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juminsmysticmc · 3 years ago

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Hii☺️So, we have RFA+Minor trio being single fathers after Mc's death, what about reversing it?So that Mc is a single mother after they died(

I waited really long to finally make a request and I am very excited right now, especially since it's you.I really love your writings and I read all of them for like a dozen of times and I can't get enough of them😍Thank you so much for your work and stay healthy 🙏🏻

Mc being a single mom after the RFA + Minor Trio died ( Trigger Warnings! )

Trigger Warnings, mention of death, parental death

RFA + Minor Trio as single fathers after Mc’s death (Parental death/ Trigger Warnings)

Did I mention that I like drama? Enjoy!

Jumin

You pressed your lips together as tears went down your cheek. The baby you just gave birth to was sleeping in Jaehee‘s arms as you sobbed into Zen‘s embrace.

,,It‘s as if he planned everything,“ you sobbed, making your red haired friend shake with his head.

,,When he found out you were pregnant, he made me do all this. He didn’t plan to die a month after the birth of your baby, really, he just feared that if something happened to him, his father would have acted the way he did,“ Seven explained.

The reason why you were currently staying over at Jaehee‘s place was that Jumin died a week ago. One day you let him go out of the front door, still smiling as he kissed your newborn, and not even half an hour later, you found yourself in the hospital.

Someone shot him.

And as if it wasn’t enough, your father in law tried to take away your baby, saying that he had to give his grandchild a better life.

But Jumin, even in heaven, saved you once again, saving a lot of money and having an external saving method thanks to Seven.

He even left behind a letter to his father filled with lies, explaining that the baby wasn’t his child.

Of course everything was a lie, but this lie made it possible for you to see your baby grow up.

,,I can’t even go to my husband’s-” your words died in tears.

,,He will always look over you, Mc, and we’ll help you. It will all be better soon…“ Zen patted your back. He too was mourning for his friend.

Zen

,,Mommy, do I really look like daddy?“ your youngest girl asked you as she brushed her long white hair.

You gulped as you looked over to your oldest daughter.

Her eyes were again filled with tears.

Zen died two years ago, leaving you behind with three wonderful children.

You had to give up your job as manager and instead began to work part time in a restaurant at night and other little jobs while the girls were at school.

,,Daddy… I don‘t even remember him,“ your middle child hissed as she entered the room.

,,I don’t even know him, that’s worse!“ your youngest began to sob.

She indeed looked like Zen. He would have been proud to see her beauty.

Well, he was proud of every daughter he had. He loved them with all his heart.

,,Trust me, I would rather not remember him than live with memories,“ your oldest daughter Mina hissed as she put down her lipstick and rushed out.

You sighed as you looked at your little family.

You were all sleeping in one single room. No one had their own space and instead they all argued with each other whenever they had the chance.

,,You’re always so negative, MINA!“ your middle child Hana hissed, followed by the youngest, Sera.

,,I HATE YOU GUYS! HE DIED BECAUSE OF YOU!“ she screamed, making your heart stop.

Mina glared at her and fell on her feet as she began to scream a loud, high pitched scream.

,,SERA RYU!“ you screamed.

The house died down as only sniffles were heard.

,,Your father died when the three of you caught a virus. He was trying to go to the shop for some medicine, but that doesn’t mean that one of you is at fault, understand?“ you hissed.

You sat down and began to cry yourself as you called them over into your arms, ready to embrace your crying children.

,,No one is at fault. Please, please don’t fight, girls, your father would be devastated to see that,“ you begged.

,,Sera, you do look like dad,“ Mina sobbed and smiled, making your youngest smile brightly.

Yoosung

Your son finally fell asleep after a long crying session.

Nothing hurt you more than consoling your son who was in deep pain because he got bullied at school for not having a father.

Yoosung died six months ago, making you move into a tinier apartment which led to your son attending another school.

However, you regretted every single decision.

You pulled your phone out as you tried to dry your salty tears.

You entered a new chatroom as you asked for help.

,,What happened? Shall I come over?“ Jumin responded, being the first one online.

,,I can come quicker, I‘m omw,“ Zen shortly afterwards responded.

,,No no, I just…

Can you please bring Jinyoung to school tomorrow? He got bullied… I think if other children see him with you guys, they will respect him more,“ you wrote.

Of course Seven jumped in and wrote six lines about how happy he would be to play ⅓ of a father, making you actually choke on your tears.

,,Thank you,“ you typed and decided to bring your son to bed.

Indeed the three boys kept their promise, making him laugh like never before.

Jaehee

,,And that‘s how we met,“ you laughed as you told your son about the meeting between you and Jaehee.

He nodded as he looked at the picture over the table.

It portrayed you, him, and Jaehee on his first day of school.

Jaehee died a year ago from an illness.

It all went so quickly. One day she got diagnosed and a few months later the two of you prepared the funeral for her.

As if it was yesterday, you remembered picking up your son and driving him to the hospital to give Jaehee the chance to see him one last time.

And indeed, it was their last goodbyes.

Jaehee would never see him finishing school, university, or begin a job, fall in love, or try to cheer him up while being lovesick.

She would never see him get married or have his first child.

It hurt your heart to know that you were the only one left for him.

On the other side, Jaehee was happy that at least he had you. ,,How did your favorite TikTok go?“ she groaned.

,,Take him to the moon for me,“ she whispered.

,,Mom was a strong woman,“ you told your son as a tear left your eye.

,,You too, Mommy, you too.“

Saeyoung

You sighed as you turned off your alarm to get off the bed.

It was still dark outside, but you had to wake up with the last strength you had. You pulled yourself together and walked back to the kitchen where you prepared some breakfast for your child.

Like every morning, reality hit you as you silently sobbed while putting some rice into the bento box.

Your hands trembled as you looked up, just to gasp for air and keep going.

It was hard ever since Saeyoung died. Things weren’t going well for you.

You thanked God daily for the remaining person you had, that you had friends and family who supported you.

But you also begged God to make this bad life end. Even though it was selfish, you just wanted to see your family again.

Even if Jaehee often tried to make you understand how lucky you were, even at the times where Jumin promised to help you with the medical expenses, even at those times when Yoosung came over to cook dinner, and even at those times when Zen promised to go with your and your child to the park, you just wanted this to end.

You inhaled again and dried your tears as you made yourself a cup of coffee.

,,Good morning, baby,’�� you whispered as you turned on the lights of your son’s room.

,,Mo….m,’’ the boy groaned, probably in pain as you helped him get up to sit on his wheelchair.

,,Wet…’’ he gasped as you noticed that he wet his bed again.

,,It’s okay, baby, don’t worry,’’ you smiled, pushing the chair through the door, passing at the picture of Saeyoung, Saeran, and your two perfectly healthy children.

That day, Saeyoung didn’t just die in a car accident from speeding, he also took his brother and one of your children with him, leaving you with your second son disabled by the accident.

,,It’s okay,’’ you whispered.

Saeran

You looked up to the ceiling as you felt a warm, little hand on your chest.

Turning your head, you could see how relaxed the face of your daughter was as she slept safely and soundly, not worrying about anything or anyone.

You smiled as you saw how much she resembled Saeran, her father.

Your hand moved to stroke her head as you remembered the day you told him that you were pregnant, how he cared for you and his daughter in the pregnancy, how hard labor was, and how emotional it was when he once again decided to save his brother after seeing his own daughter.

,,He would be happy to see her,’’ he said after she was newly born and he was finally allowed to hold her in his embrace.

As if it was yesterday, you remembered how he taught her to walk, how he stood behind her while going to the park and how much he loved to feed her.

This all disappeared one day.

In the morning, he told you that he might have found Saeyoung and in the evening he came home, beaten up with a shotgun wound, collapsing in front of your porch.

It was your worst nightmare and you were honestly happy that this all happened at night, knowing that back then, your three year old daughter wouldn’t have seen anything.

Ever since then, life became harder.

You moved, fearing the Prime Minister or the agency Saeyoung was in would track you down and kill your daughter. The RFA kept helping you guys, but questions like, ,,Where is Dada’’ weren’t always easy to respond to.

,,Mommy,’’ she mumbled and opened her eyes, smiling brightly at you and rubbing her eyes to wake up.

,,Mhhh?’’ you asked her.

,,Daddy visited my dreams…’’ she giggled and fell asleep again, making you wander back to old memories too.

Jihyun

,,Mom, I don’t understand my homework,’’ Lucy said, whispering as she entered the room as quietly as possible.

You looked back to her and nodded as you looked back to the little bed your son was in before you walked away, your hand on Lucy’s hair as you smiled at her.

,,What topic?’’ you asked her.

You noticed that she was hesitating so it was probably art since it was related to her father.

,,Art?’’ you asked her to make it easier for her. She had a pretty hard time ever since Jihyun died, well, you too. You all had a pretty hard time.

Jumin wasn’t the same person anymore, or so Jaehee said. Yoosung seemed to regret a few things, and Saeran and Saeyoung were grieving, just like Zen.

Everyone was in pain after the painful death of that one special person.

,,Our teacher told us to draw a painful happy moment but… how am I supposed to make something happy if it’s supposed to be painful?’’ she asked you.

You nodded. ,,Well, describe something painful. What is painful?’’ you asked her.

,,Getting hurt is painful, falling is painful, getting hit is painful…’’

,,How about losing someone?’’ you asked her, making her think about it for a few seconds before she asked you if it wasn’t something sad instead of painful.

You nodded. ,,When I told you that daddy wouldn’t come home anymore back then when you were younger, do you remember how you felt?’’ you asked her.

,,Did your heart hurt? Did you feel scared and suffocated? Wasn’t it painful?’’ you asked her and even though you could see that she was tearing up, you knew that this was something the two of you had to talk about.

Indeed, Lucy closed up about her feelings ever since then, but this was also a good opportunity.

,,Now, think of a happy moment with your father. Isn’t it something painful but a happy moment as well?’’ you asked her and got up, knowing that she knew what to do.

A week later, you were invited to see your daughter receive a prize for the most beautiful portrait of Jihyun as an angel looking down at the world, a painful and happy moment for everyone who knew him.

Vanderwood

,,Mommy,’’ your son asked you, pulling at your shirt as you stood in front of the stove.

,,Mhhh?’’ you asked him without looking as you were cooking.

,,Why did Daddy leave us?’’ he asked you out of the blue, making you stop everything and look at him.

,,The fish is burning,’’ he suddenly said as he saw the flames, making you shriek and quickly take care of everything.

After everything was taken care of, you took him in your arms and showed him a few pictures of his father.

For now, you never showed him his father. You never dared to speak about Vanderwood, fearing that your son wouldn’t understand your words, but by now you learned that he was much stronger than you ever thought.

,,This is your father, Vanderwood. He didn’t leave because he wanted to, he was kind of forced to,’’ you told him, gulping down the bad feeling you had as your heart began to beat quickly.

,,And why is he gone?’’ he asked you, softly touching the picture of a cool looking brown haired man.

This was on the day you two went to eat after you craved a salad and ice cream.

,,He had an important job to do,’’ you explained. Of course you didn’t tell him that the agency tracked him down and killed him brutally while he tried to keep you, his heavily pregnant, hidden.

,,And what is he doing now?’’ he kept asking you as you remembered the day, as if it was yesterday, when he pushed you into the closet, begging you to close your ears and never come out until called you.

However, that call never came. Instead, Saeyoung pulled you out moments later. You didn’t remember how much time passed.

You just knew that he asked you to keep your eyes closed as he led the way out of the room.

,,He is now protecting you, me, uncle Saeyoung, uncle Saeran, uncle Jumin, uncle Zen, uncle Yoosung and aunt Jaehee,’’ you answered with a smile.

How much he would have loved to meet his son, you were sure.

He was your happiness after all, the last memento of Vanderwood.

MASTERLIST 1

MASTERLIST 2

MASTERLIST 3

26.07.2021// 00:13 MEST

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whump-town · 3 years ago

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A Favor

Feeling very Hotch and Hank these days (feel free to send me asks about them because I fucking love them and I will write more about them if given the chance)

No warnings

No Pairings

It begins about mid-April in the height of the whole “April showers bring May flowers” thing. Hotch is sitting on the porch when Derek pulls into his driveway. The day is chilly, the perfect sort where the weather never gets the chance to get humid because the rain doesn’t stop falling and the sun stays tucked behind thick, billowing clouds. Windshield wipers darting quickly, never fast enough to fight the rapid downpour. Sitting out in a rocking chair, sweater pulled over his white-shirt to fight the chill, Hotch cocks his head to the side as Derek throws his door open, jogging - head down- to the porch. The car is still on.

“I need a favor,” he shouts as he nears the porch. He runs on up, ignoring Hotch’s raised eyebrow of confusion. Derek follows his eyes to the car and lets out a breathless sigh. “Listen, man, Hank’s got the croup or something. The nursery won’t take him when he’s got a fever and the plumbing just blew sky high at that house I’m renovating on Sixth Street. Savannah -”

Hotch stands, all Derek needed to say was that he needed Hotch to watch Hank for a little bit. The rest is rather unnecessary. How many times did Derek spend an hour or the day watching Jack so Hotch could do his job? Hanging around a park or the office instead of out doing what he wanted. Even if he hadn’t watched Jack, Hotch loves Hank. He cares about Derek and he also likes Savannah. Besides, his day isn’t exactly looking too busy at the moment. “He’s in the car?” Hotch asks, reaching down and grabs the raincoat he’d laid over the chair beside him.

Derek nods. He winces, “he’s moody but I think he’s excited to see you.”

Hotch hums. As they near the car, Hotch’s jacket is thrown over his arm as he walks into the rain, he smirks as they get closer and Hank’s crying gets louder. He looks at Derek, a twinkle in his eye, and betrays his amusement. Hank doesn’t exactly sound excited to be here.

Derek opens the door, immediately placing a hand on Hank’s heaving chest, shushing him gently. “Hank,” he calls, rubbing Hank’s chest with his thumb. “Baby look who it is.” Hank whines, kicking out and still making softer crying sounds as he rubs his eyes and finds Hotch. “See?” Derek offers, stepping to the side to let Hotch step closer. “I promised I’d take you to see Hops.” Hank still cries, softer now but big pitiful tears that make both men’s heartache. It makes Derek feel awful that he has to leave him.

Derek steps back, sighing as he moves to the other side of the car for the diaper bag. “Everything should be in here,” Derek shouts, as he leans around and drags the heavy bag out. He hadn’t looked in it, he realizes, before leaving but he’s certain diapers are good but he’s not so sure about a spare change of clothes. If it’s that big of a deal, Hotch will just drive him to Derek’s. Besides, Savannah should be off by five and Derek should be done by lunchtime. They’ll be fine. Hotch has done the baby thing before.

Hotch unbuckles the straps holding Hank in, frowning when Hank immediately starts fighting to get the rest of the way out. His fingers have lost the dexterity he had in his youth - too many years of abusing them for all they were worth in fights, countless hours of paperwork, and... Foyet. Wiggling baby and tiny little mechanics do not help. He’s managing slowly when Derek comes back around, his grey t-shirt now soaked, and he steps back to let Derek in.

“Alright, alright -” Derek gets him out in a second. Working through the straps and buttons with no issue. “Look,” Derek turns and gives Hank to Hotch. Smiling when Hotch wraps his raincoat around the baby, rocking his body to try and soothe Hank back down. The baby takes to Hotch, wrapping his arms around his neck, and presses his wet face into Hotch’s shirt. Derek can faintly hear him hiccuping, still crying but softer now. Whining more than sobbing.

At that moment, Derek has no idea the impact of the domino that he has knocked over.

When Hank was born, before Hank was born, Reid went through this phase of reading every parenting book he perceived worth it. If they were really good, if Reid found them intellectually stimulating and correct statistically, he’d turn them over to Morgan. Annotated. They would be covered in sticky notes, full of notes and commentary. Lots of directions about orders to read the books in and how to skip around so ensure he got the best read according to Reid.

Having nothing to do with what Reid thought was best or even important, Derek found himself reading through the guides about grandparents. About the ways that people change. Adapting to being a parent and then how parents handle being grandparents.

His father would never meet Hank.

Chicago is so far away. Fran is here when she can be, she’s a fantastic grandmother. He’s called her for everything under the sun and even though Hank has had a thousand colds and upper-respiratory infections come and go, he still calls her for every single one. Just to make sure. Just for someone to tell him he’s doing all this right.

Savannah hasn’t talked to her parents in years. Things are too complicated.

Hank will have a grandmother. One.

It’s so unfair.

It eats Derek up. Grandparents had been so important to him as a child. His grandmother was one of the only people he felt safe with, always. She was just calm in the storm of pain in his life. Who could be that person for Hank? He never wants Hank to need someone but it’s better to have a net to fall on, something to brace against when the floor gives way than to come crashing through the floor. To be met with concrete where it doesn’t have to be.

Then Derek goes and spills all those dominos.

The first time that it happens he’s a mess. He dropped Hank off at daycare at seven, like he does every morning. So, reasonably, that’s where Hank should be at two when Derek goes to pick him up.

An hour later, shaking and on the verge of tears, Derek finds him in Hotch’s backyard. The two calmly swaying in the hammock, Hank drowsily listening to Hotch read “The Lorax”. Even intently listening, head tilted up so he can see Hotch, to the older man’s boring, if not entirely too complicated, commentary about capitalism and Karl Marx. The alienation of labor and lack of class consciousness, it’s no wonder the kid is falling asleep.

Putting Hotch on the emergency list had been more of a precaution for the possibility that Morgan is on a job and Savannah has work. He hadn’t really considered Hotch would need to go get Hank. Morgan hadn’t even wanted to list him, didn’t want to bother him like that.

