#I also brought a sketch book and some knitting with me so I had many non-phone things to amuse myself with | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

blissfulalchemist · 4 years ago

Note

“I made your favorite.” For CatRaf? 😘😘😘

Thank you for sending this in Jo! Please enjoy this little slice of life piece that I had so much fun writing!

“What day does dad come back again?” Liz asked as she hung upside down on the couch, The Old Man and the Sea in her hands as her long hair pooled to the floor beneath her, “I need to know when to get his present ready.”

Cat looked up from the stove to Liz, “You’re not going to try and deface property again are you?”

“I was joking,” she gave Liz a sideways glance, Liz changing her tune, “Well the shop owner gave me permission, not my fault it was the wrong one we needed.” Cat shook her head, turning the stove down, “Danny is the one that drew it,” Liz grumbled.

“But you let yourself take the fall for it,” she pointed out, her daughter letting out a huff, “You want to take a break from your homework for a little bit?”

Her brown eyes looked over to Catlina, narrowing slightly, “Depends,” Liz let her legs fall forward cartwheeling off the sofa, “What are you making?”

“The recipe your grandmother left for me to start,” Cat looked down re-reading the instructions making sure she understood what was written, “I feel like this doesn’t need that much paprika.”

Liz put her chin on her mom’s head, “Careful mom, you know how they can be about following the recipes. Dad had to get it from someone.”

“Hush you,” Cat said, laughing as she waved Liz off of her, “Will you start peeling the potatoes for me, please?”

Liz smiled, getting the peeler out, “You didn’t answer my question though.”

Cat hummed, “He flies in the twenty-ninth.”

“What are we going to be doing when he comes in? Are we celebrating his birthday first or Christmas? Cause I vote we get the capitalistic holiday out of the way first.”

Cat looked up to her daughter, eyes tired, “You love Christmas so don’t try to put your social justice airs on for me.” Liz scoffed mumbling to herself, “I think it’s going to be Christmas first. I don’t know what we can do for his birthday.”

Liz gave a solemn nod, “You left it to the last minute didn’t you?”

“I did not, now peel those potatoes,” Cat tied her hair up letting out a breath, “I just feel like we’ve done everything at some point for him. There’s nothing left to do that just feels special enough for him.”

Liz stopped peeling looking up, “I’ve never seen you make him any food for his birthday.” Her brow knitted together frowning, “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you two make anything for each other for events that special. What’s up with that? You two cook so often you think you would have at some point in my life.”

“That….,” Cat stopped thinking it over, “No we can’t. It became a rule and after all these years of peace, we don’t need World War Three happening.”

“There was already a threat of that mom,” Liz pointed out, “And I’m sure yours and dad’s isn’t going to live up to that one.”

“Watch yourself,” Cat warned, “Just trust me, it’s better for everyone if we don’t touch that flame.”

“Mom, it's not that difficult, all you have to do is make his favorite food and be done with it.” Liz put a hand on her hip, “Besides what can be more special than doing something he would never expect from you? You say it yourself all the time, you making food is a labor of love. Why is making something for dad on his birthday any different.” She stood straighter, “In fact I find that that qualifies as more reason for you to show him that you love him.”

Cat crossed her arms, Liz was right and she hated to admit it, “There’s also one hiccup in your plan honey,” Cat turned back to the stove, “I could never make the dish to his liking. He’s so particular about it. I’ve tried and just can never seem to get it right. Even he doesn’t like it when he makes it.” She gave a heavy sigh, “No one else can make it like his mom.”

Liz rolled her eyes, “Oh so tragic that she isn’t currently staying with her for a while.” Liz held a potato up after seeing the narrowed eyes her mom gave her, “I know, I know. Watch the sarcasm. But mom seriously just ask her to teach you. Grandma isn’t going to be offended, bet she wants to teach you.”

“I want to teach your mom what?” Raf’s mom asked as she walked in setting bags on the counter, Liz rushing to help her put the groceries away.

“How to make dad’s favorite dish,” Liz said giving her mom a smile, “She wants to do something special for his birthday.”

“Oh,” the older woman said looking at Cat, “is that all?” Cat nodded, glancing between the stove and her mother in law, her grey hair falling into her eyes as she pointed to some places in the kitchen, directing Liz where to put items. “Where’s your younger brother?”

“Sketching upstairs,” Liz saw the package of sweet rolls, longing to have one, “You got him his favorites didn’t you?”

“Of course I got them for my little Cielito,” she said sweetly, handing the bag over to Liz, “Here put these in the bread box with his name on it, Loquita.” Liz muttered under her breath as she put them away, going back to peeling the potatoes. She gave a clap of her hands turning to Cat, “Now what’s this I hear about you wanting to learn how to make my most secret recipe?”

“You don’t have to. I can always come up with something else to make or do. Liz just thought it would be nice because it’s something we never really do.”

“You never cooked for my boy?” She asked a serious note in her tone.

Cat’s eyes went wide, “Oh no. That’s-that’s not what I meant at all,” she stammered, “I cook, we cook, for each other all the time we just agreed to not on special occasions. It’s just you know- it makes life easier so we aren’t trying to pass the other one up.”

“You and that damn competition of yours,” she waved off, “You know there’s no beating him. But here,” she placed her hands on Cat’s shoulders, looking her in the eye, “I will teach you.”

Cat blinked a few times, “You will?”

“Of course. I can’t have that recipe lost just because I didn’t have a daughter of my own,” Cat and Liz opened their mouths to speak, “I only taught Raf the basics. He doesn’t have the permission to learn the secret ingredient. It’s why he can’t make it properly. Gotta keep the boy humble.”

Cat and Liz looked at each other shrugging, “Can’t blame you.”

“Exactly,” she gave a single clap before pointing to Liz, “Now you. Out of the kitchen. Go and find your brother.” She turned her eyes on Cat, who shifted under the woman’s gaze, “You finish that recipe so I can see just how much my son has taught you.”

“I-. Well we don’t have to start right now,” Cat watched as Liz made her way upstairs laughing to herself.

“I have to know where to begin with you,” she pointed a finger to the skillet on the stove, “because I already know you didn’t measure out the paprika.” She turned Cat to face the stove before taking a seat at the breakfast bar, “Now show me what you got.” Cat stared at the stove trying to remember where her place was. She turned ready to ask a question, “No you can’t have any help.”

Liz came back down the stairs, Danny following behind her, “Is this a test to see how good of a teacher dad is?”

“Grandma’s actually teaching mom how to cook?” Danny asked as he made his way into his grandmother’s outstretched arms, “This oughta be fun to watch.”

“Mom,” Liz said noticing how still Catlina had become, “You were on the sixth step.”

“I said no helping,” her grandma warned, looking down to the sketch book Danny had brought with him, “What are we working on today my Cielito?”

She took it from him, as he sat down next to her, “Something for dad since our last attempt didn’t work out.”

“Awww,” she pinched his cheek, “Your sister should have done more research, so that your art could grace this county.”

Liz got a glass of water taking a sip, “And we wonder how dad could have ever gotten his ego,” she mumbled under her breath. Cat smiled holding back her laughter.

“I heard that Liz,” she said, not looking away from her grandson.

“Grandma, if not for Liz I’d have been arrested,” Danny reminded her.

She gasped pulling him close to her, “Oh, you’re right. Your face could not survive such horrors.” She gave a smile to her granddaughter, “Thank you Liz.”

“Wessy would have gotten him out before the paperwork was even finished,” Liz joked, rolling her eyes as she sat on the other side of Danny.

“How is Wes and his wife doing lately?” She asked watching as Cat made her way through the recipe picking up a serrated knife, “You need the chef’s knife, my Lina.” Cat nodded grabbing the one from the wooden block.

“They’re doing well, mom,” Cat said chopping up some of the potatoes, “Wes got a promotion and Wren has been doing a lot of great work with the kids and starting plans for connecting music therapy to the schools. They also really enjoyed the cookies you sent over to them for Christmas.”

“Of course they did. Are their kids still doing well in school?”

“Willow always does. Same with Wyatt when Liz doesn’t rope him in to something potentially stupid,” Danny teased.

“At least I’m not taking after my namesake and pining,” Liz gave him exaggerated puppy dog eyes.

“Danny is this true,” Raf’s mom asked.

Cat looked up to Danny seeing the blush creeping up his neck, “Yeah. I didn’t know you had a crush on someone at school.”

“It’s not a crush. We’re just friends,” he argued.

“And so were your father and Wes,” grandma stated, “Now I just want to know who so I can start listing off reasons why they aren’t good enough for you.”

Liz subtly flipped the sketch book a few pages to a sketch of the girl, “He draws pictures of her.”

Danny snatched up the book holding it close to his chest, “Liz,” she stuck her tongue out at him, “that’s not funny. She’s just my friend and these are from a school project that she helped me with.” His cheeks burned as Cat held her hand out for the sketch book.

“Give it here, it’s causing too many problems now,” Danny handed it over, his mom putting it on the counter, Raf’s mom looking at it over her glasses.

“Her hair is too curly,” the three of them gave a side glance to the old woman, “We’d lose the Estrada curl that’s too perfect.”

“Mom,” Cat said laughing.

“What? We just got lucky your dad’s hair had a curl that was close enough to ours,” she said ruffling Danny’s hair, “Now it’s even more perfect.”

Cat rolled her eyes, “Grandma how come you never ask Liz,” Danny looked his sister in the eyes as she took another sip of water, “if she ever has any crushes at school?”

“Liz do you have anybody that you like at school?” Liz stayed silent shaking her head, “See there we go.”

“That’s not fair,” he pouted, Cat shaking her head as she grabbed the small measuring spoons.

“Pobrecito Cielito, Liz doesn’t need the protection that you do,” she wrapped him in her arms, stroking his hair, “You’re soft and sweet just like your mother. You need someone perfect.”

Liz looked over curious, “So then what do I need?”

She didn’t look up to Liz, “You need a Wesley.”

Cat snorted, holding back her laughter as Liz’s mouth fell open, “What’s that supposed to mean, Grandma?”

She pulled away from Danny with a sigh, “It just means that while Danny here,” she cupped his face, “is soft and precious just like your mother,” she gave a smile to Cat before turning to Liz, “While you my dear are like your father.”

Danny laughed pointing at his sister, “You’re bossy Liz!” Liz glared, lightly punching his arm.

“So I just need someone to boss around?” She leaned back in the chair crossing her arms in a huff, “Well that’s not happening. Never going to find someone here like that.”

“No you won’t, because,” their grandma said pointing to Liz, “you need someone that will keep you grounded but appreciate your flying. If it was just a matter of who’s the boss and who’s not then your mother and father would have never worked out.”

“I feel that is our dynamic mom,” Cat said, putting the finishing touches on the meal, “He leads I follow.”

“Wrong.” Her finger moved from point at Liz to Cat, “You remind him how to lead. Don’t think I forgot the first Thanksfighting, you held your own against him. He did relent eventually,” Cat grabbed some plates from the cupboard brow knitting together, “He did. It’s harder to see but I know it when I see it.”

Cat shook her head making plates for them all, “Well no need to question something if it’s not broken. Danny, make your grandma some coffee, there’s hot water on the stove already.” He nodded making quick work of what his mom asked of him. “Shall we eat at the breakfast bar or the table?”

“This is fine,” Raf’s mom told Catlina, taking the mug from Danny, “Thank you. We might get to cooking lessons right away.” The four of them grew silent as they ate for a few minutes, Cat’s eyes not leaving her mother in law, waiting for her reaction. She gave a small shrug with a small frown, “It’s not bad, Lina,” Cat took a breath waiting for the rest, “but could use a little work.” She turned to Danny, “Danny! Get my chef’s coat!”

“Ohhh,” Liz started smiling, her laughter intermixing with her voice, “Mom’s in for a crash course in cooking.”

“I love how you think you’re exempt from this Loquita,” her grandma laughed, “Come. If I’m gonna teach your mom, I’m going to save time and teach you too. Two generations taken care of.”

Liz whined looking to Catlina for help, giving her daughter a shrug, “Estrada’s are nothing short of efficient.”

“I thought that was the Rojas’,” Liz argued.

Cat rolled her eyes, “It's from both sides. Besides this was your idea and I’m sure it’ll be fun.”

The week that followed stopped being fun pretty quickly as the three generations tried to work together in the kitchen. There was no formal recipe, so both had to pay close attention without getting in the other’s way, all the while Danny got to watch eating the sweet rolls and sketching the scenes from time to time. Raf’s mom made sure there was nothing but perfection from Liz and Cat, their days getting longer as the pieces came together, their bonding feeling more like a bootcamp. Finally, two days before Rafael’s expected return Danny was finally kicked out of the kitchen and sent to his room, the time finally coming for them to learn the secret step that was tradition for only the women to know. One that wasn’t mastered until twenty four hours before Raf’s return.

That night, Cat and Liz were tasked with making a portion each to make sure it was the perfection grandma expected. The two tired as they placed their plates in front of their judges, leaning against the counters. “I’m never listening to your ideas again mom,” Liz whispered.

“I don’t know what planet you just came from,” Cat narrowed her eyes at Liz, “but this was your idea.”

“And you should know better than to listen to me,” Cat rolled her eyes at the comment watching her mother in law. Cat’s hands starting to shake as her heart thundered in her chest, Is this what it feels like to be on the TV competitions?

Raf’s mom looked to Danny, the two giving curt nods, the older woman stepping down from the chair, arms outstretched. “Mijas,” she embraced them both, “It is perfect! I am so proud of you both.” When she pulled back her eyes looked at Liz first, “Yours can use a little work but you’re still young,” she gave a pinch on Liz’s cheek.

Cat had started to laugh as the two discussed what needed to be fixed when her phone rang. Cat ran to it, her smile spreading seeing Raf’s picture on the screen, “Raf, please tell me they gave you an earlier flight. The kids and I miss you so much. We can’t wait for you to get home!”

He was silent a moment before letting out a sigh, “I know you do Conejito, but,” Cat’s face started to fall at his hesitancy, “there’s been some delays here because of the weather.”

“Oh,” Cat said crossing her arm across her chest, “You’re just gonna be a bit later than expected which is okay. We can all wait up for you.”

He gave a small laugh, “I’d love for nothing more than to see all your faces as soon as I walk through that door, but it’s expected to be an extra day, maybe a few more depending on how this storm goes.”

“I-I see,” she turned away from everyone else hiding her disappointment, “What does it mean if it’s longer than a day? Will you be able to extend your leave?”

“I can’t this time, mi amor. Worst case is that I would only get a few hours with you all,” she could hear the pain in his voice, “Which is fine, so long as I get to see you all, but we won’t be able to do much more than have lunch.” Cat stole a glance behind her to their kids, their faces growing sadder as they put two and two together. “Look, we just have to hope for the best okay. We do that and it’s going to all work out.”

Cat nodded, “You’re right. That’s all we have to do. In the end we get to see you still and that’s what matters.”

“Exactly, and don’t worry I’ll keep you updated,” she heard him swallow hard, “Are the kids there? I want to say hi to them.”

“Yeah, your mom is here too still,” Cat handed the phone off to them making her way up the stairs to the master bedroom, wiping the tears from her face. It just didn’t seem fair that while he was away he only got so much time to fly overseas to see them, only for a storm to hit where he was making it harder for them to see each other. She gave a sigh making sure she looked presentable before making her way back downstairs.

The next twelve hours were slow and filled with dread as they all waited for updates on what was happening with Raf. It was Liz that spoke up first during the family’s transition to another movie, “I can’t stand to mope about any more today! I’m calling Tia Wren to come and get us.”

“And do what,” Danny asked looking up from where he laid against Cat.

Liz stood putting her hands on her hips, “Anything but what we’ve been doing. Time will move faster if we go out and do something.” She held her hand out to her younger brother, “What do you say?”

Danny looked up to Cat, giving him a nod, “Alright let’s go call them.” He jumped up following Liz to the other room.

Raf’s mom moved to sit next to Cat, putting an arm around her, “I’ll drive them there. You stay here just in case he never got a chance to update us on his arrival.” She kissed the top of Cat’s head, “You look like you could use the rest anyway.”

“Mom,” Danny called out, “Aunt Wren and Wes want to know if it’s okay for us to stay the night there. They have something planned for dad and want us to help out.”

“Are they planning a party?” Grandma asked, “Cause if they are I will stay with you all.”

Danny nodded going back to the room, “You don’t have to do that mom. They’ll be fine with them.”

She waved off Cat’s comment, “I like planning parties and I can give them a little break too. Take the kids out to a movie or something.” Cat’s phone chimed with a text from Raf. It was a selfie of him with a sad face next to a screen with the estimated arrival date of his flight. From what Cat could gather from the picture he at least wasn’t where he was stationed at. She gave a sad laugh showing the screen to his mom. “He’s not coming in until tomorrow it looks like,” she gave a sigh, hugging Cat, “You still get a few days with him, mija.”

Liz and Danny rushed back into the room, “They said you can stay if you want grandma,” Danny said as Liz made her way up the stairs. He took in their faces, “Any word on dad?”

“Tomorrow afternoon,” Cat told him, “Sorry buddy.”

He gave a shrug, “He’s still going to be on time for the party and then we have him all to ourselves for a few days after that.” He gave Cat a hug, “It’s all going to work out mom, just you wait and see,” she gave him a kiss on the cheek before letting him rush up the stairs to pack an overnight bag.

Cat looked to Raf’s mom, “Do you know how to get there?”

She nodded, “A little and if anything I’m sure those two know how to get there.” She gave a pat on Cat’s knee as she stood to collect her things. The three of them were saying their goodbyes to Cat in the span of ten minutes reminding her to keep the party a secret as they drove away. Cat laid herself down on the couch putting another movie on to keep the silence of the house at bay finding herself falling asleep for the duration of it. She woke to an update from Raf, this time showing himself at an airport that looked more clearly to be one in the states, his face looking bored as he stared off into space, the caption reading “Why must airplane food taste worse than MREs?”. The second picture he sent was one of a golden retriever that had rolled onto their back looking up to Raf, it’s tongue hanging out “Since when does Wren let Wes out without a leash.”.

Cat couldn’t help but laugh at the pictures, sending a selfie of her own worried face, “Well that’s a problem considering I just sent the kids to stay with him for the night.”. Raf’s response was quick as he sent his own worried face. She laughed a moment before her heart felt like it was pulling towards him, “I miss you, my love.”. His response took a little longer, the little dots staying up as he must have been deciding what to write before settling on, “I miss you too.”.

Cat looked up to the ceiling debating what to do with the time she had. She didn’t feel like watching another movie yet and the time showed that it was too early to start getting ready for bed or even dinner. Her eyes looked to the kitchen, it wasn’t too early to start making a meal though. Cat got up making her way to the kitchen, making the dish she had perfected, readying it to be stored in the fridge, just under cooked enough for it to taste it’s best when she heated it up.

Time was still stretching as she just decided to make her way upstairs to take a bath and relax. Another update from Raf, this time a picture of the inside of a plane, “One more layover!....I don’t know how long it will be.” a sad face emoji with a tear became its own text. She smiled settling in, asking him to hurry back to her along with a picture of her in the bath as extra incentive. She found herself getting ready for bed once the water became cold, her routine taking longer than normal making herself perfect for Raf’s return.

By the end of it she still found herself wandering around the house settling back down on the couch getting her favorite show ready to watch, one more text from Raf coming in. This time it was a professional photo of a blue horse statue with red eyes, followed by the familiar terminal behind Raf’s smiling face, “Praise Blucifer! I am within driving distance if I have to be.” Cat laughed simply sending a kissing face emoji to him. Her mind no longer able to focus on the show as she laid there her heart racing, knowing he was just so close to her. Her eyes started to close as a slow song played during an episode, her mind already playing a scene of her and Raf together again.

The moving headlights hurt her eyes as she sat up in the now quiet house, catching the time on her dying phone, six in the morning. She yawned, stretching out her arms, hearing the faint sounds of a car door slamming shut. Cat walked to the front door of the house, smoothing out her hair, watching as a familiar silhouette passed the windows, heart racing as she wanted nothing more than to run to him. The door opened slowly, his smile meeting her first as he stepped through, Cat running into his arms as the door closed behind him.

He lifted her easily as she buried her face into his neck, wrapping her arms and legs around him, “I missed you so much,” she said between her tears falling, kissing his cheek.

“I can’t even begin to tell you how much I missed you,” he pulled away far enough to take in her face, kissing her deeply, his arm tightening around her. “Is everyone asleep upstairs?”

Cat shook her head, “They’re all at your brother’s place,” she put her hands around his face kissing him again, “You said tomorrow afternoon, so they stayed the night.”

Raf moved them further into the house setting her on the back of the sofa, “It was going to be,” he kissed down her neck, his hands running along her legs, “I guess I must have looked so sad seeing that picture of you,” Cat started to unbutton the jacket he wore, “because someone gave up their seat to get me home faster.”

“Well I am thankful for them,” she pulled on the lapel of his jacket bringing his lips down to hers. His hands moving under the silky pjs she wore, trails of fire forming with each touch of his fingers against her skin, as his lips moved down her neck. Cat gave a small moan parting her lips, before she started to hear Raf’s stomach start to growl. She laughed pulling away from him, “When was the last time you ate?”

“It doesn’t matter,” he tilted her chin to look her in the eye, “I can wait.”

She shook her head, “No, mi amor,” she pushed him away gently, “You need to eat or else you’ll have no energy.” She got down from the sofa making her way to the kitchen, “Besides I made your favorite,” Cat stopped at the fridge holding on to the door turning to him, “and I promise you that it’s going to be worth the interruption.”

He leaned against the counter, arms crossed, cocking an eyebrow, “Oh will it now? Cause you’ve tried in the past to make it.”

“Well I didn’t spend a week learning exactly how to make it from your mom,” she teased as she bent down grabbing the food, feeling Raf grab her hips.

“She actually taught you how to make it?”

Cat nodded, setting the food on the counter, “Liz too. Even had to make a blood oath to never tell the secret step to you or anyone else. Only our granddaughters.”

He laughed, pinning her against the counter, giving her a kiss. When she didn’t start laughing with him, he stopped, “Oh you’re serious. Even the blood oath?”

“Well Liz and I both cut ourselves at least once during the week and your mom said it counted,” she explained holding up her hand with the mostly healed cut between her thumb and forefinger. He smiled, bringing her hand to his lips.

“Well at least you and Liz survived.”

His hands started to run up her body, bringing their hips together, “I’m still going to make sure you eat dinner first,” she whispered in his ear.

He kissed up her jaw before whispering, “And what if I just want to skip straight to dessert,” he lightly bit her ear lobe while his left hand found its way into the waistband of her shorts. “There’s only so much time we truly have alone,” he said lowly, his fingers running over her lace underwear, sending small waves of pleasure through Cat. “We should take advantage of it, mi amante,” his hand left her shorts lifting her by her thighs, Cat’s legs wrapping around him on instinct. She smiled kissing down his neck, reveling in the moans he gave her as he walked them up the stairs.

Once at the top he set her down letting her pull his jacket and shirt off before Raf had her against a wall his kisses feverish and hands rough, Cat’s trying to keep up as she fumbled with trying to loosen his pants and feeling his toned body. She wanted every part of him, making it known as she made a space big enough to rub his already hard length, his hands starting to push her towards their bedroom. The two didn’t even bother closing the door as Raf threw Cat on the bed, letting her watch as he quickly removed his pants, pulling her legs to the edge to remove her clothing.

He brought himself onto the bed using his hips to part her legs for him as he kneeled above her taking in her body. His hands ran down her body lightly, as her breathing became heavy as his touch traced every part of her. Cat moved her hips up trying to get some kind of friction, Raf pushing them back down against the bed. She let out a small whine growing tired of him, in her mind, teasing her, pulling on the dog tags that still hung around his neck. She kissed him roughly taking advantage of the small surprise on his end to force him on his back, straddling him as she moved her lips down his neck and across his collarbone. Her hands played with the waistband of his boxers, sliding in after he gave a few breathy moans from her kissing alone, running her fingers up and down his shaft. He let out a groan, his head falling back, muttering to himself as she kissed down his torso, stopping just above hips. She gave a smirk biting her lower lip, meeting his eyes as she said, “Welcome home, my love,” she pulled his underwear down letting her tongue run along his length, “and happy late birthday.”

#x: top chefs #this turned out to be 5300 words exactly and I am very proud of this fact

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the-shadow-of-atlantis · 4 years ago

Text

All The Stars (Pt 7)

Summary: The girls decide to go on an adventure. Pam belongs to @thespacebuns

Tagging: @thespacebuns @the-sun-and-their-moon @melyaliz @coffee-randomness @speedypan

Read Earlier Parts Here

The girls' slytherin dorm room was quiet, or as quiet as it could get with Pam who was not fond of staying still. She wore her sneakers and tapped the heels together as she lay on the edge of the bed with her legs straight up in the air. Adeline was trying her best at knitting frowning when her stitching was coming out too loose. Stephania and Joanne were trying to catch up on some homework which Nova had no idea how they could have possibly gotten behind when Pam, Adeline, and her were the ones usually sneaking out.

Nova on the other hand was humming to herself as she checked the inventory on her potion ingredients. Marking in her notebook which ones she needed to refill and which ones were good. She frowned when she noticed just how many she needed to replace. The amount of times Nova had to place an order with her parents to bring her more ingredients was starting to get absurd. It didn’t help that Nova knew Snape had his own personal collection of ingredients yet he never shared with anyone. Nova let out an annoyed huff as she shut her notebook.

“What’s up?” Pam asked, perking up.

“I’m low on ingredients again.” Nova sighed as she started putting her bottles away.

“And.” Pam pressed nosing Nova was up to something.

“Snape has a closet full of potions and ingredients. But he never shares with anyone.” Nova grumbled.

“Maybe some of the ingredients are dangerous.” Stephania tried to defend the professor, but the defense made Nova snort.

“The majority of the castle is dangerous not to mention Peeves.” Pam countered.

Nova got up from her spot and tucked her things away but not before slipping out her special notebook.

“Well I’m going for a walk.” Nova said and with that left the common room, Pam and Adeline quickly followed her.

“That bloody wanker.” Nova hissed as she looked up at the many shelves that stored different ingredients and potions. “Gillyweed, nightshade, frogs breath, unicorn hair, veritaserum, he has bloody veritaserum.”

“Isn’t that illegal?” Pam asked as she looked at the jars of pickled intestines.

“Like that would stop Snape.” Nova mumbled.

“Are you guys almost done?” Adeline asked quietly from the other side of the door.

“Yeah.” Nova mumbled as she walked out a frown still on her brow. “I'm sure most of those things I could find in the forbidden forest.”

“Is it really forbidden or does it just have a spooky name to keep muggles out?” Pam asked.

“Well there's one way to find out.” Nova said with a sly smile.

~~~~~~~~~

“Remember point your wands low.” Nova whispered as she pointed the light her wand was producing low to the ground.

“Why couldn’t we have come in here when the sun was still up?” Adeline whispered nervously huddling close to Pam.

“Where’s the fun in that?” Pam asked as she peered into the wood trying to make sense of the shapes.

“Oh I should have brought my telescope.” Nova whispered as she paused in a small opening and looked up at the night sky. “How can the stars look so much brighter in the forest?”

“Next time you can stargaze, for now get what you need.” Pam whispered shaking her head in amusement.

“Right, right.” Nova said looking back down and trying to study the plants around her.

“Did you get everything you need?” Adeline asked hovering much closer to Pam as the woods seemed to be getting colder the later it would get.

“I just need a few more things.” Nova replied as she finished bottling the last of the plant she was harvesting. “But I think I can get those during the day cause they should be located around the lake.”

“Cool, cause even I'm starting to get the creeps about this place.” Pam said looking around.

“Not everything that’s in the woods is bad.” Nova said getting up and brushing the dirt off her pants. “These creatures just aren’t used to humans.”

“And that’s comforting how?” Pam asked as she started to follow Nova.

“Oh wait wait.” Nova said as she paused looking up at the clear patch of sky, she quickly pulled out her notebook and began trying to chart the starts.

“Seriously?” Pam hissed.

“Just give me a moment.” Nova said as she focused on the stars trying to identify them as she sketched.

"Guys I think something moved." Adeline squeaked.

"I'm almost done." Nova whispered.

"Nova." Pam squeaked out also.

"What?" Nova asked almost hissing then paused as the giant spider stood before them. How did she miss that?

The spider clicked and hissed and the girls screamed. Nova instinctively held out her wand and shouted the first spell that came to mind. Red sparks bounced off the spider harmlessly and it hissed again. The girls took off running every now and then shooting back spells at the creature. Was it technically illegal to use the killing curse if it was aimed at a giant insect? Nova didn't really have time to find out because Adeline suddenly tripped and fell.

Pam and Nova quickly returned and tried to pry away the roots that seemed to keep Adeline in their clutches. The spider was gaining on them and Nova stood protectively in front of her friends racking her brain for a better spell. Suddenly a large shadow passed over them and Nova froze wondering if maybe they were lead into a trap and other spider was waiting for them. Instead Nova was met with the backend of a horse.

“Halt.” A loud booming voice said, it took nova a second to realize it was coming from the horse except it wasn't a horse. “You know very well the students are off limits.”

The spider hissed and clicked angrily as it shuffled from side to side contemplating if it should also attack the centaur. In the end the spider hissed in annoyance and scurried off. The centaur turned to face them but seemed to pause when it spotted Nova. He leaned forward and studied her eyes though he seemed to focus on just one of them. After a few moments he straightened up and turned serious.

“What are you doing wandering the forest this late at night?” He asked.

“Would you believe us if I said we were collecting potion ingredients?” Nova asked her hand resting on her bag hoping she didn't break anything.

"Don't humans have places to acquire such things." It sounded more like a statement then a question.

"Yes but I figured I'd save my parents the money." Nova shrugged.

"The woods are a dangerous place. Some creatures know best to stay away other will not hesitate to eat." The centaur stated.

"Well we would have gotten out sooner if Nova hadn't been star gazing." Pam said poking her younger out at Nova.

Again the centaur seemed to study Nova carefully when he heard her name.

"You like to study the stars." Again it seemed like more of a statement then a question.

"When I have the time." Nova said simply looking down at her hands only to realize she was only holding her wand.

"Oh no my book." Nova exclaimed as she patted her bag as if the book would suddenly appear. "Poppycock I think I dropped it when we got attacked."

Nova was about to walk back the way they had run from when the centaur held his arm out and stopped her.

“You will return to the castle now before even more creatures discover you are here.” He said.

“But my notebook.” Nova pouted in the direction they came. However she knew they definitely should head back to the castle and make sure Adeline was okay.

“What ar’ you three doin’ in the woods?” Hagrid nearly shouted when they approached his hut.

“Make sure they are returned safely to the castle Hagrid.” The centaur said.

“Will do Ferinsi.” Hagrid nodded and quickly ushered the girls to his side to take them back to the castle.

