#I’m definately a beagle

[froody]

*based off the 2023 AKC registration rankings

[eego0]

mcd dog designs pspsps?

Okay so with LOTS of people asking for the dog designs, I wanna talk about the dogs and their characteristics.

In season two when Kiki is telling Aphmau about who the dogs bred with, I interpreted that as what breeds Aphmau’s dogs were (aside from being wolves).

Since I haven’t finished the coloring for my dog designs, I’ll just tell yall where I’m going with them!

——

Phoenix-Dalmatian

Defining features: black spots, black ears, particularly powerful hind legs, medium size, partially deaf

Jiggy- Beagle

Defining features- slightly domed skull, moderately long tail thats carried high, very vocal, smaller than Dalmatians but not TOO small

Puma- st Bernard

Defining features: BIG. Definitely the biggest of all of Aph’s wolfs, fiercely protective, black mask over his eyes, brown ears, brown back, tail down, white belly and paws.

Thorgi- corgi

Defining features: longer body and shorter legs, orange ears, face, and back, white belly, very black-not wolf like eyes. Kind of stupid looking eyes actually, like a teddy bear. Sticks the closest to Aph

Cookie- Bernese Mountain Dog

Cookie was a little harder to design because the breed of dog she was wasn’t specified, but I made her a bernese mountain dog because of their size and personalities!

Defining features: “The Berner is an affectionate, intelligent, and alert dog. They're also gentle, calm, and tolerant. Easy to train, it is affectionate, demonstrative, and playful, and it is generally friendly toward strangers, other dogs, and other pets. large, heavy dog with a distinctive tri-coloured coat, black with white chest and rust-coloured markings above eyes, sides of the mouth, front of legs”

Drawing coming soon🫡

[shivunin]

A Golden Bell Hung In my Heart

For Kat (@star--nymph)—happy birthday! When I was trying to think of what to write you, I couldn’t think of anything more fitting than, well…this. (And here is the AO3 version, cus it's loooong) 

I’m sure you know where this is going by the title, but if not I pose the question: What if Amalthea had been the one to define what her “self” was? What if Lír didn’t have to let her go after all? And, of course—what is the point of immortality if you don’t get to choose how to spend it?

I hope I’ve done your loves justice and that this is coherent. Thank you for trusting me with them, my dear, and again—happy birthday!! May it be ever better than the last. 

"Your name is a golden bell hung in my heart; I would tear my body to pieces to call you once by your name."

—The Last Unicorn, Peter S. Beagle 

“Ghilan'nain's curse took hold, and the hunter found that he was unable to hunt. Ashamed, the hunter swore he would find Ghilan'nain and repay her for what she had done to him. He blinded her first, and then bound her as one would bind a kill fresh from the hunt. But because he was cursed, the hunter could not kill her. Instead, he left her for dead in the forest. And Ghilan'nain prayed to the gods for help. Andruil sent her hares to Ghilan'nain and they chewed through the ropes that bound her, but Ghilan'nain was still wounded and blind, and could not find her way home. So Andruil turned her into a beautiful white deer—the first halla.”

—From Codex entry: Ghilan'nain: Mother of the Halla

“Unicorn, mermaid, lamia, sorceress, Gorgon—no name you give her would surprise me, or frighten me. I love whom I love…You have no power over anything that matters.”

—The Last Unicorn, Peter S. Beagle 

There was no sense in hunting within the bounds of the silver halla’s forest. 

Everyone knew that. The great halla’s forest was a protected space—peaceful, enchanted, even sacred, in its way. A hunter would find no quarry there, nor a tracker prey to flush beyond its boundaries. 

The forest’s trees and glens rang with the songs of birds, its grounds and bushes thick with the creatures of the wood. What sport they might make of each other went unmonitored, for even in such a place it was not the right of any creature to dictate the nature of another. The creatures might fall to tooth and claw, for that was their nature; almost none of them fell to arrow and sling, nor knife and spear. 

The streams of the wood ran with clear water in the spring and summer, thickening and hardening in the fall and winter until their surfaces were smooth as glass and just as transparent. The leaves on the trees were beautifully green, untainted by spore or rot until the moment they turned yellow or amber or brown, then drifted away to the forest floor. The berries grew thick on the bushes, and the halla and scampering creatures grew fat on the fruit. Winters were harsh, but there seemed always to be just the right sort of underbrush to huddle beneath for warmth, just the right sort of outcropping in the cliffs to make one’s den. 

On calm nights, the wind itself seemed made of song. When it played over the branches and leaves of that place, any human who’d been allowed so far might hear flutes or violins instead. A fanciful idea, perhaps, but anyone who spent the night within its borders would have difficulty denying the truth: that the land itself had its own music, even beyond the sweet songs of the birds in the trees. If one listened carefully, if one had a true enough heart, one might even hear it. 

The statues had been there longest. The owls, the great stags with their proud heads, the watchful wolves—they’d stood on the walls of ruins even longer than the trees. If they’d been possessed of memory, they might have recalled a time of blood and screams, a time when elves had fallen by the score and had never risen again. A thousand years gone and more, those days, but the statues might have remembered. 

There were other things they might have known, too. They might have remembered a time when the great halla who’d dwelled there had trotted past the dens of the bears without a second glance, when she’d sang of water over stone, of tree roots reaching deep, of the ponderous pace of the years. Most critically—the statues would have been able to tell the animals who dwelled in that wood that the silver halla who wandered the wood now was not the same as the one who’d once guarded these borders.

No; despite the peace of the forest, despite its prosperity and harmony, it was a different creature who stepped in the bracken and trotted through the streams now. Her body was—to her occasional, distant discomfort—much the same as the one who’d once stepped lightly over the undergrowth. The same strong legs carried her forth, and the same twisting, silver horns graced either side of her brow. For this creature, all was much as it had been for her predecessor. But her heart—

Her heart bade her slow when she saw the bear cubs tumbling down a hillside, their watchful mothers nearby. Her heart ached with a wound no balm could ever heal when she saw the swans gliding upon the lake, pair by pair, their little cygnets gliding along in a line behind them. When humans made their careful way into the wood, bowing their heads before taking careful handfuls of berries from the bushes or curling bark from the willows, the silver halla found herself lingering just out of sight to hear their voices, to listen to the sounds of their laughter. 

She’d heard laughter like that once. It had been deeper, though; she was certain of it. Laughter, the flash of gold on crimson in the sunlight, and—

Gone. 

Whatever it was, it was gone now.

When she sang, she did not sing of the forest, whole and hearty around her. She did not sing of slow growth through the soil and the earth. Instead, she hummed the tunes of humans and elves, love ballads and lullabies and laments alike until she could not hear the songs that the woodlands sang around her.

The land was peaceful, calm, and whole. 

And Eurydice dwelled there profoundly, completely alone. 

|

Before

It seemed like the whole world was full of sunlight for the Commander and Inquisitor since the birth of their daughter. 

The two of them spent most of their time in her quarters, for it had only been a week and Eurydice still needed more rest than usual. Little Psyche was a source of fascination for both of them, for all that she spent most of her hours sleeping. There—the little curl of her mouth. Could that be a smile? Or—when she waved her hand, was that her reaching for her mamae’s curls? 

But, for all that they were cozy and happy in their rooms, they could not stay there forever. Nor would they want to; with Corypheus so newly dead, there was plenty of cleanup yet to do. There were experiments she’d put on hold in her workshop, and small mountains of paperwork in Cullen’s office to sift through. 

And then there were the gifts. 

They’d poured in from everywhere, piling higher and higher until Josephine had, somewhat desperately, sectioned off part of the great hall for their keeping. Unfortunately for the happy parents, some of the gifts were useful, so they could not simply get rid of the lot without checking. It would be painfully inconsiderate to ask poor Josie to look through them and send her thanks in their stead, so in the end the task fell to Cullen and Eurydice. 

There were bright spots: a little cloth wrap sent by one of the western Dalish clans, intended for carrying the babe comfortably on one’s back; well-cured leather from the farmers of Redcliffe made from the wolves who’d once hunted them, some of it cut into neat strips for weaving. One of the mages’ groups had even sent a small orb which, when touched, illuminated the walls with swathes of stars that perfectly matched the nighttime sky. When Eury had touched it, Psyche had been in her arms. The little one had reached for the swirls of color, making a soft noise that might have been wonderment, and Eurydice had been hard-pressed to do anything but set it aside to keep for her. 

Most of it was utterly useless, precisely the sort of things nobility sent to each other to garner social capital: ornate rocking chairs it would hurt to sit in, teething rings of ivory and gold, a cradle with so many gilded faces on it that it was sure to give any child nightmares, and on and on. These things, they were more than happy to record and rid themselves of by whatever method seemed quickest. Useful metals were melted down for reuse, books on the care and keeping of children were foisted upon the keep’s librarian, and the fussy infants’ clothing was unstitched and put back together in new shapes for more practical purposes. 

But—they still had to sort through it all. 

Cullen stood on the sidelines now, unarmored and unarmed, Psyche snuggled into his shoulder. Eury pressed one last kiss to their daughter’s cheek, her eyes closing for a moment at the contact. 

Maker, how he loved her; it still took him by surprise sometimes, as if  his love of her was a force that knocked him breathless to the ground. It had been a wonder to watch her grow round with their babe; it was a wonder now, every day, to watch her be a mother. As he had many times since he’d first seen their daughter cradled in Eury’s arms, he thought how painfully sweet it was to hold something so soft, so breakable, and know that she depended on you utterly. To know that the whole glory of her life still lay before her, every possibility untested, all of it yet new and fresh with no mistakes nor faults to mar its potential. 

“Let me know when you’re ready to trade,” he told Eury, catching her mouth with the briefest of touches. It would be too easy to get caught in each other, even now. If he let himself hold on to her, he would never want to let her go and there was still plenty of work to be done. 

His love nodded, her mind plainly elsewhere. She stroked a hand over Psyche’s curls and stepped into the hills and valleys of the gifts sent for the Inquisitor’s first child. 

“How is the little one this morning?” Josephine asked, stepping up beside him and smiling at the babe pressed to Cullen’s shoulder. 

“Quite well,” he said, smoothing a hand over Psyche’s back, “She slept all night, so Eurydice did as well. It was much needed.”

“I am not surprised,” Josephine said, “It is a tiring thing, to have a newborn. I remember when my Mama had Yvette that not one of us slept easy for what felt like a month. We threw a party for the family the first time she slept through the night. A very quiet one.”

Cullen chuckled, eyes still following his beloved. Eurydice sidestepped an ornate statue of what looked like an irate toddler and flicked the hem of her skirt to the side just before it would have been caught on the edge of a surprisingly realistic rocking horse. 

“Yes,” he told Josephine, “My youngest sister used to cry constantly when she wasn’t held. I would carry her up and down the hallway until she calmed just to give my mother a break. Thankfully, our Psyche seems to sleep well so far.”

Josie chuckled and adjusted her grip on her writing board. The smell of breakfast cooking began to drift up from the kitchens, and Cullen’s stomach reminded him that he hadn’t eaten in quite some time. Amongst the gifts, Eury held up a loose, soft-looking dress and tilted her head consideringly before tossing it in the direction of the things she wanted to keep. 

“Our Inquisitor seems to be recovering well,” Josie went on, bending her head to jot something down on her topmost page.

“She is,” Cullen said, watching as Eurydice considered an ornate, beribboned box. 

“Motherhood suits her,” Josephine said absently, and her quill scratched over the paper. In Cullen’s arms, Psyche stirred, making a soft noise of protest. 

“Shh, shh, shh,” he murmured, rocking her slightly, and she subsided against his shoulder. 

How soft she was, and how warm; he’d forgotten how boneless infants seemed, how vulnerable and fragile they felt to hold. Perhaps the effect was magnified now because she was his own. Cullen did not know; but holding her now woke a fierce, protective streak in him. He wanted to clutch her tight and shield her from the world, nearly as much as he wanted to wrap her in layers and layers of soft things to keep her from every sharp edge and bumpy road. 

Foolishness. 

It was foolishness, he knew that. To remain static and unchanging was to cease being truly alive; no amount of protection could save her from the world. 

Eury fiddled with the ribbons on the box, then drew her ever-present dagger from the small of her back and slashed them away. Cullen smiled fondly, still rocking Psyche, and watched as she finally lifted the lid and took the contents out in her left hand. 

It happened so quickly. None of them could have stopped it, no matter how much Cullen told himself otherwise later. 

As soon as her hand touched the twisting silver horn  in the box, it lit with the light of a thousand noons. Its light was white, harsh, and as soon as it lit the room it was impossible to look away. Eurydice’s mouth was open in a silent scream, lit from within by that horrible light. Cullen willed himself to move; willed himself to step forward, to draw the sword he wasn’t holding, to call up powers he no longer held to end whatever spell held her in its grip. 

He could do none of those things. His blade and armor were upstairs still, tucked out of the way. His strength had drained away with the last of the lyrium, and he could no more Purge this spell from her than he could spread wings and take flight. 

Stuck. Helpless. Vulnerable—he could do nothing to protect the woman he loved, and she was right there. 

Beside him, Josephine stood frozen as well, and he couldn’t tell if Psyche was breathing in his arms—Maker, if she was—she couldn’t be—

As his thoughts turned desperate, as he tried to turn his head to look, the light dragged his love into the air as if pulled by a rope at her waist. Eury went, her head turning barely, barely toward him, those lovely violet eyes as wide and desperate as his felt. 

As if she needed him; as if she was asking him to help her. 

He couldn’t move; couldn’t even take a breath.

The light dripped from Eurydice’s skin and hair, stronger and stronger until it hurt Cullen to look at it. When it had coated her entirely, something changed—he did not know what—and the light cast a different shadow on the wall: a halla, horns weaving backward from its head in spirals, shining with that same merciless light. 

And then she was gone.

Everything, from the moment she touched the artifact to the moment it fell to the ground, dull and lifeless, lasted only seconds. Cullen knew this only because, as the horn thudded against the stone of the great hall, the ribbons cut from the box finally, softly, finished drifting to the ground in a coil. 

All was still.

Psyche, at last, sucked in a breath and began to cry. 

|

The ground below was damp and soft. When the silver halla first struggled to her feet, the earth gave away beneath her and she sank in slightly into the welcome forest floor. She stumbled, righted herself, and panted into the cool air for a moment. Her breath rose from her in a mist, visible against the dark trunks of the trees around her. 

She stood in a forest. 

Why that surprised her, she did not know. It was her forest after all; she knew that as well as she knew…well. 

Not her name. 

As well as she knew that up was up and down was down. 

Something was…strange. She could not hold it in her mind, but there was something not right. For a moment, the halla stood frozen, ears pricked for any sense of movement. 

The wood was still around her. Only the trunks of the trees stood dark against the expanse of white, the snow settled into drifts and hills over the forest around her. She stood in a curiously bare patch, the earth under her feet soft as mud in springtime, the snow melted away in a clean circle. Not right; it did not seem right. 

There were no sounds, no skittering movement. No birds flapped their wings, and no other halla darted past near-invisible in the snow. The silver halla wanted to…reach for something. Strange. But how she might reach, she did not know. Her legs were strong and good, but they were not meant for…whatever they wanted to be doing. Twining with…something. Tugging at…something. 

She did not know.

A shiver worked its way under her flank; the halla flicked her tail to work it out, then stepped delicately into the woods. Soon enough, she blended in with the ice and snow, save the faint glimmer of green that twined around her front left hoof. 

Eventually, all that was left to signify her arrival was the circle of bare earth. When the snow began to fall that evening, soft and downy as cotton, even that much was gone.

|

Two Weeks Later

“I can’t,” Cullen said, knuckles braced on the desk, head hanging low, “I cannot leave her. Not after what…she needs a parent.”

“Of course,” Josephine said, gripping her writing board, “It is your—”

“Not of course,” Dorian said, slashing his hand through the air, “There is no choice—and you’re a fool if you think otherwise. Did you make a vow to the Inquisitor or not? I cannot seem to recall.”

“Do not—” Cullen began hotly, but cut himself off at the soft noise from the cradle beside his desk. Psyche had been restless ever since her mother’s disappearance—which Cullen understood well, because he felt much the same. She’d finally fallen asleep only moments before these two had walked in, because that was how his luck had fared since Eurydice had vanished. 

He bent over the cradle now, but she was not quite awake; only frowning slightly, one hand curled into her own hair. Cullen ran a hand over his face and turned back to the other two. Josephine stood near the desk, poised as ever, and Dorian paced on the other side of the room. 

The problem, as they’d just explained, was this: 

Tracking spells no longer worked on Eurydice. 

Oh, they were no phylacteries—she would never have allowed it—but there were spells to be done with hair, for example, that should have given some direction. And—nothing. They’d used her sister as a focus for a spell next—something which Aegle had taken part in with her usual cheer—but this, too, had not given them enough. They needed more. They needed someone who’d known her more recently, who could focus their thoughts on the essence of her. For that, there was nobody more fitting than Cullen. 

“I cannot leave her,” he said more softly,

“I know you are not a gambling man,” Dorian said, planting his hands opposite Cullen on the desk, “But consider your odds. If we do nothing, she remains lost, possibly forever. That kind of magic is powerful—and I know of nobody who can counter it. If you come with us, we might yet find her. The Inquisitor is a powerful mage; she may have knowledge of the Dalish that I do not. If the spell continues to affect her, that is. We’ve no confirmation of that now, of course.”

At this, Psyche began to cry. Cullen turned at once and lifted her into his arms, automatically falling into the soft, bouncing rhythm that soothed the worst of her cries. 

“Shh,” he said, “Shh, shh. It’s alright, darling; I have you. I have you.” 

Cullen pressed his cheek against her head, murmuring soft nonsense until she calmed again. He would need to call the wet nurse in soon enough; Psyche was due to eat, and he could not hold onto her forever. 

“Consider,” Dorian went on, and Cullen knew at once from his tone that whatever he said next would hurt, “What she will think about this when she’s older. What will you tell her about her mother? Will you tell her that you did everything in your power to bring Eurydice back? Or will you tell her that you abandoned her, alone somewhere with none of her allies to support her? Vanished by some foul magic that none of us know, lost, perhaps captured?”

“That’s enough,” Cullen murmured, but Dorian wasn’t done.

“Will you tell your daughter that you gave up on her mother?”

“That’s enough,” Cullen said, sharper, and Psyche made a soft noise of protest into his shoulder. 

The Commander turned away from them, pacing toward the window that looked out over the valley below. The snow was blinding down there, its covering complete. There might have been nothing under it; there might have been rivers frozen over, or hard stone, or homes and lives lost a thousand years ago. The Frostbacks were like that; they did not give up their dead. They held their mysteries close. 

Out of sight of the others, Cullen reached under the bottommost layer of clothing, drawing a locket from around his neck. He did not open it. Looking at the picture inside only hurt him now, Eurydice’s face detailed with exquisite care, her expression beautiful and at peace. He held it not as a remembrance, but as a reliquary, as if praying to some distant god for guidance. The metal warmed in his hand, and his pulse thrummed harder where the locket pressed hard into his skin. 

In the end, he…he couldn’t allow her to wander out there, lost and alone. Not when he knew their child would be safe here. 

He had to take the chance—that she could be found, that he could bring her home, that they might yet raise their daughter together. Dorian was right to say that there had never really been a choice at all. 

“Alright,” Cullen said at last, turning from the pitiless landscape below, “Give me today to prepare myself, to hand the most urgent matters off to others, and…”

“She will be cared for with the utmost attention,” Josephine said, stepping forward at once, “Please, allow me to handle it. I will prepare an appropriate list and you can approve it; her aunt will, of course, remain with her at all times, and when she is not nearby I will be. There is nothing to fear; she is safe here.”

“Thank you,” Cullen said, his attention already divided. Half of him was somewhere far away, his thoughts on his vanished love; the other half dwelled on the soft shape against his shoulder. 

The daughter he would soon be leaving behind. 

Abandon one by leaving; abandon one by staying. No; it was no choice at all. 

“Leave me,” he said, “to my preparations. We’ll leave at dawn.”

Dorian nodded sharply and turned on his heel at once. Cullen did not watch him go. He sat instead, the weight of the world pressing down on him all at once. 

“She will be safe here,” Josephine said again, already writing furiously on her board, “I guarantee it.”

“Thank you,” Cullen said again, but he hardly heard her words at all. 

|

When the party rode forth the next morning, Cullen hung back an extra moment to kiss his daughter’s sweet forehead, to brush her wealth of curls away from her face. He lingered a moment longer than the others, just holding her, trying to make it last as long as he could.

“Be safe, darling,” he told her, as if she had any power over such a thing, “I…love you more than the entire world, and so does your mamae.” 

The locket was in his hand again, though he did not recall pulling it from where it rested over his heart. He hesitated, then lifted it over his head. When he would have handed it to Aegle, Eurydice’s sister shied back. 

“Keep it,” she said, “Keep it. It’ll be luck.”

“I—” Cullen spoke around the tightness in his throat, “She should know what her mother looks like. In case…”

“There are plenty of court portraits,” Josephine said, “Of both you and the Inquisitor. Should something happen—be assured that she will know precisely who her parents were.”

Cullen’s hand drifted back to his side, the long chain dangling in the frigid winds of the mountains. 

“Every day?” he said, “You’ll show her?” 

“I will,” Aegle said, adjusting her grip on her sleeping niece, “I will, every day. Promise.” 

Cullen nodded, because words were beyond him. He drew the chain back over his head and let it slip soundlessly back beneath his tunic, where it was safe. 

“We’ll be back soon enough,” Bull said, striding the other direction, “She won’t have time to miss you. You’ll see.”

Cullen nodded, already turning toward his own mount—but he had his doubts. 

Whatever had happened to her—it would have no easy ending. This, he knew all too well. 

|

The silver halla happened upon the den one bright morning, when the sun on the snow refracted rainbows into the cold air. Her steps were sure and careful in the powder, but when she rounded a certain corner she saw them: 

Two older bears, a mother and father, fat for the winter. They were curled around babes—one, two, three little cubs, curled safe and warm between their parents. They did nothing; it was too early for them to wake and go foraging. 

She stood silent for a long time anyway, watching and watching and watching, until the sun fell over the horizon and she could see them no longer. 

|

Several Months Later

Cullen couldn’t count how long they’d been traveling. The days had blurred together very quickly, each one so like the next that it seemed pointless to count. If he thought about it, thought hard, he might have found the answer—but it grew harder to think the longer they searched. It seemed that by now, the four of them had seen Thedas in its entirety, from sea to mountains, from forests to plains. They’d been cordial at first, then grouchy, and after the months of searching they’d all settled into a sort of weary, companionable rhythm. 

In the morning, the four of them rose quietly and packed up their night’s camp. There was usually something hot to drink and something simple to eat for breakfast. None of them were at their best this early in the morning—frankly, Cullen didn’t know how the Inquisitor had stood traveling with them all that time—so after several increasingly heated arguments they’d agreed to spend their pre-travel adjustments in silence. 

After that, when the mounts were loaded with gear and the campsite was cleared of belongings, Dorian would do his spells and Cole would do…whatever it was Cole did. Searching through the Fade, perhaps. Then, if they could get a direction from either Dorian or Cole, they’d turn themselves that way—sometimes backtracking for miles, sometimes heading in an entirely new orientation—and when they or their mounts were too tired to go on they would make camp and settle in for the night. 

The morning this routine finally changed, Cullen waited beside his mount while the mage worked. Bull leaned against a tree nearby, finishing a letter to update the ones they’d left behind. The raven to carry it waited on Cullen’s shoulder, preening its wing feathers, a loose string hanging from one foot.

“What do you think, Knight? Is it a lucky day?” Cullen murmured to his horse, his back to the mage. 