By about the hundredth time, it’s no longer jarring to walk into the daycare and find his son is already gone. Even the workers know to warn him now.

Derek has a key to Hotch’s, he’s more than earned that right but especially these days. He lets himself into the front door and through the house, knows exactly where to find his son. The kid spends more days out of daycare than he spends in it.

“What are you two going to do when he goes to Kindergarten next year?”

They’re in the backyard, as they typically are. As annoying as he finds paying for a program that Hank doesn’t honestly attend most days, he can’t complain that much. Hank is reading exceptionally well, having two adults’ undivided attention for long periods of time helps. There are side effects. He can read books on his own but he does occasionally do old people things.

Like grunt when he sits down.

And asks to drink everything out of a mug.

Derek can see the face Emily makes, knows how this conversation goes by default of how it’s gone a hundred times before. “No,” Derek says, flatly. “You can not pull him out of Kindergarten.”

Hotch looks down at Hank, the toddler curled up into his side with a picture book. “He doesn’t have to go to Kindergarten.”

Derek had made himself sick thinking about Hank’s perceived lack of support. He hadn’t anticipated this. The giant hammock Hotch put up in his backyard. Met for fall days just like this, large enough for Emily and Hotch lay on two separate ends. Hank in the middle of them, feet kicked up on Emily’s thighs like a little king. The bookshelf in Hotch’s old office lowest shelf full of children’s books. The car seat in his old pick-up truck. The go-gurts, applesauce squeeze drinks, and gummies in his kitchen cabinets.

“There are proven benefits to homeschooling,” Emily offers, eyes peeking up above her own book.

Morgan rolls his eyes, “and there are too Kindergarten as well.”

Hotch says nothing but the blank look, the slight glare, speaks for itself.

“I don’t want my four-year-old to act like an old person,” Morgan defends. Is it not bad enough he grunts when he bends down to get things? That he’s told Savannah his back hurts and he needs a heating pad? He’s four. He doesn’t need any of those things. “No offense,” he adds, very delayed. The worst part is that he was going to have to bring Hank here this afternoon anyways. He’s expecting a new roofer at his property on the other side of town and Hank gets too antsy to watch. Besides, Hank would much rather be here.

“Look!” Hank sits up, twisting and turning around so that he can show Hotch his book. Derek moves forward, about to fuss and warn him to gentle but Hank knows what to do. He spends every day with two old people, neither as limber as they once were. Covered in scars and trauma that have stolen mobility. He knows how to be excited and bouncy with them. So he’s careful even as he looks like a monkey climbing up the side of Hotch’s legs and hip to half sit on his stomach and turn his book around. “See?”

Hotch nods, smiling encouragingly. Hank’s new thing is spiders. Bugs are very age-appropriate but Emily and Hotch struggle to maintain a blind amount of interest. Especially when Hank brings them bugs, he’s so excited too. It’s adorable but Hotch is going to lose his mind if he has to let Hank crawl into his lap with one more spider.

“I’ll be back by six,” Morgan says. He kisses the top of Hank’s head, nodding his head when Hank shows him the enlarged picture of the spider in his book. “If not--”

“He’s fine here, no reason to rush around.”

Morgan nods, "love you, buddy."

Hank ignores him, just falls over onto his side. Squirming around until he's tucked against Hotch's side, smirking up at his father.

"Behave."

But the truth is, Hank always acts on his best behavior for Hotch.

#criminal minds #derek morgan #aaron hotchner #hank morgan

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kirsteninthesun · 3 years ago

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AG Headcanons

Here are my headcanons for the historicals (just the ones I know well enough):

Kaya becomes a talented horse breeder and trainer, willing to take risks that pay off. She has a daughter of her own. She sees much of the Northwest and learns many languages (literally too many to name). She becomes a sort of “fun aunt” who will tell you stories and let you get away with things, and always has a sense of humor. She tries to learn to bead but it doesn’t stick because she can’t sit still.

Felicity also works with horses her whole life, and in addition to raising a large family she provides veterinary care to local animals. She records her memories of the war with Elizabeth and while they don’t get famous, their story remains in print. While not an active abolitionist activist herself, she donates money to the cause and encourages her children to become abolitionists.

Josefina becomes a healer and lives in Santa Fe, where she lives and works. She marries and has children. She volunteers to go to rural areas to help impoverished people and brings her children with her so they can learn her trade. She continues with piano and often plays at church. She learns English, Navajo, and Apache to better communicate with her patients.

Kirsten considers becoming a teacher but meets a man and marries young, before going with him to Tacoma to log. In Tacoma, she spends time with local native communities and learns the languages, helping teach various immigrant and native children English casually. She continues to quilt. Britta lives with her and becomes a teacher herself. In her old age, Kirsten goes looking for Marta’s grave.

Addy also becomes a teacher, teaching until she marries and moves to New York, where she raises a family and sews in her spare time. She writes an account of her life that is published in a collection of stories and remains popular and in print. She is recorded on film talking about her experiences once. She learns Latin.

Samantha and Nellie attend college, where Nellie takes an interest in the classics and gets a graduate degree, and Samantha continues her interest in labor activism. She marries but doesn’t have children, though Nellie does, and instead becomes a donor and writer for women’s and labor rights. They both live out their lives in New York.

Rebecca goes into silent film and becomes an actress. She travels extensively, marries and has two boys, and writes fiction that is published. Though not famous per say, her face still crops up in films from her day and on old vintage calendars.

Kit writes and writes. Fiction, news, anything she sees, and she throws it at the wall until it sticks. A fictionalized account of a corrupt local government becomes popular and catapults her name into history. In the fifties, she weathers the Red Scare and writes a popular series of short stories satirizing it. She never marries, though rumors abound. ;)

Molly becomes a court reporter and is well liked by her colleagues. Smart and quick, she excels at her job and transfers up and out, working all around the country before settling down with a family, though still working part time. She loves the sixties style and attitudes, and experiences as much of the world as she can. She visits all the national parks and camps often. Later in life, when a child at her church is diagnosed with autism, she realizes that she was likely affected by it in her own childhood. She learns to ski. Eventually she settles in Chicago.

This is all I’m gonna do bc I’m not familiar enough with the others to really speculate. I wanted these to be a little more… realistic? Nothing wrong with it but I’m not a big fan of “Kit becomes a world famous hero” type headcanons and like to imagine the simpler ideas.

#agblr #american girl dolls #dollblr #kirsten larson #doll blog #doll collection #history #swedish #addy walker #molly mcintire #kit kittredge #rebecca rubin #kaya’aton’my #felicity #felicity merriman

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grokebaby · 3 years ago

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Summary of the eldritch angel story

Terminology masterpost

Central Characters

Heaven:

Lamera

ZZZ

Grandefel (Persecutor)

J'aimekiel

Ngah (High angel)

Kxxxtr (High angel)

Combfa (Caretaker)

Samuel (Angel in training) (not my character)

God's throne

Hell:

Deirdre (Persecutor)

Delilah (High demon)

Xerxes (High demon)

Hart (High demon)

Devoul

Limbo:

Godwatcher

Story summary/walkthrough under the cut

Our story kicks off when Lamera, J'aimekiel, ZZZ and Grandefel are all wondering what hell is like, since none of them (except Grandefel, who's lying about it) have ever been there. ZZZ is extremely curious by nature and decides to just go there because why not. Grandefel tries to resist and ZZZ calls her a coward (You can read this first part here, but it's not great quality imo)

About a day passes without much happening, until everyone hears a distress call from ZZZ. Ngah who's the mother of Lamera and ZZZ, scoops them out, whereupon everyone sees the sorry state the angel is in. Something bad and violent had happened in hell (You can read this part here, content warning for nonhuman gore)

We come back to the story not long after, with our two persecutors, Grandefel and Deirdre meeting secretly in limbo. Deirdre has news she's worried about but loses her chance to tell them when Ngah bursts into the scene, foaming at the mouth, demanding retribution for how ZZZ was treated down in hell. Grandefel is forced to leave and Ngah makes Deirdre escort her to speak to hells manager high judgement. Apparently ZZZ violated several rules upon entering hell and was generally very rude, driving some of Deirdre's friends to attack them on her behalf. Deirdre stayed compliant because she hasn't been feeling well lately and isn't fond of angels in general (except Grandefel). The explanation and lukewarm apology for what happened doesn't please Ngah and she decides to call on a high court case, aka essentially suing them. Hells high judgement has no option but to attend the case (You can read this part here)

After about an hour, hells high judgement along with Deirdre and a few punishers make their appearance in heaven, but not before J'aimekiel can wonder outloud about how empty heaven is. She tries to ask Lamera about why there's barely any angels but the high court case starts. Deirdre gets her apology in, but before it can be accepted properly by all high angels, Ngah directs the conversation elsewhere. She accuses Grandefel of "using her time unprofessionally", and starts trying to squeeze out something from both Persecutors. Delilah, Deirdre's sister, intervenes so the court won't dissolve to off topic accusations but Xerxes wants to hear what Ngah has to say. (You can read all that in more detail here)

After dancing around the topic with increasing frustration, Grandefel reveals that she and Deirdre are in a relationship. Ngah not-so-subtly expresses her disgust with this and makes a direct jab at Deirdre, revealing to everyone that she's pregnant. Since it's a surprise to everyone but Deirdre herself, the revelation is met with backlash. Ngah knows this because as a high angel she can sense angelic life, and because she has a habit of stalking keeping a very close eye on everyone around her. Now that everything has finally been outed, the court dissolves into arguing.

Most angels aside from Ngah and maybe Kxxxtr are actually pretty fine with this kind of crossover happening and Lamera would gladly step in to Grandefels defense but is held back in fear of Ngah's rage. J'aimekiel however isn't, and raises her voice from the crowd. She calls out Ngah for her hateful remarks and reminds everyone that she was born a demon but became an angel after, and if that is fine, this should also be fine, right? Ngah starkly disagrees and in vague terms makes it clear that J'aimekiels existence is only tolerated, and might be because they quote on quote don't have better options right now. J'aimekiel is quite distraught by this and Lamera tries to come to her defense but is shut down by Ngah.

After a painful few hours the court case finally draws to a close with some new rules put in place going forward. One of them being that only the persecutors can make cross visits regularly, since it's required for their job. If any high judgements want to make cross visits it needs to be agreed upon beforehand. This is to avoid all possible conflict. Ngah also makes it clear that, "if they ever survive birth", Grandefel and Deirdre's children must pick a side and that "it would be for the best" if they never knew what they really were, or who their parents were. Despite the backlash, she gets everyone to comply thanks to everyone still being a little confused about the whole ordeal, and Ngah promising to be their personal problem if the children act out of line.

Case closed, everyone goes home. Deirdre feels extremely isolated from everyone now. Grandefel is kept busy by being given alot of heaven-centric work. While not explicitly getting in trouble for it, it's heavily implied that Grandefel really shouldn't be seen with Deirdre again outside of work related situations. J'aimekiel also feels isolated from everyone now.

A few dreadful months later the children are born in hell with Delilah supporting her sister. There's three. One is confirmed an angel via her halo. When Grandefel hears about their birth she can't keep herself away from them anymore, and with her help the children are named. The oldest is Mihail, middle one Meredith and youngest Gabriel. They also make the difficult decision of who gets to live with who. Despite all Grandefel doesn't take the angel child with her, instead taking Gabriel who she thinks would fit in due to how he looks. The children are raised apart like this and don't get to meet their other parent, despite being aware of their existence.

Somewhere along the line, one of Lameras halos gets a crack, something that's painful and quite a big deal for an angel. It's on the collar halo. The crack is small enough that he manages to hide it from everyone, especially since his beard covers most of his neck from view anyway

About a year later things have mostly calmed back down again. Although there's now alot more people who hate Ngah. A certain rather ordinary demon named Devoul makes the news in hell, thanks to Lamera hearing about him from a mortal. The thing is that Devoul has been tricking mortals into working for him in exchange for superpowers and getting something they desperately want. He's been doing this under the guise of being "The Devil" who rules in hell. This is obviously unture and a trial ensues, but it's only kept to hell because nobody wants to involve heaven after last year's occurrence. It goes surprisingly smoothly, and a portion of the souls are reborn and the rest decide to continue on with their lives. One of them, Samuel, inspired to make up for his bad deeds, becomes an angel in training. Devoul is sentenced to 800+ years of tedious physical labor, case closed.

We resume to the story when in limbo, by pure happenstance, Devoul and Lamera bump into each other. They have a moment of "YOU" where Devoul manages to hit Lamera right in the mommy issues, making him drop all attempts at being nice. Devoul is taken aback by how much he unintentionally managed to rile up Lamera, knowing him to be one of the good™ angels. Devoul notices the crack in his halo and becomes curious, whilst also trying to pull up any shreds of decency he has. Lamera tries to deflect most of it and finds out Devoul is here to look for Godwatcher to ask some questions.

On their way to find them, the two talk over a few things and find themselves understanding each other better. Lamera still feels iffy about Devoul though, despite him trying to explain himself

They find Godwatcher together and ask some general questions about morality and the nature of angelhood. Godwatcher can't really give them any one correct answer, rather than "What you think is good or bad depends on what you value in this world. No angel is born being better and no demon is born being worse". The two mull over some of the things they've heard and talk about ""God"". Devoul keeps asking Lamera increasingly difficult questions that cause him to doubt his own worldview and dig into the fact that Ngah is absolutely not a good angel. This causes Lameras halo to crack all the way through, causing him pain and distress. He's deeply afraid of Ngah's reaction if she were to see him like this, and feels like he'll be in trouble. Devoul, having gained sympathy for Lamera, feels guilty that he caused this and tries to offer various ways to help, none of which end up helpful. Figuring that he'll have the next 800ish years of being punished anyway, he decides to dig his grave deeper by pretending to attact Lamera. As a cover up for what broke the halo, so Lamera himself won't be blamed since it obviously broke in conjunction with his trust in his mother.

Speak of which, Ngah hears them and scoops up both. Right on time too, since Deirdre was just about to retrieve Devoul to do his work. Up in heaven, Ngah Is "Dissapointed but not surprised" that Lameras halo broke. She lifts him up by it, intending to fix it, but being manhandled by his mother, through an injured body part, distresses Lamera alot. It doesn't sit right with Devoul and he tries talking to Ngah, who dismisses him as a speck of dust not worth listening to, and they dissolve into arguing. The stress of it all causes Lameras collar halo to finally shatter and fall off completely. He deflects any further attempts to fix it, and tries to confront Ngah about her behavior. This infuriates Ngah who then accuses Devoul of corrupting her child. More arguing ensues, during which Devoul uses his special power of reading people's memories to briefly look at Ngah. He sees her attempted murder and banishing of their third high angel who hasn't been seen in a long time. Apparently heaven had a big inner conflict some time back, which Ngah resolved this way. Their current low number of staff is due to a huge chunk of the angels leaving since they supported Ezekiels cause more.

Ngah, despite wanting to sweep it under the rug, doesn't deny that she did all this, which upsets Lamera even more. He and Ngah argue. Lamera hits her where it hurts (insulting her divinity) and she's about to possibly get violent, when Devoul casts a spell that paralyses her physically. As she's a powerful high angel it won't hold her for long, and the duo flee heaven

Devoul and Lamera hide out and rest at the foot of a mountain on earth. They go over everything and get to know each other better. Lamera is surprised that Devoul would care this much about what's happening upstairs to which he replies "Hey I still have morals" - "Except for that one time". Their bonding is interrupted by Deirdre who caught up to them finally, intending to take Devoul back. Lamera resists, to her surprise, and they explain the situation. Deirdre sympathises with them heavily but is unsure if they can do much. She promises to speak to the high judgements about this all anyway, as a start. Lamera decides to try talking things out with the high angels. Devoul makes a spell that allows him and Lamera to call and talk to each other just in case. The duo separate after sleeping through the night at that mountain.

Heaven: Lamera goes to talk to Kxxxtr about everything he's found out. Kxxxtr expresses regret over letting everything go on like this, especially since she doesn't necessarily agree with how Ngah works things around here. Witnessing the murder attempt has been traumatic for them, hence they stayed compliant out of fear. Kxxxtr does also make clear that whatever Lamera tries to do to change things in heaven, he'll have their support. Ngah who's been listening in on them, bursts in angrily, accusing them of conspiring against her. Kxxxtr tries to get past their fear and stand against Ngah, who proceeds to purposefully trigger them in order to get them to stand down. Instead of backing out, Kxxxtr strikes Ngah in a bout of rage. Regretting the move immediately, they send Lamera up to the higher heavens to safety, and so he could talk to the highest power: God's throne.

Hell: Devoul goes to his house to look at his spellbook in case there'd be anything useful, while Deirdre proceeds to talk to the high judgements. Before he can really find anything, Lamera calls him to tell that Ngah and Kxxxtr are at each other's throats and he's afraid and not sure what to do. Devoul helps him calm down and barely gets to explain what he's doing before the call forcefully disconnects with Lamera notifying how beautiful God's throne is (using both he and it pronouns). Devoul has just enough time to find a spell that will take away a big chunk of power from a powerful individual, before Deirdre comes to him in a rush. One of the high judgements, Xerxes, takes things related to Ngah very seriously and has decided to go fight her. It's not entirely clear if there's ulterior motives, other than wanting to fight her. Deirdre and Devoul head to an opening where they find the three: Delilah chewing out Xerxes for throwing his staff at the heavens, and Hart snickering in the background.

