and after a long moment the black drew back from his face, slowly, flowing down over his neck and shoulders like water draining away, and there he was. It was Frank. It was the face from the diner on Forty-Sixth Street, the face from the hospital records, the face from the photograph in Shinjuku, but it had been worn down somehow, the way the steps of a very old church are worn down by feet, and his eyes looked at her from a long way back, as if from the bottom of a well. He looked at her for a long time. Then he said her name. It was hoarse and very quiet and did not sound like a voice that had been used in a long time. She said his. Then she sat down on the edge of the platform, because her legs would not hold her up anymore, and after a while he came and sat down beside her, a little apart, with his legs over the tracks, the way Natasha had once sat with him, though Karen did not know that.

She told him everything she had missed, and he told her almost nothing. That was how it went. She talked, and he listened, and when she asked him things he either did not answer or answered in a sentence. She asked about Natasha, and he was quiet for so long that she thought he would not answer at all, and then he said, “Seven times. She came seven times,” and nothing else. She asked about the Congregation and he said, “Pilgrim's,” as if that explained everything. She asked about the suit, and she saw it move. She would remember that for the rest of her life. She asked what it was, and the black on his shoulders and his neck rippled, very slightly, the way the skin of a horse twitches off a fly, and drew tighter around him, and for a moment it seemed to her that it was flowing back up toward his face, as if to cover it, as if it did not want her to see him, and he put his hand flat on his own chest, over the skull, and pressed, the way you'd press a hand on a dog that was growling, and it stopped. “It came to me,” he said. “In the rain. It tried to take me, and I didn't let it. It's mine.” He looked down at his hand on his chest. “It doesn't talk,” he said. “It listens.” Karen looked at his hand on the skull, and at the black flowing over his knuckles in a slow, continuous ripple, and she thought, with a cold certainty she could not have explained, that he was wrong. That it was not listening. That it was waiting.

She asked him what he was going to do now. They were looking for him again, she said. She had heard it from a source at the FBI the day before: Ross had restored the detention order, and they were building something enormous, every agency in the country. She said he could leave. He could go somewhere. He did not have to be this anymore, the world was back, everyone was back, he could stop. And he looked at her for a long time from the bottom of the well, and then he reached into the suit, into the black over his chest, which parted for his hand like water, and took out a legal pad, soft and dog-eared, with a number written on the cover in black marker: 14. He opened it to a page and held it out to her in the flashlight, and she read it. There was a name on the page in block capitals, underlined twice. JAMES BUCHANAN BARNES. And under it, two words and two initials in the same block capitals, NOT HIM. T.S., with a single line drawn through them. She did not understand at first. Then he told her. Not all of it. Enough. The list, and the man at the top of it, and the dead man who had tried to take him off, and the line. When he was done, Karen sat on the edge of the platform with the legal pad in her hands and looked at the line through Tony Stark's words, and her voice, when it came, was a whisper.

“He's one of the vanished,” she said. “He just came back. He was gone for five years, Frank, he just came back.”

“I know,” Frank said.

“He was brainwashed. They tortured him. For seventy years. He didn't choose any of it. That's your rule, Frank, that's your own rule, I've read about it, everybody's read about it, they print it on T-shirts. The ones who were made into weapons and didn't choose it. Never.”

“I know,” Frank said. “I wrote it.”

“Then why?”

He did not answer for a long time. The suit rippled on his shoulders. He was looking down the tunnel into the dark. When he spoke again it was very quietly, almost to himself. “Because it's the last name,” he said. “Because it's the last name, and then it's done.” He was quiet. “And because he's the only one on the whole list who did what I did. All of it. For longer. And they're giving him a medal. And somebody has to.” He did not finish the sentence. Karen looked at him in the flashlight, at his face, at the black flowing over his shoulders in its slow, continuous ripple, like something breathing. And she asked him, because she had asked him once before, five years ago, from a desk in Brussels, and he had not answered, and she needed to know. She asked him if he was still in there. He turned his head and looked at her. And the black on his shoulders moved, all at once, quick as a striking snake, and flowed up over his neck and his jaw and his mouth and his eyes, and covered his face completely, and the two long white eyes looked at her out of the smooth black mask, and he did not say anything at all. She sat there with the legal pad in her hands and looked into the white eyes for a long time. Then she put the legal pad down on the platform between them, and stood up, and walked back up the tunnel through the broken threads in the dark, and did not look back. She did not go home. She went to Brooklyn, to an address she had found the day before, through a source, because she was a reporter and she had never in her life been able to leave anything alone, and she knocked on the door of an apartment in a walk-up on Sackett Street at two in the morning until a man with a beard and tired blue eyes opened it, and she said, “Captain Rogers. My name is Karen Page. I need to talk to you about Frank Castle.”

Chapter IV: Pilgrim

Frank went to the cathedral in Ozone Park on the eleventh of November, a Saturday, late at night, after the last service, and came down through the skylight sixty feet up in the ceiling, down a single line, past the great white skull painted on the plaster, and landed on the altar without a sound. John Pilgrim was waiting for him in the front row. He had known Frank would come, the way he had always known. He was sitting in one of the plush red seats with his hands folded in his lap and a Bible on the seat beside him, closed, and his sons were not there. He had sent them home. He looked up at the black shape on the altar with the white eyes and the white skull, standing under the white skull on the ceiling, and he did not kneel. That was the first thing Frank noticed. For five years, every time Pilgrim had seen him, Pilgrim had gone to his knees. He did not kneel now. He sat in his seat with his hands folded and looked at Frank, and his face was the face of a man who has been awake for three nights and has come to the end of something.