He dreaded the moment that he would see Dorian’s head bow in resignation. He didn’t want to see the look on the man’s face when he turned to tell Cullen they were traveling without a course again today. Instead, he kept stroking his gloved hand over the horse’s neck, leaning into the warmth and solidity of it. For a moment longer, he could pretend that today would be the day, that all would at last be well. 

Let it be today, Cullen hoped silently, squeezing his eyes shut. If he tried very hard, he could still feel Eury beside him, could still see her as she’d woken that last morning. Her hair had been in a mass, drifted over one shoulder and splayed over the pillows, her expression peaceful in the early morning light. Their daughter had been curled into the crook of her arm, equally serene. They’d been beautiful, the two of them—perfect. And then—

“Yes!” Dorian shouted behind him, and Cullen spun around, his recollections set aside for the moment. 

“What?” he barked, “What is it?” 

“We’re close,” the mage said, cupping an orb of violet and green light in his hands, “And I’ve made it stable—we should be able to track this to the source very soon.”

“How soon?” Cullen asked, gripping the reins tightly in his left hand. Cole stood there, too, his face tilted down and away so his face was hidden.

“We might expect a day’s travel until we reach her, maybe two,” Dorian said, flicking a stray lock of hair from his forehead, “We should be close enough to search visually once we’re within the range.”

“Maker preserve me,” Cullen murmured through an abruptly tight throat, “I—thank you. Thank you.”

“Well, what’re we waiting for?” Bull boomed behind him, causing one of the other mounts to shy back, “Let’s go!”

The raven shot into the air with a rustle of black wings, the scrap of white on its ankle visible for only a moment before it passed into the trees and was gone. 

|

The wood itself was always loud, but the silver halla walked in silence. 

The forest was her charge. As any other creature that needed care, it was finicky, fussy, needing the halla’s constant attention lest it fall to ruin. She could hear the trouble like a low hum in the distance—poachers, rot, and such—and she made her way in its direction quickly whenever something was amiss. Hunters could be run off; those too foolish to leave fell to her horns and hooves. 

They were better as food for the forest, anyway, she might think absently before trotting away again, their bodies splayed and lifeless behind her on the soft earth of the forest. 

One memorable afternoon, she happened upon a hare trapped in a cruel snare. The wire loop hung from a low branch had caught its neck as it ran along its path. The snare gleamed silver from the recesses of its fur now. The more it struggled, the tighter the snare wrapped until it was choking, gasping for air, its wide feet kicking feebly against the soft earth below. The silver halla watched it in sorrowful silence until the creature’s eyes finally filmed over, for she did not have the means to free it. Breaking the branch would not have let it go; it would still have been trapped, snagged on another branch somewhere else down the path unless someone with careful hands had come upon it and twisted the loop free. She was the only witness when its body went lip, when its legs stopped kicking at last and its soul left its body behind.

When the hunters came back for its body some time later, she made very certain they knew better than to try that again within the bounds of her forest—if they made it back out again. 

It would be hard for them to leave after she’d broken some of their pieces in return. But this, unlike the rabbit, was not her problem.

Yes—there was much she could do for the creatures who lived there; some things, few as they might be, were beyond her. 

The snare was one. The cottage was another. 

There was only one of its kind built within the bounds of the wood, and she didn’t see it until the thaw was well underway, as if the snow itself had hidden the house beneath. It stood near the northern edge, closer to where most of the humans were. It must have been there for an age, for its whitewashed walls had long since fallen prey to storms, the pale covering flaking away in large patches that littered the forest floor around the outer walls. Its thatching was in disarray, the tightly-bound reeds now home to any number of birds and rodents. 

Curious, the halla peered through the time-worn windowsills and holes in the brick of the fireplace. She saw little of the insides; told herself she ought not care. Whoever had once put it here, it was clearly better used as a home for the forest creatures. 

Except. 

Except she kept coming back anyway, circling the clearing around it, admiring the strength of its walls, the surprising evenness of the wooden floors within. There was even a shed tucked up against the main structure, and to her sensitive nose it smelled faintly of herbs and magic. 

She…did not know why she liked that smell so much. 

The cottage was her one indulgence, her one concession to selfishness. She wished only that she had some means to see the rest, to put it back as it had once been, to walk those even floors and lay down in the shelter of its damaged roof. 

But why she might want such strange things—that, she did not know. 

|

Their quartet reached the wood that night and camped on its outskirts, Dorian rightfully arguing that searching around in an unfamiliar forest in the dark was too foolish for words. Cullen chafed at the delay, though, pacing along the boundary long after the others had begun to make noises about turning in for the night. 

“Hey,” a deep voice said behind him, and Cullen spun on his heel. 

“Yes?” he snapped, then sighed, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to…”

“’s alright,” Bull said, waving a hand the size of Cullen’s head, “Here. Message from Josie.”

“Is—” Cullen began, already reaching for the letter with his heart in his throat, but Bull was shaking his head again. 

“All good. Just an update,” he paused, surveying Cullen’s mussed hair and shaking hands, “Be up a little more if you need something. Almost there.”

“Almost there,” Cullen echoed, and the letter crinkled in his hand. 

Bull nodded once more, then strode back to the campfire, his steps improbably near-silent. Cullen took a deep breath, tucked a finger under the wax seal, and opened the letter. 

Commander Cullen, it read, 

Before I address other matters, I must begin by informing you that your Psyche is in good health and progressing beautifully.

Cullen paused here, eyes squeezed tightly shut. After a moment, his lungs reminded him that they still needed breath. Shakily, he sucked in air and went on:

She is beloved by everyone who sees her, and she now ably flips from front to back. Though she struggles with the reverse, I and her aunt are confident she will continue to learn. She is certain to inform passers-by of her every thought and seems most perturbed that none of them quite seem to understand her yet. We are careful to show her the court portraits of her mother and yourself daily—

“Maker,” Cullen said with feeling, sucking in a sharp breath and turning his face to the sky. 

The faint wind cooled the tears on his cheeks until he scrubbed at them with his sleeve. One hand found the locket on its chain, tucked under his shirt where nobody else could see. Since the day he’d lost his Eurydice, he touched it often—though he still hadn’t opened it again. He was afraid to; as if her expression might have changed to one of accusation. He had left their daughter behind, after all.

It was not fair. Not fair. 

None of this should have happened; had Eurydice not given up enough? Had she not sacrificed her role with her people, time with her family, her own eye for all of Thedas? 

Had they not suffered enough? And now they must miss every milestone of their young daughter’s life. Had they missed her first laugh, her first smile? Would she even know his face when he returned to her?

More importantly—would she know Eury’s?

Above him, the moon sailed on, serene through the night sky. Clouds had gathered along the horizon, puffy and white, silver where the moonlight touched them. He’d looked up at that moon every night since she’d vanished, wishing he could know for certain that wherever she was, Eury could see it, too. Whenever he stopped for long enough, the questions crowded in: was she safe? Was she hurt? Had she been confined somewhere, locked away from the air and the sky? 

But now, as every other time he’d asked himself those questions, he still had no answers. Only the wind and the stars and the cool light of the distant moon above. 

And the little sketch Josie had tucked into the letter of a small, round face and two tiny, pointed ears surrounded by a fountain of curls on either side. 

By the Maker, if there was any good left in this world he would make damn sure she would see them both again.

|

When the silver halla dreamt, it was often of a strange, brilliant figure shaped like one of the People but formed of light instead of flesh. In the dream, she sat amongst the trees and the halla lay her head upon the light-woman’s lap. Her horns ought to have eviscerated the woman, ought to have pierced her in a dozen places, but they never did. 

“You have seen much pain,” the woman would say in these dreams, one hand stroking along the halla’s neck, “You have known betrayal and abuse. You have felt pain beyond your years. It is calm here; it is quiet. There are no demons nor voices calling when you would not answer. You are safe now—safe from everything. This is what you were meant to be—where you were always meant to go.”

It seemed to the halla that this was not right, that the information was somehow incomplete. In the way of dreams, she never knew precisely why she thought so. She just lay still and let herself be comforted for hurts she neither felt nor remembered.

Each day she woke again, lifted her head, and began her daily wanderings. 

Each night she lay down her head and felt a deep, sourceless sense of grief and dissatisfaction that no manner of dream could lift. 

No—regret. That was the name for it. 

The halla felt regret. 

She prodded at the feeling as one might a bruise, feeling for its boundaries and origins, but to no avail. 

Perhaps it, like the loneliness, was simply something she was meant to feel. 

|

The trees were tall and dense. They did not welcome outsiders. 

As the days went on, it became more and more clear that the forest itself was alive, knowing in a way that did not fall neatly into any category of magic Cullen had yet seen. After days of brambles that seemed to spring up directly in their way, branches near-falling on Dorian when he tried to use his tracking spell, and Cole’s somewhat ominous pronouncement that they weren’t all welcome, Cullen had begun to despair. 

Now, with a headache pounding at Cullen’s temples, the four of them faced a racing river. There was not supposed to be a river here. No river entered nor exited this wood on the map, though there was meant to be a lake somewhere further in. And yet—here it was, and no bridge with which to cross it. 

Eury was somewhere on the other side. Dorian’s spell, before it had been broken by a falling tree limb, had been clear about that.

Cullen crouched, pinching the bridge of his nose for a moment and trying to think around it. There could be an easier fording place elsewhere on the riverbanks. They might split up, search for a better place to ford it further down- or upstream. They might cut down a tree or section off one of the downed trunks to make a simple bridge. Or—

“Cullen,” Cole said in a strange voice, and Cullen turned his head to look at the boy.

“Yes? What is it?” Cullen said. 

“The wood doesn’t want us.”

“Yes,” Cullen said, frowning, “I’d divined that for myself, thank you. Now, we need to—”

“No,” Cole said, shaking his head and coming closer to crouch at Cullen’s side, “It doesn’t want us. Wrong, too much metal; push it out, like a splinter under skin. The river is a wall.”

“Metal—What…?” 

Ah; yes, perhaps that was it after all. He’d heard of such places before—places that had a mind of their own. The Blackmarsh, the Korcari Wilds, the Brecilian Forest—and there were some things such places did not tolerate. 

Cullen pushed to his feet, ignoring the usual wave of dizziness that followed. One hand reached for the buckle at his shoulder. 

“Here,” he said, catching Bull’s eye, “Take this for a moment.”

It was quick work to remove it all, for he’d long practice donning and unlatching all his armor. The Qunari took it with a look of understanding, and none of them stopped Cullen when he shouldered his pack and waded into the shallow end of the river. 

Cullen’s boot stretched over the water for a moment. He steeled himself, took a breath, and set it in the white foam of the rushing river below.

To his shock, the racing water stilled. The foam gathering along the top of the water drifted gently, piling up until it made a sort of path through the center. In the smooth, still water, he could see a clear reflection of the tree’s crowns, the small patches of blue interspersed amongst the green. He could see his own face, drawn and unshaven and haggard. 

Cullen swallowed and waded on until the water was at his knees, then mid-thigh. He hoisted the straps of the pack higher to keep it from the wet and strode on, ignoring the drag at his legs, ignoring the reflection in the water, until at last his feet met the damp rock of the other side. 

“I think—” he began, turning, but his words were lost in the roar of the river as it sped up again behind them. 

The others tested the waters as he had, but it would not let them pass and it would not let Cullen return. It seemed that they had come as far as they were going to come. 

The rest of the journey must be his and his alone. 

At last, Cullen swallowed, pressed a fist to his heart, and turned away. His pack was a heavy but reassuring weight at his back. The forest echoed with sudden birdsong around him, and the sun shone brightly between the gaps in the canopies above. 

Maker, he prayed silently as he stepped into the clear path between the trees, let her be near.

|

It was almost eerie the way the forest seemed to part for Cullen now that he’d left his weapons, armor, and traveling companions behind. 

The ease of it left him uneasy, jumping at shadows, wary over every rustle in the bushes even after it became obvious that the wood was improbably full of wildlife. Birds winged from every bough, some in colors he’d never seen on such a creature. He saw glimmering eyes in the distance at night more than once. After one day’s fruitless searching, he returned to his camp to find tracks all around the fire. Cullen slept in the trees after that, careful always to pack up and hang his food when he was gone. Something told him he’d have very little luck with hunting here, even if he were equipped with something he could use to hunt. 

Uneasy as Cullen was, he never really felt like he was in danger. Nothing growled in the dark; nothing hunted him in the bushes. For all that the forest was technically located in Ferelden, there were no signs that the Blight had ever touched this place. He saw signs that other people had been here recently, but as far as he could tell none of them remained. At least, in his days of searching he never heard or saw someone else. 

Still: it was a beautiful forest, and edible roots and berries seemed plentiful enough. If Cullen hadn’t been searching for the lost love of his life, he might even enjoy himself. But…well, as matters were, he felt guilty for every beauty that he saw, as if even the potential for enjoyment took something away from the seriousness of his search. In recompense, he doubled down: less sleep, more walking, even when it was by the light of the crystal Dorian had passed off to him before he’d left. 

On one such evening, Cullen held the crystal aloft, peering into the darkness around him. He was fairly certain he knew the way back to his makeshift camp. This direction was simply the only one left that he hadn’t searched yet. If he just went a little further—

A tree root in the path; his foot caught on it unexpectedly and he launched forward, then down, down, down. There’d been no rain, but the bank he rolled down was slick with newly-wet mud anyway. By the time he reached the bottom, he was all but coated in it, and dizzy and sore besides. As he rolled the last few feet and stared, dazed, at the sky, he let go of the crystal lighting his way. It slid away in the bracken, still lit. 

Briefly, before he gave in to the dizziness that fogged his mind, Cullen could have sworn he saw a…halla, standing over him, its horns glimmering silver in the intermittent moonlight. 

And then all was dark. 

|

It wasn’t that the halla had never seen a human up close before. She’d seen plenty: gatherers with lowered eyes and upraised palms, backing slowly away; hunters she drove away and those she left broken in the bracken and earth. 

In all her days, she’d never seen one quite like this. 

The human’s face was lit in the flicker of the stone he’d held. He was pale, dark under the eyes, with muddy golden hair. She saw little of his eyes, for he closed them almost as soon as she stepped closer, but what she had seen reminded her of the soft underbark of a pine tree, beaded with sap in the sunlight. 

Strange; another of those odd urges she could not shake. She wanted to touch his hair—but carefully nudging it with her nose did not seem to satisfy the urge. What did she want?

Why did it distress her to see the creature lying at the bottom of the slope like that, limbs askew? He reminded her of that poor snared rabbit, kicking and kicking until the wire finally cut its neck. 

She did not like that. 

No; no, she did not. 

So instead of turning away, as she so often had, she stepped closer and made a choice.

|

Cullen woke on the forest floor. 

For a moment, he didn’t know where he was. A raindrop hit his cheek, filtered from the overhang above, and when he blinked it all came into focus: a grey day, but it was day now. He lay half-under the shelter of a large, flat shelf of granite. The cold wall of rock pressed against his back, and when he shifted he found himself supported by a bed of leaves and vines. What…?

You were injured, a painfully familiar, rough voice whispered. Cullen sat up, immediately knocking his head against the rock above. 

That was unwise, Eurydice’s voice went on, cool and disinterested and agonizingly dear, your head does not need more damage, yes? Yes. 

“Eurydice,” he gasped out at last, eyes still squeezed shut, one hand bracing against the earth and the other pressed to his aching head. 

A pause. 

Rest now, the voice said, a note of command in its tone. 

A note—but not one he heard aloud, Cullen realized. However the voice was speaking, its words were whispered directly into his mind. The old fears crept back again; that this was a demon somehow reaching into his thoughts to give him what he wanted most deeply. Would he betray himself by giving in just because it sounded like his…his…

“Eurydice?” he said again, and opened his eyes.

A creature stood before him, silhouetted against the grey of the day beyond. It was a halla; he knew that at once. But where bone-white horns ought to curl back from its head, it bore a different set. They were silver, as if they’d been dipped in metal or mercury, and even the faint sunlight seemed to trace them with exquisite care. Along the creature’s foreleg, there were traceries of green. At first, Cullen thought that it might have stepped through undergrowth of some sort, but then he looked closer. 

The green pulsed with a faint, near-inaudible hum that Cullen knew very well. He’d slept beside that hum. He’d held it to his lips, against his skin. That was the Anchor; he’d stake his life on it. There was no fabricating something like that. And her eyes…

Violet, beautiful deep violet, shining faintly when she blinked. 

Those were Eurydice’s eyes. He knew them better than he knew his own. 

“Eurydice?” he said again, and slid from beneath the granite shelf, “Eury—it’s me. Don’t you remember…?”

She didn’t. He could see she didn’t. 

The halla cocked her head, silver horns winking in the light. 

You will not heal if you do not rest, she said, If you walk away, I will not follow you.

Cullen’s hands curled into fists at his sides, the abrupt fear and anger and relief twisting inextricably in his chest. 

She was here; she was gone. He’d found her; she was lost to him. 

Beyond all that—Maker, his head ached. He could barely think past the throbbing.

Rest, she said again, and—well. There seemed to be no better choice. Still watching her as if she’d vanish when he took his eyes away, Cullen settled back into the hollow made by the granite and lay on his side. 

|

Eurydice was gone when Cullen woke, but his head had stopped aching. Rather than try to find his camp again, he stayed in place, neatening the little alcove for lack of anything better to do and then performing his usual stretches in the sunlight when she still hadn’t returned. 

She arrived in the glen at last sometime around noon, judging by the height of the sun, when Cullen’s stomach had begun to grumble badly. He was just beginning to consider trying to forage in the berry bushes just past this little clearing when she broke through the trees on the other side, trotting into the light and surveying him with a tilt of her head. 

You are still here, she said, Are you in pain?

“I—no,” Cullen said, throat tightening at the sound of her voice, “No—I am quite well.”

Then why do you remain?

“I…wanted to offer my thanks. And—offer to help you, if I might.”

She tilted her head the other way, the sharp points of her horns catching the sunlight. Cullen ignored them and focused on her eyes. 

“There must be tasks you need help with,” he said, for he’d had some time to think about how he might stay near her, “I—I would be glad to offer my service. Surely…surely having hands would be of use to you? I would be glad to assist, however you may need it.” 

For a long moment, he thought she might simply choose not to answer him at all. Then, she huffed and began to trot away. 

Come, then, she said, there are things to be done, yes? Yes.

Cullen swallowed hard, straightened his shoulders, and strode after her.

|

The halla still dreamed, but sometimes the words were different. 

This night, the light-woman stroked her flank and spoke in the gentle tone of a mother correcting a wayward child. 

“Do not trust a human,” she chided, and the halla wished for nothing more than to not be touched, though she could not lift her head or move away. 

“He is not meant for this place,” the woman went on, “He upsets the balance. You do not need any help he can offer; you are better off on your own. You have been doing quite well so far, have you not?”

For the first time, the halla, dreaming, wondered: 

Who is she? And, Why does she tell me what I should do? I know what I should do. I do not need her help. 

When the dream ended, she did not send the man away. There were things—specific things—that she wanted him to do. But…perhaps she would not start with those. Perhaps she would watch him first, to see what he would do. 

Yes; yes, that was wisest. 

First, she would learn more; then she would ask. 

|

Cullen knew when he was being tested. 

There were simple tasks: move this rock here or there for the snakes to den under, drag this branch closer to the river so it doesn’t start too large a fire, put this little bird back in its nest before it’s trampled. He performed all the tasks without complaint, searching always for some hint that she still knew him. Two years ago, he would have thought himself mad for playing errand boy for a talking forest creature, let alone believing that said creature was the mother of his child. Now, though…

Now, he did as she asked simply for the pleasure of hearing her speak to him again. 

He thought often that he should go back to the others, explain what he’d seen, but then what? Could he guarantee that she would still be here when he returned? 

They’d searched for too long for him to walk away now. So he stayed instead, did all she asked him, and lived for the next time he heard her voice—distant as it was.

At last, perhaps a week after he’d woken under the rock shelf, Eurydice nudged him awake and indicated he follow her. Cullen rose, rubbing sleep from his eyes, and trailed behind. It seemed that the forest itself moved for her, or perhaps it was simply that she knew the wood so well that she could easily pick a path between the trunks and bushes without needing to consider where she was going. 

There is a place, she told him after over half an hour of walking, It is near the edge. You can fix it. 

“What?” Cullen asked, for he’d expected another trivial task. 

The halla looked back over her shoulder, one delicate hoof raised. After a moment, she turned away and carried on. 

It is an important place, she told him, a note of impatience in her voice, A good place. A…house. It is broken, but it is good. You can fix it. You are a human. Use your hands.

“I…” he bit back the refusal, the explanation that for all his youth growing up at a farm he didn’t clearly remember how to make major household repairs. The explanation would mean little to her, though. He knew enough to know that much. Instead, he took a deep breath and continued:

“I will do what I can.”

|

The cottage might have been lovely once, at the top of a low hill with the forest laid out around it. There was a bit of a meadow, too, with tentative flowers tucked her and there amongst the tall grasses. A stone path still led up the hill to it, and the stone steps seemed intact. 

That was the best he could say for it. 

The walls were falling apart; he could see daylight through them in several places. The roof was missing large sections, and what remained was patchy at best. A large section of the fireplace had fallen in, and when he stepped inside the floor reeked of animal droppings and rot. On the fifth step, his foot went through. 

At first glance, he would have said it was hopeless, except he walked outside and found Eurydice, dancing back and forth in an attempt to look inside again. When she turned her violet eyes upon him again, there was only one answer he could give. 

“I’ll try,” Cullen told her. 

So he did. 

|

There was much to be cleaned from the dwelling. The silver halla drifted back periodically to check on the human. He fashioned a broom from twigs and things and cleaned it all out first. That was the boring part. But the rest…

She liked watching him. Sometimes, he grew angry and shouted at the wood and the paint. Sometimes he sang. Sometimes he did nothing at all; only lay on his back before the damaged building and watched the sky above. At night, when the stars came out, sometimes she came and watched with him. That…made sense, somehow. Seemed right. 

“Do you remember a time before this forest?” he asked her on one such evening. She sat with her legs folded beneath her several feet away, just in case. When the man spoke, the hart tilted her head his direction. 

What do you mean?

“Before you came to be here,” he said, his face lit only by the moonlight, “Do you remember what it was like?” 

There was no time before the forest, she told him, puzzled, There is nothing to remember. I have always been here. I am the forest.

He seemed to consider this in silence for a time, but he spoke again at last. His voice was odd; crumbling, like old clay.

“Have you tried?” he asked, “To remember?” 

Why should I? I have everything I need. I am happy.

She hadn’t spoken false, but the words didn’t sit right with her. The halla shifted uneasily, flicking her tail to the side, shaking her head as if casting off the touch of an insect. 

I am leaving, she said abruptly, and trotted away into the woods. 

The man didn’t call after her. 

|

At long last, the cottage was clean and dry. Now, the floors had to be patched and repaired in places. Water had soaked into the corners, expanding and rotting the wood in turns. Whole sections had to be ripped up and replaced—and Cullen wasn’t certain at first if he could trust the timber and tools that simply turned up one day, set neatly beside the front door. 

So: floors, which he must then sand and finish. But before that, he must do something about the roof—for what was the point in fixing the floors if they might be rained on again before he could get to them? So, then, the roof, and then the floors—and the stairs, of course, to the small second level. 

Maker, he was glad the foundation was solid, that the bones were good. He’d no idea what he might do if he had to shore it up from beneath, if he had to replace the studs and struts or patch a cracked foundation. At least he could count on the fundamentals. 

|

“Do you know where all this comes from?” the man asked the halla one day. His foot nudged a board, laid to the side of the door. 