While waiting for the staff to hopefully return, Devoul decides to call Lamera back just in case. At first it feels like the call is forcefully blocked and directed away but eventually he responds. His answers are cryptic and he sounds overall very out of it. At one point, he starts talking entirely differently, way louder and with a completely different voice, asking Devoul if the staff should hit something. He makes it clear that it should definitely not hit anyone or anything and the staff gracefully floats back into Xerxes' hand. The call disconnects. Devoul is worried and decides he really needs to get up there. Luckily for him, despite Delilah's efforts to stop him, Xerxes is about to throw again. Impressed by Devouls determination, he puts the little demon onto the staff and throws it. This time the throw is alot less coordinated due to Delilah physically restraining his hand. Devoul however makes it to where Ngah has currently dropped Kxxxtr down from the cloud. They have a brief confrontation before Devoul uses the powersucking spell on her, causing her to also fall off the cloud. The spell takes a physical toll on him, partially by causing him to feel extremely hungry. All of Ngah's now removed power manifests as an orb. He hopes Lamera is okay and tries to look for him, and is suddenly lifted up to where he is, as if on command.

He enters the throne room where Lamera looks.. Off. He's extremely swollen, like a balloon blown to it's limits, and his entire face is engulfed in flames. He doesn't respond to Devoul trying to make sure he's okay. He only speaks in that different voice that's clearly not suited to his vocal chords. In the background Devoul sees God's throne, mouth moving slowly. He has a hard time really registering the Throne's physical form into something he can comprehend. There's separate elements (Crystals and gems, large mouth and eyes, galactic matter streaming in and out of it) but his brain can't bring them together in his head. Despite this he addresses the Throne With "What the fuck did you do him? (Lamera)". The throne proceeds to ignore his questions and attempts to take the orb from him through Lameras body, since the entity itself can't move much at all. Devoul is unwilling to hand it over until God's throne explains that now, since Kxxxtr is heavily injured, and Ngah technically not a high angel (in terms of strength), they need a new one. He exposits how He was just going to make Lamera into a high angel instead but having Devoul enter with the orb brought another option to the table. Devoul hands over the orb, which God's throne takes into it's mouth and Lamera falls limp, now presumably free from it's control. After both making sure they're okay, they exit the throne room and take a moment to collect themselves and pass out from the exhaustion.

Meanwhile Kxxxtr fell down to limbo, bleeding, where they're still laying, unable to move. Xerxes, who partially went to look for his staff, and partially to punt Ngah in the gut, discovers her. Kxxxtr is terrified at first but Xerxes offers her his armor, to cover for her leaking insides. She's taken aback by the kind gesture and they just sorta awkwardly hang out there while Kxxxtr explains what happens. Xerxes escorts her back later. Ngah has turned into a giant three headed serpent, and is having an episode somewhere, enraged and miserable at being demoted. Samuel and J'aimekiel are shook by the commotion and are trying to figure out what's going on. Xerxes finds Ngah on his way back and they start fighting (he still hasn't gotten his staff back).

Upon waking up, Devoul and Lamera lament over the whole mess. Samuel and J'aimekiel find the two and want an explanation. Devoul and Samuel aren't thrilled at seeing each other again. After a thoroughly uncomfortable interaction they part ways, Lamera leaving to clean up things upstairs and Devoul returning to his punishment work downstairs, dreading all the more trouble he might be in now. He stumbles upon Xerxes with Ngah in a chokehold, and doesn't even recognize her. Ngah is now even more pissed at him, but with some help he realizes who she is. Xerxes seems intent on killing her but Devoul tries to stop him, knowing Lamera would be destroyed by something like that happening. They heavily discuss it before concluding that Ngah really should answer for her crimes instead of getting the easy way out. She's locked up in the Void District until she can play nice again (and until they can figure out a proper punishment for her). Xerxes and Devoul chat on their way back, and Xerxes, still very impressed by the little demon's spirit, offers to recruit him. Devoul, although surprised, accepts the offer. He still has alot of punishment work left but at least he'd get to do it in consistent company.

About a day passes and everyone is almost getting to settle in, when something strange captures the attention of all the angels. God's throne is now finished making them a new High angel - how exciting! The new angel, instructed by the Throne, fetches and throws Xerxes' staff right back to him. They then backflip out of the high heavens to meet everyone, making a thoroughly.. Interesting first impression, to say the least.. The angels have a hard time swallowing that a demon - Devoul specifically, kickstarted the creation of their new High angel. Samuel nopes out, Grandefel heavily considers asking for a refund, and the new angel, not seeing anything wrong with any of this, hops down to hell to meet their "Daddy". Devoul is taken aback by the news but welcomes his "child" with open arms. He with Lameras help, proceed to name them Terjey, since God's throne didn't give them a name (which is very unusual). Heaven returns to cleaning up the mess and dealing with the staff shortage and Devoul returns to his work.

And that was everything that happened up to this point, the present day.

The end - for now!

#eldritch angel #My writings #Lore #Ref #No way I'm tagging every single character here #Original stories #Oc stories #my ocs #Wowowow applaud me I did it #And from now on everything is hypothetical. This is it. The whole story up to the latest point.#Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaa #I may write little snippets of backstory or whatever the characters are doing but not too heavily #I need a break hah #Lmk if you read this because I'm dying to know what you thought

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tf2-hellhole · 4 years ago

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May i have some retirement hc like the mercs ( and ms. Pauling) settled down with thier s/o maybe started a family and just enjoying life

Sorry this is like a whole essay, I just already had some personal head canons for this so a lot of them are in here

I always imagined that Mann Co. is forcefully closed a little while after the comics and the mercs are forced into retirement, so that headcanon kinda feeds into this

Scout:

Scout’s sad that he’s done with mercenary work, but he’s excited to see what his future holds.

He wants to have a bunch of kids, but nowhere near as many as his mother did. He knows his mother did her best for her kids, but it was hard for her to give all eight of her boys the attention they needed, as well as work several jobs to support them, and he understands that. So he wants to have like 3-5 kids.

He has his S/O move to Boston with him and auditions for and joins the Boston Red Sox baseball team. He plays for them for a few years and becomes one of the best players the team has ever had. He never says it, but he dedicates every game to his family, his S/O especially.

After he retires from that, he coaches a team at the high school he attended. He sucks at it at first but eventually becomes an excellent coach and his team wins many awards. All of his children are big baseball fans like him and all of them have been on his team at some point

Soldier:

Soldier honestly doesn’t know what to do with himself. He wants to go off to fight in Vietnam, but now he has his S/O to take care of! He can’t just leave them alone!

So for a while he doesn’t work (he doesn’t need to, as the mercenaries were paid a lot over the years) to think it over. In the meantime, they consider having kids; He doesn’t want many, only about 1-3

But then he realizes what he wants. He just wants to be with his family. Part of the American Dream is to have a happy, healthy family, though that’s not the only reason he wants to be with them. He does genuinely love them and would lay down his life for his S/O or his children.

He actually never works again (highkey because no one will hire him) and uses his savings to raise his family and enjoy his retirement with his S/O.

Pyro:

Pyro will live wherever their S/O wants to live, they don’t care at all.

They never get another job, as they don’t need one nor want one. They just want to spend the rest of their life with their S/O.

Pyro doesn’t care about having kids, but if their S/O wants to adopt some, they’ll let their S/O adopt as many as they want.

They just live out their lives going on adventures and exploring the world around them. It’s a very carefree and joyful lifestyle for them.

Demo:

For a long while, Demo is kind of depressed after losing his job. That job had meant so much to him. It’s mostly because of the emphasis his family has always placed on keeping multiple jobs, though it’s also because he will miss his friends dearly. He needs lots of encouragement from his friends and S/O for him to get up and find a job. He’s actually very qualified, so he could find several jobs in demolition for construction companies and things like that. So he finds a few jobs in Scotland (he insists on having multiple) and brings his S/O there to live with him.

Demo absolutely wants to raise kids with his S/O, and he wants around 2-4. He’s totally fine with adopting.

He goes to rehab to stop drinking before they have kids, though. He relapses a few times but eventually never touches alcohol again. He and his S/O are so proud of his accomplishment.

He, over time, becomes very successful selling and using his bombs, and his family lives in comfort.

Demo never realized how unfulfilled he was when he was working for Mann Co. he’s so happy he was able to change his life for the better and spend the rest of it with his wonderful S/O

Heavy:

Heavy immediately buys a home near the one he bought for his family in America, and asks his S/O to come with him.

He probably takes a job in manual labor, and publishes a few successful books over the years

He really wants to have a huge family, like 6-10 kids, but he feels like he’s too old to be having children, which makes him really upset. He doesn’t say anything but his S/O knows him like the back of their hand and can tell how he’s feeling. They suggest adopting children. He’s a little hesitant at first because he wanted his kids to be biologically his but he eventually falls in love with several of the kids they meet at the adoption agency and realizes being related doesn’t matter. They adopt the kids and Heavy loves every single one of his kids more than anything and he calls them his cubs.

He devotes his life and his work to his family and would lay down his life for any of them.

He goes into a depressive state after his mother passes away of old age. It takes a lot of work but his sisters, S/O, and children eventually pull him from this state, and he’s eternally grateful for that

Probably cries when he meets his first grandchild. He doesn’t sob or anything but tears are running down his face and he has the biggest smile anyone has ever seen on him

Engie:

Engie wants to own a farm more than anything. He wants to go back to Texas but if his S/O wants to go anywhere else, he’ll go if they can find a place for him to have a farm. They’re able to make money off of the productions of their farm, but Engie also continues to invent and makes money selling his creations as well

Engie also wants a big family, somewhere around 4-8 kids, and he’s cool with adopting if they can’t have the kids themselves. He wants at least one of his children to become an engineer, though he won’t complain if none of them pick that career path.

He dedicates the rest of his life to doing what he loves; Inventing and spending time with his loved ones. Even if he spends all day in his workshop, he always makes sure to spend the rest of the day with his family and spends a lot of extra time with his S/O. His S/O is his main encouragement when he’s having trouble with an invention. They always make him feel better about it when he’s feeling really frustrated.

Medic:

Medic doesn’t want to go back to Germany, he wants to stay in the States with his S/O. He sets up a small doctor's office to make money; The only reason he doesn’t experiment on his patients is because his S/O told him not to

Medic isn’t interested in children and also thinks he’s too old to be having kids, but if his S/O wants some, he only wants 1-2. He’d prefer his kid(s) to be biologically his even though he’d get a little worried considering his age, but he isn’t against adopting. He makes sure his kid(s) receive the BEST education and are able to pursue any career they want. Like Engineer, he’d like at least one of his kids to follow his career path but doesn’t mind if they don’t.

He spends a lot of time traveling with his S/O once the kid(s) are independent; He enjoyed travelling when he was a mercenary and wants to explore the few corners of the world he didn’t visit when he worked for Mann Co.

Sniper:

Sniper, in all honesty, wants to get as far away from Australia as he can. It reminds him too much of his childhood and his parents. So he’ll go wherever his S/O wants to go, as long as it’s not Australia. He still occasionally goes back with them just to visit his parents’ graves.

He probably continues doing assassin work, though sometimes he gets a little salty about the fact that it doesn’t pay as well as working for Mann Co.

He lives in his camper when he’s out working (he’s often gone for a few days to a week), but he absolutely buys a house for his S/O and leaves them there while he’s gone so he doesn’t put them in danger. He makes sure to call his S/O when he can while he’s gone, at least once a day.

He doesn’t think he could be a good dad and doesn’t want to raise a child because of this fear, but if his S/O really wants a kid he’ll give in. Like Medic, he only wants 1-2. But once the kids are with them he grows more confident over time. He still knows he’s not perfect but he knows he’s learning every day and thinks he’s doing a decent job.

Once he’s older, people don’t hire him as much because there are younger snipers with better eyes and quicker reflexes. It hits him like a truck and he’s really distraught over it for a while. But he realizes that he has tons of savings now and can focus on enjoying the rest of his life with his S/O.

Spy:

Spy wants to take his S/O back to France with him. If they don’t want to live there, he’ll complain a lot so they compromise with spending half the year there and half the year where his S/O wants to live. He has a ridiculously fancy home in France, and will buy an equally fancy one where his S/O wants to live.

Like Sniper, he continues working as an independent assassin, but he spends much more time away from his S/O than Sniper. Spy is still really terrified of commitment because he doesn’t want to put them in danger, so he makes himself feel better by staying away from his S/O for a while. It takes him a while to work up the courage to stick around more often.

He gets really scared if his S/O asks him about kids. Like, he wants to run away and never come back, he’s so scared. He doesn’t think he could handle a child. He tells his S/O that his age worries him, though that’s not the actual reason. He’s scared of the responsibility, and he doesn’t want a child to have a father like him. He’s let down the many children that he fathered throughout his life and he feels like he’s gonna let down his S/O and the child if they have one. But when he sees his S/O so excited about the idea of having a family, he gives in. He only wants 1 child, and wants to adopt.

At first, he’s kind of cold to the child. But as he spends time with them he grows attached to them fairly quickly. His S/O can’t help but smile when he holds the child close or smiles and talks to them over dinner if they’re an older kid. He starts to spend even more time at home to bond with the child and eventually becomes an excellent parent

Like Medic, he wants to travel a ton once the child is independent. He’s also seen most of the world and does it more because he wants to show his S/O the places he’s been.

Ms. Pauling:

Ms. Pauling is absolutely devastated when she loses her job. Her work was practically her whole life and now she doesn’t know what to do. She’s so shell-shocked that she needs her S/O’s guidance to find a new job. She finds an accounting job since she did a lot of accountant-type work while at Mann Co. but also does independent assassin work occasionally.

She never thought about having kids and panics when her S/O suggests having kids. She trained in killing people and hiding bodies, not raising kids. She does want to have 1-2 kids but doesn’t feel she’s ready yet. They do have/adopt 2 kids eventually, and it turns out she’s an organized chaos type of mom.

In the end, Ms. Pauling and her S/O live a pretty normal domestic life, though they sometimes go on weird adventures with some of the mercs when they visit.

#tf2 #teamfortress2 #tf2 scout #tf2 soldier #tf2 pyro #tf2 demoman #tf2 heavy #tf2 engineer #tf2 medic #tf2 sniper #tf2 spy #tf2 x reader #tf2 headcanons

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valentinax · 4 years ago

Text

[ VALENTINA ALVAREZ. 30. CIS WOMAN. SHE / HER ] is here! They’ve lived in Silver Lake for [ 12 YEARS ] and are originally from [ PASADENA, CA ]. They are a [ BARTENDER AT DUNGEON & YOGA INSTRUCTOR AT 24/7 FITNESS ] and in their downtime love [ PLAYING VIDEO GAMES ] and [ UPCYCLING CLOTHING ]. They look a lot like [ EMERAUDE TOUBIA ] and live [ IN OASIS APTS ].

content warnings: mentions of alcohol and underage drinking, pregnancy and labor, allusions to nsfw content.

timeline.

december 10, 1990 -- valentina elena maroun is born. half-sister to four older brothers, her biological father misses her birth and is almost entirely absent throughout valentina’s youth.

1990 to 2008 -- valentina spends her formative years in pasadena, ca with her family. during this period, her mother gets back with her previously separated husband ( valentina’s brothers’ father ) for good. valentina considers this man to be her real dad, and at the age of 9 valentina’s surname is changed to his: alvarez, matching the rest of their family. upon her high school graduation at 17 years old, she prepares to move to silver lake with two of her friends: they’re both to attend usc, while valentina attends ucla on a partial athletic scholarship for softball.

2008 to 2010 -- spends her first two years of college doing exactly what most expect: going out with friends, experimenting, drinking whatever she can get her hands on, and so on and so forth. she still takes her studies and softball seriously, and works part-time at paco’s tacos in silver lake during this time.

2010 to 2011 -- falls pregnant at 19 and gives birth to her daughter, rosa torres, shortly after turning 20. has taken the fall and spring semesters of this school year off to prepare for her daughter’s birth, as well as to be home during rosa’s infancy. has a strenuous, lengthy and difficult labor. it’s under pressure from her parents that valentina pursues a romantic relationship with rosa’s father, lucas torres, for rosa’s sake. by 2012 however, they come to agree a platonic relationship coparenting works best for everyone involved.

2011 to 2014 -- moves in with her brother in santa monica, bringing rosa along with her, to return to school and cut her commute in half. has lost her athletic scholarship, yet earns a partial academic one. valentina relies heavily on family to help out with rosa during this period and has reached out to her biological father for financial aid. their relationship is strained, but on the mend. upon her graduation, valentina gets a job as a server at maria sol on the santa monica pier.

2015 to 2016 -- though valentina doesn’t want to, she relents to moving back home so rosa can be closer to her father. valentina reluctantly moves back in with her parents and enters a job tending bar at dungeon.

2016 to 2018 -- unable to stand living at home, valentina convinces another one of her brothers to let her move in with him in silver lake. gets a second job as a yoga instructor at 24/7 fitness. she cuts back her hours at the club when in 2018, she manages to land yet another job: as a project-based writer for buzzfeed reviewing and researching sex toys. this quickly leads to her brother encouraging ( read: telling ) her to move out when he’s put in the uncomfortable position of, to put it as cleanly as possible, hearing her working.

