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im-the-punk-who · 4 years ago

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The Real People of Black Sails!

Here’s a quick(I promise....I promise this is as short as I could make it without leaving out some really choice shit) rundown of all the real historical figures peppered throughout Black Sails! I think I caught them all but if you know of others please mention them and I’ll add them on! Under a readmore because this is....so long y’all.

Pirates & Maroons

Anne Bonny (possibly 1697 – unknown; possibly April 1782) Started life crossdressing at her dad’s behest to avoid his wife(who wasn’t Bonny’s mom), married a guy her dad didn’t like, moved to Nassau. There her husband became a spy for Rogers and Anne was like ‘Not cool bro’. She met Jack, they started fucking, and Anne discovered she was really good at stabbing things. Resumed dressing as a man and started trying to seduce Mary Read who was also dressed as a man. They did indeed fall victim to one of the classic queer blunders. Anyway, Anne’s like ‘it’s not gay I’m a chick!’ And Mary is like ‘really?? Then it’s a little gayer than you realize because I’m a chick too!’ They (probably) start banging. Rackham’s like ‘hang on! I’m the only dick in Anne’s life’ and Mary and Anne are like ‘you sure are’ and Mary shows him her boobs and then they have some sort of complicated and probably not totally consensual threeway. Then they get captured because, Jack is That Guy Who Was Too Drunk To Realize His Ship Was Under Attack and Mary and Anne had to defend the ship against like, a whole other crew. Jack is hung(not a dick joke), but both Anne and Mary plead stays of execution due to pregnancy. Anne disappears but possibly is maybe referred to later. No one knows. Neat!

Edit: According to sources from this post there is a genealogical record that refers to Anne and it records her death as 1782. Very neat!

Israel Hands (c.1701-death unknown) Israel Hands was a real pirate and Blackbeard’s first mate. Not much else is known about where he came from or his life, other than that Blackbeard shot him in the knee at one point while supposedly aiming for another man. ‘Oops my bad this pistol is from like, the 18th century or something.’ While recuperating in Bath he was arrested after Teach’s death but took a pardon in exchange for ratting out the colonial officials who had been bribed by Teach. It’s unknown what happened to him after that although That Book About Pyrites says he died a beggar in London.

Benjamin Hornigold (1680–1719) Horny4gold was one of the most well known and influential pirates of the Golden Age. Most other pirates sailed under him or with him at one point, and he was one of the founders of the Pirate Republic of Nassau. He never attacked british ships during his time as captain so that he could be like ‘but brooooo I was acting in Britain’s Interests!!! Bro!!!!!’ But his co-pirates didn’t like that and eventually voted to replace him with Sam Bellamy. He accepted the king's pardon in 1718 and became a pirate hunter instead. Bummer. He was reportedly killed in a shipwreck.

Okay listen Horingold in any universe is a fucking JOKE I have to share this passage with y’all:

“Hornigold is recorded as having attacked a sloop off the coast of Honduras, but as one of the passengers of the captured vessel recounted, "they did us no further injury than the taking most of our hats from us, having got drunk the night before, as they told us, and toss'd theirs overboard"” WHAT A JOKE.

Dr. Howell - (birth/death unknown) John Howell was a pirate surgeon forced into service by Hornigold sometime in early 1717. He sailed with various pirate crews until October before returning into the service of Governor Rogers.

Ned Low (1690–1724) N’EDWARD. Okay I’m serious again. Born in London, Lowe grew up a thief in a thief family before moving to Boston. His wife died in childbirth in 1719, so he decided ‘fuck it I’ll become a Pirate Captain’ and did just that. He was known for torturing the people on board the ships he captured before murdering them and burning the ship. Interestingly though, Lowe was known to have a huge amount of regret over abandoning his daughter when he turned pirate, and wouldn’t force married men into his service. He also reportedly would allow women to return to port safely. Because of his numerous captures and cruelties, he was one of the most well known pirates in his day. There are differing reports about Low’s death - some say his crew mutinied and marooned him and he was subsequently hung, others say his ship sunk in a storm, and some say he just straight up disappeared. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Jack Rackham - (December 26, 1682 – November 18, 1720) Really a pirate, really named himself after a housecat pattern. (No, okay, he didn’t, it was because of his threads. But wouldn’t the cat thing fit too?) Sailed with Vane, Anne Bonny, and Mary Read. Was mostly known for being That Guy Who Was Too Drunk To Realize His Ship Was Under Attack and being Anne and Mary’s captain. He was captured and sentenced to hang after the aforementioned Drunk Blunder in 1720.

Mary/Mark Read - (1685 – 28 April 1721) Much like Anne Bonny, Mary dressed as a boy for much of her youth so a parent could swindle someone out of money. From her teenage years on she continued dressing as a man to find work in the military and as a sailor. She did marry but her husband died young and so she decided to become a pirate. Like ya do. She accepted the king’s pardon in 1718, then mutinied on the privateer she was aboard, once again becoming a pirate. Because pirates are sexy. In 1720 she joined Jack Rackham’s crew and sailed with him and Bonny. Cue the whole ‘Hey you’re hot, also I’m a woman.’ ‘Oh, hey, same hat!’ with Anne. In November of 1720, Rackham’s ship was captured. Mary died of a fever in prison(likely due to her pregnancy) in 1721.

Edward Teach - (c. 1680 – 22 November 1718) He started piracy sailing under Hornigold, and built the fleet alongside him and Stede Bonnet until Hornigold retired. COOL fact about Blackbeard is he was a MASTER showman who liked to light slow burning fuses under his hat to scare his enemies, and he relied more heavily on creating an image his prizes feared than violence. He did a lot of cool shit including ransoming the entire town of Charles Town and annoying the shit out of Woodes Rogers before settling in Bath and later dying of like, a shit ton of wounds while battling Lieutenant Maynard. The battle on Roger’s ship is pretty much what happened minues the keelhauling. Afterwards he was beheaded, his head hung from the bow of Maynard’s ship, and his body was thrown in the bay in Bath, where it’s said his ghost still haunts! Funky!

Charles Vane - (1680 – 29 March 1721) Really a pirate captain! Known for being Not A Nice Dude. Sailed with Henry Jennings, Edward England and Jackie Rackhammie. He led the pirates in resisting Rogers in Nassau, and yeah he really did light a ship on fire and 18th centuryeet it into Rogers’ line in order to escape. There’s a note that he returned to Nassau to get married but I couldn’t find any info on who he married so he’s gay now. That’s a rule I just made up. Anyway so at one point his ship got into a fight with another ship and Vane ordered a retreat and the crew was like ‘this is BOOshit’ and voted him out in favor of Jack Rackham. Ouch. Vane and some of the crew that supported him left aboard the Katherine(I believe) but then they got caught in a storm that said ‘fuck you specifically to Charles Vane,’ and he was marooned on an island. He survived! Just long enough for a British ship to stop at the island for him to attempt to board, get caught, and then hung. Deus ex piratica.

(Honorary mentions)

John Silver + Captain Flint (sort of but I’m not kidding!) Okay so of course there are a bunch of suspected origins of the characters of Captain Flint and Long John Silver, but the one I like the most is of two brothers - one of whom had a peg leg! - who captured an enormous Spanish treasure and buried it near Ocracoke island. Their names were John and Owen Lloyd. (And yes, John was the one-legged brother.) In 1750 a Spanish treasure fleet named the Flotas de Indias attempted to sail from Havana to Spain in late August, and three ships were wrecked during a hurricane. By a stroke of luck, the Lloyd brothers had been blown to the same inlet as the wrecked ships Guadalupe and Soledad , and managed to convince the Captain to hire them to transport the treasure to Norfolk.

But of course because they thought the Spanish SUCKED they said ‘psyche’ and just fucked off with it while the Captain was fighting Bureaucratic red tape in North Carolina. Iconique. Owen Lloyd reportedly buried the treasure on Norman Island and the pair became folk heroes in the area, particularly in St. Kitts. (P.s., the Stevenson family ran a sugar production business on St. Kitts, and R.L. Stevenson’s great grandfather worked there as early as 1773 - just 25 years after the epic heist. COOL STORY BRO.)

Captain Throckmorton (Okay not really but I just love this guy’s name) Okay so this guy wasn’t really a pirate captain but he was a Steamboat captain in the 1830s and his name is just too ridiculous for someone to make up. Toot toot, motherfucker.

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Queen Nanny(Maroon Queen/Madi) (c. 1686 – c. 1755) The spiritual, cultural, and military leader of the Windward Maroons (who the Black Sails Maroons are based on.) She led them alongside her ‘brother’ Quao although the relationship between them isn’t known. Exact information about her origins are not known but best guess is that she was of royal lineage from present-day Ghana, born sometime in the 1680’s. She did have a husband named Adou(who may have been the same person as Quao? I’ve read conflicting stuff), but they had no children. Many of the guerilla warfare tactics we now think of as common practice were developed by Queen Nanny and the other Maroons in their fight against British incursions. (The trap that Flint lays, covering themselves with paint and leaves, and the pits the Maroons lay in the forest are tactics known to have been used by the Windward Maroons.)

Nanny was a fucking legend okay a LEGENDS ONLY legend. She was one of the most instrumental people in preserving African culture among freed slaves and Maroons, and in encouraging the resistance to slavery in the Bahamas and surrounding areas. She was one of three leaders of the First Maroon War (which the war in Black Sails is based on). She initially refused to sign the treaty offered to Cudjoe because she knew the British were losing and was like ‘Why????? Would I surrender???? In a war??? I’m winning?????’

Anyway Queen Nanny was a fucking badass please read every piece of literature you can find on her. (You should absolutely read her full bio because she was fucking badass.)

Cudjoe (not exactly, but Julius is very close) (c. 1690s – 1764) Likely a freeborn son of one of the original escaped slaves turned Maroons, Cudjoe is hailed as one of the greatest Maroon leaders(after Queen Nanny). Much like in Black Sails, these original Maroons were slaves who escaped or overran their masters, forming free communities in the Mountains of Jamaica. The treaty in Black Sails is based on the one Cudjoe negotiated with the British, wanting an ‘honorable peace’ with the enemy, rather than the continued war and better terms that Queen Nanny and Quao wanted. (sound familiarrrrrr?) I do want to note that by the end of his life he became completely disillusioned with the idea that the British should be reasoned with and basically started fights with every British superior he could.

The English, Spanish, and Scottish!

The Guthries So while there wasn’t ever a female head of the Guthrie clan in Nassau, the Guthries were a Scottish merchant clan who emigrated to Boston around 1652 due to religious and racial persecution. While most of the family stayed around Pennsylvania and Massachusetts, John Guthrie moved to Virginia and his brother James Guthrie moved to Bermuda sometime after 1683.

(James Guthrie of Suffolk County, Massachusetts was listed in the will of John Richardson, dated 7 May 1683, in which Richardson says, “I give and bequeath unto James Guthrie all I have in the world except twenty shillings to buy John Harris a ring and ten shillings to buy John Kyte a ring.” This was witnessed by John Raynsford and John Ramsey.) Fellas is it gay.

Anyway, between Virginia and Boston and James’ ties in the Bermuda islands, the family made a shit ton fencing pirated goods during the Golden Age of Piracy, particularly from the Pirate Republic of Nassau.

A John Guthrie(likely a son of James’) was also a Colonel who was part of the peace talks with Cudjoe and the Maroons. Neat!

James Oglethorpe (22 December 1696 – 30 June 1785) Okay listen Oglethorpe was COOL AS FUCK. He is the founder of the colony of Georgia and is imo who Thomas Hamilton is probably based on. Oglethorpe was a HUGE humanitarian and even before he decided to form an entire colony around people not owning slaves. He advocated for better conditions for sailors, and prison reform. In 1732 he read a letter by a slave in Maryland named Ayuba Suleiman Diallo and on the spot decided slavery was terrible, divested himself of his stock in the African Trading Company, and resolved to include a law banning slavery in Georgia to the colony’s charter. Radical, man.