The halla glanced at it, then turned her attention back to the man. He was fascinating, with his curling golden hair and his strange fingers and ears. Sometimes he waved his hands when he talked, and sometimes his face turned paler or pink or red in the sun. It made little sense to her, but she could not shake the feeling that if she just kept watching him she would come to understand it all in time. 

From me, she told him, and he looked at her with surprise. 

“From you? But how? You don’t carry them here.”

No, she said impatiently, I told the forest how I want this place to look. It brings the things for me. 

“But the forest can’t build it for you,” the man said, looking at her for a moment and dropping his eyes, “That’s why you asked me.” 

He did that often, too—looking away. She did not like it. She wanted to keep looking at his eyes.

Yes, she said, Yes. When will you be done?

The man sighed and ran a hand back through his hair. The curls were pressed back for a moment, then sprung back into shape again. The halla watched them intently, as if each coil held a secret she might yet unravel. 

“I don’t know,” he said, “I don’t know.”

|

Eury came to watch Cullen sometimes, and despite his hopes she never seemed to see him as anything more than an intriguing distraction. There was no sign that she knew what they’d been to each other or what they’d left behind at Skyhold. There was no sign she had much personal interest in him at all.

Until one day there was. 

Cullen was resting by the side of the house, sipping from his water. The thatching was near-done, and thank the Maker for that. He’d move on to replacing some of the boards on the stairs and…

What is that? Eury asked. 

Cullen started; he hadn’t heard her arrive. Well, he rarely did these days. 

“What?” he asked, and she inclined her head to his arm, where he’d been toying with his braided leather bracelet.

“Ah,” he said, and the grief struck him out of nowhere, as it often did. He swallowed around the lump in his throat and toyed with the cool bump of the bead at the end. 

“It was a gift,” he said, “Someone I care for a great deal made them for me. I’ve more in my pack.”

He’d packed nearly all of them when he left Skyhold. He’d taken several from the hilt of his sword before leaving it with the others, too. It had seemed…wrong to leave them behind. Wrong, when he needed every piece of her that he could hold. 

He had left a few, though—the ones without beads. For Psyche, he’d told Josephine, who’d taken them from his hand like they were made of crystal or porcelain instead of worn leather. 

Eury watched closely while he fetched the rest and even deigned to come closer to inspect them up close. 

They are very neat, she said after a moment, doubtfully. 

There was something odd about her voice, and it took Cullen a moment to place the tone. She’d sounded like that before, he thought. When she was unhappy with how one of her gifts had come out, when she wasn’t sure if she should give him yet another to wear on his wrist. 

“They are good luck,” he told her, and when he held one out she didn’t move away, “I…could give you one, if you’d like?”

She looked like she might shy away at that, so he kept himself carefully still. If he moved an inch, he thought she might bolt at once. One minute went by, and then another. A breeze blew through, cooling the sweat on his clothes. 

Yes, she said at last, Yes. 

Cullen moved closer than she’d allowed him yet, moving very slowly. She tilted her head his way and he marveled at the shine of silver on her long, braided horns, at the graceful slope of her neck. It was horrible, what had been done to her; and yet, it did not seem horrible to look at her now. She looked like moonlight given form, like art that breathed and moved.

It seemed wrong to tie the bracelet off around her horn; too much like some kind of harness. He wove it into the base of the horn instead, tying only the ends together so it wouldn’t fall off. She allowed this maneuver and only shook her head back and forth when he finally stepped away. 

Thank you, she told him gravely, and darted off for the forest again. 

But—but she’d nudged his arm first. She’d let him touch her. 

And so—there was still hope. 

|

The forest was well, but the silver halla was not. 

Something was wrong. 

She did not know what. She did not know what. 

She visited the human fretfully, watching him from a distance for a time. The roof was finished, and the work moved inside. She did not like this. How could she see him if he was hidden away? 

Yet she could not determine why this bothered her. Why losing sight of him caused her to creep closer than she’d meant to, to peer through cracks and windows at the man. 

Why did she care? Why did she want to look at him again, to hear the sound of his voice? Sometimes she could hear him singing from a distance and the sound of it made her want to wail in grief.

Something was wrong and lost, and she couldn’t find it; she couldn’t even name it. But he…

He made the hole seem smaller somehow. 

So she kept coming back. 

|

The stairs were solid enough to trust, though Cullen despaired about the color of some of them. He supposed there was no way to properly match wood this old, but the lack of evenness bothered him. Ah, well; there were more pressing things. Repairing the fireplace, for one, and that was a chore. Filling in the worst of the cracks and holes in the walls—yes, that too, and fiddly work it would be. At least he could move his things inside and sleep under cover when it rained. 

One evening, he lay outside looking up at the stars as he often did. There was a rustle in the bushes and she was simply there, all at once, as if she’d appeared to him from nothing. Cullen didn’t react; he’d learned it was best not to. 

Where did you come from? she asked him, Before you were here. 

There was a focus to the question that made him turn his head. 

“I was…at Skyhold,” he said after a moment, “I…used to lead an army.”

Used to; that stung, even though he knew he would never have been able to stay without her there at his side. 

Skyhold, she said, and nothing else. 

That night, she slept just outside the front door. When he couldn’t stop checking to see if she was still there, Cullen took his bedroll outside and curled up only a few inches away. 

This…wasn’t quite what it had once been, but it was still her, and they were still here together.

And…even if she was gone when he woke, he’d still spent the night close to her. Cullen would count it as a victory. 

He needed every victory he could get. 

|

The time before. 

That was the problem. She’d known it for a lie when she’d told the human she was happy, but there had been no question in her mind that the rest was true, too. 

But—there was a time before the forest. She remembered arriving here, so she must have arrived from somewhere. 

But where?

The silver halla pondered this question for a long time. She even returned to the spot in her earliest memories, though it looked different in the spring than it had in the winter. 

The dissonance troubled her, fretted at her mind, and she spent more and more of her time at the cottage to make the thoughts go away. The questions seemed less pressing when she watched the man work, filling in the cracked walls with white clay that had appeared in a bucket one morning. They began to speak to each other during these hours.  

Even stranger, she began to enjoy it—an alien sensation, that, to crave the sound of someone else’s voice. 

Why are you doing that? she might ask him, and he might find a window to peer through for his answer. 

“If I don’t close up the holes between bricks, the heat will escape,” he might say in response, or, “I am tired. I am sitting down to rest now.”

Or, one sun-drenched morning when she’d wandered into the glade to find only the sound of him breathing inside, labored and heavy:

“I cannot work today,” he told her when she made her presence known.

Why? she asked, peering through the hole where a door ought to go. Her horns made it so she could not look entirely inside, but she tried anyway, until the sharp ends scraped along his new doorframe. 

“I am not well.” 

He seemed unwell—or, at least, he seemed like he wasn’t himself. His face was even paler than usual, almost as pale as her coat, and the pleasant flush of exertion he usually had about his cheeks was gone. He looked wet, too, golden ringlets sticking to his forehead, the collar of his tunic dark and damp. 

She did not ask what was wrong. She had little understanding of such things, and even if she did it seemed…wrong to ask, especially when he looked so dreadful over it. 

Can you reach the door? she asked, and the point of her horn carved another new line on the lintel. 

The man made it at last, stumbling toward her and crawling when his feet would no longer cooperate. When he reached her at last, she bent her head and bade him hold on. Surely it would be better for him to rest in the light; it offered the forest creatures comfort to curl up at her side in pools of sunlight. Perhaps it would be the same for him. 

Indeed, he did seem to rest easier once he’d curled up along her flank. After a time, his hand curled into the longer fur along her neck, and the silver halla found to her surprise that she did not mind his touch at all.

Odd, that this should feel so perfectly natural; odd, that she felt the urge to tuck the hair back and away from his face. How would she even do such a thing? She hadn’t the fingers for it. 

She considered this while he slept, when he murmured fevered words in his sleep: 

“Eury,” he said, and “No,” and, most bewilderingly, “Psyche.” 

That last word revolved over and over in her mind, fixing itself in place. She could not think around the word; it took up all the space, frightening in its intensity. She might have run if he hadn’t been lying bent over her flank, but instead she lay in place, stiff, trembling, frightened of the word that would not stop resonating in her mind. 

Psyche. Psyche. Psyche.

What did that mean?

|

Eurydice stayed away for days after he recovered from his bad spell. 

Cullen blamed himself; how could he not? But he went on working even so, taking more care to rest when he could. If he had a dizzy spell and fell from the roof, no amount of comfort from her would put his bones back together. 

The back of the fireplace was finished at last, solid as he could make it, smoothed over along the back with more clay in case there was a crack he’d missed. The walls inside were a mess; he’d need to scrape the old plaster off in places where moisture had gotten under the first layer, and after that he would have to reapply a new layer. Exhausting; but at least the bottom floor had walls of wood, so only the top would need the work. Strange—that a cottage in the woods would be constructed thus. He wondered who’d once lived here, so long ago. 

So Cullen scraped the plaster, applied new in place of old, neatened up the corners, painted the walls that needed painting—alone. He felt her absence keenly after so much time together; but he knew Eury. She would come back to him when she was ready. 

He spent the warm nights lying in the grass outside, staring up at the stars and wishing himself in two places at once. 

Eurydice always came back to him. He had to have faith in that even now, no matter how hopeless it seemed.

|

“My poor child,” the dream woman said to the halla, and this time the halla did lift her head, did pull away when the woman tried to lay her hands upon the halla’s fur once more. 

“My poor child,” the woman of light said again, “You are disturbing things best left alone. You are like the rabbit, thrashing against the snare. The more you fight it, the more it will hurt. Do you not see? You are meant to be here. You were always meant to be here. You marked yourself for me long ago, did you not?”

No, the silver halla told her, You are wrong. 

“Am I? You have wished for this your whole life, or you would not be here. Are you not free? Are you not fast enough to get away? Strong enough that none will touch you? Free of petty concerns and arguments, of foolish requests and all the noise of those creatures and their cities? I have given you the gift that I was given, long ago; the gift of freedom. Will you spurn it now? Will you throw it aside without a care?” 

The halla took a step back, then another. 

She didn’t have an answer. Didn’t know. The woman kept speaking of…a time before the forest. So—the man was right; there had been something before. 

“Do not leave what you fought so hard to find,” the woman pleaded, and for the first time the halla peered past the light and saw her. She had horns of her own, skin that was both fur and not-fur, eyes that were both eyes and not-eyes, hands that were bound and free at once, fingers and hooves at the end of her wrists, a face that was a halla’s face and the face of one of the People simultaneously. She was there and not-there, light and not-light, and the harder the halla looked the less she felt she saw. 

When she woke, rain poured over her. She stood, shook herself, and turned at once for the cottage. 

She may not understand—but she wanted to. And there was one person she knew she could ask. 

|

What is Psyche? 

Her voice was abrupt, and Cullen dropped the paintbrush as soon as he heard it. 

“Eury!” he said, and winced; she wouldn’t answer to that name. Or—she hadn’t before. It had to have been at least a week since he’d seen her, though it was hard to keep track of time here. It slipped through his fingers in a way that didn’t seem entirely natural—but then, it was hard to tell when he had his bad days. How much time was passing? He could not say.

What is Psyche? she asked again, and Cullen leaned out the window on the upper floor to look at her. 

“Where did you hear that name?” he asked, fingers curling hard around the wood. 

She shook her head, the silver winking in the light, the bead on the leather band in her horns throwing a flash of red amongst the rest. 

It is a name? Whose? one silver hoof dug at the soft earth, leaving a deep divot behind, Whose? 

“Our…my daughter’s,” he told her, and cleared his throat, “Psyche is my daughter.”

There was a sound, then, a pained cry that came from her throat and not her mind, as most of her speech seemed to. She wheeled around and raced away without another word, so quickly that the forest swallowed her in seconds. 

Cullen, alone on the second floor of the house, bowed his head and felt the weight of time on his shoulders. 

How long would he spend here, hoping that repairing this cottage would somehow bring her back to him? How long could he hope? This magic was beyond him, far beyond him. He could never imagine wanting to leave her side, to leave her behind.

 But…but his daughter needed him, too. She deserved to have both parents. If both could not return, she deserved at least one. Maker, that much at least, when he would rather give her the world. 

“A little longer,” he murmured to himself, taking the paintbrush from the floor, ignoring the splotch of paint it left behind, “I’m so close. The walls, the cabinets in the kitchen, and then…”

And then, he acknowledged silently, there would be more. He couldn’t help himself; he wanted to make it right, and fixing a cottage was a poor stand-in for bringing back his beloved. 

But—for the moment, at least, rebuilding this place was all he could do. 

A little longer, at least; and Maker let that be enough. 

|

A dream, a nightmare; she could not tell which: 

It was bright; perhaps too bright. She ached from somewhere in her midsection and her head, but this did not seem to bother her. A soft noise roused her at once, and she sat up, lifting hands with fingers on the end, pushing away thick grey curls that hung from her own head. Another soft noise, and she lifted a soft bundle of blankets into her lap. 

(It did not trouble her, in the dream, that she had hands and hair and such. She knew them, and they were hers, and that’s all that mattered to her. The rest was irrelevant.)

There was a little face in the blanket, and a wealth of curls which acted as a frame. It had two tiny, pointed ears, a perfect little nose, and soft, plump cheeks. The sun shone brilliantly through an open door somewhere to the side, and the light of it played along the babe’s golden curls. Someone touched her back, and it was expected, wanted, comforting. The warmth of a hand she had chosen to welcome; the soft, incomprehensible murmur of a deep voice she both knew and did not know, all at once. 

And the little babe tucked into soft blankets, held safe in her arms. 

Psyche. 

|

Cullen was shocked to find that she’d come back to him the next day. He paused midstep, peering out the great round window in the largest bedroom. She waited below, circling the little cottage, plainly waiting for something. 

Waiting for him. 

“Good morning,” he told her when he reached the bottom. She turned to look at him, for she’d been walking away, and approached very slowly over the meadow flowers and grass. 

...Good morning, she said after a long moment’s consideration, I have questions.

“Ask them,” he said, taking a step closer, “I will answer as best I can.” 

She did not shy back from him. Instead, she bent her head until they were nearly eye to eye. 

Your Psyche, she said, Tell me about her…mother. 

Cullen sucked in a sharp breath. His heart seemed to pause in its beating before picking up speed quickly, and he clenched his hands at his sides. 

“What about her?” he asked. 

Eurydice considered him for a moment. 

What…was she like?

“She’s fiercely loyal,” Cullen said at once, “Strong. Beautiful. Clever. Curious…Fascinating.”

The halla shifted uneasily, and there was…something in the tilt of her head that abruptly reminded him painfully of how she’d been before. He took a step forward.

“I miss her terribly,” Cullen said before he could think better of it, “I think of her every morning when I wake and every night before I fall asleep.”

Perhaps that was enough. Or—he thought, his heart hammering against the inside of his ribs, maybe he should keep talking. She’d been speaking to him more often of late; maybe talking was the key.

He…he might as well try.  

“When I close my eyes, I dream of the day I lost her.”

One more step.

“Do you…do you ever dream?”

She took a step back just as he might have brushed his fingers against her neck. Cullen froze in place, hand still outstretched. For a moment, they looked at each other. The woods around them went quiet.

Yes, she said, and took another step back, But I do not want to anymore. 

This last was said quickly, as if she was trying to get the words out as quickly as possible. Without saying any more, she turned and bolted, the sunlight rippling over the silvery-white fur for only a moment before she made it to the shadows of the trees again. 

Gone. Gone. 

Cullen’s hand dropped to his side. 

After a moment in the sun, his head bowed, he turned around again and strode into the house. 

He had things to set right—and no time to feel sorry for himself. This much he could do, so he would do it. 

But he owed their daughter more than groundless hopes. Soon, he would need to pay up. 

But not today.

He did not see the pale shadow amongst the trees, watching, watching, still and silent as the trees themselves.  

|

When she opened her eyes that night, the halla was in the same glade in which she usually saw the woman of light, but the figure was not there. The silver halla turned and turned, hemmed in by trees on either side, her horns catching on low branches until she must wrench them free over and over again. 

She woke moments later, sides heaving, and crept back to the dark cottage on the edge of the wood. 

The man was snoring inside. She could hear him through the big, round window on the second floor. The halla listened for a moment, ears twitching at the rhythm of his sleep. At last, she lay in the meadow outside the front door. She did not sleep again, but listened to the soothing rumble until dawn broke over the treetops again. 

Do you dream? He’d asked. 

Only once, as far as she knew, that had actually mattered. 

|

That night, when Cullen stood in the meadow to watch the sunset, she came to him. 

“Hello,” he said. She regarded him solemnly. 

“Ah—did you need something?” Surely she’d come for a reason; Eury would not have needed one, but she did not remember that she was Eury. 

Cullen did not try to move closer. He just stood, and waited, and hoped. 

She came closer, each step as deliberate as a note played on a lyre. 

Something is wrong with the forest, she told him when she got closer. Cullen straightened, reaching for a sword he no longer wore. 

“What is it?” he asked, “Can I help?”

She angled her head, her eyes wise and distant. After a long pause, filled by the birds in the trees and the last sunlight splayed over the treetops, she spoke again. 

There is something wrong, she said, I do not know what. I want to stay.

“Oh,” Cullen said, and his hands fell loose to his sides, “Well, I…Of course. It’s your cottage, isn’t it?” 

She did not answer this. Instead, she settled herself beside the door and stared at him. 

“Right,” he said, “Right. Let me get my water and I’ll join you.”

|

The night was vast and deep and neither moon hung in the sky. 

The halla regarded it all as if from a great distance, the wrongness stirring again in the back of her mind. The human sat to her right, resting against the cottage wall. He’d spoken earlier, but she hadn’t taken note of the words; now, the wood seemed too loud, though the wind had stilled in the leaves and the night creatures did not call any more than they usually did. 

Her eyes were good, but they saw little in this darkness that felt infinite and deep. The jangling in her ears intensified, no matter how she twitched them to dispel it. It was too loud; the quiet was too loud; she needed—

Say something, she told the human, who startled like a hare in a bush. 

“Ah,” he said, leaning forward with a rustle and peering at her, “What should I say?”

I do not care. Something. Sing. I like when you sing. The night is too—

The halla cut herself off; to say would be to admit some weakness. She waited, though, picking out the shape of him in the darkness. He shuffled closer. 

“Do you care what I—”

No, she interrupted. 

The man sighed and took a sip of water. Then, he took a deep breath and began to sing. 

She’d heard little of human songs. Or—she’d thought she had. But this one sounded familiar. The halla shifted closer to him, the soft words filling her ears, driving away the dark of the night and the discomfort in her heart. By the time he was done singing, she’d moved closer to him and settled herself against his side, careful to keep her horns out of the way. When the tune died out, he cleared his throat again. 

“Another?” he asked. 

He smelled pleasant; like leather and clean skin. 

Yes, she told him, and he sang again. 

The halla closed her eyes in pleasure at the sound, relaxing for what felt like the first time in her life. After a long, long tune, he set a hesitant hand on her forehead and stroked the fur there. It did not bother her; it was not unwanted. His hands were gentle, light, nothing like the ones in her dream. 

Much to her surprise, when she fell asleep she had no dreams at all. 

But she woke with her head in his lap, and that was far too much; the halla bolted into the forest before she could think better of it, and the soft cry behind her did not halt her steps. 

|

Cullen built the cabinets for the kitchen, fit them in snug and neat beside the intact fireplace. He woke one morning to find glass windows leaned against the side of the house, and installed them with only a few minor incidents. The shattered glass was easy enough to clear from the floors, at least.

It looked like a home now. It had seemed like spring in the woods when he’d first seen this place, but now it seemed…well. The flowers had not been anywhere this thick on the ground then, nor as lovely. It was odd how much time had passed, how little time it seemed at all. 

But time had passed. Time would continue to pass; he could not stop it.

One morning, Cullen woke and trudged downstairs to see what the forest had left for him this time. He found only four pieces of wood and a small pail of nails there, and puzzled over them for a moment before he realized what they were. 

A simple rectangular box, its shorter sides ending in curved pieces. A cradle—the forest had sent him a cradle. As if by finishing the house, the forest had decided he ought now furnish it. 

How cruel, to see it and remember all of their hopes, all of their wishes for their little one. How cruel, to look at the pieces of it and remember that his daughter had been left behind—with family, perhaps, but left nonetheless—and he couldn’t even remember how long he’d been away from her. He might have been fixing this cottage for an age; it might have been only a month. He could not say. 

Cullen sat on the small set of stairs leading to the house for a long time, elbows resting on his knees, his head in his hands. 

At last, he carried the pieces inside, nailed them together with care, and gathered up his waterskin. 

It was time to send a letter—long past time. 

He could not be forever split between the forest and Skyhold; there was only one solution he could see.

|

The man was gone. 

The silver halla didn’t know when he’d left. It must have been when she’d been on the other side of the wood, watching a swan and her cygnets drift over the water. She’d lost track of time, and when she’d come back…

She hadn’t needed to look. She just knew. 

He was gone. He had left her. 

She hesitated for a long time, her ears pricked, her eyes trained on the pretty cottage. He’d done well with it, from what she could see. The walls looked sturdy, the roof was watertight—as they’d discovered during the last storm—and the hearth could happily hold a fire without causing the rest of the house to go up in a blaze. 

It had only seemed worth it to ask him to do this because it was a special place. It was still special, whole and beautiful against the green of the meadowgrass and the yellow and pink and blue of the flowers. But it was also…empty. Empty. 

For many hours, the halla paced around the cottage, trying to make sense of the emotions that crowded her chest and mind, hammering against the inside of her skull when there was nowhere for them to go. 

No matter how she tried, she could not understand. 

At last, when night fell, she curled herself up by the front stoop and allowed her head to droop low. Maybe…if she could not find him here, in the cottage he’d put back together, perhaps she could still find him in her dreams. 

|

Cullen strode through the forest with speed, his eyes fixed straight ahead. He passed the rocky overhang where he’d first seen Eurydice again. He ducked past trees where he’d once slept, retreaded paths he only half remembered, and at last he reached the river again. 

It all looked exactly the same as it had the last time he’d seen it. Even the other three—somehow, they were still camped on the other bank, in more or less the same state he’d last seen them. Strange; he’d expected them to return to Skyhold and take up their duties again. But he could hardly complain when their presence made his task so much easier. 

The moment he set foot in the river, it calmed for him in a path straight across. Cullen blinked, then cleared his throat. 

“Thank you,” he murmured, hand absently reaching for the hilt of a sword he hadn’t held for months and then dropping to his side. Nothing changed; nothing responded. He waded into the water even so, eyes trained on the far bank. 

He wasn’t sure when he felt the change; perhaps it was only his imagination. But sometime between lifting his first foot onto the riverbank and lifting his second, there was a sensation like a…snapping against his skin, like something breaking loose. Cullen grunted at the feeling, and the dizziness that accompanied it, but shook it off. 

“Done already?” Dorian asked, standing from the camp and frowning, “That was far too quick—did you find a path? Something more from us?”

Cullen blinked, fighting back a moment’s disorientation. 

“What do you mean? It’s been months. I’ve been gone for…what do you mean, ‘done already?’”

The other three looked at him. Cole clasped his hands around his knees, then tilted his head to speak. Cullen could not see him past the hat and all the hair, but his words were gentle enough.

“Time can move faster and slower; you don’t decide. We don’t decide, either. It’s the trees that know, and the forest.”

“Yeah,” Bull said, watching Cole, “I don't know what that means, but you’ve been gone for two days. We haven’t even got a messenger back yet.”

“Two days,” Cullen repeated, then raked a hand through his hair, “Two days. Right. Right.” 