~~~~~~

“I can’t believe you three were caught in the woods, after curfew, got attacked by a giant spider, then saved by a centaur, and you only lost 50 points.” Cedric said as he got his broom ready.

“In our defense Dumbledore found it amusing that the reason behind our venture is that Snape is stingy with his ingredients. Also Adeline wouldn’t stop apologizing.” Nova shrugged and Adeline blushed.

Cedric shook his head and turned to face Pam. “You ready.”

Pam nodded and kicked it off on her broom with Cedric following behind her. As Nova waited for them to finish she went to the edge of the lake and began inspecting the plants picking the ones she would need for potions. When her friends finished she was trying to take inventory again.

"I miss my notebook." Nova pouted as she erased a part of her note and recounted.

"What's so important about that notebook?" Pam asked as she sat down beside her.

"I have everything in that notebook." Nova said simply. "My personal star charts, my favorite spells, my favorite potions, my personal map of the school."

"That notebook is so small how are you able to fit all of that in there?" Cedric asked in disbelief.

"I have my ways." Nova shrugged but then frowned. "But it's lost now and I doubt I'll be able to find it again. I'll have to start from scratch."

"You'll manage." Pam said patting Nova on the back then looked up at Cedric. "Round two?"

"You're on." Cedric smiled.

"I have no idea how you two can fly around in those things." Nova wrinkled her nose at the brooms.

"Says the girl who wants to go to space in a tin can." Pam snickered.

"At least the tin can has seatbelts." Nova countered though rather weakly.

"Yeah yeah." Pam smiled as she hopped up. "Come on let's do this I really want to get on the team next year."

Again the two took off to the sky and Nova sighed trying to focus on her work. Her friends were still in the area Pam was giving Cedric a run for his money and Nova couldn't help but wonder why the Slytherin quidditch team didn't let her on. Suddenly Nova couldn't help but feel like someone was watching her, turning around she didn't see anyone but she did notice some of the tree leaves rustling.

“I’ll be right back.” Nova said to Adeline who looked at her nervously.

After making sure that the coast was clear Nova ventured to the edge of the woods. She didn't have to go far until her foot tapped against something on the floor. Looking down Nova immediately recognized her notebook. Quickly she scooped it up and inspected it, it didn't appear to be damaged. However when she opened it she found that the star chart she had been working on before the attack had been completed. Looking up into the woods Nova simply smiled before closing the notebook and headed back to her friends.

#hp oc #slytherin oc #all the stars

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ask-de-writer · 4 years ago

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MET BY MOONLIGHT : (Part 2 of 3) : Flocking Bay

Return to the Master Story Index

Return to Flocking Bay

MET BY MOONLIGHT

De Writer (Glen Ten-Eyck)

5740 words

written 2003 by Glen Ten-Eyck

Reproduction in any form, physical, electronic or digital is prohibited without the express written consent of the author or proper copyright holder.

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I was liking Laelia more and more. We ordered lunch and it was so good that we wolfed it down. We relaxed over coffee and watched the harbor. I could see Allison’s little sailboat skimming out past the breakwater. Laelia appeared to be thinking something over. I let her have time.

Abruptly Laelia said, “Just how interested are you in the local history?”

“I find it to be fascinating,” I said. Then with a grin added, “Almost as fascinating as my present company.”

“Flatterer. Why don’t you come to my house and have a look at my collection?” she asked. Then with an impudent smile said, “No etchings — — — Just woodcuts.”

“That sounds irresistible,” I said, reaching impulsively across the table and taking her hand. We left the Stone Oven and strolled up the street, away from the harbor.

Laelia’s house was on a side street a few blocks from my clinic. Changer’s Ct. I commented on the name and Laelia responded by telling me that money changers used to have shops along the court. Most of the lots along the street were overgrown with brush and trees. Obviously, few had ever lived here. It took a very long time for brush and trees to reach the size of the ones that I saw.

Laelia’s house was another surprise. At first glance, it seemed to be a thoroughly modern cottage set among large trees. Then I noticed traces of the original drive. There was a maple growing in it that was easily five feet through the bole. What at first I took to be siding proved to be hand-cut, adze squared timbers on closer examination. The proportions of the house betrayed great age. The more I looked, the older I realized it was.

The door was made of oak and beautifully carved. It was topped by the Darkmoon crest and filled with scenes from the history of Flocking Bay. I noticed that there were none depicting the Marquost massacre.

The inside of the house showed none of the betraying signs of its age. All was neat. The walls were finished in modern style and the lights and computer in the corner were up to date. The kitchen where she went to fix a pot of tea was as tidy and modern as the rest.

In the living room was a locked, glass front bookcase of antique design, if not a genuine antique. The dairies and other books of her history collection were housed in it.

Laelia emerged from the kitchen with the teapot and cups. She laid out the service, solid silver, not plated, or I was completely off base. I had seen a set like it once before. In a museum. Hallmarked Paul Revere.

She poured the tea and unlocked the bookcase. I carefully took down the first of the Darkmoon dairies and looked at it. It had been rebound several times and was in excellent condition, given the age of its pages. I took down several other volumes at random to assess their condition.

It was a pleasant surprise. Diaries of that era are usually delicate and crumbling. The Darkmoon Diaries were in excellent condition. Even the Hilstrom Diaries were in good shape. I recognized that the early Hilstrom Diaries had many palimpsest pages. In the 1600’s paper and parchment were dear.

For the first time, I learned the full name of that first ancient enemy. He was Eben (short for Ebenezer) Gaston Hilstrom. I did not find the personality revealed in the pages to be a likeable one. In spite of that, he was an acute observer and had much to tell, including the names, not only of his descendants but those of the other ‘founders’ of Flocking Bay. The massacre was described in great and self-righteous detail. Interestingly enough, the matchlock musket that Eben used to slay the Shaman would never fire again, no matter what was done towards repairing it. It was retired to Eben’s mantelpiece with a small plaque.

They had named the town for the many bird rookeries in its sheltered waters and woods.

The first of the Darkmoons had come a year later, from Civilized Europe, though she spoke English only haltingly. She had been a stowaway, fleeing from a forced marriage in Poland. Two ‘honest sailors’ vouched for her and Eben bought her indenture from them to reimburse the ship for her passage. He was pleasantly surprised at the low price that he paid. At the normal and customary rates, she would be a free person in only five years. Eben altered the price on the document of sale and had her services for seven.

Sipping Laelia’s excellent English tea, I turned to the Darkmoon Dairies. She was busy with official business, working away at her computer in the corner of the room. A few people came and went on routine business needing a Justice of the Peace. A few traffic and parking citations, an application for a marriage license, nothing extraordinary at all. After the marriage license applicant had gone, Laelia got down a large ledger type book and copied particulars from the application into it. She shut the book with a snap and a satisfied smile.

I looked up from my reading. The Darkmoon Dairies were fascinating in themselves but there was something that I couldn’t quite put a finger on. It wasn’t their age. I was certain of that. I determined to get copies of both sets of books, if Laelia would allow it.

“Laelia,” I asked hesitantly, “would it be alright with you if I brought over my digital camera and an ultraviolet light?”

She looked up from her work with a secretive smile and asked, “Why the U.V. light?”

I carefully held one of the first volumes of the Darkmoon Dairies open and pointed to a page. “This is a palimpsest. The older writing was erased, probably with a sponge of vinegar, and new writing done over it at right angles. A U.V. light picture of the page with the proper digital enhancement will reveal the original writing as well as that of your ancestress’.”

Her eyebrows raised up and her pupils widened in interest. She nodded. “I had experts look at them years ago. They thought that these weren’t recoverable. If you think that they are and it is as nondestructive as that, go ahead. I will need accurate copies of anything you get, both the palimpsests and the main books. I need good readable copies to give to Mrs. Alderman at the library anyway.” She grinned lupinely and added, “You cannot believe the determination of that woman where a historical document is concerned.”

“Then I will make three copies,” I replied. “One for you, one for the library and one for myself.”

“Yourself? You will have it in your computer and on disk won’t you?”

“I like the feel of paper in my hands when I’m studying. I’m old fashioned that way.”

She had crossed the room in uncanny silence and I nearly jumped when she laid a hand on mine. “I would very much like to recover those palimpsests but there is a problem. I don’t want all of them to be known. Can I sort which ones are to be available?”

What could I say? It was the only thing possible, so I said, “Certainly. I will have to have copies in my computer and storage devices but I won’t release anything without your consent.”

I hadn’t even realized that she was tense until she relaxed. “Thank you, Dr. Fredricks. I don’t know for sure what is there but I do know, from family tradition, that some of the parchment in the first volumes of both the Hilstrom and Darkmoon Dairies was made from skins salvaged from the Marquost village.”

Hiding my excitement, I said, “I have it on good authority that though the Marquost did not write, per-se, they did have a system of pictographs. Some claim to be able to interpret the few pictograms that survive.” I should know. As the last Shaman, I was one! And I had lied about the writing. The Marquost had been genuinely literate.

Laelia said with some authority, “With my family history, I am most curious about any such things. I made tracings of the ones on the Blackwall before you built your clinic around it. Does your system work on stone as well as paper?”

I grinned back at her. “The photographic system was originated for recovering lost stone pictograms. I made some pictures before I built the clinic around the Blackwall. Do you want to see them?” I was already sure of the answer and was pulling a wallet of photos out of my inside coat pocket.

Laelia looked carefully at my enhanced photos, brows knitted in concentration. Almost absently she opened the bookcase and pulled a slim binder out of a hidden drawer. She laid it open and took my photos in hand. After many minutes she laid aside my photos and looked at her drawings with new eyes. She picked up a pencil and began to sketch rapidly, muttering, “Of course, now it makes sense.” Her pencil down, she looked at me and nodded. “Yes, definitely do your magic on the books. Who knows what will be revealed?”

I agreed at once, before she could change her mind. Over the next several weeks Allison became sure that there was something going on between Laelia and myself because I was spending so much time over at the little house on Changer’s Ct. The job of photographing three hundred years of written history was huge. Also, the dairies were fascinating in themselves.

Among the hardships that the people of Flocking Bay endured were many minor animal attacks. Dog bites, the occasional bear mauling, being raked by an eagle for getting too close to a nest were just a few. Occasionally there was a fatal attack but those seemed rare. There appeared to be little discernible pattern to the attacks.

On the other side, Flocking Bay was not your typical small town that would die out. The small fishing fleet always managed to find the best and highest priced catches. Gardens and surrounding farms bloomed. Stores found active trade. No matter the vicissitudes of the world outside, depressions, wars, epidemics or whatever, Flocking Bay continued to prosper quietly.

Few ever wanted to leave and most of those came back.

Through all of this vast span of time the Darkmoons had stayed and observed. Oddly, there was no mention of marriages or husbands. All of the Darkmoon children were female and carried the family name. In so small a town, it was peculiar that nobody seemed to notice. It was simply accepted that the Darkmoons would cling to their ‘foreign’ ways. They stayed to themselves, out of the way, nearly out of town, on the virtually deserted Changer’s Ct. For almost all of that time, the one thing that they did do was handle the duties of the Justice of the Peace. Animal Control had been added to that office in the 1950’s.

The Darkmoons were always ready with assistance for those in the town who needed help. It might be a loan or perhaps just a suggestion for a way to make money. The Darkmoons showed little or no need for money themselves. They always appeared to have whatever they needed for the people that came to them. Perhaps they were independently wealthy. Nobody knew — or cared.

The Hilstrom Dairies ended in 1867. The Darkmoon Dairies came right up to the present. Laelia was still writing in the most recent volume.

The photography had been, if a long project, at least a simple one. Now the real work began. Allison now thought that Laelia and I had broken up. I spent all of my time at the computer, enhancing the palimpsests first.

Some were of no interest, just old notes or handbills of one sort or another. Others were very different. There was the original Darkmoon indenture contract, now recovered. The forgery to gain an extra two years of service showed too. More important to me were the ones on homemade parchment.

<==Previous Next==>

Return to the Master Story Index

Return to Flocking Bay

#MET BY MOONLIGHT #Part 2 of 3 #Flocking Bay #Written by De Writer

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the-awkward-outlaw · 5 years ago

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Second Chances - Ch. 8

Finding Courage

Warnings: Swearing, angst, grief, fluff with an extra serving of fluff!

Word count: ~10,000

**Author’s note: A book is mentioned that wasn’t published until 1999, but humor me. It’s fiction!

It’s been three weeks since Arthur brought you back to camp. Your ribs and head have mostly healed and cause little pain. Your leg, on the other hand, still has a ways to go. You are starting to get bored and stir crazy, trapped in camp. Strauss determined, shortly after you came back, that you would need around 6 weeks of recuperation, and Grimshaw is hell bent that you don’t leave Arthur’s tent until you can walk again.

Nearly everyone in camp has come to your aid in relieving the boredom. Mary-Beth will sometimes come and sit next to you, discussing books as the two of you knit. She brings you the materials so you don’t have to leave the cot. Javier occasionally sits next to you and plays his guitar or tells you stories about Mexico. One day Jack even comes, offering you a string of flowers to wear around your head that he made himself. You feel extraordinarily grateful to all of them. However, no one can light a candle to Arthur’s efforts.

He’s hardly left camp, determined to take care of you. He brings you coffee every morning and Pearson’s stew every night. As much as you appreciate it, you also wish he’d go out and do things for himself the way he did before you left. He has done one thing for you that you have greatly enjoyed. Nearly every afternoon, he comes into the tent with a book and he reads to you. Sometimes, he’ll hand you the book and have you do it, but you secretly adore it when he’s the one reading. You love hearing his deep, gentle voice. His face softer when he reads, brightening his eyes.

You feel bad for taking the man’s tent and cot. A week after you returned, you tried to offer it back to him, saying you could go sleep in your own tent and bedroll, but he refused, stating you needed it more than him. He’s been spending his nights sleeping close to you, usually on the ground propped up against the crates.

It’s nearly afternoon now and Arthur’s been in camp all day. You’ve been keeping an eye on him, watching as he does chores during the morning. He approaches you, smiling.

“Hey there, Y/N,” he greets, sitting down in the chair that’s remained in the tent. “I need to go huntin’ again, Pearson’s gettin’ real low. But listen, I ain’t gonna go far. When I get back, we can read some more if ya like.”

“Sounds good. I hope Hosea has a new book, think we’ve breezed through his collection already.”

He chuckles. “I’m sure he has one ya ain’t read. ‘Sides, I’m shoar Mary-Beth would be more than happy to lend ya one of hers.”

You sigh, a soft smile on your lips. “Wish I could go with you,” you admit. “I’m getting so bored! If only this damn leg would get better.”

“I know, ya just gotta be patient. Anyways, I need to get goin’.”

He stands up and heads off. Over the past couple of weeks, you’ve been careful with your emotions around him. You’ve done nothing to show you’re still interested, despite it being completely true. If anything, your feelings have gotten stronger, but so has your friendship, and you refuse to let anything ruin that again. He climbs onto Artemis’s saddle and leaves after waving to you.

You wave back, feeling your heart sink. A few days after you had returned, you remembered what happened to Rain. The pain from your leg has been nothing in comparison to the loss of your horse. You tell yourself she was just a horse, an animal. Still the pain of losing such a close friend and companion is so deep sometimes you feel like you’re drowning. You’ve been trying your best to hide it all from Arthur and everyone else, but there are few things you’ve done that are more difficult than suppressing them. Now that no one is around to see you, you lie down on your side, facing the wagon. You silently acknowledge the pain now and let the tears stream down your face, soaking the pillow. It feels like someone shot you in the chest, leaving a gaping hole that cannot be filled. You wish you couldn’t feel anything, it would be so much easier. You purposefully clench your leg in a way that you know will force it to flare, the physical pain is a great distraction and far preferable to what you feel in your heart.

You must have fallen asleep; someone shakes your shoulder gently.

“Y/N, ya awake?” Arthur quietly asks.

You turn, rubbing your sore eyes, looking up at him and sitting up. “Yeah, yeah I am.”

“Sorry, didn’t mean to wake ya. I have somethin’ for ya, though.”

You look at him as he sits down and reaches into his satchel. “I stopped in Valentine, needed to get somethin’ from the store. Found this, thought ya might like it.”

He hands you a thin book. The green cover has a sketch of a horse’s head, framed in gold ivy. You read the words above the sketch. “Black Beauty,” you say.

“Yeah, thought it might be different. I ain’t never read it before. Figured we could try it.”

You smile as your eyes begin to water. “Thank you, Arthur.”

He smiles sadly at you. “I know ya miss her, darlin’. Rain. She was a good horse.”

“The best,” you say, wiping your eyes. He grabs your hand, running a thumb over it. “It’s hard, sweetheart. I still miss Boadicea. Every day, ‘s matter of fact.”

“But you have Artemis, and I know how much you like her.”

“I do, but that don’t mean I don’t miss Boadicea. What I’m tryin’ to say is it’s okay to miss her, but that don’t mean ya can’t get another horse and care about it, too.”

You can’t prevent the tears falling again. “I just… it makes me feel so weak to feel this way. Sometimes it’s like I can’t breathe.”

“I know,” he says, squeezing your hand. “But to be honest, if ya didn’t feel this way, I’d be more worried about you.”

You sit there in silence, trying to wipe the tears from your face, which seems pointless since they keep falling. He reaches into his satchel and pulls out a thin cloth, handing it to you.

“You wanna tell me about her?” he asks softly, taking hold of your hand again.

You smile, despite the pain. “Yeah” you sniff hard, composing yourself enough to talk. “When I was about 10 or so, my grandma had this big, black mare. She got pregnant. I was staying in her cabin when the horse went into labor. My grandma was one of the toughest people I ever known. She had me help her with the foaling. While we were in the barn, a huge thunderstorm came on us. Rained like the devil. My grandma handed her to me right after she was born. I held her head in my lap while we waited for her to start breathing. She was so goddamn cute! We stayed up for hours, cleaning her up, petting her all over. Then she finally stood. When she started nursin’, my grandma told me to name her. I remember listening to the rain outside; that’s how I named her.”

You wipe your eyes as a new wave of tears hits you. Arthur rubs your hand encouragingly. “My grandma told me that she wanted me to take care of the foal. I didn’t live with her, but I visited her every day after that. She showed me how to train her to take a halter, bridle, saddle. Then she taught me how to groom her, clean her feet. When she was about a year, she taught me how to ride on her. We learned together. I can’t tell you how many trail rides I went on with my grandma after that. She used to tell me how Rain would pine for me when I wasn’t there.”

You smile fondly at the memory, your chest clenches painfully. “Then my grandma died a few years later. My dad sold every horse she had, including Rain’s mom. Made a lot of money, too. He tried to sell Rain as well. That was the scariest time of my life. I thought I was gonna lose her. Somehow, though, I convinced him to let me keep her with his grumpy old gelding. She came with me when I got married. I remember one time my husband was outside. He was real drunk, stumblin’ all over the place. He somehow made it inside our pasture. Rain walked over to him just so she could kick him!” you chuckle, Arthur joining in. “Probably a good thing he was drunk; he couldn’t remember a thing about it later on. I’ve always been able to trust her. Knew she’d never let me down. She was the only thing I could depend on after my grandma died. And now I’ve lost her!”

Your voice gives out as the pain overtakes you, forcing your knees to your chest. Arthur lets go of your hand and places it on your back, rubbing gently. He stays silent as you sob into your hands. When you begin to quiet down, he speaks up.

“I’m so sorry, darlin’. I never knew you had that kind of connection to her. Makes me and Boadicea seem like a regular pair of fools. But I want ya to know something.” He takes his hand and places it under your chin, turning your wet face to look at him. His thumb wipes away a tear from your cheek. “She’s happy, I’m shoar. She’s up there in a great prairie, where she can eat, drink and play all day long. She still remembers ya, though, and no matter what happens, she’ll always be with ya. Don’t ever doubt it. She wants ya to be happy because ya made her so happy.”

You close your eyes, fresh tears dripping from your eyes. Arthur’s face is so close you can feel his hot breath on you. You open your eyes and see yourself reflected in his blue ones, the scar on his chin. His scent envelopes you; that smell of pine and leather. He’s starting to lean in, you can’t stop looking at his lips.

Reverend Swanson stumbles over, waving around a bottle. “One night when I was frisky,” he starts singing loudly. Arthur and you dart away from each other, startled by his sudden presence. “After drinkin’ some potent whisky!” He continues on. His red, puffy eyes find the pair of you and he smiles broadly, making his clumsy way to you.

“Hey, you two! I want ya to know,” he stumbles, leaning against the pole that holds up the canvas above your heads. “That you are children of God! Children of God!”

He suddenly slumps onto the ground, unconscious.

“Damn it, Swanson,” Arthur grumbles as you giggle. He stands up and picks up Swanson, kicking his empty bottle away. You wipe your eyes as he heaves the Reverend back to his own cot. You hear someone calling his name after that, asking him for his help.

Sometime after the incident with Swanson, you’re lying in the cot still. You’ve managed to compose yourself after your meltdown, but you still hold the book Arthur brought you. You haven’t opened it, waiting for him to return so you can read it together.

Charles enters the tent, holding a long, wooden cane. He looks at you; he seems nervous. “Hello, Y/N,” he greets.

“Hey there, Charles,” you smile.

He holds up the cane. “I, ugh… I made this for you. I know you won’t be able to walk for a bit, but I thought it could help you.”

You look closely at the cane as you take it from him. It’s made of dark wood, the handle has been carved into the intricate form of an owl. You run your thumb over its orb-like eyes.

“Charles, this is amazing!”

He gives you a rare smile. “I just wanted to let you know how much this camp’s appreciated you. Ya know, Pearson’s stew hasn’t been this lean on meat since Colter.”

You chortle. “Well, that means a lot to me, Charles. Thank you so much.”

He nods and leaves. You glance back at the cane, admiring the delicate carvings. You feel honored to receive such a beautiful gift, despite the fact that you and Charles have rarely even spoken to one another.

Arthur returns, followed by John, Bill and the O’Driscoll prisoner, whom you learned a while back is named Kieran Duffy. He looks around nervously, particularly at the tree he’s been tied to since the gang arrived here. You’ve spent hardly any time around him since you yourself were a prisoner of sorts until recently and didn’t want to be seen interacting with a known enemy. You come to a decision, determined to pull it off.

You throw off the blanket, swinging your legs so they dangle off the cot. Your thigh complains at the movement, but you ignore it. You press your feet to the ground, basking in the feeling of grass against your skin again. You grasp the cane as hard as you can, using it to begin lifting yourself up.

“Woah, woah!” a voice calls out, getting close to you. Lifting up your head, you see it’s Arthur. “What ya doin’, girl?”

He approaches you so quickly you sit back down on the cot.

“I’m bored, Arthur. I been layin’ here for weeks! I wanna get up, see the world. Even the other side of camp would be a welcome sight.”

He huffs, standing in front of you. “I know. I don’t know if yer strong enough, though. Don’t want ya hurtin’ yer leg again.”

You straighten up. “I can handle it just fine, Arthur. Besides, I have this to help me.”

You lift up the cane. Arthur grabs and inspects it. “Where you get this from?”

“Charles. Said he made it for me.”

“Well, that’s real fine,” he says, smiling as he hands it back to you. “Tell ya what, ya can try standin’ and walkin’, but I ain’t leavin’ yer side.”

“Deal.” You situate the cane again, using it to pull yourself up. Arthur offers you his hand, which you take. He helps lift you up, letting you put a good portion of your weight against him as you slowly start to press down on your leg. Although it hurts like hell, it seems like it will hold your weight. For now, at least.

Arthur takes a step away from you, still holding onto your hand. He gestures to you, telling you to walk forward to him. You take a hesitant step, moving the cane with your leg. You can tell instantly by the shaking and the pain that if Arthur weren’t there, you’d have fallen already. You look down, shaking your head.

“Maybe you’re right, Arthur. I don’t know if I can do this.”

He sighs heavily. “I ain’t surprised. Well, can ya stand on it at least?”

You slowly nod, a little unsure.

“Good. Ya mind if I…” he gestures his arms towards you, wrapping one around your waist while the other approaches your knees. You realize he’s offering to pick you up. You nod your head and drape an arm over his shoulder before he sweeps you up effortlessly into his arms. You hold on tight to your cane; it dangles from your grip as he swings around and walks towards the hitching post where Artemis is tied. You see Hosea and Grimshaw looking at the two of you, smiling. You try your best to prevent the blush in your cheeks as he carries you over to the large grey horse, setting you down close to her. He stands behind you, letting you use him as a pillar to lean on in case your leg gives out.

You test your aching thigh, finding it capable of holding you up. You reach up with your arms and pat Artemis’s neck. She rumbles softly, the sound low and deep, swishing her tail. Her ears point back so she can hear you, her eyes soft as she chews slowly.

“Ah, knew she’d remember ya,” Arthur says softly behind you. He reaches into his satchel and pulls out a treat, handing it to you. You take it and offer it to the large horse. You continue to pet her as she munches on it.

After a few moments, your leg begins to remind you that it’s still wounded. You do your best to turn to Arthur. “Thank you for this,” you say, smiling up at him, limping. “You’ve no idea how nice it is to pet a horse again. Even if it’s not…”

His hand reaches up and settles on your upper arm, his thumb tracing lines. Without a word, he sweeps you up into his arms and towards the tent. You hear from the direction of the campfire the sound of Javier playing his guitar.

“Arthur, wait. Will you take me to the campfire?”

He stops and looks. “Shoar, why not?”

He changes directions and takes you over, setting you down carefully on one of the logs. You adjust your leg so the pain is hardly noticeable. Arthur sits down close to you, pulling out a cigarette and lighting it.

Javier stops playing, looking up at you. “Hola, Y/N,” he says.

“Hi, Javier. Please don’t stop playing on my account.”

He smiles as his fingers expertly pluck at the strings again. “Glad to see you finally out of that tent.”

“Me too. Arthur here’s too kind to let me use it, but I’m ready to leave.”

The two men chuckle. Arthur hands you his cigarette. You take it and drag from it as Javier begins singing in Spanish. The sound of the guitar and his voice washes over you. You’d take this any day over Dutch’s gramophone, especially since you swear Dutch likes to play it either late at night or unforgivably early in the morning. It’s amazing it hasn’t mysteriously disappeared. You hand Arthur back his cigarette, trading smiles with him.

A few days later, you’re standing in camp, leaning against the table where Lenny and Micah play five finger fillet. You’ve been standing up each day, even taking a few steps, trying to gain the strength back in your legs. You feel particularly proud today since you managed to walk all the way to the table by yourself, despite the pain. You had to use the cane, of course, and it took an unimaginably long time, but you did it. Your leg throbs painfully now, having been strained by the walk.

Arthur’s not in camp. Dutch had sent him out early this morning to go meet with someone named Trelawney with Charles and Javier to retrieve Sean. Word is that Sean is being held near Blackwater by bounty hunters, so the group left to go and get him back. You have to say you’re looking forward to seeing him again. He always has a way to lighten up the mood in camp. You just hope nothing goes wrong.

Hosea approaches you as you lean up against the table.

“Hello, Y/N,” he says as he uses a mortar and pestle to grind up some herbs. You recognize it instantly. After Grimshaw and the others had you cleaned and stitched up, Hosea made a highly useful combination of grounded herbs to help with the pain. Swanson had given you a dose of his morphine previously, but you didn’t like how fuzzy it made you feel. It also tended to make you feel nauseous and sick. You wondered how he managed to take it so frequently. Soon afterwards, Hosea introduced you to the herbs. They didn’t knock out the pain as effectively as the morphine, but at least they didn’t make you sleepy.

“Keep on giving me that stuff, Hosea, and I’ll live to be a hundred,” you joke as he leans next to you.

He laughs. “That’s the idea. How’s that book you and Arthur been readin’? What’s it called again?”

“Black Beauty,” you say fondly. You and Arthur have been reading from it nearly every day since he brought it to you. You’ve grown fond of it, even though it makes you miss Rain.

“That’s the one. Ya mind if I borrow it when yer done?”

“Sure. Don’t know if it’s really up your alley, though.” Arthur mentioned that Hosea was more of a mystery fan when it came to books.

“I’m always open to new stories,” he says with a sly smile. “Arthur tells me yer gettin’ real good with readin’ and writin’.”

You smile. “Yeah. Hard to believe only two months ago, I couldn’t read. Seems like a lifetime ago that I was runnin’ on my own.”