2018 to 2021 -- valentina finally moves out into a three bedroom apartment at the oasis with long-time friend, helena, for a roommate. still works part-time at dungeon with hopes to quit soon, and continues to teach yoga and contribute to buzzfeed.

personality traits.

alluring, assertive, vehement -- valentina is a very passionate person and this translates into her sensuality. she’s never really been afraid to go after the things she wants, whether it’s in her personal or professional life. in personal relationships, valentina isn’t ashamed to make the first move and can be quite flirty at times. unfortunately, valentina has yet to be in a relationship that’s lasted longer than a year or two. while she does want to settle down, she can be fickle and unsure of what ( or who ) she wants.

candid, effervescent, resilient -- in general, valentina is a person who values honesty and respects people who tell the truth when it’s most difficult. her keen attitude on brutal honesty doesn’t, however, get in the way of her easygoing nature: it’s not hard to get along with her and she’s incredibly outspoken and outgoing. of course, this may rub people the wrong way at times.

egocentric, erratic, frivolous -- it may or may not be obvious that valentina has a penchant for changing her mind. she does her best to think of others first, especially so when it comes to her daughter, but she’s entirely susceptible to her own whims. she’s impulsive and seems to lack purpose. and, ultimately, it scares her to consider that she’s never known what she wants to do with her life: so she doesn’t stop to think.

recalcitrant, resentful, rigid -- valentina is a fan of grudges. she tends to hers like pets. she’s often stubborn and unwavering and entirely unwilling to admit when she’s in the wrong. fully the type to never forgive, never forget, but just move on. and perhaps it comes from being the youngest, but she’s also known for being pouty and upset when things don’t go her way.

miscellaneous headcanons.

for about 2 years beginning when she was 25, valentina was apart of a roller derby team in los angeles. given that the pronunciation of her nickname valé sounds so close to valley, she quickly adopted valley hurl as her derby name. she eventually quit due to no longer having the time to attend practices.

she still roller skates to this day and, a year ago, blew up on tiktok ( along with her roommate, the one who initially put her on to skating ) when she posted a video of herself skating and dancing down the street. she’s since deleted previous videos and curated her entire tiktok feed to focus solely on her roller skating.

her social media totals: 1.8m tiktok followers, 178k instagram followers, 2k twitter followers. most of these were gained within the past year and she’s certainly not famous by any means, though she has been able to make money off sponsored ads on her instagram.

she’s very into fitness! she played soccer growing up and still loves a good game of softball, she loves running, taking various fitness classes, etc. and on the mention of sports, she also loves going to dodger games and watching sunday night football.

has considered streaming on twitch but ultimately decided she doesn’t have the time to commit to that sort of endeavor. also has considered starting a podcast. sort of a jack of all trades, master of none.

case in point: got into upcycling clothes a few years ago. as a result, got into sewing and began to go thrifting more frequently. briefly sold stuff on depop before quitting that endeavor a month or so into it -- now she mainly upcycles pieces for herself and her friends, as gifts for people, etc.

has a few tattoos ( tbd ) that are easy to cover up and generally only visible when she’s wearing certain clothing. her mother and grandparents were disappointed when they found out but are okay with them now.

is actually a pretty damn good singer! her entire family is. at family parties, you’ll often catch them getting into karaoke or clearing out room somewhere for a dance floor. it’s not unusual for them to egg you on to join in.

on that note, a big part of valentina’s enjoyment comes from this type of fun. even since having a child she’s never necessarily cut back on going out -- whether it’s to nightclubs, dive bars, karaoke nights, concerts, anything -- and has made some technically irresponsible choices. still makes them to this day. she’s not perfect by any means. she’s learned to be more conscientious over the past decade, however.

ultimately, valentina struggles with motherhood: she does the best she can and although her parents are great people, she wants to make different choices than them. there’s a lot to be said about how she dealt with parenthood at first and how she still struggles with it now, but the short version literally is this: she’s trying.

is afraid of the dark... like very. checks under the bed and in the closet at night to this day. likely stems from the various pranks her brothers played on her as a kid.

currently does not eat noodles. after a conversation with her daughter about how noodles look like worms, valentina agreed to abstain from eating them out of solidarity. is hoping her daughter will get over this aversion soon because valentina loves noodles.

#slintro #one ✯ character study.#i know this is long so like sincere thanks if u read lmaooo.

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writtenjewels · 4 years ago

Text

At the Opera

(inspired by a scene in Ken Follett’s “Fall of Giants”)

He knew he'd surprised Maxwell by suggesting they go to the opera. Maxwell was of course a fan of the theater, but it was clear he hadn't expected Jacob to be one as well. Especially since attending the opera required one to dress in finery. Yet here they both sat in a box seat listening to the opera playing out below.

The last time Jacob attended the opera he'd been a child, and had come with his sister and grandmother. His father was skeptical at the time that Jacob would be able to sit still, but Jacob did through the whole performance. Something about the drama and the music captured his attention. Casting a glance to Maxwell, he knew he'd enjoy it even more now with someone who understood theater on a technical level at his side.

For the first few numbers they both sat with polite attentiveness. But then came a song that swelled with power, and Jacob thoughtlessly reached for Maxwell. His hand grazed the man's leg and stopped there. He didn't dare look to see the older man's reaction. Slowly Jacob moved his hand down to Maxwell's knee to squeeze, then up to his thigh. He dared to look and saw that Maxwell's attention was still firmly on the performers, though his eyes did look a bit brighter than usual.

Am I really doing this? It seemed so, as Jacob slid his hand even farther up to nudge Maxwell's crotch. He felt Maxwell twitch a bit under his touch. Jacob swallowed hard and hoped that the light wouldn't expose his blush too much. He moved his hand so it was pressed firmly between Maxwell's legs, and then he rubbed.

“Ah!” The noise escaped Maxwell's lips. The older man coughed and said, “This is a good part,” trying to excuse his gasp. Jacob couldn't help the smile that spread across his lips. He wasn't sure what had possessed him to start this, but now he had he wanted to see it through.

He kept his eyes on the stage; he thought if he caught Maxwell's eyes, he might stop. It was enough to hear the man's breathing get more and more labored as Jacob's hand stroked and gripped through the material of the trousers. Now and then another noise would slip out that Maxwell tried to disguise as a thoughtful hum or a noise of pleasure in the performance. Maxwell's cock was getting hard, straining against the confines of his trousers. Jacob wanted to look but he kept his eyes forward. No, the risk wasn't in stopping, but in doing more. If he saw Maxwell's expression Jacob might want to kiss him. He might loosen the trousers and pull Maxwell's cock out.

His hand moved faster and squeezed harder, and in response he felt Maxwell shift in his seat. The music below them was swelling and Jacob tried to work Maxwell so his climax came at the same time. Jacob felt the man jerk roughly and he couldn't resist looking as the ecstasy of an orgasm swept over Maxwell's face. It took all of Jacob's strength to hold himself back from kissing Maxwell then-- to help in muffling the cry, of course. Luckily the singers below did a good enough job of drowning him out.

Maxwell slumped a bit in his seat when it was done, sighing. He lifted Jacob's hand from his crotch and kissed it. Jacob's fingers twitched a bit in the other man's grip.

I really shouldn't have done that, he thought. Now he had a good idea of what Maxwell's cock felt like, and he would no be able to get it out of his head. Of course Maxwell only added to the problem by pressing his lips to Jacob's skin. Another thing Jacob would keep thinking about and wanting to feel again.

“Is this how you usually attend the opera, my dear?” Maxwell asked him.

“Of course not. I just...” He didn't know how to explain, because he didn't even know why he started it. “I just thought 'why not'.” As expected, the words made Maxwell laugh in delight. His gaze was fond but burning and those lips were curled in a wicked smile.

The spell was broken by intermission. Jacob pulled his hand out of Maxwell's grip and moved to get up. Maxwell did the same but was quick to catch the younger man and force their eyes to meet.

“Don't forget, my dear,” the older man growled, “there is a second act.”

#jacob frye #maxwell roth #rothfrye

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eleanorbloom · 4 years ago

Text

When You’re Ready Ch. 08

Pairing: Bryce Lahela x f! MC (Eleanor Bloom) x Ethan Ramsey.

Word Count: 4.5k

Warning: Angst, cursing.

Summary: Bryce has decided to let go Eleanor because she’s in love with Ethan Ramsey. But a turn in her relationship with the attending might change Bryce’s plans.

A/N: To the people who still is reading this story, thank you! Things are going to get juicy from now on, so I hope you are all prepared! (And I hope things in the book get really juicy too. I’m still recovering from last week’s chapter omg. My heart will never be the same after what Ethan told to MC :( (And I don’t even want to think about Bryce. My babyyyyyyyyyyyyy is so precious!)

Well, well, well. Hope you enjoy today’s chapter!

Taglist @utterlyinevitable @shanzay44 @choicesficwriterscreations @laiba-the-person @starrystarrytrouble @lahellacute @lucy-268 @aylamreads @binny1985 @romewritingshop

Let me know if you wanna be added to my taglist!

________

Chapter 8: Me cuesta tanto olvidarte.

Y aunque fui yo quien decidió que ya no más (And even though it was me who decided we were through)

Y no me canse de jurarte que no habrá segunda parte (And I didn't tire of swearing to you that there wouldn't be a second chance)

Me cuesta tanto olvidarte (It's so hard for me to forget you)

As much as he tried to avoid that moment, there he was, both feet on the grounds of Boston Logan International Airport. After two months in the Amazon, he was back at the place he wanted so much to escape, only to return with empty hands, with his personal mission failed.

His heart was feeling like there were never eight weeks since he left Boston, and was aching as much as the night they said goodbye. He had left for nothing. He wanted a reset, but he wasn't sure if that's what he got there.

Even if he tried every day to get her off his head, the most nonsensical things would remind him of her.

The sparkling eyes of the children seemed attached to the memories of her giving him the shiniest smiles he had ever seen.

The carefree nature of a young woman would remind him of her youthful spirit, a trait he had grown to appreciate since the moment he knew her, but that he had failed to preserve in the last months, due to his erratic attitude towards her.

And if there was nothing that reminded him of her during the day, there would always be a sparkle at the end of the day, just about to sleep, that would explode in his mind like a firework. Whether it be the feeling of her hands touching his face, his hair, his bare chest; or the feeling of her soft lips giving him life after a searing kiss.

Whether it be her amber eyes illuminating the darkness of his mind and waking him up to a trance of vivid memories and feelings of happiness and joy. Vivid memories of something that were long gone and that couldn’t be back; or her laugh invading his ears and making him jolt as if it was the painful hallucination of a schizophrenic mind, and swear she was just laughing by her side when the truth was they were thousands of miles away.

Some nights he would toss and turn in bed, wondering what would she be doing; if he had broken her more than he was aware; if what he had done was right; if all this was really about her or about his fears and the ablaze belief that he would never be worthy of her because he could never give her everything she deserved. Wondering if all this was always about the fact that since he was a child, he never felt worthy of love.

He honestly couldn’t know.

He didn’t know how to face a truth that had been carrying his whole adult life, and he wasn’t sure it was now the time to explore those feelings. It didn’t make sense now.

Some other nights he would lay remembering her, but the tiredness would be like morphine to his mind, sending him to sleep just as his head would touch the pillow. The memories of her wouldn’t haunt him like a ghost all night, the guilt wouldn’t eat him alive, there would only be a full night’s sleep, with physical recovery but with the same burden on his mind.

After three weeks, however, he had convinced himself that he had done the right thing. That she would eventually move on, that she would let him in the past and all this bad road would be over soon. But the hollowness somewhere inside him reminded him every time, that it wasn’t what he wanted, that he didn’t want it that way.

There was another way, but he was a coward.

Deep inside, he was hoping that the distance between them wouldn't make an effect like he intended to. He wanted it to fail. That her love was stronger than that. That that strongness was the proof he needed to push himself towards her, to fight for her, to hold her and never let her go again.

But then he would remember that all that he had been doing the last months, was for her, and only to protect her. That this self-sabotage would only damage her career. He couldn’t let that happen.

Ethan was having dinner at the ranch in the company of the owner, a Colombian elder woman who had spent her entire life receiving tourists that came to the rainforest from all places, and that had taught her the basics in various languages to communicate with them, English above all.

She had observed him for weeks. He noticed he was taciturn, thoughtful, that would never involve in small talk, so she had decided to respect his privacy and his love for silent meals. But he looked too troubled that night to ignore it.

“Are you in love, doctor?”—The woman asked, interrupting the dissection of his own thoughts.

“I beg your pardon?”—He replied, a bit startled for the intromission.

“I have lived long enough to know, by the look in your eyes, that you are in love. And that you would do anything to deny it, but it’s a stupid try, mi niño.”

He remained silent.

“I know you the yankees only care about work and money. You as a doctor are more human than others because you are here,”—She splayed her arms in the air, trying to sum up in a single gesture the greatness of the Amazon— “but for the same reason, you deprive yourself of the more important things in life as family and love.”

“Saving lives is the more important thing to me.”

“I know that. You have no family, no partner because your job goes first. But you are in love and I bet you are keeping the person you love away from you. Maybe that’s the reason why you are here, in the first place.”

“I didn’t know people in the Amazon were diviners.”

“We are not, but I have lived enough to see too many people coming here to forget, and that had failed.”

Ethan stared at her, thoughtful, not even sure if he would address her accusations.

“So, I am right?”

There was no point in denying. He would be gone in three weeks and then he wouldn’t see her again. He wasn’t risking anything.

“Yes, you are.”—He finally admitted.

“And Medicine has not taught you anything, doctor?”

“What do you mean?”

“You see life and death every day. You know the value of life and how easy it goes. Being a doctor is a tough job, but as someone who knows about the meaning of life and death more than any other person, you don’t seem to put into practice everything you have learned: To live and love ”

“It’s not that simple”

“It is simple. You have no idea how simple it is. I only hope you don’t learn it the hard way, when you lose your chance. I have seen it so many times, you wouldn’t believe me.”

The friendly silence joined the tabled again, leaving Ethan more pensive than before.

Maybe the elder woman was right, but Ethan was never a man of sentimentalism, of searching the meaning in things. He only wanted to seek the truth in life, how things were based only on facts. And the truth in this situation was that he had to stay away from Eleanor to protect her reputation and her career. There was no point in trying to find an alternative answer to that. The truth about them was absolute.

Still, he couldn’t stop thinking of her words.

Ethan force himself to come back to reality as entered in the baggage reclaim area of the airport. Once it was all collected, he took a cab to his apartment.

Once he was there, he took a shower, unpacked his luggage, and drop off his clothes from the trip at the laundry service on his way to the hospital.

The sun was already set when he met Naveen at his office.

“Ethan, my boy, I’m so happy you’re back safe”—He greeted giving him a hug that Ethan replied coyly.

“Good to see you, Naveen. How have you been?”

“Incredibly well, the weather has been so nice. And my position as Chief gives me more time to enjoy the sun, so I’m incredibly well with the amount of vitamin D I have absorbed these past weeks.”

“I can see it. You’re more joyful than usual.”

“Not just because of the sun, but because you’re back. I sincerely missed you, my friend”

Ethan nodded in a way that Naveen interpreted as he felt the same.

“How was Manaus, well, and the rainforest in general?”

Ethan updated him about his trip, describing the streets and highlights of the city in detail, and after that, he followed up with his labor with the WHO, and how things were when he left.

The origin of the epidemic had been found in a river that rises in Colombia and flows to the Amazon River, in the middle of Brazil. The Amazon River was the biggest in South America and its size was the reason it had caused nothing less than an outbreak just in a few weeks.

Just before Ethan left, the development of a vaccine had started, as a variant from the Malaria’s; therefore, in the next three months it was expected to be tested and by the end of the year, it was expected to be produced. He wasn’t sure if the WHO would call him for another Mission, but Naveen would be fully aware of that in case they would.

The hospital was quiet when both mentor and protégé left the office. They parted ways in the parking lot. Naveen, to go to his car, and Ethan, to walk down the street towards Donahue’s to say hi to Reggie.

He needed a drink to feel he was really back in Boston. At Edenbrook. But deep down, he wanted to go there because he hoped she would be at the bar. There was no way she wouldn’t be with her friends celebrating their last day as interns and welcoming the first day as second-year residents.

His pace was slower than usual for multiple reasons. First, because he wanted to enjoy the warm night Boston was welcoming him with; second, because he wasn’t going there to kill the tension of a day’s work, just to enjoy the night. And third, because some part of him was afraid of what he would find there. If she was there. If his face would betray him even if he had mastered the stoicism long before he met her.

“Don’t teaser her, Jackie! I still have nightmares about that Ethics Hearing!”—He heard just when he was about to turn to the entry. “If Eleanor had left Edenbrook, I don’t know what we’d done.”

He had no doubt that that sweet and soft voice belonged to Sienna Trihn.

“Stolen her spot in the diagnostics team?”

And that snarky retort was from Jackie Varma.

“Oh. My God”—The tiny resident said once her eyes caught him at the entry.—“He looks so different.”

She didn’t even lower her voice as she acknowledged him. And he didn’t care. As soon as he realized where Sienna and her friends were, his eyes couldn’t help but search for her eyes.

“What are you talkin-“—Eleanor turned and her mumbling stopped right away as their eyes met. Her confused amber eyes went stunned in an instant.

“Rookie”—Was all he could say to not let his feelings betray him. The sole sight of her was painful enough to try something else.

“It's good to have you back, Dr. Ramsey”—She murmured, her voice distant. Like she wasn’t even conscious of her words, like she wasn’t saying them, and an automat had taken hostage of her body.

Even though she knew he would be back tomorrow, it was clear she didn’t expect to see him tonight.

“Yeah… Good to be back”—He tried to remain serene, but for a second his eyes faltered on her with a torn expression.

He hesitated for a moment before keep walking towards the main bar.

***

She felt like someone was turning the volume up in her head. The chatting of her friends, the clinking glasses, the laugh of people, the cars passing by, the music on the jukebox inside. All was too fucking loud on her head.

The bubble that had alienated her from the outside had popped just the moment she met eyes with Ethan. Every sound was irritating to her. Every laugh, every word, every passing car. Her heart beating fast, her agitated breath. All the noises were multiplying.

Still, she didn’t even know how she found the strength to reply to him. It didn’t sound like her at all. It was like she was observing herself outside his body, the obvious first-hand and only witness of her own autoscopy.

“Relax”—Bryce said in a jokingly tone when Ethan was out of sight—Ramsey might not be my type, but damn, I felt things too.”