There was no time to think about the implications of this now—that there was, apparently, a forest that existed out of time in the middle of Ferelden, that nobody had thought to explore or record it until now. All of that was rather decidedly not his problem. 

Cullen turned again, eyeing the river. It rushed on and away into the woods, as fast and uncrossable as ever. What if…what if it wouldn’t let him through again? What if he’d lost his only chance to…

To what? Remind her of what had been? Would it not be cruel now, to show her what she’d had before she’d touched that gift? When he had no way of turning her back to what she’d been before?

Was it not enough to bring their daughter to her? At least then she might still be able to watch her grow. Cullen, for his part, would much rather spend the rest of his life in a cottage in the woods with a Eurydice who did not know him than in Skyhold with only her memory.

“I need to send a message,” he said instead of voicing any of these questions aloud. 

They would not have the answers anyway.

|

When the silver halla slept, her dreams taunted her. 

They were pain, the arc of steel cutting into her eye, hands dragging her by the hair, huddled alone in the earth; they were joy, the swooping feeling in her chest while she stood with her hand on an unfamiliar wooden door. 

“Was it not all too much to bear?” the woman asked her in the dream glade. The halla wheeled around, looking for her, but there was nothing to see; the clearing was empty, and the voice came from everywhere.

“Is this not better in every possible way?” she went on, “Does it not make more sense? All of that messiness, all of that pain and uncertainty; you can leave it behind. He left you, did he not? So let him go. You might yet live forever, little one. Be happy with what you’ve been given. It is more than most can begin to comprehend.”

The halla—Eurydice, she remembered all at once; her own name was Eurydice—shook her head as if shaking off the voice. Her silver hooves dug furrows in the ground, the green-laced one ringing with a strange song with every blow. 

“No,” she said, and struck at the encircling with her hooves once, twice, and—

|

It took Josephine and Aegle only a few days to reach them along the king’s road. How strange it was that the path they’d taken had dragged them back and forth across the country for months when the journey was really only three or four days by the Imperial Highway. 

The days waiting for his daughter seemed to drag on and on. Cullen spent most waking minutes pacing back and forth before the river, wondering if he should have left the forest the way he had. Surely he should have told her what he was doing. Surely he should have explained. 

He knew why he hadn’t, though; it would have been far too painful for her to tell him she didn’t care if he stayed or went.

When he wasn’t worrying, he was planning: How could he get Psyche safely across the river? How would he find Eurydice again? Could they arrange for a supply to feed the babe while he sought the cottage again? 

By the time they rode up through the woods, he’d planned and planned again, accounted for every possible obstacle and concern between him and his beloved Inquisitor. 

He hadn’t accounted for how he would feel when he saw his Psyche again. 

She was riding with Josephine. He’d been very specific when he’d left, once it had become clear that they wouldn’t be finding Eury without his presence. Either Aegle or Josephine was to remain with her at all times; it would be all too easy for anyone with a grudge to take or hurt her and, by extension, the Inquisitor and their organization. So, when the small party came to a halt, he knew exactly where to look. 

She was still so small; so perfect. But she’d grown in the months he’d been gone, and he saw the flash of one hand over the sling as she reached beyond the confines of the cloth. 

“Here is your Papae, little one,” Josie said, even before she’d greeted the rest of them, and lifted the babe to hand him. 

For a moment, he stood frozen, as frozen as he’d been before he’d taken her the first time. What if he’d forgotten how to hold her? What if she didn’t remember him?

But Psyche turned her head and met his eyes, and when she lifted her hand she was reaching for him. 

All at once, she was in Cullen’s arms and he was clutching her to his shoulder, eyes squeezed tightly shut. 

“I’m so sorry, darling, I’m so sorry,” he was saying, his eyelids not quite managing to keep the tears from his cheeks, “I didn’t mean to be gone so long, I swear it; Maker forgive me, I did not mean to leave you.” 

Psyche made a little hiccup against his shoulder and cooed, one hand with its tiny, sharp fingernails curling into the collar of his tunic. For a long time, Cullen held her just like that, ignoring the voices of the others in the distance. 

Nothing else really mattered; only that he had her safe again. 

Only that soon enough her mother would, too.

|

Cullen was tall enough, strong enough to carry Psyche over the water without getting her wet. He couldn’t seem to stop talking to her, little as she seemed to understand. Her eyes peered up at him with keener interest than she’d had before he left, and he wanted, all at once, for her to know everything. 

Her eyes—those were different, too. When he’d ridden away from Skyhold, they’d been the undifferentiated blue that all infants had. He’d told Eury that he’d hoped they would be like hers in time, shining with the violet he loved so well. Now, they were like his own eyes looking back at him, warm and brown like sunlight on a tree branch. When he would stop periodically to rest, he would marvel at them over and over. 

How strange it was, how wonderful, to see a piece of yourself in someone else and find that you loved it after all. 

The forest let him pass without any trouble, though it was much quieter than he remembered. Again, he passed his old camps, the ways he’d wandered looking for his lost love, the overhang where she’d tended him, and…

And the cottage, right where he’d left it. 

Cullen paused just before the trees broke to the green meadow beyond. It all looked much the same as it had when he’d walked away a few days prior, save one major difference. 

Eurydice lay beside the door, curled up and sleeping. She still looked like a halla, with horns of silver and one green-vined leg. The bracelet she’d woven for him was still twined around one horn. Unlike other mornings when he’d woken to find her resting by the front door, flowers had grown up and around her, stark contrasts against her silvery-white fur. She seemed almost like a statue there, a statue that nature had grown up around and accepted as one of its own. 

But she was no statue; she was the love of his life, the mother of his daughter, and he would not give her up to the forest. Not while he still had breath in his lungs.

Cullen leaned down to press a kiss to Psyche’s forehead, then straightened his shoulders and at last strode across the meadow to the cottage where Eurydice waited. 

|

“This is a battle you cannot win,” the woman of light told Eurydice, who struck again and again at the borders that held her, “You are fighting yourself, poor creature. Can you not be content with the peace you’ve been given?”

And, when Eurydice continued to ignore her:

“It hurts me to see you like this, so full of desperation. Be still—calm yourself—”

“You speak too much,” Eury snapped back, and a branch cracked free from the encircling briars, “Too much.”

“You are only hurting yourself,” the woman said, from the trees and the earth and the sky, “Do you not remember the rab—”

“The rabbit died because I do not have hands. I do not have hands because you took them. Stop talking.”

The voice was silent for a moment, and more branches broke free. 

“You could be at peace. Why do you not wish for peace?”

“I wish to make my own choices,” Eury said, and though her limbs were shaking and weakening, she struck out and snapped one more branch free. 

A hole opened in the undergrowth. 

A hole through which she could see the man walking through the meadow before her, an infant cradled in his arms. 

Psyche. 

Her Psyche.

No; she would not be held any longer. Not here. Not by this being, whatever she was. Her daughter was right there and Psyche needed her mamae; Eury needed to leave now.

“Why do you not wish for the companionship of the wood? Why do you not wish to be amongst kin, amongst those who would understand you?”

“I wish to be my own self,” Eury said, and the hole widened before her. 

“Why do you not wish for strength? For freedom? When such concerns only drag you down, only trap you where you would not be.”

“Eurydice?” there was her name, called gently through the space she’d made in the trees and thornbushes, “Eurydice, love; wake up.”

“Freedom?” Eury said, and at last it was enough: she could fit through, push through to the other side, “I am free.”

And—all at once, she was.

|

Cullen knelt before Eurydice, he on one side of the circle of flowers and she on the other. He did not know how to wake her; in the old stories, it might be done with a kiss. Given the circumstances, he thought it might be better to call gently from a distance. He was holding something fragile and precious, after all; best he not surprise her too badly. 

“Eurydice?” he called, and settled Psyche more comfortably in his arms, “Eurydice, love—wake up.”

To his shock, she began to glow. It was not the harsh, merciless light he’d seen in the great hall all those months ago. No. This was a softer light, the gentle glow of the moon on a dark and cold night, the light that guided one home through inhospitable lands. It was the light one saw through one’s window on waking from a nightmare, the light that brushed aside the cobwebs of unfriendly sleep. 

As she glowed, she changed. The fur melted away, blowing gently in the wind like dandelion fluff. The horns fell bloodlessly aside, one to her left, and one to her right. When it faded away, as gently as it had come, she opened her eyes. 

Cullen might have thought, given the gradual change and the light, that it would be a gentle awakening. He would have been profoundly incorrect. 

Eurydice sat bolt upright, her eyes wild, her hands already reaching for him. 

“Psyche,” she said, “Where—where—”

“Here,” Cullen said, because he could no more deny Eurydice her child than he could choose not to breathe, or not to love her wholly. Eury leaned past the encircling flowers, snatching the babe up in her arms, and cuddled her close, her face twisted with pain. 

Maker; what was there to say? What was there to do? What time they’d lost could never be retrieved. 

“I’m…sorry,” he managed after a moment; for what could one say to such pain? He’d failed her, in not finding her sooner, in not preventing her from being taken from them in the first place. They’d lost months with their daughter, both of them; they’d lost all of the first changes, precious moments they might have lingered over together. 

“I should’ve,” he began, choked, but she had none of it. Eurydice reached for him, too, and dragged him against her free shoulder with an iron grasp. 

“Cullen,” she said, pressing his face into her shoulder, and he gave a gasp at the sound of his name on her lips, “Cullen, ena’vun, my ena’vun; You are here. You found me; you came back.”

Words were beyond Cullen for a moment. He didn’t even bother to try searching for them. He just pressed his face into her shoulder and wept, too overcome to bother with anything but holding her just as tightly and making sure Psyche wasn’t being pressed too hard between the two of them. 

They stayed just like that for a long, long time. Cullen lay half-across the crumpled flowers, Psyche already rested sleeping against her mother’s shoulder, and Eurydice held them both as tightly as she could. 

Whole, together, and free. 

|

Eurydice’s memories of Psyche were still foggy. She could not remember what the babe had been like before; had her eyes been so clear, so bright? Had her fingers been so clever, her ears so sweetly and faintly pointed? 

She did not remember, but it mattered little at the moment. They sat among the flowers now, Psyche laid over her knees, and she traced the babe’s features over and over again with her fingertips. The touch at her nose made the infant sneeze, her tiny face screwed up with surprise, and Eurydice laughed when the babe did. Joy spread across her face like ink in water, and the sight of it warmed her. She had been so cold for so long; it was a relief to let it all melt away.

She was loath to let go of her daughter for even a moment; holding her felt right, filling the hole in her heart immediately and perfectly. There were pieces of her mind that remained fragmented, trapped in some other body with its other, graceful limbs. As long as she held Psyche, none of that mattered. This body had hands to stroke her hair; this body had arms to hold her, and a lap to set her in, and a mouth that could smile. That was all that mattered—and the longer she held the babe, the more the broken pieces found new ways to fit together. 

Yes; this was her body. The other one was hers, too. It did not matter that the two ideas did not agree; she could make them both true. 

What mattered was the sun on her skin and Psyche’s, the way the babe seemed determined to stuff fistfuls of her mother’s hair into her mouth. 

What mattered was the soft noises she made as she waved her hands around, as if trying to explain something very important to Eurydice. 

What mattered was that Cullen was here, too, leaning against her side and watching them both with a smile on his tired face. As if this was all he’d wanted—as if he, too, was content. 

As if he, too, knew that this was home.

|

Much, much later when the stars were spread across the sky like a comforting blanket, Cullen stepped back from checking on Psyche in her cradle. Eury, lying in the grass, held out her hand to him. 

It was hard to stop touching even now; setting their daughter aside to rest had felt like too long apart, even if she was only a few steps away. Neither of them had really wanted to put her down, but they’d badly needed a few moments just to hold each other without checking to make sure Psyche hadn’t rolled off down the hill or stuffed a handful of flower petals in her mouth. 

When he lay down beside her, Eury rolled onto her side and into his arms, sighing faintly. Cullen laced his fingers together, holding her against him, savoring the familiarity of the sharpness at her hips, the weight of her head on his shoulder, the waves of her hair flowing over his shoulder yet again. 

“You’re here,” he said, because he couldn’t help himself. 

“Yes,” she said, and he could feel the tickle of her eyelashes against his neck. 

They lay in silence for a moment, the rise and fall of his chest matching hers. 

“It is still there,” Eury said after a moment, and he tilted his head to look at her, “The other one. I did not undo the spell. I did not want to give it back to her.”

Cullen tilted his head to look down at her, and she angled hers to look up at him. 

“She should not have given it to me if she wanted to keep it for herself,” she said, “I can still be the other one if I choose it.”

“But…” Cullen frowned, “But—would you forget, as you did before? Would you…you wouldn’t…”

“I will not leave,” she told him, “If I go, I will come back to you.”

“I believe you,” Cullen said slowly, trying to wrap his mind around the concept, deciding at last to think about it later, when his mind was not in a fog, “I…suppose it is like being able to change shapes, as some mages do.”

Eurydice hummed in agreement and squirmed even closer, the arm across his chest tightening. 

“We will come back here someday,” she said, “It is supposed to be ours, this place.”

“Is it?” Cullen considered this for a moment, “I suppose it does feel that way, doesn’t it? Like you and I were meant to find it.”

Earlier, when the three of them had stumbled into the house, he and Eurydice half-distraught, the cottage had seemed almost to curve around them, comforting and solid. He’d written it off as another quirk of this strange place; the wood that had always seemed alive in its own way. Perhaps what he’d felt had been more than the forest’s usual strangeness after all.

“Yes,” he said after a moment, squeezing her as tightly as she was holding him, “Yes. We’ll come back, someday. Together.”

“Together,” she echoed, and lifted her face to be kissed. 

The wood sang around them, a song they might have heard more clearly if the world hadn’t already seemed full of each other. Only a few steps away, little Psyche, curled in her father’s mantle, supported by the cradle he’d built for her, dreamed of warm arms and purple eyes that shone with love. In the distance, cygnets huddled on their parents’ backs to drift sleeping for the night. The trees rustled with the life of the night creatures, while the creatures of the daytime sought their dens and burrows for the night. 

The statues of owl and halla and wolf, overgrown and tucked amongst the ruins, might have been able to tell that this had all happened before, in its way. They may have been able to speak of loves found and lost, of a cottage built for a family once before and now again. Perhaps they may even have told the story of one transformed ages before, of the creature who’d once found freedom in four legs instead of two, of fleet feet and the emotions—or lack thereof—that only immortals can feel.

But statues, as we know all too well, do not speak, nor do they tell tales. 

That is for the living. 

And Cullen and Eurydice’s tale was far from over.

~The End~

[catherdrashepard]

Lysander was Doomed from the Start Part 1

I was thinking about Lysander, as one does, and I started wondering what would happen if he had made different decisions during Iron Gold. What if he actually had self awareness? Then I got to thinking about what would have to change in Lysander’s life for his story to take a different direction than it did. Dark Age spoilers ahead.

At first, I went over the decisions Lysander made in Dark Age. Why did he team up with Atalantia? And, as much as he thinks he’s out playing her, he’s definitely being used as a pawn for Atalantia’s goals. I’m not entirely sure Lysander fully agrees with what Atalantia wants, in fact...I’m pretty sure he doesn’t. But, I know that he at least thinks the Society has a better system than the one Darrow is fighting for, even he believes the Society needs revamping. I don’t agree with that point of view at all, even if I try my best to understand at least a little where he’s coming from.

Shoving my empathy aside for as long as I can, I’m going to try to look at his perspective from a more scientific and sociopathic angle. From what I understand (and with the wonderful help of @hyena-frog yet again), the first Colors were developed for life on Luna, so the niches they were placed in was practical. But, to quote @hyena-frog: “Over time, eugenic ideals started getting involved.” Evolution is not a fast process, but I do think it’s entirely possible that with the combination of eugenics and advanced technology, the Golds “helped” the other Colors speedrun evolution so that they would fit into their specific biological niches. But ALSO, as @hyena-frog brought up “In other ways, they tampered with natural processes also, like the fact each caste can't have children with other ones without surgery. I think of it like dog breeds. Any dog can have offspring with other dogs, no matter how physically different they are. But Golds artificially made it so Colors can't interbreed even though they're all still human.”

Eugenics is a very Interesting subject because it has both good and bad sides but the connotation of it is negative. Breeding out undesirable traits is a slippery slope depending on what you define as undesirable. I think we all do it on a very small scale based on the people we are attracted to. But I don’t think it’s something people are actively choosing to do? I’m demisexual so my understanding of attraction is.....mediocre. But, as far as I know, people have preferences for physical appearance and that could be seen as a benign form of eugenics. As for the idea that disease and disability should be bred out...I have mixed feelings about it. As someone with a chronic illness, part of the reason I don’t want children is that I wouldn’t want to potentially pass it on to them. However, with illnesses that are probably genetic, it’s still a crapshoot whether or not you’ll have it. But also, I feel that things like diseases and injuries and illnesses help with human innovations.

But back to Red Rising, I’m going to try to analyse what specifically the Golds were using eugenics for. To continue from @hyena-frog’s thoughts, it started off...understandable enough. They wanted to colonise Luna and needed very specific jobs to make that work. For whatever reason, breeding people to be the best at those particular jobs seemed like the best idea. Ok....I mean.....survival of the fittest is a thing, although people tend to misunderstand what it means exactly. Animals in nature (not counting humans) will try to breed in desirable traits and breed out the ones that aren’t. I’m not an expert on evolution (yet), but from what I understand, they do this to aid in survival.

ALSO, to keep on @hyena-frog’s thoughts because I suddenly had more. Dogs. Some dog breeds, as far as I know, are bred for a specific purpose or job. Not all dogs end up living lives where they do what they were bred to do. For example, beagles are bred to be hunting dogs but the beagle my family owned was just a very loved house dog. That being said, he still had those beagle instincts where he was constantly searching and sniffing around for food. Another thought I had was of a certain conversation you have with Ashley in the first Mass Effect. She voices complaints about letting a Turian and a Krogan have full access of the ship. She then goes on to compare them to dogs, saying something along the lines of if you end up in combat with a bear, you’ll leave your dog to fight it off and run. There a few things wrong with that. For starters, no one I know would leave their dog alone to fight a bear EVEN IF it’s a karelian bear dog or something equally competent against bears. I imagine most people would either fight with their dog or pick it up and hightail it out of there.

But of course, that’s not the only problem with that statement. She’s comparing dogs who, while a gift to the world, have a level of sentience akin to children and they can’t develop beyond that. I kind of get what she was saying....because Turians and Krogan are not human and I think the implication is you put yourself and your own before everyone else. Which doesn’t fit the dog analogy anyway because most people treat their dogs as family. But aside from that, the mission you’re on in the first Mass Effect directly affects the Turians as well as the humans. Eventually it’s revealed that the Reapers are a threat to the ENTIRE galaxy, including all the species in it. ALSO, the beef humans have with Turians is over a misunderstanding that happen THIRTY  YEARS ago at the time of the first game AND the conflict only lasted THREE MONTHS.

Anyway, the point is, it’s stupid to hold onto biases based on some kind of us versus them point of view. I understand that in Red Rising (and Mass Effect too but the next point doesn’t apply), there are differences between the Colors but, and this is where eugenics comes back, those were specifically designed to exist. So not only are the Golds perceiving the other Colors as lesser than them, they are doing so based on a system they themselves created. The line Lysander said about some Gold being more miserable is made more frustrating because just....HOW do you misunderstand your OWN thoughts. I just don’t understand how Lysander can’t see that people being miserable in a system they created specifically to keep them at the top indicates a problem with the system itself.

If we go back to Iron Gold and think about everything that happened with Cassius and the Rim, what would it have taken for Lysander to not make the decisions he had? I mean...it’s entirely possible him and Cassius would have died if he hadn’t done what he did but I feel like one of the more important things Lysander did was to save Seraphina. But Lysander’s decision to save her over the lowColors was done because he values the life of a Gold over any other. But why? We know he believes Golds should be leaders; I think he even calls them shepherds at one point. He wants Gold to be the guides for the other Colors. But....WHY?

I know I mentioned in my last post how Lysander was not given the opportunity for to develop like a normal child due to the trauma of witnessing his grandmother’s death and his subsequent isolation. And while that certainly had an effect on what he became in the future (it is not, however, an excuse for being a terrible person), I’m not sure that’s where it started. Which...I mean that’s pretty obvious when we learn just how fucked up Octavia and the way she raised him was. And of course the memory wiping. But I feel like the biggest indicator of Lysander being the way he is is his mother.

We don’t really know much about her other than that she obviously really loved her family. But I think the most important thing is her murder, and the implication that she, her husband, and Atlas were “removed” because of an attempted coup. We don’t get a detailed explanation about why she wanted to get rid of Octavia, but Kalindora mentions in Dark Age that Anastasia was a reformer. So, I think it’s possible that Lysander’s mom would have started her own Rising of sorts if her coup had been successful. Also, if we remember that Lysander was being groomed as the next Sovereign, it would make a lot of sense for Octavia to take extreme measures to make sure Lysander does not have the same sympathies his mother did. I definitely think that Octavia used the Pandemonium Chair to erase any pro-reform lessons that Lysander’s mother may have given him amongst other things. I’m also sure Octavia fed him information about how important the Society is. Octavia was very important to Lysander and I think losing her affected his perception of everything after that.

I want to go over more of Lysander’s perspective, and I’d like to actually get into what I mean by the title but I’ve already talked enough about Lysander. So, unfortunately this is only part 1.

[zukoromantic]

Spoilers for The Life and Crimes of Scrooge McDuck!

Okay so. This episode was.... WELL HOW WAS IT. Me personally, I think it was good!! And bad..... it's complicated. So right now i will be reviwing/analyzing this episode, including where i think the narrative and lessons of this episode go wrong and how this episode stands in relationship to the season.

So we were about teaching both Louie AND Scrooge to take over responsibility and owning up to mistakes. Which was nice!! I think that part was well done! But HOW they did that with the villain sides.... not so much?

First off, I like how they showed Scrooge making that mistake with Poe and recognizing the need of an apology and the blame he carries. Him saying he doesn't want to be defined by his mistakes but by admitting them, DAMN that shit was good. Especially since he already knew he was fucked as soon as Magica entered the room, so you really felt that one. It is something that he apparently recognized as his fault before this episode, so it felt like a genuine apology and a sincerely learned lesson.

Not only that but also Louie saying there's always two parties at play and Scrooge is not the only one to blame. They also wronged him. And this is where the issue starts.... While this is true, yes, this is not the reasoning (or at least not the only reasoning) that should have been brought up. Louie briefly adresses this when he said Glomgold brought his villainess upon himself saying "He is literally planting dynamite under Scrooge's chair right now!" Which Doofus debunks with a quick "But would he have lit that dynamite if Scrooge wasn't sitting there??" and it's just not elaborated on at all for the rest of the episode. The argument they go with in Glomgold's case instead is just "He was a villain well before this event."

The problem I have with this whole thing is that it absolutely dismisses the responsibility that the VILLAINS carry for themselves. That they don't have to CHOOSE to let Scrooge's mistake affect them this much (regardless of how much Scrooge actually is to blame). This goes against all modern narratives of redemption and is also a Pretty hot philosophical take.

So uhh brief excourse, idk if you know this but the theory of determinism says that every decision we make is just the sum of all of our experiences and genes. This is one of the things questioning free will and in that progress, manages to take blame away from people who have done something wrong (in this case, the responsibility of scrooge's enemies for their own choosing of path in life). Regardless of one's opinion on the concept, this is WHY it is NOT being used in court, it's not applicable to any justice system.