Speaking of Georgia, and specifically his plantation near Savannah, Oglethorpe actively spoke with the native Yamacraw who populated the land to ask permission and trade for the land he sought to build Georgia on. His plantation was meant to help debtors in London, released without any support, from falling back into debt and offering them a way forward to landownership through indentured servitude. I highly recommend anyone interested in early attempts at an equality based colonial system read up on the original charter of Georgia. (Of course there were still problems, but Oglethorpe was one of the most prominent proponents of a non hierarchical society - including limits to the acreage any person could own based on how helpful that land was to the people who worked it, and communal resources.) Oglethorpe was also a lifelong friend with Tomochichi, the chief of the Yamacraw, and worked very closely with him on colonial-indigenous relations.

Vincente de Raja (birth/death unknown) He was the real Governor and military Captain of Cuba from 1716-1717. He was a devoted pirate hunter and encouraged Spanish privateering against the pirates. Due to an attempt by Spain to increase tobacco profits at the expense of the farmers, there was a large revolt which resulted in many of the Cuban officials, including Raja, being replaced.

William Rhett (4 September 1666 – 12 January 1723) He was a merchant captain and plantation owner in Carolina who served in the colonial militia and hunted pirates. He captured Stede Bonnet and was probably just as much of an asshole as he is in the show.

Woodes Rogers - (c. 1679 – 15 July 1732) The Governor of Nassau who was largely responsible for ending piracy in the Bahamas. He really did offer a universal pardon, which a large number of the pirates took. Fun fact: before he was Governor, he rescued Alexander Selkirk, who is believed to be the guy Robinson Crusoe is based off of! Neat! He really did have a brother who really did die during his privateering exploits which also really did leave him ‘disfigured’. He got sued by his crew, went bankrupt, wrote a book, got famous for writing the book, and he really did have a wife named Sarah whom he divorced shortly after all this happened. He then became Governor of Nassau for the first time. This first term did end in him being imprisoned for debts incurred defending the island from Vane and Teach and the Spanish, but he was released, helped write that most famous A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates, and became governor again in 1728. He died in 1732 of just plain exhaustion from dealing with the bureaucracy. Alexa play tiny violin.

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cancelledhq · 5 years ago

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Below, you will find all groups and their televised time slot. All characters that are in italic are sponsors. Please, consult with your thread members about which setting (also listed below) you will be using. Finally, there will be randomizer links for any that would like to experience the true version of the game in their thread. If you have any questions, please reach out to the main.

Best of luck!

GROUPS

Level 1: Miranda Ellis, Tomas De Visser, Joseph Naor || 10:00am

Level 2: Thalia Blanche, Derek Uehara, Anthony Deluca || 11:00am

Level 3: Jerome Castillo, Charles Irons, Ant Funke-Flynn || 2:00pm

Level 3: Juno Benson, Freya Asquith, Sloane Bennett || 3:00pm

Level 3: Iris Loussaint, Taliesin Collier, Clementine Fehr || 4:00pm

Level 3: Liana Clearwater, Tommy Price, Isobelle Menchaca || 5:00pm

Level 4: Eloise Bardot, Jade Bellamy, Henri Olivier || 8:00pm

Level 4: Annissa Zadani, Angel Deaquino, Claudia Marshall || 9:00pm

Level 4: Eila Levitt, Luda Mae Kerrigan, Cayla Barker || 10:00pm

Level 4: Cheyenne Stewart, Teagan Harper Hale, Julian Santiago || 11:00pm

SETTINGS

All settings have been constructed painstakingly by the special effects department. They will all be in contained settings within Prometheus Productions’ studio lots. You may find aesthetic boards here.

Chuck E. Cheese || Animatronics. Candy. Games. Tickets. Prizes. Cheap thrills for little kids. There’s a pizza waiting for you on the table, and a cake dripping in sprinkles. In icing, it says Happy Birthday. You swear you heard a kid laugh, but there’s no one else there but you. Enjoy the party.

Movie Theater || Welcome to the very place the audience is introduced to you: on the big screen. You may come in and see you have some guests in the seats. Don’t worry. They’re harmless and lifeless. The manikin faces are painted in humored grins. It’s proof the audience still loves you.

Photo Development Room || There is one lightbulb hanging above your heads. It casts everything in red. Freshly developed photos are hanging for you to see the final product of someone’s vision. You look at them and see your co-star. You see the next and notice it’s someone you know got cancelled. The next one? It’s you. You don’t remember the photo being taken, though.

The Train || You look around and you swear you’ve stepped into an Agatha Christie novel. It looks like it’s from the same period. It’s truly rife with the air of an unsolved murder that you’ll have to take part in. The curtains are drawn over the windows. You peel them back because you’re curious because you’re not going anywhere, are you? You see the outside world flash, streaming by like you are, and then you stumble into your seat; the train has hit a bump in its tracks. You repeat to yourself: we aren’t going anywhere. We aren’t going anywhere.

Hospital || It’s a sterile room. We wouldn’t want to have any infections. There’s an operating table with a practice dummy sprawled on top of it. Next to it are surgical tools. You have gloves, a scalpel, everything you would need to perform the perfect organ transplant. It’s funny how you see boxes with hazardous symbols plastered on the outside of them.

The Mirror Room || It’s not exactly the carnival room you were so fond of once upon a time. The room has four walls, but each of those walls is a mirror. From floor to ceiling. You see yourself. You watch and you stare like you’ve never seen yourself before. Then you feel your blood go cold and your brain is triggered. Did you just blink? Your reflection told you you did but... you don’t feel like you did. Time passes. You see a wrinkle. You see your face melting. And then boom. You realize it’s no mirror at all. They’re screens. Perhaps you’ll see more than just yourself after awhile. An audience maybe. Anything is possible.

Retro Motel || It’s a time warp. Motel 6 in the 1980s. The walls are an awful wallpaper. The king-sized bed looks made with mints on the pillow. A corded phone in faded yellow is on the nightstand, illuminated by the oversized lampshade. Turn on the TV, adjust the antennae, relax and enjoy your stay.

RANDOMIZERS

[Level 1]

[Level 2]

[Level 3]

[Level 4]

#cancelled.event #yourchoice #rp #roleplay #open rp

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clarketomylexa · 6 years ago

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That’s What Best Friends Do

“I love you,” she tells Lexa in earnest.

Lexa cocks her head, nose scrunched and finger curled into the spine of her book, marking the page. “Why.”

Clarke is taken back. Her and Octavia have been exchanging cheesy ‘I love yous’ since the second grade and there isn’t any real reason for it other than ‘that’s just what friends do’. She shrugs and purses her lips. “I don’t know,” she says plainly, and amends the words Octavia tells her, “that’s just what best friends do.”

read on ao3

They meet in the first grade.

Lexa is sweet and Clarke thinks she is cool in her own quirky way.

She moves in on a Sunday and she stands on the other side of the picket fence as they talk, in a green sweatshirt with tiny, little pugs on it and one leg of her denim overalls rolled an inch higher than the other, rainbow piñata socks on show underneath scuffed up sneakers. Her hair is braided into a crown around her head—a style that Clarke files away among what Octavia likes to call a ‘fishtail braid’ and how to tie her shoelaces for later—and she has a scar above her top lip that Clarke imagines she got doing something exotic.

She’s so much cooler than the kids in her grade that Clarke almost wants to yell out how unfair it is that she won’t be going to her school in the Spring.

“But Oakside is so far away,” she laments, hands fidgeting with the Barbie doll tucked beneath her arm. Most of the kids her age in their cul-de-sac go to Ridgeview. Privately Clarke thinks Octavia is the only one worth talking to though, because she has it on good authority that Miller picks his nose and Bellamy just tries too hard.

She isn’t allowed to tell people that though so she watches Lexa shrug.

“My cousin goes there.”

Abby calls her from the porch a moment later and Clarke is forced to say goodbye to her new friend to wash up for sinner. She thrusts the topless Barbie over the fence in a form of peace offering—Lexa’s eyes bulge out of her head and Clarke wonders if she’s never seen a Barbie before so she makes a mental note to invite Lexa over to play with them—and tells Lexa with the utmost importance that she will talk to her tomorrow.

“I made a new friend today,” she tells Abby and Jake from her stool by the kitchen sink as she methodically washes her hands like the chart tacked to the wall tells her to. Jake says she’s a ‘sociable child’ which Clarke thinks is adult speak for ‘will talk to anything that moves’ because once she made friends with a duck in the park that had one leg and an eye that didn’t open. But if being ‘sociable’ means she can talk to Lexa again Clarke will accept the title gladly.

When she closes her eyes she can see Lexa’s pretty braid and the way her eyes aren’t quite one colour but not two either. Like what would happen in art class when Clarke mixed turquoise and forest green together on her plastic pallet because she was using what Miss Henry called ‘artistic license’. Maybe God or whatever Bellamy’s new theory on who created the universe used their ‘artistic license’ when they were making Lexa too.

It makes an awful lot of sense when she thinks about it.

“Clarke you’re wasting water,” Abby reminds her, ferrying pasta bake and green salad from the island to the table and Clarke dries her hands obediently and tucks her stool into the scullery to claim her chair.

“Her name is Lexa,” she continues. “She has piñatas on her socks. She lives next door.”

“The Shepard house sold?” Jake asks.

Abby nods. “I met the new owners at the open house last month. She’s a lawyer,” she looks at Jake in the way Clarke has noticed her parents do when they are talking about ‘parent things’. “I don’t think he’s in the picture anymore.”

“What picture?” Clarke pipes up, distracted as she uses the spoon to scrape the cheesy, bread crumb topping from the side of the dish. She likes drawing. Her favourite is when they finish their worksheets quickly on Friday afternoons and her teacher tells them to bring a piece of paper and a book to lean on, and takes them to the playground to draw the plants and the bugs. The boys in her class spend the time throwing sticks at each other but Clarke always finds a corner to tuck herself into and a lady bug to examine.

She likes the colours.

“Your Mom means that Lexa’s Dad doesn’t live with her anymore,” Jake explains. He takes the spoon from Clarke and scoops the stuck piece of pasta bake onto her plate before topping it up with salad and ignoring the way she frowns at the limp lettuce leaves.

Thinking on it, Clarke nods without ceremony. “If Lexa’s Mom’s a lawyer,” she posits, “can she arrest Nate for stealing my gel pens?”

Nate sits across from her in art class and has a habit of stealing her stationary when he thinks she isn’t looking because he likes colouring his notebooks with sparkles. It’s annoying because she refuses to tell on him and Abby says she doesn’t want to buy her more if they are going to continue to go missing so she has to resort to using Octavia’s ones without the good smelling scents.

“I don’t think that’s how it works, honey,” Abby laughs.

“That’s prob’ly for the best,” Clarke smacks her lips in thought, “he sticks them up his nose.”

Clarke invites Lexa over two days later to play with her Barbies and Lexa sits on her lawn in a bright pink long-sleeve with patches shaped like fried eggs on the elbows and socks that have milk and cookies on them.

When she jokes that Lexa is wearing her breakfast, Lexa smiles so wide Clarke thinks the world will split in two.

She invites Lexa to the lake three months later.

It’s a five hour drive to the house that has been in Jake’s family since he was Clarke’s age but it’s one that they take every twenty-second of June when Abby has cover at the surgery. The house is big and old, with a deck and a new paint job and big windows that overlook the lake. If you squint on a clear day, you can see the proud, white facades of the houses on the other side with their boat sheds, trellises and peaked roofs.

A jetty sits in the water and a tree clings to the bank with a tire-swing Jake had fastened to the middle-most branch—against Abby’s better judgement but she never can stop her husband when he has one of his ideas—so that when you stand as far as you can up the bank and let go you can fly out far enough not to touch the bottom of the lake. It’s Clarke’s favourite thing since she learnt how to do a handstand on the side of the garage.

Not that Clarke has to sell it really, because after three months of Barbie Dream house in the front yard Lexa is nodding as soon as she mentions it would mean spending the summer with her. She explains diligently that there is a double bed in the room Clarke usually stays in—because Abby said that sometimes people don’t like sleeping in the same bed as other people—but that they can sleep in the bunk room instead, or Jake can pull the trundle bed out.

Lexa just nods.

She is fairly sure that is she asked Lexa to jump off a cliff, she would walk straight off it, piñata socks and all but then Clarke would miss her too much.

