Secret phone tapping of children's phones is legal. 13-yearolds should be put in prison. Highest unemployment in Europe. 30 billion spent on tax breaks for the rich while our healthcare is falling apart. One of the largest literary events in the country are hosting an Israeli propaganda machine with a talk named "The fabricated starvation in Gaza". The Social Democrats have turned into yet another mattress for the far right to fuck on, instead of acting like the opposition they're supposed to be. Calling a cop "pig" is now illegal. Svt say they won't boycot Eurovision because inviting states currently committing genocide is "neutral".
If Russia bombs us, at least they wouldn't be lying about what our government is 🤷♀️
The Swedish election is a lot to deal with. It's like some of them compete in "how to be the biggest racist".
Screen all 5 year olds for Adhd, but only in certain areas.
Test all 2 year olds for their knowledge in Swedish.
And the subway train. The fucking train.
And yesterday the (tbh not unexpected) news broke that the man who murdered Ing-Marie Wieselgren (she was coordinator of psychiatry between the regions) in Almedalen was planning to murder Annie Lööf (party leader of the Center Party). When I say it isn't unexpected I mean that she has been very vocal against Nazis and other right wing extremists. The Center Party is the only right/liberal/middle party that won't cooperate with the Swedish Democrats (a bunch of racist and Nazis). The Liberals changed leadership and out went the slogans and promises of never.
I know non of this makes sense and I'm not clear enough. I just want to vent, it's so frustrating. I'm angry and sad.
I'm back! well I guess on this blog it's not odd that I don't post for a while but still. I'm back! and since it's @aphrarepairweek2020 and I made best friends with a little girl on my mail round when she followed me through two streets and helped me put mail in mailboxes, this is the perfect time to indulge this ship that I'm not sure is actually a thing or I made up myself, and some kidfic (sort of)! this is for day 2, thunderstorm :0
Even if Feliks is still unsure of how he fits into the lives of Berwald’s sons, there is only one thing he can do when one of them is afraid of a thunderstorm.
~~~
Feliks is just about to put in his earbuds to listen to a podcast, when he hears a small, unfamiliar sound over the rain clattering against the windows, crashing into the sea somewhere near. He puts his phone down next to his crossed legs. Listens.
He can still hear the shower, barely, so it can’t be Berwald already. Maybe he dropped something, in there. His depth perception is awful without his glasses; Feliks wouldn’t be surprised. Hopefully, he’s almost done cleaning by now, anyway. Taking a shower during a thunderstorm isn’t the best idea, and Feliks feels a little guilty, since he was the one who dropped his drink on Berwald.
Thankfully, they’ve been dating long enough now that he doesn’t feel the terrible embarrassment he’s sure would have overwhelmed him in the beginning.
It seems to be silent now, or relatively so, given the downpour outside.
A clap of thunder, and another noise just out in the hall. Feliks half-turns to look over the back of the couch as the living room door opens, and a small, pale face peers through the gap, single blue eye wide. Ah, of course.
“Dad?” comes the usually so loud voice of Berwald’s eldest son, now just above a whisper. Feliks laces his fingers together in his lap, and takes a deep breath.
“Your dad’s taking a shower, Peter,” he says, smiling in what he hopes is a reassuring way when the boy spots him. Both Peter and his younger brother Lars know him well enough by now—he’s spent enough time around their father lately—but Feliks can’t deny that being around the boys still makes him a little nervous, if only because he knows they mean the world to Berwald and he’s terrified of somehow doing wrong by them. Having kids was never something he seriously thought about, because he just didn’t think he would be any good with them. The little Oxenstierna family is doing their best to prove him wrong.
“Oh,” Peter is saying, and he is already closing the door when the thunder rolls again, and he practically sprints into the living room instead, halting next to the couch. He’s clutching the hem of his pajama shirt with his small fingers, knuckles whitening. Feliks shakes his thin hair out of his face, meeting Peter’s eyes.
“Are you…” He tilts his head, assessing how Peter appears to be trying to control his fear. “Did you want to check on your dad, Peter?”
Peter nods vigorously, grateful, and Feliks can’t help but smile.
“Is he afraid of the thunder?”