“He came back,” Pilgrim said. “Asa. In the middle of the sermon. In the same seat. Holding a pencil.” He looked down at his folded hands. “I preached for five years that the Lord had reaped him. That the Reaping was the Lord's judgment, and that my boy was taken because the Lord had chosen to take him, and that I must believe in the wrath even when it took what I loved, because that was the price of faith. I said that. I said it to six hundred thousand people. And then my boy came back, holding a pencil, and asked me why I was crying.” He was quiet for a long moment. “It wasn't the Lord,” he said. “It was never the Lord. It was a purple giant with a glove who flipped a coin. And then some men and women who loved each other went and took it back. That's all it was. There was no judgment. There was no reaping. There was no wheat and no chaff. There was a coin, and then there were people who wouldn't accept it.” He looked up at Frank. “And I built a church to the coin.”

Frank did not say anything. He stood on the altar under the skull. The suit was perfectly still.

“I know what you're going to do,” Pilgrim said. “Barnes. Everyone in the Congregation knows; we have people everywhere, you know that, in every precinct, every agency. They've been talking about it for a week. They know about the list, they know the name. They think it's the last act of the wrath. Half of them are praying for it.” He shook his head slowly. “Some of them have found him. They've come to me. They've told me where he is. They want me to tell you, so you'll know that the Congregation stands beside you at the end, the way I always said we would.” He was quiet. “I'm not going to tell you.”

The black shape on the altar did not move.

“You came to my church once,” Pilgrim said, “in the other building, the old warehouse, after Dayton. You threw my lectern across the room. You told me a six-year-old girl and a four-year-old boy had died in their beds because of what I'd built. And I told you that I didn't build it. That you did. That they did what they did because they watched you, and what they heard you say, every time you killed a man, was that the wicked don't deserve to live and that a righteous man has the right to decide who the wicked are.” He stood up. He was an old man now, older than he should have been, his hair white, and he stood up out of the plush red seat slowly and stood in front of the altar and looked up at the thing on it. “I was wrong,” he said. “I didn't know it then. I know it now. It isn't that the wicked don't deserve to live. Maybe some of them don't. I don't know. I'm not God; I learned that this week. It's the other part. The part about the righteous man deciding. Because the righteous man always decides that he's the righteous man. And then he decides who the wicked are. And then he goes on deciding, and deciding, every day, and one morning he wakes up and he is the wickedest thing in the world, and he still believes he's the righteous man, because he's the one who decides.” He looked at Frank. “In the stairwell, in Long Island City,” he said, “years ago, you could have killed me. I'd come to kill you for money. I was a bad man, I had been a bad man all my life, and you had me on the floor with my own knife at my throat. And you looked at a picture of my boys, and you let me go. You said, go home to your boys. You didn't ask whether I deserved it. You didn't weigh me. You just saw two boys in their Sunday clothes and you let me go.” His voice cracked. “That was the wrath of God, Frank. That moment. That was the only time I ever saw it. Everything after that, everything I built, was just me, looking for it again, and finding you instead.”

The suit on Frank's chest moved. Pilgrim saw it, and he stopped speaking, and watched it. It moved the way the sea moves, slowly, in a long swell, from his shoulders down to his waist and back. And then, very slowly, the black drew back from Frank's face, and Pilgrim saw it, and he would carry what he saw for the rest of his life. It was not a cruel face. It had never been a cruel face. It was a face that had stopped feeling anything at all, a long time ago, and was very tired, and very far away. Frank looked at him from the altar for a long time. And Pilgrim saw, in the long white eyes that had been there a moment before and in the human eyes that were there now, that he had not reached him. That there was nothing left in there to reach.

“Barnes was somebody's son,” Pilgrim said quietly. “He had a mother. In Brooklyn. In 1925. She held him on her lap and sang to him.”

“I know where he is,” Frank said. His voice was hoarse. “I've known for a week. I don't need you to tell me.” He looked down at Pilgrim. “Go home to your boys, John.” And the black flowed back up over his face, and he went up the line into the dark of the ceiling, past the white skull painted on the plaster, and out through the skylight, and was gone. John Pilgrim stood alone in front of the empty altar of the cathedral he had built, and after a long time he went to the wall and pulled the lever that turned on the lights in the ceiling, all of them, and stood in the bright light under the great white skull, looking up at it. Then he went home to his sons. The next morning, the Sunday service at the cathedral in Ozone Park was canceled, without explanation. It was never held again. By the end of the month, the Congregation of Nahum had split into eleven factions, and by the end of the year it had mostly ceased to exist. John Pilgrim was not part of any of them. He moved with his sons to a town in western Pennsylvania where nobody knew his face, and got a job driving a delivery truck, and went to a small Methodist church on Sundays where nobody knew his name, and sat in the back, and never spoke.