“It’s lucky Arthur found ya. You’ve been good for each other.”

You smile wider, staring off into the camp as Hosea continues to grind the herbs. Lenny, standing in the trees, shouts that someone’s coming. Javier prances in on Boaz, his silver paint; Sean sitting behind him. He hollers loudly, calling the entire camp’s attention to him. Charles follows behind, rolling his dark eyes.

“Fear no more, ladies and gents!” Sean yells loudly in his thick Irish accent, spreading his arms wide open. “The life of te party is back!”

You can’t help but laugh as he hops off Boaz; you can tell by Javier’s face that he was quite the companion. Javier dismounts, muttering in Spanish, stalking off to the campfire.

“Ol’ Grimshaw!” Sean yells as Susan walks past, holding a cup of coffee. “Don’t ya worry, lass! I’ll get these girls whipped up into shape again! Pearson!” he yells at the cook, skinning a rabbit. “That pot o’ yours will never ‘ave been fuller now I’m back!”

Pearson and Grimshaw laugh. Sean turns and sees you next to Hosea. He notices the the way you hold your leg, cane in hand.

“Ah, it wouldn’t be right if ya didn’t have some new injury to show off!” he guffaws, approaching you. You can’t help but chuckle with him. “You and John could be best mates! Ol’ Scar Face and the One-Legged Belle!”

You guffaw, “Yeah, ‘cept I still have my leg, ya dolt!”

He stands next to you and drapes an arm lazily over your shoulder, not noticing your attempts to gently shrug it off.

“Ah, o’ course, o’ course. Bet ya gave te bastard who tried rippin’ it off quite a time, though. Hardly known a better butcher than you, ‘cept for old Arthur maybe!”

You giggle, finally pulling his arm off of you. Hosea walks off, shaking his head fondly. Just then, Arthur trots in on Artemis. You turn to face him, smiling widely. He smiles back as he dismounts.

“Ah, and if it isn’t ol’ grumpy Morgan now! Don’t know why ya hang wit’ him so much. Such a downer, that one!”

You laugh, waving him off. Sean struts away, calling to Uncle. Arthur comes and stands in front of you, hands on his gun belt.

“Ya manage to get over here on yer own?” he asks.

You smile proudly. “I sure did! Only took me half an hour. Glad you got Sean out of there, even if he talks too much.”

“Yeah, he might be a loud mouth and a braggart, but he’s a good kid.” He smiles, reaching into his satchel. He pulls his hand out, which is clenched around something.

“I, ugh,” he begins before clearing his throat loudly. “Found this when I was headin’ back. Well, after I helped some wildlife photographer get his bag back from a greedy coyote. Reminded me of you.”

He opens his hand and reveals a necklace made of a silver chain. Dangling from it inlaid in a silver clasp is a small sapphyre. You look up at him after admiring the stone.

“Arthur, you didn’t have to get me this,” you say. “How much this cost you?”

He huffs. “Technically, it didn’t cost me nothin’. Some guy on the trail bumped into me, then demanded I apologize.”

You laugh. “I imagine that didn’t end well for him.”

“No, it didn’t. He’s fine, though, if yer wonderin’. I only took his money and found this in his pocket. I was gonna sell it until I saw it proper. Thought you might like it.”

Your heart swells as he puts it around your neck, latching the chain to the hook. You admire it as it rests on your chest, then look up at him again.

“Thank you, Arthur. But seriously, you should have sold it. Bet ya could’ve gotten twelve dollars for it, if not more.”

“Nah, I think I prefer it this way. Looks nice on you.”

His hand comes up to settle on your upper arm. You find yourself placing your hand on his chest, feeling the stamped leather of his red vest. He starts pulling you closer, shrinking the gap between you. His eyes are mirroring yours.

You hear someone yell Arthur’s name. John walks up and the two of you split immediately, hoping he didn’t see you standing so close to one another.

“Morgan,” he says again. The look on his face says he didn’t notice your close proximity to one another, and if he did it doesn’t show. “Mary-Beth said somethin’ ‘bout that train goin’ south to Saint Denise. I think we oughta start plannin’ on it, see if we can take it.”

Arthur sighs in frustration as you lean back on the table. “Robbin’ trains are a pain in the ass.”

“Yeah, but she did some diggin’. The take should be real good. ‘Sides, I have a few ideas for it.”

“Fine,” Arthur says. He glances at you before leaving with John, heading for the other side of camp. You clutch your cane and start preparing yourself to walk back to Arthur’s tent.

“Well, well,” says a greasy voice from behind you. “Looks like Ms. High-and-Mighty decided to grace us with her presence and leave her cozy little tent!”

You turn and glare at Micah.

He sneers at you. “Was wonderin’ when you’d finally leave Morgan’s cot. Not that I’m surprised. I thought you’d have invited him into your bed a long time ago.”

You stand up as straight as you can, ignoring the pain. “I ain’t that kind of girl, Mr. Bell. Besides, I’d let him or anyone else in this camp in my bed before I’d ever let you even come close.”

He snickers. “Ya always did have a soft spot for him, didn’t ya? Well, I hate to break it to ya, sweetheart, but he’s still got somethin’ for that Mary girl. Now I bet she’s a fine woman. The kind that could make a man wanna kill another man. Doubt anyone would even look twice at you if she were around.”

Your temper flares. You know he’s just trying to upset you. “How would you know, Micah? Ya ever seen her? I doubt it, the sight of you is enough to make anyone nauseous.”

Laughing again, he approaches you. “Because Morgan only goes after pretty girls.” He grins nastily at you as he leaves. You wish your leg was stronger, you’d already be giving him a good beating. Instead, you turn away and stare off into camp, trying to ignore what he said. The warm feeling you had before is gone. You clasp the cane again, heading back to the tent.

Night has come. Pearson, Karen and Uncle have pulled out bottles of alcohol to celebrate the return of Sean. The Irish man stands on a box, giving an almost taunting yet endearing speech about how everything’s going to be okay now he’s back. You can’t help laughing with the others as you lean on Pearson’s wagon. Karen approaches you with a bottle of whisky.

“Here, girl!” she proclaims, handing you the bottle.

“Nah, I really shouldn’t. I just took some more of those herbs Hosea’s been givin’ me, I doubt they’ll mix well with that.”

“Ah, don’t be so worried! ‘Sides, it can’t hurt too much.” She winks and shoves the bottle in your hand and you take a sip. She walks off, swaying a bit.

You grasp your cane and walk over to the campfire slowly. Uncle, Sean, Javier, Pearson and Arthur sit around it, drinking and joking. As you sit next to Arthur, Uncle breaks out into song.

“When I was just a lad, you know, I met a gal from Blue Bordeaux, she had blonde hair and blue eyes too,” he starts and the others join in the song. You can’t help but laugh at the heavily inappropriate song, drinking more.

“That’s what ya call the ring dang do!” the men finish, roaring with laughter.

“Yer a dirty man!” Arthur chuckles as you hand him the bottle. He takes a long drink as Dutch calls from his tent.

“That’s all well and said, but how about something a bit more civilized?” He turns around and switches on his gramophone. Classical music sweeps over the camp. Arthur gets up to go and speak to John and Charles. You stand up, too, leaving your bottle behind. You don’t really want to drink anymore, despite the fire in your belly. You find yourself limping past Dutch’s tent and stop when you see the man dancing slowly with Ms. O’Shea. They laugh sweetly when Dutch twirls her around. You can’t help but smile.

Arthur wanders past you, finishing a bottle of beer. You call his attention to Dutch and Molly.

“They seem so sweet together,” you mumble, your head feeling a little misty. “Y’know, I never known how to dance.”

He looks at you curiously. “Well, I ain’t much of a dancer neither, but ya wanna try?”

You stare up into his eyes, unsure. “I don’t know, Arthur, with this leg…”

“Ah, don’t worry, darlin’, I’ll help ya.”

He offers you his hand. You toss your cane a few feet away and take it. You reach up and place your hand on his sturdy shoulder as his hand hesitantly slides onto your waist. He starts leading you around in a slow circle. The mixture of herbs and alcohol has greatly dulled the pain from your legs as well as your regular inhibitions, although you still limp. He takes his hand from your waist, bending you down backwards and pulling you back up, releasing a giggle from you.

“Well, Mr. Morgan,” you laugh. “I never knew you could be so graceful!”

He huffs. “Turns out I’m just full of surprises.”

He leads you in a circle again, breaking it up every once in a while with a dip or a flourish. Your heart flutters every time, you can’t help but breathe in his scent and gaze into his blue eyes.

The pain in your leg is starting to flare, making you long for the bottle of whisky, when Arthur grabs your hands and twirls you around delicately. He spins you back towards him and pulls you in close, enveloping you in his strong arms. You wrap your arms around his waist, tucking your head under his chin. The sound of his heart pumps fast in your ears. You feel your own beating a thousand miles a minute. His arms wrap tighter around you as he sways you back and forth, no longer circling. Despite all the efforts you’ve made to not let him know how you feel, you revel in the feeling of his skin against yours, the feeling of his cheek resting on your head. You never want this moment to stop as you close your eyes.

The music suddenly ends, you hear Dutch compliment Molly. Arthur’s arms relax, releasing you. You have to adjust your leg quickly so you don’t stumble, taking your weight back and feeling somehow colder. His eyes are hidden beneath his hat, but he’s wearing a smile.

“Sorry if that was a little too close for comfort, Y/N,” he sighs. “I just… been wantin’ to do that for a while now.”

You giggle, unable to hide the blush crawling up your cheeks. “No, Arthur, that was… well, it was nice.”

You stretch up as much as you can and kiss him on the cheek, turning away to watch Karen lead Sean into John’s tent.

Two weeks have gone by since Sean’s party. The ambience in the camp has shifted; it’s become lighter and happier. At night, the sounds of laughter often echo from the campfire. Your mood has greatly improved as well, now that you’re no longer restricted to Arthur’s tent. You’ve been moved back into your own for nearly a week after Grimshaw declared your leg is healed enough to withstand lying on the ground. You still have to walk around with the cane sometimes, but you can go for a period of time without it.

You’re standing at the washbin, scrubbing at some dishes when you hear a familiar snort. You turn and see Arthur riding in. He smiles widely at you when he sees you, and you return it without hesitating. Ever since the night Sean came back and the two of you danced together, your friendship has blossomed. Of course, it has also deepened your feelings for him, although you’re still reluctant to mention or even show it. You’ve become conflicted by his behavior though. When the two of you are hidden from the eyes of the others in camp, Arthur will usually grab your hand or put his hand on your shoulder or back. Sometimes he’ll even pull you into a quick hug.

He approaches you, rubbing his hands together.

“There she is!” he says happily. You return his greeting.

“How’s yer leg?” he asks, putting his hands on his gun belt. You turn your face back to the water, blushing. Nothing makes you want to wrap your arms around him more than when he stands like that.

“‘S doin’ good!” you say, continuing to scrub. “I’ve hardly had to use my cane today.”

“Well, good, I’m glad. Say, ya wanna go into town?”

You look back at him. “God, I’d love to. So sick of seein’ this camp.”

“Let’s go then,” he says turning away and going back to his horse. You begin to follow, limping a bit, but then stopping as he hops onto the saddle. “What’s wrong?”

You hesitate. “I don’t know if I can ride a horse yet, Arthur, with my leg.”

“We’ll go slow, darlin’,” he says, reaching his hand towards you. “Just let me know if it gets to be too much.”

You grab his arm and he lifts you up behind him, not letting you go until you’re situated. Your thigh twinges a bit, but the pain is manageable. You nervously slither your arms around his abdomen. He turns Artemis down the trail, walking her slow. When he gets to the main trail, he turns to you.

“How ya doin’?”

“Good. You might be able to go faster, actually.”

He kicks Artemis into a trot; she picks up the pace, swishing her long, black tail. He keeps her at that pace all the way into town.

You almost admit that you’ve missed seeing the muddy town and its simple folk, but then you realize that even after six weeks, nothing can really improve this dump named Valentine. He slows Artemis to a walk as the two of you pass the train station and livestock yard. You see a large, white tent to the left up ahead.

“What is that?” you ask, never really having paid attention to it before.

“Think it’s one of them movin’ pictures I been hearin’ folk talk about,” he answers, pulling up to it.

“I never seen one of them before,” you admit, taking one of your hands away from his waist.

“Well, let’s change that,” you can hear by the tone of his voice he’s smiling. He stops Artemis outside the tent and swings his leg over her head, slipping off. He puts up his arms, helping you off. Your stumble a bit as your leg adjusts to the weight, but he doesn’t let go of you. Once you’re balanced, he offers you his arm and walks you up to a man standing behind a desk, offering tickets. He pays $2 for them and walks you inside.

Inside, the tent has a projector pointed at the opposite wall, rows of seats filed under the projector’s beam. You pick two seats; there’s only a couple of other people in the tent. Just as the two of you sit down, the show starts as the electric lights dim. It consists of nothing more than some images with some type of moving element. A man narrates over the scenes, telling the tale about why the bear hibernates during winter. You’re fascinated; you’ve never seen an image move before.

As you’re watching, Arthur lifts up his arm as he scratches the back of his neck. He then drapes it behind your head, resting his hand on your shoulder. You lean into him, feeling your cheeks grow hot. You’re glad the tent is dark so he can’t see.

The show ends, the lanterns glowing again. Arthur removes his arm as the two of you stand. He smiles at you as he hides his eyes under his hat again. You take hold of his hand as you both walk out and back to Artemis. He lifts you back onto her then climbs up in front of you, carrying on to the middle of town.

He hitches Artemis outside the saloon, helping you off. The two of you head inside and he buys you dinner, despite your comments that you can buy your own food.

“Ya think ya might be up for a huntin’ trip soon?” he asks as you both eat.

You pause, chewing. “I dunno, I hope so. Be nice to get out again for a few days. I just… don’t know if…”

“I know, yer worried about yer leg. But ya seem to be doin’ good. I bet ya can handle it. ‘Sides, ya deserve to get out. Been cooped up in Horseshoe too long.”

You smile at him. “Well, there’s that then. Only problem is I don’t have any weapons anymore. Those damn monsters took ‘em when they… after I got captured.”

“Well,” he says, wiping his mouth with a napkin. “Gun smith is right ‘cross the road. Bet we could get ya another bow, maybe some guns.”

“That’s a fine thought, Arthur,” you say, taking the last bite of your lamb. “‘Cept, I doubt I got enough money. And before ya say it, I don’t want ya spendin’ anymore money on me.”

He laughs softly. “A’right, fine.”

You nod your head, happy that’s settled. The two of you head out of the saloon.

“Ya mind if I go get a bath? I haven’t had a proper one for far too long,” you say. He nods his head, saying he’ll go back into the saloon and order some drinks while you’re gone. You go and order a bath. Before you enter the water, you take off the bandage from around your thigh. Grimshaw showed you weeks ago how to change it, which must be done every couple of days. You go to a tall mirror in the corner of the room, turning around and twisting your neck so you can inspect the wound. It’s ugly, but at least the stitches are gone. You frown at the angry red line that marks where you were shot by the arrow. You tell yourself it could have been a lot nastier; at least the wound didn’t get infected.

You sink down into the tub, sighing happily as you scrub the old sweat and dirt from your skin. You get up, dry yourself off, and redress your leg. You head outside, thanking the hotel clerk as you exit, and see Arthur standing next to Artemis, holding a Springfield rifle. You approach him, wondering what he’s up to, when he hands you the rifle.

“What’s this?” you ask, taking hold of it. You realize it’s brand new. The metal’s carved with intricate, weaving patterns, and there’s an engraving of a wolf in the handle.

“‘S for you,” he responds.

“What? Arthur! I told ya not to buy me anything!”

He guffaws. “”S too late now! ‘Sides, I wanted to. Also, got ya this.”

He hands you a bow and a quiver of arrows. You blush, sighing deeply. You feel frustrated yet grateful. “Why are you doin’ this, Arthur? I coulda gotten these myself.”

“I know. I just wanted to.” You sigh, defeated before leaning up and place a kiss on his cheek. You notice the red on his cheeks, but say nothing.

He hops onto Artemis, offering to take your new weapons back to strap onto Artemis. You hand them to him, resigned and hop on behind him with his help. The two of you trot back to camp as the sun begins to descend. When Arthur hitches Artemis and dismounts, he speaks up.

“So, tomorrow sound good for huntin’?” He helps you off again, not letting go of your hand.

Smiling, you answer. “Of course. One question, though. I… obviously don’t have a horse anymore. How are we going to work around that?”

“I’m shoar ya could borrow a horse from camp. Plenty a people here ain’t gonna be usin’ theirs for the next few days.”

You shrug your shoulders.

You’re lying in your tent, the singing of birds and the cool air gently waking you from your sleep. You hear someone walking towards your tent. Arthur’s deep voice calls your name. You sit up and peak out of your tent.

The sky above his head is still dark but the horizon is fading into a soft, light blue, rivaling the color of Arthur’s eyes.

“Ya ready to go?” he asks.

“Now? This early?”

“‘Course,” he smiles. “We can get more time in if we leave now.”

You stand up, stretching and putting on your hat. You’re glad that you had approached Hosea the night before asking to take out one of the draft horses that usually pulls the wagons. He also offered you a spare saddle and bridle to take. You go groom a large dun Belgian Draft, strapping the saddle to her and fitting on the bridle. She stomps her foot, making you a bit nervous. You swallow, gather your courage and mount her, your leg only twinging a little. Arthur comes up, strapping on his satchel, smiling.

“Got on yer own just fine, did ya?”

You smile and nod, patting the mare’s neck.

He hops onto Artemis and the two of you head down the trail at an easy trot. You’ve no idea where he’s leading you, but you follow him obediently, enjoying the sweeping views of New Hanover: the distant river, the wide canyon, the orange that is beginning to take over the sky. He leads you up into Valentine and passes the stables, trotting merrily down the faint trail which winds down the hill and towards the river. The two of you cross it, glancing at the sound of a man in a nightgown standing waist-deep in the river, screaming at some invisible being to get away.

You both continue on until you reach an intersection in the trail, heading up the mountain. The temperature begins to drop slightly, and far up ahead on the mountain you see distant trees topped in snow.

The trail levels out and you head down the left side, travelling along it until a pond comes into view. Arthur slows to a stop and you do as well, admiring the sight. The wide pond is beautiful, rippling calmly, its far banks flanked by deer and ducks. You spot the arching antlers of an elk in a nearby copse of small pines. On the other side of the pond, the land rises up into a tall mound, topped with a ram and multiple bighorn sheep, browsing among the trees. You look to the left, to the open grass sloping down the hills and towards the train tracks tucked into a gorge.

“Arthur, this place is beautiful,” you say.

He turns back to see you. “Found it right before we left Colter. This the place we tried robbin’ that Cornwall train. This is Cattail Pond.”

You lead the dun mare to the water. She dips her head and drinks as you dismount, removing the bow and quiver. You adjust your gunbelt slightly, making sure the knife is still in place. You’re happy these things got saved, along with your sawed-off shotgun.

Arthur pats Artemis, telling her to stay put. He approaches you, situating his own bow.

“Now, if ya need anythin’, ya just call me.”

You nod, the both of you wandering into separate directions to hunt.

By midafternoon, you approach the large mare, heaving an elk pelt onto her bag. She snorts as you strap it down, swishing her tail. You glance up the hill towards the main trail and you see silhouettes of horses, grazing. You pull out your binoculars and zoom in on them. You spot a pure black saddler, a palomino, and a dun Appaloosa stallion, his hindquarters heavily spotted. For some reason, you can’t take your eyes off him. You study him as he raises his head, snorts and then goes back to grazing. Arthur approaches you, a white ram pelt tucked under his arm.

“What ya lookin’ at?”

You point ahead at the stallion. “That horse. He’s real pretty. I always had a soft spot for Appys.”

He pulls out his binoculars and looks with you. He lowers them and turns to you.

“Well, go get it then.”

“Huh?” “Go get it!” he says, gesturing to the horse. “Go get on his back and tame him. Bet ya won’t even have to try hard.”

You look at him doubtfully. “Arthur, even with a good leg, I don’t think I could do that. No way I’m coordinated enough. ‘Sides, I wouldn’t even know the first thing.”

“Ya even been bucked off before?”

“Oh yeah. Rain’s mom bucked me once. Flew off and landed like a sack of potatoes.”

He chuckles. “It really ain’t that hard sweetheart.” He goes on to explain how to break a mustang, to maintain your balance until the horse tires out.

“C’mon, girl. How ‘bout I lasso him, ya get on his back. We’ll work together.”

You hesitantly agree. Arthur pulls out his long rope, already knotted. He gestures for you to follow him, hunching slightly. The two of you sneak up the hill slowly, walking as quietly as possible. When you’re close enough, you call out to the stallion, Arthur stopping behind you.

“Easy boy!” you call. “Easy.”

His head launches up as he snorts heavily. He stomps his feet, his ears darting in every direction. You walk towards him slowly, your arms slightly raised.

“Stay calm, boy. I just wanna make friends. You’re real pretty.”

Surprisingly, the stallion doesn’t run but he continues to stomp, tail flicking. You get closer, almost within patting distance, when he rears up. You quickly take several steps back when Arthur’s lasso flies up and over his head, wrapping around his neck.

“Now, Y/N!” he yells.

You dash over and launch yourself onto his back. The stallion begins bucking and plunging, roaring in anger. You grab hard onto his mane, twisting and turning your body to maintain balance. He rears again, nearly throwing you. You clutch to his neck as Arthur yells at you to hang on. He slams back into the ground, you feel yourself start to slide over his side when Arthur catches you, pushing you back onto him.

“There,” he says, breathing hard. “Think ya wore him out.”

The stallion stomps his feet again, tossing his head. You straighten yourself up, patting his neck.

“There,” you pant and pat his neck. “We’re friends now.” You reach into your saddle, offering him a treat.

“That was real good, Y/N,” Arthur praises. He tells you to stay on his back as he leads the horse to the other two. For the next few hours, the two of you work together with the horse, getting him used to being touched. By the time the sun sets, you’ve managed to get the bridle and saddle from the Belgian onto him. You hitch him to the tree as Arthur sets up his tent, spreading out your bedrolls. You pat the horse fondly before turning and kneeling next to the fire.

After cooking a few hunks of meat, the both of you decide to call it a night. Your thigh is sore and achy from the strains of taming the appaloosa. You limp over to the tent, sighing as you lie down. Arthur settles himself behind you. You twist your body so you’re lying on your back. You face him, your eyes already growing tired.

“Night, Arthur,” you sigh, closing your eyes. You feel his hand takes yours as he bids you goodnight.

It’s still dark when you wake, but you can tell by the songs of the birds that morning is near. Your leg hurts quite a bit, which is probably why you’re awake so early. You force yourself to get up, going to Arthur’s grill where the fire was, even though all that is left is a pile of smoldering coals. You reignite it with some nearby dried pine needles. You add some grounded herbs for the pain to a tin cup, adding some hot water from Arthur’s percolator to it. You drink it quickly, despite the awful taste. You add some coffee to the percolator, drinking that as well.

Despite the early hour, you’re wide awake. You hoist yourself up, grunting a bit, and approach the appaloosa stallion still hitched to the tree. You feel a tightening in your gut when he grumbles a deep, happy snort at you, reaching for your outstretched hand with his muzzle. You offer him a treat, patting his neck. You admire the fine white hairs on the back half of his body, the smattering of brown spots. You suddenly feel inspired.

You turn away and take a seat by a large log near the water of the pond. You pull out the journal from your satchel and turn to a blank page. You start to sketch the horse, trying to match the delicate lines of his neck, his slender legs, the long tail. You can see in your head how Arthur would have drawn it since he’s shown you a number of his own drawings. You stop and see your work, feeling unimpressed and dissatisfied. You sigh, disappointed.

“How ya doin’ with that?” Arthur says, plopping himself next to you.

You smile. “It’s crap.” You show him the sloppy lines. You can tell he’s trying not to laugh.

“Let me help ya,” he says, putting an arm behind you. You flip to a new page and he takes your hand in his, guiding the pencil along the page. Every now and then, he’ll point to the horse, drawing your attention to certain details. He shows you techniques to bring out different textures and patterns. After only a few moments, the shape and details of the stallion begins to appear.

The sun is well-risen now, illuminating his face, his scruffy beard turning gold. He’s so close you can see the scar of his chin once more, the specks of green in his blue eyes.

“Thank you, Arthur,” you almost whisper. “None of this would be happening if it weren’t for you.”

You can’t stand it anymore You don’t want to hide your feelings for him. So what if he doesn’t feel anything for you? All you want is to show the entire world how you feel about Arthur Morgan. You take your hand from his, reaching up and placing it on his cheek. You almost expect him to pull back, but he doesn’t. You glance briefly at his lips before you stretch up and place your own against them. You breathe in deeply, absorbing his scent as he stiffens to your touch. You pull away. Well, he knows what you think of him now.

You open your eyes; his face is unreadable. You let your hand slip from his face, feeling a sinking in your chest. You fool, you think. Of course he wouldn’t want this, your kiss. You distance yourself more from him, looking down.

“I… I’m sorry, Arthur,” you say. You snap your journal shut, sliding the pencil back into the leather strip quickly. “I didn’t mean to…”

As you begin to stand up, his hand suddenly reaches and gently touches your neck, pulling you to him. His lips crash into yours as his other arm wraps around your shoulders. You reach up and loop your arms around his neck, memorizing his lips with your tongue. His hand leaves your cheek and knots into your hair.

You pull away from him, panting heavily. He places his forehead against yours.

“Ya’ve no idea how long I been wantin’ to do that, darlin’,” he mutters deeply. The sound of his voice sends shivers up your spine.

“You don’t have to want anymore, Arthur Morgan,” you sigh. He leans in and kisses you again. You kiss him back hard, pressing yourself into him. His arms pull you into his broad chest. You kiss one another until you’re forced to pull back again by the need to breathe. He guides your head to settle onto his shoulder and you cuddle into him, your arms still wrapped around his neck.

You both sit there, watching the sun climb higher into the sky. His hand traces patterns into your back as you brush your hands through his hair.

After a while, he pats your back.

“Ya ready to go hunt again, sweetheart?” he places a kiss on your forehead.

“Mmm. Do we have to? It’s perfect here.”

He laughs softly, the sound reverberating through you. “I know, darlin’. I don’t want this moment to end either. But camp’s gotta eat.”

You sigh heavily. Arthur Morgan, the outlaw who would break his own back to make sure the people he cares about are taken care of. You reach up and place one more kiss to his lips before standing up. He follows your lead, grabbing his hat from the tent before wandering over to Artemis to remove his bow. You grab yours as well, scanning the environment for signs of animals.

For the next few hours, the two of you go about, bringing down animals and butchering them. You aren’t as smooth with the bow as usual. You keep getting distracted by the memory of Arthur’s lips against yours.

You stalk a whitetail buck near the train tracks. You hide in a clump of bushes and see him grazing. You notch an arrow and take aim for him. You let the arrow fly; it plunges into his side. The buck falls, but then stands up again, running off. You follow as quickly as you can, ignoring the pain in your leg. He falls again after a few yards, brought down by blood loss and shock. You approach him, trying to ignore his cries. You kneel down, pulling out your knife.

“I’m sorry, my friend,” you say, knowing how painful it is to be struck by an arrow. You plunge the knife into his heart. You skin the carcass and start heading back up the hill towards the pond and the horses. By the time you reach the top of the rise, you’re panting heavily; your thigh burns. You sit down to give yourself a break. Arthur calls to you from across the pond in the trees. You can’t understand what he’s saying, but you wave your hand to show you heard him. He calls again, and again you wave.

You start massaging your leg through your jeans, trying to soothe the pain. You hear splashing and look up. Arthur’s wading across the pond up to his calves, coming towards you. He calls to you again from the bottom of the hill.

“Ya a’right?” he yells.

“Yeah, leg’s just being a pain.”

He climbs the hill, approaching you. He kneels next to you, looking hard at your leg.

“I’m a’right,” you say. “Like I said, leg’s bein’ difficult.”

He looks up into your eyes. He sighs heavily. “Maybe we oughta head back. Ya ain’t much use huntin’ if ya can’t walk.”

“I can walk, just need a break, Arthur,” you say indignantly.

“I know, darlin’. Ya have to remember yer still healin’. Do this for me?”

You sigh, defeated. “Fine. Let’s just see if we can bring back something whole for camp.”

He nods, helping you stand up. He takes the pelt from you then grabs your hand as you both wander over to the horses. He throws the pelt over the stallion.

“Ya thought of a name for yer boah?”

You bite your lip. “Yeah, maybe.”

He looks at you, waiting for you to say. When you don’t, he speaks. “Well?”

“Rannoch,” you finally say. “His name is Rannoch.”

He raises his brows. “Rannoch, huh? Where’d ya get that?”

You shuffle your feet. “My grandma used to read me a story. ‘Bout a stag named Rannoch, born the night his dad was born. I wish I could remember the name of the book. I’d love to read it again. Was my favorite.”

“I like it,” he says, putting a finger under your chin, lifting your face. “Suits him.”

You smile, glancing over to Rannoch. He flicks his tail, eating from a bush, completely uncaring about his name.

“Well, let’s do a bit more huntin’,” he says. You agree and the two of you head back out, away from one another. After several moments of stalking, you bring down a bighorn sheep. You bend down to pick it up, but as you start standing your leg gives out.

“Shit!” you yell as your knee slams into the ground, the carcass slumping back down. You feel your wound quickly, determining that it’s fine. Turns out your leg just isn’t strong enough to carry the extra weight. Arthur comes dashing out of the trees, attracted by your yell.