She stands on the Griffin’s porch on the morning of the twenty-second, in cactus socks and second-hand short-alls—the pants cut down to her size—with funky patches sewn into the bib, thumbs working their way under the straps of her backpack as her mom thanks Abby profusely.

She’s a pretty lady, with Lexa’s smile and round glasses who looks both flustered and relieved as she sweeps a hand over her daughter’s forehead and admits in a way Clarke knows she is supposed to pretend not to listen to that Lexa is having trouble making friends. Which Clarke thinks is ridiculous because Lexa is sweet and funny. She wears her hair like a crown and has been rolling the legs of her pants up at different lengths for three months because Clarke said she thought it was cool.

Clarke’s chest aches when Lexa won’t look up from the tips of her shoes and she thinks that Lexa’s mom mustn’t know what she’s talking about.

Clarke has been doing multiplication in math.

She knows that two and two is four, and three and three is six.

And if that’s true then she thinks Lexa and summer must equal something like ‘better than good’—but not ‘bestest’ because Lexa says ‘best’ is already a superlative.

Clarke doesn’t know what a superlative is, but Lexa can define words like ‘diversification’ so she thinks Lexa must be right.

They swim until water rattles in their ears and Jake teaches them to fish off the jetty after they stand on stools to help him pull the rods down from a shelf in the boat house, carefully showing them how to thread the bait onto the hook and cast the line into the water. When Lexa can’t get her hands around the line, face contorting unhappily, Jake heaves her onto his lap and repeats the process patiently until her frumpy frown straightens out.

They go out on the boat on hot days; Jake makes the boat corkscrew so that the water froths out in a V behind them, and when Clarke begs, he flings them writhing and giggling into the water by the strap of their life-jackets and fishes them out again while Abby rolls her eyes.

It’s in the quiet moments though, when the lie on the grass in damp swim suits and sunscreen-sticky skin, that Clarke discovers two very important things.

The first: Lexa does this thing when she is happy where she scrunches her eyes and throws her head back to laugh and it’s so ‘positively lovely’—which is another thing that Lexa says a lot—that Clarke makes it her mission to make her happy every day of her life.

The second: every time Lexa is happy, it makes Clarke feel ten feet tall. It’s a feeling that starts in her toes, ticking the soles of her feet and shooting like growing pains up her legs until her stomach is hot and her cheeks are pink and she feels stronger than before. She is pretty sure that if she were to climb the tallest tree on the bank and let go, she would fly and not fall.

She thinks about it as she sits, chin sticky with lemonade popsicle on the jetty.

Lexa lays sprawled on her back, legs akimbo and arms stretched out into the sky. Her fingers are splayed and her whole face is contorted so that she can squint up at the sky and trap the sun in the circle of her fingers. She has freckles peeking out shyly from the bridge of her nose and when she notices Clarke staring, she drops her hand and smiles. It’s lopsided—like her pant legs and her socks—but it’s whole in a way that makes Clarke’s stomach flip-flop.

“Want to see something cool?” she pokes Lexa in the soft of her ribs with her pointer finger.

Lexa nods, pushing herself up onto her elbows, intrigued, “uh huh.”

She folds her legs and cocks her head. Clarke makes sure she is watching before she picks her way up the jetty, where the grassy verge tangles with the roots and rocks.

The tire swing is tucked over a low branch—at her mom’s request because technically Clarke isn’t supposed to use it without ‘adult supervision’ but Lexa talks like an adult sometimes with her ‘therefore’ and ‘henceforth’, so she thinks it will be okay—and stands on a rock that juts out into the water with one leg, reaching out with the other until she can feel the tire under her fingers. Grinning, she pulls it into her hands and hooks a leg over the rope, taking three steps back and launching herself off the bank.

She lets go when the tire is just about to swing back like Jake taught her and surfaces just out of the shallows, hair in her eyes and heart thumping against the cage of her chest. When her ears unclog, Lexa is whooping and the jetty bends and gives beneath her uncoordinated victory dance.

“I can go higher,” Clarke garbles, mouth full of water.

Lexa’s whole face shoots upwards in disbelief. “Cannot,” she says.

“Can to,” Clarke insists, arms flailing as she doggy-paddles inelegantly to the shore.

Their life jackets are hooked over the railing of the deck and it crosses Clarke’s mind that maybe she should go and get hers, but if she does Abby will see her through the kitchen window and she gave them instructions not to go in the water when she went in to put lunch together.

She fishes the tire swing towards her and steps back as far as the rope will go this time, rooting her toes firmly in the soggy grass. Lexa is staring at her in wide-eyed apprehension but Clarke sets her brow until it furrows above her eyes and her stomach whooshes out from under her as she kicks off the bank, mud stuck between her toes.

It dawns on her when the air is whining in her ears that maybe this isn’t such a good idea.

Her foot catches and before she understand what is happening she is careening back towards the bank, heart stuck in her mouth.

Lexa lets out a sharp yelp, as Clarke’s hand slips. She lands face down in the dirt, the air punched out of her chest, still for a moment until pain blooms across her right cheek and a cry escapes her mouth before she can recognise it as hers. She hears a shout when her ears stop ringing, and rolls with a hard gasp onto her back as Lexa’s head and shoulders swim into her vision, awful worry crunching her face. She pets Clarke’s hair as Clarke blinks up at the sky, voice trembling as she coos ‘it’s okay, Clarke’ and ‘I’m here, Clarke’ in a high, thin voice that Clarke can’t help but think is less soothing and more unsettling, until the thick goo that seems to be sitting on her lungs seeps away and she can breathe.

But then her mom appears—all grumpy line in the place of her mouth—wiping her hands on her pants as she squats on the grass and Clarke thinks she is going to puke all over again.

“Mom,” she squeaks, whining as the right side of her face throbs hotly.

Abby takes one look at her—wet swimsuit and lank hair, blood pooling beneath her eye and Lexa’s hand squeezed tightly in a balled fist—and tsks, tucking a hand under her to sit her up and Clarke sways before falling into her chest, whining ‘it hurts’ into the soft neckline of her shirt.

The first-aid kit is found and Abby asserts that it won’t need stitches.

She gets a talking to about not doing what she’s told—which Lexa stands through too, fingers wound through Clarke’s in a way that makes it hard to focus on why ‘insubordination’ is a bad thing—and she wears a hulk band-aid on the bony jut of her cheek for a week.

Lexa traces it with a feather-light finger as the lie, side-by-side in the double bed beneath the lazy turn of the ceiling fan in the room that has been Clarke’s since she was three years old. She wears llama pyjamas and is unapologetic about not wanting to sleep on the trundle bed Jake offers to make up for her, instead, pressing herself into Clarke to feel for the bump of the scab forming under the band-aid with a frown in the way that makes warmth curl under Clarke’s ribs.

“I did it on purpose,” Clarke says, eager for anything to get rid of the crunch between Lexa’s eyebrows. She wants to reach out and touch it but her hands shake so she doesn’t.

Lexa blinks slowly, “nuh uh,” she says without heat.

“Did to,” Clarke fists her hand under her chin and nudges Lexa’s nose with her own. She smells like bubble-gum toothpaste and the Griffin’s shower-gel and the wonderful notion that Lexa is hers wafts in her mind until she can’t help but smile. “Now I match you.”

Lexa reaches up to touch the shallow half-circle above her top lip like she’s forgotten about it, fingers tapping her teeth for a minute before she shakes her head. “Yours is cooler,” she says definitively, “I got mine falling off my bike,” she explains, “you got yours flying.”

Lexa smiles her world-splitting smile and Clarke thinks that while swimming and the fireworks Jake sets off for the Fourth of July are all well and good, bedtime might be better. It’s a secret she will take to the grave along with how she only pretends not to like broccoli but the stripy wallpaper and floral sheets of the room feel impenetrable and Clarke builds them a fortress out of cotton sheets and shadows cast from soft lamp-light; a place where Lexa is hers.

She wraps her fist around the top of the sheet and pull sit over their heads until they are breathing the same hot air.

“You’re my best friend,” she says wondering why her throat gets hot and tight as she does so. The words have been sitting on her chest since the day they met—a secret locked tight like the acorns she keeps in the sticker decorated box beneath her bed that is so true she feels it in her bones every time Lexa talks.

Lexa’s eyes go big. For a horrible second, Clarke thinks that it was the wrong thing to say and her stomach flip-flops but not in the way she has come accustomed to it doing when she is around Lexa—this flip-flop feels like the warning kind that comes before Clarke has to go in search for her mom in the middle of the night because she ate too much ice-cream in one go and it winds itself into a knot so tight the only way out is up. But then, Lexa mumbles ‘best friend’ under her breath like she wants to taste it and nods, smiling so warmly Clarke wants to wrap herself up in it like a blanket and never crawl out.

“I’ve never had a best friend,” she admits, cowering behind the words like they will change Clarke’s mind. When Clarke doesn’t reply, she peers at her intently and Clarke recognises the look that she gets when she is helping Clarke with her addition and subtraction worksheets. “Is it different from just being a friend?”

Clarke thinks about it for a moment.

“Yes,” she eventually lands on, “and no.” Lexa nods. “It just means more,” Clarke whispers, “it just makes it more special.”

“Okay, then,” Lexa decides. “You’re my best friend too.”

Lexa is soft when she sleeps. With her admission she goes limp like pasta when you put it in the pot and Clarke manoeuvres her happily, all gangly limbs and knobbly joints, until she can tangle them together like a puzzle—the kind that isn’t meant to unravel—and when Abby comes to check on them, if it weren’t for the different colours of their pyjamas, she wouldn’t know where one started and the other ended.

They talk during the year but it isn’t the same.

Lexa gives Clarke a pair of socks for her birthday with tiny little sloths embroidered into them—Clarke knows they cost her whole allowance and for that it means the world. She presents them with as much importance as when she knighted Clarke in the woods behind the lake house with an old plank of timber they found in the shed and she hangs over the fence every day after school with her lopsided smile and embroidered overalls, telling Clarke about the books she reads and her nine-year-old cousins shenanigans until her mom calls her in.

Sometimes, when Lexa’s mom is working she stays at Clarke’s on Saturday nights and on those days, Clarke can almost pretend it’s summer. They stand on stools in the kitchen side-by-side as Jake stirs the pasta sauce and lie in Clarke’s twin bed at night, watching the glow-in-the-dark stars. But Lexa is all angles unfortunately—she looks forlorn whenever someone mentions it to her, but Abby insists that she will grow into her lankiness—and while in summer it provides places for Clarke to tuck herself into comfortably, during the year, the positions she has to contort them into to make them fit clench at her chest.

She presses sloppy kisses to Lexa’s forehead to tries and convince herself otherwise, but Clarke comes to the conclusion that Lexa isn’t hers during the year when Lexa regretfully turns down an invitation to go bowling when Jake offers to take her, Octavia and Bellamy one Friday night.

She stares at her toes when she tells Clarke that her mom said no and she looks so much like the snail that Clarke found on the back path without its shell one morning that she pester her for more information.

Two weeks later, Clarke has to say no to backyard pizza with Lexa and her mom because of Octavia’s seventh birthday party—a slumber party that ends at eight when they all inevitably fall from their sugar highs that Lexa isn’t invited to despite Clarke’s best efforts.

Octavia doesn’t like Lexa. She says she’s ‘too colourful’ with her stripy shirts and rainbow patches even after Clarke explains her theory about ‘artistic license’ and Clarke thinks it’s a horrible reason not to like someone. When she asks her mom Abby tells her that Octavia is probably feeling left out and Clarke thinks that maybe, she isn’t Lexa’s during the year either.

The thought is so distressing, she lies awake with it at night, raggedy Ann doll squeezed under her armpit as she stares at the spot where the wall meets the ceiling. She twists her finger over the woollen curls.

Summer is four months away but suddenly, it becomes the center of her universe.

Clarke is nine years old and Abby has set them loose to play in the thatch of trees beside the house.

They pick through the leaves in shorts and t-shirts while their bathing suits dry over the railing and play catch with the neighbour kids until they are flush faced and breathless. Lexa wears popcorn socks beneath her sneakers and Clarke slips a hand, fingers splayed, over her mouth to mask the sound of her heavy breathing as they crouch in a heavy crush of limbs behind a tree. They are pressed so close together Clarke can feel the rapid pat-pat of her heart and when the Monty and Jasper run past in a flurry of kicked-up leaves and pine needles, Lexa licks a wet stripe across Clarke’s cupped palm with a fierce brand of mischief in her eyes until Clarke squeals away.