Chapter V: The Asset

Bucky Barnes had been alive again for twenty-six days, and he had spent most of them sitting by the window of Steve's apartment on Sackett Street watching the people on the sidewalk below. He did not know what else to do. He had been standing on a battlefield in Wakanda, with a rifle in his hands and Steve's voice in his ear, and then he had been dust, and then he had been standing on the same battlefield with the same rifle, and the sun was in a different place in the sky, and a sorcerer he did not know was opening a burning hole in the air in front of him. He had gone through it because Steve was on the other side. He had fought. He had watched Tony Stark die from a distance, and gone to the funeral, and stood at the edge of the lake while the wreath floated out, and felt nothing he could name. Then he had come back here, to Brooklyn, because Steve was here, and because there was nowhere else, and he had been sitting by this window for twenty-six days. And every one of those days, he had felt it. Not the way Steve felt danger, with his gut. Bucky felt it the way the Winter Soldier had felt things, for seventy years: with the back of his neck, with the cold place at the base of his skull where the programming had lived. Somebody was watching him. Somebody had been watching him since the lake. He never saw anyone. He only knew they were there, the way he had known, in the old days, when somebody had been sent.

Steve told him on the morning of the twelfth, at the kitchen table, with coffee, and with the woman from the night before sitting across from them, a reporter named Page, who had come to the door at two in the morning and talked to Steve in the kitchen until dawn while Bucky listened from the other room. Steve did not soften it. He had never softened anything for Bucky, not in 1936, not in 1944, not now. He told him about the man the government called ORB WEAVER, and what he was, and what he had done, Washington Heights and Sinaloa and the cull and Tokyo, and what he had become in the five years Bucky had been gone. He told him about Tony's machine, and the list, and the numbers. And then he told him that Bucky's name was on it. At the top. Ninety-nine point nine. And that Tony, before he died, had taken it off, and written two words beside it, and that Castle had put it back. Bucky listened to all of it with his hands around his coffee cup, the gloved one and the other one, and did not say anything for a long time after Steve was done. Karen Page watched him across the table. She would write about this conversation years later, in a book, and in the book she would say that the thing she remembered most was that Barnes did not look afraid. He looked like a man who had been told that a letter he had been waiting for all his life had finally arrived.

“Ninety-nine point nine,” Bucky said at last. “That's a good number.” He turned the coffee cup in his hands. “That's a better number than I'd give myself.”

“Buck,” Steve said.

“No. Listen to me.” Bucky looked up at him. “I killed Howard Stark. I killed Maria Stark. I strangled her in a car on a road in the snow while she called her husband's name. I remember it. I remember all of them. Every face. Two hundred and eleven, by my count, and that's just the ones I remember.” He set the cup down very carefully. “I've been in therapy for that. Did you know? In Wakanda. Two years, before the Snap. A lot of it was about the word choice. I didn't choose. That's the line, right? That's the thing everybody keeps saying. I didn't choose. They put me in a chair and they burned it out of me and they said the words and I did what they said. And that's true. I know it's true.” He looked at the window. “But they were still my hands, Steve. Every one of them. And now there's a man out there who did what I did, more or less, for five years, all over the world, and he did choose, and he wants to do it to me. And I keep sitting here thinking that maybe that's fair. Maybe that's the only fair thing anybody's ever going to do about me.” He looked back at Steve. “Maybe he's right.”

Steve stood up from the table so fast the chair went over. He did not shout. Bucky had never once in eighty-five years heard Steve Rogers shout at him, and he did not shout now. He stood by the overturned chair with his hands at his sides and his face white, and he said, very quietly, “No.” He said it again. “No. He isn't right. He's never been right about anything, not once, in seven years, and he's not right about you. You didn't choose it. I don't care whose hands they were. It's not the same. It was never the same.” He looked at Karen, and then back at Bucky. “I'm not going anywhere,” he said. “Not until this is done. I don't care how long it takes. The stones can wait. Bruce can wait. I'm not going anywhere until he's stopped.” And Bucky looked up at him from the table, at his oldest friend standing there in the kitchen with his fists clenched and his face white, and he understood two things at once. He understood that Steve meant it. And he understood that Steve had something he had not told him: some plan, some place he was supposed to be going, that he was now not going to go, because of Bucky, because of this. Bucky did not ask what it was. He did not need to. He had known Steve Rogers since 1925. He knew what it looked like when Steve was about to give up something that mattered for someone who did not deserve it.

Steve drove up to the lake that afternoon. Bruce was there, in the big green body that was still Bruce, with his right arm in a sling, burned black from fingertips to shoulder, sitting on the porch of the lake house with the stones in a steel case beside him and the quantum platform assembled on the dock, waiting. He had been waiting for six days. Steve told him. Bruce listened, as Bucky had, and he did not argue, because he had heard about what was on the rooftops of New York, even in the five years, even upstate. Then Steve told him the rest of it. That he had fought Castle once, in Riga, and lost. That Castle was stronger and faster than he was, and that the thing in the suit made him stronger and faster still, and that Steve did not think he could beat him, not with the shield, not with anything he had ever had. Except. And he looked at the steel case beside Bruce on the porch, and the thing lying across the top of it. Thor had left it when he went off with the Guardians, because it had come forward from 2013 and had to go back. Mjolnir. Steve looked at it for a long time. Bruce followed his gaze. Then Bruce said, quietly, that he had read the Life Foundation's files on the symbiotes, years ago, when Tony first heard rumors about the thing that had come out of San Francisco. He said they were weak to sound. To fire. To electricity. He said that a hammer that could call down lightning was probably the most dangerous thing on earth to that suit. And he said that if Steve was going to tear it off Castle, he had better be ready to catch it afterward, because the files were very clear that a symbiote without a host did not die. It went looking for another one.