All her friends burst out in laughs, trying to alleviate the tension.

“No one can deny that the man's his appeal, and with that makeover, oof. Total heartbreaker”—Conceded Jackie.

But she was barely conscious of what their friends were saying. Just as he entered the bar, she felt disoriented. Lost. The volume in her head started to turn down, silencing her from the noises around her. Like the earth had stopped rotating and she was caught in the middle of her own thoughts.

She didn’t expect that. She had come to terms with the fact that she would see him tomorrow, at Edenbrook, but she absolutely wasn’t prepared to see him tonight. At the bar. She should have known.

Then, she heard her name somewhere. Somewhere very, very far. And after that, a warm caress in her back shook her out of her stupor.

“Elle, are you okay?”

She looked up. All her friends were trying to catch her attention, and Sienna was staring at her with her brows furrowed in concern.

“Ellie…”

“Yeah, sorry, guys, I think the beer went to my head.”

Eleanor felt a warm caress against her back again.

“Babe, are you okay? D’you need a moment?”—He whispered, leaning carefully towards her.

“No, no, I’ll be fine.”

Bryce didn’t look so convinced.

She looked at him in the eyes, knowing that it would ease her mind. She smiled. It had worked. But she knew she couldn’t spend her life being wrapped to Bryce to feel calm, that she couldn’t run to his arms every time she felt something for Ethan. She had to face the pain, the fear, she needed to confront him to really be over Ethan. She had to do it alone with all the pain it was involved in.

“I’m okay, really”—She reassured, his lips quirking a bit to resemble a smile.

He nodded.

She wanted to be okay, because the last thing she had on her mind, was to make a scene, just as the last time she saw Ethan. No, she had to grow up. The days where she would drown in sadness and ‘what ifs’ were over. She had to handle the situation like the adult she was.

But it wasn’t that easy. Even though she rejoined the conversation with her friends, after an hour she really felt the need to have a moment.

“Sienna, care to join me?”

“Of course, Ellie”—She replied getting up from the bench.

The walked carelessly towards the bar, Eleanor trying to ignore completely the presence of Ethan sitting on his usual spot.

“Are you okay?”—She asked once she closed the door behind her.

“I… I’ve been better.”—She confessed, leaning against the wall.—It’s just… I wasn’t expecting to see him today, tonight, here. I made my mind I would see him tomorrow. But well, that’s how things went.”

“It was so shocking, for all of us. Mostly because of that makeover. I swear I thought I was confusing him with another person”

“Like a extremely hot twin brother of him?”

“Kinda, yeah”

They both laughed.

“That’s torture. How can he appear here like that and expect me to stay away?”

“Eleanor…”

“Sienna, I’m teasing”

“I wouldn’t be so sure.”

“But I am. And I can’t even think about doing something with Bryce here.”

Eleanor shook her head.

“Ah, poor Bryce. He’s all in the comforting mood but I know it hurts him.”

“Maybe, but he’s actually worried about you.”

“Why he has to be so selfless? I don’t deserve it.”—She protested —He has been an angel with me this whole time. And this stupid asshole appears, and I fell to the ground like a whiny stupid.”

“Ellie, he knows what he’s dealing with. And I know he’ll be wise enough to leave when his time is over. I just hope that doesn’t happen, and that he gets his happy ending with you.”

“You don’t think I want the same? I want it. But it doesn’t matter what I want when the person I’m in love with it’s not him.”

There was silence. Sienna looked at Eleanor. She was pissed off, but not defeated like before. That was progress.

“Okay. Let’s focus.—Sienna exclaimed with renewed energy, trying to comfort her friend—"The things are this way: You’re still not over Ethan, but if you want to, you will. And you’ll do it by stop having hopes. You’ll focus on the good. On Bryce. On the beautiful moments you two have had. And as long as Ethan doesn’t say ‘Eleanor, I love you, let’s be together’, your situation with him is the same as it was when he left. It’s done. Terminated. Over. Okay?”

“Okay, yes. Yes. Crystal clear.”

“Pinky promise?”

“Pinky promise”—She replied as her pinky locked Sienna’s.

A few moments later they returned to the table. Jackie had brought a new round of beers. Eleanor took her seat next to Bryce, and without a moment’s hesitation, she brought her lips to his cheek and kissed him softly.

He stared at her a bit confused. That day, at the beach, they agreed to be more discreet with their relationship now that Ramsey was back. Somehow, she wouldn’t feel comfortable that he could know about them when nothing was settled, and she didn’t want to provoke a response in him by jealousy or make him doubt her feelings for him. That way, they would return to their habitual friendly interaction in public spaces, but their relationship remained the same. Therefore, that show of affection in public was against their agreement.

“What was that for?”

“You just deserve a kiss for being so cute with me.”

He smiled.

“In that case, I deserve more than a kiss on my cheek, don’t you think?”

She shook her head and brushed her lips into his.

“Better?”

“Much better”

They continued their chatting through the night until Reggie announced he was about to close. Eleanor and her friends collected their used jars and went to the bar to give them to Reggie. Ethan was still by the bar and apparently, he had no intention to leave soon.

“What? Last call doesn't apply to you?”—She asked, her words coming out of her mouth incautiously. Like nothing had happened. Like the two months they didn’t see each other never existed.

“Reggie and I go way back. We have an arrangement.”

“An arrangement?”—She snorted— “Is that what you call friendship?”

“I don’t have friends, but I wouldn’t mind you joining me if you were so inclined.”

“Say it. You want me to join you?”—She defied.

He stared at her seriously for a few seconds.

“I do.”

Eleanor turned to her friends

“I’ll stay for a while to check in about tomorrow with Dr. Ramsey.”

“Okay”—Sienna replied—"Just don’t stay out too late... Aurora's dropping off the rest of her stuff before work tomorrow.”

Eleanor nodded and her eyes directed to Bryce. He winked at her before turning to the door, but she could have sworn his smile fainted the very moment he turned.

“Well, we've got ourselves a brand new Ethan Ramsey.”—She stated, approaching him at the bar.—"You took the reset thing seriously.”

He gave him a painful look and scratched the back of his neck.

“Why don’t we move outside?”—He suggested, trying to diffuse his tension—"It'll be winter before we know it. Might as well enjoy the weather while we can.”

Ethan took a half-drunk bottle of nice scotch and head out to the empty beer garden, taking a seat beside a small fire pit.

“So… how have you been?”

“As good as it can be, given the circumstances there.”

“Yeah, I figure. I’m sure you went through a lot there.”

Ethan nodded. Thinking that he indeed went through a lot there, but maybe not the kind she had in mind.

“What about you?”—He inquired after a brief reflection.

“I’m doing great. Excited that intern year has finished. And tomorrow is my first day on the big leagues”

“Yeah. You start with the DT. Time has passed so fast”

“Certainly.”

Then, the silence made its presence. They stayed still to study each other subtly. Ethan couldn't decipher what, but there was something different in her that had nothing to do with the passing of time. It wasn’t the hair, her summerly outfit, or something physical. It was something in the way she was looking at him, in the way she was speaking, and even in her gestures, that made him realize she wasn't the same he had left eight weeks ago. There was something familiar about her manners, but he wasn't sure what it was.

And after an eternity of silence and endless questions inside his head, she finally spoke.

“Why you didn’t reply or call back… or said anything?”

All Ethan could think was if she was interested in asking that, it meant there was something still there. That maybe she still cared for him.

“Eleanor…”

“I had to ask Banerji to know me if you were okay. Don’t you think it isn’t unfair?”

“I know, he told me.”

“It was a fucking message, Ethan. Just ‘I’m okay’, just that, I wasn’t expecting a report. Just a fucking reply.”

“I know. I’m so…”

She raised her hand, stopping him midsentence.

“Please, don’t. If you were truly sorry, you wouldn’t have done it in the first place. It was so simple.”

“I needed to walk away…”

“Yes, I know, but this has nothing to do with that. With your so-called self-control. Cause I don’t know how much self-control you can compromise by sending a couple of words. It’s not like you can lose it being thousands of miles away from me. But, of course, the fault is always mine for expecting some decency from you.”

“You were worried?”

“How can you ask something like that? Of course I was worried! Epidemics are unpredictable and much riskier to doctors.”

She shook her head.

“I really hoped our conversation would’ve made sense to you. But no. Nothing’s changed. You can’t even be a decent friend or colleague.”

He remained silent.

Eleanor took a sip of the scotch, and then breathed heavily with her eyes closed. After a few moments, she opened them with renewed energy.

“Well, no point in dwelling in the past. Let’s talk about tomorrow.”

Her words caught him by surprise. The way she just shook off of his mistake was new. He expected she would give him hell for at least fifteen minutes, but apparently she had more important things to discuss.

“Okay, what do you want to know”—He said, finally.

“What should I know?”

“Well, once the meeting with all the other residents is done, you have to go to the Diagnostics Team office, to join us for the daily meeting. We’ll be discussing a new case too. A few hours ago, the hospital informed me that we are receiving a patient from Manhattan Presbyterian, so that will be your first case as Fellow Member.”

“Excellent. Anything I need to know about the other members?”

“I leave it to you, so you don’t meet them biased from what I tell you”—There was some strange tint in his sight, something mischievous Eleanor couldn’t decipher.

“I think you’re being tricky with the answer.”

Ethan chuckled.

“I’m not. Tomorrow you’ll have your first impressions on the members. It’ll be fine.”

“I suppose”—She sounded tense.

“You’ll do it great, Rookie. You had an excellent performance in your first year, and you made a diagnosis neither your boss nor your boss’s boss couldn’t make, so, that’s quite impressive. You deserve the spot.”

“That’s because I learned from the best.”

And there it was again, the silent longing in their eyes. The intense looks, the pain, the restraint. The alternated gaze between lips and eyes. It seemed like the dynamics from past months were about repeat again. Eleanor succumbing to her feelings, asking for a chance, breaking their boundaries just to have one more kiss, and lose herself in the same old lie with the same old ending. And just like before, Ethan would fall too. As if eight weeks hadn’t passed. As if the time and distance hadn't done their part.

But things had changed. He had no idea how much things had changed.

Because after what it felt an eternity, she just smiled at him shyly and then looked away from him at slow-motion speed. Or that’s how Ethan saw things in his disappointed mind.

Then she took her glass, her hand almost imperceptibly shaky, and drank the remained scotch on it.

Ethan froze for a moment, completely surprised at her reaction, and then turned to the table, sipping his drink too. His mind still was wondering why it was being so easy for her to just look away and don’t dare to kiss him. He was back after two months out and she didn’t even want to kiss him.

“Good thing you’re back just when summer is beginning, so you don’t end up freezing for changing temperatures.”

Ethan couldn’t repress the astonishment when he noticed Eleanor was using the small-talk card. They had never had small talks before. She always had something to comment, some insight to share, even something to recriminate him with. But now there was nothing of it.

Maybe it was her last resource to avoid something utterly stupid or senseless like kissing him. He couldn’t really blame her.

“Yes, glad I can catch some sun. Vitamin D has worked wonders in Naveen. But he’s too cheerful for my liking.”

“Ethan, Dr. Banerji has always been too cheerful for your liking.”

“Well, yeah, but he is annoyingly cheerful now, and summer is just beginning”

“May the Force be with you”—Eleanor joked, getting up from the bench.—“Well, I’m going home now. Tomorrow’s my first day and I have to come up as fresh as a daisy.”

Ethan smiled faintly at her.

“Goodnight Rookie, I see you tomorrow”

“Night Ethan, see ya”

#open heart #bryce lahela #ethan ramsey #choices stories you play #bryce lahela x mc #bryce x mc #bryce x casey #ethan x mc #ethan x casey #ethan x f!mc #open heart choices #open heart fanfiction #oh choices #oh fanfic #oh #choices fanfiction #fanfic

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dwellordream · 3 years ago

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“Jeanne Boydston’s study of housework suggests another possible explanation for the tendency of parents to withdraw their daughters from domestic employ: the devaluation of housework itself as an activity of any economic value. The introduction of a cash economy into the interstices of post revolutionary American life meant that activities that did not customarily generate cash—including those myriad duties of domestic maintenance—became ‘‘invisible,’’ defined as something other than work both by those who did housework and by those who did not.

Women themselves increasingly devalued the importance of their own work, as evidenced by Lydia Almy of Salem, Massachusetts, who ‘‘wove, attended to livestock, made cider, carted wood, tanned skins, took in boarders,’’ but nonetheless, recorded in her diary that she was disturbed to know that she was ‘‘in no way due any thing towards earning my living,’’ unlike her mariner husband. The increasing tendency to define housework as hardly work at all, because of its unwaged (or low-waged) character, influenced the calculations of parents as they made decisions about their daughters’ lives.

Mary Virginia Terhune’s advice explicitly attributed a cash calculation— and an invidious distinction—to the attitudes of both daughters and their fathers toward daughters’ work, especially when girls had received educations. Fathers, she felt, imagined that ‘‘the labor of an educated woman,—especially if that woman is his child, and her scholastic education has cost him thousands of dollars—should . . . command a better market-price than that of an illiterate Celt, whose schooling cost nothing.’’ Daughters themselves might have adopted a wage theory of value to assess the value of their own labor, Terhune speculated. A middle-class daughter’s ‘‘time and strength are worth more than a seamstress’s, or chambermaid’s or cook’s wages. The world teems with seamstresses, chambermaids, and cooks, clamoring for the very work she abhors.’’

Frances Willard’s book of advice to girls put a different spin on the situation, based on a similar hierarchy of class. She urged middle-class daughters to aspire to higher work than housekeeping, arguing that opening a place for a domestic servant in their homes created a place for a destitute young woman who otherwise ‘‘might be tempted into paths of sin.’’ (Prostitutes themselves often compared the two vocations, to the disadvantage of housework.) Writing in the 1880s,Willard and Terhune did not lament the graduation of middle-class girls from housework; they seemed to agree that middle-class girls either had priced or should price themselves out of the market for domestic labor.

…One of those who worked for her living was Ann Ware Winsor herself, who ran a school from their home and sought other ways to eke out the family’s subsistence. In a letter to her daughter the previous summer, she informed Annie of several schemes she had for making money; for one, the boys would raise chickens. ‘‘While they make money out of hens, I expect you girls to make it out of small fruits, and I have engaged a lot of plants to be delivered here in the Spring for you to cultivate!’’ Ann Ware Winsor assured her daughter that not only would it provide a welcome contribution to the family coffers, but ‘‘That’s the way out of head-aches and other ails. Read some books on the subject and you will grow enthusiastic.’’

Despite the economic worries of the Winsor family, however, only one child, a middle son, actually worked at a paid job outside the home in 1880: seventeen-year-old Paul was a clerk at the railroad office. The eldest, Robert, was in college, and all the rest were in school, including nineteen-year-old Mary and fifteen-year-old Annie. Presumably the ‘‘opportunity costs’’ of educating the girls were low enough that it weighed against sacrificing their education. Family calculations also suggested that the daughters’ extra energies would be better used in assisting in teaching in their mother’s school than in doing housework. For the 1880 census indicated that the Winsor family employed three female servants. (Annie’s private journal recorded cryptically, ‘‘Maids are an abomination for children.’’)

…The growth of the market economy during the course of the nineteenth century meant that girls as well as their parents felt the need of cash. Those without access to cash sought strategies to make some, whatever their attitudes toward women’s wage work as a social development. Away at school in the cash-poor South, and largely abandoned as well by her father, Mary Thomas fantasized about alternative lives. In one of them she sold things, ‘‘for I mean to work a patch next year and make some money, if I don’t have to come back to school; and then at Christmas, I will have a right good lot of money to do as I please with, I think I shall get a watch with it.’’ Despite her clear disdain elsewhere in her diary for the notion of working for a living, Mary Thomas was willing to countenance work for wages in order to be able to participate in a consumer economy.

A fourteen-year-old subscriber to the youth magazine Harper’s Young People reported that she had earned the money for her subscription herself ‘‘by sewing for the black people.’’ She reported that she had to sew ‘‘very cheaply, because they are so poor’’; presumably her low wages also reflected her low level of skill. A correspondent to St. Nicholas also reported that she and her brother had earned the money for their subscription themselves—in this case by selling hickory nuts and onions. Elite girls came late to money earning. Mary Virginia Terhune charged late Victorian parents with discriminating against girls in their differential training in the basics of money management.

‘‘Jack raises chickens and sells the eggs and ‘broilers’ to Mamma. Willy splits kindling-wood for the kitchenfire and draws his lawful wages from Papa as would any other laborer. Mamie comes down to breakfast, as gay as the morning, hair bound with a blue ribbon that matches her eyes, waltzes up to Papa, in a gale of affectionate glee, throws her arms around his neck and begs for a kiss. She gets two and a gold dollar, fished up from the vest-pocket nearest the paternal heart—‘because she looks so pretty today.’’’ Terhune’s charge that girls were not given experience managing money had some basis.

Women were not paid wages for housework; instead, their work was supposed to come ‘‘from the heart,’’ and to be inspired by devotion to the family good. To the extent that girls shared in their mothers’ lots, they too were encouraged to dust, to make beds, and to shell peas not as entrepreneurs but as part of their responsibilities to womanly service. However, just as housewives made some cash through the nineteenth century for a variety of home manufactures, girls too might learn to work for profit in performing those home tasks still considered ‘‘productive.’’

…Good parents saw to it that daughters had some skills in handling their own money—and because few urban girls had the money-making possibilities available to Margaret Tileston on her family’s farm, some of them began to receive small sums in the form of a regular allowance. An 1897 study on ‘‘Children’s Sense of Money’’ found that 7 percent of all girls were given a regular allowance. Jessie Wendover, the daughter of a prospering Newark grocer, was one. At the age of nine in 1881, she received ten cents a week allowance, which was raised to twenty-five cents by the time she was fourteen. She kept a careful account of every expenditure.