They spend the rest of the afternoon as the taggers but Clarke can’t find it in herself to complain.

The next day tag becomes boring and they think of a new game.

Clarke remembers the story book that she packed in preparation for the lazy hours her and Lexa were sure to spend lounging on the grass—a thick tome her grandmother gifted her for Christmas completed with the words ‘For Clarke’ scrawled inside the front cover in her thin, looped writing that Clarke equated to the threads of the spiderwebs that hung from the beams in the shed. It contains everything from fairy tales to folklore.

She lays it on the picnic table and points to the characters illustrated in battle garb, assigning one to each of them.

Clarke is the sky princess, thrust from her cloud-top home—Olympus, Lexa corrects her quietly, pointing to the illustration of a tall, columned building gleaming atop the point of a high mountain. Her inspiration comes from a short story about a boy named Hercules that Clarke knows nothing about except for the fact that she dimly remembers watching a Disney movie about a boy who was half-god and half-human and had an angry goat instead of parents. She drapes a strip of gauzy fabric over her shoulders rummaged from the depths of the house, a dress-up left over from her aunts’ childhood summers, and threads flowers through her hair, feeling suitably wispy and ‘effervescent’, which Lexa tells her means ‘like air’.

Lexa is the warrior queen whose territory Clarke falls unwittingly into. Clarke thinks it suits her—she peers at the illustration of the woman with braids and leather armour, riding a horse with a sword in her hand and battle-paint on her skin and the slight downward turn in the corner of her lips is so similar to the way Lexa’s face contorts sometimes and she congratulates herself for putting two and two together. Ignoring the short yelps when she mistakenly tugs a stray curl, she clumsily threads Lexa’s hair into a braid the way Octavia taught her at recess. The outcome is less than good. Lexa bears more resemblance to the mangy cat that stalks the neighbourhood begging from scraps than a warrior-queen but she smudges wads of dirt over her eyes to fix it ignoring the way everything inside her goes warm and melty when she smiles—like the s’mores the make in the fire-pit at night in when Lexa is in pyjamas that smell like the Griffin’s detergent and socked feet.

Jasper and Monty grow restless, encroaching on the bubble Clarke has built for them with bored whines and Clarke thinks it’s lucky that Santa Claus never gave her a baby brother for Christmas two years ago because she got Lexa instead and Lexa smells much better than a boy. She assigns them characters anyway; the palace guards, and they search the ground for suitable ‘spears’ wielding gnarled sticks with as much menace as nine-year-olds can.

She kneels before Lexa’s throne—a fork in the twisted branches of a tree—with a circlet made from daisy chains in her hair, head bowed and launching into a wistful monologue of her harrowing journey to the ground, complete with fierce dragons, and a sea-witch who tried to barter unsuccessfully for her voice, while Monty and Jasper level their sticks at her in mock-fighting stances.

Back straight, Lexa blinks at her behind her crude war paint and Clarke thinks time stops.

Later—after they are called into lunch by Abby—they lie, sprawled out in the grass in the sticky heat of the day. Lexa has her bathing suit on beneath her shortalls instead of a t-shirt and her hair has dried in soft corkscrew curls around her hairline so that if she wasn’t peering so intently down at the book she has spread out before her, Clarke would reach out and wind one around her finger.

Instead, she feels like her body is humming with energy she doesn’t know what to do with.

Jake always likes to explain his work to her, he sits her on his lap and draws out maps of electrical circuits, explaining the mechanics of them and Clarke feels oddly similar to an overloaded circuit right now. Like she is plugged in to too many things and it’s making her unable to sit still.

Fingers splayed on the grass, she kicks up into a handstand, grinning at how Lexa looks upside down and the way she mouths the words she’s reading like it will help her remember them better. When she stands back up, the blood rushes back to her head and she peers over Lexa’s shoulder.

“What does ‘fealty’ mean?”

The word sits on the top line of the page in neat, Times New Roman font and it tastes so elegant rolling over Clarke’s tongue she can’t help but ask.

Lexa cranes her neck to look up at her, squinting one eye against the glare of the sun. A swathe of sunburn tints her cheeks red. “It’s like a promise,” she poses like a question, grappling for the right explanation, “or a vow.” Clarke cocks her head. “It’s like when you make a promise to someone,” she tries again, pushing herself up onto her knees so that from her angle, Clarke blocks the sun, “like, ‘I’ll love you ‘till the end of time’.”

Clarke has to rally herself against the sudden burst of dizziness that hits her in the chest with the force of the tee-ball bat in gym class. Lexa kneels in front of her, freckled-nose and braided hair, and if Clarke thought time had stopped before, now it ceases to exist entirely. The world has become just them; this sticky-sweet moment that has wound itself so eagerly around her chest.

Fourth grade science class has brought rudimentary explanations of the universe—how everything they touch is made up of things called ‘atoms’ and how when she looks up at the sky, she has to imagine the biggest thing she can possibly comprehend and then quadruple it and it won’t be nearly a one billionth of what is really out there. To Clarke it doesn’t make an awful lot of sense, the vastness of it all makes her head spin but the one thing she does understand is how the earth rotates around the sun because it’s similar to the way she thinks she rotates around Lexa.

“I love you,” she tells Lexa in earnest.

Lexa cocks her head, nose scrunched and finger curled into the spine of her book, marking the page. “Why.”

Lexa doesn’t come with them in the summer between sixth and seventh grade.

With help from a contact at work her mom gets her to the top of the waiting list for a sleep away camp in the Maine and Lexa pulls up the website on the Griffin’s computer in the kitchen on Saturday night, scrolling through page after page of girls in tennis whites and soffe shorts, playing field hockey and toasting marshmallows around a campfire.

“I don’t really want to go,” Lexa says quietly, nose wrinkling at Clarke’s silence. Behind them Jake dices vegetables for tacos and a bespectacled Abby checks through Clarke’s book report for spelling eras but the comforting familiarity does nothing to stop Clarke souring at the blindside. “My mom thinks it will be good for me.”

Clarke is getting tired of what Lexa’s mom thinks will be good for her.

The woman is sweet and kind. She has heard her parents talking about how she ‘does her best’ for Lexa which she knows is what adults say when they are commiserating the hardships of single-parenthood but in her worst moments Clarke wants to shake the woman until she understands that Lexa’s quirks don’t make her ‘unique’ in the way that people talk about people who are different, they make her special.

So what if Lexa likes books better than people? Clarke likes girls better than boys and nobody is up in arms about it.

Sometimes it feels like Lexa’s mom aches for her to fit in more than Lexa does.

She can’t stop Lexa from going though, and the morning before they would usually leave for the lake sees her standing on Lexa’s front porch instead, with a horribly permanent pout on her mouth that she can’t shake. Lexa stands before her in sneakers, navy shorts and a tee with her camps logo printed on the front in bold white letters, her hair in two, tight braids and she looks so startlingly un Lexa-like stripped of her embroidered socks and circle of braids that when Clarke winds her arms around her neck in a dramatic goodbye, she finds herself mouthing a silent prayer to whomever is watching to put her best-friend back together again.

Hooking her chin over Lexa’s shoulder Clarke makes her promise to write weekly, hating the tears that seem to be squeezing their way out from beneath her eye-lids, and Lexa swears a solemn vow to do so, nose tucked into the crook of Clarke’s neck.

When it’s time to let go Clarke reluctantly untangles herself and retreats back to her own front yard, pressing herself against the white fence and waving vigorously as Lexa’s mom loads her and her trunk into the car and the Sedan inches its way out of the driveway.

“You’ll see her in August,” Abby reminds her, arms tucked over her daughter’s shoulders, “we can buy some stamps and you can write to her whenever you like.”

Clarke nods dumbly, trying not to let the whole affair feel like an awful betrayal.

When they make it to the lake two days later after a near silent five hour drive, it rains for the first time in as long as Clarke can remember.

In lieu of her best-friend, Abby has extended the invitation to her sister-in-law and her kids and Clarke stares at her cousins—five-year-old twins and a nineteen-year-old who is more interested in her boyfriend who insists on calling Clarke ‘squirt’ at age twelve-and-a-half than she is in Clarke—wondering how she is supposed to bestow the honour of her summers on people who are so clearly unqualified.

She wallows in the absurdity of it all as she is relegated to the bunk-room, watching with her stomach churning and a hot, angry thing she doesn’t care to understand clawing at her ribs as her Eden is invaded by her cousin and her Air Jordan wearing boyfriend with his stupid, unbrushed mop of hair. And even though Clarke is relatively sure a five story drop onto concrete wouldn’t do any damage to the twins—they’re dim-witted at the best of times and they paw at the t shirt Lexa bought her for her birthday like it’s something they are allowed to touch—her aunt decides it’s best if Clarke takes the top bunk, despite the fact that puberty is beginning to bring her her promised growth spurt and folding herself into the top bunk is a feat worthy of a contortionist.

The bout of water-logged days mean the boat stays in the shed and the twins grow restless in the sticky-wet heat. Clarke takes it upon herself to commandeer the role of ‘moody teenager’ two years too early and sprawls out on the wooden floors near the closed glass doors and punches the buttons of her Nintendo DS until Mario stops obeying her commands as the rain beats at the window panes. She thinks it’s pathetic fallacy, or whatever her English teacher had said when she explained the way authors use the ‘external environment’ to show a characters ‘internal emotions’, because if she could peel back a layer of herself and peer into her soul, she is sure the unhappy, slate-grey of the lake is what it would look like.

She hopes it isn’t raining on Lexa too.

They cut their trip short and Clarke is sitting with her chin in her hands when Lexa returns.

Her ponytail sticks to the nape of her neck where it is secured with an elastic, remaining stubbornly in her t-shirt and shorts even though Aurora invited them around for pizza and too cool off in the Blake’s pool—even the promise of seeing their newly acquired black Labrador puppy wasn’t enough of a bribe to get her to give up her post.

Her and Lexa have been exchanging letters once a week without fail over the eight weeks of Lexa’s session, detailing each other in on the smallest things. So much so that Clarke thinks she is the one who has been rotating through six activities a day and sounded off to sleep by Taps at precisely nine-twenty but it hasn’t been nearly enough. It’s stupid, but she needs to see Lexa again with her own eyes, as if to make sure she hasn’t disappeared into thin-air like a product of her imagination.

“Clarke!”

When she looks up, Lexa is standing three feet away from her, tanned and slightly breathless. Her mom’s Sedan is still inching its way into the drive, which means Lexa took a flying jump from the passenger door while the car was still in gear to find her. She’s wearing tiny, navy running shorts and her camp tee—slightly faded from almost daily washing and eight-weeks’ worth of sun—hangs off her teenage frame, knotted at her hip so that the hem rides up to reveal a long triangle of skin that makes a hot, aching thing build in the pit of Clarke’s stomach. Instead of deciphering it, she propels herself from her crouch on the porch to fling her arms around her best-friend’s neck, instantly recognising the way Lexa seems imperceptibly broader and stronger in her arms. Her shoulder blades flex beneath the press of Clarke’s hands as she draws her desperately closer and when Clarke prods a finger at the offending strip of skin at her waistband—teasing her mercilessly about her bare midriff—gone is the softness Clarke usually finds there when she curls into her in their shared bed at night.

Instead she is long limbs and lean muscle, her cheeks are dusted with sunburn and her hair is lighter, but the worst? Her freckles are on show and this time it isn’t Clarke who has put them there, but a girl by the name of Costia who’s neatly printed name is in the center of those scrawled on the back of Lexa’s shirt in permanent marker.

They lie on the mesh of Clarke’s trampoline after Lexa has hauled her trunk up to her room—her mom gave her four hours before she had to return next door and sort out her laundry—with cans of diet coke sweating in their palms as Clarke recounts the story of walking in on her cousin and her boyfriend being more intimate than strictly necessary on a family-friendly vacation.

“I almost barfed,” she giggles heartily, “I wanted to end it all right there but my mom talked me down from the ledge.”