“Can you build something?” Steve asked. “To hold it?”

Bruce looked at his burned arm in the sling for a long moment. Then he looked at the workshop on the far side of the lake house, Tony's workshop, the one Tony had built when he moved out here, still full of his tools and his half-finished projects, untouched since the funeral. “I can build something,” he said. “I'll need a few days. And I'll need to be there, Steve. Nobody else knows how to run it.” Steve said he could not ask that. Bruce said he was not asking. He said that Tony had built the thing that pointed Castle at the world, and Tony was not here to clean it up, and somebody had to. He said it was his turn. Steve looked at him for a long time, the big green face with Bruce's tired eyes in it. Then he nodded. He picked up Mjolnir from the steel case. It came up into his hand as easily as it had on the battlefield, and he stood on the porch holding it, looking at it, the borrowed weapon of a god, that he would have to give back. He had no right to it. He knew that. He held it anyway.

Bruce built the thing in four days. He called it the cell, for lack of a better word: a cylinder of Stark alloy the size of a fire extinguisher, with Wakandan sonic emitters from the old lab at the compound wound around its throat in a coil, and a plasma field generator scavenged from one of Tony's old suits, and a trigger. When it was opened and aimed, it would draw anything without a solid body into its field and hold it there, in a cage of sound and heat, and seal. Bruce tested it on a jar of motor oil, because it was the closest thing he could think of. It worked. He did not know if it would work on the real thing. He told Steve that, honestly, on the night of the sixteenth, on the phone. Steve said it would have to do. They planned to go into the city the next night, the three of them, Steve and Sam and Bruce, and find Castle, and end it. Steve did not know where to look. He thought Karen might. He called her and she said she would take them to the tunnel. He hung up. It was eleven at night. He went to tell Bucky. And the window by the kitchen table was open, and the chair by the window was empty, and on the table there was a note, in Bucky's neat, careful, old-fashioned handwriting, the handwriting of a boy who had learned penmanship from the nuns at Our Lady of Perpetual Help in 1931. It said: I'm not going to let you give it up for me, punk. Whatever it is. Not again. You've done enough. Don't come after me. It's mine to settle. And under it, a single line, smaller, as if he had added it at the last minute: Thanks for everything. Since 1925. B.

Steve stood in the kitchen with the note in his hand for perhaps three seconds. Then he was moving. He called Sam. He called Bruce, at the lake, a hundred and forty miles north, and Bruce said he would be there in an hour, and Steve did not ask how. He called Karen, and asked her, in a voice she had never heard Captain America use, if she had any idea where Bucky would go, if he were going to meet Frank Castle. If he were going to go somewhere to settle something. Karen was quiet for a long moment on the other end of the line. Then she said, slowly, “The carousel. In Central Park. Where Frank's family died.” She said, “He read the files. He'd go there. If he wanted to say he was sorry. If he wanted to give him the place.” And Steve put down the phone, and picked up the shield, and picked up the hammer, and went out into the night.

Chapter VI: The List

The carousel in Central Park had been closed for the season since the end of October, and it had been closed for most of the five years before that, and in that time nobody had thought to change the locks on the gate. Bucky went in a little after midnight. He did not need the locks; he had been getting into places he was not supposed to be since before he could shave. The carousel stood in its open-sided brick building in the middle of the park in the dark, under a tarp, the painted horses frozen mid-gallop in rows under the tarp like animals asleep in a stable. Bucky pulled the tarp off. He found the control box in the operator's booth and opened it with his left hand, the black glove off, the metal fingers bending the steel of the lock like tin, and he found the switch, and he threw it, and the carousel woke up. The lights came on first, hundreds of them, warm and golden, running up the poles and around the canopy and along the mirrors in the center. Then, with a long groan of machinery that had not moved in months, the platform began to turn. And then the organ started. It was a cheap bright song built for children, played on pipes and drums and cymbals by a machine that was a hundred years old, and it rang out through the empty park in the dark like something from another world, too loud, too bright, too happy, and Bucky stood beside the turning carousel in the golden light and listened to it, and waited.

He had read the files. Steve had given them to him, everything Karen had brought, everything Steve had been able to find, and he had read them the night before by the window on Sackett Street while Steve slept. He had read about the afternoon in spring seven years ago, the gangs and the gunfire by the boathouse, and the man with a bullet track across his head crawling across the grass toward his son. He had read about the white horse with the chipped gold mane. He walked slowly around the turning carousel now, looking at the horses as they came past, until he found it, an outside horse in the second row, white, with a gold mane, and on the left side of the mane, behind the ear, a long chip in the gilt where the white plaster showed through. He reached out and put his hand on it as it went past. His right hand, the flesh one. Then he took his hand away and stepped back and stood there in the golden light with his hands at his sides, his coat open, no weapon, and waited. He did not have to wait long.