At fourteen, her expenditures included an occasional soda water (ten cents), ice cream, Sunday school donation (five cents), a variety of school supplies, carfare, ribbons, music. Although she was not usually responsible for buying her own clothes, she also recorded paying twenty-five cents several times for a bustle, perhaps because it was not encouraged by her mother, or more likely because it was one of the few ready-made items in her wardrobe. She paid for her own magazine subscription to St. Nicholas, $2.75, or nearly three months’ allowance. As befitted her regular habits, Jessie Wendover customarily carried a balance of $5 or so from month to month, except when depleted by the Christmas season.

By 1887, when Wendover was fifteen, she was receiving fifty cents a week, and recorded paying twenty-five cents ‘‘to see picture ‘Christ on Calvary.’’’ At sixteen, she developed a taste for milkshakes, a habit of occasionally eating lunch out, and a preference for having her bangs cut by a salon. Chewing gum, peanuts, and marshmallows made their appearance in her accounts in the summer of 1888, but so did regular contributions to the missionary box, and in the fall, a donation for yellow fever sufferers. The following year she noted frequent small outlays for hokeypoky—ice cream—and she once spent seventy-five cents to have her hair shampooed.

But in October of that year she was sufficiently ahead to deposit $3.00 in the bank, and in September of 1892, her twentieth year, $20.00. Clearly Jessie Wendover’s ample allowance and her own prudence allowed her early to learn not only how to spend money and account for it but also how to save it—all important lessons for bourgeois helpmates. Another pattern though seemed to be gaining currency at the same time. Increasingly, household chores began to creep in as part of the way that parents justified giving money to youth.

…Occasionally, and unevenly, girls’ diaries began to suggest that they themselves were beginning to expect and to receive wages for work done for their families. Marian Nichols reported receiving wages for family sewing. ‘‘Worked on some drawers for Margaret. Mamma is to pay 30 cts a pair for them.’’ The next year she reported that she was even getting paid for exercise. ‘‘Went to school. Walked in and out by myself. Rosy doesn’t like my getting money from walking out. I get 3 cts.’’ Jane Addams’s father paid her for every volume of Plutarch she read and reported on, as well as for every volume of such things as Irving’s Life of Washington, ‘‘after the manner of Victorian fathers,’’ according to Anne Scott.

The custom of paying daughters for their work in the bourgeois family suggested a new approach to girls as well as to family economics. The same study that tracked the development of the ‘‘allowance’’ also discovered that fully a quarter of all girls reported making money for doing housework. It is no wonder that girls increasingly began to resist doing housework as part of their womanly lot that others were getting paid to do. Giving girls allowances was good Victorian practice—encouraging regularity of habits, responsibility, careful accounting, and prudence.

Yet in its tendency to evolve into a quid pro quo for performing household and other kinds of chores it contributed to a radical new notion well expressed in the economic writings of Charlotte Perkins Gilman—the notion that daughters, if not their mothers, were autonomous economic beings in control of their own labor, and able to exchange it for currency. When Victorian fathers paid their daughters wages for housework, they were laying the seeds of turn-of-the-century rebellions against conventional notions of female self-sacrifice as woman’s natural lot.”

- Jane H. Hunter, “Daughters’ Lives and the Work of the Middle-Class Home.” in How Young Ladies Became Girls: The Victorian Origins of American Girlhood

#jane h. hunter #history #american #victorian #class #how young ladies became girls

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thedistrictroleplay · 3 years ago

Photo

ID:

TRIGGER WARNINGS: none?

TIMELINE:

1989 - Gwen Davis, daughter of conservative mayoral candidate Ryan Davis, meets Stephen Weiss after his concert and the two spend the night together. The night results in a pregnancy that no one but Gwen want to see carried to term.

1989 - The Davis and Blackwood family come to an agreement on the future of their children, encouraging (read: requiring) a fast wedding between Gwen and Richard Blackwood to avoid the scandal of a child out of wedlock.

1989 - a large sum of money is exchanged between Stephen Weiss and Gwen Davis to keep the truth of the child’s parentage. The money is placed in a trust.

1990 - Richard Nathaniel Blackwood Jr is born on April 27

1994-1996 - Nate is placed in various lessons (piano, foreign language) and left mostly in the care of his au pair

1997 - Nate begins attending Camp Walt Whitman every summer

1998 - Nate asks to be referred to by his middle name exclusively after the older kids at school/camp start calling him Dick Jr. It marks the beginning of the decline of the relationship between father and son

2006 - Nate gets an after school job at a subsidiary of Blackwood Industries

2007 - During a party for his father, Nate gets drunk and chats up a woman he thinks is interested in him and talks openly about his father. An article comes out the following morning detailing the entire affair. Richard Sr. and Nate have it out and do not speak for several months

2008 - Shortly after his mother tells him the truth about his father, Nate is arrested after taking one of his dad’s boats out on a joyride with a woman and crashing it into the docks on the way back in. Money makes the problem more or less disappear, though it further strains the near-nonexistent relationship between Nate and his father

2009 - Nate begins studying business at Brown University

2015 - Several bad business ventures have Nate trying to bridge the gap between his father and himself and prove that he’s worth investing in

2018 - Nate is involved in a public altercation at his father’s 50th birthday party after news of an affair with a married woman made its way to the ear of said woman’s husband

2020 - Nate invests the entirety of the trust containing the money from his bio dad and several large sums of money from other friends and investors and loses it all

2021 - In a desperate attempt to recoup the money lost (and save his own ass), Nate follows the breadcrumbs leading to Stephen Weiss’ only acknowledged child all the way to DC where he intends to get the money he believes he’s owed

BIOGRAPHY:

They say heavy is the head that wears the crown, and while the Blackwoods were not royalty by any sense of the word, the name still carried with it weight. It wasn’t just a name, but an expectation. A legacy. And for Nate, it was his biggest adversary.

Richard Nathaniel Blackwood Jr. had been set up to fail from the beginning. In a true show of what Nate believed for all of his childhood to be narcissism, his father had bestowed his name and every single impossible expectation upon him. For reasons he wouldn’t understand until early adulthood, an impossible chasm existed between himself and the man he so desperately wanted to impress.

Gwen Davis was a nineteen year old rebellious daughter of a conservative mayoral candidate. She’d long since perfected the art of getting whatever it was she desired and on a hot night in mid-July of 1989, that was Stephen Weiss. The two shared a night together and went their separate ways. It probably shouldn’t have been such an unexpected surprise when she wound up pregnant, and even less so when it seemed that Gwen was the only one interested in seeing the baby carried to term. In lieu of actually being a parent, Stephen and his team sent along a large sum of money to keep his involvement a secret. That was more than okay with the Davises, who were enraged by the news, worried more about the threat to her father’s mayoral position than the son Gwen would be bringing into the world. They went to work pulling strings and trying to cover their tracks, the answer found in a marriage between Gwen and the son of a family friend, Richard Blackwood. Though the Blackwoods didn’t come from old money-- its origin only two generations back-- they had their hands in a little bit of everything. The union hadn’t come out of nowhere (which made the haste in which they married less suspect), but it was not necessarily what either of them would have chosen for themselves. It was a marriage of convenience, of favors, and of power.

Life was… fine. Nate was born after a lengthy labor and they settled into a routine that worked for a while, but then Gwen found that she was still too young, too rebellious, to be tied down by a child and resentment set in. It was a different kind of resentment than the kind wielded by the man who masqueraded as his father, but it was felt nonetheless. But again, that was fine. He had a wet nurse and then an au pair and they were fine-- if not a bit too easy to manipulate. And yes, it seemed that was a trait passed down beautifully from mother to son. It was a craft to be honed and perfected, practiced on the unsuspecting children and teachers at school.

As Nate grew, so too did his need for acceptance. It wasn't until he began attending Camp Walt Whitman that he realized most families didn't appear nearly as fractured as his felt. He'd thought the impossibility that was impressing his father was simply a part of the deal. He'd thought yearning for acknowledgement to be just another component in the equation of family. The realization had him cultivating a resentment of his own. He became angry, began to act out in ways he hadn’t before, began to draw the kind of attention to himself that turned little Richard Jr. into the butt of a small dick joke. So he became Nate. Richard Jr. hadn’t known any better, but Nate? Nate knew how to charm, how to sweet talk, how to channel his endless rage into a symphony loud enough to gain the attention of his parents.

The rift between himself and his father only began to grow larger and while he’d go to his grave swearing he didn’t give a single fuck about what his father thought of him, it seemed that some days, that longing for acceptance was the only thing driving him forward. His father was a businessman, so he tried to show an interest in business. His father liked golfing, so he practiced alone in his room with a solo cup and a club stolen from an old set stashed away in the attic. None of it mattered.

So, eventually, he did the opposite. He leaned into the role of the slighted son. He got drunk at a party meant to honor his father and some new business venture or big sale or who-gives-a-fuck, and aired his grievances to a pretty stranger. Reading his words in print the next morning had only solidified the notion for him that it was never about him, only about what he could offer. To her, it had been an exposé, to his father, it had been an embarrassment. The silent treatment that followed could be felt spanning coasts.

Right at the start of the summer before he went off to college, his world changed. In perhaps the least tactful way she could manage, his mother dropped the bomb about his biological father. It felt as though the floor had fallen out from underneath him. He didn’t know how to process or how to cope and he had no one he could talk to about it. So he did what he did best: he acted out. He stole his dad’s boat: a feat that ended with the vessel crashed into the docks and Nate in jail. Money made the problem go away, polished off his record, just in time for him to attend Brown.

He was good at college, he found. Maybe not so much the academia of it all, but the partying? Aced it. But still, that niggling need to please his father-- even if the man wasn’t really his father at all-- rotted in the back of his mind. It drove him to desperation in his professional life and found him fumbling through one bad venture after another. He made risky moves knowing that if only ONE came through, it could change everything. But they never did. Instead, he found himself on the knuckle end of an angry husband whose wife had apparently been Nate’s woman of the week. It was his father’s fiftieth birthday party and even though Nate hadn’t known she was married (though… it likely wouldn’t have mattered if he had), it changed nothing. The tenuous and tattered relationship with his father all but dissolved in that ballroom. He thought he’d known desperation before, but he knew then that the damage was irreparable. He had nothing to show for anything.

In a last ditch effort, Nate came up with a business plan. He emptied the trust left behind by his biological father-- money he promised himself he’d never touch-- and somehow managed to convince some acquaintances and bigwigs to invest money in his newest venture. It should have worked. It should have, but it didn’t. He lost everything: his money, their money. All of it. Gone. And because Nate has always been captain of good ideas, instead of facing the people whose money he lost, he tracked down the only child his sperm donor seemed to give a shit about. Sure, he was gone. But his money wasn’t. And he owed him that, at least, didn’t he?

Nate is written by Jamie.

#district character bio.#c; nate blackwood #matthew daddario fc #pronouns; he/him #residence; downtown #writer; jamie

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dawniebb · 4 years ago

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Closure pt. 2

Uhm...due to personal reasons (lmao) this was supposed to be a marathon, but I’ll just...yeah. I’ll just leave the second part right here and I hope you like it. As I explained in the last one, this is from the canon divergence I share with @healing-winston-pratt and it’s a series of fics about grief, basically.

You can read the Georgia chapter (”I Kill Giants”) here

And this is the Evander chapter, so this is all the background you need;

Evander’s wife, Sandra Wade.

Sandra and Arthur’s portrait: https://healing-winston-pratt.tumblr.com/post/626983013669044224/sandra-obrien-wade-and-arthur-evander-wade

Tag list: @novadreamer95438 @idkimbadwithusernamesandstuff @obsidianfr3sk @novas-tunnel-of-anxiety

Evander

Lay Me Down

You told me not to cry when you were gone But the feeling's overwhelming, it's much too strong Can I lay by your side, next to you, you?

“Sandy, please… “

“No, dad. I need to see him. I need to… “

Sandra Wade stopped in the middle of her sentence, as a bush of red hair caught her eye. However, those were curls instead of straight hair, which meant that, indeed, that wasn’t her husband.

That wasn’t Evander Wade. Renegade. Husband. Dad to be.

After the explosion or… whatever that thing had been, that gave powers to everyone in the world, right after the sudden lift of the city, the telephone lines and television lines had stopped working, which had caused her to go uncommunicated.

A Renegade wife who, if that weren’t bad enough on its own, was also pregnant, completely unable to contact her husband.

She had no way to know where he was, because even his location device had been disconnected at some point, leaving the last trace of Evander at the Arena.

It was the morning after three consecutive disasters.

1: The terrorist attack to the Arena.

2: The lift of the city.

3: The explosion Sandra refused to call a supernova like everyone else was doing because…

Where the heck had they gotten a star from?

Maybe she was just stressed and the pregnancy hormones were playing tricks on her, but she couldn’t help but think about how people were willing to come up with every ridiculous thing possible just to spice things up.

It wasn’t funny.

Nor was it spectacular.

It was mean. And cruel. And Sandra couldn’t stand listening to them, just like she couldn’t stand listening to the rest of her family telling her to stop, because worrying so much was going to hurt the baby.

That wasn’t a nice thing to say to a worried person. And if she was only worried before, now she was in a frantic state, distraught, as her step-dad drove her through the city, while she analyzed every tall, red-haired man with clothes that looked even vaguely similar to Blacklight’s.

The access of cars to the streets was restricted, but that didn’t stop Dad, telling the patrol units he was driving a pregnant woman. Just because this was an emergency. He wouldn’t have done it under different circumstances.

The city, on the other hand, looked pretty good for having been lifted, because people also wanted her to believe Simon and Hugh’s youngest son had been able to fix the mess.

Sandra refused to believe any of it, for the sake of not wanting to believe it; given that he had such a dangerous job, Evander had always advised her to be prepared for the worst; ever since they had gotten married.

However, when he left for the public execution and exposition of Agent N at the Arena, he promised he would come back, and Sandra recalled it perfectly because he was touching her belly, he said:

“See you in a few hours, Sandy.”

And he sealed that promise with a kiss.

Now, Sandra didn’t agree with that execution, because…maybe executions were something that shouldn’t be shown to the public. But she knew that Evander had to attend. After all, he was part of the Renegade Council…and, again, he had promised he would come back.

And that was a hundred times more valuable and meaningful than a tasteless and empty threat about how someday the worst would happen.

Evander promised he would come back in a few hours, which meant he had to be alive.

Maybe he was just busy.

Maybe he was running late.

Maybe he was looking for a payphone that would, for some reason, work and allow him to contact her (and that was the reason why she was keeping her cellphone close).

He would come.

He would come back.

He would be with her during the birth, because he knew how scared Sandra was of labor pain, and because he knew they weren’t getting a C-section because the only thing Sandra feared more than labor pain was being conscious while somebody ripped her skin open.

Evander wouldn’t leave her alone in this, would he?

He wouldn’t. He promised he wouldn’t, so now he had to come back.

He had to meet his baby.

Evander had to come home.

He couldn’t leave her.

He couldn’t…

“Sandra, please… “

Hugh Everhart’s hands were on her arms, though Sandra couldn’t recall having entered the Headquarters. Maybe it was the fact she had grown to know those hallways very well, and she had come to a point where she just navigated through them by routine.

Besides, Evander was his husband.

Hugh had no right to stop her from coming in.

“Sandra, stop. Please.”

“I need to… “

“Sandy. “

“GET OUT OF MY WAY, HUGH! I NEED TO SEE HIM! “

He…

He was alive.

It couldn’t had happened any other way.

Evander knew.

Evander knew he had to stay alive for her. He had to stay alive for little unborn Arthur, his son. He had to stay alive for himself.

He was young.

He was healthy.

He had so much to give.

So much to live.

So much to go through still.

So many family vacations.

So many sleepless nights and rainy afternoons.

He had so much love to give yet.

He had promised it.

He had said it in his vows, that they would be one forever, and that they would have 4 children because that was what they had agreed when they were dating.

They had to get pregnant 3 more times. And he had to see them grow, inside and outside of Sandra’s womb.

“Take me to him. I need to see him.” Sandra begged, and she saw Hugh’s whole brave, unbreakable facade become small, surrendering to her pleading.

But surrender for him didn’t mean moving.

Hugh Everhart didn’t take her anywhere, nor did he speak and, for a moment, he didn’t even breathed.

And at the same time, he said everything he had to say, until there was nothing left, and Sandra stepped backwards, her body falling into Dad’s arms, who held her by the shoulders, as she held her belly so tightly she almost felt she was touching Arthur through layers and layers of skin.

“No.”

“… I’m sorry, Sandra. “

“No. “

He had promised.

He had promised he would come back.

He had promised to hold her hand while she was in pain.

He had promised to hold their baby.

He had promised he would stay alive and they would love each other as long as they could, until they were old and sick.

Evander had promised he would come back.

But he wouldn’t.

Evander was gone.

And through all that madness, Sandra kept stepping backwards and backwards and backwards, until Dad managed to stop her.

So then she tried to fall on her knees, but they stopped again.

So she screamed.

And no one, no one dared to stop her from doing that.

-.-

Sandra kept screaming almost every day for a whole month after Evander’s passing; after a funeral she refused to attend, surrounded by a pile of yellow folders full of papers she was yet to sign.

She screamed for so long, she didn’t even had to be convincing to cloak her labor screams with grief.

By the time Kasumi Hasegawa arrived to the house and broke into her room after a distressed call from Sandra’s parents, he was already there.

Arthur had been sleeping on Sandra’s chest for over an hour when Kasumi Hasegawa found both of them in the bathroom floor, where Sandra had given birth to him leaned against the bathtub.