“Oh, the dramatics,” Lexa sighs, grinning. She takes a sip then looks at Clarke seriously. “Was it really that bad without me?”

“I think you know the answer to that,” Clarke says softly. It wasn’t bad so much as it was empty, completely void of all of the things that made summer summer and Clarke has been left with the odd feeling that she is returning to school having not had a holiday at all.

Lexa screws her nose up and nods, “if it makes you feel better camp sucked too.”

“No it didn’t,” Clarke laughs, curling onto her side, “but thank you for making me feel better.”

Lexa piques a brow. “Are you call me a liar?” she accuses, feigning a hurt look. When Clarke shrugs, she flings a leg over her hips and pins her to the taut mesh of the trampoline with her arms by her ears and Clarke tries not to gasp at the electric shocks that skitter across her skin when they touch. Instead, she collapses into laughter, tipping her head to the side as Lexa knees her beneath the ribs, demanding ‘take it back, take it back’ in a low, teasing voice.

“Fine!” Clarke gaps, writhing against the assault, “fine!” She paws at the smooth length of Lexa’s thighs where they sit nestled against her waist. “I believe you.”

Clarke has a hard time pinpointing exactly what happens next.

Somehow she raises her head and simultaneously, Lexa goes to lower hers. The result is a cacophonous collision of foreheads and noses; Clarke opens her mouth to whine in pain and finds a mouthful of Lexa’s bottom lip instead, eyes bulging as her pulse skyrockets to a speed she thinks surely signals a cardiac arrest.

Lexa makes a noise that resembles something close to an ‘oof’ then her fingers come to Clarke’s cheek in concern. “I’m sorry,” she smiles ruefully—it’s the same lopsided, word splitting smile she has always had and it does something to quell the stagnant uneasiness that has taken root in Clarke’s spine, if not the smouldering build up of who knows what in the pit of her stomach—and runs her thumb in a practiced motion over the short, white scar beneath Clarke’s eye.

“It’s okay,” Clarke whispers. She fiddles with the edge of the tie-dyed bandana that is wrapped and knotted around Lexa’s wrist, trying not to focus on the impending sense of doom she feels as her body betrays her.

#clexaweek2019 #day 3 #only one bed #clexa fic #childhood friends #clarke griffin #lexa

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diveronaevents · 6 years ago

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BUONASERA!

YOU ARE FORMALLY INVITED TO THE PARTY OF THE YEAR, THE CASTELVECCHIO GALA. PLEASE JOIN US IN VERONA, ITALY TO CELEBRATE ART, BEAUTY AND PASSION. THIS YEAR’S THEME IS LOVE & WAR - FOR ALL IS FAIR IN LOVELY VERONA.

Founded in 1985 by the WITCHES who vowed to devote their lives in service of perfection and beauty, the Castelvecchio Gala is Italy’s most exclusive event in the name of art, culture and fashion. Once a year, every eye in Italy turns to Verona as the most well-known names in the country gather in the same city. It is more than a red carpet, it is more than a fashion show; it is a celebration of the highest level of talent and beauty in the country, a party planned only for Italy’s best.

But the Castelvecchio Gala is more than just the party of the year; it’s a battleground for a long and bitter competition that reaches its peak on one day of the year. For only two names matter in the world of art and entertainment: Capulet and Montague. Both own a wealth of record labels, production studios, talent agencies and more, with the best and brightest names in the industry under their representation. You work for one of those companies, and they own you. They lay claim over your soul and your artistry, and you humbly give it because you know. You know that the only way to become anyone is through their seal of approval. They offer more than a company and a brand. They offer a family that binds your success to theirs. With their name under your belt, you are promised more than just a job; you are guaranteed a legacy.

And whichever company has the most seats at the table wins the unofficial title of best in the business.

The WITCHES have made a calculated and perhaps cruel risk to host each attendee at their fine establishment, the Hotel Emilia. Every detail is taken care of, and only the finest of accommodations are permitted - and how can anyone say no to their kindness? Italy’s best will fly into Verona one week before the gala, with plenty of time to explore the city and become reacquainted with one another.

Life is long and rivalries are longer, but the witches love a spectacle and they so hate to be disappointed.

OVERVIEW: Welcome to part one of our month-long AU event! Your characters have just arrived in Verona and have exactly one week until the Castelvecchio Gala. Note that the locations will remain the same but are no longer assigned to territories -- all of Verona is safe and all characters are free to roam the city without consequence. Please timestamp all threads from MARCH 29, 2019 to APRIL 5, 2019. Below is a list of each character’s new occupation; if you have any concerns, please reach out to the admin team and we are happy to adjust accordingly. Feel free to complete any threads that are in progress and in-game throughout the month, but we ask that our members do not begin any new in-game threads until the event of the AU month is concluded. As always, if you have any further questions, don’t hesitate and have fun!

Alexander Rallis is a model under Montague management, especially celebrated for his brows and his stunning tattoo artistry.

Bellamy Santo-Domingo is a singer newly under Montague management, beginning his career on YouTube and recently signing with Montague’s record label.

Brielle King is a socialite and philanthropist under Montague management with major contributions to the conservationist movement.

Brigitte du Pont is the Public Relations Manager for Capulet, creating and maintaining a favorable public image by communicating programs, accomplishments and/or points of view.

Boris Kovrov is an esteemed songwriter and producer under Montague management, surrounded by speculation that he’s stolen several of his most successful songs from other artists.

Calina Sokolova is the Public Relations Manager for Montague, creating and maintaining a favorable public image by communicating programs, accomplishments and/or points of view.

Castora Aguilar is an award-winning artist/photographer known for making politically-charged art under Montague management.

Catherine Daly is a famous installation artist under Capulet management, creating three-dimensional works that often are site-specific and designed to transform the perception of a space.

Celeste Duval is a fashion and beauty YouTube influencer under Montague management.

Cyrus Sloane is the lead singer of an up-and-coming rock band under Capulet management.

Delilah Bello is an up-and-coming pop singer under Capulet management.

Easton Craven is a television actor and a teen heart throb under Capulet management.

Everett Craven is a Talent Manager for Capulet alongside Rafaella, organizing and advancing the careers of the talent under Capulet management.

Genevieve Zhang is a retired supermodel and the Montague spokesperson, representing the company at major events and press conferences.

Grace Daly is a stuntwoman under Montague management, famous for her motorcycle stunts.

Hector Rivera is an award-winning script writer under Montague management who focuses primarily on family dramas and arthouse films.

Henry Zhang is an award-winning film director under Montague management who focuses primarily on family dramas and arthouse films.

Hugo Kim is a documentary director whose in-depth and compassionate dive into varying social justice issues has earned him respect and admiration from all social classes.

Isabella Gagliano is the Feature Editor for Italy’s most prestigious fashion and culture magazine, Couture.

Ivan Rahal is a late-night talk show host known for exposées of celebrities and ruthless interviews under Capulet management.

Juliana Capulet is the Capulet heir with a long career as an actress/singer, spanning from childhood to present day.

Katarina du Pont is an award-winning fashion photographer under Capulet management who dabbles in photojournalism.

Lawrence Vernon is an award-winning actor under Montague management, known for his stunning performances and versatility as both a lead role and a supporting role.

Lucrezia Falco is a headhunter for Capulet, finding and signing top talent for the company who is also rumored to be launching her own fashion line soon.

Maeve Petre is an up-and-coming ballerina under Capulet management.

Marcelo Rosso is an award-winning fight choreographer and a stuntman under Montague management.

Matthias Warren is a socialite under Montague management and the heir to his family’s own billion-dollar company.

MIkael Falco is heir to a political dynasty, but chose instead to become head of a tabloid known for its rather torrid articles.

Nikolai Borisov is an independent socialite, he’s well-known in the social circles as having dabbled with certain royals but is primarily famous for his antics and debauchery.

Odessa Vernon is a television actress under Montague management, recently cast for her first movie role.

Orion Massetti is a talk show host under Capulet management, famous for his comedic pranks and celebrity interviews.

Pandora Phan is a former principal dancer who now choreographs revolutionary ballets under Montague management.

Paola Damasco is an independent actress, known for being highly relatable and an activist for grass-root causes.

Rafaella Capulet is a Talent Manager for Capulet alongside Everett, organizing and advancing the careers of the talent under Capulet management.

Ramona Aguilar is a model and artist under Montague management, known for frequent Banksy-esque stunts.

Regina Daly is an award-winning documentary director under Capulet management, famous for her unbiased eye and unique storytelling.

Santino Gallo is an editorial photographer under Montague management, famous for his glamour photography.

Tiberius Capulet is a top-charted rapper under Capulet management, known as Tigre.

Vivianne Sloane is the Capulet spokesperson, representing the company at major events and press conferences.

#diveronaevent #lsrpg #literate rp #mob rp #established rp #active rp #au event #event: modern hollywood

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bettsfic · 6 years ago

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Whaaaa have u finished s5?????!!!! THOUGHTS???

i mean overall, critically speaking, it was probably one of the best single seasons of any teen tv show i’ve ever watched. like top 10, up there somewhere with buffy s2. the plot was tightly wrought, most things that happened made sense (which is something i’ve learned to let slide with this show), and every character had a reasonable motivation for doing what they were doing. granted, the bar was painfully low after s3 and 4, but i think if i picked up this show at s5 without seeing any of the prior seasons i still would have loved it.

THAT SAID, because i have seen the rest of the series, some of the OOC elements bothered me. i only saw a few glimpses of clarke’s history as the great wanheda (that quick knife to niylah’s throat? NICE). i didn’t like that all of her motivation had been reduced to motherhood when we’ve seen her in the past as a leader and lover and fighter and healer. BUT i also really loved the clexa moments, which didn’t feel cheap at all to me, and made clarke’s relationship with madi much more interesting after several cringey moments of “i’m willing to torture you to protect you.” similarly i didn’t like that abby’s character was reduced to her addiction and that guided everything she did. i like addiction narratives, but only when they’re not a plot device, which this very much was.

conversely, i think bellamy became more complex somehow, and his arc made sense -- he had six years in space to think on shit, and that changes a person. he continues to be probably the only truly trustworthy character on the show (i mean trustworthy to the audience) because his sense of loyalty is consistent and overrides all other traits, and his conflict (like captain america’s) always involves the compromise of his loyalty. in the case of this season, the people he’d spent six years with, or his sister, who is only a shadow of the person she once was. bellamy remains one of my favorite television characters of all time. (also note, i LOVED his fight scenes this season -- i can’t tell if it’s bob or the choreographers but all of them were really beautifully done, and it was a refreshing change of pace to not see him constantly beaten down every other minute. his face was only bloodied in one episode all season!!).