He did not see Frank come. He felt him, the way he had felt him every day since the lake, the cold place at the base of his skull, and he turned his head, and there he was. Standing on the roof of the carousel building, at the edge, above the canopy, black against the dark trees, with the golden light from below running up the black of the suit and catching in the two long white eyes. He was very tall. He was perfectly still. He was looking down at Bucky. Bucky looked back up at him. He had faced a great many things in eighty-five years, and he had never seen anything like this. He had seen photographs. The photographs had not prepared him for the stillness. It did not move the way a man moves when he is standing still, breathing, shifting his weight. It did not move at all. And the white skull on its chest looked down at him in the carousel light, and the organ played its bright cheap song, and the horses went around.

“I came to tell you something,” Bucky said. He had to raise his voice over the organ. “I'm not going to fight you. I know what you are. I know what I am. I read about your family. I'm sorry. I know that doesn't mean anything, coming from me. I know what I did, I know who I did it to. Steve thinks I didn't choose it. Maybe I didn't. But I did it. They were my hands. And I came here because this is your place, and I wanted you to know that I know it. That's all. I'm not asking you for anything.” He spread his hands, the metal one and the flesh one. “I'm just here.”

The thing on the roof did not answer. It came down off the roof. It came down the way water comes down, all at once, in a single black pour, and landed on the carousel platform among the turning horses without a sound, twenty feet from Bucky, and stood there, and the platform carried it around, slowly, past the mirrors and the golden lights, and it did not take its white eyes off him once. Bucky stood still. He had meant what he said. He was not going to fight. He had decided that in Steve's kitchen, and again on the walk across the park, and again with his hand on the white horse, and he had been sure. And then the thing on the platform turned its head very slightly, the way a dog turns its head at a sound, and the white eyes narrowed, and something in the black of its chest seemed to swell, and seventy years of HYDRA conditioning, seventy years of being the most dangerous killer on earth, woke up in the back of James Buchanan Barnes's skull and took his body away from him, the way it always had, and his left arm came up on its own, with the metal fist closed, and he was moving. He did not decide to. The Winter Soldier decided for him, in the last moment, because the Winter Soldier had never in seventy years walked into a room with a threat and not attacked it. That was the last thing Bucky would have time to be ashamed of.

It was not close. It was not a fight. There is no other way to say it. The Winter Soldier came across the platform at the thing in the black suit with everything HYDRA had ever put into him, the speed and the strength of the serum and the vibranium fist and seventy years of killing, and it was like a man running at a cliff. The black shape did not dodge. It did not need to. It let the metal fist come, and it caught it, in one black hand, an inch from its white skull, and it held it there. Bucky felt the vibranium grind in its grip. He had punched through the hull of a helicarrier with that fist. He had stopped Captain America's shield with it. And it was being held, perfectly still, by a hand that did not tremble, and the white eyes were looking at him over it. Then the black hand closed. The vibranium of the fingers folded inward with a shriek like a train braking, and crumpled, and Bucky screamed, because the arm was wired into his nervous system and he felt it as if it were his own hand being crushed. And the black shape pulled. It pulled the arm off. It tore it out of the socket at the shoulder in a single long wrench, the plates and the cables and the vibranium and the scarred flesh where they met, and threw it across the carousel, where it struck the central mirrors and shattered them, and the organ's song went on, bright and cheap, among the falling glass.

Bucky was on the platform. He did not remember falling. He was on his back among the turning horses, with blood pouring out of the ruin of his left shoulder, and the platform was carrying him around, slowly, and the black shape was walking alongside him as he went, keeping pace, looking down. He tried to get up. He got as far as his knees, and the black shape hit him. Not with its fist. Something came out of its arm, a long black blade, and went through him, and pinned him to one of the poles, through the chest, and lifted him off the platform and held him there against the pole with his feet off the boards, and the pole carried him up and down, up and down, the way the horses went up and down, with the carousel turning. He could not breathe. He looked down. The white eyes were very close. And through the pain and the blood and the bright cheap music, a strange thing happened to Bucky Barnes, at the end. He did not think about HYDRA. He did not think about the chair, or the ice, or the words, or the two hundred and eleven faces. He thought about a carousel. A different one. Coney Island, 1932, the summer he was fifteen, when he had taken Steve Rogers there, skinny little Steve, sick all the time, and paid for him because Steve never had any money, and they had ridden the horses side by side in the hot salt wind, and Steve had laughed so hard he couldn't breathe, and Bucky had to pound him on the back until he could. He thought about that. And he thought, with the last clear part of his mind, that it was strange, and somehow right, that it should end on a carousel, after everything. That he had started his life on one, laughing with his best friend in the summer, and was ending it on one, alone, in the cold, at the hands of a man he had wronged, like every other man who had ever met the Winter Soldier. He did not think it was fair. He did not think it was unfair. He thought: oh. Of course. And then the black blade twisted, and Bucky Barnes died, pinned to a pole on a carousel in Central Park with the lights golden around him and the music playing, and the platform went on turning, carrying his body up and down, up and down, past the white horse with the chipped gold mane.