I'm not saying that the villains should have admitted to being at fault as well, i just think they should have done the opposite actually. Show that they are NOT willing to take responsibility for their actions, neither past nor present and that this is what sets them apart from Scrooge and Louie in the end (Doofus doesn't apologize in return either). I don't know how relevant each of them will be in the show's finale, but either way, i don't think this would have been a problem because either way, their takeaway from this ep wouldn't have been too different since they got mad anyway.

So, the way did handle all this, is a very fragile take. Why is this the writing this episode chooses? Because this episode isn't for the anatgonists, it's for Scrooge and Louie. And in that regard it mostly works! They learn their lesson and they learn to take responsibility where it is due. To apologize regadless of how much they aare actually to blame. Which is a nice lesson!! I mean, we DID already have something similair for Louie in s2, with the whole Timephoon thing, but then again, that was never truly resolved actually, only in regards to working for your success. So it's obviously a lesson that fit Louie well and I love how they paired this with Scrooge's less obvious need to learn this!!

This is already pretty long, so i will keep the rest short.

Glomgold's and Ma Beagle's stories were okay. I preferred Glomgold's story by a lot though, it was actually - a nice insight?? Actually feel sorry for him ngl i mean yeah he's still good ole glomgold apart from this but.... his main mistake here was thinking they had been planning this thing together. If it hadn't been for what's her name, then this story would have looked pretty different. I just thought tgis was p interesting and actually deserved a bit more spotlight tbh.

And then OH BOI HAHA MAGICA AND POE OH GOD THERE IS FAR TOO MUCH TO BE SAID ABOUT THIS. Just lemme say i LIKED IT A LOT and i WISH it could have been explored more since it's super interesting and just about everything deserved more attention and time than it got. We all knew this part of the ep would steal the spotlight and it DID. THIS is some ducktales i would have wished more for in season 3. This story alone clearly could have, and should have filled a whole episode. The other two.... Meh, Glomgold's story, i'm not sure, it could be elaborated on and feel more natural, but Ma's, not really. Maybe it could have been mentioned in some other episode as a side thing and THEN it would have kinda come down to that in the end and the trial would have been part of a diffetent episode? This episode's theme DID feel a little bit big for one episode. I'm not sure about this, but i definitely think that Magica and Poe part very much deserved more time. Maybe it would have gotten that with another season, who knows. I DID like the general theme actually, so I would not have minded for it to be a bit more relevant. Especially since it's a very good fit for the season's theme of legacy. But then, again, Huey is once again not tied into any of this so that's a problem.

Okay this is all i have to say. It's a complicated episode because it's not bad per se, it just suffers a lot from one-sided narratives and classic time issues. It was, as so often, pretty enjoyable and a highlight for all Magica fans.

(And obviously, yup, Poe, very good, Martin Freeman, yes, you already know it all.)

[monkey-li]

Dimeshipping short

Sappy little Dimeshipping one shot that just came to my mind ^^

Magica sat sulking on a money bag in the vault of Scrooge McDuck's money bin. "Why can't I swim in it?" She demanded to know. "You make it look so easy...".

She laid her hand upon the coins that Scrooge had collected over the course of his life. To her, it almost felt like solid ground.

Scrooge emerged beside her from the money in which he had been jumping around like a dolphin in water before. He sat down beside her, smiling indulgently. Playfully, he nudged her with his shoulder.

"As far as I know I am the only one who can do this. I can tell you it took a long time and a lot of practice before I managed it. Otherwise it is dangerous. That's how I once managed to take out the whole Beagle Boy gang!"

Now he looked at her and stroked her cheek tenderly. "And I certainly don't want you to get hurt..." Immediately she closed her eyes and cuddled in the touch but her pout remained.

Scrooge sighed. "Is there not a spell that will enable you? Wouldn't be the first time you liquefied my money." He laughed a little as he recalled their many battles against each other. She frowned at him. "This is not the same..." She leaned against him and immediately he put his arm around her.

She stroked his chest with her hand and played with the button of his jacket. "You can do it without magic..." Tenderly, she rubbed her head under his chin, and there was a content sigh from Scrooge as he pulled her closer.

"It is something that you enjoy so much, that in some ways even defines you... I want to be able to share it with you without cheating..."

Scrooge's cheeks turned red at her words. It was the first time anyone actually took his strange hobby seriously. "Are you really willing to learn, no matter how much effort it takes?" Magica grabbed his hands and looked him straight in the eyes.

"Have I ever shied away from hard work? I want to understand you better, I want to share your joy!" She smiled softly and bent over to kiss him tenderly. For a moment they both sank into this wonderful feeling. Then Magica parted with a mischievous grin.

"Isn't that the same reason you want to learn everything about magic and to make simple potions even if you don’t carry magic in you?"

His cheeks turned even redder. "Of course...Magic is such an important part of you that is still stranger to me...  I'm just not used to anyone taking such an interest in me." Embarrassed, he turned his head away, but Magica held him back with one hand on his cheek.

"You'll have to get used to it, Scrooge McDuck. For I love you..."

His heart still leapt when he heard those words. It was still like a wonderful dream. He kissed her again and then slipped backwards into the coins. Pulling Magica gently with him so that she rested on his chest. He dived so deep that the coins washed around Magica's body without hurting her. A first, slow getting used to the feeling she needed for that.

She chuckled like a young girl, and Scrooge knew what happiness meant. Full oftrust, she looked at him as he led her carefully through the coins.

No one had ever seen him smile so gently, and that side of him would for ever be reserved for the woman in his arms.

"I love you, Magica McDuck..."

[lady-divine-writes]

In Style (Rated G)

Aziraphale ponders the evolution of the modern family while Pepper mourns her curls after a bad haircut. (780 wods)

Written for @drawlight‘s ‘31 Days of Ineffables’ prompts sleigh bells, silent night, and choir.

“Brian. Wensleydale. Miss Pepper.” Aziraphale welcomes the children walking into his shop without his eyes leaving the paragraph he’s reading, the jingling of the sleigh bells hanging over the door announcing their arrival. “To what do I owe the honor of your …?” A heavy, spiritual sigh passes through the room and he glances up, his Celestial Observer sliding from his grasp in astonishment when he gets an eyeful of the young lady weeding through her companions to explain. But she needn’t say a word.

Her hair says it all.

“Good Heavens! Pepper!” He bobs left and right for a better look at the mess that has been made of the once neat curls that crowned her head, now a sloppy - and in some cases, hacked to death - mop of mayhem. “Not again!”

“I’m afraid so, Mr. Fell.”

Aziraphale sighs. “So, what’s the occasion this time?”

“Choir recital. I have a solo. Silent Night.”

“Yeah, and we’re all gonna be there to watch,” Wensleydale says, beaming with pride for his friend.

“That’s very nice of you,” Aziraphale says, and Wensleydale smiles as if he’s just won the World Cup. “Pepper, my dear, we’re always happy to help you out, but if you don’t tell your mother what your aunt is doing to your hair, she’s going to keep sending you to see her.”

“I know.” Pepper’s eyes wander, taking stock of Aziraphale’s trinkets and knick-knacks, searching for her favorite among them – a cherub with hair and a nose like hers, crouching down to pet a beagle puppy. She finds her reflection instead, in the door of one of Aziraphale’s curio cases. She sighs when she sees the massacre, raises a hand to touch it, sadly twirling her remaining curls around her finger. “But it makes my aunt feel so good to help. It’s been a long time since she’s felt like part of the family, you know?”

“I know, my dear.” Aziraphale watches the boys put a hand on her shoulder and give her a squeeze. She smiles at them, huddles a step closer, and they reassure her with their smiles.

Family.

It seems like such a solid thing. Indeed, it is the foundation of most human lives. But, in truth, it’s a nebulous concept. In the beginning, the first family – Adam, Eve, Cain, and Abel – all they had was each other. One would think that would cement a bond so great none could break it. But Cain and Abel turned on one another. And throughout time, it’s been that way – brother against brother, sister against sister, father against mother. But here, in the so-called ‘modern age’, humans define family for themselves regardless of how the Almighty originally intended it. Friends can be closer than family. Aziraphale has seen it in his shop. Found families they’re called. The families people choose as opposed to the ones assigned by birth.

Aziraphale has often wondered how God feels about that, seeing as She is the one who assigns them. But best not to ask Her.

She’s not so much a fan of questions.

And besides, had She not favored lamb over a plant-based diet, Cain might not have slaughtered his brother, and would things not be different?

Who knows.

Aziraphale knows the story of Pepper’s aunt and the fight that caused her to leave the fold. But now, after over a decade, she’s back, living in Soho of all places, though Aziraphale has yet to cross her path. And Pepper has been acting as the family’s official dove, carrying olive branches and mending fences.

Creating a whole out of two broken halves.

Unfortunately, her hair often gets caught in the crossfire.

Aziraphale holds out a hand for hers. When she takes it, he puts his other over it and silent blesses her. “Pepper, you are a wonderful human being.”

She looks down, slightly embarrassed by the compliment. “Thank you, Mr. Fell.”

“Crowley? Dear?” Aziraphale calls over his shoulder.

“Yes?” a disembodied voice calls back.

“Miss Pepper is here and she’s in need of the usual.”

“A snip and a fix?”

“Yes, Mr. Crowley,” she answers with a giggle.

Almost in a puff of smoke, Crowley is there, standing in the doorway of Aziraphale’s back room, one hand on his hip, a frilled black apron tied around his waist, a towel draped over the back his neck, and a pair of scissors in his hands. Not that he’s going to use them. He’ll need to miracle most of Pepper’s hair back to right.

He just enjoys any opportunity to dress the part.

He tosses his hair dramatically as the children giggle and his angelic husband rolls his eyes.

“I’m on it.”

[surveys-at-your-service]

Survey #307

“you lie so much, you believe yourself”

How long has it been since you kissed someone? Like, two years or so. What level are you on Farmville? Never played it. What are you looking forward to in the next year? I hope Covid just withers away, dammit. I truly, truly hope this vaccine is effective. And that people start wearing their GODDAMN masks. Do you use a lot of emoticons? Not really nowadays. Would you ever climb a mountain? No. Even if my legs were capable of handling that, I'd be too afraid of an avalanche. Colons or equal signs for your smiley face’s eyes? Colons. When was the last time you swam in a lake? A looooong time ago. If you could have anything right now, what would you want? It'd be great to chill at Sara's house honestly, I miss that. What’s your relationship status? Single and I think finally starting to truly accept I need to be right now. I wouldn't want to date myself in my current position, so I shouldn't expect anyone else to. When was the last time someone asked you your age? On my birthday when I mentioned in group therapy that I was trying to make it an especially good day about myself. When was the last time you danced? Very, very poorly with Sara years ago lmao. Has anyone ever tried to physically fight you? Someone snatched my arm and yanked me down to look her in the eyes in HS because she was a jealous bitch back then telling lies, but idk if her intention was to actually try to start a physical fight. Are you avoiding someone? No. What’s your favorite primary color? Red. What do you have pierced? Just my ears and bottom lip now. :/ I want morrrreeee. I'm forever tilted that so many of my piercings closed when I was hospitalized. What is your favorite dog breed? I find pugs to be very cute, but I do not support their breeding whatsoever so would never buy one. Besides them, I have a definite bias towards beagles. In your honest opinion, what is the scariest sea creature you know? Fucking Christ, giant squids. Terrifying. Do you believe there is just one love for everyone, or…? No. There are way, way, WAY too many people on this planet for that. What natural disaster scares you the most? Tornados. What outrageous career could you see yourself wanting to do? Define an "outrageous" career... but I can't visualize myself doing anything very unordinary. In what way would you want to help change the world? I truly hope I can make some considerable amount of contributions to natural conservation and animal education. When driving down the road looking for an address do you turn the radio low? I don't drive, but I know I would, considering I can't concentrate on driving if the radio is on anyway. What do you think of when you look at the stars? How little I and my problems really are. It gives me perspective. If you could say ONE THING to the president, what would it be? Well, Biden just got into office, so I can't really say yet. We'll see what he does. What Disney princess are you most like? Personality wise, I mean. Uh. I'unno. Maybe Snow White because animals? haha Do you believe in astrology? Not in the slightest. Do you look into people’s eyes when you talk to them? I try to, anyway, but I tend to find it very uncomfortable, and I never know if I'm offering too little or too much. So I have trouble maintaining it, especially with people I don't know. You can have one of the following two things: trust or love. Pick one. Trust. What do you think is the most important thing in this life is? Hm, that's a deep one. Perhaps the understanding that you are just as important as the next person and that we should work as one to make this one life that we know of worthwhile. Make the world better than when you entered it. What is your favorite shade of blue? Pastel blue. I just like pastels in general. When's the last time you bought something just because? I don't buy things "just because." If I actually have money to spend, I use it with motivation behind it. What Ozzy lyric describes you best? WHOA NOW HUNNY you are asking the WRONG person because I can just about name his entire discography so there are waaaay too many song lyrics to dig through and pick one for myself. Probably something from "Dreamer," after a short moment's consideration. When was the last time you went for a walk without a specific destination in mind? Not since Sara and I walked down the path near her house. We didn't plan on when we would turn around to go back. Do you daydream? Only all the time. What was your last daydream about? Ha, thanks to that other question, visiting Sara again. It'd be nice, but yeah, financial limitations and corona. Ever won the lottery? Bitch I wish. What was the most important decision you made that screwed up your life the most? Ugh... I'd say putting all my self-worth, happiness, and source of peace into one person was pretty big but also fucking stupid. What is love really about? Don't ask a romantic this and expect a non-essay, haha. But to keep it as short as possible, it's about mutual care, the desire to grow together, trust, openness, the peace to be vulnerable with the other... It's about a lot. It's such a deep, beautiful feeling. What's the most you ever made in a year? lol Do you have an online diary? Only through surveys, really. What's the biggest pot you've won in poker? I haven't played poker since I was a kiddo, so idr. What Metallica lyric most describes your life? Who wrote this and knows my favorite bands????? Like damn. There's a good handful of the sadder songs I relate to; I did some brief digging through ones I know I relate to, and perhaps the one I feel closest is within "The Unforgiven II": "The door is locked now, but it's open if you're true. If you can understand the me, then I can understand the you." Aaaand now I'm gonna go binge Metallica 'cuz it's been too long, thanks. How many concerts have you been to? Just one. :/ Which one was your favorite? I've only seen Alice Cooper, and it was great. What's the most illegal thing you've done? Pirated stuff, oops. Ever get busted by the cops? What for? No. How many pairs of rollerblades do/did you own? I doubt I have any anymore. Ever wear out a CD? What was it? Ahaha... There is some scratching on my mom's copy of Ozzmosis thanks to me playing it so much on my old CD player. Ever have a tornado in your town? Well my city is pretty damn big, so yes, in some spots. I don't think my immediate proximity has ever seen one, though. If you HAD to pick ONE song to listen to for the rest of your life, and that would be the only song you ever heard, what would it be? I would absolutely need something motivating if that was the case, so most likely "Life Won't Wait" by Ozzy Osbourne. That song touches me so deeply and gives me the courage to do what I can to tackle life and try not to waste it. I know, I'm doing a great job at that. Ever heard of Shinedown? Hell yeah; I was actually listening to them in the car earlier. What does your lawn furniture consist of? We have nothing out there. Ever live off of canned soup and ramen noodles for weeks at a time? Er, no. But when I got my tongue pierced, I had to survive off of popsicles and... I somehow forgot the main thing I ate???? How?????? But anyway it was something that didn't involve much or any chewing, either. I actually lost a little bit of weight in that week or so because eating solids was impossible, and I didn't enjoy "eating" liquids either. That piercing (snake eyes, btw) was soooo so cute tho. I really wish it hadn't started to damage my teeth, or else I'd still have it. What musical group/artist do you love, but hide from other people? I used to be kinda embarrassed by artists like Melanie Martinez when you compare her music to my adoration of metal, but at my age now, I don't give a damn. I like what I like and won't hide it. What is the first meal you remember eating? ... Does anyone actually remember this??? What's in your keepsake box/scrapbook? Good God, a lot. I haven't looked in it in a very, very long time though. It brings a usually painful nostalgia. What did you score on your SATs? I don't even remember if I took them. I THINK I took the ACT instead? I don't even know the difference. When was the last time you saw a rainbow? Hm. Been a while. It's not like I'm out of the house a lot, especially nowadays with quarantine. What colors is your lava lamp? I wish I had a lava lamp, they're rad and really relaxing. What's the strangest thing you've ever hung on the wall? Nothing, really. Can you name every place you've ever had sex? I mean I can but I'm not going to. What's the most important thing you ever lost and never found again? My favorite childhood cat Charcoal. He was an outdoor and intact male, so it was very normal for him to eventually vanish to rove. Please keep your cats indoors. What forms of birth control have you used? The pill and, uh, having "barriers." How many webpages have you created, and can you still find them all? I made Wetpaint sites for my two RP mobs back in the day, but the site has since been completely revised, so no, they don't exist anymore. I checked outta curiosity I think last year. How many people are in your family portrait? We don't even have a proper family portrait. Ever punched a wall? No. When's the last time you really lost your temper? In some argument with Mom I don't remember. Ever thought you (or a girlfriend) were pregnant, but it was a false alarm? I had massive anxiety over it once, but it was irrational and even I knew that. Not that anxiety cares. If 97 is yes, were you glad or sad? I was very glad when my period came lmao. What was the last conversation you had with someone before they died? When I saw my grandma for the last time, I just let her know that I loved her and that she was so, so strong, and she was. No one could believe how long she warded death off when she finally stopped chemo. What do your drinking glasses look like? We have some more unique cups and mugs, but the majority of them are just plain, slightly angular glasses, some short, some tall. How many bottles/containers are in your medicine cabinet? Oh wow, a lot. We're covered for most potential problems. How many funerals have you been to? Uhhh I think one. Maybe even none, just wakes. What was the last bug you killed and what did you use? An ant, I think? I just used my fingers. How many computers in your household? There are three laptops, but no desktop computers. Ever help to solve a crime? There was one occasion years ago when our neighbor's window was busted overnight and cops came to us to ask for any evidence we might have had, but we didn't have any. Idk what came of it. Ever get pulled over by the cops and get away without a ticket? I've never been pulled over. What was your first legal alcoholic drink? I think it was a margarita, but possibly a daquiri. Ever get published by one of those poetry groups? I fucking wish. I've tried, but to no avail. What's the furthest distance you've moved? Not very far at all. Just to the neighboring town. How many friends from high school/college do you still talk to? Only a few now and then. Girt is the only one I have real conversations with, though. What's the most expensive things your parents ever bought you? Probably the laptop I have right now, but idk. I've never asked how much things they've bought me cost, it seems rude somehow. What's the most expensive thing you've bought? The upcoming revamp of my tattoo. Deposit was $100, and then it's probably going to be another $300-400. I can't afford it all myself; as my birthday gift, Mom is helping me pay for it, but I've got most of it covered thanks to Christmas and birthday money. How many times did you intentionally start to commit suicide? Start to do it? Well, I was trying to run for sharp objects to do it twice, but on each occasion, someone held me back 'cuz they knew I was about to do something rash, so I didn't get very far, thankfully. The only time I fully went through with an attempt was my OD. Ever spent the night in the "loony bin?" How fucking disrespectful to call it that, but whatever. If you put all the instances together, I've been in psych hospitals for around a couple months, maybe more. What is your favorite cover song? Disturbed's cover of "Sound of Silence" is absolutely unbeatable. I'd just about call it a cold hard fact. What's your inspiration? Other's success stories, music, art in general, etc. What's the longest relationship you've been in? Over 3 1/2 years. Did you ever drop out of school? I dropped out of college three times, yikes. Three times is enough; even if I think I want to, I'm never going back. That is just way too much money to keep throwing down the drain, and there's clearly a pattern. Ever raise a child that wasn't your own for more than 3 months? I've never raised a kid period. Strangest medical procedure ever performed on you? Look up what a pilonidal cyst is and know I had one surgically removed. Pretty strange and uncomf. Song that has changed your attitude recently? None, really. What's something that you say a lot to be mean? ... Why would I try to be mean??? Who told you they loved you last? Me mum. Ever had a pet frog? Not technically, no, but as kids, my sister, neighbor, and I saved hundreds, maybe thousands of tadpole eggs from a ditch that was inevitably going to dry out. We transferred them all to a kiddie pool and let them grow naturally, hopping out and into the world whenever they were ready. I wouldn't call them "pets." Your worst enemy? IT'S NO SURPRIIIISE TO MEEEE I AAAAMMM MY OWN WORST ENEMYYYYY Do you believe in karma? No, but I wish it was a thing. What was the last hurtful thing you said to someone? I'm not sure. I certainly try to avoid doing so. Do you love someone enough you'd die for them? There's multiple people. The last song you listened to? I wasn't joking when I said I was gonna go on a Metallica spree, haha. "Of Wolf and Man" is on rn. Your most favorite memory as a kid? Too many, man. If you had the choice to work or not, would you work? Yes. I need something to do that benefits others in one way or another. Ever TRULY wanted to kill someone? I can't say for sure, if I'm being totally transparent. When I found out about Jason's gf after me, I can say with certainty I wanted her dead beyond dead, but I don't know if I wanted to kill her, per se. Just to clarify, no, I don't wish any negativity upon her now. I was certifiably insane before and certainly don't think I am anymore, so... Marvel or DC? I don't care. Do you watch anime subbed or dubbed? Both. I prefer dubbed, BUT only if the voice acting isn't insufferable. I like dubbed just because for me, it's very distracting to have to keep looking down at subtitles. How often do you exercise? I don't... I'm still waiting for Mom to move into her actual room versus the living room couch so I can do WiiFit with some privacy. I'm too uncomfortable to exercise in front of anyone. What is your favorite book series? Warriors will forever have a very special place in my heart. What is your favorite OTP? I will probably ship Rhett and Link for my entire life. Their friendship is truly incredible and so so SOOOOOOO cute. Who is your favorite Harry Potter character? I've never seen the series, actually.

[haloud]

many times, many ways

a malex christmas gift for christi @michaels-blackhat, who inspired me into holiday fluff and who spent this month writing wonderful gifts--I hope you enjoy this one in return! Happy holidays, everyone!

-- ao3 --

An unmarked package. An envelope, more accurately, hand-folded out of plain brown paper and left right in front of Alex’s front door. Buffy is sniffing at it before Alex can stop her; he snags her by the collar, heart in his throat, but she’s close enough to nudge it with her nose. Alex holds his breath, but she just lets out a soft boof, then loses interest and heads back inside. Alex, however, can’t be quite so cavalier. It may not have exploded when Buffy moved it, but there are ways other than explosives that a strange package can fuck you up. He fetches a pair of gloves and a particle mask before he even touches it. A small gesture toward security, maybe, but it makes him feel safe enough to work a pocketknife under the tape and slowly pull the paper apart.

Alex blinks twice at what’s inside. Pulls his mask off so it falls around his neck and blinks again. Reaches out to touch it.

It’s…a Christmas ornament. But not any, it’s—it’s light in his palm, a tiny thing, a miniature of a poster he had as a kid, the one Maria smuggled into his car after school and he hung up in the toolshed where no one would see it. Alex holds it up. Dangling from a scrap of black ribbon, the little orange rectangle catches the light, gleaming off the black enamel picking out the singer’s little face and the Danger! At the Picture Show lettering. It’s cold when he clenches it in his fist, heart pumping a hundred miles an hour.

For a second, he’s seventeen again, and he has to laugh at the memory of that kid he used to be, earbuds stuffed in his ears, knees jammed up against the desk waiting for the first period bell to ring. He grins despite himself, turning over the paper again, searching for any kind of note or indication who it’s from. Rosa, maybe? Secret presents are definitely her thing, and she was the one who gave him his first DatPS CD when he was fourteen. Maria is the other person who comes to mind, but Alex hopes she would just give it to him in person—he doesn’t like to think of her being too anxious to give him something like this face to face, what with all the mending fences going on.