Yet, the only thing she could say as her numb eyes met Kasumi’s terrified ones, was:

“I should’ve gone to the hospital.”

Kasumi agreed with that, because she did force her to go to the hospital afterwards, where she was put on some medications and stitches while, fortunately, Arthur was declared to be healthy.

Sandra didn’t hold him at first. Not really. Because her arms were too tired from holding him for an hour, and her mind was too tired to do anything at all.

The rest of the Council came to visit, of course, and they kept telling her how handsome that baby was until she politely asked them to shut up.

For the first 3 days, her family did the mothering… which, she liked to call it like that because the baby had no father.

It wasn’t until later, when they begged her to give herself and her baby a second opportunity, because the baby wasn’t reacting well to formula milk and, apparently, was missing his mother’s presence.

“We all lost him.” Kasumi told her.

“But you get to have what’s left of him… and he, conveniently, has his eyes. “

And, yes, indeed, Arthur had Evander’s eyes.

So bright and grey.

And things were what they were.

The moment Sandra agreed to hold him, she got to experience the love she had felt growing inside of her for 9 months.

When Evander broke his promise and never came back, Sandra and Arthur were left with each other.

The tragedy of the circumstances would chase her for years, which was something she was aware and willing to accept.

But when he left, Arthur stayed here, as a reminder there was ever somebody named Evander Wade, and this child represented the love he had felt towards someone at some point.

And Sandra loved him, because even if it hadn’t been so, he was perfect on his own, with his tiny hands, tiny legs and tiny everything.

Someday, he would understand his father had left his side not because he wanted to, but because it had happened like that.

In the meantime, Sandra would make sure Arthur knew he had her.

Maybe her heart would forever be missing the part Evander had taken with him.

However, it was still beating.

And she still had two arms that could perfectly cradle a baby.

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diddlesanddoodles · 4 years ago

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DEAD WALLS RISE - CONNAR

PART THREE

His father was grim faced and his mother clutched her children’s hands hard enough to hurt but neither Connar or Penny pulled away. Gen stood near the small hearth, watching the flames dance.

“What...what does that mean for us, then?” Arthur asked. “Now that he’s dead.”

“The war’s over,” the captain explained, cleaning the inside of his pipe’s bowl with his pinky finger. “But don’t get too excited just yet. King Warren’s mandate will take time to reach the ends of Vhasshal and still there’s no guarantee all folks will honor it. Smuggling and selling humans has become quite profitable for some. Best keep on as you have for a while.”

Gen pushed back from the hearth and turned to regard the blue coated giant. “Should I keep sending in the reports?”

“Yes. They may be more valuable now than ever. Now that the trade’s illegal, information’s going to start drying up. People will be less likely to tell you all that they have. So whatever you have, keep sending it to me.”

“But still,” Penny said, surprising most of them as she never spoke whenever Keral visited. The large man outright terrified her and she always made it a point to make herself scarce around him. “The Blood King is dead. Things will get better right? They have to...”

Keral took a moment to regard the girl. “Doesn’t always work out that way, lass. Nethrin’s dead. His last son’s King now. He’s gonna have to work hard and smart and very quickly to secure his power. The time between transitions of power is precarious and if not done right, will make more of a mess than what we had to begin with. For now, all we can do it wait and see.”

…………………………………..

Connar and his family stayed with Gen in his home for another five years. In that time, Gen continued to supply the blue coats with as much information as he was able to garner, but as Keral predicted, most of it dried it very quickly. Connar’s skill with leather continued to grow and he branched off into metal works. For almost a year, he worked on nothing but knives. Pocket knives, axe blades, kitchen knives, etc. Gen was beyond pleased with his progress and continued to challenge the boy as his teenage years began to slip into young adulthood.

Gen’s gray hair began to turn white and his strength was not what it had been until one day he gathered them all to tell them something.

“I have been playing with the idea of perhaps moving in with my sister,” he said. “She’s already assured me you all would be welcome.”

“Doesn’t she live in the village outside the castle, though?” Maria asked. “Would it be safe?”

“With the King so near, I’d imagine the village might very well be the safest place of all,” Gen replied. “And there is also the option of the Hill Tribe if you wish to live with your own people.”

Maria suddenly sent her daughter an amused side eyed glance. “We might be able to find you a nice beau, Penny. And you can start giving me some grandchildren.”

Penny flushed red and pointed to Connar as he took a large bite of an apple. “What about Connar?”

Arthur laughed. “Oh, he’s hopeless. He’d scare any girl off.”

Connar made a muffled whine of offense at the accusation as they all had a good laugh.

In the end, they did make the move the Gen’s sister’s home. Beth was a pleasant woman, fifteen years Gen’s junior, and like her brother, was a widow with all four of her children grown and having moved away. She and Maria became fast friends and both immediately began a crusade to find Penny a nice young man, despite her protestations. Connar was simply happy that they had not began to do the same to him and he was free to continue on learning whatever Gen still had left to teach him.

A little over a year later, Penny was married and moved to the Hill tribe with her new husband and soon after, they welcomed their first child into the world and both Connar’s parents moved in to help with the baby. Connar stayed behind in Beth’s house with Gen, still eager to learn and hone his skills.

Gen passed away in his sleep two months later.

Looking back, Connar would remember very little of that time. In many ways it felt as though he had lost a father. He and his family owed so much to Gen and with him gone, Connar felt adrift and without a moor like a boat being carried away by the current. Too tired to try and steer himself back on coarse and too numb to understand why he should even try.

His family had a new baby to help distract from the pain and as much as he tried to throw himself into his work, he just could not bare to even look at his tools. The same ones Gen had made for Connar himself. With his hands.

Gen’s funeral was attended by more people than Connar would have thought and he stayed very close to Beth and her eldest son during the whole affair. Trying very hard not to see the way some of the attending giants sneered at him. Unlike Silvaaran funerals, Vhasshals buried their dead rather than burn them on pyres. They were placed in family tombs built far into the ground and the flesh of the dead would be returned to the earth and once there was nothing but bones left, they were pushed back into the far chamber with the bones of their ancestors to make room for the next body. So a single family tomb could hold hundreds of individuals.

Connar’s family were forced to leave early as the baby began to make a fuss and Penny was worried he might catch a cold in the chilly air. Connar thought it was more to do with being nervous around so many giants and he did not blame them. But he petitioned to stay.

He couldn’t leave.

Connar stared at the large opening to the Taversh family tomb as six Vhasshalans carried Gen’s shrouded body down, feeling numb. Flowers and wreaths and ribbons were places all around the opening as well as food and gifts that would be collected after by the family. When the giant emerged from the tomb without Gen, Connar felt the tears fall heavily down his face.

We can’t just leave him down there...

“I’m so sorry, Beth,” said one of the giants, voice thick with emotion. He was very tall for a giant and his arms were thicker than tree trunks. He lowered himself to hug the much smaller woman.

“Oh, Hevian. You’re so much taller then I remember,” Beth said, smiling through tears. She patted his shoulders. “And thicker! By the Gods, you’ve grown.”

The giant smiled, but it looked hollow as grief was painted thickly upon his features. He turned to Gen’s son and shook his hand, muttering a small greeting and condolence. But his eyes dipped lower to spy Connar. Beth caught the giant’s questioning look.

“Hevian, this is Connar,” she said. “Gendril took him and his folks in during the war. The human lass with the wee babe that left earlier? That was them.”

Hevian crouched down and extended a hand towards Connar and stuck his finger out. “It’s nice to meet ye, Connar.”

He looked up at the giant and reached out to grip the tip of the large finger.

“You too,” he mumbled.

“You know,” Beth said. “Gen was teaching Connar here. You should see some of his leather work, Hevian. It’s beautiful. A wee small, but beautiful.”

Hevian’s face lightened with intrigue and he spared the human a smile. “Well, I might need to come visit ye some day and take a gander myself.”

Beth looked down at Connar. “Hevian here was Gendril’s apprentice. Took over the royal smithy when Gen retired.”

And then Connar’s brain kicked him as he suddenly connected the dots and he blurted, “Oh! So you’re Hev.”

The giant grinned. “Aye, that’s me.”

“Gen told me a lot about you,” Connar replied.

“Good things I hope.”

“Mostly he said your leather work was crap,” Connar replied and then cursed at himself. But much to his relief, Hevian just threw his head back and laughed.

“Aye, that sounds ‘bout right to me. Never was much good with all that stuff. Was always more interested in playing with fire and sharp metal.”

…………………….

The funeral came and went and Connar returned to Beth’s house. That night at dinner, she pulled him aside.

“You’re always welcome here, dear,” she told him. “But I can’t help but wonder if you might feel better with your folks.”

“I thought about it,” he replied. “And it makes the most sense. I don’t want to impose on you. I know it’s a pain having me here. Your neighbors would be happy, I guess.”

“Oh, who gives a right hooey what they think,” she spat. “Gen loved you, Connar. And until the day they lay be beside him, you will have a place here. Same as your folks and sister.”

“I don’t know what I’ll do,” he said finally.

“Well, however long you need to decide take it.”

“Thank you, Beth.”

………………………………………..

His father had gotten him a job as a field hand working one of the wheat fields in the Hill Tribe. In all honesty, Connar did not even know anyone in the Hill Tribe farmed at all. But it sounded like a good way to start off on his own and long hard labor might just be what his idle brain needed to snap out of his rut.

He refused Beth’s offer to escort him there, promising her he would be fine. “Besides, if anyone give me trouble, I’ve got this,” he said, pulling out a large hunting knife. Beth was very reluctant to let him go on his own, but finally convinced her by promising he would go through the woods instead of using the roads.

“Please be careful,” she begged.

“I will,” he laughed, waving back at her as he began to walk. “I’ll see you soon.”

The Vhasshal castle was an imposing looking structure set at the top of a large gentle sloping hill with the village just below. The Hill tribe was a few miles away on the other side of the castle where the hills were more pronounced. In order for Connar to get there, he traveled through the forest that made a half moon shape around the castle and since it was strictly part of the castle grounds, it was considered trespassing for anyone to use it without permission from the Crown. Which made it the perfect path for Connar to get to his destination without being spotted by anyone with ill intentions.

He was almost through the thicket part of the forest when his foot caught on something and he fell forward just as metal teeth sprung up from the earth and clamped down onto his left leg. He fell to the ground and drew in a shocked and rattling breath as the worst pain he had ever felt radiated from his leg. He gave a breathless cry and he rolled over to see what had snagged him and he felt his heart drop at the sight. A spring loaded metal snap trap was clamped onto his leg, the sharp metal teeth digging and cutting into his flesh and passed the exposed meat of leg and the seeping blood, he could see the pale white bone.

His head spun as he gave his first real scream of pain. There was so much blood. Already he felt his backside was damp with it. He reached for his hunting knife and tried to pry the teeth apart, but his strength was quickly waning.

“F-fuck!” he screamed. “Augh!”

He quickly pulled his tunic off and used his knife to cut long ribbons out of it, wrapping them around his leg just under his knee and prayed desperately that it would stop the bleeding. Oh Gods, it hurt so much…

He pulled the ends of his makeshift tourniquet with a muffled cry of pain and fell back onto the ground. With every wave of pain, he screamed; fingernails digging into the ground and racking up the earth. All sound around him became muted as every piece of his waking mind was dedicated to feeling the pain from his leg.

He felt more than heard someone approach and the ground shook as a very large someone dropped to the knees beside him. He barely registered that they were speaking to him and through the tears clouding his eyes, he could not make out a face. The end of a stick was pressed against his lips and the voice above began to speak with a little more clarity.

“...gonna hurt like hell. Bit down on this,” the giant commanded. “Better a stick than your tongue.”

A soon as his teeth were around the stick, there was an abrupt and wholly unwelcomed pressure on his leg as the metal teeth were pulled from his flesh and he heard the shriek of springs. His whole body was shaking from the pain and he sobbed, hands reaching out blindly until they found the warm flesh of a giant hand.

“You’re gonna be fine, Connar,” said the giant. “Keep biting down, lad. Keep breathing. I’m gonna pick ye up, now. Ready? One...two...”

He didn’t wait for the count of three before picking the injured boy up and Connar screamed through his teeth. The trees above him rushed by at an incredible speed before disappearing and were the replaced by stone walls and ceilings. Unfamiliar smells and sounds passed by and he got his first real proper look at the giant.

“...Hev?” he asked just as the darkness around his vision became absolute and he passed out.

………………………….

When he woke up, his head felt thick with fog and his limbs were heavy and sore.

But he couldn’t feel his leg. Weak as he was, he lifted his head up as high as he could and looked down at himself. He lay in a human sized bed in a room that was anything but human sized. There was a collection of bottles and rolls of bandages on a small table next to his bed, but the one thing that struck him was the tell tale lack of shape next to his right leg. Just below his left knee, there was nothing. A wave of emotion roiled up from inside him and he fell back against his pillow, tears already falling.

The second time he awoke, Keral was there and was speaking to a human who he initially thought was a man, but their voice revealed themselves as a woman.

“...he’s on some pretty heavy sedatives and pain tonics,” said the woman. “But he made it through the fever just fine. He’ll be bed ridden for a while yet while he heals.”

“Beth’s all outta sorts,” Keral said. “Blamin’ herself fer lettin’ him go on his own. His folks are wonderin’ when they came come see ‘im.”

“They’re welcome to come and see him, but don’t give them the impression he’ll be awake at all. I’m trying to keep him sedated as much as I can so I don’t need to bottle feed him pain tonic. I’m not trying to make him into an addict and with the dosage he would need at this stage, he surely would be.”

Time became inconsequential as he slipped in and out of consciousness. He vaguely remembered his mother and father visiting and Beth as well, but he was unable to speak or if he did, he could not recall what he said.

And for three weeks, that was Connar’s existence.

………………………….

Sawyer handed him a small book. “Barnaby said you might enjoy this one. Funny poems and such.”

“Thank you,” he said, idly flipping through the pages.

“So,” she said, “Give any thought to what you might do?”

“I guess go back to Beth’s place for a while. Teach myself to walk again with a crutch and be the local cripple. Beg for coins at the street corner.”

“Well, what were you doing before?”

“...honestly? Mooching off Beth. Gen before her. I was going to go be a field hand, but...well.”

“I though Hev said you were a craftsman.”

Connar blinked. “He said that?”

“Yeah. That you worked with leather and such.”

“Well, yeah. I do. Gen taught me. I wasn’t his apprentice or nothing. He just showed me some stuff.”

Sawyer gave him a look. “So, why aren’t you working with the skills you already have? You’re a skilled craftsman. Go craft. You don’t need both legs to do that, do you?”

“No, but what could I make that a giant would want to buy?”

Sawyer rolled her eyes. “Just because you lost your leg doesn’t mean your life and dignity went with it.”

………………..

He had just finished the book of poems when Hev came to visit him. Even among giants, Hev was tall and broad shouldered. His black hair was pulled back into a braid and though his tunic was clean, he still smelled like the forge; ash and metal and smoke. It reminded him a lot of Gen.

When Hev entered the infirmary, he gave Connar a wide white tooth grin and grabbed a chair. “How’re ye feeling, lad?”

“Better now that I can think straight,” he replied, setting the book aside. “But I think I’m done spending all my time in bed.”

Sitting into the chair, Hev gave Connar a nod. “Aye, suppose there’s only so much peace and quiet ye can take. Manage to get around on them at all?” He pointed to crutches leaning against his bed posts.

“A bit,” Connar shrugged. “Not that hard. Just tires me out. Not use to walking with my arms.”

Hev chortled at that. “Well, reason why I wanted to come see ye was I had an interestin’ talk with Sawyer. About yer future.”

Connar furrowed his brow. “Yeah, she was talking to me about that. Thinks I should try and use the skills Gen taught me. Since I’m useless like this for any job in the fields.”

“Aye,” Hev said. “And I agree with her. Last time Beth visited ye, she came by the shop and gave me this.”

From his pocket, he pulled out a knife sheath. He had made it for Gen for a new knife he’d made. It was not long after they had first moved into Beth’s home and Connar had decorated the flat sides of the sheath with depictions of the village with the Vhasshalan castle up on the hill.

“Ye made this?” Hev asked, his tone oddly serious.

Connar nodded and stared at the sheath in Hev’s hands. “Yeah. For Gen.”

“Ye want a job?”

Connar blinked at him. “Wait...what?”

Hev grinned and held up the sheath. “This is amazing work, Connar. I showed it to Master Donal and he showed it to the King.”

Connar blanched. “You...he did... wait, what?”

But Hev just grinned wider. “Aye. He was might impressed too. Told me I should offer ye a job in the smithy. And I agree. Ye’d be a great help.”

Connar did his best impression of a fish as he gaped open mouthed at him. “You...you’re offering me a job?”

“I am.”

“Oh...well,” Connar shrugged as a wide and elated smile crossed his face. “Fuck yeah I will!”

“Don’t ye wanna know the wages?” Hev laughed.

“Doesn’t matter,” Connar replied excitedly. “You could pay me in fucking paper coins and I’d still do it.”

“Oi, careful now, lad. If Donal ever hears ye say that he might take ye up on that offer.”

#DEAD WALLS RISE #G/t story #Giant/tiny #Connar #Hev

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star-anise · 5 years ago

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why would your social environment affect if you identify as a woman or nb?

I don’t know if you meant it to be, but this is a delightful question. I am going to be a complete nerd for 2k+ words at you.