BELLARKE?? the bellarke moments were so good and so infuriating. as much as i appreciated them, i just kept thinking about what the show would be like if they’d gone canon at different points earlier on, and how that would make their relationship so complex. if they’d been together during praimfaya and bellamy spent six years thinking she was dead. if they had the same ride-or-die loyalty of monty and harper or the passion of murphy and emori, and how much more interesting that would make the show and the characters and -- well, i also firmly believe that any romance arc shouldn’t stretch over 5 seasons, so at this point it’s looking more like a gimmick to keep people watching, and i think if it were really confident in its quality, it wouldn’t need to use slow burn romantic tension to engage its audience. too much build-up ruins the breaking point, ya feel? five seasons is enough.

anyway. raven, sadly, never gets a character arc in order to let her either grow or shrink because, being the engineer, she’s always forced into a function of plot. in every season, her job is to move a machine from point A to B, and her obstacle is always physical torture. it’s a shame because i think lindsay’s performance is so good. i dug zeke’s character and their romance, though, so i hope to see more of that in s6.

and murphy. wow. for the first time we get an actual internal arc. even if it’s as blunt and heavy-handed as a brick, murphy had no clear-cut external goal, and everything about his growth this season was his internal acceptance of usefulness and heroism. as i type this i’m seeing a pattern, though, because emori, despite having a very interesting potential arc as grounder-turned-engineering-apprentice, was reduced to a function of murphy’s self-realization. i would have liked more development for both characters, because i think they were really close to something epiphanic that never got fully formed and had the potential to advance the moral cornerstones of the story.

ugh, echo. fuck echo. i think the only way she could be redeemed to me is if she showed bellamy the same loyalty she had once shown roan, and bellamy, rather than turning that loyalty romantic, would have dismissed it as being forced and toxic and destructive, so echo would be forced to actually consider herself as an individual rather than a member of a unit. but everything about their relationship was so sloppily done, and i found myself looking away whenever she was on screen. (which is not at all about the performance, which, again, was stellar.)

monty and harper provided a fraction of a wider perspective toward fixing what i think is the ultimate problem of the show, which is that the writing seems grossly unaware of its own moral assumptions. and maybe i’m projecting because i recently got that same feedback from an author i really admire (and he was right) but i may have internalized it so much i see it in other things now. monty and harper provided a much-needed “we don’t have to participate in this, and there are other solutions to be found” pacifist perspective which really helped round-out the season and provided a breath of fresh air to an otherwise exhaustingly dark plot.

diyoza? stellar. perfect. wonderful. 10/10. a competent, lawful neutral to act as a foil to octavia’s chaotic neutral leadership. i liked that she was pregnant, but i disliked that her motivation and mcreary’s weakness was reduced to their feelings about that pregnancy, so it felt like just a gimmick to manipulate the plot and tip the scales against mcreary.

kane is always fab, but i’m biased because i think henry ian cusick is the second best actor on the show. i wish he was more coherent as a character. as it stands he’s just kind of silly putty that gets formed into whatever he needs to be. i would be SO HERE for a kane/diyoza/abby triangle (which i would turn into an OT3 immediately). the daddy vibes this season were great.

one of the most understated characters has always been indra, played by the best actress on the show, adina porter. this season i really adored her relationship with gaia. i don’t think i’ve ever seen a mother/daughter relationship as formal and loving as theirs, and how it seamlessly encompassed their respective love/worship of octavia. they’re a good example of characters how further the plot but also get to be actual characters. idk why it’s so hard for this show to figure out the difference between plot devices and characters but it’s really hit or miss.

aaaaand then there’s octavia. i was pissed earlier in the season that jaha was killed off just for the sake of landing some leadership advice, because i really liked jaha’s character and (like many of the more competent characters who are put into the hands of incompetent writers [see: lexa]) thought he’d been poorly utilized the past 3 seasons. i don’t get why octavia was the leader at all?? like, kane, indra, abby, and jaha were all more qualified, and they were all in the bunker together. i think there was supposed to be some commentary on charisma and loyalty or something but it got lost in the heavy-handed “we do what it takes to survive” and “we pursue violence for peace” rhetoric that oversaturates the entire show because jroth can’t think of anything deeper or more meaningful to say about the complexity of being (and it’s what will probably get the show canceled in the next year or so -- no growth in moral reasoning = no new drama to be found). the only part that really sold me was octavia’s decision to shoot the people who refused to eat, even though i thought it was a dumb premise to begin with, because the flashback was well-placed and the performance was great, and it showed a genuine breaking point between octavia and blodreina.

if i had written the season, there were a lot of things i would have done differently (we get this ominous shot of the worms that doesn’t amount to anything, and a twist ending that felt cheap even if it was emotionally compelling), but in comparison to the prior seasons, i commended this season on not pulling its punches on the practical details like it’s always done (clarke eating windshield bugs to survive), threading in the consequences and details from all the prior seasons and the show’s own canon (abby using The Blight to motivate octavia into forcing everyone to eat), and overall slowing the fuck down (the entire season leads up to one [1] battle).

i don’t think the show will ever fully recover from lexa’s death, which decimated its fanbase and lost trust in the writing, but s5 put up a decent mulligan of s4 to wrangle the juvenile moral quandaries the show attempts to assert. if s6 can advance the philosophical implications of its own world, lose the “our people” bullshit jargon, and focus on the fucking characters which is the only reason anyone watches the damn show, then i think it could really be up there with the other cult faves like buffy and star trek and supernatural.

#the 100 spoilers #100 #meta #this got really long sorry!!#Anonymous

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cursedwatershq-blog · 7 years ago

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. * ┆ ‘ OUR VALENTINES event has now officially begun !! threads should now be wrapped up, and new ones should commence at this very moment !! under the read more, you can find your partner if you wanted us to randomize it for you !! please note no more pairs will be randomized from us, from this moment on. if you want a pair from this moment on, you’ll have to find one yourself ( check this post ) and then message us so we can to the list below, don’t forget to read this post about any event details. thanks !!

Finn is married to Elizabeth Swann Bruce Wayne is married to Serah Farrow Piper Halliwell is in love with Robin Hood Dolores Abernathy is in love with Percy Blakeney Hayley Marshall is married to Loki Laufeyson Octavia Blake is in love Cheryl Blossom Freddie Facilier is in love with Chic Cooper Henrik Mikaelson is in love with Jane Donna Sheridan is in love with Killian Jones Fred Andrews is married to Laurel Lance Mateo Solano Villanueva is married to Rose Tico Sam Carmicheal is married to Tabitha Galavan Rosie Mulligen is in love with Robert Philip Dirk Gently is in love with Anya Romanov Tinkerbell is married to Enjorlas Caitlin Snow is married to Alexander Hamilton Petra Solano is in love with Ceceily Herondale Emma Swan is married to Cleo Satori Kylo Ren is married to Usagi Tsukino Lady Lola is in love with Seven/Saeyoung Choi Rikki Chadwick is in love with Sirius Black Rey is married to Conner Kent/Kon-El Terra Markov is in love with Salem Elisa Esposito is in love with Rory Williams Allison Argent is married to Newt Scamander Brett Talbot is in love with Beth Greene Telemachus is in love with Sayori Alecto Carrow is in love with Lily Luna Potter Ignis is married to Smaug Sterling is in love with Newt Uma is in love with Jonathan Byers Scott McCall is married to Lina Santillan Sonya is married to Melody Rebekah Mikaelson is in love with Neal Cassidy Lydia Martin is in love with Mavis Dracula Toothless is in love with Orion Harry Hook is in love with Will Graham Bill Denbrough is married to Hanna Marin Clementine is in love with Robin Mills Dimitri is married to Mary Stuart Sabrina Spellman is in love with Josh Washington Jane Villanueva is married to Malia Tate Luke Skywalker is married to Jane Sloan Gwen Stacy is in love with Peta Mallark Adam Parrish is in love with Ellie Solano Mary 'Boo' Gibs is married to Lucy Quinzel Steve Rogers is in love with Amy Pond Jason Scott is married to Belle Vicky Decker is married to Negan Henry Tuner is married to Drogon Aladdin is in love with Jenny Poe Dameron is in love with Obi wan Kenobi Tony Stark is in love with Hannibal Lecter Katherine Pierce is now married with Elena Gilbert Harley Quinn is now married with Pamela Isley Joseph is now in love with Lucille ( did not provide us full names ) Bellamy Blake is now married with Clarke Griffin Troy Otto is now in love with Alicia Clark Jace Herondale is in love with Clary Fray Simon Lewis is married to Isabelle Lightwood Mickey Milkovich is married to Ian Gallagher Will Turner is married to Jack Sparrow Sam Winchester is in love with Peyton Sawyer Theresa Agnes is married to Thomas Kim Possible is married to Cedric Diggory Kate Marsh is in love with Lucy Weasley Rosalinda Fiore is in love with Nate Gray Gabriel Novak is in love with Tar ( did not provide one full name ) Teddy Lupin is married to Steve Trevor Hope Mikaelson is married to Caradoc Dearborn Cassian Andor is married to Jyn Erso Logan is married to Baby Margot Bishop is married to Lucifer morningstar Jackie Burkhart is in love with Lip Gallagher Albus Potter is in love with Scorpius Malfoy Betty Cooper is married to Jughead Jones John Murphy is married to Raven Reyes Carol Grimes is in love with Marienette Dupain-Cheng

#cursedwimp #cursedwstarter #cursedwhw #cursedwvalentines

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corixus · 4 years ago

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Language reality and image

Wednesday, July 13, 2011

The artist is the opposite of the politically minded individual, the opposite of the reformer, the opposite of the idealist. The artist does not tinker with the universe, he recreates it out of his own experience and understanding of life.

~Henry Miller

The big question for those researching the languages of representing reality is why do some suggest that the motivations behind art and science represent conflicting impulses, while others see the two approaches as integrally related? Model-making is an essential feature of all human thinking and applies to obtaining both a scientific and an artistic understanding of the world. In both activities, the "abstraction ladder," leads from observations of a material reality to simpler models made visible using the 'languages' of numbers, diagrams, poetic descriptions and pictures. Through abstraction, art as picture making today is becoming increasingly complex and referential; aspects of culture and our ecological identity are constantly being brought to together, by either implication or association, in landscape. The conjunction of these processes in the work of Susi Bellamy, implies a new way of cross-discipline thinking, which needs clarification through the critiques of artists and/or scientists if none is provided by the artist herself.

As soon as a person starts to think she starts to criticize. Human nature is inclined to comparison and discussion, particularly now that we live in an age when the public have come to expect the artist to constantly review her relationship with images. This is usually achieved using abstract forms. The objective is to create a personal language for articulating a sharper reality of relationships between people, environment and the psyche. Explanation of a work of art involves discovering a meaning and its significance to the human condition. An important part of the critics' role is to discover and write about the intended and perceived meanings the work may have for the viewer. This is particularly important when reviewing Susi Bellamy's work because she has been for the past two decades always in the territory of experimentation. There she has engaged with research into pictorial representation aimed at the blurring of direct human references in order to reconstruct a more thoughtful relationship between people's inner and outer worlds.

From time to time she has immersed herself in the skills of representational art to create traditional still life and portraits. But her real motivation has been to apply old master techniques and palettes to create abstract metaphors of topographical mindfulness. In this endeavour she grapples with the historical procession of art in order to re-conceive, experience and revise it as a personal language.

Since the 17th century exotic shells were a favourite item in still life paintings, often in combination with large bouquets of flowers. Many would say that Susi Bellamy has picked up this historical thread of realism to explore the way randomness and precision, which come together in shell pigmentation, may give rise to pleasing patterns.

Every artist has to find a way of describing the inner truth of things. This is the unified complex of characteristics that give each thing its subjective uniqueness and differentiates it from other things. Then there comes the definition of a route to transmit it as a mental wholeness to others in the hope that it will be seen as more than a pleasing image. The term 'inscape' was invented by the Jesuit poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins, to describe inner truths of things in conjunction with the term "instress." By "inscape" he means the unified complex of characteristics that give each thing its uniqueness and that differentiate it from other things, and by "instress" he means either the force of being which holds the inscape together or the impulse from the inscape which carries it whole into the mind of the beholder. He also uses the term to mean ‘the stress within’, the force which binds something or a person into a unit.

It is possible to trace Hopkins’ ideas on the nature of perception to his early encounter in 1872 with the writings of the medieval author, John Duns Scotus (c.1265-1308). Scotus was a Franciscan friar born in Duns, in the Scottish borders, and studied and taught at the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge and Paris. He, in turn, had taken the germ of the ideas from Peter Lombard's ‘Sentences’. Peter Lombard was an Italian theologian (c.1100-c.1160-64) who wrote his book of 'sentences' in about 1150. Arranged in four parts, it discusses all aspects of theological doctrine systematically in a long series of questions. A key phrase in Scotus which seems to have been developed by Hopkins was:

‘By grasping just what things are of themselves, a person separates the essences from the many additional incidental features associated with them in the sense image… and sees what is true… as a more universal truth.’

We can take from Hopkins the essence of probing a divide between descriptive science and spirituality. For example, on 13 August 1874 he wrote;

‘ The laps of running foam striking the sea-wall double on themselves and return in nearly the same order and shape in which they came. This is mechanical reflection and is the same as optical: indeed all nature is mechanaical, but then it is not seen that mechanics contain that which is beyond mechanics’

Modern neuropsychology is investigating these two aspects of seeing and communicating because it is at the heart of both our feelings of 'belonging' and 'alienation'. In the poem "Ad Marian," Hopkins impersonates the inscape of the month of May in a pre-Christan spirtitual setting as Spring's daughter. In so doing, we see the inscape as an archetype of the Mother of all humankind, who is as vital "as Dew unto grass and tree." The poems remind us that the female principle of fecundity is ever present in the landscape. It is significant therefore that Susi Bellamy during a period of residence in Italy came to focus on the re-construction of 13th and 14th century icons of the Madonna. Her starting point was the extensive collection of Madonnas in the Venice Accademia Galleries, where they are stranded high and dry from the sea of faith which produced them seven centuries ago. What she has produced are powerful and disturbing contemporary icons of motherhood in which the naturalistic facial features of Mary and her child are enfolded in a complex expanded decorative collaged cosmos. Their instress emphasises the truth that a noisy unruly world can't take away the persona and its relationships with the processes of nature. They are most essential for each of us. These Madonna inscapes should be reassuring to anyone in the midst of a world of trivial productions that is threatening to remove what is most essential to their individuality.