He smooths his thumb over the ornament’s glossy surface one more time, then puts it on a shelf for safekeeping for lack of anywhere more festive to put it. He doesn’t really decorate for Christmas; the holidays were only ever more of the same when he was a kid, with a thin, grotesque veneer of family over the top of it.

Things get even more festive the next day, though, when he gets home from work and finds another package, in the same brown paper, sitting on the porch steps. It’s bigger this time, three dimensional, and after a moment of deliberation, Alex picks up the phone. Guerin might laugh at him, but that’s a price he has to be willing to pay.

He doesn’t laugh, though. He rolls up in his truck, that, despite the circumstances and the vaguely tipsy feeling of fear lurking in his blood, Alex has to laugh at—there’s a sprig of mistletoe wrapped in bright red ribbon hanging from the rearview mirror.

Michael bounds over to him and says, slightly breathless, “What did you need me to check out?”

Alex waves his hand in the direction of the stairs. “It’s probably nothing. I got something similar yesterday, and it was fine, I just—”

“Oh. Oh, yeah, I get it. Here, let me.” Michael squeezes Alex’s shoulder, a quick, warm, reassuring touch, then takes a step back. Focusing, he narrows his eyes at the little package, then wings it in an arc off into the empty desert.

A second passes. Nothing blows up. Michael pulls the package back in.

Rubbing the back of his neck, he says, “Sorry if whatever’s in there broke. But whoever sent it to you should have known better. Fucking idiot.”

Alex lets out a long breath, forcing his shoulders to drop and his brow to smooth. “No, it’s okay. ‘Tis the season, right? It could be from anyone.”

“Still.” Michael’s mouth curls downward, like he tastes something foul, like he tends to look whenever he tries to make nice with Kyle. It’s exasperating. It’s also a little sweet, in a twisted way.

The box has the same wrapping, same tape job as yesterday’s envelope. It comes apart easily, and inside is—Alex pulls it out, holds it up.

It’s. It’s an alien, full-on little green man alien, holding up its noodly little hands in two peace signs. Wearing a Santa hat. Covered in gaudy glitter. And still intact—only one piece has snapped off, a little piece of red molding clay that someone clearly fashioned so an ornament hook could go through it.

After a shocked second, Alex lets out a very uncharacteristic giggle; then, face burning, he drops the little alien back into the box and glances up at Michael, who’s watching him with his head tilted and a shy smile of his own on his pink mouth.

Their eyes meet for a long, breath-catching moment, a spark jumping through the cold, dry air from one body to the next. Then they both look away, clearing throats, shoving hands in pockets, and looking up at the sky instead of back at each other, each of them so large in the other’s sight to block out the sun.

“Secret Santa?” Michael says, voice cheerfully flippant. He’s still grinning somehow. Alex wants to wipe that look off his face. With his own face.

“Something like that.”

“Next time try to get someone who knows you better than to get that touristy shit.”

“I’ll do my best.”

Michael leaves after that, making it both easier and harder to breathe. Touristy shit aside, Alex puts the Santa alien on the shelf beside the first ornament, and later that night, after tossing and turning for a little while, he grabs his crutches, goes to the shelf, gropes in Jim’s old toolbox for a tube of superglue, and hunches over the coffee table to fix the clay part, making it an ornament once again.

One is an event. Two is a coincidence. Three ornaments in three days, and it’s a pattern.

No brown paper package shows up the third day; rather, he finds the ornament when he checks his mailbox in town. It’s a little laptop this time, nothing special, but it still brings a smile to his face when he holds it in his palm.

Who could the mystery sender be? It turns into something of an obsession over the next few days, which see him receiving a log cabin, a beagle, and a beautiful handmade silver and turquoise songbird. It’s clearly someone who knows him now, and someone who knows him well enough to know his home, his pet, what he does for a living…it’s a narrow field, to be sure—basically just Maria, Liz, Kyle, or Rosa. He rubs his thumb over the beagle’s little painted nose while Buffy shoots it a suspicious look from the couch as he considers his options.

Whoever it is, Guerin must know, because since the second day, the ornaments have arrived in his mailbox or on his porch unwrapped or in clear plastic wrap if it’s raining out.

Of course, all the evidence could point toward it being Guerin himself. But…somehow, Alex can’t bring himself to believe it, if only because the thought of Michael thinking of him like this, over time, with dedication, makes Alex’s chest ache with longing to see him, to hear him, to feel him. Better it be some scheme of Rosa’s. It’s just…better that way.

The gifts keep coming. Day seven, it’s the Air Force crest; on the eighth and ninth days, he finds a sunbathing alien and a bowl of ramen on his front step. They both go on the increasingly-crowded shelf, though he shoots the ramen a nasty look when he puts it in place. Another point in the Maria column, considering last time he went to one of her movie nights, he was asked to put pizza rolls in the oven and managed to burn them despite absolutely following the instructions on the package.

The tenth day’s ornament arrives in a blue Tupperware container, just translucent enough to see the ornament inside, but not so much he can tell what it is.

He opens it and finds a ball ornament wrapped in strips of paper cut from dictionaries in ten languages he can identify, including all six he speaks. It’s sturdy papier-mâché, but Alex still holds it like it might shatter if he breathes on it too hard. Every line defines things like family, like love, like forever. He returns it to its box and puts it on the shelf with the others, but his fingers linger over the lid, because there are lines he hasn’t traced with his fingertips yet, and he can hardly tear himself away.

He goes into town later that day on a grocery run with words still swimming in his mind and his mouth fixed shut because he’s not sure what might come out. But no level of distraction or concentration could keep him from being blindsided when he runs into Guerin outside the Crashdown, their bodies catching shoulder to shoulder, Guerin’s hand on his arm to steady him—their collision almost knocked a big box out of Guerin’s hands, but he steadies it with a little help from his powers until Alex has his balance back and he can take it in both hands again.

“Alex,” he breathes, then clears his throat. “Fancy seeing you here.”

“I could say the same to you,” Alex manages.

Guerin shakes the box lightly. “Liz wants to surprise Arturo with the decorations this year, so I figured I’d offer my services. I’m the only one who can get tinsel into all the hard-to-reach places, after all.”

“Oh, that’s—that’s really nice.”

“Nah, I’m getting paid. Mostly in milkshakes and fries, but who’s complaining?”

They stare across the box. It’s been like this, lately, a small talk stiffness to their interactions, and Alex doesn’t know how to make it stop. But at the same time, he isn’t sure he wants to. It’s almost…nice. A couple weeks ago Alex drove by the junkyard just because he could, and Michael smelled like snow and pine and commented on the weather, and that brief exchange left the both of them grinning like idiots by the time Alex drove away. They aren’t lovers again, not yet. But they’re something. They’re getting there.

“Want some help? I’m free tonight,” Alex says, and Michael smiles at him, and that’s that. Alex comes back late, once the Crashdown is closed and Arturo is in bed. Liz and Rosa come downstairs to work on the decorations too, and more hands makes for light work, though Michael does most of the work without using his hands at all. They’re finished in no time. Alex plugs the lights in, flips the switch, and Rosa laughs, real and unrestrained and tugging Liz into the middle of the floor, dotted with multicolored puddles of light, twirling her in a circle. Sometime during the decorating, Rosa managed to stick Michael with a present ribbon, and it bobbles on top of his curls as he slinks over to Michael’s side to knock their shoulders together. Alex lets him, in the spirit of the season, and because every time Michael touches him his body goes weightless.

Now is as good a time to ask as any.

“So, Guerin,” he says, “I’m still getting ornaments every day. You wouldn’t happen to know anything about that you haven’t told me, would you?”

Michael shrugs and grins that cowboy grin. “Looks to me like you’ve got yourself a secret admirer.”

“Secret, huh?”

“Looks that way.”

And before Alex can say another word, Michael is walking away to join Liz and Rosa dancing, whistling Let It Snow. He gets away from Alex that time, but before their little impromptu party is over, Alex manages to steal the bow from his hair, just glancing his fingers off those curls, so lightly Guerin doesn’t even seem to notice.

Whether he’s the ornament giver or not, Alex puts the bow on the shelf with the others. Just in case.

The next day, there’s no ornament when he leaves in the morning, and nothing in his mailbox when he checks it that evening, either. He’s—frustrated, okay, rather than sad, because what was the point? Stopping ten days in, what was even the point? It leaves him feeling untethered, without that tiny little thing to look forward to each and every day. Somehow, without even really noticing, he’d kind of gotten into the Christmas spirit. He even, feeling ridiculous the entire time, went to the pet store and bought a couple gifts for his dog, because he’s in a gift-giving mood even if he’s not sure he’s exchanging gifts with anyone else this year.

He shoulders his way out of the office, avoiding eye contact with the clerk, who’s surely noticed him coming in every single day, when he used to only check his mail once a week at best. Whatever. Now he has no reason to come back so often, and they’ve got plenty of time to forget him, like the way things should be.

He’s so caught up in his thoughts that he almost smacks Maria right in the face with the door as he leaves. She yelps, and he catches it at just the last second, tripping over apologies while she flaps her hand at him dismissively.

“It’s fine, it’s fine, Alex, really,” she laughs. Alex steadies her with his hands on her shoulders, and she tugs him to the side, out of the way of the sidewalk traffic. “I was hoping to run into you anyway. I have something for you.”

Oh shit. Anxiety spikes, and Alex blabbers, “Oh, shit, Maria, I’m so sorry, I didn’t know we were doing gifts this year—”

Great. Their friendship is finally finding even footing again, and Alex immediately puts himself in the red again by hitting her with a door and tells her straight up that he didn’t get her anything for Christmas. Batting a fuckin’ thousand, isn’t he. No wonder his secret admirer or whatever got bored of him.

“Alex, seriously, chill.” She tweaks his chin. “No presents is one hundred percent fine. You think I’m all about worshipping at the capitalist altar that is Christmas? Hell no. Buuut someone asked me for a favor, and it just so happened that I had something for you anyway, so here you go.”

She grabs his hand and presses into it a beautifully beaded eight-pointed star, red and white and gold. Alex gasps, and says, “This is—”

“One of Mom’s, yeah.” That wry, sad smile Maria gets when she talks about her mother curls up on her face. “She makes a lot of them on her good days, and her nurse says it’s good that she’s working with her hands. And Mom specifically said this one was for you.”

“God.” Alex swallows and grips the star as tightly as he can without crushing it. “Let me know next time you’re going to visit her, okay? So I can thank her in person?”

“Sure thing.”

Maria blinks rapidly for a moment, and Alex, understanding, doesn’t mention it. She composes herself quickly, and then Alex just has to ask:

“So it hasn’t been you the whole time, has it?”

“What, leaving you the ornaments? I am not that sappy.”

“Come on, there’s nothing wrong with being a little sentimental,” he teases.

“Uh huh. Sure. I forgot I was talking to the master of fuzzy feelings himself.”

“Do as I say, not as I do.”

Maria laughs at that and, hooking her arm through his, starts off down the street. “Now, we may not be exchanging presents this year, but that doesn’t mean I can’t make you help me with the rest of my shopping.”

--

The next day’s ornament is a classic Han Solo one, and if Alex lets out an undignified gasp when he sees it, Buffy is the only creature around to witness it. If he spends the rest of the day finding and watching the Star Wars Christmas Special, well, the same goes for that too, and his dignity is firmly intact.

The day after that, Liz texts him to come to the Crashdown, and since it’s a weekend he makes it there to meet her on her lunch break. The decorations look just as good in the daylight, if an inch or two less magical, and Alex has to duck his head to hide his grin when he remembers Michael very seriously placing a Santa hat on each individual alien in the place.

Liz beckons him over to a booth, two shakes and a plate of fries already in front of her. “Figured since I called you out, I could at least treat you,” she says. “On top of what I called you here for, which is….” She does a little drumroll on the table, then plonks an ornament box down on the table.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Alex bursts out.

“I know, right? I couldn’t believe it when I found it.”

Laughing and shaking his head, Alex picks it up. It’s a cat wearing an antenna headband so, so similar to the one perched on Liz’s head—the wrong shade of green, but still.

“I don’t suppose this is your way of telling me you’ve been leaving me ornaments all month, is it.”

“Pfft, no way.” Liz steals a fry from his tray and crunches it smugly. “Secret admirer, Manes. It’s supposed to be secret.”

Day fourteen is something delicate, so much so he’s a little scared to touch it. It’s thin glass, deep blue, and when it catches a light source it sends shimmering blue all around the room. It’s the day Alex stops trying to guess who his mystery gift-giver is, because now he’s been given light to hold in his hands, and it makes him feel—makes him—

Someone thought he was worthy of this. Someone wanted him to have it. Whether or not they ever tell him who they are, that means something.

His fifteenth ornament is the third one to come wrapped in a package, but this time it’s in an actual USPS shipping box, and it comes with a letter inside, in handwriting he recognizes.

Captain, it says, we got pressed into service again, and I was the unlucky bastard who drew the short straw, so I’m sending this to you, along with a warning that you fucking owe me…

The ornament is basic, a decently pretty white and silver snowflake. He puts the letter on the shelf with it. If the season is forcing everyone else into a sentimental mood, he might as well succumb to it too.

He wakes up on the sixteenth day with a bit of a sentiment hangover and lets himself lie in bed for a little while longer than usual, fondling Buffy’s soft ears and cradling this lovely, bittersweet feeling inside himself. If Christmas is the deadline for this whole ornament thing, he’s over halfway to the end. He takes the morning slowly, lingering over his coffee and over the view of the desert through his kitchen window, the high def white-gray limning of the world you get with a serious cold.

That day’s ornament doesn’t match Alex’s mood at all, but he still chuckles and shakes his head when he sees it. It’s another patch job like the Santa alien, but this time some sort of Valentines leftover—a traditional Roswell Gray holding a big red heart that says you’re out of this world!, with a handmade place for ornament hooks to go. It looks absurdly out of place next to everything else he’s accumulated, but he gives it its place of honor anyway.

He doesn’t expect his seventeenth ornament to arrive on the doorstep or in the mail, and sure enough, the pattern holds and it’s hand delivered at like ten o’clock that night. He almost doesn’t answer the door, but to be honest he’d left his leg on after work expecting just this.

“Ho ho ho,” an exhausted-looking Kyle says, shoving a box into Alex’s hands.

“Dude, did you drive all the way out here after your shift? It could have waited.”

“Nah, this is my one good deed for the year.”

“You’re literally a surgeon. Your job is good deeds.”

“Fine—my one act of charity.”

Alex bristles at that. “I don’t need—”

“Not for you.” Kyle punches him lightly on the shoulder.

Cryptic bastard.

“Go ahead and open it,” Kyle says, “My blood is eighty percent coffee right now, and I want to get home before I crash”

“You know you can stay if you need to.”

“Yeah, yeah. Open it.”

Alex’s eyebrows go straight up when he does and pulls out a shimmery white ball with the Buffy the Vampire Slayer logo on it. “You didn’t pick this out yourself. You asked me why I gave my dog a porn name the first time you met her.”

“Hey! I listened when you explained—” When Alex fixes him with a glare, Kyle gives in with a laugh. “Okay, okay, Rosa helped. Oh ye of little faith.”

Kyle leaves after that, with a quick hug and a Merry Christmas, and Alex goes to his shelf to put the ornament away. He hasn’t been keeping them in chronological order, more a sort of a…thematic grouping. The Buffy ball goes with Maria’s star, Liz’s alien cat, and the snowflake from his unit.

He looks up and turns away, casting his eyes all around the room to hide from no one the fact that he’s getting a little bit choked up.

Maybe he’ll buy some lights tomorrow. Or tinsel or something. No reason he can’t go in on the decorating, right? Why is he still holding himself back?

--

He doesn’t make it to the store the next day, or the two after that, three days that see him receiving a coffee mug, a UFO that’s supposed to light up when it’s plugged in, and a little truck hauling a Christmas tree.

He wonders if maybe that last one is a promise.

The pattern of hand deliveries every other day has been broken. But, in the spirit of the season—Alex doesn’t dwell on the fact that he never got one hand-delivered by Michael and instead chooses to think about the other thing that could mean.

On day twenty-one, he gets a glass teardrop that shimmers purple and golden, and on day twenty-two he gets a golden disc engraved with a tiny, perfect star chart.

The day before Christmas Eve, he opens the door to find an acoustic guitar.

As if he didn’t already know.

--

Christmas Eve dawns gray and dismal with the smell of snow in the air. Buffy trots around the yard in circles, lifting her nose every couple minutes to sniff the cold, and Alex cradles his coffee in both hands to keep them warm while he watches her, content. Part of him regrets that he never went and got more decorations, but it’s okay. This whole month—it’s been such an unexpected thing to be able to accept a simple joy into his life, to let himself expect a little, uncalled-for gift every day, that all he can feel at this point is just…peace. He couldn’t have asked for anything else. He didn’t.

Buffy barks, and Alex looks up just in time to see a familiar truck coming down the road, the bed covered with a tarp. Alex puts his mug down on the railing and regrets it instantly for want of something to do with his hands as Michael parks, opens the door, and jumps out of the car.

“Hey,” Alex says.

“Hey. Merry Christmas,” Michael says in return.

They just stare at each other for a moment, something that happens a lot when it’s just the two of them. Like they have to steel themselves to speak. Like they have to make sure that no, it’s not, it’s not the time to take that step forward and drown themselves in each other. It’s okay, yeah, it’s okay to just be here. Like this.

“Want some help with that?” Alex tilts his chin in the direction of the tarp.

“Y-yeah. Sure.” He stumbles over the word and ducks his head, rounding the truck to reveal what’s underneath.

It’s exactly what Alex expected, and everything he never did. His heart in his throat, he touches one of the branches on the tree, needles pricking his skin, sap sticky on his fingertips when he pulls them away.

“You get the other end,” Michael says, and they carry it inside together, a crate full of other decorations floating along behind them, Buffy pulling up the rear, eyeing it suspiciously. She settles in the corner to watch as Michael sets the tree up, hammers it into the stand, and positions it in the corner where it’ll be out of Alex’s way.

Alex hovers in the kitchen, making them both more coffee, hands shaking a little bit on the grounds, on the filter, on the carafe. The tree still takes up too much room. Michael takes up too much room. He always has. In this tiny house. In Alex’s heart and in his head and between his ribs. Michael pulls things out of the crate one by one and hangs them in the air around himself—bundles of lights, a skirt for the tree, multicolored balls and delicate paper snowflakes to fill all the spots left between the ornaments in Alex’s new collection.

Their fingers brush when Alex hands him a mug, and Alex lets the moment hang there. Skin on skin in the most casual, innocent way, but with Michael’s golden eyes so close it still manages to heat his blood, dry his mouth, cover him in yearning.

“Thanks,” Michael says hoarsely. He drags his index finger along Alex’s as he pulls his hand away, sending a shiver through the both of them.

Decorating for Christmas shouldn’t feel forbidden, but it does. It does, as they circle around each other, spiraling lights around the tree, eyes catching on every pass, Alex’s face so warm every time he sees Michael’s answering blush, on his cheeks, on his lips. Once the lights are on, they start in on the ornaments. Alex picks them off the shelf in chronological order, passing half of them to Michael, keeping half of them—like Mimi’s star, Han Solo, and the guitar—for himself.

“How did you manage it?” He asks eventually, fixing the teardrop to a high branch so Buffy doesn’t get any ideas.

“A friend who knows how to navigate Etsy, a sister with Amazon Prime, and a little bit of old-fashioned gumption.”

“You’re ridiculous.”

“Sure am.” Michael grins with satisfaction at the Valentines alien. Then he sobers a bit and says, “Hey, look, I’m sorry about the packaging the first couple days. I wanted to surprise you—I wasn’t thinking, and I should have.”

“It’s okay. You changed it up, and…yeah. It’s fine.”

“Thanks.”

A couple minutes pass in silence as Alex searches for what else to say. To ask. Why did he do it? When did he get the idea?

He asks, “What about the others? The ones you had Maria, Liz, Kyle, and the guys pick out? Red herrings, or did you just run out of ideas?”

“Oh, I had lots of ideas.” Michael presses his shoulder to Alex’s, coming in close to hang the star chart right beside the silver bird. Nudging him shyly, Michael says, “But my favorite one was the one where you got reminded how many people care about you.”

Alex almost drops the UFO at that, at Michael’s absurd honesty. He has nothing else to say, and they finish decorating the tree in peaceful silence. When they finish, Alex turns the lights off, and Michael plugs the tree in, and the gray day is dark enough that everything lights up bright like it would in the evening, all the colors of the rainbow.

“Fuck,” Alex breathes. It’s like a punch to the gut, happiness and disbelief and the unavoidable need to hoard this feeling, this moment, that comes on the heels of those feelings.

“So you like it?”

“Fuck,” Alex repeats, “Michael. I love it. It’s…I just…”

“Good.”

Michael, hesitating all the way, reaches out and takes Alex’s hand, sliding their fingers home together.

“I have one more ornament for you.” And he reaches into his pocket.

Alex makes a strangled noise when he sees it. Instinct tells him to rip his hand out of Michael’s and flee to the other side of the room to regroup, but he stays rooted in place, struggling, grasping for anything to say.

The console shard—because that’s what it has to be, just with gauzy ribbon looped and knotted carefully around one end so it dangles neatly from Michael’s fingers—shimmers in the soft rainbow light. Michael’s eyes shimmer along with it, equally as alien.

“I can’t,” Alex blurts. “I can’t take it. Michael. No. It’s—”

“No, no, listen, please.” Michael tugs on his hand like he wants to pull him closer, but Alex can’t—he just can’t—

He can’t be what ties Michael to Earth. He can’t be the sole tether that keeps him here, to the world that hurt him again and again, even if it’s the thing he wants most in the world, to protect, to hoard him like he hoards every sliver of a happy memory, where no one can take it away from him. That’s why he—months ago, when he most thought Michael was slipping through his hands, he gave him the console piece he found so he could go if he needed to. And now Michael tries to hand another piece back to him again?

“I can’t,” Alex says again, stuck on repeat.

“Hey, hey,” Michael fumbles for Alex’s other hand, and Alex lets him catch it, because with Michael holding him in place he doesn’t feel as cold. “It’s not what you think. I’m not asking you to keep me here, or anywhere, just.”

He swallows. He’s beautiful, in this light most of all. The most beautiful thing Alex has ever seen. Shining in every way, from the golden brushstrokes of his hair to the heart of him, who knew that Alex must never have had much of a holiday and decided to give him one.

Alex wants to kiss him. Wants to swallow whatever words Michael is going to say next and end the conversation there.

“Look.” Michael squeezes his hands. “When my mom—when she died. And after. Everything I worked for, everything I built the console for and devoted my life to, I thought it was over. Useless. But…you told me you were my family. And I know it took me too long to believe it, but I do now.

“I built the console because I was searching for my family. And now that it’s right in front of me, I want you to have a piece of it. Want us to have a piece of it.”

Alex searches Michael’s face, every earnest, open inch, until he can’t stand it anymore, until he drops Michael’s hands in favor of cradling his face, pulling him in, and taking his mouth in a slow, deep, careful kiss, tasting coffee on his tongue, drowning in the coming home of him, of his mouth on Alex’s, the rightness of having him in his arms. Michael responds with enthusiasm, stroking his back with his broad hands, making eager little noises into the kiss, going along with it until Alex pulls away to look at him again.

“You’re unbelievable,” Alex breathes.

“Thought it was the season for believing,” Michael replies, a little smile returning to his face.

“That’s what they tell me,” Alex says, and kisses him again.

--

Michael stays the night, wrapped up in Alex’s blankets, wrapped up in every inch of space Alex has ever thought was empty or cold. He doesn’t even need to set the heater that night, kept plenty warm by Michael’s body all along his back, holding him so close.