“Gender” is distinct from “sex” because it’s not a body’s physical characteristics, it’s how society classifies and interprets that body. Sex is “That person has a vagina.” Gender is “This is a blend of society’s expectations about what bodies with vaginas are like, social expectations of how people with vaginas do or might or should act, behave, and feel, the actual lived experiences of people with vaginas, and a twist of lemon for zest.” Concepts of gender and what is “manly” and “womanly” can vary a lot. They’re social values, like “normal” or “legal” or “beautiful”, and they vary all the time. How well you fit your gender role depends a lot on how “gender” is defined.

800 years ago in Europe the general perception was that women were sinful, sensual, lustful people who required frequent sex and liked watching bloodsport. 200 years ago, the British aristocracy thought women were pure, innocent beings of moral purity with no sexual desire who fainted at the sight of blood. These days, we think differently in entirely new directions.

But this gets even more complicated, in part because human experience is really diverse and society’s narratives have to account for that. So 200 years ago, those beliefs about femininity being delicate and dainty and frail only really applied to women with aristocratic lineages, and “the lower classes” of women were believed to be vulgar, coarse, sexual, and earthy, which “explained” why they performed hard physical labor or worked as prostitutes.

Being trans or nonbinary isn’t just or even primarily about what characteristics you want your body to have. It’s about how you want to define yourself and be interpreted and interacted with by other people.

The writer Sylvia Plath lived 1932-1963, and she said:

“Being born a woman is my awful tragedy. From the moment I was conceived I was doomed to sprout breasts and ovaries rather than penis and scrotum; to have my whole circle of action, thought and feeling rigidly circumscribed by my inescapable feminity. Yes, my consuming desire to mingle with road crews, sailors and soldiers, bar room regulars–to be a part of a scene, anonymous, listening, recording–all is spoiled by the fact that I am a girl, a female always in danger of assault and battery.”

She was from upper-middle-class Massachusetts, the child of a university professor. A lot of those things she was “prohibited” from doing weren’t things each and every woman was prohibited from doing; they were things women of her class weren’t allowed to do. The daughters and sisters and wives of sailors and soldiers, women who worked in hotels and ran rooming houses, barmaids and sex workers, got to anonymously and invisibly observe those men, after all. They just couldn’t do it at the same time they tried to meet the standards educated Bostonians of the 1950s had for nice young women.

Failure to understand how diverse womanhood is has always been one of feminism’s biggest weaknesses. The Second Wave of feminism was started mostly by prosperous university-educated white women, since they were the people with the time and money and resources to write and read books and attend conferences about “women’s issues”. And they assumed that their issues were female issues. That they were the default of femaleness, and could assume every woman had roughly the same experience as them.

So, for example, middle-class white women in post-WWII USA were expected to stay home all the time and look after their children. Feminists concluded that this was isolating and oppressive, and they’d like the freedom to pursue lives, careers, and interests outside of the home. They vigorously pursued the right to be freed from their domestic and maternal duties.

But in their society, these experiences were not generally shared by Black and/or poor women, who, like their mothers, did not have the luxury of spending copious amounts of leisure time with their children; they had to work to earn enough money to survive on, which meant working on farms, in factories, or as cooks, maids, or nannies for rich white women who wanted the freedom to pursue lives outside the home. They tended to feel that they would like to have the option of staying home and playing with their babies all day.

This is not to say none of the first group enjoyed domestic lives, or that none of the second group wanted non-domestic careers; it’s just that the first group formed the face and the basic assumptions of feminism, and the second group struggled to get a seat at the table.

There’s this phenomenon called “cultural feminism” that’s an attitude that crops up among feminists from time to time (or grows on them, like fungus) that holds that women have a “feminine essence”, a quasi-spiritual “nature” that is deeply distinct from the “masculine essence” of men. This is one of the concepts powering lesbian separatism: the idea that because women are so fundamentally different from men, a society of all women will be fundamentally different in nature from a society that includes men.

But, well, the problem cultural feminism generally has is with how it achieves its definition of “female nature”. The view tends to be that women are kinder, more moral, more collectivist, more community-minded, and less prone to violence.

And cultural feminists tend to HATE people who believe in the social construction of gender, because we tend to cross our arms and go, “Nah, sis, that’s a frappe of misused statistics and The Angel In the House with some wishful thinking as a garnish. That’s how you feel about what womanhood is. It’s fair enough for you, but you’re trying to apply it to the entire human species. That’s got less intellectual rigor and sociological validity than my morning oatmeal.” Hence the radfem insistence that gender theorists like me SHUT UP and gender quite flatly DOESN’T EXIST. It’s a MADE-UP TERM, and people should STOP TALKING ABOUT IT. (And go back to taking about immutable, naturally-occuring phenomena, one supposes, like the banking system and Western literary canon.)

Because seriously, when you look at real actual women, you will see that some of us can be very selfish, while others are altruistic; some think being a woman means abhorring all violence forever, and others think being a woman means being willing to fight and die to protect the people you love. As groups men and women have different average levels of certain qualities, but it’s not like we don’t share a lot in common. The distribution of “male” and “female” traits doesn’t tend to mean two completely separate sets of characteristics; they tend to be more like two overlapping bell curves.

So, like I said, I grew up largely in rural, working-class Western Canadian society. My relatives tend to be tradesmen like carpenters, welders, or plumbers, or else ranchers and farmers. I was raised by a mother who came of age during the big push for Women’s Lib. So in the culture in which I was raised, it was very normal and in some ways rewarded (though in other ways punished) for women to have short hair, wear flannel and jeans, drive a big truck, play rough contact sports, use power tools, pitch in with farmwork, use guns, and drink beer. “Traditional femininity” was a fascinating foreign culture my grandmother aspired to, and I loved nonsense like polishing the silver (it’s a very satisfying pastime) but that was just another one of my weird hobbies, like sewing fairy clothes out of flower petals and collecting toy horses.

Within the standards of the society I was raised in, I am a decently feminine woman. I’m obviously not a “girly girl”, someone who wears makeup and dresses in ways that privilege beauty over practicality, but I have a long ponytail of hair and when I go to Mark’s Work Wearhouse, I shop in the women’s section. We know what “butch” is and I ain’t it.

But through my friendships and my career, I’ve gotten experiences among cultures you wouldn’t think would be too different–we’re all still white North Americans!–but which felt bizarre and alien, and ate away at the sense of self I’d grown up in. In the USA’s northeast, the people I met had the kind of access to communities with social clout, intellectual resources, and political power I hadn’t quite believed existed before I saw them. There really were people who knew politicians and potential employers socially before they ever had to apply to a job or ask for political assistance; there were people who really did propose projects to influential businessmen or academics at cocktail parties; they really did things like fundraise tens of thousands of dollars for a charity by asking fifty of their friends to donate, or start a business with a $2mil personal loan from a relative.

And in those societies, femininity was so different and so foreign. I’d grown up seeing femininity as a way of assigning tasks to get the work done; in these new circles, it was performative in a way that was entirely unique and astounding to me. A boss really would offer you a starting salary $10k higher than they might have if you wore high heels instead of flats. You really would be more likely to get a job if you wore makeup. And your ability to curate social connections in the halls of power really was influenced by how nice of a Christmas party you could throw. These women I met were being held, daily, to a standard of femininity higher than that performed by anyone in my 100 most immediate relatives.

So when girls from Seven Sisters schools talked about how for them, dressing how I dressed every day (jeans, boots, tee, button-up shirt, no makeup, no hair product) was “bucking gendered expectations” and “being unfeminine”, I began to feel totally unmoored. When I realized that I, who absolutely know only 5% as much about power tools and construction as my relatives in the trades, was more suited to take a hammer and wade in there than not just the “empowered” women but the self-professed “handy” men there, I didn’t know how to understand it. I felt like I was… a woman who knew how to do carpentry projects, not “totally butch” the way some people (approvingly) called me.

And, well, at home in Alberta I was generally seen as a sweet and gentle girl with an occasional stubborn streak or precocious moment, but apparently by the standards of Southern states like Georgia and Alabama I am like, 100x more blunt, assertive, and inconsiderate of men’s feelings than women typically feel they have to be.

And this is still all just US/Canadian white women.

And like I said, after years of this, I came home (from BC, where I encountered MORE OTHER weird and alien social constructs, though generally more around class and politics than gender) to Alberta, and I went to what is, for Alberta, a super hippy liberal church, and I helped prepare the after-service tea among women with unstyled hair and no makeup who wore jeans and sensible shoes, and listened to them talk about their work in municipal water management and ICU nursing, and it felt like something inside my chest slid back into place, because I understood myself as a woman again, and not some alien thing floating outside the expectations of the society I was in with a chestful of opinions no one around me would understand, suddenly all made sense again.

I mean, that’s by no means an endorsement for aspirational middle class rural Alberta as the ideal gender utopia. (Alberta is the Texas of Canada.) I just felt comfortable inside because it’s the culture where I found a definition of myself and my gender I could live with, because its boundaries of what’s considered “female” were broad enough to hold all the parts of me I felt like I needed to express. I have a lot of friends who grew up here, or in families like mine, and don’t feel at all happy with its gender boundaries. And even as I’m comfortable being a woman here, I still want to push and transform it, to make it even more feminist and politically left and decolonized.

TERFs try to claim that trans and nonbinary people reinforce the gender identity, but in my experience, it’s feminists who claim male and female are immutable and incompatible do that. It’s trans, nonbinary, and genderqueer people who, simply by performing their genders in public, make people realize just how bullshit innate theories of gender are.. Society is going to want to gender them in certain ways and involve them in certain dynamics (”Hey ladies, those fellas, amirite?”) and they’re going, “Nope. Not me. Cut it out.” I’ve seen a lot of cis people who will quietly admit they do think men and women are different because that’s just reality, watch someone they know transition, and suddenly go, “Oh my god, I get it now.”

Like yes, this is me being coldly political and thinking about people as examples to make a political point. Everyone’s valid and can do what they want, but some things are just easier for potential converts to wrap their minds around.. “I’m sorting through toys to give to Shelly’s baby. He probably won’t want a princess crown, huh?” “I actually know several people who were considered boys when they were babies and never got one, and are making up for all their lost princess crown time now as adults. You never know what he’ll be into when he grows up.” “…Okay, point. I’ll throw it in there.” Trans and enby people disrupt gender in a really powerful back-of-the-brain way where people suddenly see how much leeway there is between gender and sex.

I honestly believe supporting trans and enby people and queering gender until it’s a macrame project instead of a spectrum are how we’ll get to a gender-free utopia. I think cultural feminism is just the same old shit, inverted. (Confession: in my head, I pronounce “cultural” with emphasis on the “cult” part.)

I think feminism is like a lot of emergency response groups: Our job is to put ourselves out of a job. It’s not a good thing if gender discrimination is still prevalent and harmful 200 years from now! Obviously we’re not there yet and calls to pack it in and go home are overrated, but as the problem disappears into its solution, we have to accept that our old ways of looking at the world have to shift.

#staranise original #lgbt discourse

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vanessakirbyfans · 4 years ago

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Vanessa Kirby has never given birth, but after shooting her first lead movie role in “Pieces of a Woman,” she kind of feels like she has.

“Whenever I see a pregnant woman now, or someone’s telling me that they’ve just given birth, I smile,” she said in a recent video chat. “I feel with them.”

The two full days she spent shooting a searing scene for the film could explain this psychic confusion, as could the thorough way Kirby, 32, immersed herself in the role.

In “Pieces of a Woman,” which debuts Jan. 7 on Netflix after a limited theatrical release in December, Kirby plays Martha, a pregnant woman whose home birth goes horribly wrong.

This pivotal event at the beginning of the film plays out in a 24-minute, single-take scene that starts with Martha’s first contractions and ends in tragedy. The camera follows Martha, her partner Sean (Shia LaBeouf) and a midwife, Eva (Molly Parker), around the couple’s apartment, condensing the agonies of labor into under half an hour.

In September, the film premiered at the Venice Film Festival, where Kirby won the best actress award, and began to be talked about as an Oscar contender.

Kirby said she wanted to portray Martha’s labor as authentically as possible. “That was terrifying, because I didn’t want to let women down,” she added.

So she got down to research. Watching many onscreen depictions of birth left Kirby no closer to understanding the experience, she said, since they were so censored and sanitized.

“Then I was even more scared, because I realized that I had a responsibility to show birth as it is, not as it’s even edited in documentaries,” Kirby said.

She talked to women who had given birth and women who’d had miscarriages, as well as midwives and obstetrician-gynecologists at a London hospital. While she was there, a woman arrived having contractions, and agreed to let Kirby observe the birth.

The experience of watching that six-hour labor “changed me so profoundly,” Kirby said. “Every second of what was happening to her, I just absorbed.”

And she began to understand how to play Martha. The woman in the hospital went into a primal, animal-like state, Kirby said. “Her body was taking over and doing it, so that helped me so much for the scene,” she added.

Over two days, that long take was shot six times. In a phone interview, the director, Kornel Mundruczo, who also works in theater and opera, said that preparing it was like getting a stunt scene ready: “Lots of planning, but you don’t know what’s actually going to happen.”

In the end, each take was different, Kirby said: Martha and Sean’s conversations shifted, the way Martha’s body reacted to the contractions was distinctive each time.

“It was, I think, probably the best career experience I’ve ever had,” Kirby said of those two days of shooting. Inspired by the labor she’d observed, she tried to think as little as possible, she said, and not judge what her body was doing in the scene.

After a decade of work, “Pieces of a Woman” is Kirby’s first time leading a feature film, and it is a bold and memorable role that shows her flexing her acting muscles. Mundruczo said he needed an actor at Kirby’s exact career point: “Where all of the skills are already there, but the fear is not,” he said. “When you are very established, you are more and more careful.”

Kirby has been honing those skills since she was a teenager. She grew up in a wealthy, West London suburb, where she attended a private, all-girls’ school and escaped the social pressures of teenage life onstage, in plays and youth drama clubs.

“Every time I walked into that space, I suddenly felt not judged at all, I just felt accepted,” Kirby said. “You didn’t have to be anything, or do anything right.”

After graduating from college, where she studied English literature, Kirby was accepted to the prestigious London Academy of Music & Dramatic Art in 2009. A few months before term began, though, she was offered three stage roles by David Thacker, a former director-in-residence at the Royal Shakespeare Company, who was then the artistic director of the Octagon Theater in Bolton, a town in northern England.

Come to Bolton, he told her, and you will learn more from these roles — which included Helena in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” and Ann Deever in “All My Sons” — than you will in three years of drama school. Kirby agreed, and now describes that season as her training.

“I learned everything there,” she said. Working with Thacker taught her to trust herself, to find her own way as an actor, rather than waiting for other people to tell her what to do, she said.

Kirby has been working steadily ever since, with lead roles in the West End, as well as high profile supporting roles in films and British TV costume dramas. She starred as Princess Margaret in the first two seasons of “The Crown,” a performance that earned her a BAFTA award. Her Margaret fizzes with restless energy, an ideal foil for Claire Foy’s restrained Queen Elizabeth.

In 2018’s “Mission Impossible — Fallout,” she played the White Widow, a glamorous black-market broker who carries a knife in her garter, and knows how to use it. She is slated to appear in two further “Mission Impossible” sequels.

Even as these supporting roles brought her critical praise and awards, Kirby wasn’t in a hurry to find her first onscreen lead role, she said. She’s played many complex characters onstage: women like Rosalind, the fiercely intelligent heroine of Shakespeare’s “As You Like It.” She was holding out for an onscreen lead in whom she could feel some of Rosalind’s “magic,” she said, which made performing “like flying when you step onstage.”

“I could never find those roles at all onscreen,” she said. So she waited, using her smaller parts as opportunities to observe and learn, asking Anthony Hopkins about his craft when they worked together on the British TV drama “The Dresser,” and watching how generous Rachel McAdams was onset for the film “About Time,” she said.

It’s fitting, given Kirby’s theatrical background, that “Pieces of a Woman” started life as a play, written by Kata Weber, Mundruczo’s partner, who drew on the couple’s own experience of losing a child. The play “Pieces of a Woman,” which is set in Poland, consists of only two scenes: the birth, and an explosive dinner with Martha’s family that occurs about halfway through the film adaptation. Its 2018 premiere, directed by Mundruczo at the TR Warszawa theater in Warsaw, was a hit, and the production is still in the company’s repertoire.

Around the time Mundruczo turned 40, five years ago, he started wanting a bigger audience for his work, he said, so he switched from working in German, Hungarian and Polish; “Pieces of a Woman” is his first English-language film. In adapting the play for the big screen, Mundruczo set it in Boston, he said, because he felt the city’s Irish Catholic culture mirrored Poland’s conservative social landscape.

The loss of a pregnancy is rarely featured in onscreen entertainment. Mundruczo said he hopes watching Martha’s experiences will encourage “people to be brave enough to have their own answer for any loss,” he said.

In recent months, the model Chrissy Teigen and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex (writing in The New York Times), have shared stories of their experiences with pregnancy loss. Kirby said that, while researching for the role before filming, she found that women who had experienced one were “actually really relieved to talk about it,” and appreciated that someone wanted to understand.

“Pieces of a Woman” was shot over just 29 days last winter, but Kirby said it took months for her to shake off the experience of playing Martha. “I knew my job was to feel it, to feel what she felt,” she said. Carrying that degree of empathy was “really difficult and disturbing,” she said, but added that the privilege of spending time inside another’s experience is what she loves about her work.

Kirby’s next project will see her co-starring as Tallie, one of two farmers’ wives who fall in love in the United States in the 19th-century in “The World to Come,” a meditative drama from the Norwegian filmmaker Mona Fastvold slated for theatrical release next month.

And after that? Kirby said she was reading scripts, on the hunt for the next role that will scare her. She’s looking for an “untold story about women,” she said, that will feel as urgent to tell as Martha and Tallie’s did.

“What’s that expression?” she said. “Feel the fear, and do it anyway.”

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