Nodding again, Peter shuffles a little closer. His pajama shirt has a pirate ship on it, and the pants are printed with tiny rapiers and skulls, but he is no longer wearing the eyepatch and hat he had on this evening, when he insisted the trampoline in the backyard was his pirate ship and tried to get his brother to walk the plank multiple times, in increasingly loud pirate brogue. Lars kept refusing, of course, and Feliks had been tasked with distracting Peter. He could probably do so again, even if there’s no way he’ll go out and try to do tricks on the trampoline again like he’s seventeen and still dreaming of a career in gymnastics. Not in this weather.
More thunder.
Peter winces, hands wringing into his shirt. Feliks’s heart clenches. With how boisterous he is, it’s easy to forget that Peter is still just a six-year-old boy, who wants his father to comfort him during a storm even if he’s too proud to admit it.
“I’m afraid of thunder, too, you know,” Feliks tells him, which isn’t true—thunder is one of the few loud noises he actually doesn’t mind—but that doesn’t matter.
“I’m not!” Peter insists, even as he climbs on to the couch next to Feliks, who grasps his shoulder to steady him. “I’m a pirate, an’ pirates are never afraid!”
“Yeah? You must be worried about your ship, like, with all this rain, right? The waves must be huge.” Feliks holds his breath while Peter sits close to him, pulling his legs up on the couch and wrapping his arms around his knees.
“My ship is undestroyable,” he declares. “It’s called—it’s called Storm Dee-mise!”
That one’s Feliks’s fault; he inadvertently taught Peter the word demise just this afternoon as he tried to think of a name for his trampoline ship, and the boy has used it in all the names he’s come up with since then, of which there have been about twenty. He’s got a very vivid imagination.
“An’ it’s got cannons that’re louder than the thunder, an’ the sails—” He cuts himself off at a particularly loud roll of thunder that seems to shake the house and follows the lightning almost immediately. He scoots closer to Feliks, who tentatively holds out his arm at just the right height for the boy to duck underneath it. After a second, he does so, nestling himself against Feliks’s side.
God, if his twenty-year-old self could see him now, Feliks thinks. Or even his thirty-four-year-old self of two years ago, when he’d first been introduced to Berwald through mutual friends, most of whom had been as surprised as Feliks himself when they started dating. Partly because Berwald had children, and Feliks supposes he’s never been known for his great social skills, whether with children or adults, and partly because everyone still remembered that he had been very intimidated by the tall man when they’d first met. And Feliks says strange things when he’s intimidated.
There’s only so much time you can spend awkwardly standing next to each other not knowing what to say while your friends blather on, though. And once they started, it proved difficult to stop.
“Hey, Pete,” he says, softly, and he thinks it’s the first time he’s called the boy that, the first time it’s felt appropriate.
Peter looks up at him from underneath his arm, blue eyes mirroring his father’s. Feliks has no idea where those dark eyebrows he’s currently drawn into a frown have come from, though.
“Are you still scared?” Peter asks manfully.
“A little.” Feliks shakes his hair away again. “Do you think I could come onto the Storm’s Demise?”
“’Course.” He burrows further into his side and the couch cushions at another clap of thunder, following the lightning flashes ever closer now.
“I bet you can’t even, like, hear the thunder belowdecks, right?”
Peter nods against his ribs. Still cautious, Feliks reaches for the mop of blond hair hiding his face, and cards his fingers through it. It’s all sticking up even more than usual. He must have spent some time tossing and turning in bed before this. For a young boy, it’s far too late to be up, especially after all that trampoline excitement. It’s not something Feliks thinks he would have even known a year ago, but he’s concerned about it now.
“Your dad would like to be on the ship too, I bet.”
“Lars can come too,” Peter mumbles through a yawn, and he glances up with half-lidded eyes when Feliks can’t help but chuckle at that.
“Good! That’s good, Pete. You look after your little brother.”
“He’s only five. He’s a baby.” The words are mumbled into his hoodie. Well, Berwald’s hoodie. Maybe Peter finds the fact that it smells like laundry and wood as comforting as Feliks does. “I’m six years old.”
“Yeah, you are. Do you know how many years old I am?”
Peter looks up appraisingly, silent for a long moment save for the rain pounding against the glass like an unwanted stranger. The sound of the shower has stopped, but Feliks couldn’t say how long ago that happened.