They wake up slow in the morning, but Alex earliest, because…

Well, even after everything Michael has done this month and everything he said the previous day, Alex is nervous about Michael’s Christmas present. He needs those extra minutes, watching him sleep peacefully, to steel himself.

But when he watches Michael wake up, sees how the first thing he does is look for Alex so he can smile at him, he isn’t so worried anymore.

They bring the blankets out into the sitting room, bundling up under the tree. Buffy leaves her bed to lie beside them instead, on top of the blankets, effectively pinning them in place, so Michael has to use his powers to get the wood and kindling set and strike a match and get a fire going in the fireplace.

The light flickers like something living off the console shard hanging from one of the uppermost branches. Heart in his throat, Alex pulls the envelope—the same one that held the ornament he got on December 1st—out of his pocket.

“I have something for you, too.”

Michael takes the envelope, eyes locked on Alex’s like he’s waiting for permission to open it. When Alex nods, he slips the tape open carefully, almost reverently. Like Alex, he’s never really gotten a gift before. Not one he thought meant anything. Not one he thought could stay.

He shakes the envelope, and a key falls into his hand.

“It’s to the front door,” Alex says to fill the silence.

Michael’s fist clamps around it with a familiar desperation, like someone might come out of nowhere to snatch it away. He blinks glossy eyes, wet lashes up at Alex, his mouth open, closed, throat bobbing as he swallows. Alex reaches out to stroke his closed fist.

“You’re my family. You’re my home. I don’t ever want to shut you out; I want you to be here. With me. Together. And I think you want that too.”

“Alex,” Michael chokes, and then he’s in Alex’s arms, wrapped around him in a hug.

He stays like that for most of the day, handsy and gentle, reaching out to touch him whenever they’re separated even for a moment. The next day passes much the same—then the next they both have to go back to work, live lives outside of their little holiday bubble.

Alex gets home first. He takes the dog out, gets dinner out of the freezer. Then about an hour later, he hears a car outside, footsteps on the stairs, then, after a minute’s pause, a key slots into the lock.

And Alex knows.

[cartoonbudartz]

Meet Blot Beagle!

Unlike the rest of his brothers and cousins, Blot has no interest in continuing his family’s tradition of committing crimes, but instead wants to find a future in art. He spends most of his free time creating sculptures made out of whatever scraps he can find in the junkyard.

Unfortunately, no one in his family seems to appreciate or approve of his dream, especially Ma. His brothers hardly ever let him join their heists, since he’s always too distracted with doodling in his notebook to be a good thief or lookout.

Despite receiving abuse and scorn from his kin, Blot hopes to one day make it big in the art world and to not let his family name define him.

Recently, I wondered what would happen if a beagle boy decided to go rogue and forge his own path. I’ve always wanted an OC that could have more connection with the main cast. Not sure if I’ll choose to elaborate more on this idea, but I’m still satisfied with the end product.

[salmonthestoryteller]

Creator’s Appreciation Week - Malex Fluff

This was not meant to be a Malex Fluff list.  But about halfway through making it, I realized the list would end up skewed heavily in their favor and gave up on the idea of it being a general list. There are quite a few of these that were written while the show was still airing that include Noah or reference things that ended up different in canon.  I am behind on my fic reading, so I’m probably missing quite a few good ones that are newer.  To all the creators for giving us these wonderful mood-brightening fluffs:

Thank-you!

Nachos https://archiveofourown.org/works/18161771 They think they’re so subtle, sitting at a booth together sharing a bowl of nachos. By: @el-gilliath

First Dates & Milkshakes https://archiveofourown.org/works/19739965 The Crashdown isn’t exactly the best place for a first date, but then, really, they’ve done everything backwards ever since they first met, so it seemed oddly fitting that, really, their first date is overseen by an excited Liz and a watchful Arturo. Little Green Man shakes had been put on the table, along with two baskets of fries and the promise that they’d be left alone to enjoy their date and so far, thirty minutes in, that’s exactly what’s happening. aka, the cute fluffy first date fic that no one asked for. By: Estel_willow 

This is Gospel https://archiveofourown.org/works/18238103 A weird glowing rock forces Alex to tell the truth. Set after 1x09. By: @aliencowboys Romance Me https://archiveofourown.org/works/20372080 Alex is craving a little romance. By: @spaceskam

memento https://archiveofourown.org/works/18146837 He comes up short when he gets a good look at the envelope. Its flap has been tucked in and its contents are partially visible. It contains a single color photograph. By: Nielrian

You’re a miserable liar https://archiveofourown.org/works/18568522 Michael and Alex are miserable liars. But so are Isobel and Maria. Or The BBQ where everyone learns something new. By: @caitlesshea Lies Made of Truth https://archiveofourown.org/works/20033995 “I need you to pretend to be Alex’s jealous ex,” was the first thing Michael heard when he opened the door to Liz’s lab and he blinked. By: @lightweightalexander

Put Your Money on Me https://archiveofourown.org/works/20155798 Alex needs a fake boyfriend to prevent his Air Force buddies from setting him up with someone, post-DADT repeal. It's obvious that Michael is the best choice, but what isn't obvious to either Alex or Michael is that it's not quite as fake as either one of them thinks it is.

I’ll Make the Starlight Circle the Room https://archiveofourown.org/works/18278933 Friday night is poker night, but this week isn't like any of the others. Michael's got a weird nervous energy that Alex can't place and everyone is acting stranger than usual.

By: Andrea-Lyn This is our home, this is our family https://archiveofourown.org/works/18551974 Liz and Michael find another pod. They keep an eye on it and after a few weeks it starts to move. Out hatches a newborn-aged baby. By: @roswaliens

Family https://archiveofourown.org/works/18456365 Michael and Alex build a family of their own with their foster daughter, Mia, and the family they chose. By: @fraudulentzodiacs

The Adventures of Wentz and Whiskey https://archiveofourown.org/works/18725197/chapters/44414452 The many tales of Michael and Alex's two beagles, Wentz and Whiskey By: @michaels-blackhat @el-gilliath Bestillmyslashyheart

I could build a home for your world https://archiveofourown.org/works/19694446/chapters/46614835 A story in which Michael and Alex repair everything from the cabin, to their hearts. By @saadiestuff

My hands and mouth they know where to go to flip the switch https://archiveofourown.org/works/18245360 Being in a committed relationship and getting to show it off for the first time in their lives is an exhilarating experience. Letting the world not-so-discreetly know that they’ve been having a hell of a lot of naked fun since getting together is even better. Except for amongst their friends. Suddenly, Alex is regretting years of giving them all shit for what they’ve been getting up to with various partners, because it’s all getting thrown back his way now. Next time, Guerin gets the hickey instead of Alex, he thinks. By: @littlecountrymouse

The Flamingle Series https://archiveofourown.org/series/1340080 Michael's never been to a zoo before so Alex takes him in place of date night. By: @stars-collide-for-malex

You’re in the car with a beautiful boy https://archiveofourown.org/works/18110585 There he was. The reason he had agreed to come back to his godforsaken hometown. Wavering like a mirage in the heat. Only it was Michael outside the Wild Pony. Drunk out of his skull and barely able to stand. “Guerin,” Alex said cooly as soon as he stopped alongside him. Or at least as cooly as he could ever manage with Michael. All those years and Alex still felt an undeniable pull towards him. Once, he would have defined it as finding your one true love. Like a true romantic. Having parts of him blown off by an IED had cured him of that. By: @djchika

Friday night lights https://archiveofourown.org/works/19997836 On a Friday night, long after Michael’s locked up at the junkyard, just as the stars come out in full, Michael lets Alex pull him across the parking lot of their old high school, across the dewy football field, and under the silver bleachers. By: @cosmicsolipsism

[fuckyeahalexedler]

Ben Kuzma: Chasing fitness fanatic Sedins could help Edler extend NHL career

"As you get older, everyone expects you to get slower. I feel good. I’m not really looking further than my contract, but I obviously want to keep playing as long as I can." — Alex Edler, Vancouver Canucks veteran defenceman

Endurance and recovery are key components in any training regimen.

For Alex Edler, ramping up a running routine to complement skating drills in advance of the Vancouver Canucks training camp — set to begin on July 13 — has taken on a new meaning.

He knows the best-of-five qualifying series with the Minnesota Wild is going to test his strength, stamina and stride with games every other night. He also knew making the most of the Lower Mainland outdoors during the novel coronavirus physical-distancing restrictions could be a bonus.

Especially when you accept a running invitation from fitness fanatics Daniel and Henrik Sedin.

Edler has a year left on his contract and the 34-year-old Swede would like to emulate his countrymen by extending the competitive career curve. Chasing the Sedins on a vertical mountain trail is a good barometer.

After all, the day before Sedins Week in February to celebrate their jersey retirements, the twins ran a half marathon. No big deal, they have run a marathon. Running six times a week and logging 100 kilometres is part of their retirement routine.

“Every summer, I try to focus a lot on cardio and they asked me if I wanted to join them for a trail run,” Edler said Friday, following a Phase 2 voluntary skate at Rogers Arena. “I said I didn’t know because I probably had no chance of keeping up with them. They said: ‘It’s OK because we just ran a marathon last week and this is more of a recovery week for us.’

“So, I did run but it was really long and hard. It was 20 kilometres up and down and not running all the time, but we were going up Grouse Mountain because they know all the trails up there. I was just trying to stay with them and even trying to catch up to them, but that made it even harder by trying to run and talk.

“I’ve been fortunate to work out with them a lot because of their work ethic and it just rubs off on you. And it was so good for the young guys to see how hard they pushed.”

That experience and career perspective afforded by the Sedins — first ballot Hockey Hall of Fame locks for sure — is inspiring.

Edler vowed to carry on their legacy in the community and be a culture-defining presence in the room. And because he doesn’t want to be one of those 30-plus defencemen who just fades away and proves more of a hindrance than a help, he gamely attempts to match strides with the Sedins, and also works on every facet of his skating with local skating coach Barb Aidelbaum.

“He’s a quiet guy,” said Aidelbaum. “We’ve been skating together since 2014 and I just kind of sat back and looked at what he was bringing to the rink when we first resumed skating two weeks ago. He was mentally free and physically fresh.

“You see that and think: ‘Gee, I hope the other players have used their time as productively as he has.’ He’s a thinker and in a really good place. It took him about 30 minutes our first day and you would look at him and think he hadn’t had the (season pause) break. He felt it in the lungs, but he has done so much work on the technical aspect of his skating, that the fundamentals are there.

“It’s the edges and balance and his drive and positioning. It has been repeated for so many years and you don’t lose that. It’s not quite as easy as riding a bike, but if you show up the first day and you’re set — you’re just ready to go. He’s in a really good place.”

It didn’t happen overnight. It came through observation and application.

Edler was 20 in the 2006-07 season and the Canucks roster sported seasoned blueliners in Sami Salo (31), Mattias Ohlund (29), Willie Mitchell (29) and Brent Sopel (29). The Sedins were 25 and already 80-point producers, so the on-the-job training was not lost on Edler.

And if Aidelbaum could help fine tune the skating, then Edler was going to have a leg up on longevity.

“She’s not trying to change the way you skate, just make small tweaks to be more efficient,” said Edler. “It has been really good for me because as you get older, everyone expects you to get slower. I don’t know how you’re supposed to feel when you’re 34.

“I feel good. I’m not really looking further than my contract, but I obviously want to keep playing as long as I can. We’ve been getting better and it’s exciting and you want to be a part of it.”

The Sedins retired at age 37. Salo and Mitchell called it quits at 38 and Edler’s future depends on health and club direction.

Younger players like Olli Juolevi must be worked into the fold and there’s the ongoing pursuit of Nikita Tryamkin, the curiosity if Brogan Rafferty’s offensive game can translate from the AHL and how far NCAA phenom Jack Rathbone is from playing in the NHL.

Edler suffered a shoulder injury in a collision with Zack Kassian on Nov. 30 and was sidelined for 10 games. His average minutes slipped from 24:39 last season to 22:37 with the arrival of Calder Trophy candidate Quinn Hughes. The rookie’s ascension included quick promotion to the first power-play unit that was ranked fourth when the NHL season was paused March 12.

Edler ranked third overall in blocked shots this season and of his 33 points (5-28) in 59 games, 26 came at even strength. He also took a team high 26 minor penalties.

Edler’s best value this season may be in what awaits the Canucks.

Jay Beagle leads the club in post-season experience with 85 games and won a Stanley Cup with the Washington Capitals. Tyler Toffoli (47 games) and Tanner Pearson (34) won a Stanley Cup with the Los Angeles Kings, while Edler (65) and J.T. Miler (61) have considerable game experience.

However in the top-six mix, Elias Pettersson and Brock Boeser have yet to play a post-season game. Same for third-liners Adam Gaudette and Jake Virtanen.

“Who knows what it’s going to be like with empty stands, so it might be even more important to try and lead the way and use my experience,” said Edler.

“The Wild have some veterans who have been around and have playoff experience. It’s definitely going to be a hard series and a tight series, but we have a good chance.”

Edler has two young daughters and is vigilant with COVID-19 safety protocols in the city and province. He’s also wary of how they’ll be applied at the Western Conference post-season hub in Edmonton. There is some trepidation among players and opting out of post-season play is an NHL option.

“They’re working hard to create a safe space for us and there’s no doubt that everything that can be done is being done,” said Edler. “There’s uncertainty for the whole world, but it’s obvious we have to create a safe environment for everyone. And if we can’t, we can’t play because that’s priority number 1.

“Everyone is in a different situation. Some may have health things going on, something in the family or just what kind person you are. The virus has been hard to predict and it’s the right thing to think about health and family first.”

(July 3, 2020)

[theyearoftheking]

Book Twenty-Six: The Drawing of the Three

“Here is another one ready to die for you, Roland. What great wrong did you ever do that you should inspire such terrible loyalty in so many?”

I’m annoyed. I had almost this entire blog written and thanks to the magic of the interwebz, it never saved as a draft, and is now gone forever. I’m trying to keep my rage to a manageable level, I have a conference call in about an hour, and rage would not be appreciated. 

So, let’s try this again. 

Yes, I totally just saved this as a draft once again. I’m going to be compulsively doing that for the next hour. My apologies, you’ll be getting a far less robust post than I initially intended. Blame Tumblr. 

I loved opening The Drawing of the Three and reading it for the hundredth time. I can’t explain the comfort that comes with Roland waking up on the beach to the lobstrosities, or looking at the bizarre artwork that doesn’t match up with my mental images of the story. Or reading about Eddie and Susannah/Detta/Odetta and their fantastic backstories. This is one of my favorite books in the Dark Tower universe and re-reading it is never a disappointment.

However, I fear I’ve been doing something all wrong up until this point. I have been keeping track of Dark Tower mentions in other books, but I wasn’t prepared for the number of other Steve books mentioned within this one. So far we’ve got:

The Shining: Eddie talks repeatedly about the movie, and even speaks very highly of Stanley Kubrick, so that was fun. 

The Stand/The Eyes of the Dragon: towards the end of the novel, Roland mentions our crafty friend Flagg. 

Misery: Jack Mort, the “pusher” refers to himself as a “Do-Bee;” a reference that would have made no sense to me had I not just finished reading Misery. 

This is me, trying to tie all the threads together...

One glaring thing I never picked up on until this re-read: this book should have been called The Drawing of the Two. Yes, Roland walks through three doors, but only ends up with two members of his ka-tet. He basically just uses Jack Mort as a way to stock back up on ammo and medicine. Wow... Roland isn’t that different from social distancing hoarders right now. But I digress. We don’t get the final member of our ka-tet until the next book.

Ka. 

For those not familiar with the term, Roland defines it as, “...it means duty, or destiny, or in the vulgate, a place you must go...I don’t discuss philosophy. I don’t study history. All I know is what’s past is past, and what’s ahead is ahead. The second is ka, and takes care of itself.” 

The Drawing of the Three opens with Roland washed up on a beach, having his extremities munched on by lobstosities. He ends up losing a toe, and two fingers; which is bad business for a gunslinger. He fights off the lobstrosities, and passes out further up the beach and out of the reach of their little claws. 

Roland eventually starts his sojourn down the beach where he encounters the first of three doors. This one is labeled, “The Prisoner”. The prisoner in question is Eddie Dean, a heroin junkie currently flying back to New York from Nassau, with cocaine taped to his body. Smart, right? Roland basically jumps into Eddie’s body and helps him evade customs officers by transporting the drugs back through the door and into his world. There’s an ensuing gunfight with the Italian mafioso who hired Eddie to smuggle the drugs, and Roland helps him survive. 

There’s also a lot of back story about Eddie’s brother, Henry Dean: eminent sage and junkie; who was responsible for getting Eddie hooked on drugs in the first place; and the guilt Eddie feels for Henry’s death. Eddie is a complex, well-drawn character that you equally sympathize with, and want to kill. 

Roland and Eddie are a hot mess: Eddie is going through heroin withdrawals, and Roland is fighting off an infection from the lobstrosities bites. But they keep pushing on, and make their way to the second door: “The Lady of Shadows”. The “lady” is Detta, or Odetta Holmes, depending on which personality has come out to play. Odetta Holmes is the wealthy heir to a dental fortune, and she spends her days doing the things classy ladies do: shopping, lunching, civil rights protesting, and being driven around town, because a she’s missing her legs from the knees down (the result of being pushed in front of a subway train). Odetta is pretty, kind, and well spoken. Detta on the other hand, is a demon from hell. Neither woman knows of the other, and when Detta is inhabiting her body, Odetta think she’s just had a bad headache and has passed out for a bit.

As someone who suffers from migraines, I seriously hope I don’t have an evil twin who takes over when I’m passed out. My drunk alter ego, Rosie, is already too much for me to have to deal with. 

But Roland and Eddie have their hands full with Odetta/Detta; and Detta keeps trying to kill them every chance she gets. It’s both terrifying and entertaining. Eddie is over the worst of his withdrawals, but Roland is seriously knocking on death’s door by the time they find the third door: “The Pusher”. 

The Pusher is Jack Mort, who is responsible for pushing Odetta in front of a subway train, and in a coincidental turn of events; dropped a brick on her head when she was a small girl, which could have caused the Odetta/Detta personalities. And, remember Jake from the The Gunslinger? Mort was maybe the one who pushed Jake in front of a taxi and killed him. But unlike Eddie and Odetta/Detta, Roland doesn’t bring Jack back with him. Instead, he just inhabits his body to get antibiotics and ammo. As you do. 

Roland forces Jack to jump in front of the same subway train that maimed Odetta/Detta; which kills him, but also causes a battle royale between the two personalities and ultimately creates Susannah Dean: a combination of her two previous personalities. 

Got all that? 

So, Roland recovers from his infection, Eddie and Susannah fall in love, and Roland admits he’s probably going to end up sacrificing them both on his journey for the tower. 

The end. 

I’m pretty sure my first review was more eloquent, but you get the idea. It’s a fantastic story full of deep character development, and it leaves you wondering what’s going to happen in the next installment. Well, if we were reading these in real time, we’d only have four years to wait for the next book. But, we only have six more books to read before we get back to Jake, Blane, and the Wastelands. Bring it!!! 

Total Wisconsin Mentions: 16

Total Dark Tower References: 21

Book Grade: A-

Rebecca’s Definitive Ranking of Stephen King Books

The Talisman: A+

Misery: A+

Different Seasons: A+

It: A+

The Shining: A-

The Stand: A-

The Drawing of the Three: A-

Skeleton Crew: B+

The Dead Zone: B+

‘Salem’s Lot: B+

Carrie: B+

Creepshow: B+

Cycle of the Werewolf: B-

Danse Macabre: B-

The Running Man: C+

Thinner: C+

The Eyes of the Dragon: C+

The Long Walk: C+

The Gunslinger: C+

Pet Sematary: C+

Firestarter: C+

Rage: C

Cujo: C-

Nightshift: C-

Roadwork: D

Christine: D

Next up is The Tommyknockers, which I know absolutely nothing about. But the first few pages involve a beagle, soooo... there’s that. 

Until next time, Long Days & Pleasant Nights, Rebecca

[cksmart-world]

The completely unnecessary news analysis

by Christopher Smart

February 18, 2020

BERNIE BROS BE PISSED & WHAT’S WRONG WITH THE ERA

Supporters of Bernie Sanders are more than a little chafed at other Democrats who are taking an “anyone-but-Bernie” stance and they're letting folks know in no uncertain terms: “you A-holes.” Supporters of Bloomberg, Buttigieg, Klobachar, Warren and Biden say Bernie can't beat Trump because the Name-Caller-In-Chief will label him as a Marxist dog and scare the bejesus out of voters. Many also say Mayor Pete can't beat Trump because he's gay. Rush Limbaugh already has started in on Buttigieg for kissing his husband in public. Oh, Lordy. Evangelicals are hugging their Bibles. Elizabeth Warren has dropped in the polls, largely because she has a plan for just about everything and that's confusing to American voters who hate details. They're more into stuff like, “Make America Great Again.” Poor Joe Biden has hit the skids, too. Old Joe's jokes have gotten stale and aviator sunglasses have gone out of style. Amy Klobuchar is a good, Midwestern woman with a nice smile who knows how to milk a cow. But she's a little too nice and doesn't have the money that Michael Bloomberg has. And now we find out that the New York billionaire had the horribly racist “Stop-N-Frisk” policing policy when he was mayor of the Big Apple, so he can't get the African-American vote. And it's just been revealed that Bloomberg hates babies and puppies. But hey, don't lose hope: The staff here at Smart Bomb has come up with a bumpersticker for Dems: “Miracles Do Happen.”

WHAT'S WRONG WITH THE ERA

It's been 48 years since the Equal Rights Amendment was submitted to Congress in October 1971. It passed both houses and was ratified by 35 of the necessary 38 states. But it died after a decade of fierce debate. The arguments in the Beehive State were as contentious as anywhere. In the end, Utah did not ratify. Why not? What's wrong with an amendment that seeks equal rights for women and men? Our crack research team here at Smart Bomb dove into the archives to find the answers then and now:

1 – If the ERA becomes law, women will have to use urinals.

2 – If the ERA becomes law, men will have to wear bras and lipstick and fix dinner.

3 – God created special roles for men and women: men wear pants and drink beer; women wear skirts and drink tea (and don't belch).

4 – If the ERA passes, women will have to go into combat and share foxholes with horny men without condoms who are trained to kill.

5 – If the ERA is ratified, women can become president. Yikes!

6 – If the ERA becomes law, workplace sex could cease to exist.

7 – Or, it could mean that workplace sex would get out of control with women jumping men in the utility closet. OMG.

8 – If the ERA becomes a reality, young Mormon women will go on religious missions.

9 – If the ERA is ratified, women will become astronauts and orbit the Earth and feel superior to men.

10 – And the very worst part of the ERA, according to Utah Sen. Mike Lee, is that it is part of a “radical pro-abortion agenda.” Yeah, damnit, it's “an Orwellian mischaracterization of what it would do,” Lee said, because it will allow women to have abortions but not men.

HEY, ALEXA, GET OUT OF MY FACE

Your friend Alexa, who helps you play music, turn off the TV and put on the bedroom lights, may not be as warm-hearted you think. Amazon has big plans for its virtual assistant. Sooner than you think, Alexa — or one of her siblings — will be directing our lives — it’ll interpret our data and make decisions for us, according to Rohit Prasad, the scientist in charge of Alexa‘s development. George Orwell was distressed about Big Brother, but he couldn't imagine we would willingly invite him or Big Sister into our lives with such giddy anticipation. The aim is to turn Alexa into an omnipresent companion that shapes our lives. You might find yourself in an argument with Alexa on what music to play or what to watch on TV or which car to buy. Yep, it's “2001: A Space Odyssey” all over again. HAL has collected all your data and now, there is no real reason for you to exist — well wait, Alexa does want your money, but you don't have to worry your lil’ head about that, she'll tell you how to spend it.