“I’m fine,” you holler as you stand up, testing your leg. “Will you help me? I can’t carry this thing.”

Arthur approaches, smiling mischievously as he lifts up the sheep onto his shoulder with ease. You follow him back to the horses, where he straps the sheep onto Rannoch.

“I’ll be back,” he says, walking back into the trees. You brush Rannoch while he’s gone. After several moments, he returns, hauling the body of a doe. He straps it to Artemis. You both saddle up the horses and mount up. Arthur puts a lasso around the Belgian Draft, pulling her along behind him as the two of you leave Cattail and head back to camp.

The sun has set when you both enter the trees to Horseshoe. Karen’s on guard duty, she calls to you.

“Nice horse!”

You thank her as the two of you go up the trail, approaching the hitching post. You dismount, then turn to Arthur. The two of you are standing between the horses, blocked from view of the camp.

“Arthur?” He turns. “Thanks for takin’ me out and for… everything else.”

He smiles, putting his hands on your shoulders. “Anythin’ for you, darlin’. Can I ask you a favor, though?”

“‘Course.”

“D’you mind if we keep this between us for now?” You pull away, surprised and even a little hurt. He must see your emotions on your face.

“It ain’t that I’m ashamed,” he scrambles, pulling you close. “I just… want to keep this quiet for now. Besides, we both know how the others will talk. And maybe I like the idea of havin’ ya to myself for now”

You chuckle, relaxing in his arms. “Yes, I do know. But promise me it won’t be long?”

He smiles, pulling you into a tight hug. “I promise.” He leans down to kiss you, shielded from the others by the horses and the darkness.

#red dead redemption 2 #red dead fanfic #rdr2 #rdr2 fanfic #arthur morgan #arthur morgan x reader #arthur morgan x female reader #arthur morgan x oc #Van Der Linde Gang #rockstar games #r* games #it's so fluffy i'm gonna die!#i'm awkward #second chances

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cela-astral-projection · 5 years ago

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When you touch my weary head And you tell me everything will be all right You say use my body for your bed And my love will keep you warm throughout the night

Muriel woke to a supremely odd sensation. The sun was high and hot through the window. He must have been tired. He didn't generally sleep this late. This was well past "sleeping in".

He looked down, squinting, chin pressed to his chest. Celeste was between his legs, her chest against his stomach, running something across his torso. From nipple to nipple. He grunted, confused.

"Morning." She said, quiet, not ceasing.

He brought his hand up to hers, and she let him take it from her. He held the object in front of his face. One of his clay pieces. A fox. It was an older piece. One of the many that Asra had snagged from him years ago and kept in his little collection here in Nopal.

She sang, low, "The fox and his wife, without any strife, Cut up the goose with a fork and a knife..."

He shushed her, a finger at her lips. "Fox stayed home. And, unless you want me to fall back asleep, you have to stop."

She laughed. It was the long-standing family lullaby of choice. Asra had sung it to everyone at one time or another, and it just became a tradition. Muriel was as susceptible to succumbing to it as either of the girls, even singing it himself. He was unreliable when it came to the bedtime routine, passing out on the job.

His eyes wandered back up to the window. "How late is it?"

"Noon, maybe?" she said with a shrug.

"When is the last time we slept until noon?" he asked, rubbing a hand over his face. He reached up to place the little fox in the windowsill.

"Fucked if I remember."

He nudged her with his knee, and she disengaged from him, pulling the thin sheet around her naked body like a gown as she stood.

He sat on the edge of the bed, stretching. He cracked his neck from side to side, then twisted, popping his back. She looked on, wincing. He looked at her from the corner of his eye and laughed.

They chatted as they got ready for the day. About the girls, and work, his projects, Asra. He sat on the floor in front of her, she a kitchen chair, brushing his hair out and braiding it. "Nice to do this on someone who knows how to sit still and not cry like I'm murdering them." She said with a laugh. He gave a quiet, contented noise. He loved when she brushed his hair. She remembered a time when that was not the case. But, he was rather more pliant now than he had been.

They made breakfast together. It was too warm to consider cooking anything, so it was mostly fruit, cold cuts, cheese, nuts, and some crusty bread and butter.

They retreated to the back deck. It was warm, but there was some shade, so it wasn't unbearable. He had brought some of his woodworking tools to work on some little presents for the girls. She was reading some old journals that had been recovered from the palace, though she was still firmly restricted on what Muriel and Asra would allow her to read every day, afraid she'd be overwhelmed.

For the most part, they were genuine medical notes. A few sketches in the margins. Faces she recognized. Others she didn't. It was her writing, but it all felt very impersonal. A girl's handwriting. Curvy, loopy letters. At this point, she felt Asra and Muriel were making much ado about nothing. No headaches. She didn’t feel anything but irritation. She hadn't suffered any pearl-clutching or fainting episodes.

Muriel almost had, though, when she came across a short, but a clear, passage, detailing the loss of her virginity to a red-headed doctor that she worked with. The note was short and perfunctory. No declarations of love, or lifelong pledges of commitment. He had still choked a bit when he read it. She and Asra had both burst into uncontrollable laughter. After that, he asked to just hear the highlights, and for that particular memory to stay between the three of them.

She ran her fingers over a drawing in one of the margins, brow knitted. She knew this face as intimately as she knew her own, but she had no name for it. She sighed and turned the book to Muriel. "Long shot, but do you know who that is?"

He squinted at the page, then nodded, sitting back. "That's one of Lucio's guards. I didn't know him very well, but...he was nice. He used to run errands for you."

She turned the book back to herself, making a contemplative noise. "Do you know his name?"

"Aedan."

She rolled the name around in her mouth. It was just at the edge of her vision. On the tip of her tongue. It didn't click into place. She sighed throwing her head back, frustrated.

Muriel sensed it and stuck his hand out. "Give it here. You can look again later."

She rolled her eyes but relented. He laid the book down beside his chair and went back to his work.

She shook her head and stood up, he watched her as she went. Going from each of the little pots on the railing. Beautiful, healthy succulents. She busied herself taking cuttings and separating hens from the chicks. Something she could set by so the girls could help her plant them when they came. Some would need to be repotted, confined by their containers. Hearty little things and hard to kill, they were perfect starter plants for the girls.

It was almost evening, and she had made him commit to going into town for dinner. He was not thrilled by the idea, but, the idea of cooking was also unpleasant, so he relented. Nopal was much quieter than Vesuvia, so it wasn't a terrible prospect. Nobody knew him here, and not in the "look away and forget me" respect. They made their yearly trip, people fawned over Asra and Celeste with their "Oh, great Magician," and "Oh, great Enchantress," nonsense, and then they went home at the end of the week, no worse for wear.

They went to a small restaurant just off the town square. The sun was setting, and the sky was orange and purple, hazy clouds drifting slowly.

They sat at a cafe table. The restaurant must have had an excellent seafood vendor because they were presented with a mountain of crab.

It was cold, with warm butter and lemons. Muriel eyed it warily. It seemed like such a fussy food. He fumbled with a single leg, demolishing it, getting frustrated and abandoning the task. Celeste took it from him, eyebrow arched.

He watched her as she made quick work of the legs, totally ignoring the utensils they had been supplied. The meat slid cleanly from the shells, and she submerged them into the drawn butter. She speared a piece and fed it to him. He savored it. Sweet and briny. Pure luxury. "That's perfectly adequate." He said, smiling. "How'd you learn to do that?"

"Do what?" she said, taking a bite from her own small pile.

"Crack the crab like that?"

"Probably the same place I learned how to fish and hunt and cook. And we don't know where that was, so," She shrugged. "Maybe I'm just naturally talented."

He watched her face. She looked distant. They ate in silence for a while. Then, he ventured a question. "Do you want to know, about...before?"

She drew a deep breath. She replied, contemplative. "I don't know if any of it matters. It's not coming back. I have...so much. You don't remember everything about your childhood and what you do remember wasn't exactly happy." She raked a hand through her hair, looking off into the distance. "I am happy. I have a life that people only dream about having. I am so incredibly lucky. Every day that I am alive is a victory. It feels...ungrateful to look back and want something that I can't have. That I can't fix."

He reached across the table, and she put her hand in his, giving him a slight smile.

"It is okay for you to want things, Cela," he said, low and sweet. "All you have do is ask. I will go where ever and do whatever it takes. We all will. Just ask me."

She gave a weak half-smile. She felt tears pricking at the corners of her eyes, and reached up to wipe them away. She cleared her throat and shook her head. "That's a big ask. I don't know how many big gifts someone is allowed in life."

She had her family. Her friends. Her work. Her very life. She was so very loved.

He squeezed her hand, tilting his head. "You know none of us would be here if it wasn't for you, right? None of this...is possible without the sacrifices you made for us. I don't mean the little everyday commitments..." he tried to search for words. It was hard to encompass everything she had done. To elevate your spouse to deity status. Someone so domestic. But, she was. She was a savior. "You...don't do what you have done for...everyone, and not get to ask for something as simple as your past. I can't believe that."

She scoffed a bit, dismissive. "You act as if I did it all single-handed. I didn't do anything that you wouldn't have done for me. We take care of each other."

He closed his eyes. It was an argument he wasn't going to win. She could deflect praise as well as he could, if not better. "All I am saying is that you don't have a limit. You deserve to have what you want. And I will fight to make sure you get it. Because I love you. You are worth the fight."

She was well and truly crying now. He threw a fist full of coins and crystals on the table, more than enough to cover the bill. He pulled her up and into his chest, planting a kiss on the top of her head. He knew not to feel bad about the tears. She was just a crier when she was overwhelmed. "Let's go."

She nodded, sniffing. He lead them out of the square, towards the outskirts of town.

When they got back to the house, she had settled. She splashed water on her face and took her hair down. Muriel sat on the edge of the bed, arms outstretched. She came to him, sitting in his lap. She felt so small in his embrace. Her head was on his shoulder. He rocked her back and forth, holding her firmly against his chest.

"You're going to help me?" She said, almost a whisper, eyes closed.

"Of course." He replied, kissing her forehead. "We're going to figure it out. I promise."

She ran her hand over his chest, resting it over his heart. They rocked for a long while. She sang, quietly, to herself. "The fox went out on a chilly night, he prayed for the moon to give him light..."

He hummed along with her, joining her with a deep voice when they came to his particular favorite part. "...He ran till he came to his nice warm den, And there were the little ones, eight, nine, ten. Sayin' Daddy, Daddy, better go back again..."

He sighed, and Celeste felt it too. They missed Asra. Especially here. Whispers of him everywhere. They both felt homesick. And they felt guilty. Enjoying each other while he was at home. They were good as a pair, but better together. And Asra was still days away. He had the good sense to put a five-day limit on it. And that still felt too long. And Celeste felt it. Asra missed them too. They had been together for far too long. It had seemed like a practical arrangement, but now, they just wanted each other.

"Do you want to call him?" Celeste asked.

Muriel nodded, making a quiet noise. Relieved that he wasn’t alone.

#the arcana #arcana #apprentice x muriel #muriel #mc #oc #apprentice oc #apprentice celeste #celeste #fanfiction #domestic tranquility #apprentice x asra x muriel

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heyyyharry · 6 years ago

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In Another Life Series: Chapter 8 - The Curse

…in which Y/N discovers the truth, and Harry is just late.

Series description: Y/N and Harry are soulmates and destined to meet in every lifetime, but no matter how many times they reincarnate and find each other again, they never seem to get it right.

AU: reincarnation, soulmate!harry, prince!harry, assistant!y/n, witch!y/n.

Chapter 7 - The Tour: Harry’s tour begins, and Y/N struggles with her feelings for him.

(So this is pretty dark...but it turned out better than I’d expected. Btw, all the characters besides Harry, Jeff, Mitch, Sarah don’t exist in real life lol)

wattpad link

Jason loved Y/N. It was obvious, like a written fact. His parents knew, all their friends knew, only she didn’t. Well, Jason assumed she probably did, but in order to keep their friendship from falling apart, she pretended like she had no idea.

She called him up again tonight and told him, Harry/ her boss/ the-man-she-was-in-love-with decided to stay in his toxic relationship, choosing his girlfriend and not her. Y/N was crying, and Jason swore he almost booked a plane ticket to go see her right away. He’d known it was a bad idea since she started having these dreams about Harry, which had gotten quite intense lately; the most recent one being him getting hit by a car right in front of her eyes. It wasn’t just a nightmare because she woke up crying and gasping for air.

Jason couldn’t logically explain the reason why this guy named Harry had such a tremendous impact on his best friend that it was gradually driving her insane. However, he knew it would be best if she came back home.

“I will,” she told him, to his surprise. “I’ve…made up my mind. I’m going to quit.”

“Are you sure?” He asked though he felt so relieved knowing she was going to walk away from the job that had been tormenting her from the beginning.

“We’re doing the LA show tomorrow night and I’ll let him know right after that. Don’t worry.” The sigh at the end of her sentence left a heavy feeling in the bottom of his stomach. She truly loved this man who didn’t love her, and the worst thing about that was Jason knew exactly how she must have felt.

“I’m sorry for calling you up, J. Thank you for hearing me out,” she said.

To which he replied saying it was not a big deal. “We’re best friends, aren’t we?”

“The bestest.” He could feel a smile in those two words. “I’ll call you tomorrow. Good night, J. Love you.”

“Love you,” he repeated what she’d just said, while meaning something else entirely different.

Ann sat by the fireplace in her dark room, all windows were closed and the only source of light in presence was the flame dancing before her eyes. She was bored, so she tapped her forefinger once, almost putting out the fire and then one more time to revive it. The witch repeated her magic trick a couple more times, when all of a sudden, there was a knock on the door, which caught Ann off guard, causing the flame to flare and knocking Ann right off her chair.

She sat on the floor, eyes wide, mouth agape, chest heaving up and down as she had no idea what had just happened, and how. For a second there, she lost control of her own power.

The person knocked louder this time. Ann hurriedly stood up, then told them that they could now enter.

“Ann, darling, I brought you your meal,” said the young maid who was carrying a tray into the room. Ann was disappointed because she’d been expecting to see Edward, though she’d known it couldn’t have been him in the first place, he wouldn’t have knocked.

“Marina,” spoke Ann as the maid turned to leave. “Do you have an idea where Edward might be?”

“No, dear, I haven’t seen His Highness today,” she replied with a sympathetic smile.

“Oh….”

“He’s been busy you know. I heard he had to meet with the ambassador from Spain this morning and show them around, and also there’s a lot to prepare for his wedding with princess Emilié.”

Ann nodded once, staring down at her feet. “Right…the wedding.”

The maid released a long sigh as she slowly approached the sorrowful girl, reaching out to hold her hand. “My dear, I’m very sorry, I know how much you love His Highness.”

“Marina, am I being stupid for loving him?” Ann asked quietly, her voice trembling as if she was on the verge of tears.

“You’re not the first to fall in love with the Prince,” said Marina. “But…you’re the first he’s fallen in love with. I’ve seen the way he’s always looked at you, and he keeps reminding me to send you nice clothes and fine meals and making sure you stay warm at night.”

Ann looked up to meet her eyes. What the maid had just said should’ve made her feel better, yet it didn’t, not a bit, not at all.

“But, again, His Highness is always going to choose his throne, which also means…the Princess.” Marina gives Ann’s hand a gentle squeeze as she noticed the young girl’s glistened eyes. “If I were you, I wouldn’t build my hopes up so high for it to get shattered down. I know you’re a good person, Ann, and you deserve more than a troublesome life bound by these walls.”

Ann mumbled her gratitude then watched the girl walk out of the room. Soon the door was closed again and she was left alone, again. Edward hadn’t come visit her since last night, after she’d found him and Emilié, his true wife-to-be. Maybe he’d made his choice.

However, Ann loved him too much to make her own.

“Hey, Lisa!” Jason smiled when Y/N’s flatmate came to answer the door.

“Hi, kid. What are you doing here?” Lisa raised an eyebrow at him. “She’s on tour with Harry Styles, the love of her life, remember?”

He rolled his eyes and stepped inside before she even intended to invite him in. “I left my notebook in Y/N’s room the other day when I was helping her pack. I come to get it.”

“Okay. Be quick, I’m leaving in five minutes.”

“Five minutes. Got it,” Jason said quickly as he headed straight to Y/N’s bedroom. He’d been here too often so it was like his own place now, but his best friend had never been a tidy person, so to look for something in her room in five minutes only would be quite a challenge.

“Where the hell is it?” grumbled the young man when he searched through the stuff on Y/N’s working desk, which was always disorganized anyway.

By accident, he knocked over a pile of books with his elbow, cursing and bending down to pick it up. It was only then did he discover a brown paperback sketch book which, for some reason, caught his attention before anything else lying on the floor. He picked it up and sat down on the edge of her bed as he opened it. He’d never seen this book before, but he was sure she wouldn’t mind him taking a look for she loved bragging about her masterpieces to him anyway. Jason had always loved seeing Y/N’s artworks; whenever she showed them to him she would go into every detail from her choice of colors to the story behind each sketch and painting. Nevertheless, there was something wrong about these drawings. These weren’t what she normally would draw.

The first few pages of the book were portraits of familiar strangers, whom Jason could easily recognize, but he never would’ve thought his best friend would know about these people. He flipped fast through the next pages and found some scenes she’d described to him before, those were the scenes from her dreams, she’d been drawing them probably to remember or to try and put two and two together. She wanted to know the answer for them perhaps.

The most recent sketch in the book was of a throne, on which sat a king whose face was blank, which was too creepy for Jason’s taste. On the walls behind the faceless man hung plenty of portraits of royal members without faces as well.

“Hmm…portraits…a palace…a king…”

Jason widened his eyes when he felt a lightning strike right through his brain. He swiftly flipped back to the first pages of the book. How could he have missed it? The portrait of Edward Rammour in the museum!

Y/N was right to say he didn’t know any celebrity who was still alive, because Jason recognized most of the people in her sketch book. The only thing they had in common, besides the fact that they were all famous and dead, was how much they resembled one another.

All of them possessed a strikingly identical pair of green eyes.

“Edward, stop!”

The young Prince squeezed his eyes shut when he halted his feet, then turned around to face his mother, the Queen. Her eyebrows were knitted together when she approached him, and without waiting for the young man to speak for himself, she scolded him first, “I can’t believe you called off the meeting to run off to see your lover! That was not how a prince should behave!”

“Mother, I called off the meeting because that man was talking nonsense.”

“That man, was about to offer us powerful warships so whatever nonsense he’s feeding you, you accept, with gratitude!” Said the Queen, shutting Edward up for good. “You need to stop acting like your father and keep it in your pants, for God’s sakes!”

“This is not about Ann, mother.”

“It’s been about her since the day she arrived!”

Edward didn’t argue this time, so she knew she was right. That girl must have casted a spell on her child, because the son she’d brought up wouldn’t be such a fool for any woman. She didn’t raise him to be like his ignorant father.

“Edward,” she lowered her voice and laid a palm on his face, stroking his cheek gently like she’d always done since he was a baby. “You’re young and I cannot forbid you from lusting for beautiful ladies, but she’s not worth the time. You’re getting married, and you should only be this devoted to your wife and your wife only.”

“I…I’m gonna try to accept the marriage,” he said, almost making her happy. “But I don’t love Emilié, mother. I never will. You told me to follow my heart, right? That’s exactly what I’m doing here. I love Ann, and I want to be with her.”

The Queen did advise him that, but what she meant was him falling in love with a noble, not a girl with no background or title.

“Edward, you’re hurting both girls by making this decision,” she said, stopping him immediately when he intended to walk away. “Do you think she’s going to stay around while you’re married to another? And what would the people say if they know their King is in love with a peasant?”

“Father sleeps with the whole kingdom and he’s still King, isn’t he?” The question slipped out before Edward could stop himself, leaving him and his mother in utter shock.

He swore he’d never seen her so hurt and disappointed for she didn’t need a reminder of how her husband had never loved her, especially when it was a reminder from her own child.

“I didn’t mean t—“

“Enough.” She raised her voice. “You are coming with me back to the throne hall. We’re having tea with the ambassador.”

“But mother—“

“Either you come, or you can stop calling me mother for good.” With that, she stormed away, leaving the Prince behind with a difficult decision to make.

Edward thought about Ann and how sad she must have been waiting for him to come visit. He loved her, he truly did, but he also loved his mother, and he couldn’t let her down like his father had always done. Taking a deep breath, letting it out, Edward quickly followed the Queen back to the throne hall, even when his heart was aching to be elsewhere.

Y/N knew she was supposed to hand in her resignation form after the show, but then she overheard some girls in Harry’s team gossiping about how she was in love with him and he’d told her no because he was in love with Lillie. They called her by these awful names she couldn’t forget, and they didn’t even know half the story to make such cruel accusations. All those lies made her feel sick and she couldn’t be anymore patient to wait until the show was finally over to get this pain off her chest.

That was why she knocked on the door of his dressing room just fifteen minutes before the show, thinking there was no turning back now that she’d made up her mind; yet the moment she saw him and he smiled at her, she almost forgot why she was there.

However, she couldn’t allow herself to forget, not this time.

“I quit.”

Harry froze as soon as he heard those two words from his assistant, who was actually handing him her resignation form. This clearly wasn’t a joke.

“Why?”

“Why?” Y/N furrowed her eyebrows at her employer and snorted humorlessly.

That was his response? Just a one-word question without any emotion at all? That was how much she meant to him?

Despite the look of shock on the assistant’s face, Harry seemed rather indifferent to this news, almost as if he didn’t care, which made her wonder,

Does he care?

“Your contract hasn’t ended yet, so if you want to quit you must give me a good reason.”

“It’s all in this form—”

“No. I want to hear you say it.”

Now Y/N had officially lost her patience. She withdrew the paper and held his eye-contact as she spoke loud and clear, “I cannot be around you anymore, Harry, that’s why. Is that a good enough reason for you?”

“And why can’t you?” He raised another question, looking as calm as ever, which drove her insane.

“Are you seriously not letting me quit?”

“You have to answer my question, Y/N.”

She looked at him.

He looked at her.

She didn’t know what he wanted or why he was acting this way. He appeared like he didn’t care whether she left or not, but at the same time he didn’t seem like he wanted to let her go. What exactly was it that he wanted? She wasn’t a psychic, he couldn’t expect her to read his mind!

“Y/N,” Harry broke the silence to remind his assistant he was still waiting for her reply.

Well, if he wanted to know the truth so badly, she would let him. It didn’t matter anymore, because once she’d left this job and gone back home, they would never see each other again. She would never see him again…Though the thought of that made her sad, it was reality, and she needed to accept it, and move on.

“Because…” She took a deep breath. “I think I love you.”

Harry didn’t say anything, just stared at her. Though she wasn’t looking at him, she could feel his eyes burning holes on her face. Y/N wished he would start to speak, he could just laugh at her if he must, at least give her a reaction. His silence right now is slowly killing her.

“Now you know the real reason,” she said because he didn’t. “Can you let me go?”

“Think?” He puckered up his forehead, leaving her surprised. “You’re not sure?”

“Was that all you cared about?!”

“Yes, Y/N, that was all I cared about because I am sure. I love you.”

What?

“I love you,” Harry repeated once again, assuming she didn’t hear it the first time, but she did. She did clearly. She was just bewildered and had no idea how to react and what to believe.

“But you and Lillie—“

“Are over,” he finished that sentence for her, leaving her once again at a loss for words. “I broke up with her that day when she came here. She asked me to do her a favor by letting her team announce our breakup, because you know…Lillie. She’ll probably say she broke up with me, whatever, that doesn’t matter anymore.”

Harry left silence for Y/N to fill in but she remained quiet and kept gazing at him. It was all up to him now. He’d said what needed to be said and she hadn’t stormed out so it was a good sign. He might as well finish this the right way, what he should’ve done along time ago.

“I wasn’t supposed to tell anyone, but I’m telling you now because…” Y/N felt her stomach tighten, and her hands shake, when he took a step forward closing the distance between them. “I don’t want you to leave.”

She had never stand this close to him. She thought she might pass out, hoping she wouldn’t. Their lips were just a few inches apart. So close. Almost…

Is he gonna—

Then her phone started to ring.

“Don’t answer that,” Harry whispered, a frown formed on his face as he stared at her intensely while reaching out for her hands. Y/N, however, recognized the special ringtone so she couldn’t ignore it now.

“It’s my best friend Jason,” she said. She had never neglected any call from Jason. The voice in her head told her this one might be urgent, it hadn’t been wrong lately, which was what she was afraid of. So she withdrew her hands from Harry’s, excusing herself to go outside and answer it.

“I’ll be right back, I promise,” she said before walking out of the door.

Harry watched her go with a lump in his throat and an ache in the chest which he couldn’t explain, even to himself. What if that moment before the call was the only happy moment they would ever get? What if the promise she made, was the only one she failed to keep for him?

Emilié had no idea why she was requested to come meet the Queen in her garden by the lake. She was specifically told to come alone, so it shouldn’t have been something as simple as discussing a royal ball or her wedding with the Prince, which, by the way, was getting quite close already.

“You would like to see me, Your Majesty?”

The Queen, whose back was turned to Emilié, didn’t speak, she nodded to signal her two maids to leave her with the Princess, and went on admiring the beautiful red roses she loved so dearly.

“This is my favorite spot,” she spoke and carefully ran her fingers across a delicate rose petal. “I’ve grown these myself, do you like them, Princess?”

“I do, Your Majesty,” replied Emilié. “But I suppose they’re not the reason you wanted to see me?”

“Well, they are, just not entirely.” The Queen finally turned around to face the young lady. She might not be as youthful as Emilié, but her beauty was doubtlessly timeless. Everyone knew Edward didn’t inherit his beauty from his father, but from his mother, who, unfortunately, was never the King’s favorite woman.

“You see, our people grow a lot of trees and flowers and herbs in this garden. My roses are indeed the most beautiful of all, I’m very proud of them,” the older noble said with a gentle smile. “So tell me, Princess. If our palace was ever under attack, and if you were given a chance, what would you most be likely to save from this garden?”

“The roses, Your Majesty?”

“False,” the answer left the Princess in shock. “The herbs.”

“But you said—“

“The roses are just for presentation. We like to look at them, but we don’t need them, whereas the herbs can be used as remedies for sickness, healing herbs can ease pain and fix wounds.” The Queen took a long pause to study the Princess’ face, and once she was certain Emilié knew where she was heading to, she continued, “You are a rose, beautiful, yet useless. She is a herb, Edward needs her to survive. She’s in charge of his heart, sooner or later, my throne.”

“He cannot make her his Queen, she’s not a highborn.” Emilié laughed wryly, however, deep down inside, losing her title as the future Queen of England was what she’d been afraid of since the moment she’d laid eyes on Ann.

“You foolish child!” The Queen suddenly raised her voice, causing Emilié to flinch in shock. “Edward ran away from everything once and he didn’t have a solid reason then. Now, he’s got her, so if he cannot run away, he’ll make sure she stays by his side, no matter what the cost is.”

There was something in the Queen’s tone that gave away her fear and worry which she’d tried so hard to cover up. The fear that her one and only son, whose royal blood was running through his veins, was likely to give up his crown for a peasant, with no background or title.

“I raised him. I know how stubborn he can be. Edward would go against God to make that girl his Queen if he wanted to. So as long as I’m alive, I cannot let a dynasty crumble to pieces, just because my son’s wife is an idiot who cannot keep her man.”

Emilié swallowed hard and took a step back once the Queen took a step forward.

“He promised he would give me a chance…”

“Promises can be broken, like stitches! She’s already sleeping in his bed and you’re here to tell me my son’s future is built upon a promise?”

“I’ll come up with a better plan—“

“No. You’ve done enough,” said the Queen as she raised one hand in the air, telling the girl to shut up and pay attention. “This time you do as I say.”

“What if Edward finds out we’re plotting behind his back? I cannot risk losing his trust again…”

The Queen released a sigh, for she could see behind the face of a ruthless girl like Emilié was still a fragile heart. She used to be like that, many years ago, soft and weak. Having lived that long and gone through that much damages like she had, the heart, like a rose, would eventually wilt to brown.

Edward was the only light that kept the Queen’s heart from rotting, and she would do anything, and she meant anything, to make sure her first and only son got to sit on that Throne, unharmed. His desire for the girl named Ann would threaten his claim as well as the French alliance, and if she ever got to become Queen, blood would have to spill. A mother could not standby and watch that happen to her own child.

“Don’t worry, darling,” the Queen said, lifting the Princess’ chin up with one finger. “By this time tomorrow, the girl named Ann will have been long gone.”

Harry was sweating in this suit.

He had never experienced such anxiety before going on stage. He’d been performing in front of a massive audience ever since he was a teenager. He was born for the spotlight, he loved being up there, he loved the sound of the crowd cheering him on. So what was happening here? Why were his palms shaking and why couldn’t he breathe?

“Kid, are ya alright?” Mitch asked in concern as he saw Harry struggling to even stand on his own two feet.

Though his headache was killing him, the first thing coming out of Harry’s mouth was, “have you seen Y/N?”

“No, she came to see you earlier, didn’t she?”

“Yes, she did, but then she left to answer a personal call.”

“H, you’re sweating. Are you sure you can go on stage?”

“I’m sure…” he replied, trying to steady his breathing. “I think I’m just nervous.”

Mitch laid his palm on Harry’s forehead, then with a frown, he said, “kid, you’re burning up. You can’t go on stage now.”

“I can,” Harry groaned, eyes squeezed shut, reaching for his friend’s shoulder for support. He didn’t look fine, not at all.