“Dad’s forty years old,” Peter eventually says, thoughtful. Berwald is thirty-nine, but it’s almost his birthday, so that’s fair. “You must also be forty.”
Fair enough.
“Almost,” Feliks replies, and Peter smiles proudly, probably glad to have worked out that puzzle, and he still winces when there’s more thunder, but is still smiling when it’s over.
“Uncle Søren is thirty-seven,” he starts recounting, “an’ Ashleigh is six also and Refik is seven an’…”
Feliks tunes him mostly out while he lists the ages of all the neighborhood children, his grandparents—which he’s pretty sure are wrong, because he’s met Berwald’s parents and doesn’t think either of them looked anywhere near a hundred-and-twenty—and then who knows who else. He just ruffles the boy’s hair every once in a while, when there’s more thunder, even though Peter barely seems to notice at this point, caught up as he is.
Not for the first time, Feliks catches himself thinking that Peter has inherited his father’s logical mind, to be so fascinated with numbers, and then, definitely for the first time, he thinks, well, there’s something I can help him with when he’s older, because Feliks likes numbers too. They’re nice and straightforward, don’t change values depending on context. He thinks about helping Peter or Lars with math homework in a house he designed, at a kitchen table Berwald has built, and it’s a bit of a terrifying thought, but not so scary that he refuses to think it. Not so scary that it can’t be a silent hope.
He would have locked it away, not so long ago. The Oxenstiernas are teaching him things in more than one way. Or maybe he’s just finally growing up as he nears forty.
“Feliks?” A heavy hand on his shoulder. Feliks startles out of his daydream. Looks down at Peter, who is silent now, and—oh, he has fallen asleep tucked against him, one hand grasping the hoodie.
Swallowing heavily, Feliks shifts his gaze up, to where Berwald is smiling down at him. His eyes are bright in that way that Feliks has realized by now suggests warmth. It’s easy to mistake it for judgment, or indifference, but he knows now that Berwald cares deeply about many things, his sons above all. You just have to know to look for it.
“Everything okay here?” he’s asking now. He reaches over to where Feliks is still absently stroking Peter’s hair and pushes it out of the boy’s closed eyes. “Pete couldn’t sleep?”
“I convinced him I was the one who was scared of the thunder,” Feliks whispers, briefly wondering if maybe that was the wrong thing to do—because surely, it’s important for Peter to learn that it’s okay to be afraid of things himself—but Berwald smiles, familiar laugh lines forming around his eyes.
“Thank you.”
“Yeah, sure, like…” He doesn’t know what to say, so he just looks down at the boy peacefully sleeping against his side. “Of course. He’s… Of course.”
Berwald walks around the couch silently and gazes down at the two of them, seemingly similarly lost for words. He has already changed into his pajamas. Quite unexpectedly, Feliks is out of breath at how quaint this all is, and how much he wants to keep it. He blinks rapidly as Berwald crouches down. The man rests one hand on Feliks’s leg while he gently touches his son’s forehead with the other, callused thumb smoothing away a frown as it appears. Peter doesn’t wake. Berwald looks up at Feliks, who chews on his lip until he reaches up and cups his jaw.
“Okay?” Berwald asks, his voice deeper than the rolling thunder but infinitely more soothing.
In response, Feliks smiles, and untangles his fingers from Peter’s hair, careful not to jostle him, to run both hands through Berwald’s short hair instead until he’s cupping the back of his head and Berwald is leaning up with his leg as leverage to press a kiss to the corner of his mouth. He smells like shampoo now. Feliks smiles, ruffling his hair this time.
“Alright,” Berwald mumbles, pushing himself to his feet, dropping a kiss on top of Feliks’s head as he goes, “let’s get him back to bed. ‘S too late to be up.”
Nodding, Feliks shifts so Berwald can gather his son into those strong arms of his. He could probably pick Feliks up with the same ease, but it’s never come up. Peter sniffles and curls into his father’s broad chest, but doesn’t wake even as thunder rolls again.
As Berwald moves towards the stairs, Feliks decides to follow, turning off the lights in the living room and carefully closing the door so it doesn’t rattle in the wind that will inevitably creep in. While Berwald tucks his son back into bed, Feliks brushes his teeth, changes into his pajamas, and uses the bathroom, and they meet again on the landing in front of Berwald’s bedroom, where Feliks smiles softly and starts to whisper something about Peter, when Berwald leans over and kisses him, grasping his face with those big hands.