Susi's choice to manipulate a powerful Christian icon is not the beginnings of cultural disavowal but an attempt to make visible and readable what for most people in the West has become withheld from comprehension and symbolisation. She has made the surfaces of the paintings visibly deeper and each Madonna is the equivalent of a mental 'big bang'.

The decorative random, yet ordered, matrix constructed from mass-produced paper patterns produces a deep cosmic depth in which many narratives are possible in the mind of the viewer. Her pictures, like the works that led up to them, are really toolkits for meditation on our affair with consumerism, which today pervades everything we are.

Every day, we move through landscapes that are the historical results of local economic processes of programmed randomness. Susi began painting on the premise that there are many ways to combine abstract language with the stylistic forms of figurative painting to reveal intermediate hidden truths of mental picturing. This is evident in her many 'halfway away/half way back' effects, which are the outcomes of moving up and down the ladder of abstraction on a quest to capture and transmit more than is visible to the naked eye. This has involved the controlled use of randomness to enable works to form freely. The Madonna pictures came after a period when she was engaged in producing formless but dynamic 'plasmas' which explored combining chaos and order of liquid paint on tilted canvas. In the end, order prevailed in which areas of colour were arranged like rows of classified rocks and vibrant microcosms constrained within golden ribbons. The Madonnas and their characteristic colour palette seem to emerge from the end point of this phase where entities coalesced like technicoloured polished sections cut through meteorites.

This emphasises that Susi's consistent probing approach to reveal inscapes has been based on the adoption of a distinctive, vibrant palette echoing the false digitised colours used by astronomers to delineate the complexity of galaxies and the birth and death of stars. In this respect, they are miniature expressions of cosmic thinking. Another development of randomness-with-order, was her printmaking carried out in the Florentine print workshops, which served Picasso and Henry Moore. In these experiments rows of darker, angular, horizontal structures divide up a landscape format, like inscribed stone walls. These are inscapes where the instress could focus on compartmentation as symbolising either 'belonging' or 'exclusion'.

Regarding the expressive power of her work, an ambiguity of meaning is one of its most definitive characteristics. At one time you may imagine you are looking at a section of Hadrian's Wall in the empty Northumbrian landscape. Another time, the same picture may appear as a piece of crumpled patterned fabric. A jagged mass of blue might be a transient break in a threatening sky implying a forthcoming natural disaster, whereas its incidental feature was the surface of a lighted swimming pool overlooking a deep Tuscan valley in twilight. Here, as in most of her work, Susi literally harnesses randomness and makes it operate on the entities selected for exploration. Many people like her paintings, probably because, as just another species, and the result of natural selection, we seem to gladly embrace fractal and chaotic structures and work on them to discern some kind of order. In the ever-threatening world in which our biological evolution occurred, such behaviour would confer a survival advantage by reinforcing a sense of place.

With her early background in fashion journalism it was inevitable that Susi would become interested in the relationship between the frame and the picture. In contemplating a picture, the frame is generally taken for granted. It is a fait accompli, and most of us may be unaware of how powerfully the frame can influence our perception and enjoyment of the picture within. It was in Florence that she studied the classical proportions, abstracted sculptural ornament and muted patina of Renaissance and Baroque frames. Florentine frame-making is part and parcel of the family histories of master carpenters who still ply a trade as old as the Madonna icons.

The marriage of picture and frame may be harmonious or discordant, enhancing or depressing, or somewhere in between. In Susi’s view, most private and public collections contain pictures the true impact of which has been compromised by their frames - often in an insidious way - for decades or even centuries. Susi is adamant that the artist should devote much thought to the way a frame can enhance the 'performance' of an image. Her frames possess a timeless quality, not necessarily related to a specific period of interior decoration.

In all her works, Susi has produced modern icons for meditation on the birthing moments we all have when suddenly becoming aware of a new arrangement of the natural or built environment. This is a pointer to the fact that for many modern artists the instress of human adaptation to environment is a steady process of being at one with the physical laws of the universe and the random events they produce. Humanity is not the one-off supernatural project of an omniscient being.

The opening up of windows on non-religious spirituality happened for Susi Bellamy when she gave up strict control over the application of paint with a brush to dribble and paste directly onto the canvas. The actual shapes, patterns and textures were largely determined by the random dynamics of the material and her process: the viscosity of the paint and the speed and direction of its flow on the canvas. An important random factor in the making of Madonnas was the availability of commercial patterned papers. This is simply to say that throughout her career Susi has been firmly in the territory of artistic experimentation, intent on making various kinds of paintings as alternative solutions of equal worth rather than attesting to a life-long process of relentless technical development. Her consistent aim has been to render visible 'inner' or 'immaterial' phenomena. In this respect, she sits firmly at the forefront of part of the contemporary art scene, which is a play of language, reality and image. As art and science continue to bump up against each other, new images are constantly required to express new models of reality and Susi's diversity of artistic style becomes a deliberate stylistic principle of cross-disciplinary research.

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clockadile · 7 years ago

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“The captain?” Liam cocked a skeptical eyebrow. “And which of the infamous fiends commands this one? Vane? Flint? Henry Avery back from the dead with a crew of jolly skeletons?”

“None of those.” Regina was clearly enjoying the reveal. “Not one you’re likely to have heard of – yet. But as I said. You will, for any number of excellent reasons, want to make quite sure not to underestimate Captain Swan.” -The Dark Horizon by @qqueenofhades

As some of the CSBB crew will know, this one’s been a long time coming. It’s been a big experiment of colour and lighting outside my comfort zone and I’m finally ready to let it go. Going into The Dark Horizon I was a little weary of it’s crossover genre, but I trusted Hillary to pull it off so I decided to first go watch some Black Sails and then dive in. I’m so glad I did because this fic fucking delivered. The political threads were perfectly woven to slowly unravel until from the chaos came clarity with all the historical tid bits and fantastical world building and action thrown in. And of course an amazing journey for the good ship Captain Swan.

And I swear to you, everyone who reads this can’t help but come out with a great love for Black Sam Bellamy.

It’s all one hell of a storm to ride through. Also check out it’s sequel The Rose and Thorn which I’ve fallen behind on due to time but is turning out to be a great adventure of it’s own.

#cs ff #cs fic rec #captain swan #cs crew #cs fanart #ouat #ouat art #ouat fanart #my arts #IT'S POSTED!#I know that at no point ever in the story is killian with the Hook with Emma on the Blackbird actually a thing #but I think you'll agree that's besides the point #And in case you forgot about my random flag inquiry before I disappeared and pretended I was never there to have asked the question #yes #this is what that was about

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qqueenofhades · 7 years ago

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The Rose and Thorn: Epilogue

summary: Sequel to The Dark Horizon. The New World, 1740: Killian and Emma Jones have lived in peace with their family for many years, their pirate past long behind them. But with English wars, Spanish plots, rumors of a second Jacobite rising, and the secret of the lost treasure of Skeleton Island, they and their son and daughter are in for a dangerous new adventure. OUAT/Black Sails. rating: M status: COMPLETE available: FF.net and AO3 previous: chapter XXXII

New York City

April 1755

The carriage rolled to a muddy-wheeled halt in front of the handsome stone rowhouse, the driver jumped down from the running board to hold the door open, and Geneva accepted his hand out into the street, while Jim fished out a few pence to cover the tariff and tossed him the extra. Diana wriggled past both of them and ran up the steps, whereupon she performed the impatient dance common to all eleven-year-olds whose parents were moving far too slowly for their taste. In her defense, it had been a fortnight on the journey up from Tortola, and there was not much room to run around on board. The Athena was smaller than the Rose, a two-masted brigantine not dissimilar to the Blackbird that Mother had sailed once upon a time, and while she had served well since the old girl was given a dignified retirement several years ago, there were times when even Geneva found herself with a touch of cabin fever. It would be nice to have (for once) some space. Not to mention, actual privacy.

As Jim bent to heft their bags, the driver climbed back into his seat and clicked to the horses, and the hire carriage lumbered away. Geneva started up the steps to join her daughter, who was standing on her tiptoes in an attempt to reach the knocker. “Diana, you could help your father with the luggage, you know.”

Diana gave her a look as if to say that fathers by their very nature existed to carry luggage, which made Geneva bite her cheek. She couldn’t deny that she too was very much looking forward to this, and as Jim made a manful effort with the various satchels, portmanteaus, and other whatsits, Geneva knocked. She was at least impressed with the house, if not necessarily the location. Manhattan was a small and boggy island that had been bought on the cheap by some Dutch fur traders in 1626 and christened New Amsterdam, captured by the English in 1664 and renamed in honor of James, the Duke of York, and while it was making some effort at turning into a real city, it was still nothing to compare with Boston or Philadelphia. But now that it had its own university – King’s College, founded last year by royal charter of George II – perhaps it would flourish in turn. That, after all, was what they were here to celebrate.

After a moment, the door opened, and Diana let out a joyful squeal. “Uncle Sam!”

“Hey, you’re here!” Sam Jones managed to hug his niece with one arm, his sister with the other, and exchange a cordial nod with his brother-in-law. “Voyage not bad, then?”

“Nothing out of the usual,” Geneva said. “A bit fresh with the spring winds, but we made good time. I wasn’t going to miss this, anyway.”

Sam flashed a crooked grin, which gave her a brief and strange sense of no time passing at all. It was almost five years since she had seen her brother, and he was now in his middle thirties (Geneva herself was a year away from the rather daunting age of forty) but he looked exactly the same as ever, tall and thin and genial, with the faint hint of laugh lines around his eyes. He considerately moved to unladen Jim from some of his burden, pretended to break his back for Diana’s benefit, and led them into the house, which still smelled of new carpentry and unfinished plasterwork, trunks not yet entirely unpacked and afternoon sunlight slanting on the wall. “Oy, Jack. They made it. Well, some of them, anyway.”

They passed through the sitting room, where Sam and Jim left the bags, and then stepped into the dining room at the back of the house, where Jack was sitting at the table and perusing a stack of notes with intent, frowning attention. At the sound of their entrance, he looked up, then actually smiled. “Good to see you, Hawkinses.”

“And you.” Geneva stepped over to kiss her brother-in-law’s cheek. He had a few threads of silver in his black ponytail, and he was wearing reading glasses, which he must have had made in Philadelphia before they left; Ben Franklin, whom Henry was still working with, had recently invented a sort of spectacle known as bifocals. They conferred an attractively educated and mature air on him, which suited quite well. After all, Jack had just been invited to take up a chair of medicine at the newly founded King’s College, after working for several years at the Academy of Philadelphia (coincidentally also founded by Franklin). The hope was that this would eventually lead to the establishment of a proper medical school, the first in the Colonies, and either way, the honor was considerable. Looking at him now, Geneva thought, you would never guess either how he had started out, or that it was the same man. Dr. Jack Bellamy, indeed.

“Sit down,” Jack said, going to poke the embers in the coal stove and put the kettle back on. “There’s several rooms upstairs, you can choose which one you want. Though the one at the end leaks, they haven’t finished the roof. Still, I think we’ve done well.”

“You have,” Geneva said. “Who knows, one day maybe property in Manhattan will actually turn out to be valuable.”

“I’m just hoping it doesn’t rain as much as Scotland,” Sam remarked. “Anything else, I’m flexible.”