“Don’t be an idiot,” Mitch scolded him while holding his face. “I’m gonna get Jeff alright.”

“Get Y/N...”

“Okay, Jeff and Y/N. You sit here.” Mitch grabbed a stool nearby, pulling it to his side and making Harry sit down on it before telling a guy from their team not to let Harry on stage until he felt better. Everything after Mitch was gone became hazy to Harry. All the sounds were muffled and his sight started to fade. All that was left in his head, was Y/N.

In the bathroom, down the hall, Y/N was hiding in a stall, sitting on a toilet lit while talking to her best friend, because the loud music from outside didn’t allow her to hear him clearly.

“Hurry up, Jason! I’m late!” Y/N cried out, burying her face into her palm. “This better be important or I won’t ever pick up your calls again!”

“Look, you need to calm down and hear me out! Jesus…just…put me on video.”

“I don’t have time to video chat with you, J.”

“Damn it, just do it!” His response really surprised her. He’d never talked to her like that, so she was taken aback and therefore didn’t hesitate to do as he said immediately. Jason’s face popped up on the screen soon after, he was still sitting at her desk, in her bedroom.

“Wait, are you in the bathroom?” He raised an eyebrow, causing her to squint her eyes in annoyance.

“Just hurry up!”

“Okay, okay, do you know these people?” Jason went straight into the point with a question while showing her drawings on the cam for her to see.

“How dare you look at my—“

“Just answer the question!”

“No! They were just random people I saw in my dreams!” She breathed harshly, confused and offended by his weird behaviors. “What’s wrong with you today, J?! It’s like you’re being possessed.”

Jason ignored that and went on explaining, “these aren’t just people from your dreams, Y/N. They were real people!”

Y/N snorted, though she was a little bit creeped out by her own best friend at this point. “J, I know I’ve told you some weird stuff but—“

“This one is Basilio,” Jason began anyway, pointing to the first portrait in Y/N’s sketch book. “He was a famous British painter in the 17th century who fell in love with a girl named Elia. His family forbad their love and then she died of a terrible disease.” He quickly flipped to the next page. “Jameson Wallace, an 18th century’s writer. In his autobiography, he mentioned his lover Martha who killed herself when he chose to marry another woman, whom he’d been engaged to for two years before he met her.” Then onto the next drawing. “Lewis Reeves, a scientist in the 19th century, already married when he met the love of his life, they had an affair and he died while traveling at sea.” The one after that. “Leon Morrison, an actor in the 20th century, their love story made the papers because she was seventeen and he was twenty-five, they couldn’t be together and he died later in a car crash.”

“But—“ Y/N was almost speechless. She was scared, no, terrified. “Those people couldn’t be real, because…”

“Because you thought they were different versions of Harry that you came up with in your own head?”

Yes.

“No.”

“Then we all circle back to…this.” Jason ignored his best friend’s denial and moved the phone’s camera to the laptop behind him, on the screen of which was an image of the portrait of the King, the one they’d seen in the art museum, where it all began. “Edward Rammour, King of England in the 16th century, fell in love with a peasant girl who was prosecuted of treason and later on executed.”

No, this can’t be true.

“Remember when you told me how this man’s eyes resembled Harry’s, and you kept seeing them in your dreams? What if it’s not just a coincidence, Y/N?”

This can’t be happening.

“What if they’re all linked together?”

“This…is insane, Jason…” Y/N tried to laugh, but she found no humor in the story. “Tell me this is all a prank you came up with to scare me.”

Jason looked at her, frowning as he shook his head, “I wish I could, Y/N…”

“So you’re telling me these are all…the same person?”

“Not really...Have you ever heard of reincarnation?”

She had. She remembered reading about it somewhere but she didn’t believe it. No sane person would, obviously.

“Reincarnation is the philosophical or religious concept that an aspect of a living being starts a new life in a different physical body or form after each biological death.” Jason read out loud the information on Wiki and turned back to the cam. Y/N’s head was spinning, still she managed to hear some keywords to understand what he was talking about.

“Y/N, describe again to me that room you see in every single one of your dream.”

“Why?”

“Do it.”

She breathed harshly, shutting her eyes to reimagine the scene before her eyes. “Okay, it was in a palace. There was…a high back chair made of a deep dark oak finish with a red velvet cushion…a throne, it sat at the top of a three stepped platform. There were high windows, many tapestries hung from the walls. There were…many paintings…portraits of faceless people…That’s all I can remember.”

“Like this?” He showed her an image he found online, which was exactly like the room she’d just described.

“H-How?”

“This is the throne hall in the Rammours’ palace. How do you know the details of a room you’ve never been in, Y/N? The only reasonable explanation is that you have been there before.” Jason looked at her and he was just as frightened as she was, maybe more. “Those dreams you were having weren’t dreams, they were memories from your past lives.”

Everyone in the Kingdom had heard of the King’s reputation. He was everything his son Edward was not. He cared about himself more than his people and had spent most of his time on the throne sleeping with young girls and blaming others for his own failures. Instead of trying to stop crimes, poverty, and hunger, he wasted so much effort and wealth into these terrible witch hunts, for which countless of innocent lives had ended in ashes.

Rumors had it, when the King was still a young prince, a fortune teller told him a woman with magical powers - a witch, would take away everything he loved. She would end his life and also his family name on the throne. He believed her words entirely, so the first thing he did when he became King was to capture every woman whom he suspected to be performing witchcrafts, then have them burnt alive with no mercy.

However, a witch wouldn’t have easily got caught by an imbecile monarch whose heart was as small as his brain. Witches were usually charming and wise and beautiful, and a man like the King would never have harmed or suspected a beautiful lady.

His lust for Ann had intensified since the day his son brought her to court. The only reason he hadn’t laid a hand on her was because Edward was always by her side. The only person beside himself and Ann that could sense his desire for the young girl was his wife, the Queen.

“Your Majesty,” a guard announced to the King, who was getting dressed in his chamber by two of his maids. “Princess Emlié is here.”

“Send her in.”

“Yes, Your Majesty.”

Emilié entered shortly after with a vibrant smile on her face, the one that would light up every single room. Had she not been his own son’s future Queen, the King wouldn’t have let such an opportunity pass by.

“You’d like to speak to me, Princess?”

“Yes, Your Majesty, but—“ She pursed her lips, looking at his servants. “—Could we speak alone?”

“Don’t mind them. They’re quiet as mice,” the man said and raised his arms so the girl in front of him could button up his shirt. “I’m a busy man, Princess. You’d better not waste my time.”

Emilié straightened her back and cleared her throat. She couldn’t let anxiety talk her out of this. “It’s…It’s about the girl named Ann living in this palace, Your Majesty.”

“What about her?”

“Well…She’s a dear friend of my future husband, your son, Edward, and we are very close to each other. She’s told me that she…she had a desire for…you, Your Majesty.”

The King froze at once, then held up his hand to tell his maids to step aside. The Princess stood with her head hung low as the monarch approached her. His broad-shouldered figure towering over her, leaving her hands trembling on her sides.

“Is this true?”

“Yes, Your Majesty. And I’ve noticed the way you’ve always looked at her, so I told her that you might feel the same, and she was very happy.”

“Was she now?”

Emilié nodded, then finally looked up at the older man, faking a smile. “She will be waiting for you at midnight, in your library, if you are interested.”

There was a long pause in the conversation. The King probably needed a little bit time to think about the offer, but of course, he couldn’t say no to it.

“Tell lady Ann, I’ll be there.”

“She’d be thrilled to hear that, Your Majesty.” Emilié bent her knees and gave the King one last smile before making her way out of his chamber. Her heart was beating like a drum, yet there was a strange kind of liberation inside of her. She’d thought she would feel so remorseful for doing the thing that she’d done, but now, revenge actually made her feel…alive.

“So I was all of those dead girls, and Harry was all of those dead guys?”

“Y-yeah…” Jason nodded fast. “Jeez, it sounds creepy when you put it that way.”

Y/N hated how her best friend sneaked in a joke in every situation, including ones like this. She ignored him and continued, “okay so…if that’s true. Then why did it only happen to Harry and I, and not…you…or Lisa! Or anyone else for that matter!”

“Okay, my theory…” He tapped a finger on his lip, forehead crinkled from thinking too hard. “The witch, well, the first you, got angry because Edward didn’t stop her execution, so she cursed him to never find love again?”

“Then she would curse him to die in every lifetime, but that wasn’t the case wasn’t it? You told me there was that girl who killed herself, one died from a disease? I mean, why would you curse your own self in the after life to die? Unless this witch me really sucked at being a witch.”

“Okay, you’ve got a point, so it wasn’t her who cursed him.” Jason rested his chin on his knuckles on blew air from his mouth from frustration.

“Yeah, I refuse to believe the first Harry would agree to kill the first me, I mean, he might not be Harry but he was still…Harry. And Harry’s too kind...” She bit on her bottom lip, holding back another sigh as she mumbled to herself, more like a realization then a wild guess, “maybe he was just late. He couldn’t save her.”

Jason noticed the way Y/N kept her head down and he intended to ask her what she was thinking of. He didn’t need to though, it was her who spoke first, “so what will happen in this life then?” Her voice was trembling because she was truly afraid. “Is either of us going to die?”

That, Jason had no answer for. He wished there was anything he could do to find out, to protect her, but he knew as much as she did, maybe less. He couldn’t be her hero, not in this story.

“I…don’t know…but that was how it went, right? They died because they fell in love.”

It took Y/N a moment.

“No…” Her eyes widened as she discovered something. “They died because they tried to get together. They all met at the wrong time, one was either taken, engaged, forbidden by their family or too old and too young for each other…But Harry and I, we’re different.”

“He’s got a girlfriend, Y/N!”

“He told me he broke up with her, J! He told he loved me right before you called.”

“He…he did?” Jason didn’t know how to feel about this, but he’d got a bad feeling because it wouldn’t be this easy. He didn’t want to tell her that though, she looked so much happier, he couldn’t put out the hope in her eyes.

“Yeah, this is a good sign right?” She smiled, exhaling all at once. “Maybe we’re an exception! Maybe it’ll all work out in this lifetime!”

“Y/N, I think—“

Suddenly, Jason was interrupted by a voice from the other side of the door. “Y/N, are you in there?”

“Sarah?” Y/N spoke up, giving Jason a look before standing up from the toilet lit.

“Oh God, there you are! Everyone’s been looking for you. Are you alright in there?”

“Yeah, I’m on the phone…” Y/N answered honestly, but she couldn’t help but notice how frantic her friend sounded. “What is it, Sarah?”

“Harry…” There was a pause, as if Sarah couldn’t find a proper way to deliver this news, or maybe she didn’t want to be the one to do this. It took her a few seconds to finally complete that sentence, knowing it would crush Y/N.

And, it did.

“Harry…Harry’s in the hospital, Y/N.”

#this is the most difficult piece i've ever written in my entire life #harry styles #harry styles writing #harry styles series #in another life series #harry styles fanfic #harry styles angst #harry styles fluff #harry styles fanfiction #harry styles imagine #harry styles fanfics #harry styles fanfictions #harry styles one shot #prince!harry #soulmate!harry #witch!y/n #assistant!y/n

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laythornmuse · 7 years ago

Text

Merry Christmas!

To @mybeautifuldecay

It’s been so fun getting to know you a bit this Holiday Season! Your drawings and fanfictions are beautiful and I’m so grateful to have gotten to know you better. I hope my messages brought you an extra helping of cheer, and I hope you love this story. It’s taken on a life of its own, and I have you to thank for it <3

Thank you @moghraidhjamie for hosting this wonderful event!

To all the wonderful Outlander fans, I hope you all get some downtime this holiday season and get to catch up on all the wonderful fiction the writers are pouring out! I know I will.

PROLOGUE

Claire first felt it when she was 9 years old, a warm, delicate flower blooming in her chest, that made her stomach tingle and her knees wobble. It occurred every time she greeted James Fraser, the laird’s son.

At 12 years old, Jamie was tall for his age, though his face held a softness to it that magnified when he smiled. It was that smile and the gleam in his blue eyes that made her say yes when he invited her to play, and she quickly found herself with three new siblings as Ian, Jenny, and Jamie counted her as their fourth.

A resident of Broch Morda all her life, she and Uncle Lambert moved into a cottage at Lallybroch later that year when Brian Fraser hired him to tutor his children. Though Jamie would be sent to Paris in a few years, he needed instruction to prepare him for the rigors of University, and as a learned man, Uncle Lambert suited this position well.

Living at Lallybroch also suited Claire. She was an adventurous and spirited child whose curiosity often lead her into hour-long discussions about every topic imaginable, but her latest obsessions were plants: the purpose of plants, how they grow, and why there were so many of them.

She hated the Church’s answer.

“But WHY did God make them all?” She whined one afternoon, tapping her pencil along her ledger. She puffed out a breath that made her curls bounce against her brow, and frowned at her uncle.

“Maybe God was bored,” Jamie muttered, too engrossed in his arithmetic work to look up. Jenny rolled her eyes at him and kicked his shin under the table. She looked at her friend and chewed her bottom lip.

“They offer wonderful variety,” Jenny said, contemplating the question. “They’re all so unique in shape and color, and they change as all living things do.”

“Variety can’t be the only reason,” Claire argued. “And they’re not all pleasant. Some are sharp and grotesque.”

“Good use of your vocabulary word,” her uncle murmured, before tipping his head up and smiling at her. “Why, it’s quite simple, my dear. They each perform a special task in nature. Plants can heal and kill, and some can do both. The real pleasure comes in studying how.”

With those words and a copy of Phillip Miller’s “The Gardener’s dictionary,” published just last year and a prized possession in the Fraser home, Claire took to botany and the healing power of plants and herbs.

When not sleeping or doing her chores, Claire would spend hours reading and collecting plant samples. When Brian Fraser bought her a mortar and pestle and some herb seedlings, Claire added gardening to her daily joys.

Her love for plants proved useful one winter when Jenny, Ian, and Jamie were confined to their beds with awful fevers and coughs. Claire dutifully made eucalyptus pastes and ointments and applied it to each of her patients to help them sleep.

Jamie however, wanted no part of it.

“It smells awful,” he moaned, pulling his blanket up to his chin and shifting away from her.

“I’m surprised you can smell at all. Your nose is redder than cherry.” She tutted at him and circled around to the other side of the bed. He immediately moved away from her. “Really, Jamie if you don’t hold still, I’ll sit on you.”

“James Fraser!” Brian barked from across the hall. “Let Claire treat you or I’ll make you wish ye had!”

He glared at her and her smug grin and huffed in defeat. Claire crawled on the bed next to him and applied the ointment to his throat and chest.

“You’re less fevered today, at least. Do you want me to read another chapter?” Claire asked with a smile, as she tucked the blanket back under his chin.

Jamie yawned and turned on his side. “Aye, but start at the beginning of Chapter 2? I fell asleep during it.”

Claire smiled and pulled the book into her lap as Jamie shifted closer to her knee.

“That evil influence which carried me first away from my father’s house—which hurried me into the wild and indigested notion of raising my fortune, and that impressed those conceits so forcibly upon me as to make me deaf to all good advice, and to the entreaties and even the commands of my father—”

“Sounds like a trouble you two share,” Brian Fraser said under his breath as he tucked an extra blanket around his son’s feet. He soundlessly padded out of the room before tossing a final glance at the pair, not missing the gentle smile his son wore as Claire turned the page.

In the spring, Claire would lead the group on foraging expeditions, and she often found new specimens in between their games and adventures. Jenny would sketch the plant, and if deemed necessary, Jamie would painstakingly dig it up so it could be relocated to Claire’s garden and studied.

This morning Jamie and Claire were alone, as Ian and Jenny were still working on their lessons.

“I’m not having much…” Jamie sneezed violently. “Luck…with this one…”

He carefully wiped his 15-year-old face on his sleeve as his eyes watered. Claire, now 12, grinned and took the plant from his hands. He blinked rapidly, and when his eyes cleared, he saw Claire’s smile, radiant as a spring morning’s glow.

“I think that’s three allergies I’ve discovered now, Jamie. One could wonder why you bother helping me anymore.”

Jamie’s cheeks turned pink as he kicked at the dirt by his feet. He never turned down an opportunity to spend time with her, even if it was to dig up ragweed. He shrugged, but Claire saw the telltale drumming of his fingers against his thigh. His expression settled into one of determination, and before his bravery waned, he closed the distance between them.

The kiss was a quick beat of butterfly wings against her lips, and too soon his wings were gone.

“That’s why,” he whispered.

A moment later, courage fully expended, he was gone, headed to the barn to finish his chores. Claire held a hand to her mouth, a giddiness filling her as her lips tingled, still wet from his. She could smell his lingering scent, grass and salt and fresh hay. She stood still for another ten minutes, taking inventory of all that would or could change from that kiss before she returned to her garden with her new specimen.

When the sun began to lower into the hills, Jamie found her in her garden where she usually ended her days. He smiled at her as she stood and was about to speak when Brian Fraser called them both inside.

“Jamie, you remember your uncle, Dougal?” Brian said curtly, eying Dougal where he stood in their parlor.

“Aye. Welcome, Uncle.”

“You’re a braw lad, Jamie,” Dougal began, “and your father and I thought it time for you to know your Makenzie lines.”

“Aye?” Jamie looked at his father whose face was blank, masked to hide his true feelings on the matter.

“Your mother and I agreed to it after Willie passed. Your uncle Colum is a wise man, but unable to travel. A season or two at Castle Leoch, under Mackenzie care,” Brian’s eyes burned into Dougal’s, “and then three years at University in Paris.”

Jamie’s mouth gaped like a fish for a few moments before his father’s raised brow made him close it. He had yearned for this day for years, anxious to advance his sword skills his father had taught him.

A smile broke across his face as Dougal’s hand clasped his shoulder. Brian ruffled his son’s hair, a sadness drifting through him at the thought of parting from him.

Claire watched the exchange from the doorway, her mouth clamped shut to prevent it from trembling.

Four years? From her closest friend and…her thoughts traveled back to the kiss and she tasted acid in her mouth.

Not to be. Not now, at least.

And so she forced a smile on her face, for Jamie seemed overjoyed, and went to set the table with Jenny.

2 Years Later

“The Fool. His letters get shorter and shorter while his requests only grow longer.” Jenny muttered.

Claire laughed as she looked up from her knitting. “What now?”

“Three shirts, a scarf, and a package full of mending. Apparently, he’s too busy to darn his own socks.”

“You’d think with his exams he’d look forward to distraction.”

“Oh, he’s plenty of those,” Brian Fraser muttered, not looking up from his book. Jenny’s eyes darted from her father to Claire, whose attention was now focused on her pearling.

Jamie’s letters had turned from warm to formal, and their length from 5 pages to 1. Brian’s messages with his son, however, had become longer and solicited more exasperated sighs and Scottish affirmations.

For several months, Brian was tight-lipped about their contents, but finally a month ago the contents had mingled into Jenny’s letters as well.

Jamie thought himself in love with a woman named Annalise.

Claire, simply put, was devastated.

The letter had arrived months ago, and Jenny had shared it with Claire without knowing the contents. Claire had held her face until she was back in her shared room. She cried until her chest ached, and tried her best to keep quiet to not disturb Jenny.

Eventually, Jenny slipped into bed behind her and pulled Claire to her shoulder.

“Sob if you must, Claire, and hold onto me. I’ll never tell a soul, mo chridgh.”

She let her tears roll freely down her face, gasping for air as her heart throbbed and her lungs shook with the strain of loss.

Jenny held her through the night, stroking her hair until Claire fell into a fitful sleep at last. In the morning, Jenny felt a shift within Claire. Her face was solemn, having tucked away the shards of her heart, and by afternoon she renewed her vigor in her studies.

Jenny watched her now with pursed lips, but Claire’s indifferent mask did not falter.

That night, there were no tears.

Chapter 1

#Outlander Secret Santa 2017 #To Have Your Heart #LaythornMuse #LTM To Have Your Heart

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wellesleyunderground · 6 years ago

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Wellesley in Art: Hannah Heller ‘09, Museum Educator (@museum_matters)

Hannah Heller is an NYC based freelance museum educator, and has taught and worked on research and evaluation projects in several cultural institutions including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, Inc., Whitney Museum of American Art, El Museo del Barrio, the American Folk Art Museum, and the Museum of Arts and Design. She is currently a doctoral candidate in the Art & Art Education program at Teachers College, and holds a MA in Museum Education from Tufts University. Her research interests include developing orientations towards social justice through close looking at art; she believes art can play an active and healing role, especially when addressing difficult topics such as race and racism in a group setting. Follow her on Twitter @museum_matters! Interview by Tiffany Chan ‘15, Arts Series Editor

Q: What is your ‘origin story’? How did you know that you wanted to pursue a career in the arts? In museums and education specifically?

I actually took a course my last semester senior year at Wellesley on “art museum issues,” which really opened my eyes to the inner workings of museums, and the prospect of museum work as a viable career.

After graduating I did my first unpaid internship (out of about a thousand) abroad with an upstart website creating content on Israeli artists. While there I applied to museum studies MA programs and ultimately came back to Boston for my Museum Education MA at Tufts. It finally made sense to me why I was so drawn to the art history courses I had taken at Wellesley but for some reason didn’t excel at-- I was missing the personal connection, the humanity behind these objects, the “why” of the work. The more collections and audiences I work with the more certain I become about the power of art and my role in facilitating those experiences.

Q: What was your professional journey like? How did you get to this job?

After finishing my MA program I went to intern at Lincoln Center in NY with their guided tour program. The internship turned into a full time fellowship, which turned into a job and I ended up staying there for about three years advancing ultimately to manage their entire volunteer corps, part time staff, and summer interns. But after a couple years I realized that even though I was working super closely with our audiences in a customer service role, I was no longer doing work that felt as meaningful as anything I did as an unpaid intern working with the tour program and helping shape those prolonged, more educational experiences. I also found that I missed school a little bit, that I still had questions about the nature of my work that I wanted to research. So I quit and went back to school to get my Ed.D. in Art & Art Education at Teachers College, where I am currently finishing up my 4th year.

Being back to school affords me the opportunity to get back into freelance museum education work, and finally delve into and sharpen some of those questions I had related to practice, creating a really productive theory/practice feedback loop. I get to read all this theory, apply it to my work, see what works and what doesn’t, go back to the literature and sharpen some of those ideas, and try it all over again.

Q: What does a normal day look like for you?

Because I’m a freelance educator, and I’m also in school, every day looks like really different. But most days start with a morning school group tour at one of the museums I teach at (I teach at three), or at one of the schools that my museums partner with. Each of my museums coordinates several school partnerships, and will send educators like me out to the schools, and then invite the students to come to the museum a couple times-- I love partnerships because I get to know the kids so much better than I would on a one-off field trip. I love field trips too; depending on the museum, it’s either an hour-long gallery tour where we focus on maybe 3-4 art works and include lots of sketching and movement activities, or a tour plus art making workshop.

Then I clean up, and I might jump on the train and teach another tour/program at another museum, or go the library, do an observation for my research, or go to a coffee shop and do some curriculum writing/planning. What’s really fun about my job is at each of my three museums the exhibitions switch up every couple months, which means I’m always doing research on something new. I like to say that I know a little bit about a lot of different things. The switching up goes for the audience too; on a given day I could be in a kindergarten classroom, teach a tour to 9th graders, do some planning for a college internship program, and finish up the day doing a “VIP” tour at a corporate sponsor event.

And then I come home and shift into admin mode-- answer emails, respond to bookings, send some invoices, follow up with teachers, plan or collect materials for the next day, etc etc. I’m always carrying around a tote bag or two full of art materials.

One thing that helps clarify my job for other people is to explain that NYC is super unique in that people like me get paid (pretty well too, relatively) to do this work, whereas in a lot of other cities the work is done by unpaid volunteer docents. I can make $50-$150 an hour depending on the program (though of course I don’t work a 40-hour week at that rate!). I think that’s a gesture to the competition in this city, and the high standard for museum educational programming that that competition supports. It also means that a part time teaching gig typically requires a MA degree, 4+ years experience, etc etc, all these bonkers qualifications that can make it really hard to break into.

Q: What was your ‘eureka moment’ in wrestling with race and the art world? Or was it even a moment or rather a long process?

I point to Michael Brown’s murder in Ferguson in the summer of 2014 as a turning point for me. Obviously it wasn’t the first time a Black person was extradjudicially shot by a White police officer, but it began to feel impossible for me to both witness the explosion of discourse in the media that his death spurred, the advent of the #BlackLivesMatter movement, and also do nothing about it. My journey started with having conversations with friends and family about their reactions to Ferguson and subsequent shootings, which were often really uncomfortable and awkward.

It was particularly hard with my family; I notice a trend with a lot of people in my Jewish social networks, where so many Jewish Americans come from families where their grand or great grandparents came here with nothing after experiencing profound oppression in their home countries, and then were discriminated against when they got here, but then climbed the ladder, achieved the American dream, etc etc. So when you bring up discrimination against another group of people, there’s almost this knee-jerk reaction among older Jewish people I’ve spoken to be like, oh, don’t tell me about oppression, I get it. It was pretty shocking at the time, since I’d only known the privileges associated with being brought up in a close knit Jewish community, so for me it was like-- well all right, let’s take this history of oppression, and see if we can harness that experience towards alleviating current forms of oppression where we can. The more awkward it got the more it signalled to me how necessary these conversations are, particularly amongst White folks purporting to be “progressive” and liberal, but also can’t be bothered to really address these issues critically (ie in a way that would address their own privilege).

Running parallel to these personal conversations was a field-specific awakening to our own equity issues, and lots of people have done amazing work to bring attention to racist hiring and curating practices, as well as cultural barriers to success for employees of color. The big question for museums has to be: how can we hold ourselves to treating our guests equitably if we can’t even treat our own fairly? Tackling diversity and equity issues in museum work has to have a multi-pronged approach, and I’ve sussed out my own little niche in this much larger conversation by examining the various techniques museum educators use to discuss race and other equity issues using objects as the catalyst.

More recently, my research is focusing on manifestations of whiteness in gallery teaching. I think centering whiteness in a conversation about anti-racism is important so that White people can first of all name it, critique it, and figure out what it means for them first as individuals and then as part of a system-- we can think specifically about museum education in these terms-- that on one hand acts as the oppressor but which can also be used dismantle the status quo. And the only way this happens though is if we ALL (managers, educators, curators, directors, board members) make a shift from conceptualizing our various roles as supporting a "culturally sensitive," or "multicultural," or perhaps just at a base level not-racist neutral stance, to being full on, explicitly anti-racist and anti oppression.

Q: How have other people responded to your writings?

So far so good! I’ll always be nervous as a White person to discuss this work publically; am I offending anyone, have I said something problematic, etc etc. But the bottom line is POC can’t do this work alone, and they put themselves out there every day just by existing, so writing the occasional journal article or blog post seems really like the least I can do.

Q: What are the best ways that we can start productive conversations regarding race and art?

Such a great question, and there’s no one-size-fits-all answer, but in my experience as a museum educator, there’s some really simple, go-to tools in our educator toolboxes to help navigate these conversations authentically and productively. The question is about starting, and I like to start with the art. Gather some basic observations from the group, see where they’re at and go from there. Object based learning provides a really nice context for having conversations about difficult topics without it being explicitly about the people involved in the discussion. There’s a sense of safety there, where we’re talking about the artwork, not ourselves per se. I like to choose objects based on what aspect of a counter story to the dominant narrative they can reveal. This counter story can say something about the artist, the content, the subject-- something that reveals a turn away from the dominant (while, male, straight, cis, "able" bodied) canon. A lot of educators feel like they can't talk about oppression because their institutions' collections don't explicitly treat the topic (ie are made by and picture all White men). So pick an object and ask students to create narratives to fill in the gaps. Who isn't there? Why? What if the artist was working today in your neighborhood, what might look different? What if YOU were the subject-- how would you be represented? (I obviously take certain liberties when it comes to "respecting" the "intent" of the artist which some educators or managers may take issue with. So be it).

When problematic comments based on biases and assumptions do come up, and that’s where those educator tools come in. One tool I like a lot is inspired by Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS), which is a student centered methodology for looking at art. Part of the method involves asking the question, “What do you see that makes you say that?” when a student makes a comment the includes an inference. So if a student says something like, “I think that painting looks weird,” you can respond by saying okay cool, what do you see that makes you say that, putting the onus on them to back it up. That being said, while we like to say there’s no right or wrong answers in art, sometimes we do get a problematic comment and my position is I don’t want to validate those, but I do want to turn it into a learning moment. So when that does happen, I’ll say something like, “okay, you’re making an observation based on a racial stereotype xyz; what do you see that makes you say that?” More often than not the student is forced into this “aha” moment of oh, I don’t really know why I think that, maybe I need to readjust my thinking.

Another tool we have is language. It’s our primary mode of teaching, and I think museum educators need to shift from thinking of verbal discourse as non-neutral terrain; it’s either helping or it’s hindering. I’m digging into this idea more in dissertation research, but my pilot data suggests that the more explicit educators can be in our facilitation of dialogue with our language, the more productive our conversations will be. So, for example, most museum educators paraphrase each student comment (or I think they should!)-- those paraphrases are great opportunities to insert appropriate language and vocabulary. In other words, we can keep our teaching student centered, without mirroring their biases.

Q: What are several steps that we can/should take to be better allies/educators within the arts world specifically?