Frank stood on the platform and looked at him. The blade drew back into his arm. The body slid down the pole and fell onto the boards and lay there, and the platform carried it away from him, slowly, around the curve, and then, after a while, back toward him again. He watched it come. It was done. The last name. Seven years. The list was finished, all of it, four thousand one hundred and twelve, every one of them, and he stood on the turning carousel in the golden light with the music playing and waited to feel something. He had always thought it would feel like something, at the end. He did not feel anything. He felt the suit on him, warm, tight, humming, very pleased, in the deep place where wanting lived. That was all. He stood there and the platform turned and the body came around again, and he looked at it, and he heard, very far off across the park, coming fast, the sound of footsteps running. Heavy. Familiar. He had felt them before, in a basement in Riga. And something else, above them, a sound he had never heard in his life but understood instantly, deep in the oldest part of his body: a low, rolling, growing growl, like a storm coming in over the sea. The suit on him tightened all at once. He felt it go hard and cold, the way a dog's hackles rise, and he felt, for the first time in five years, the thing inside the suit afraid.

Chapter VII: Some Men Need to Die

Steve came over the low wall at the edge of the carousel plaza at a dead run, with the shield on his arm and the hammer in his hand, and Sam came over the trees behind him on his wings, and the first thing Steve saw was the carousel, turning, golden, with its bright cheap music playing too loud in the empty park. And the second thing he saw was Bucky. On the platform. On the boards between the horses. Being carried slowly around in the golden light, on his back, with no left arm, in a dark spreading pool, and his face turned up toward the canopy, and his eyes open. Steve stopped running. He did not mean to. His legs stopped. He stood at the edge of the plaza and watched the carousel carry his best friend's body around the curve and out of sight behind the center mirrors, the shattered ones, and then, after a while, back again. Sam landed beside him and said his name and Steve did not hear it. He was looking at the thing standing on the platform. It was standing beside one of the horses, a white one, very still, with its back to him. It had not turned around. It did not need to. It knew he was there.

“Castle,” Steve said.

The thing on the platform turned its head. Just its head, the way an owl turns its head, and the long white eyes looked at him over its shoulder. Then it stepped off the platform, onto the bricks of the plaza, and turned the rest of the way around, and faced him across thirty feet of golden light, and Steve saw that there was no man in it at all. In Riga there had been a man. Cold, and far away, and holding back, but a man. He had looked at Steve over the shield and said you're the best I ever fought, I mean that. There was no man in this. There was a shape in black with a white skull on its chest and a body at its back, and it was looking at him the way a spider looks at whatever has just touched the edge of its web.

Steve did not say anything else. There was nothing else to say. He threw the shield. And the thing was not there when it arrived. It came at him across the plaza, and this time it was not holding back, and in the first three seconds Steve understood how much it had been holding back in Riga. He had thought he knew. He had not known anything. It hit him in the chest and he went backward through the low brick wall at the edge of the plaza and into a tree on the other side and felt three ribs go. He was up again before he knew he was down. It was already there. A black blade came out of its arm at his throat and he got the hammer up and the blade struck Mjolnir and rang like a church bell and the shock went up his arm to the shoulder. Another blade from the other arm. He got the shield up from where it had come back to him and the blade skidded across the vibranium and shrieked. Then a third, from its back, a long black tendril curving over its shoulder like a scorpion's tail, and that one he did not block, and it went through the meat of his thigh and out the other side and lifted him off the ground by it and threw him thirty feet across the plaza into the side of the carousel building. He came down in the bricks. He got up. Sam came down out of the sky at the thing with both machine pistols firing, and a tendril came up off its shoulder without it even turning around and caught Sam's left wing and tore it off at the root, and Sam went spinning into the trees, and did not come out. Steve got up. He came back. He came back with the shield and the hammer and everything he had, every blow he had ever learned, all of it at once, the way he had in Riga, so many blows from so many angles that even a man who could feel all of them could not be out of the way of all of them, and some of them landed. He felt the hammer hit it, hard, in the side of the head. He felt the shield crack against its chest. And it did not matter. Whatever he broke, healed before he could hit it again. Whatever he hit, did not feel it. And it was hitting him back. Steve had been beaten before. He had been beaten by Tony in Siberia, by Bucky on the Helicarrier, by Thanos in the ruins of the compound only weeks ago. He had never been beaten like this. It was taking him apart, piece by piece, patiently, the way it had taken apart the Lizard in the culverts, timing him, testing him, and every time he got up it put him down again, harder, and every time it put him down he got up. That was all he had. He had always only had that. He did not know when to quit. He had not known in an alley in Brooklyn in 1934 and he did not know now. He got up, and got up, and got up, with blood in his eyes and his leg not working and his left arm hanging, and every time he got up, it was waiting.

The last time, he could not get all the way up. He got to his knees in the bricks in front of the carousel, in the golden light, with the music playing, and the shield was gone somewhere, and the hammer was in his hand, and the thing was standing over him. It had stopped. It stood there looking down at him with the long white eyes. And Steve looked up at it, and past it, at the carousel turning behind it, and saw Bucky come around again on the boards, and Steve understood, very clearly, that he was going to die here, beside his friend, and that it was going to happen in the next few seconds, and that there was only one thing left he had not done. He had not wanted to. He had held it back the whole fight, the whole week, because it was not his, because it was a god's weapon and he had borrowed it and had to give it back, and he had no right to bring that down on a man. He looked at the thing standing over him. It was not a man. He lifted Mjolnir over his head. And he called the storm.