Jack arched an eyebrow at his dearest spouse, but forbore to actually comment. A year after the events of Skeleton Island, he had moved to Edinburgh to begin his education at the university’s medical school, paid for by part of the Jones family’s share of the treasure. Sam, accustomed to the sun, sea, and heat of Georgia, had loathed Scotland with every fiber of his being, especially crowded, sooty, filthy, rainy Edinburgh, but considered it an acceptable trade-off in order to be with Jack. However, just as Jack was finishing his studies, the long-rumored second Jacobite rising had broken out, involving a brief occupation of Edinburgh by Prince Charles’ army, and the battle of Culloden in April 1746 had been an absolute disaster for the Scots, with ramifications long beyond the fight itself. Jack had embarked on a daring and dangerous campaign through the ravaged Highlands, offering his medical services free of charge to anyone hurt by the English, which was quite a few. He and Sam could have both been hanged for aiding and abetting traitors if they were caught, and they had several more hair-raising adventure stories from this period. Indeed they had finally left in 1749 after one too many close shaves with the law, moved to Philadelphia, and Jack had begun to teach at Ben Franklin’s fledgling university. Henry and Violet were still there, as were Liam and Regina, so they had plenty of family nearby. And New York, of course, was not far away.

Jack poured them tea, found a few biscuits for Diana, and they sat down for a refreshing post-travel constitutional. “Who else is coming?” Geneva asked. “Us, Mother and Daddy, and – Henry and Violet threw you a farewell party before you left, didn’t they?”

“Aye,” Jack said. “Henry has a printing project he needs to finish for Franklin, and Richard’s getting married soon anyway, they have to stay and prepare for that. Besides, he’s up to New York fairly often, we’ll see each other. Liam and Regina are getting too old to travel, so they wished us well in Philadelphia too, but I heard that Matthew, Cordelia, and Martha might turn up.” He shrugged, with a slight wry smile. “Still surprises me.”

“Martha?” Diana perked up, as she was best friends with her cousin, close to her in age and the family member she had seen the most of. Geneva and Jim sailed the Athena across the Caribbean and the colonies on various ventures and opportunities, and on the longer of those voyages, they left Diana in the care of Matthew’s wife, Cordelia. Matthew himself was still in the Royal Navy, having accepted a new commission as captain of HMS Lancaster. However, he had acquired a reputation of one of the most coolly fair-minded and independently inclined captains in the Admiralty, openly ignored orders that he felt were unjustified or unwise, and actually did what the Navy was supposed to do and so often fell short upon: serving and protecting those who needed it. He had also dedicated himself personally to the dismantling of all of Robert Gold’s secret societies and patronage networks and dirty politics, and the same with Fiona Murray’s. This had likewise earned him some new enemies, but he felt it all to the good. So did his adopted parents, for that matter.

“Aye, they might make it,” Jack said, grinning at his niece. “Charlotte and Alix will be here too, and Cecilia and her new husband. I have to meet the man, make sure he’s good enough for her. He’s named Stevenson, that’s all I know. Another Scotsman from Edinburgh, actually. A trader in a West Indies firm.”

“It’ll be a proper party for you, then,” Geneva said. “The ceremony at the college is what – Friday? Mother and Daddy should be here tomorrow, if the wind cooperates from Savannah. It’s a bit of a long journey at their age, but they’re a pair of old sailors, so they insisted.”

“I’m sure Dad would point out that he’s only sixty-eight,” Sam said. “Like Grandpa used to.”

A solemn silence fell over the table. James Flint had died last year at the age of eighty-one, after a brief illness, which Geneva had not been able to get back to Georgia in time for. Perhaps it was for the best, as her grandfather told her, the last time they saw each other, that he did not want that to be her last memory of him. That when he died, he would be the sky and the wind and the sea, and he would see her there anyway. Geneva was inclined to think that this was true, as she had had more than one dream about him, and sometimes woke in the dimness of the Athena’s cabin to think that he was still there, sitting at the desk and listening to the lap of morning waves against the hull, watching her with that amused green gaze before he faded back into the mist. She knew with that same utter and absolute conviction that he was all right, that he was free and happy and safe, and that was good.

Besides, it had been cruelty to make James McGraw, the man who had become Flint for the depths of his true loves, live the last four years of his life without them. Thomas had died in 1747, at seventy-five, and Miranda in 1750, at the same. It was made easier, if such a thing was possible, by the knowledge that Sam Bellamy was waiting on the other side to take care of them, to see them again, but it had still broken James to let them go one more time, to be – as ever – the last one left behind. The last time Geneva had seen him was at her grandmother’s funeral. Her downright immortal grandfather looked, at last, very old, and very tired, and very heartsick. She had worried that he would be unbearably lonely, and James told her that Silver and Madi had agreed to come up from Nassau to keep him company for a while. As far as Geneva was aware, they had then stayed. She didn’t know for certain if John Silver, who had lived so long with the guilt of destroying Captain Flint, had been with James McGraw when he finally went to his real rest, but she certainly hoped so.

“I wish Granny could have seen this,” Sam said, after a long pause. “She’d have been so proud of you, Jack.”

“She was already.” Jack smiled faintly. Miranda had gotten to see him become a physician, to take up his appointment at the Academy of Philadelphia, and to be happy for many years with Sam, and they had kept up a fairly regular correspondence while Jack and Sam were living in Edinburgh. “And I think she knows, besides.”

They all nodded, still subdued, but the conversation revived after that. Sam said apologetically that they had not yet managed to hire a cook, and both of them were horrible at it, so supper was somewhat scant, but Geneva and Jim gallantly overlooked it. They chatted well into the night, after Diana had been sent up to bed, exchanging various anecdotes from their explorations and travels, and only decided that it was quite late enough when the hallway clock struck one. Lying next to her sleeping husband, Geneva stretched out luxuriantly on a mattress where her arms and legs did not immediately hit the wall (as she got older, she had to admit that there was something to be said for creature comfort) and looked up at the unfinished crown molding over the windows. Jack and Sam were clearly planning to live here a long time, to make a permanent home, and there were certainly moments when Geneva wanted to retire from the seafaring life and stay on dry land for the rest of her days. She might like for Diana to become captain of the Athena after her, but Diana wanted to do other things, had other interests and passions, and Geneva was perfectly happy to see her follow those. In the meantime, she and Jim would keep sailing together until they didn’t want to anymore. But not yet. Not yet.

Geneva slept well, and woke the next morning at least somewhat refreshed. She dressed and went downstairs, and after breakfast, Sam volunteered to take them out to see the city, at which Jack looked up anxiously and told them to be careful. To absolutely nobody’s surprise, there was yet another war going on, between the British on one side and the French and Indians on the other, and there had been several meetings in Albany to discuss the threat, as well as fighting near Fort Niagara and Fort Oswego in the northern part of the colony, close to the border with French Canada. Various lurid stories of Indian massacres and French advances were thus circulating, and while Jack likely did not believe they were actually in danger of strolling into the middle of a battle, he always preferred to err on the side of caution where Sam’s safety was involved. It was, Geneva thought, really rather sweet.

In any event, she, Jim, and Diana spent a pleasant morning out with Sam, were not scalped or ambushed, and dropped by King’s College to see Jack’s new workplace, at which point Diana announced that she wanted to go here when she was older. The rather fussy proctor showing them around blinked owlishly from behind his pince-nez. “That is an extraordinary notion, Miss Hawkins, but I cannot see that it would be possible. The College is for the education of young men, you see. I suggest you focus on more ladylike subjects.”

Diana, who had likewise been raised with the assurance that she could and should try anything she set her mind to, stared back at him fiercely. “You’ll be dead when I’m older.”

Jim was briefly overcome with a coughing fit, while Geneva hoped that they were not spoiling things for Jack before he ever took up his post. She personally intended to see to it that her daughter got to do whatever she wanted, and if that involved stepping on a few crusty male toes, so much the better. On that note, they concluded the tour and headed to the docks, since Mother and Daddy were supposed to be arriving today, and they might as well wait to meet them. After this, Killian and Emma were headed down to Philadelphia to see Liam, Regina, Henry, and Violet, and attend their grandson Richard’s wedding, so it was a family affair all around.

Sure enough, around midafternoon, a handsome black-hulled schooner entered the harbor, took down her canvas, and glided to a halt in the quays. Passengers soon began to disembark, making their way through the busy docklands, and Geneva squinted, then waved energetically, raising her voice. “Hey! Here!”

Killian and Emma Jones looked around, spotted them, and hurried over as fast as they could, which was not quite as fast as before. Killian was using a cane, which briefly choked Geneva’s throat, one of those terribly poignant reminders that your parents were mortal and fallible and growing older, that all of them had. There likewise was not much dark left in Killian’s silver hair, and Emma’s, pulled back in an elegant knot, was entirely white. But both of them looked delighted to see their children, son-in-law, and granddaughter, and kisses, hugs, and handshakes (the latter between Killian and Jim) were exchanged. Geneva nodded at her father’s cane. “Finally slowed down, have you?

“Had a bad fall last year, unfortunately, and it helps.” Killian sighed. “This getting old business is a bloody pain in the backside, love. You’ll see what I mean.”

“I’ve noticed.” Geneva bit her lip, then smiled again, kissing her mother’s cheek. “How’s Savannah?”

“It’s…” Emma weighed her words. As they had feared would someday happen, slavery had been legalized in Georgia in 1751, and it now ran to the same voracious, devouring rhythm as the other southern colonies, in its plantations and flesh markets and unbearable cruelties. “It’s… different.”

“We’ve lived there too long to really want to move,” Killian said, “and likewise, I’m afraid we’re not quite cut out for cold weather anymore. But when Silver and Madi left after – after James, they said that they were going to Lancelot and Ursula’s island to live out the rest of their days. Could be that we’ll join them. Maybe we’re not too old for one last adventure.”

“I’d hope not.” Emma smiled affectionately at her husband and took his arm. “In the meantime, though, I could use some refreshment after this one.”

Sam and Jim grabbed their things, and the family made their way back to the Bellamy-Jones residence, where they discovered that Charlotte, Alix, Cecilia, and Cecilia’s new husband, Allan Stevenson, had arrived just an hour earlier and were being warmly received by Jack (with the exception of Allan, whom he was still staring at with an expression of squiggle-eyed suspicion). There were another round of hugs and greetings, Charlotte and Alix took pity on the men and cooked dinner, and they were just sitting down to eat when there was one final knock on the door. This proved to be a windblown Matthew, Cordelia, and Martha Rogers, and as Martha and Diana squealed and ran to hug each other, Matthew cleared his throat and looked at Jack. “Ah – congratulations, Dr. Bellamy.”

“Thank you, Captain Rogers.” Jack reached out, and they shook hands, without even attempting to break the other’s fingers. As Jack looked at all of them, crammed into his dining room and talking away, Geneva could see him struggling to possibly believe it in the slightest. That he was here in his own home with his husband and all of their extended family, preparing to celebrate his promotion to a professor of medicine at King’s College, that the spring night was warm and long and gold, and that it was real, and right, and good.

The house, while sizeable, was not quite large enough to fit everybody, so Matthew and his family, and Cecilia and Allan, finally departed to the boarding house down the street, where they had taken rooms. Geneva was feeling as if she needed quiet time after all the hubbub and socialization, so she went up to her and Jim’s bedroom and shut the door, listening to the murmur of conversation from below. There was still some blue light lingering on the floorboards, and she went to the desk and lit the candles, gazing thoughtfully out the window and onto the street. Then she turned away, went to her bag, and removed her writing book.

Geneva unpacked her quill and inkwell and pen knife, whittled the quill sharp, and opened the book, searching for the place she had left off. It wasn’t much more than a collection of thoughts and scribbles and loosely linked scenes, but she had been thinking about this recently, about their family’s stories, and that eventually, they might want to do something with it. A General History of the Pyrates had been a runaway bestseller, after all, and she couldn’t help but feel that they too had a tale worth telling. She wasn’t the right person to write it in full, but at least she could compile some of this material, their rich and colorful and tragic and vibrant history. Then one day, it could find its way into the hands of someone who could.

Geneva sat down, dipped the quill, and considered for a long moment. Then she flipped back to the front of the book, supposed that they could always change the title later, and wrote two words.

TREASURE ISLAND.

THE END

#captain swan #cs ff #cs au #cs next gen #the rose and thorn #treasure island #black sails #welp it's done #and i have a lot of emotions about this

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