Something I have observed is that not only is it really tough for POC to get through the doors and actually hired in meaningful museum positions, but also the culture of privilege, exclusivity, and whiteness that pervades museums makes it really hard to sustain POC in those positions should they get there. Museums have a problem with distinguishing between performing diversity and actually achieving equity. Cultural change needs to happen on every level of management, but it begins on an individual level, and requires a transfer of power. It just does. So whenever I see a job posting I post it right away in a job forum specifically for job seekers of color. I share my salary info. I recommend POC to positions. I’m super honest with my POC colleagues about which institutions/managers I know of who are supportive and progressive, and which aren’t. I’m not in a position right now to be hiring people or shifting workplace culture on a large scale, but I’ve worked hard to identify what power I do have and try and push the needle towards equity in the ways that I can.

But to all those managers out there, whatever your field, I encourage you to rethink the qualifications you use to hire, and the culture you create in your workplaces. I’m pretty obsessed with Nonprofit AF, a blog on inclusion in the nonprofit world and can recommend the following articles on shifting those practices:

Our hiring practices are inequitable and need to change

When you don’t disclose salary range on a job posting, a unicorn loses its wings

Basing pay on salary history is a harmful, borderline-unethical practice that we need to abolish

Why we need to end the culture of “Cultural Fit”

Q: Traditionally, introductory art history classes focus on works within the Western canon and there is a specific way that instructors analyze the works and that students remember the works. Simply put, these intro classes prioritize rote memorization of a very specific way about thinking about/talking about art. What do you think that institutions can do to change or amend the way we teach introductory courses to tackle issues of race?

Representation is key. At every moment of time in every place POC were making art, being represented in art, funding art projects, etc. It is a fallacy to suggest that like, all Classical art is of White people by White people. There were tons of POC Greeks and Romans hustling and making cool shit. I follow medievalpoc on Twitter, which is an account that highlights contributions by POC during the Middle Ages in Europe, an era we traditionally think of being exclusively White… because that’s what we’ve been taught it was. Professors need to stop being lazy and seek out those opportunities to break out of the canon.

I think art history professors need to also address the circumstances contributing to lack of representation in the arts. Like, cool let’s study Jeffersonian architecture but if you’re not also talking about the Black enslaved people who built it then you’re doing it wrong.

For what it’s worth, I don’t mind the rote memorization. I sort of love knowing(ish) when a thing was made, or what museum I could find it in. In a weird way I find that information has served me pretty well. But if you’re going to make me memorize what year Stonehenge was made then you better also make me memorize the dates and provenances of those Dogon masks too.

Q: How have your teaching practices evolved as a result of grappling with this issue head-on?

I experienced a big shift in my teaching after collecting my pilot data during an interview with a POC educator and she said something I'll never forget. I was asking about her thoughts on the pedagogical role of discomfort (it was something I was big into at the time, problematizing discomfort in a field that prizes "soft" skills, emotional intelligence etc). And she was like yeah, I get it, some kids need to made to feel uncomfortable in order to shift their thinking, but for the most part (I'm paraphrasing her response here) I mostly work with POC students and to be honest I want to think about how to get them to feel comfortable in this space that traditionally doesn't feel safe or comfortable for them. How can I help make it feel like it's theirs too? She cited a Banksy quote, "art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.” And since then I've really shifted my teaching to thinking about well okay, I'm clearly White -- these Black or Latinx kids do not need me to tell them about racism-- they live with it. Yes, I can facilitate the conversation if it's coming up for them, but if the students want to talk about color, or shapes, or what random stories or emotions are emerging from an abstract work or whatever I'm open to that too-- basically what's going to help these kids feel some ownership here.

That all being said, if it's a bunch of White kids from the suburbs or whatever, believe me they will be made to feel at least a little uncomfortable at some point during my tour. I see my role as someone who strives towards allyship as a White person to be someone who models what it looks like for a White person to talk about their own complicity, think about systems of oppression on both individual and systemic levels, and ultimately help students take the next step to think in terms of: what can I do?

Q: What is one thing that you wish the general public knew about the art world?

So many things! If I had to pick one I think I wish more museum visitors understood that the label text on the wall offers just one story, one way to interpret the work. It’s probably an interpretation guided by lots of curatorial research, precedence, art historical facts, etc. Which is all great and important, but those interpretations don’t take into account our own stories, our memories, associations, questions, problems, wonderings, etc etc. I encourage visitors to not even read the labels at first; who cares who made it-- just walk into the room and go up to the work that draws you in the most. What’s drawing you to it? Where do your eyes want to go? What knowledges can YOU bring to help you interpret its significance for YOU? A lot of people approach art like there’s one answer, but the thing is I’ve spoken to artists and nothing excites them more than observing visitors react personally to their work and see things in it that the artist never even saw themselves. At the end of the day the best art is art that offers endless entry points, and I wish visitors felt more empowered to make meaning in a way that makes sense to them, not the way dictated by others.

#wellesley underground #wellesley in art series #wellesley in art #hannah heller #class of 2009

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spideyxchelle · 7 years ago

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love is universal. it spans time and distance. and sometimes, on the rare occasion that love doesn’t quite get it right the first, love spans for more than one lifetime. this is that story.

in their first life they are called Femi and Marcus. in this, their last life, they are called Peter and MJ.

[part 1] [part 2] [part 3] [part 4] [part 5] [part 6]

This is the life she remembers.

Not all at once, but it comes to her in waves, at first like daydreams. She remembers Rome first when she’s ten years old, and then England at eleven, and France by twelve, and Russia when she’s twelve and a half, and by the time she remembers their last life she’s convinced it’s real. She knows in her heart that these memories she has are more than daydreams, they are her past, and whoever this boy is going to be in this lifetime is going to be her future.

She’s fourteen years old when she gets accepted to Midtown High for special students. She’s fourteen years old when she storms into Midtown High and stumbles right into Peter Parker.

She wants to yell at the idiot that knocked all of her books out of her hands, but when she looks up she has no words. That’s a lie, she has two, “It’s you.”

He knits his eyebrows together in confusion and gives her the same sloppy grin he’s worn in every life, “Sorry, do I know you?”

Her heart drops in her stomach at the sickening realization that he doesn’t know her, he doesn’t remember. Fate’s greatest cosmic joke.

She picks the broken pieces of her heart off of the ground and shoulders into him without another word to go and cry in the bathroom.

She locks herself in a stall and sobs. For all the pain in all her lives, this was the most acute. Michelle had never considered, not really, how painful it had to have been for Peter in all of their lives before to look in familiar eyes he loved so much and to see nothing but unknowing stares back. It damn near destroyed her.

MJ hates this curse. She hates that for no particular reason fate flips the roles around on her. Why this life? Why now?

Why them?

Once she’s cried herself raw, she picks herself up, dries her face with a scratchy, cheap towel and decides to throw herself head first into school. She’s a freshman in 2015. The world is her oyster. There is more to this life than loving Peter Parker; there has to be because he doesn’t even remember her. In this life, she can find a new purpose: to educate herself.

She’s never been to school. She’s had a smattering of homeschooling over her many lives, but education for girls was always scarce and inconsistent. She remembers when science was hailed as witchcraft. This world, this time, is better than that.

Well, mostly.

MJ is less than impressed with social progress. The world is still always at war and people would rather fight over differences then celebrate similarities. She’s lived long enough that this exhausts her and she’s only fourteen, which is why she goes home from school that day and announces to her family that she’s decided to dedicate her life to social justice.

This life she knows better, this life she can do better, and this life she will.

Michelle’s new found mission of saving the world from its stupid self does not go over super well with her classmates. High school, even an academically superior one, is not a conducive environment for breaking status quo and Michelle defies every single convention she can.

She’s never lived a life with makeup and so she refuses to start now. And she’s fine being somewhat of any outsider. She’s lived plenty of lives with plenty of friends. She is not lonely, she is motivated and fierce and brilliant and driven to make the most out of this life she is given.

The only habit she cannot seem to shake it watching Peter. It’s nearly impossible not to look at him with his nearly auburn hair and heartbreakingly familiar sloppy smile. She always finds her eyes drifting to him in every class or sketching him at academic decathlon practice and when his Uncle Ben dies the middle of their freshman year she gives him a fleeting hug in the hallway before scurrying off to hide in shame. She doesn’t miss how the brief contact makes her skin burn for the rest of the day.

She also doesn’t miss how sometime after his Uncle Ben dies Peter Parker starts hitting the gym. She sees him try and hide it under his baggy sweaters and his ill-fitting jeans, but she can tell. There is no person on the planet that knows his body better than she does.

And this transform coupled with some confidence due to a sudden and very prestigious internship with Tony Stark puts Peter Parker on people’s radar, which bothers Michelle. She knows people pretend they aren’t interested in him but she sees the way both boys and girls alike start to watch him, hoping he’ll turn his fierce, loyal gaze on them.

MJ is not immune to the wandering eye and neither is Liz Allen-Toomes, which shouldn’t make her flare with jealousy but it does. She has known him, every part of him, for each of his lifetimes and the thought of someone else getting to know this version of Peter is almost crippling.

And then, Peter’s eye shifts to Liz, too.

It’s like fate is having fun torturing her in this life. She wonders if there were lives that Peter had to watch her fall in love with someone else, but she sorely doubts it. In every life they have ever lived, Peter pursues her. He loves her so dearly and distractedly that he never waits to make his intentions clear.

Michelle is different. She hesitated that first day they met. Instead of opening up to him or smiling at him in that way that said hey, its you, and I love you, she ran. She turned inward on herself and became an advocate for free speech and change instead of picking him and most days she doesn’t regret it, but others are harder.

Especially when she overhears he’s Spider-Man. This life brought on more changes then just the script being flipped on which one of them remembers their past lives. In this life, MJ sees ordinary men become Gods. She hates that she cannot help but think back on Egypt and wonder if this new breed of superhero is actually the Gods walking the earth once more. It’s ridiculous. She’s a woman of science. And yet.

But of course, in the world’s most epic war to date, Peter would somehow get himself wrapped up in battle. After she hears him and Ned chatting lowly about his new powers, she notices how he’s always longing for battle, to throw himself head first into danger like every life before this one, and she can’t help but curse him for his stupid, honorable nobility. You don’t have to fight, she wants to scream at him every time he misses decathlon, but she refrains.

Mostly because, in this life, he doesn’t know her very well.

At Homecoming, he wanders in with Liz and her heart flares in such anger that she slaps a sardonic smile on her face and shoots him the finger. It only makes her feel better for half a second. Her relief is short lived when she sees him rush out of the school gym, away from the dance and away from Liz. Whatever he is running to, she thinks, could kill him.

That, at least, remains the same from life to life.

She spends the rest of the dance gnawing on her fingernails in worry and when her phone alerts her about the attack on Coney Island Pier she almost faints until she sees the one god-sent line: Spider-Man Apprehends Armed Weapons Dealer.

He’s alive.

Michelle’s knees give out on the dance floor. Sally is at her side before she hits the ground and she whispers a thank you.

Sally tugs her under her arm and squishes MJ, “You need to eat something. Can’t have you passing out at the dance.”

MJ’s eyebrows knit, “Why are you helping me?”

Sally glances back at the academic decathlon team and, then, smiles down at MJ flopped lazily in her arms, “Because we’re friends.”

So, its easy the next day at decathlon practice to correct Mr. Harrington, “My, uh, friends call me MJ.”

She avoids looking directly at Peter when she says that. Even so, she can feel the heat of his gaze on her face. He’s looking at her, for the first time, like he sees her and she’s terrified if she looks at him, if they meet eyes, the bubble will burst and the moment will be gone.

His phone rings and destroys the moment all on its own. He distractedly looks down at his phone and starts to spin off the bench, “Uh, I gotta go.”

“Hey, where are you going?” she pushes, leaning forward on the table. He vaguely points behind himself, like his gesturing is enough of an answer to her question. She raises her eyebrow and asks, “What are you hiding, Peter?” His mouth falls open and she can spot a sheen of sweat starting to pool on his forehead. Ned even tenses beside her. She snorts, “I’m just kidding, I don’t care. Bye.”

He looks shaken by the exchange, but he gathers his things and hops off to save the world or whatever it is the Avengers are doing today. As he walks away, she can’t help herself, she gazes at his back. Her insides screaming for him to turn around and look at her. Come on, sweetheart, her heart cries, just look at me.

He doesn’t.

When he comes back to school the next day he seems unburdened as if the world is clear blue skies for him again. He jogs up beside her in the hallway and grins, “Hey, MJ, wait up.”

She steels her heart and rolls her eyes, “I’m walking, Parker. Keep up.”

He takes two long strides until they’re walking together in unison. He’s effervescent, “I, uh, didn’t really get to congratulate you yesterday. And I didn’t want to, you know, make you think just because I ran off I’m not proud of you or whatever.”

“Proud of me?” she drawls, “Why would I care if you’re proud of me?”

“We’re friends,” he says like its the simplest explanation in the world. Her heart hastens.

She swallows the lump in her throat, “Are we?”

“Yea,” he smiles, “So when I say congrats on making team captain a normal, average friend would say thank you.” He teases, “Go on and try. I promise its not that hard.”

She bites on her lip to keep her smile hidden, “Thank you, Peter.”

He dips his head in a pseudo bow, “You’re welcome, Michelle.”

She can’t help herself, she laughs. And he looks like he’s been clobbered over the head with a bat at the sound. Self-conscious and shy, she tucks some of her bangs behind her ear, “What?”

“Nothing!” he shakes his head free of whatever cobwebs are taking up free storage in his brain, “You just, uh, you have a nice laugh.”

Her insides warm, “Oh?”

“Yea,” he squints like he’s trying to piece together some great puzzle. She remembers in their previous lives she used to call all of Peter’s vague nonsense riddles. She dampens the hope in her heart that maybe he is smarter than she is and he can put together the pieces of their missing puzzle and remember her.

She still foolishly hopes beyond hope for them.

Yet, while she hopes he finds some way back to remembering her, she wishes more than anything that he’ll stop being Spider-Man. Michelle knows what its like to lose him– she’s done it more times than anyone should ever have to lose their soul mate– and the thought of it happening again is paralyzing. Especially because Peter Parker is good.

Marcus had told her once that he was not a good person and, as Femi, she had believed him. But Peter Parker? Peter Parker is the definition of goodness. He is everything good in this world wrapped up in one slightly goofy teenage boy and even if she didn’t have several lifetimes worth of love for him she’s certain she would fall in love with him anyway. He’s perfect.

However, perfection seems uninterested in Michelle Jones. Not that she tries to move beyond being friends with Peter Parker. After she becomes president of decathlon, Peter seems to promote them to school friends but nothing more. She’s not indoctrinated into his super, secret life with Ned or invited to weekend movies or even a study party at the Parker residence. Their friendship is confined to the walls of Midtown High and, frankly, Michelle is glad.

It’s damn near impossible to keep the stars out of her eyes whenever Peter is within fifteen feet of her and she is praying he doesn’t notice. So, during decathlon practice she’s taking to blatantly ignoring him.

She is two hundred pages deep in The Awakening when Peter slams her book closed. MJ jumps back so the pages don’t nip at her fingers and she tilts her chin up to glare at him, “What gives, Parker?”

“Have I done something?” Peter leans down so they are practically nose to nose. MJ’s stomach turns; she has to kill the overwhelming need to kiss him.

Michelle crunches her eyebrows together, “I don’t-”

“Because,” he talks over her, “I thought we were friends, but lately you’ve been literally ignoring me. So, uh, have I done something?”

MJ yanks her book out from under his hand. He flushes in embarrassment as she shoves it in her bag. “I haven’t been ignoring you,” she lies.

Peter doesn’t look convinced and she can’t quite meet his eye because he’s right. In fact, she has made it a habit to ignore Peter Parker because he makes her heart beat out of her chest. He sits on the edge of her desk, “You have.” His face falls, “I really did think we were friends, MJ. Or, uh, at least on our way to being…friends.”

Michelle sighs, “We are friends.”

He perks up, “Great. Friends go to the movies together, right?”

The suggestion sounds suspiciously like a date. MJ startles. “W-what?”

Peter’s lip curls upward, “Great. Glad that’s settled. See you Saturday.” And Peter Parker has the audacity to wink at her. Her mouth falls open from the shock. She fumbles for some witty remark or some coherent thought to piece out what exactly happened but she cannot think fast enough to speak before he is gone.

Later that night he sends her a text that reads: i’ve been trying to ask you out for months, fyi.

It feels like the start of some Shakespearean tragedy, one she has lived too many times already, but in spite of how she knows this has to end, MJ curls over that night and smiles.

She goes through five different outfits before she settles on a black girl magic t-shirt and jeans. It is understated and easy movie watching attire, besides she does not want to get her hopes up for this date. If its a group date or if, somehow, she misunderstood his intentions she does not want to have her dreams dashed. It is self-preservation plain and simple.

Peter gives her the dopiest, most endearing smile when she arrives outside the theater. He reads the lettering on her shirt and grins, if possible, even bigger. “I like the shirt,” he remarks.

She eats the compliment up and stores it away to examine and re-examine to death later. “Thanks,” she tucks some hair behind her ear, “I got it in DC.”

“At decathlon?” he innocently asks.

MJ nods. “Yea, you know,” her smile turns feral, “after you disappeared and before Spider-Man showed up to save the day.”

He swallows thickly, “We were, uh, very lucky he was there that day.”

“Or she,” she teases.

Peter shakes his head, “No, Spider-Man is definitely a guy.”

“Could be a girl,” she shrugs. Keeping her eyes on his reactions, she adds, “I’ve heard their voice is kind of high.”

He scowls, “No way. I’ve heard it’s crazy manly and, like, intimidating.”

She laughs out loud at her own private joke and he looks confused but the sound of her laugh makes him smile back. It is such a simple gift, she thinks, spending time with someone who thinks her laugh is worth smiling about. In every life, she remembers him smiling at everything she did. She had taken it for granted. In this life, she did not intend to; she would cherish him and every minute they had left.

Peter, emboldened by her laugh, reaches for MJ’s hand. The laugh dies on her lips and she turns to him, eyes blown wide in terror. He is so soft with her. Gentleness comes as easily to him as breathing does to everyone else. “What is it?” he asks.

She gnaws on her lip, “I, just, I didn’t know you liked me, is all.”

It is his turn to tease her, “Who said I liked you?” MJ swipes at his arm and his face explodes in a sunny grin. “Kidding,” he clarifies, “I definitely do.” His face turns red but he does not try to explain away his comment. He lets it sit between them, the truth laying between the space between their interlocked hands.

MJ squeezes his hand, “I, uh, like you, too.”

“Oh,” he shrugs, “I know.” Her eyebrows shoot up into her hair, offended. He continues, “You spent way too much time in decathlon pretending I wasn’t there. So, you know, you either hated me or liked me a lot. And when you showed up today…I figured it had to be the second one.”

“Oh yeah?” she scoffs, trying to pull her hand out of his grip.

“Yeah,” he smirks, inching closer to her face. This is the sort of bold move that Peter would have pulled in a past life. He was always aching to kiss her or touch her or have some kind of deep, personal connection with her at any given moment. When she thinks back on their previous lives he always steals their first kiss relatively early on in their courtship– something that scandalized her in some lives and thrilled her in others.

In this life, his presumptive action makes her mouth dry and her head spin until the very last second before his lips hit hers. And when, at last, he slants his mouth over hers the cosmos opens before them. A kiss has never felt as enlightening and life-changing in any life before this one. This is the kind of kiss that won wars and made great cities fall; this was the kind of kiss that civilizations built their foundations on; and, the kind of kiss that tasted like regret and agony and deep, deep love.

When MJ pulls back, her lips turn upward and her eyes flutter open to reveal Peter’s shell-shocked face. Whatever she expects him to say it is not what comes next:

“I remember.”

Her blood chills, “Excuse me?”

He takes two steps back from her, his eyes pinched in pain. She sees all of the memories rushing back to him, several lifetimes flooding back into his system. Whatever is happening to him is sensory overload and he doubles over in pain.

MJ grabs his torso to keep him upright. And then, he starts to yell. Scream, actually. It hurts. She knows the kind of pain that fate can shackle to them and it destroys her to watch it happen to him. On-lookers look on in vague concern as MJ rocks him back and forth in her arms and whispers, “Shh, its okay, I’m here. Peter, it’s okay. Tell me how to help.”

When he starts to cry loud, woeful tears, Michelle leads him back to her car and ushers him into the passenger seat. She lays his head in her lap over the gear shift with some maneuvering. He shakes with the pain until, finally, an hour later it stops.

He heaves like he might throw up and Michelle kisses his sweaty forehead. Her voice is soft, “Peter, are you okay?”

Once he has regained his faculties, he woozily lies, “I’m fine.”

“No,” she shakes her head, “You’re not.” She squashes the hope that he might remember. While his reaction was an extreme one it did not mean for certain that he regained any of his memories, she lies to herself. He had said that he remembered but that could have meant anything, she reasons. Another lie.

He keeps his head in her lap and mutters, “God, that sucked.”

“What sucked?” she prods.

He turns his head so that he is looking up at her and she sees the war in his eyes. She sees him measuring something and she wonders, if he has remembered, if he is thinking that this life is like the past lives and she does not remember him. Or remember what they have been through together.

Peter settles on, “My stomach ache.”

“Your stomach ache?” Michelle whispers. Those three words had dashed her hopes to pieces. Perhaps it was wishful thinking to hope that he had remembered. Wishful, stupid-

“Do you remember?” he asks. His eyes are searching hers desperately and sadly for answers. The flickering in his eyes match the feeling of dread she feels whipping up in her stomach, like he is as frightened as she is and it is drowning him down in torturous worry.

Michelle bites her lip and takes the plunge. She nods. Color returns to Peter’s pale face and he forces himself out of her lap so they are sitting face to face. Her eyes well with tears and she tries to banish them away but they keep coming until she is crying in earnest. “I remember,” she finally says, putting him out of his misery.

Peter chokes on a sob and pulls her mouth roughly against his own. They are crying and kissing and, for the first time in any lifetime, they both remember. It is not a welcome relief. It feels like this moment of clarity could be ripped away from them at any moment and Michelle is terrified.

She grips onto his shirt and fists it in her hands. He deepens their kiss.

“I missed you,” he huffs against her cheek as he begins to kiss down her face to the column of her neck. “Fuck, I missed you. And you were here the whole time.”

“It killed me to see you with Liz,” she admits. “It killed me to see you happy with anybody but me.”

“Never,” he assures her, sucking on the pulse point on her neck that has her mewling in acute pleasure. “There is nobody but you for me. Oh god, MJ.”

“Peter,” she replies. “Oh, Peter,” she sighs. He bites down on her shoulder and something in her snaps. She climbs over the gear shift and straddles his lap. This is a game that their bodies know well, a connection that exists over lifetimes and wars and time.

He flattens his hands on her back and pulls her flush against him. “MJ,” he growls, “You’re-” He suddenly pulls out of their kiss and gasps. “MJ,” he repeats softer.

“Yes?” she says impatiently, trying to pull his lips back to her. He refuses.

She pouts. He looks up at her in amusement and lands a peck on her pouting mouth, “You’re cute.”

“Then, why did you stop kissing me?” she runs her hands down his chest. He grabs her wandering hands and kisses her knuckles. It is such pure gesture that her heart expands with warmth.

Peter runs his thumbs over her knuckles and watches his handiwork, reacquainting himself with the simple joys of her touch. “I’ve called you Michelle and MJ before. Not in this life…but the past ones.”

She is so pliant and warm and happy that she beats away the bells of dread of his words with a wooden bat. Choosing instead to revel in the happiness of this moment, “Did you know? Do you know, I mean? How this life goes?”

He shakes his head, “No. It’s hard to explain.”

“Try,” MJ says.

He kisses her knuckles again like he cannot stay away, “I used to get these, I don’t know how to explain it, echoes, I guess. In my head. I’d hear things, conversations in my mind, things I hadn’t lived yet. So…when I called you Michelle in France…I-I swear, I didn’t know we would end up here. It’s hard to explain.”

Michelle forces herself to look at him, in eyes that now remembered her and knew her and, possibly, loved her. “I know what you mean,” she admits, “I used to get those whispers, too. Of things that hadn’t happened yet. I remember in Russia, before I died, my last thought was your name.”

“Dmitry?”

“No,” she shakes her head, “Peter.”

He brushes her hair reverently back behind her ear. “MJ,” Peter swallows, “MJ, I have to….I have to tell you something.”

Michelle shakes her head and pulls him back in by the scruff of his shirt to kiss along his jawbone. It had been tormenting her for years, jutting out enough to tempt her but staying firmly out of her reach, and now she wants to make up for long, lost time. It always comes back to time for them. “It can wait,” she bemoans impatiently.

“No,” he hisses when she sinks her teeth into the patch of skin under his chin. “MJ, damn it, I’m trying to talk.”

“I don’t know why,” she complains. She dips her hands underneath his shirt and runs her deft fingers up his superhuman torso. Some things are the same life to life but this is a new adventure and one she plans to map out with her tongue.

Peter gulps, “Em, you’re distracting me.”

“Apparently not,” she quips, “You’re still talking.”

His muscles strain as he unwillingly pulls her away from him, “MJ, please.” The pleading in his voice makes her listen. She sits back in the driver’s seat and gives him a chance to breathe. Michelle is outrageously proud he wrecked he looks from a simple make-out session. “I…there’s something you should know about me. In this life, I mean. It’s hard to explain and I can’t even believe it sometimes. It’s, like, awesome, don’t get me wrong, but weird. Not that it’s as weird as being reborn every a hundred or so years. Basically, what I’m trying to say-“

“You’re Spider-man,” she finishes for him,

His eyes blow up to the size of drive-in movie projectors. “You know?”

“Please, Peter. You and Ned don’t know how to whisper.”

He looks besotted with her, she revels in the feeling. “You’re brilliant. You know that?”

“Mm,” she jokingly ponders and throws her leg back over his lap to settle on him. He doesn’t hesitate snaking his hand up the curve of her back this time. She purrs, “Say it again?”

“You’re brilliant,” he whispers and kisses her neck. “You’re wonderful,” he observes and kisses the corner of her mouth. Her breath hitches. “You’re gorgeous,” and he ghosts a kiss against her mouth.

MJ nudges her nose against his, “And you’re stalling.” He winks at her and the time for talking is done. They have a lot more to discuss but, for now, they decide to give in to the present because everything beyond this moment feels less than certain. It feels fragile because at any moment it could be taken away from them.

They walk into school the next day with their fingers intertwined and MJ tries not to fall into the comfortable, normal feeling it elicits in her stomach. This life is easier than the previous ones without question. From things as rudimentary as indoor plumbing to things as revolutionary to her as the Black Lives Matter movement, this feels like the kind of life they could be happy in.

Except, Peter’s Avenging looms a gigantic, red flag over their potential happiness. It’s a bloody red, too. The same red that dripped through her fingers when she ran Dmitry through with her knife. MJ does not have nightmares, she has memories instead.

Ned notices their hands first and freaks out. To be exact, he shouts at the top of his lungs when he sees them. MJ scowls. Ned trips into them, grabs their hands and lifts them in the air like they have won a boxing match and Michelle tries to wiggle her hand free, but its too late. The entire hallway has seen them.

Peter is immune to embarrassment in this respect. In every life, he’s stupidly proud of being seen on MJ’s arm. It would be endearing if she was not so mortified.

“AH!” Ned yells, “LOOK AT THIS! LOOK AT IT!”

Peter laughs. MJ’s frown deepens. “Okay,” Peter pulls their hands down mercifully, “That’s enough, Ned.”

Ned throws his arms around his friends, squishing them into his chest in a hug, “This is, no exaggeration, the greatest thing that’s ever happened.”

Peter raises his eyebrow, “I thought the other thing was the best thing that ever happened to you?”

Ned shakes his head, “Nope. I’ve changed my mind. It’s this.”

It is impossible to avoid the stares of the rest of her classmates after a display like that. The rest of the day drags by in thinned veiled questions about her new relationship and occasional squealing from Sally and Cindy.

And Ned.

Peter takes it in stride because he’s wonderful but it feels suffocating to Michelle. She is not one for spotlight or prolonged attention. The only person she has ever wanted to give her a kernel of attention is Peter Parker.

He senses her discomfort and nudges her in decathlon practice, “You okay?” She exhales. He nods, “Cool. So no.” Michelle shakes her head. His hand finds hers under the table and its ridiculous how calming his touch is to her. “You want to get out of here?”

“No,” she speaks, “No, I’m okay.”

“It’s okay if you’re not,” he reasons. “I’ll only judge you a little.”

His face gets that goofy, teasing smile that makes her roll her eyes but smile all the same. “I hate you,” she says.

He mouths, “No you don’t.” And he is right.

It is the last, beautiful glimmering moment before it all goes to shit. She wishes she would have known that at the time; she would have held on to it longer and cataloged every, single minute.

Ned’s phone lights up. He distractedly reaches for it and glances at the message written there. Then, he looks at it harder. MJ feels her stomach drop as the hateful grip of fate latches on to the back of her neck. Ned spins to look at Peter.

Cindy’s phone beeps. Then, Sally’s phone. And Abe’s and Peter’s and, finally, hers. She shakes but conjures the strength to pull it out of her pocket.

There is an alert. A state-wide alert for people to go home and find shelter. Someone, something called Thanos has touched down in Manhattan and is killing people by the hundreds. She feels Peter stiffen beside her.

And she thinks, no. No, god, not like this.

He turns his eyes to her and they are so defeated she wants to hold him, but then his resolve steels and she sees him move right past the grieving stage to acceptance. He is going to do something recklessly stupid.

The team starts to call their parents and scatter out of the room, but MJ is planted in her seat. Safety is not a High School, safety is the loving embrace of family and friends.

“MJ,” Peter says, “We have to go. I have to get you home.”