It came out of a clear sky. The night over Central Park had been cold and clear and full of stars, and then it was not. The clouds came in over the city from nowhere, in seconds, black and boiling, and the wind came down through the trees like a train, and the thunder rolled over Manhattan so loud that windows broke on Fifth Avenue a quarter mile away, and a hundred thousand people in their beds sat up in the dark. And the lightning came down. It came down into the hammer in Steve's upraised hand in a single blinding column, white and blue and screaming, and Steve brought it down, and turned it, and gave it to the thing standing over him. Not to strike it. To surround it. The lightning poured out of the hammer and wrapped around the black shape in front of him in a cage of white fire, and the thunder came with it, a sound so huge it was not a sound but a blow, and the thing in the black suit screamed. Not the man. The suit. It screamed with a voice Steve had never heard, a high, inhuman, tearing shriek from somewhere very far away and very far down, from the dark between the stars, and the black was coming off the man inside it. It was being torn off. It peeled away from him in the lightning like paint off a wall in a fire, in long black ribbons, writhing, shrieking, reaching back toward him, trying to hold on, and the thunder hit it again, and again, and it could not hold on, and it came away from him all at once and fell to the bricks of the plaza in a black seething mass, burned and smoking and alive, and lay there, trembling. And there was a man standing in the middle of the plaza, where it had been. Frank Castle. In torn black clothes, barefoot on the bricks, very thin, very pale, with his arms at his sides and his chest heaving, blinking in the light from the carousel, as if he had just woken up and did not know where he was.

Bruce was there. Steve did not know when he had arrived. He came out of the trees at the edge of the plaza, huge and green, with his right arm in its sling and the cell in his left hand, and he went past Steve to the black mass on the bricks without a word, and aimed the cell at it, and squeezed the trigger. The cell opened. The coil around its throat lit up blue, and a sound came out of it, a deep, steady, grinding hum, and the air in front of it shimmered with heat, and the black mass on the bricks screamed again and was pulled. It came up off the bricks in a long smoking stream, fighting, clawing at the air, reaching back toward the man standing in the middle of the plaza, and it was drawn into the mouth of the cell like water down a drain, and the cell sealed with a hard metallic clack. Bruce stood there holding it, breathing hard. The cell was humming in his hand. It was shaking. Something inside it was throwing itself against the walls. Bruce held it with both hands, the good one and the burned one in its sling, and looked at Steve, and Steve, on his knees in the bricks with the hammer smoking in his hand and the storm still boiling overhead, looked past him, at Frank.

Frank had not moved. He was standing in the middle of the plaza in the golden light, barefoot, with his arms at his sides, and he was looking at the carousel. He was looking at it the way a man looks at something he has dreamed about for so long that he cannot believe it is real. The horses went around. The music played, bright and cheap and too loud, the song a child would ride to, and Frank stood there in the middle of the plaza and listened to it, and Steve watched something happen to his face. It was like watching a man come up from the bottom of very deep water. It was like watching the lights come on in a house that had been dark for a long time, one room at a time. Frank looked at the carousel, and the lights, and the horses, and then the platform carried the body around the curve, and he saw it. He saw Bucky. He took a step toward the carousel. Then another. He stopped at the edge of the platform and stood there, and the platform carried the body slowly past him, a foot away, the face turned up, the eyes open, the ruin of the shoulder, the hole through the chest, and Frank looked down at it as it passed, and Steve, watching him, saw him understand. Saw him understand all of it. Not the way he had understood it a minute ago, from inside the suit, as a name crossed off a list. The way a man understands it. A man who had once carried a twelve-year-old boy three miles down a valley on his back under fire, and sat on a rock by a river afterward and wept. A man who had once had a son.

He turned away from the carousel. He turned around slowly and looked across the plaza at Steve, and Steve saw his face in the golden light, and it was the face from Riga. The face from the hospital records, and the diner on Forty-Sixth Street, and the hospital bed in 2016 when Mahoney sat at the foot of it with his hat in his hands. It was a man's face, and it was looking at what it had done. And then it looked at the thing in the cell in Bruce's hands. The cell was shaking harder now. The coil around its throat was flickering, blue and then dark and then blue again, and the hum had gone ragged, and Bruce was holding it with both hands and his teeth bared and his burned arm shaking in the sling. The thing inside was not trying to escape. Steve understood that a moment after Frank did. It was not throwing itself against the walls of the cell at random. It was throwing itself, again and again, at one side of the cell. The side facing Frank. It was trying to get back to him. And Frank stood in the plaza and looked at it, and Steve saw him understand that too. Saw him feel it. Saw him recognize, in the cell's ragged hum, the pressure he had felt every night for five years in the deep place where wanting lived, so faint he had always mistaken it for his own. A little less patience. A little less sleep. A little less asking. A little more hunger. Saw him understand what had been in him, and how long, and how much of what he had done had been his, and how much had been his and also its, and that he would never know where one ended and the other began. And saw him understand that it did not matter. They had been his hands.

“It's failing,” Bruce said through his teeth. “Steve. It's failing. I can't hold it.”