Feliks hooks his fingers into the man’s old T-shirt, smiling into the closemouthed kisses pressed against his lips.
“Thank you,” Berwald mutters, again.
“It’s nothing.”
“’S not, Feliks.” His gaze is intense in the low light coming from his bedroom, blue eyes nearly transparent behind his glasses. “You know it’s not.”
Of course it’s not, but…
Not sure what to say, Feliks just presses his face into Berwald’s warm neck, standing on his tiptoes, breathing in his clean scent and listening to his steady heartbeat. The man rests his chin on top of his head, folding him into his arms. It feels secure, in a way that few things have done in Feliks’s life, and he think he might understand how Peter felt, safe from the thunderstorm. He isn’t the boy’s father and will never be, but maybe, maybe, Feliks could mean something similar to him.
Thunder rolls. Feliks swallows.
“You’re doing great,” Berwald says softly.
He wants to muffle words into the man’s neck, wants to tell him he loves him, and may very well love his sons too, but Feliks can’t bring himself to say it quite yet. It’s a truth he didn’t think he’d ever get to say, so it can wait a while longer. Just a while.
It won’t be long.
A small noise, down the hall. They both look at the wide blue eyes underneath a mop of ginger hair, peering around the bedroom door with Lars painted on it in a child’s clumsy hand, the s backwards.
“Dad?”
Berwald kisses Feliks’s forehead and trails his fingers down his arm as he walks over to his youngest son. Feliks smiles, and wanders after him.
I screamed when i saw that according the exit poll (the last poll before we get the accrual result of the EU election in Sweden) that the sweden democrats (bad, bad bad) ended up in fourth place (when expected second) behind the social democrats, moderaterna and the green party (surprise!!).
Kanske lite sent ute men du hinner än, här är mina bästa tips (När du har bråttom) :
1. Gör en eller flera valkompasser tex svts kompass. Det gör att du får upp ögonen för vad du tänker i några viktiga frågor och vilka partier det kanske lutar åt.
2. Kolla på vilka partier du hamnat närmast, jämför gärna vad ni tycker i de olika frågorna - speciellt de frågor du tycker var viktigast
3. Googla på de två-tre översta partierna och vad de tycker (men du kan ju börja med ditt förstaval). Kanske kolla deras sociala medier. Vad skriver de om vad för slags samhälle de vill skapa? Hitta deras valmanifest (kan kallas för olika saker för olika partier) låter det du läser okej? Vad för slags förslag har de lagt fram/drivit under den senaste mandatperioden? Känner du att när du kollar på deras sidor så känns det som att du håller med om det mesta? Då har du hittat ditt parti! Du kommer aldrig matcha 100% med något partis alla åsikter - inte ens de som företräder partierna gör det. Men ta ett parti där du tycker att ni håller med om det viktigaste
4. Personrösta! Personliga egenskaper spelar större roll än vad du kanske tror. Försök hitta en person som du tror är bra och har ungefär samma värderingar som du. Jag gillar att svts valkompass matchar dig med riksdagskandidater - kolla upp några i toppen av din matchning. Låter de bra? Om det är någon du faller lite för - sök upp hens sociala medier! Känns den bra så kör, annars leta vidare lite till.
5. Upprepa detta för alla instanser. Jag har aldrig röstat på samma parti i alla tre val, olika frågor drivs i olika instanser. Personröster kan vara svårare i kommun- och regionval för ofta bedrivs inte lika tydliga personvalskampanjer. Men här kanske du känner någon? En tidigare lärare, kompis förälder eller trevlig pizzabagare kanske kandiderar. Tycker du det är en vettig person så kan du rösta på den om du vill - även om du kanske inte föredrar dens parti. Jag har tidigare röstat på ett parti som kom 4 eller 5 i valkompass i kommunen där jag växte upp för att jag visste att jag personröstade på en bra person.
6. Skriv upp vilka du personröstade på. Försök kolla upp då och då vad hen har för sig, speciellt om hen kom in i fullmäktige/riksdagen.
Hoppas detta kan komma till användning! Lycka till!!