“No,” she shakes her head, “No, I’m coming with you.”

“MJ, I don’t have time to argue with you!” his voice rips. His phone vibrates with another new message. She doesn’t want to know what the Avengers are asking him to do. She already knows the answer. They want him to die.

“Then, don’t,” she challenges. “Peter, please.” He wars with himself, she sees it, but ultimately he gives her a gift—he offers his hand. And she takes it.

They rush back to the Parker residence and its, mercifully, empty. She does not need May listening in on whatever fight might erupt between them. Screaming about past lives and Roman centurions can not be explained away. Peter locks the front door. If an alien decides to demolish the building, locking a door will not protect them, but if it gives him a feeling of control over this situation she won’t kill that feeling. Sometimes the perception of safety is as important as actual safety.

“Peter,” she whispers, “Peter, I know what you’re thinking. Please-“

“They need me, MJ. Tony needs me.”

“You’re not even an adult. How can he ask you-?”

“What do you know about it?” he cuts her off bitterly. “This isn’t a game, MJ. People are dying.”

“That doesn’t mean that you have to!” she pleads. She reaches out for him, but falls short when he steps out of her range.

“How many times do I have to die for you before you get it?” he shouts and the room shakes with the fury of lives lived and lost.

MJ narrows her eyes and pushes at him lamely with her forefinger, “I never asked you to die for me, you stupid, bullheaded-”

“This is how the story goes, Em. Every life. Every time. You can’t keep me from fighting, just like you can’t keep me from dying, just like you could never,” his eyes soften, “never keep me from loving you.” She wipes away angry, hot tears. He presses on, grabbing her hands with a ferocity of a hundred years of love and war, “I promise you– I fucking promise you, Em– I will find you in the next life.”

“I want you in this one,” she yanks her hands out of his reaching grip. “I don’t want a soldier or a martyr.” They are careening toward an inevitability and all she can do is hold on to this moment and rage against fate. He may have given up, but she can’t. She won’t. “You’re not an Avenger, Peter. You don’t owe them a damn thing.”

He wipes a lose curl out of his eyes and smiles in that sad, infuriating, all-knowing way that he has done in every life they have shared, “But I am Spider-man. And that means I have to go.”

“It’s a trap, Peter.” She repeats it softer, “It’s a trap.”

“It’s not a trap,” he corrects her, “It’s my duty. I have these powers for a reason, MJ. And if I don’t do everything in my power to save them….what’s the point?” He looks so certain and so defeated that MJ wants to scream. So she does. She screams so loudly it feels like it claws out of her chest and echoes into eternity.

He scrambles for her and she can vaguely feel his hands grabbing her shoulders to steady her, to be her rock in the middle of a listless ocean of feeling. His words reach her gently, “Breathe with me, MJ. Breathe. In and out.”

Femi, breathe with me. Femi. You have to breathe with me. It’s okay. In and out. In and out.

She grips onto his hands and sucks in gulps of air, which does nothing except make her more anxious, more frantic. He shakes his head and coaxes a sweetness out of her that only exists in his arms, “Michelle, my beautiful girl, breathe.”

And she does.

She shutters at the simple freedom of her lungs filling with oxygen and he looks so relieved that she wants to smack him. This peace can only be short lived if he’s determined to go off and die, like always. “If you do this,” she hiccups, “I’ll never forgive you.”

He steels himself, she knows what he looks like when he’s going off to battle and it is the look he adopts now, before he says, “I can lose you today…so long as I don’t lose you forever.”

“So what?” she shrieks, “The plan is to hope in our next life I forget? That way this conversation never mattered. You go off and die and I’m supposed to just deal with it?”

“Damn it, Michelle,” he yanks her into his chest and drops a furious kiss on her parted lips. She bites him, not melting into the familiar softness of his lips, however tempting. He reels backward from the assault and, then, his eyes darken.

She feels her palms sweating. She knows this look. This look is always the beginning of their circle of tragedy. “Don’t,” she whispers. She’s not sure what she’s asking him. Don’t come any closer. Or don’t stop. It feels like a little bit of both.

He decides to risk her wrath, even welcome it, when he closes the distance between them, tips her head back and licks a kiss into her mouth. She hates how pliant she is to him. She hates how she bends and snaps under the pressure of his hands. She hates how desperately she loves him.

Her voice is a ragged, emotional mess when she hisses, “Let me save you, you stupid idiot!”

He easily lifts her off the ground and she brackets her thighs around his back. His chin is tilted up to kiss her as she hovers over his face dropping kisses to every inch of exposed skin. She briefly wonders if perhaps the reason he always dies is because she loves him into ruins, ravages his body until there is nothing left for him to do but die.

She feels tears on her face and she’s not sure which of them is crying, she suspects the pair of them. MJ clings to him tighter.

His hands slid up the jagged bones of his spine until they brace at the back of her neck and, oh, it’s good. It’s always so good. “Peter,” she runs her fingers through his thick curls.

A primal growl rumbles from his chest and her back suddenly hits the wall of his bedroom with a thud. She’s breathless and he’s distraught and they kiss like the world could implode and they would scarcely notice.

She has always loved him, she supposes, but never like this. He may be the super-powered one, but under the attention of his hands she feels invincible. In this life, she knows better, she knows how this ends and she still wants him.

He wants her too, she can tell, because he rips her clothing away like a fever dream. Her head drops back against the wall and he makes work of her clothes and she stares at the ceiling seeing deep, vibrant colors. Red when he bites at her neck. Blue when his hand moves between them. And white when he works her into the fastest release of any lifetime.

They suck in air once the aftershocks of rapture start to fade and seep past their muscles into their bones and, finally, into their memory. Michelle rolls over to look at him and she thinks offhandedly that his hair is a floppy, tangled mess. The way she had tugged at it did it no favors.

He smiles sleepily and sated. It’s that soft, serene look that pushes her to wrap her arms around his middle and press her nose into his chest. He leaves a lopsided kiss on her head and she radiates happiness that edges on tragedy. It cannot last, this tentative peace between them. “Peter?” she runs a searching finger down his torso and his muscles tighten.

He reaches for her hand and drags it upwards to the safety of his chest. Any lower and the game will begin again, she knows it. “Hmm?” he kisses her thumb.

Michelle lip quirks, “That was the best first go of that we’ve ever had.”

He rumbles a roaring laugh, it shakes her willowy frame tucked into his chest, “Is that right?”

“Oh yea,” she nips at his neck and is pleased when he sighs, “Way better.”

“I dunno,” he muses, tilting his chin up to the ceiling to stare at the muted colors painted there. “Egypt was pretty good.”

Wolfishly, she grins, “The vanity at the ballet wasn’t half bad either.”

“Half bad?” he feigns upset and rolls her over onto her back. She squeals in laughter and offhandedly thinks that the intimacy between them is always good, but the fact that they laugh together is the best. It has been so long since she’s laughed like this– unburdened and joyful.

MJ kisses his chin once he settles on top of her and she spots him gazing down at her with over a hundred years of love flowing between them. It fills her heart with so much feeling it threatens to burst. The depth of emotion between them is almost too much for her seventeen year old chest. Fear clutches at the edges of her subconscious and it begs her to protect him, to keep him safe.

He sees the shadow of despair cross her features and he kisses her nose, “Come back to me, Em. Come back.” Her eyes prickle with tears and she turns her head in the pillow to hide them there. “Oh, MJ,” he heaves and hugs her close, nearly lifting her off of the bed and bowing her body into his like a perfect puzzle piece.

“Don’t go,” she implores him.

In the crook of her neck, he gives, “You can’t fight fate, MJ.”

“Fuck fate, Parker,” the strength of her voice surprises her. He yanks his head out of her neck to look down at her and she cups his cheek. She feels the patches of unshaven hair starting to grow there, lightly rough to the touch, “Isn’t that what we’re good at, anyway?”

She sinks back into the bed when he lets her go and sits up. The blankets slide down his body and pool at his waist. She reaches a hand out to touch the back that faces her and he stiffens. Atlas, she remembers thinking once, he always looks like Atlas with the weight of the world on his plucky shoulders.

“I love you,” he reiterates. Even after a couple of lifetimes of earth shattering love, these words still manage to humble her.

“I know,” she utters back.

He looks over his shoulder at her tucked cozily into his bed with his worn-out blankets strewn over her body, “And do you love me?”

“You know I do.”

“Then.” His voice sounds like a trap, “You have to let me go.”

“Bullshit,” she curses. MJ sits up and brushes his blankets away, reaching hopelessly for her clothes. She hears him sigh from where he is seated on the bed, but she does not stop tugging on her clothes. She can’t stop. Motion is the only thing keeping her together and sane and from the edge of a break-down.

The bed creaks, “MJ-”

“Don’t you fucking MJ me, Peter Parker.”

“What do you want from me?” he asks. “Huh? I didn’t pick this for us. I didn’t shackle us to this curse.”

“Oh,” she laughs without humor, “Are you saying I did?”

“No,” he gripes. “God, every lifetime you’re like this, you know that?”

She throws his shirt in his face and Peter takes the hint and tugs it over his head. “You have no idea what this curse is like for me?”

“Excuse me?” he gapes at her. “Are you serious? I literally die.”

MJ whips him with his jeans as she throws them across the room at his stupid, gigantic head. He flinches but pulls them on. Michelle sits on the edge of his desk and starts to lace up her boots, her eyes welling with angry tears. “You know, Peter.” She faces him and repeats, lower, “You know. Every life. Every life you get to remember the last. And okay, fine, maybe that’s a curse. But its also a gift because you get to remember the laughter…and our first kisses and, fuck, every special moment. But I never do. Ever. And, sure, I fall in love with you all over again…but then you die. And I feel it. And then, once the pain has stopped radiating through every muscle in my freakin’ body, I have to live the rest of my life without you. With more questions than answers. There is no peace for me after you die. Only despair and so many questions.”

He watches her in awe and sadness. She dips her chin to the ground and sees a wet tear drop off the edge of her nose and plop on her shoes, “So, yea, fine, you literally die, but Peter Parker…I challenge you to live a life where I die first and then tell me you’ve been the cursed one.”

“MJ,” he reaches for her.

She shirks her body away, “No. Go fall on your cross, Peter. After all, I’m used to it.”

Michelle wants to feel some kind of victory when she slams his bedroom door closed behind her but all she feels is the ripped out hole of agony in her stomach. She expects for that anguish to eventually give way to some other emotion but it never does.

Her phone buzzes incessantly for the next hour and she’s tempted so many times to answer but she resists the urge. She sees Peter’s name flash on her phone for the tenth time and that’s when she turns it off. MJ doesn’t want to hear his excuses. She deserves better than a half-baked excuse explaining away his borderline suicide mission.

Besides, she doesn’t need to face him dying over the phone. Bitterly, she thinks, she’ll feel it when it happens.

She knows she’s being reckless. There is a war going on one burrow away. She should be inside, she should be keeping safe, but if is planning to die then what does it matter if she’s safe? It’s a horrible, sickening thought, but she has lived too long to think any other way. Life stops mattering so much when it happens on a loop.

MJ finds refuge on a park bench and tucks her knees into her chest, eyes cast down. She hears the body flop down beside her but she doesn’t bother to look up.

Ned nudges her shoulder, “MJ?” She leans her forehead against her knees. “MJ,” Ned repeats, “Peter’s tried calling you a dozen times.”

“I know,” she mumbles into the denim of her jeans.

“You know?” he says slowly, “And you’re not gonna call him back?”

“If he’s determined to get himself killed, I can’t stop him.”

Ned tsks, “That’s a load of crap.” Ned softens and puts a steady hand around Michelle’s shoulders. She quickly hides her face in his shoulder and shutters out a breath she’s been holding since leaving the Parker’s apartment. “MJ, he’s scared,” Ned whispers. “He thinks he’s gonna die.”

She can’t help herself, she laughs. Ned gawks at her. She covers her mouth to stop the out pour of laughter. And then, something in her shifts and shatters. She cries for the second time that day in the span of two hours. Once she begins to cry she cannot stop herself from sobbing in earnest. She nudges her nose in between her knees to muffle the sound but it hardly helps.

Ned pulls her against him, “MJ, please, tell me how to help you.”

“I don’t know how to stop it, Ned,” she hiccups back her tears. “It’s a loop, you know? Where does a circle end?”

“I don’t und-”

“It doesn’t,” she talks over him. “It just goes around and around and around. Never ending. Torturing me.”

Ned clears his throat, “Michelle, I don’t know what you’re talking about. But.” And Ned weighs his words. He makes her wait for whatever modicum of wisdom he has to impart on her. She cynically thinks he’s a child with the knowledge of one life time and she is a cursed lover with the experience to know the world is always at war and death is the only end for her story. “-if you accept this, whatever it is you’re talking about, how can it end? You have to be the one to find the courage and stop it.”

She realizes the common thread between each of her lives. MJ rips herself free of Ned’s embrace and stands, her body so wound up with energy that she could not dampen if she tried. She whirls on Ned and kisses his cheek theatrically. “Ned,” she wipes away her tears, “You’re a genius.”

“Thanks?” he blinks.

She has to think quickly. MJ has to find him. There is no time to waste this life. She could already be too late. No, she banishes that thought, she cannot think that way.

MJ begins to flip through her useless catalog of Peter Parker knowledge. She has been observing him for over two years now. There has to be a place he would go before he-

And it hits her.

Peter Parker will not walk feet first into death without saying goodbye. She runs, muscles straining and cold wind whipping at her face, to the last place Peter Parker will go before battle.

Calvary Cemetery in Queens is eerily silent. There are no groundskeepers or mourners in sight. MJ knows people are hiding from Thanos, from the war to end all wars. She realizes she has lived two lifetimes now with two wars to end all wars. There is a poetic symmetry to her lives that she loathes.

Peter is standing, boldly, in his Spider-man suit looking down at Ben Parker’s grave, his mask in hand. She squints and sees him whispering something to his uncle’s grave.

Michelle Jones rages against fate. She batters against the bars of destiny. And steps forward.

“All I have to do,” she approaches him, “is stop you.”

Peter’s shoulders tense and he whirls around to stare at her. She is still wearing the same clothes he had painstakingly took off of her earlier. She sees him take it all in, recording what he thinks will be their last conversation. She cannot accept that so she says, again, “All I have to do is stop you.”

His eyes well in sadness, “MJ-”

Her words make Peter shake, so she repeats them, “All I have to do is stop you.”

“MJ,” he starts, “that’s not how it works.”

“Bullshit,” she says and she can feel the excitement building in her stomach. A flutter of hope, “We don’t know how this works. Peter, think about it, in every life…I let you go. I didn’t stop you from fighting in Egypt or England. I didn’t free you in France or Russia. Every time you died I could have saved you. I can save you.”

“MJ-“

“No,” she interrupts, wildly, “I feel you die. Every single time. It’s agony. And I know, I know in my gut, the reason I feel you die is because I let it happen. It’s my punishment. I failed.”

“I have to go,” he yanks his mask over his face. She will not accept his decision in this life. He is so boorishly stupid– her wonderful boy. She can save him and she will.

MJ takes two long strides and pulls off his mask, “I’m not done talking.”

“Yes, you are.” He tries for his mask but she keeps it from his grasp.

“No,” she says louder. “No,” she repeats softer with feeling, “Let me do it this time.”

“I don’t-” his eyebrows knit.

“Let me go instead,” she explains. His eyes widen in realization. She nods and cups his face in her hands, “Let me do it, baby.”

“You don’t even have,” he fumbles for the right words, “You’re not…you can’t fight Thanos.”

“You have the suit. I’ll use the suit.”

“It doesn’t work like that!” he shouts.

“It works that way for Tony Stark. It can work that way for me, too. That suit has tech I can use. Let me go instead.” He is shaking his head as she nods. She knows this can work, she feels it in her bones. If fate wants to take Spider-Man who says it has to be Peter Parker? Michelle Jones can put on the suit and she can do this for him. He has died for her life after life. Now, its time they shoulder the burden together.

He can see her resolve, she can tell. He grabs her hands on his cheeks and speaks clearly, like the tone of his voice will walk her away from the edge of shared destruction, “MJ. You can’t climb on walls. You can’t…”

“I can swing with the webs. I can use the suit to help me with what I don’t know. I can do this,” she nods, a watery smile gracing her tired features.

“No,” he swallows, “I won’t, I can’t. You can’t ask me to do this. To live without you.”

“That’s what I’ve done every life, Peter. Lived without you. It’s time to switch the script,” she talks gently to him, like addressing a child.

He shakes his head, “No.”

“There is so much life to live, Peter,” she explains. “You wouldn’t know. You never make it past twenty-five. You’ve never had a 30th birthday or had children or grown old. You have never lived. Not in a single life. Dying for love doesn’t make you noble. It just makes you dead. Over and over again.”

“MJ, you can’t,” he swallows down his tears. “I won’t give you the suit.”

“I have to go, Peter.”

“We can’t do this, MJ. They’ll use you to hurt me. No,” he corrects himself, “They’ll kill you and it will devastate me. Thanos and his legion are not going to show us any mercy.”

“Maybe, after everything I’ve done, I don’t deserve mercy.”

“How can you say that?” he grabs her shoulders and crushes her into a hug. They sway at the edge of Ben Parker’s grave. Life and death always intertwined with them. “How can you even think it?”

She wipes a lock of his hair back off of his face. There is so much love in her every last touch, she infuses it so he has some memories he can hold onto after she’s gone. Michelle leans forward and knocks her nose against his, he reluctantly presses their foreheads together. They both close their eyes and breathe together. “Don’t worry,” she whispers, “I’ll find you again.”

“MJ, no-” But the time for talking is over. MJ gathers all of her strength and throws it into a punch at his temple. Her hand aches from the hit. His eyes widen and then roll back. He collapses on the ground and MJ falls to her knees to cradle his unconscious head.

She kisses between his eyes and whispers, “I love you.”

Michelle steals his suit and armors up for battle.

When she goes online as Spider-man she hears the crackle of a dozen voices shouting in her head. One comes through stronger than the others, “What the hell, Parker? Where are you?”

“Peter can’t come to the phone right now,” MJ weakly jokes.

The whole line goes silent as she shakily starts to web her way downtown. She nearly falls to her death a hundred times, but some AI named Karin always catches her before she falls by instructing her gently on how to websling. She knows whatever voices were on the other end of the line have cut her off, probably fighting and discussing what to do with the person who stole Peter’s suit.

She is terrified but Karin helps.

Finally, the voices filter back into her head and Tony Stark asks, “Where is Peter? Is he okay?”

She decides to be honest, “He’s half-naked, passed out on his uncle’s grave, but beside that…he’s okay.”

“What?” a second voice joins their conversation.

“And who are you?” Tony inquires.

Michelle lands deftly in the middle of the action. Avengers all around her are fighting for their lives. MJ swallows, “What you’ve got.”

Iron-Man flies around to look at the Spider-Man impostor and inclines his head, “Okay, what-we’ve-got. Web ‘em up.”

She has never been in a battle before. The French Revolution she is not sure counts as war. She was never on the battle lines or in the trenches. She was a spy and marched for her country, but actual war is not something she has ever experienced. It is a sensory overload. Every single scream and shot and building collapse feels like the end of the world. She cannot filter out the noise. It all waves over her in a wash.

Peter could focus. He has done this for several lives. He is a soldier.

He is war and she is love. She is not suited for this ravaged battlefield, but, as she said, she is what they have here, today, and that will have to be enough. She will make it enough.

MJ shoulders the responsibility she has been running from for over a thousand years, makes her peace and shoots his web.

Peter Parker has lived many lives. In each of his lives, he is shackled with the burden of remembering his previous lives and the responsibility of a soldier. He has drenched his hands in blood to protect the innocent. He knows very little goodness save one thing—the woman who wears as many lives as him, Michelle.

When he wakes up at Ben’s grave, he is cold and terrified. His body aches from the scratch of the dirt but he forces himself to stand. He has to know what happened, he has to go and help MJ if he can. It cannot be too late, he prays.

Stupid, maddening, wonderful woman.

When he finally makes it to his apartment, he is bewildered, eyes searching for a trace of MJ. “Michelle?” he shouts. “MJ!” he slams the front door closed.

Aunt May comes ripping around the corner of their kitchen, her eyes red with tears and chokes out, “Peter?”

“May?” he raises his eyebrow. Aunt May runs across the living room floor and yanks him into a crippling hug, sobbing. He eyes widen and he softly pats the back of his aunt’s head. She is hysterical. “I didn’t mean,” he whispers, “to scare you. I’m okay.”

“I saw you die,” her back shakes in his arms. “On the news. I saw Thanos kill you.”

His knees give out.

May scrambles to keep him upright but he is falling, falling, falling. He bends over and grips at his hair and screams. He was certain, he was so sure, he would feel it if she died. They were connected. She wasn’t allowed to die. That was his burden. That was his moment. That was his destiny. She was supposed to live, grow old and find him again in the next life.

Dead.

It hits him like a bullet to the chest. She is dead.

“Oh my god,” he suffocates. “Peter,” May panics. “Baby, breathe.”

“I-I,” he clutches at his chest, “I can’t…I can’t….I can’t breathe.”

“Peter Benjamin Parker, you will breathe for me.”

He does. And his whole world crumbles around him with every breath he takes instead of MJ.

He searches his heart for echoes of her, like a second heartbeat. He starts to hopelessly think that perhaps May is wrong; perhaps May didn’t see what she thought she saw; each hypothetical scenario fleeting comforts him in-between nasty waves of the truth. Michelle Jones is dead. She is dead because of him.

The world is muted colors. The world is a little less without her. His world is nothing.

When May finally gets him off the ground—it takes too long but every time he tries to stand he sees flashes of her laughing face and he collapses—she shows him the video. She gently suggest he does not have to look at it, but he needs to see it. He has to see how she died. He has to know.

It’s horrible. The crude footage off of someone’s phone is not so terrible that he can’t hear the crack. He does. It snaps like a twig. Her swan-like neck that he had peppered with kisses earlier that morning. He wonders if her body still has the marks from him, like a ghostly kiss.

He plays it on a loop. The crack is the only sound he hears for hours.

Somewhere across town, Tony Stark pulls off the Spider-Man mask on MJ’s body. Her head lolls to the side lifelessly and Tony turns his face away. He cannot stand to look. He had hoped, perhaps foolishly, that whoever had donned the suit and mask would have been an adult, but this girl looks no older than seventeen. He isn’t sure how he knows, but this is Peter’s friend. Someone close to him.

He has to leave. He cannot stand to look at her much longer. He flips he lights off and goes.

Her body is mostly in tact. Her neck hangs unnaturally to the side, but she still looks like MJ.

Destiny watches on in despair. Whatever otherworldly power created the loop, now broken, feels no joy at the end. Poetic justice is not the same thing as justice. They deserved to live a soft epilogue, to have the credits of their lives roll without consequence. Instead, all Peter Parker has is the humming tone of her snapping neck playing on repeat across town. That is not soft. That is tragedy personified.

Time, space and grace all convene. There is nothing left to gain from the never-ending circle of Peter and MJ. So they decide to end it.

And, miraculously, MJ breathes.

#reincarnation au #spideychelle #headcanon ask

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aod4909 · 7 years ago

Note

Who’s your favourite OC that you’ve made? And if you’ve made any new ones who would be your favourite new one

Oh boy, that’s a hard one :| and if you wanted a short answer I’m so sorry (but not really cause I love talking about my children ;) still I’ll keep it as short as I can………………….

Like, even when I don’t like them much, or I get bored of them (I lose interest so fast, you can tell by my posts) I still get feels whenever I randomly think about them or see a picture of them… Like seeing an old friend you used to have great chemistry with but you got separated for a couple years and then you are suddenly strangers and it hurts inside…But you know if I have to choose I guess I’ll have to go with those I can’t get out of my head… 1 is an impossible number…

Arrow I mean duh….

Ebony again duhhhh…

The Ash'Llanyth Family

I believe I haven’t actually talked about them here…So when I first played Morrowind and my English were… nonexistent… I made Verevil or Vily for short (but don’t call him that, he can and will kill you) and I had no idea what the game was even about I just enjoyed jumping around or whatever… so he was basically just a name…Years later when my english became… existent and I got back to it I made Viniriel or Vini for short (but don’t call her that, she can and will kill you) who is now my canon Nerevarine. But the name rang a bell and then it hit me… so I brought back Verevil and made him a powerful immortal who used to be friends with Nerevar and is the personification of House Telvanni so he built himself an invisible tower floating on water in the middle of nowhere where he could brood, read, make potions and knit in peace… (pretend you didn’t read the last part….) and you know everyone just presumed he was… well… dead. Ok maybe Divayth Fyr, Vivec, Dratha and some other people knew better but whatever.Long story short Viniriel literally hit the invisible walls of his tower, they met, they eventually had a son who hated magic (only because he sucked at it and was jealous af) but he would make a good assassin so his mom got him a job with the Morag Tong (that kid basically had all the connections but he was too stupid to take advantage of anything…) He also resented his parents who at some point left for Akavir. He had a son, who also became a member of the MT but then his wife died :’c But it’s ok cause he found another one and had a daughter! At that point Vily appears out of nowhere and says “this child is to take her grandma’s name and I’m gonna be mentoring her from now on deal.with.it.” Viniriel 2 Got to spend most of her time with her grandfather and a little with her brother and eventually she somehow found herself in Skyrim but that wasn’t weird to her cause she was getting visions from Azura since she was a child and would occasionally wake up at random places but Vily was usually with her and this time he wasn’t… Until she finds him in Solstheim sipping tea with Neloth…But Arrow is my canon Dragonborn so depending on Bethesda’s next game that will come out when I’ll be close to Vily’s age, things might change… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

As for Vily in Skyrim… I wanned to play as a male dunmer and he kinda looked like what I imagined Vily to look like so it’s kinda like me just playing around with my boy cause I love him… and I’ll probably make him a follower so he can keep company to his granddaughter as he’s supposed to but offer nothing but his wisdom… no he will not help you with that dragon, he’d rather observe it’s behavior and make a shitty comment about your conjuring technique that he actually taught you….

Giovanni

(I tried to find some sketches of him but my sketchbook is currently mia send help) Giovanni is a very… dear… idk how to call him tbh… He started appearing in my head at high school and yeah… I really don’t know how to describe it but he’s special… Like he’s really his own thing… He was like a back voice in my head for a few years and I wrote a short horror story with him in class (cause I was either writing, drawing or reading novels in class…and somehow I had good grades and got into uni ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ) called “The two-faced mug”? (sounds cool in greek I swear) It was around the time I started struggling with my own personality disorder, I just had no idea personality disorders were a thing back then :c And he got me through some shit… and I’m grateful to him for that and I miss him a lot… and that reminds me I need to get back to writing but drawing requires black magic and writing is a process where you stare at a screen for 48hours +black magic for a chapter and maybe sacrifice your firstborn to actually finish a story… and art school is the goal (I guess) so yeah…

Jane M. Shepard

My maladaptive daydreamer ass things about her and Garrus every.signle.day. no exceptions… I don’t mind… like at all…. but I’d really want to sit said ass down and actually write her story too cause bOi do I hAve coNtenT for 50 bOokS by nOw….

So yeah these are my “always in mind” ocs (except for one that is kinda… an other story I won’t tell probably????)But I have so many nice ones like Hailey and Rebekah and Mor and Amanda and Moira and Olivia and Eleon and Morpheus and Mouse and Lucius that I think about frequently…AND there is my last sim I hope will work out and keep me invested but I doubt it and it’s a shame :\

#anonymous #reply #viniriel #verevil ash'llanyth #jane m. shepard #Arrow Queen of Thieves #ebony von croy #giovanni #do ya regret your question now?#lol #that drawing of viniriel there is a sneak peak #aka started a few months ago but never got arsed to finish it #but i still like it so in the far future i will kinda half finish it and post it #i don't know when to shut up #this is long and my anxiety tells me to read it 50 times to check for fuck ups but it took me hours to write it down #the more i look at it more names come up...

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thefinalcinderella · 7 years ago

Text

DIVE!! Book 2 Chapter 9-SUMMER VACATION

Full list of translations here

Last time on DIVE!!: There should be a spinoff about the training camp.

“Even if you said that you have three days off, excluding coming here and going back, you only have one day to play around fully.”

“We’d looked forward to this day, so we want to spend it nonstop, as much as possible.”

In response to that request, the next day Shibuki, together with Kyouko, led the two to a nearby waterfall, where they spent the morning dripping. Kyouko, who worked at the neighborhood supermarket, had also entered her one-week summer vacation today.

For Tomoki and Youichi, they were having their summer vacation for the first time this summer, and for Kyouko she was finally having her summer vacation. However, Tsugaru’s summer was quicker to escape from than that of Tokyo’s, and though the hot weather lingered during the day, there were no swimmers in the sea because of the jellyfish that had already appeared there. Until a short while ago, even the children who played in the sea until they burnt black weren’t seen much, having moved their turf to the rivers and the mountains, or possibly catching up on homework at home.

In a child’s mind, did the waterfall have the image of “a little sad-looking place?” The area around the waterfall wasn’t very big, and it was always quiet. On this day as well there were only two girls sketching in the shade of rocks and an old person hanging their fishing pole down from a large rock in a stream.

“Wow, look at those birds!”

“Wow, look at those fish!”

“Wow, look at that dead body—”

They gave the frolicking Tomoki sidelong glances as they tread upon the wild path surrounded by bushes, and before long the whooshing roar of the waterfall brushed against their ears, which turned into a thmp-thmp sound as they got closer, and as they approached even farther it turned into a rumbling sound. The four stared at the powerful performance swooping down to the waterfall lake from the steep cliff.