Frank looked at Steve. Steve was still on his knees in the bricks, with Mjolnir in his hand, the storm boiling overhead. Frank looked at him for a long moment across the plaza in the golden light, with the carousel turning behind him and the music playing and the thing in the cell screaming for him in its ragged hum. And Steve saw that he was perfectly calm. That he had decided. That it was the last decision Frank Castle would ever make, and the only one in seven years that he had ever been entirely sure of, and that he was making it the way he had made every other one. Who, and why. He had always been the one who decided. He was deciding now.

“Do it,” Frank said.

Steve did not move. Frank looked at him.

“It wants back in,” Frank said. His voice was hoarse and very quiet and perfectly steady. “You know what it'll do if it gets back in. You know what I'll do. I won't be able to stop. I never could. I just thought I could.” He looked at the carousel behind him, at the body going around. He looked back at Steve. “Some men need to die, Captain,” he said. “I always said that. I was right about that. I was just wrong about who.” He spread his hands, slowly, empty, the way Bucky had spread his an hour ago in the same place. “Do it.”

Steve got up. It took a long time. He got up off his knees in the bricks with his leg not working and his arm hanging and blood in his eyes, and he stood up in the golden light, and he looked at Frank Castle standing barefoot in the middle of the plaza with his hands spread. And he thought about Bucky. He thought about Coney Island in 1932, and the hot salt wind, and Steve laughing until he couldn't breathe. He thought about Natasha at the kitchen table in Vilnius, and Tony in the ruins. He thought about Johann Schmidt, in 1945, telling him that HYDRA would one day build a soldier who did not hesitate. He thought about the fact that he had spent eighty years being the man who did not do this. And he understood that he was about to do it anyway, and that he wanted to, and that wanting to was the thing he would have to live with, much more than the doing, for the rest of his life, wherever he spent it. He walked across the plaza. Frank watched him come. He did not move. He did not look away. When Steve was standing in front of him, a foot away, Frank looked him in the eyes, and something passed over his face, and Steve would never be sure what it was. It might have been gratitude. It might have been pity. It might have been an old man in a valley in Afghanistan, putting his hand on a soldier's chest. Behind him, on the carousel, the white horse with the chipped gold mane came around, and went up, and came down, and the organ played the last bars of its bright cheap song, the song he had not been able to hear for seven years without his hands starting to shake, and Frank Castle stood in front of Steve Rogers and listened to it all the way through, start to finish, and his hands did not shake at all. Steve lifted the hammer. He brought it down. It was quick. He made sure of that. It was the only thing he could make sure of.

The cell broke a second later. Bruce felt it go, in his hands. The hum went up into a shriek and the coil around the throat of the cell went dark all at once, and the Stark alloy split down the side with a sound like a gunshot, and the thing inside came out. It came out screaming. It poured out of the broken cell and fell to the bricks in a black, burned, seething mass, and it went for Frank. It went across the bricks to the body lying in the plaza, faster than anything Bruce had ever seen move, and flowed over it, over the face and the chest and the spread hands, and covered it, and for a moment it held on there, wrapped around the dead man, shuddering, the way a dog lies down on its master's grave. And then it understood. Bruce saw it understand. The man was gone. There was nothing left in him to hold on to. There was no wound left to drink from, no grief, no hunger, no hands. It came up off the body in a single black pour, tall as a man, shrieking, and turned, and Steve was standing there, broken, with the hammer smoking in his hand, and it saw Steve, and Bruce saw it look at him, at Captain America standing over the body of a man he had just killed in grief and rage beside the body of his best friend, and Bruce saw it want him. Saw it go for him. And Bruce did the only thing he could think to do. He stepped between them. He did not think about it. He was Bruce Banner, and he had spent his whole life with a monster inside him, and he had finally made his peace with it, and he stepped in front of Steve Rogers with his burned arm in its sling and his huge green body and his tired, frightened, decent eyes, and the thing hit him in the chest.

It went into him. It went in through his skin, through every pore, the way it had gone into Frank on the rooftop in the rain, and Bruce felt it. He felt it pour into him and down, past the skin and the muscle and the bone, all the way down to the deep place where the other one lived, the one he had spent his whole life learning to live with, the one he had called the Hulk and then made peace with and let back in. And he felt it find the other one. And he felt the two of them meet, down there, in the dark at the bottom of him, the old monster and the new one. And he felt them recognize each other. And he felt them, very slowly, begin to join. He fell to his knees on the bricks. The black was flowing up over his green skin from his chest, out across his shoulders and down his arms, over the burned arm in its sling, up his neck. He looked up at Steve. His eyes were still Bruce's eyes. For a moment. Steve was standing over him with the hammer in his hand, and the storm overhead, and the carousel turning behind him with its golden lights, the music running down now, slower, slower, the cheap bright song winding down like a music box at the end of its spring. And Bruce Banner looked up at Steve Rogers from the bricks, with the black closing over his jaw, and said the last thing he would say in his own voice, very quietly, almost gently, the way you tell a friend something you are sorry to tell him.

“Steve,” he said. “Run.”

Then the black closed over his face. And something rose up out of the bricks of the plaza in front of the carousel in Central Park that was taller than the carousel, and greener than the trees, and blacker than the night, with a white skull on its chest, and opened its mouth, and the last of the music stopped.