BILL BARR: I WON'T BE BULLIED

He's a strong, independent attorney general. President Donald Trump doesn't tell him what to do (except sometimes). Sure, there was that little thing with the Mueller Report that looked to nonpartisan legal beagles like a roadmap to impeachment that Barr announced was vindication. And there is that little matter of reviewing Michael Flynn's case, where he pleaded guilty to the FBI about his contacts with Russians. And just because the attorney general determined that Roger Stone's recommended sentence was far too harsh, doesn't mean he isn't independent.  The fact that Trump tweeted the same thing 12 hours earlier was just a coincidence. Bill Barr is a man of great integrity, depending, of course, on how you define it. OK, maybe critics, who say the Department of Justice is being politicized, have a point. But as President Trump insisted, he can do whatever he wants, including interceding in criminal trials, so it isn't corruption. Whether Bill Barr is an independent attorney general or not, really doesn't matter. (Well, actually it does matter but WTF.) And the president wants to know why that slut Andrew McCabe is off the hook. And why aren't James Comey, Peter Strzok and Lisa Page in jail along with Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff? Where is the justice?

Post Script — That was the week that was. And man, was it strange — that is to say, about normal for the age of Trump. Still, there is no better time to be a “Hooker For Jesus.” (We are not making this up.) DOJ officials rejected grant applications from Catholic Charities and Chicanos Por La Causa. Instead, according to Reuters, it gave more than $1 million to the Lincoln Tubman Foundation and Hookers for Jesus. Don't tell the Evangelicals, they'll freak. Speaking of sinners, Jim Jordan, the rabid congressman from Ohio, is about to be caught up in a sex scandal involving his old wrestling team at Ohio State. Bummer (no pun intended). And the hits just keep coming: Michael Avenatti, who gained fame representing Stormy Daniels, was found guilty of trying to extort $25 million from Nike. But unlike Roger Stone and Michael Flynn, he can't expect a pardon from Donald Trump. Down on the southern border, those darn coyotes already have come up with a new “camouflage ladder” to smuggle people and drugs over Trump's new border wall. The contraptions, made of old, rusted construction rebar, make the climb easy and can't be detected by cameras. Meanwhile, Trump has diverted another $3.8 billion in military funds for his signature achievement. (Mexico won't pay. Duh.) There's more — Trump is dispatching border patrol agents to Sanctuary Cities to root out them horrible immigrants who are doing all our scut work. Adn last but far from least, here in Utah, state legislators are feeling oh so generous after increasing from 0 to 25 percent Salt Lake City's share of property taxes from the Inland Port. That's better than a jab with a sharp stick, but not so charitable when you consider the city should get 100 percent of taxes from its own, damn land. And so it goes.

OK, Wilson, maybe you and the band can take us out with a little something hopeful for our immigrant friends and all the Democrats and everyone else who is on the verge of a nervous breakdown in the age of Trump:

Well, the oppressors are trying to keep me down / Trying to drive me underground / And they think that they have got the battle won / I say forgive them Lord, they know not what they've done / 'Cause, as sure as the sun will shine / I'm gonna get my share now, what's mine / And then the harder they come / The harder they fall, one and all / Ooh, the harder they come / Harder they fall, one and all...

[a-cai-jpg]

frailty, thy name is woman! (HAH)

So the other day, I was ambushed by a group of tiny puppies.

I was in the park, breathing some fresh air and sunshine for the first time in a long, long time. I sat on a grassy hill--notebook just recently closed and resting in my lap--staring blankly at the amphitheater beneath me and suddenly, I hear barking to my right and felt something nudge my thigh.

Not gonna lie, I almost screamed and whacked the puppy in the face.

They were three beagles(?), bounding around the hill because, according to their owners who respectfully stood 6 feet away from me, they hadn't left the house in a week. 

(same.)

Anyways, before they came to say hi, I was listening to a sad, acoustic playlist and writing down notes about women.

(it's not weird if u don't make it weird)

That morning, I had woken up thinking about women's issues. 

Sexism is not exactly the social issue I'm most preoccupied by. It's prominent in every aspect of life, but because I've been fortunate enough to be sheltered from most of it, the sexism I experience is very subtle and difficult to pinpoint. I grew up in a primarily female household with a lot of strong personalities, and only recently did I begin to take note of the almost indiscernible power dynamic between the men and the women.

So, most of my life, I've just been kind of cruising along, with this vaguely gender-less persona that only started to shift some time in university.

A friend once asked, "How do you know that you're a woman?"

I think this was during the same time I was taking a philosophy course about theories of sexual differences, and so all my thoughts were kind of meta and hypothetical. My initial thought was, uh what do you mean like of course I know I'm a woman that's what I've checked on all the forms. But then I thought about it and I was like. Bruh. 

Bruh.

The reply I gave her, I feel like, was unsatisfactory and very personal. I didn't want to fall back onto gender norms, because that was so obviously a cop-out. Furthermore, I feel like I didn't experience a lot of the stereotypical "what it means to be a woman." AND, the definition of "adult human being" was too inadequate.

So, how do I know that I'm a woman?

At the time, I gave her a pretty sloppy answer about internalized misogyny, and I'm not going to pretend I have a better answer now, but I think I've broken it down to two main points.

Number one: I know I'm a woman because I'm constantly in competition with other women. I view women as my primary competitors. Very rarely do I see masculine-presenting individuals as competition, even though technically, all of us are competing for resources, prestige, or whatever it is we seek. Sure, you can play a probability game and say it's all statistics, but I think there's an aspect of misogyny as well.

Number two, I know I'm a woman because I feel anger and indignation on behalf of other women, internalizing it as a personal offense, even when I myself have not undergone the same struggle.

It's the same criteria I think of when I ask myself how I know I'm Asian American. But, in the racial aspect, there's a third criteria, which is the reflexive self. I feel that other people see me as Asian American, and therefore, I am Asian American. For some bizarre reason, I didn't experience the same reflexive self when I thought about my gender.

I think it was this lack of a reflexive self and vaguely gender-less upbringing that pushed me to declare, very loudly, in the middle of a science classroom in highschool that, "I am not a feminist."

(I could self-psychoanalyze and come up with a million reasons why my upbringing was gender-less. It could have to do with the fact that my primary caretakers were women, so there was no other for me to reference, and thereby, no juxtaposition between women and men. It could have to do with early, internalized misogyny that caused me to push away things that identified me specifically as a "girl." It could also be that I'm incredibly not self-aware.)

(I stand by the statement that contrast is necessary for identification, though.)

Anyways.

I remember when I said those words, my best friend looked at me with exasperation and a classmate looked at me with disgust. For good reason.

At the time, the word "feminist," to me, had a lot of negative connotations. I equated it with the "feminazi." I didn't buy into sexist ideals, but neither did I understand the angry, seemingly unnecessary reversal of gender roles that "feminazis"  were proclaiming.

And my friend patiently explained to me that no, you don't have to be a feminazi to be a feminist. 

But see, even that in itself is anti-feminist, isn't it?

We were, again, drawing lines for what it means to be an acceptable woman--an acceptable feminist--and what it means to be an unacceptable woman.

Why is there a negative connotation to the term "feminazi"? Why is there a negative connotation to the term "feminist"? Isn't the term "feminazi" in itself misogynistic?

I think it has to do with the fact that the general culture is uncomfortable with women stepping beyond what their gender roles have prescribed them. The culture has moved in a direction where it is acceptable and almost expected for women to be feminists, but being a "feminazi" is still frowned up.

This might seem very obvious to some, but I actually haven't thought about the term "feminazi" in a long while. So, to make sure I actually knew what a "feminazi" was, I pulled up the Wikipedia article. Here are a few words used to describe a feminazi:

a committed feminist or a strong-willed woman

radical feminists

see as many abortions as possible

militants

quest for power

belief that men aren't necessary

well-intentioned but misguided people who call themselves feminists

the term came to be widely used for feminism as a whole

marginalize any feminist as a hardline, uncompromising manhater

hate men

dogmatic, inflexible, and intolerant

an extremist, power-hungry minority

I've never met anyone who fits that description, though [Limbaugh] lavishes it on me among many others

bossy, hating men and femininity

hyper-vigilant to perceived sexism

vindictive

puritanical

The term was apparently, popularized by a dude named Rush Limbaugh, and I'll be damned if I let a man determine what kind of feminist I am.

Maybe I am biased because a militant women's group seeking to overpower the patriarchy sounds pretty lit and like good material for a new Netflix show, but like.

Tell me again why it's not okay to be a feminazi.

(my primary reactions to the list above are: "i wonder why," "sounds ok to me lol," and "who the fuck are you to say")

ANYWAYS.

"Feminazis," according to Mr. Limbaugh (who even is this guy) is an unacceptable way to be a feminist.

He is a man governing what it means to be a feminist (again, who the fuck are you), but let's be real, there are many women out there who draw similar lines, maybe for others, maybe for themselves. The popular "Am I not a good feminist if I __________" questions in themselves are anti-feminist. Once again, it is a show of how women are policing themselves and each other.

I'm not big on philosophy because I can't understand most of it, but Foucault made the assertion that policing and discipline in a modern society lies with the self, or an invisible, anonymous power embedded in society.

(Ok, I'm going to be honest, I didn't want to read through 30 pages of feminist theory and I barely understood the four pages that I did read, so if I'm wrong, don't hate me.)

In other words, men and women become the gender police for themselves. Even as women gain more rights and freedom, they continue to police themselves in a new way, like asking themselves what it means to be a good feminist.

(Bartky introduces the argument that there needs to be an upheaval of social norms to end the policing.)

(And okay, so, the more I read Bartky's Foucault, Femininity, and Patriarchal Power, the more excited I get, so I'm gOiNg To StOp mYsElf hERe.)

I ask myself this question often too.

Am I not a good feminist if I express vague disapproval at someone who switches boyfriends every other day?

Am I not a good feminist if I am grateful for men opening doors for me or offering to grab my suitcase for me on the plane? (I'm 5'2 okay, I have to stand on the seat sometimes, it's embarrassing.)

See, I appreciate chivalry and I don't think chivalry is dead because what does that even mean, but I also recognize that chivalry isn't the same thing as gender equality or liberation for women (or dare I say, liberation of gender?). But, gender equality doesn't mean that women and men do all of the same things and are assumed to be able to do all of the same things. Because we, as humans, have varying abilities, don't we?

The question of what the fuck is gender equality plagued me for an entire semester and bothers me even now but I just kind of stomp on it and make it go away. The easy answer to it, for me, is a fair division of labor agreed upon by both parties, ensuring there is no abuse of power within the relationship.

But that statement in itself is problematic because it introduces a possibility of stasis, of complacency that might revert to a new abuse of power.

(It's also not one that every feminist agrees on.)

But let's return to the question of what it means to be a woman.

I wrote that contrast is necessary for identification, but I fear the statement implies that women are defined in opposition to men, which is false. Like, non-men = women. And, since gender is a spectrum, that obviously is not true. But, since gender is a spectrum, is it necessary for us to identify ourselves? 

At the end of my notes, I scribbled a series of questions.

Why does it matter to me what gender people are?

Why does it matter to me what gender I am?

Is there a correlation between sexuality and gender? Especially since we are all on a spectrum for both? Are we socialized to choose? Is this or is this not evolutionarily favorable?

(I see now that the flaw in me writing blog posts is that I can't actually have a conversation about this and that's frustrating.)

(Also, I recognize that I live in an immense amount of privilege to be asking these questions and not, I don't know, fearing for my life.)

I briefly entertained the idea that women are essentially the oppressed party in the larger narrative of gender. But there are two problems with this statement. One, women are definitely not the only oppressed party. Two, everyone ultimately suffers when there is an accepted narrative.

But, the undeniable fact is that there is a common reality that people who identify as women live. It has nothing to do with anatomy, organs, chromosomes, hormone levels, brain structure, or sexuality. It is an experience that is placed upon us by the patriarchal society, regardless of whether or not we recognize it, based on how we present ourselves.

This is how the reflexive self began to develop, in Calc B, freshman year of college.

I try to talk about gender as removed from sex as possible, because I get terribly confused when I talk about them in conjunction with each other, but also because I do think there is a difference between the feminine experience and the female experience. I just don’t really understand it.

I wrote in my notes somewhere: Gender is a spectrum. You are your own individual, gender be damned.

I don't proclaim myself an expert on this matter. These are words that chased their own tails in my mind as I tried to understand how to function in an infuriating society that constantly made me angry.

The other day, I saw a Facebook post from a stranger who was talking about how their boyfriend didn't believe women were being oppressed because even though women get paid less, men pay for dates. And this led me to think about the wage disparity and how people always tell me, well, no, it doesn't exist. It's the woman's fault for not asking for a higher wage.

And I’m just kind of like, ???

A student of mine came to me one morning, a little disappointed and a little annoyed, because he had been shut down by a fellow classmate when he made a comment about the wage gap not being an actual thing.

(the thing about talking to students is that it's a lot easier to forgive ignorance and to actually have a conversation without getting angry.)

He said that he wished the classmate, a girl, wouldn't just be all angry about it and call him dumb.

I didn't know how to respond to that then, aside from agreeing that it is necessary to have actual dialogue around important issues and asking a few questions so he could critically think about gender issues in the U.S. 

But, I thought about it the morning before I got ambushed by the dogs, and I wish I asked him to think about why people get so angry talking about these matters.

I think the reason why it's so difficult to have these conversations is because--

God, imagine the privilege of not having to have these conversations and not feeling angry and humiliated because you are pulling out this vulnerable bit of you that's been attacked by Society and trying to make someone who is implicitly attacking you understand.

That's not a comfortable feeling, and adults can't even manage it so how is a teenager expected to?

The same feeling rises within myself when I talk about race and when I talk about gender. Some of it is internalized racism and misogyny, but a whole lot of it is not wanting to be vulnerable, and that in itself is a little fucked up (and maybe, misogynistic?). 

See, when I feel very strongly about a matter, I expect strong, rigorous, academic debate. I want to break down the logic in every sentence and refute facts and opinions with Better Facts and Opinions, complete with citations, and I don’t want to fall back on anecdotes even though I end up resorting to it anyways.

(I am also the annoying person who would do the Hamilton thing and be like i have the honor to be your obedient servant, A DOT CAI.)

But, so often, we don't have the luxury to do that. And also, very often, we are utterly consumed by the larger narrative that facts end up not meaning very much to us.

We are all part of an accepted narrative, and that, along with the social norms that come with it, is the enemy.

Men are not the enemy in feminism, which is why men need to calm the fuck down and get behind the feminist movement. Men are also suffering from this accepted narrative and gender policing that lauds toxic masculinity.

I'm not saying there's a right way to be a feminist, but I strongly believe there's a wrong way to be a feminist. I think being a feminist means you support gender equality, regardless of what gender someone identifies as. I think being a feminist means you want everyone to embrace their true selves. I think being a feminist means you stand with every individual, and so I think being a feminist should be the default for a human being.

But if a person identifies as a feminist and draws rules and regulations for how to be one, then that is anti-feminist.

(Come at me, feminist philosophers, I'm very zen and I'm willing to listen to you tell me about how society needs to see an utter deconstruction of feminism and masculinity.)

Be you, my friend. Be you and let other people be themselves. It's not like they're hurting you by being trans or gay or bi. 

Like jeez, why is that so hard.

(stop hating on Irene 'cause she's a feminist, she's fucking beautiful and i will fight you.)

I don't know, I love women. They are inspiring and beautiful, and the term "woman," as much as I've broken it down, actually matters because society has forced it to matter. And weirdly enough, as difficult as it is for me to truly identify with woman at times, I like being one and I'm proud to be a feminist.

But it's also a little scary to be a woman. There are the general things a woman has to worry about, like walking around at night or traveling alone or going to a bar alone or doing anything alone to be completely honest. But there are also the other concerns, like what does a family dynamic look like with my personality and my ideals? How do I navigate a patriarchal society in terms of work and relationships? Which values do I give up to make sure I can actually go somewhere? When do I tell a friend to shut the fuck up because he’s mansplaining? How do I respond to defensiveness without getting defensive myself? How do I ensure that my daughter lives in a safer, more equitable world? How do I ensure that my son doesn't turn out to be a misogynist? Like? Help?

(sos i drank too my caffeine and now my hands are shaking)

Feminist theory, crudely put, falls into two categories (fuck i’m literally dragging things out of my ass, i don’t actually know if this is true lol), with one firmly asserting that a feminist revolution is rejecting the societal definition of femininity and the other embracing femininity. 

(idk if there are only two camps, but these two perspectives definitely exist in feminist theory ok)

I definitely fall in the latter, because I can’t wrap my head around the rejection of femininity. Like, is that not misogynistic? Camosy’s Behind the Abortion Wars uses a similar argument to proclaim abortion as inherently sexist. It strips females of what has traditionally given them power, rendering them...males. Or some version of a male.

(i’m sold on camosy’s argument. don’t misunderstand, i’m definitely pro-choice, but i have thoughts.)

See, all of this is very complicated. Sometimes I see quotes about feminist theory and it’s so intellectually exhilarating that I just have to file it away and think about it on a day where I’m wired on caffeine. But even on those days, I feel like my brain falls short on trying to understand this very meta gender theory thing.

So, obviously, I don’t hope to convince you to believe in my ideal, because I don’t know what I’m talking about. But, if you have read this far, I leave you with the same thing I said a number of paragraphs back.

BE YOU AND LET OTHER PEOPLE BE THEMSELVES.

Recognize when you are causing harm, explicitly or not.

Recognize when other people are causing harm, explicitly or not, and engage them in conversation.

(these are actually goals and guidelines for me because i have no backbone and generally just fume in silence.)

(between me brainstorming this and me actually writing this, a number of different things have come to my attention)

(one of them is the erasure of non-masculine stories in history) (and yes that's obvious, but i also watched a bunch of TedEd videos about women so it's just very salient in my mind right now)

(another is the nth room south korea scandal, and i don't even know where to begin with that)

(Disclaimer: I don’t actually know what I’m talking about but I welcome counterarguments. I also realize putting a disclaimer at the end is really dumb, but I don’t want to interrupt my non-existent narrative flow. I feel like my take on gender is too simple and not nuanced enough, but honestly, I just don’t really get gender at times? So I really shouldn’t be talking about gender theory. Yet. Here we are.)

I LOVE WOMEN.

So here is a song from a woman that I recently found and fell in love with:

陳粒 - 无所求必满载而归 它让你受折磨 觉得痛 觉得渴 [life] makes you suffer, makes you hurt, makes you thirsty 觉得无路走 无处躲 makes you feel like there's nowhere to go, nowhere tohide 无所求也求不得 even if you want nothing, you can't even have that 当我昏昏欲睡 摇摇欲坠 but when i'm about to sleep, about to fall 却学会 放下错与对 是与非 i learned to put down right and wrong, yes and no 无所求必满载而归 if i want nothing, then i'll receive everything

(on a side note, i've done nothing but read a chinese, boys love light novel. i have read three chinese novels in my life, and all three were boys love. this doesn't seem right.)

(but also, my chinese literacy is basically at that of a fifth grader, if even, so i think it's fitting that i read some trash novels.)

(but this one talks about the psychology of sexuality and gender, and i'm all for genre novels spreading ideas about bEiNg YoUrSeLf.)

(GAH.)

[laysdimplesareillegal]

EXO Reaction to Them All Liking the Same Girl

Theres definitely no sentences in this, I am so sorry, I also don't know how to spell definitely so if it's spelled wrong in here I'm so sorry.

It's also not been spell checked

****

Chanyeol-

He definitely drops this bomb when they're all having a family meeting looking for support but he starts a riot, an uproar, and the manager just doesn't know what to do, God bless his soul. The guys aren't talking anymore.

Chen-

Now not because I'm biased, but mostly because I'm biased, I think he'd be the one to act on it first AFTER finding out the rest of the guys like you, he'd be sappy and draw it out but he's pretty determined so I think he'd jump the gun before the others do, finds out, leaves the room for an undisclosed reason kind of deal

Xiumin-

Now Xiumin I think, being the chill and mature oldest member, would act on it first before hearing about it from the other guys, he's probably really good friends with you and introduced you to the band with the intention of asking you out thinking they'd accept it better after knowing you beforehand, if he hadn't asked yet and the whole band knew, he'd probably suspect his best buddy, Chen, and try and take him down before making his move on you

Kris-

Thought he was keeping it a good secret but D.O had quite the assumption that he liked you. He would be pretty confident that you would choose him cuz hey, he's Kris Wu, speaker of four languages, rapper and singer, esp tol boi. Honestly if you said no, it's probably cuz he acted cold/someone cuted their way onto your arm first, cute "isn't his strong suit," "not his style."

Baekhyun-

Definately the one who pulled the cute card on you, thinks it's easier than showing up in leather pants and makeup. *almost* feels bad asking you even though he knew Chanyeol liked you but even if it breaks the Beagle Code, this is what he needs to do.

D.O-

A very mature man incoming. Now I feel he's a little less sure of himself esp going up against all his hyungs ya feel? But with a quick pep talk and adequate props, he knows he's got it in the bag, and in the end he's probably one of the easiest one to say yes to, he's quite comfortable to be around, I see him as a comfortable silence kind of guy; no pressure.

Kai-

Cutie, Cutie Pie, if you will, very sweet and innocent and just wants to confess to you and get it over with. He is very intimidated by having all his hyungs already lining up for you and if he didn't really like you, he would be very afraid and daunted trying to show up a bunch of older, more experience guys, esp, Luhan, Xiumin, and Suho, but he would hate himself if he didn't at least try

Luhan-

Overly confident, not too much that he knows he'll get you, but he totally knows he'll get you, kind of 'lets Chen and Xiumin approach you first' he's so confident, it's the tortoise and the hare situation but the hare wins in this version. Or if it was blatant that Xiumin was trying to bring Chen down first, Luhan'd just step over them rolling on the ground fighting, and stroll off, and he's probably jerk enough to get you and not tell anyone so he can drop it like a bomb after they've all asked you and been denied (is this one obviously longer than the other ones? Is my biasing showing again?)

Sehun-

The Man™ had faith in no one else but himself, *no* competition. Kai kinda marvels at his selfishness confidence. Literally marches up to you like he already owns the world and asks you out. It definitely stuns the other members like what maknae, you don't get to do that. But who cares he's Lord Oh Sehun and he's fabulous. When he found out the other boys liked you, he took his time, he's probably been sucking up to you in preparation for this moment, the moment when he can rub it in their faces

Suho-

He was the one that called this abominable family meeting. He was actually planning on telling the group like an honest leader, ready to soak up their encouragement, but now he's really happy Chanyeol blabbed first. What a relief. Distracts the boys, probably asking them all to meet at the practice room for a late night full-band practice session but was late for some unknown reason

Yixing-

A sweet boy and wants to back off of you. But at the same time he works hard to be noticed from the back of the crowd and wowza he looks hot doing it, one smile a day keeps Lay in the game. He be such a cutie he didn't even have to lay down any hints, you already like him. Suho's kinda jealous, only really feels threatened by Lay, idk why.

Tao-

An insecure ball of fluff but practices his time honored wushu and it totally hypes him up, but then goes back to being a fluff, admires his hyungs and feels he probably shouldn't get in their way but at the same time wow he really likes you and he was the first one Xiumin introduced you to when you first came to the dorm so he feels he's got a pretty good chance with that extra five minutes of history that he's got on the guys ya know?