“If Coach Fujitani was here, he’d say something like, ‘Know the mind of the waterfall.’”

“The old man wouldn’t say that. Well, nowadays he’s been overpowered by Asaki Kayoko’s American ways.”

Tomoki and Youichi snickered.

They watched the waterfall for a while, then they turned their backs to the roaring, the sound of water becoming a steady BGM as they went towards the stream.

The wind that blew on the stream was refreshing. Sunlight filtered through the green leaves, sprinkling a clear emerald color on them as they sat on the rocks of the stream.

“I can’t stand it anymore!”

Tomoki kicked off his shoes and socks, and shouted, “Just a little bit--!” as he dived into the stream that was only ankle-deep. No one followed after him. Kyouko turned to Youichi and eagerly asked him questions like, “Did you see any celebrities?” and “How many times have you gone to Disneyland?” Shibuki stared at his girlfriend’s profile with a bitter smile. It was an nonstop day, just as he had wished.

They had their fill of nonstop-ness and returned home, where they had their lunch of chilled soumen (1), and everyone was struck by drowsiness in the tepid early afternoon.

The four laid down side-by-side on the tatami mats, and had a pleasant afternoon nap for about an hour.

It was already two when they woke up. Tomoki suddenly spoke like he just thought of something.

“Hey, let’s go to the cliff where Okitsu-kun always dived from.”

As its name suggested, it was definitely a very precipitous cliff.

It was a separating wall that cut off the sea and land.

The cliff didn’t let the rough, scattered wave crests come near even a little, and its tip pierced the sky at its highest—

“Is that twenty meters…?”

They walked for forty minutes from Shibuki’s house before finally arriving at the cliff, and stepped onto the rugged scaffolding that was laid down, so different from the platforms. Looking down at the sea that heaved far below, Tomoki and Youichi, who were supposed to be used to heights, held their breaths all at once, and lost their words for a brief moment. The magnetic field of the world shook unsteadily, as if the very earth itself lost its stability.

“It feels somewhat spooky. How long have you been diving from here?”

“Since I was thirteen. In the past, when the eldest son of the Okitsu family turned fifteen, it seemed that for a while they were taken to this cliff for their coming-of-age ceremony, but my Gramps broke that custom and dived from here when he was fourteen. He seemed to have stirred up plenty of disapproval, but in my father’s generation that custom had completely disappeared, but I wanted to surpass Gramps and dive here at thirteen.”

“Thirteen…that’s one-year younger than me.”

Kyouko’s provocative voice came from besides Tomoki, who was gulping deeply. “Do you want to try diving?”

“What?”

“Cut it out.”

Without listening to Shibuki, Kyouko walked forward until she was just a step away from the empty space, and crouched down at the tip, hugging her knees.

“Three years ago, when I started to go out with Shibuki, he made a declaration to everyone in the village. He announced that if there was anyone who wanted to steal me away, they should come here, become his opponent and dive from here.”

“Awesome~. That’s so cool.”

“Definitely.” Kyouko replied bluntly to Tomoki, who was looking at Shibuki with eyes of respect.

“Everyone was interested, even me. Though because of that, anyone who wanted to steal me away still hadn’t said anything yet. Apparently when stuff like that was said after a guy like that appeared, they were laughed at by Aya-san. Well, when I think about it now, Shibuki was still just a kid, but I still feel embarrassed about that.”

“So in other words, even now no one has appeared yet? No one else dived from here?”

When Youichi broke into a smile as he said that, Kyouko nodded and said, “Yep,” seemingly reluctantly.

“No one has dived here. Until today.”

“Until today?”

“When I heard that friends from the Tokyo diving club were coming here, I was really excited. I thought that that time might finally come, and that I won’t end up blushing every time I come here.”

Kyouko’s eyes were filled with expectation. Youichi skillfully avoided them and turned around to Tomoki.

“If that’s the case…”

“What, no way!”

With Kyouko’s gaze pouring onto him, it made the bottom of Tomoki’s eye twitch.

“We have to do it from here?”

“Because you’re divers, right? Surely, you feel good about it.”

“That’s just assuming things…”

“It’s alright, it’s lower than bungee jumping. Only there’s no bungee cord attached.”

“Eek!”

Compared to Tomoki who was completely backing away, Youichi was calmer.

“Thanks, but no thanks. If I get injured now, then the two weeks of training camp would all be for nothing. If I do dive, it’ll be after the Olympics, and after I check the depth of sea bottom with my own eyes.”

Kyouko raised her chin up. “Aw, that’s too bad,” she laughed. “But you, you’re pretty smart, aren’t you?”

Was it his imagination, or did Youichi’s cheeks turn slightly red?

Changing the topic quickly, Kyouko said, “let’s go back” as she stood up, her purple skirt flapping in the air.

“It’ll be dinner time at the Okitsu house soon.”

On the way home, Youichi bought up all of the fireworks from a small candy store, in order to have a firework display after dinner that day. The faces of Miyuki, Misaki, Minami, Kyouko, Shibuki, Tomoki and Youichi, which were illuminated by the dim lights of the fireworks, all resembled those of innocent children. A wind disturbing the night air extinguished the light of the candles, from firework to firework, and when the relay for stopping the spark from being extinguished began, everyone became more and more electrified, acting desperate as though they were protecting something tremendously important.

“Somehow, when we do stuff like this, it’s like we’re just ordinary friends.” Tomoki casually murmured while he drew pictures and characters on the board of darkness in front of the fireworks. Beside him, Shibuki and Youichi casually nodded, but if it was looked at from another perspective, it usually indicated that how much that they didn’t have the relationship that allowed them to be ordinary friends.

The end of the fireworks was always lonely.

Even if the fire was used up first, even if the fireworks were used up first, it was all unsatisfactory in the same way.

“Ahh…” Then they broke up suddenly while becoming silent, and Tomoki, all worn out from the excitement, fell asleep within ten seconds of returning to his room.

“Do you have a moment?”

It was after that that Youichi brought Shibuki out to the porch where the smell of gunpowder still floated.

“I want to confirm this once.”

Youichi got straight to the point.

“Do you know that the new semester starts in four days?”

“Oh, I’ve never counted, but it’s really in four days, huh.”

“You’re saying that you’ll be coming back to Tokyo in four days.”

“…”

“You’ll also be returning to the MDC.”

“…”

“What?”

“Today, where we went…”

“Ah?”

“The first time that I flew from that cliff, I was definitely only thirteen, but it was long time up until then.”

Am I just dodging the question, or is there actually some kind of connection? While knitting his stout fingers on his knees, Shibuki falteringly spoke. From the darkened windows of the Okitsu house where the lights were quickly turned off in succession, and only the flickering dim dots of the fireflies in the shade of the grass could be seen from the porch where the two were sitting.

“In the beginning, I dived from one- and two-meter cliffs, like Gramps told me, and when he died I walked for hours on my own, trying to find a convenient cliff…once I cleared a height, I pursued techniques next. Gramps did indeed teach me the basics from the first to sixth groups, but I could only do up to 1½ somersaults. Because when Gramps died, I was still only around eight years old. I recklessly practiced the 2½ from then on, by myself. I might have hurt my back because of that, but it couldn’t be helped. I wanted to go higher, do more amazing techniques. It was our instinct to aim for the top like that. I challenged new things, failed at them, challenged them, failed at them…I dived because of that most amazing feeling when I finally succeeded.”

But then Shibuki laughed without any power.

“But Asaki Kayoko told me that the 3½ is impossible for me now. There are athletes somewhere in the world who can compete overseas without doing 3½.”

“…”

“I can’t do the 3½. I can’t strive for amazing techniques. So now, honestly, I can’t see what I’m going to do for the future.”

To Shibuki’s bitter confession, Youichi only murmured, “I understand,” and cast his eyes down. Although he was too timid to say more than that, he understood Shibuki’s feelings so well that it wasn’t really possible to put it in words.

The surging of his heart when tackling new techniques. And the sense of accomplishment when he was able to do them. Divers seeked that moment of ecstasy that makes them feel like they wanted to roll around, and so would put up with the painful and cold practices. If they had been robbed of that…

“Even I don’t know what will happen if I’m in your position. Something like this could happen to anyone someday.”

Youichi’s voice became gloomy, and in order to show that this was never someone else’s problem, he spoke about something that, until then, he had hesitated over whether or not he should tell it to Shibuki.

“It seems that Asaki Kayoko intended to teach Tomo the 4½.”

“4½?”

Shibuki murmured, flabbergasted, and then repeated it again a few seconds later. “4½?”

“Ah, when I first heard of that, I thought there was something wrong with my ears. Even Tomo himself didn’t really accept it. But during the Beijing training camp, it seemed that he gradually came to feel that way. I guess he truly felt that he couldn’t catch up with the rest of the world if he stayed as he was.”

“4½…is that even possible?”

“Even if I used up everything to my full strength, it would be impossible for me. I know my own limits. However, I don’t know Tomo’s limits. If he could pull off a technique that I absolutely couldn’t do, I might have to quit diving.”

“…”

“But even so, I still might not quit.”

“…”

“Well, I won’t know until that time comes.”

Raising his arched eyebrows, Youichi looked into Shibuki’s face.

“That time might have come for you now. Of course, you’ll be the one deciding for yourself, but I just want to say one thing. I want to dive with you again. At the competition, it was the first time that I had so much fun, and the first time that I felt so frustrated. I want to do that again.”

The sound of fireworks came from somewhere in the distance. The sounds could be heard, but the petals of gunpowder couldn’t be seen. While the night quietly grew late, the matches beneath his feet, the sunflowers in the garden, and the towels hanging on the fence—that black mouth swallowed up all of those lingering summer scents.

To Shibuki, who currently seemed inclined to be swallowed up together with them, Youichi couldn’t press the answer here any further.

“Well, for now there are still four days left. So, take your time thinking about it. But, whatever you decide to do, you should call Ooshima-san. He seemed to be really depressed.”

“He’s depressed?”

“When you decided to pull out, he cried in front of the old man. He wanted to let you go to Beijing because it was a rare opportunity, but he couldn’t do it when he thought about your future. I don’t really get it, but it seems like that Ooshima-san himself, during his athlete days, had a lot of bitter feelings. I guess there was a lot of different factors. Then, after that…”

Leaving Shibuki puzzled, Youichi stood up and came back with his backpack in his hand, which was left in the hallway.

“I have something that Asaki Kayoko entrusted to me.”

“What is it?”

“You’ll know when I give it to you.”

What appeared from the backpack was a B5 envelope, and when he opened it after receiving it, there was a videotape and letter inside.

Shibuki’s fingers shook as he ran his eyes over the label on the video.

“Okitsu Shiraha IN 1937”

Translation Notes

1. Soumen are thin white noodles.

Next time on DIVE!!: The real canon ship of these novels.

#dive!!#dive novel translation

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briseis-lavellan · 7 years ago

Text

Tagged by @meliciousintent

5 things you’ll find in my bag:

My bag is a backpack so the common things are my textbooks for school.

Notebooks, of course. I try to keep one for each subject.

Pens and pencils. Even when I’m not in school, I have writing implements galore. You never know if you have to loan one, jot something down, or utilize it as a weapon. The potential emergencies are countless. :P

Post-it note and tab booklet that I got for free from my college. They hand them out for free at the beginning of fall quarter. Currently, the first post-it is a doodle that drew of Solas. I shared it on here ages ago. Shows how much I use post-it notes. XD

My wallet. It contains my debit card (with a perpetual 49 cent (US) balance), library card, state ID, Student ID, and almost every single receipt from the last year and a half. My regular bag/purse is pretty much the same except there are not any textbooks or notebooks. I have a boring life.

5 things you’ll find in my bedroom:

A really cool tree picture, drawn in pastel, made by my best friend for an art project. The tree looked so cool and I loved the colors that I begged her to let me have it once she was done with it for school. It adds a pop of color to my very gray room.

A ribbon that holds my button pin collection. I love button pins and I started a collection. A majority of them are from college events, but I hope to score more from other places.

A hurricane lamp made out of recycled vintage tins. I bought matching ones for my best friend and myself. She has a tall one and mine is short. Also a colorful edition to my room.

TV and my Xbox One, where I play games like The Witcher III, DA:I, and Skyrim. I prefer PC, but my laptop is a very basic machine for school, but I hope to get a decent rig so I can play my favorite games.

A really pretty blue and white quilt. I was once homeless and I remember there was this lady who would make regular visits to the park I would frequent and sew her quilts (she liked to do some parts by hand). I really loved the colors of the one she was working on and I told her so. I didn’t see her the next day, but the day after that she handed me the finished quilt and told me she hoped that it would keep me warm, and when I wrap it around me that I would feel the love she put into making it. She was Wiccan and she often blessed her work as she made them. Protection, warmth, and love were what she put in and I have an awesome sense of that when I sleep with it. It was the best thing someone outside of my friends and family ever gave me.

5 things I’ve always wanted to do in life:

Travel somewhere that is outside of the US, preferably off the continent. I have always wanted to visit Europe. When I was young, I wanted to visit the famous major cities like Paris and Rome. Now I am aware that cities have too many people and I’m not a fan of that, so I would love to visit the rural villages and towns.

Swim with dolphins. Preferably in the open sea and not captivity. I know that’s not a likely thing, but a girl can dream.

Adopt a panda. When I was about 4 or 5, my grandparents took me to a county fair and one of the booths had a video about how the habitats of pandas were being destroyed, and how they were dying out. I was so upset and when I learned that you could adopt a panda, I begged my grandfather to do it. My grandfather was a very doting one and had a hard time saying “no” to me or my brother (he did sometimes, but it was very difficult for him). He spoke to a lady at the booth and brought out his checkbook and filled it out. After all was done, he was given a certificate and other paper work, everything but a panda. I was inconsolable upon learning you don’t actually physically adopt pandas. It wasn’t until my grandma handed me a stuffed panda that we got as a thank you gift that I became content. I was a fickle 5 year old. To this day, though, I am still pissed that I didn’t get my panda.

Attend a convention. I have never been to one. My guy friend invited me to one. He wanted me to wear a retro Star Trek costume and help him sell his homemade action figures. Sadly it was on my nephew’s 2nd B-day party and his mom would have never forgiven me if I skipped it. So I had to turn him down. :(

Be the first member in my entire family, both sides, to graduate college. Which I will do next month!

5 things that make me happy:

My nephew, who is the most awesome 5 year old ever. My 17-yr-old niece too, when she’s not being a bratty teenager, I love her to death though.

My field trip that I’m going on tomorrow. We get to visit Mt. Saint Helens and I’m excited.

Roadtrips in general. Every male in my family have been long-haul truck drivers, and I think that contributes to my wanderlust.

My grandparents. Sadly my grandfather (the one who adopted a panda for me) passed on two years ago, but I have my grandma still. I got to visit her last summer and I don’t remember ever being so happy or my former self. Memories of my grandfather are sometimes sad, but mostly happy because he was awesome and I miss him terribly.

Baby animals. I mean seriously, how can anyone look at a baby animal and not feel warm and fuzzy? Monsters, that’s the only way I can explain them.

5 things I’m currently into:

Dragon Age

Shameless (US version). I swear this could easily be my family.

Harlots (on Hulu). I am so into the drama of this show. I even like that the soundtrack is modern even though the series is set in the 1700′s. Reminds me of Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette.

Books by Juliet Marillier. I love how she writes her female characters. Strong but you still get a sense of their fragility. They are almost never portrayed as damsels in distress, but rather heroines in their own right. One saved her brothers from a curse. Another saves her lover from the fae world. She’s awesome and deserves to have more readers.

Knitting, though I never finish the things I start.

5 things on my to-do list:

Finish that final chapter of my fic, maybe even work on more sketches for Cassandra (my drabbles)

Actually start my homework assignment way before it’s due.

Clean my room. It is a disaster zone.

Mail my homemade mother’s day card to my grandma. It’s cheesy and kind of bad, but she’ll love it anyway.

Pack my lunch for an upcoming field trip.

5 things people may not know about me:

I was homeless for nearly three years. First year of that was spent living in a van with my dog. Second was spent in a women’s shelter, the third was a transitional shelter before I finally got back on my feet and was able to get my own place.

I can eat jello with chopsticks. It’s a fun party trick.

I am terrified of the sound of popping balloons. I have no idea why.

Not really uncommon knowledge and many do it, but I procrastinate a lot.

I have a weird and secret relationship with a friend of mine. We kind of get a thrill out of being the only ones who know. We don’t really have the same circle of friends, so it’s easier to maintain the illusion of not really being anything more.

#Not Dragon Age #I don't know who to tag #but feel free to participate anyway!#I am kind of boring #the only interesting fact about me is probably the fact I was homeless #that was an interesting experience #don't want to do it again though

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banal-adventures · 8 years ago

Photo

Heyyyyyy guess what!! it’s time for a HAUL POST

(the most self aggrandizing of all posts)

So y’all may know that I just came back from an epic 9-day road trip with my buddy Laura driving up to Seattle and back, and because I’m bad at money I did a lot of shoppinggg in San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle! And because I love oversharing and talkin’ about my business, here’s some pix. (Descriptions under the cut!)

First photo: yarn!! Oregon is full of sheep so I HAD to find a yarn shop in Portland. Sadly this is not Oregon wool but it’s still gorgeous so I don’t really mind. The brown gray on the right is a super soft cotton/wool blend; the charcoal is baby alpaca/cashmere/merino; and the chartreuse is alpaca/merino. The two on the end I actually bought in LA just before I left at the Last Bookstore downtown. They’re hand-dyed fingerling silk/wool blend which I am DYING to make into socks. I also got a cute tape measure shaped like a chicken, a bamboo crochet hook, and some bamboo sock needles currently being used to knit a sock.

Next three are books!! I went to several indie stores and Green Apple Books in San Francisco, and Powell’s City of Books in Portland, all of which were freaking magical. Photo 1 is nonfiction: The Art of Language Invention by David Peterson, 1491 by Charles Mann, and a 5-year journal. Photo 2 is indie stuff: a sketch journal, “The Many Ways of the Potato” by Sanaa Khan, “Maple Syrup” by Casey Elsass, “Shit I Said on the Internet While Taking Prozac” by Jamie Mortara, and a couple fun pins. Last photo is fiction: Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott, Deathwish by Rob Thurman, The Princess Bride by William Goldman, and Anno Dracula by Kim Newman.

Last two are food, basically all of which I purchased at the incredible Pike Place Market in Seattle that I wish I could’ve put in my pocket and brought home with me. I got some new tea cause I have no self control: gunpowder green, cream earl grey, and “emerald princess,” a blend of green tea, rose, and lavender, plus some teabags. In the other photo, we have some AMAZING flavored pasta (pesto blend, porcini mushroom, and lime cilantro), a bing cherry and bergamot shrub, and some ~*~weed products~*~ (loganberry cannabis syrup and cinnamon mints with california poppy and cannabis extract). Accompanying my food is a cool piece of driftwood I picked up on the Northern California coast near the redwood forests.

Lemme know if you want stores or reviews!! The food places you can order from, and they have a TON of great products I just couldn’t justify (like lavender jelly, omg).

#haul post #weed #books #yarn #tea #food cw #drugs cw

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doodlewash · 5 years ago

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Hello! I am Vasundhara. I am born and was brought up in Satara, Maharashtra State, India. A beautiful scenic town situated amidst seven hills, Satara is a five picturesque hour drive from Mumbai. As a child, I was always fascinated by the beauty I found around me. My eyes used to form objects by seeing uneven shapes of stones, clouds, tiles, brown crust of chapati (flatbread). Anything could be endearing for my visualization.

But nobody, including me, realised my exceptional talent for drawing until the age of 6, when I enlarged an approximately 5cm sized image of Lord Krishna into the 3ft tall sketch on the blackboard without scales. Everyone was amazed! I remember my father clicking my picture along with the sketch in his camera. Maybe that’s how I started. It felt so good when my drawings made everyone happy.

The encouragement I received from my grandmother had a profound impact on my paintings that you see today. I have seen her sewing and knitting beautiful things, along with her absolute hand for beautiful rangolis. So, I would definitely say that it is in my genes, as in family, my parents are pretty much obsessed about perfection, and I perceive them as a blessing. Also, there are many members in my family who can draw perfect lines and sketch sometimes, but they’re all in different fields, and never enrolled themselves in the Fine Arts because there was no Art School in our town those days.

But I was very sure and clear about my goals at a very young age. I did not want to go into the fields of commerce or science (the only options we had in our town, moreover it would have added another two years of waiting to go for G D Art & I had no patience to wait). I used to participate in drawing competitions, and even though I bagged the first place in my batch, unfortunately it was never considered as a core subject to include in grades.

At the age of 15, I took the big decision of my life. I somehow gathered courage and told my art teacher in the school that I wanted to pursue my education in Fine Art, that I wanted to do G.D. Arts (Graduate Diploma in Arts). My teacher considered the conversation with warmest regards, later to find out my father’s agreement to my decision and wanting to send me to Pune (two hours’ drive from my town, which was a big deal for my family then, as sending daughters away for education was something they weren’t familiar and comfortable with), where I could pursue my dreams.

I was amazed, excited and nervous at the same time. To achieve my dream, I had to leave my loving family, my town, my comfort zone and go to Pune City, which has a rich legacy in education and considered as the Oxford of India.

My 10th standard exams were over and like every year I bought a new drawing book for myself, so that I could draw the way I wanted to with no worries about other subjects like history, maths etc. My results were out and I passed with 56% which was not something to be proud of, but still I distributed sweets to all the members of my family and friends as a funny ritual. The next day my father took me to Pune to get a prospectus of the college. I glided with joy after seeing the college of my dream. I wonder how hard it was for my parents. I am grateful they could control their emotions while sending me away for my education, or rather, for the sake of my dream.

I got the admission for Foundation (1st year) in Bharati Kala Mahavidyalaya, Pune. On the desired date, my parents and siblings came to drop me to the hostel. Thankfully, one of our relatives were there to guide me till the second day of college, until which whom I was supposed to stay with. I didn’t realise the pain I was going through staying far from my family. I used to cry a lot (as if someone had forced me to go away from them). But college was a blissful distraction. I used to learn deliberately and most importantly enjoy everything which came along my way.

My professors appreciated me all the time. The things I learnt in college still stand strong, the values cherished every day. I had learnt good understanding of light, shadows, depth, perspective at that age. I used to do my assignments in poster colours aka gouache. I never tried watercolours those days (which is a regret, how I wish I had known it is a delight of painting). I stood out first in the annual examination among girls and second in the class. I wanted to continue in the same college for the next four years but as I hadn’t completed my 12th grade, I wasn’t qualified for the degree course.

I had to move to another college which has a Diploma course, which is equivalent to a Degree, that’s how they call it, `Graduate Diploma in Art’ aka G.D. Art. I was selected through merit in Abhinav Kala Mahavidyalaya, Pune, for the Elementary (2nd year). I got to learn the things which are efficacious for a lifetime. My personality developed from a shy girl to a confident artist. I became proficient in subjects like life drawing, illustration, graphic design, caricature, portraits, calligraphy and typography.

Even at this stage, I never considered watercolours for my projects. I used to do it in acrylics when I had to paint on the canvas. I had plenty free time in those days and I hardly did plein-air landscape paintings in poster colour. I remember doing a commission work of 6ft x 6ft mural in acrylics and I bought a first model of 3.2mp camera phone for myself, to help with my projects. In those days I was a career enthusiast and often dreamed of making a career in painting.

I worked as a graphic designer in TimeOut Bengaluru Magazine after I was married. Needless to say, life changed completely as I moved to Bangaluru, Karnataka State with my husband. A state where the regional language was different than my native place. I feel fortunate to have wise in-laws, who always encouraged my art even though everyone comes from a technical background and didn’t know what exactly I was going to do with my degree. I used to get few commission works and for that I had to search for materials which was not as easy as it used to be in Pune. I had to start everything from scratch.

I hardly received funds from the clients which was minimal compared to my efforts and contribution to fetch perfect results. But it certainly gave me different subjects to work on and helped me learn new things. It was heart-warming when people didn’t know me, yet tried to trust my work. Later on, I got pregnant and took a huge break and my baby became my passion. I was enjoying the contrast in my world. My basic trait of enjoying the beauty never diminished and I used to feel the nature intently with my baby now. It developed the little world in my womb. My childhood literally came back to life.

When my little one was about 4 years, I gradually tried to explore the spectrum of my art. I fashioned handmade greeting cards along with customized envelope from scratch. I designed my logo as `Piece of Mind’ and received orders for customised work. It used to fulfill my creative yearnings. I managed to paint some canvases with a different illustrative character. I exhibited my work in Chitra Santhe (Art Market) where artists from all over India get an opportunity of exhibiting their work for a day. My work did good business and I acquired good connections in the field. When I finally felt settled, my husband was relocated to Scotland.

I was going to get a new world but, for that, I had to leave so many things behind, again! I had to search things related to my art, again! I had to prove my talent in the unknown place, again! Most importantly, I couldn’t carry my beloved art materials which I had gathered after all these years. Obviously buying things related to art is not easy. It is quite challenging financially and qualitatively.

We moved to Glasgow in Scotland (a place I had never heard of before). It was love at first site. It released a true artist hidden inside me. Naturally, it took a few months to find what I could do with my art here. As being in a new country has its own many challenges. After dropping my child to school, I used to walk miles in search of materials and waited for my calling. My husband encouraged me to advertise my cards in the Scottish Design Exchange, but unfortunately I could not reach my expected targets. I was completely embarrassed but did not give up on hope.

One fine day, a friend took me to Glasgow City Mission (GCM). I met a few of the kindest people who work for homeless and refugees. In order to gain proficiency in the English language, everyone was welcome to attend. It encouraged interactions from people all over the world and it was a huge confidence boost for me. I had a look at their event schedules and it said ‘Art’ on Fridays. I was overjoyed to see this and I went there on Friday and was enchanted by the lovely artistic aura of the place. People were doing everything related to art, sketching, painting, pottery. I tried pottery for the first time and it blew my mind. I found it very satisfying. I started looking forward to Fridays.

Once, I observed an artist painting a wreath with watercolours and I also felt like experimenting. I borrowed a lightly tinted paper and gave watercolour a try. It was extremely overwhelming. I sensibly invested in WHSmith watercolours and A4 watercolour paper book and started experimenting with it. I first painted live, sitting in my living room. It was a view of sunlight falling on the bedroom. I was happy with the result. The next day, I captured a sunset image while going to a grocery shop. I painted it after returning home by seeing it on my phone. It took me nearly 2 hours to complete it. I was stunned with the alluring effect of watercolours. I wanted to do more.

I referred another image from Edinburgh, which I had captured from a hop on-hop off bus. I was satisfied when I discovered I could do better than I expected. I have a habit of clicking pictures on my phone. I don’t own any DSLR camera as of now. So that’s how I took a shine to this new side of my art. I never stopped from that point. Later on, I got to know that, for watercolours, I should use good quality paper, which must be 100% cotton. I didn’t want to buy it immediately, though I dreamt of painting on that. I wanted to gain more confidence to achieve the best results.

Also, those papers were expensive to start experimenting with. (I always considered my logo ‘Piece Of Mind’ (POM) is going to present me as my brand. And I had no funds remaining at POM. Even though my better half would love to invest, I didn’t want to treat myself with easier options. Challenges can bring out the best in you. So, I bought an A4 size Cass Art watercolour book after I completed my first book with good results. I started posting my work on Instagram. I made a video of the book flipping by taking help from GCM. My second book was a bigger accomplishment.

I do not own a studio for my art yet. As my work requires a lot of floor space, I paint in my living room sitting beside my kid’s toy arrangements. It is funny and challenging at the same time. It is my dream to own a studio plus workspace, with ample amount of natural light, a good storage space for materials, a desk, an easel, and essential gadgets like DSLR camera, scanner, printer.

Now, I am working on my third book, an A3 sized Winsor & Newton watercolour book. From the first painting in this book, I was elevated with the relaxing strokes I painted on it. I have bought three shades of Winsor & Newton professional watercolour tubes. The paper felt very beautiful for the washes and it dries out late so it helps to do wet on wet technique easily. Also, the texture is amazing to see the pigment granulation. Every painting I paint is a subject of profound happiness.

The credit goes to Glasgow and its environment, for being purveyors of eternal beauty of its buildings. I got inspired seeing this and my real talent started to transpire. I wish I had known my passion for paintings much earlier. Being a homemaker, I face many obstacles and get involved in many time consuming chores which keeps me from my painting, but I manage to find the time to engage in my fancy for watercolours. I give myself more challenges to overcome the anxiety of painting complex subjects. Believe me it works the best!

I am someone who prefers looking for art materials rather than jewellery, accessories and clothing. People think I should invest in gold, which can be useful in the future. Either way they’re right. But each piece I create is more precious than gold for me. I may not earn today. But it will be respected even after my life! Gold can be melted and turned into another piece. My paintings will be engraved in many hearts and remain forever as a beautiful memory. Thank you for reading and I wish you all the best for your artistic journey!

Vasundhara Instagram

GUEST ARTIST: "My Profound Love For Watercolour" by Vasundhara - #doodlewash #WorldWatercolorGroup #watercolour #watercolor Hello! I am Vasundhara. I am born and was brought up in Satara, Maharashtra State, India. A beautiful scenic town situated amidst seven hills, Satara is a five picturesque hour drive from Mumbai.

#watercolour painting #WorldWatercolorGroup #artist #doodlewash #drawing #featured #India #inspiration #painting #plein air #sketching #travel #UK #watercolor #watercolor painting #watercolour

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