#The text was taken directly from the book of course.

[juno-in-aqua]

Re-reading JSMN and I really wanted to try drawing some of my fav scenes. First up is the intro for Mr Segundus and Mr Honeyfoot, who I adore now on my re-read.

[threestarsinline]

Children's Books and Leather Jackets (Part II)

Jason Todd x reader one-shot

Summary: You couldn't love your job more. Or at least, that's what you thought, until Jason Todd started coming into the bookshop every week without fail, like clockwork. And then you form a connection that tilts your whole world on its axis.

Word Count: 15.5K (total of 29.2K)

Category: More fluff for you all (yes, more jsjs), (plus slight angst related to mutual pining, idiots in love, friends to lovers and typical Gotham villain stuff)

Warnings: Jason stealing your heart (and you stealing his)

Author’s note: Well, here you go babes, the second (and final) part to what once was just a one-shot but that became so long that I had to split it up (despite how much it broke my heart to do so). Hope you enjoy it!

<Part I

After that night at the dinner (that you didn’t ever want to end, though of course, sadly, it had to), everything stayed more or less the same. Jason kept coming into the bookshop several times a week, buying books and checking out some others.

Except that now, while you scanned the children’s books, as you knew what they were for now, you asked how the kids were doing.

Except that now, a lot of times when he came in the afternoons, Jason stayed in the bookshop with you until you closed, keeping you company.

Except that now, sometimes Jason brought food with him and had lunch with you.

Except that now, you texted each other practically everyday, carrying on conversations from the bookshop and talking about everything.

Except that now, your heart, instead of giving little jumps, it run whole laps every time you saw him.

And right now, you’re buzzing with nerves.

Because you don’t know where the line stands anymore, having become blurrier and blurrier with each smile, every longing look and every soft touch on his arm or the small of your back when you pass each other a lot closer than what is necessary.

And now you’re bouncing behind the counter, wondering if what you are about to do today is too much.

When that white streak that you love so much makes its way through the door, you can hardly wait to show him what you’ve found. Jason, like always, greets you with a smile and goes directly to the counter, not bothering with excuses anymore.

“There you are!” You exclaim, barely containing your excitement.

“Hi to you too.” He chuckles at your warm welcome as he finishes approaching the counter.

“I found it.” You say with a grin. Surprise makes its way across Jason’s features, immediately knowing what you were talking about.

“You did?” He asks in disbelief. You nod proudly and from under the counter, you slip out the third and last installment of a book series about the adventures of Daisy the giraffe. In the store you only had the first and the second one and the kids loved them. They had read both several times but were unable to see how the story ended since the books were quite old and very hard to find.

“Oh my god, I can’t believe it.” Jason continues as he takes the book from your hands that are extending it to him. “You’re amazing, Y/N.” He looks back up at you with shining eyes. “How did you do it?” You shrug your shoulders.

“I just tracked it down.” You answer. The truth was that it had taken a lot of time and effort to find it but the kids’ joy and how happy you felt right now made it all worth it.

“You did a lot more than that, believe me. The kids are going to love it.” Jason says, glancing back at the book and then at you once again, his eyes full of admiration. “Thank you.” He adds almost breathlessly.

You nod in acknowledgement with a bright smile.

Jason had faced a lot of impossible situations during his life. Hardships that proved difficult to endure. From his days in the streets, to his Robin training and to his patrols as Red Hood.

But right now Jason feared that he may have found his greatest enemy. A problem hard to solve. A feat that will not be easy to achieve.

These damn braids.

Jason’s eyebrows are furrowed and he clenches his jaw in concentration. Despite having asked for help and Cass and Steph having taught him, he still was having trouble french braiding Lily’s hair.

He was in the area and decided to check on the kids, even though they didn't have a reading scheduled. After greeting the few that were there, Lily grabbed his hand and monopolized him.

She had asked him a few times to do her hair and he had tried but without much knowledge it had proved to be a disaster. At least now, even though it still felt a bit like an uphill climb, it seemed that his new skills were getting him somewhere.

They were sitting on some crates on the floor, Lily in front of him playing with her teddy and telling him his latest adventures as Batbear, making him chuckle at her great imagination.

He was working on the second braid when suddenly Lily fell into silence, deep in thought. He was about to ask her what was wrong when she finally spoke up.

“Do you like Y/N?” Lily asked, with the blunt curiosity characteristic of children her age.

Jason’s hands freeze on her blonde hair.

“Why do you ask?” Jason asks back nervously, afraid to give a clear response, as if after hearing it, Lily would run over to wherever you were to tell you. But she just shrugs her shoulders, lifting Batbear in her arms and examining his button-like eyes.

“She’s nice and funny.”

“Yeah, she is.” He coincides while slowly continuing to work on the braid.

“I like her. The other day she brought us all cookies from a bakery. They were delicious.” Lily continues, her voice acquiring a dreamy tone at the delightful memory.

Jason’s hands freeze once again. He had no idea you had done that. You hadn’t mentioned it to him. You had gone out of your way to buy treats for the kids and come here on your own on a non reading day.

Jason stands still on his seat, his gaze lost and thoughts clouded with you. He didn’t think that he could admire you more than what he already did, yet here he was, even more entranced by your kind nature.

“So you like her then?” Lily insists. She says it more in an innocent way rather than in the romantic sense, like when you meet a friend of a friend and they asked you if you liked hanging out with them. Just as Lily finishes her question, he ties up her braid and Lily turns her head, feeling him finish his work.

She catches sight of her reflection on a dirty window and lets out a delightful squeal that makes Jason jump in surprise. In an instant, the little girl is on her feet and admiring her hair from side to side, Batbear still in her grip.

Jason grimaces when he sees how the top of one of the braids is already starting to loosen and worries about what Lily will say. He still clearly needs more practice. But then-

“I love it!” Lily screams and Jason grins at her happiness. Ha, success. “Thank you, thank you, thank you.” She says in quick succession in a way in which the words jumble together and turns to give him a bone crushing hug, surprising for how little she is, and a sounding kiss on his cheek.

Then Lily sets off running, probably to show her friends her new hair, laughing all the way, completely forgetting about her earlier question. Jason can’t help but laugh under his breath too. He loves those kids.

He stands up and shakes his hands over his jeans to get rid of any possible dirt from the crate.

“Yeah, I like her very much.” Jason whispers, answering Lily’s question. His thoughts, as they usually tended to do, drifting back to you.

“Oh my god, what happened to you?” You ask him another day when he enters the bookshop with a black eye. He opens his mouth to answer but you interrupt him. “Let me guess, boxing again?” You say with eyebrows raised in a playful manner so that he doesn’t need to worry about a fake excuse. But he chuckles and shakes his head.

“Not this time, no.”

“No? Impossible.”

“Okay so, turns out that Damian, for whatever reason that I still cannot comprehend, threw his phone at Tim. But Tim ducked and guess who was passing behind him in that exact moment just peacefully enjoying his bowl of cereal?”

“No way.” You say breathlessly, a smile already pulling at your lips and a laugh making its way up your throat.

He nods and sees you put a hand over your mouth, trying to conceal your laughter. The sight makes him smile, despite the fact that the movement pulls at the swelling of his cheek under his eye, making him wince slightly at the pain.

“Sorry.” You say, failing miserably in containing your laughter.

“It’s okay, go ahead. It is funny.”

You then finally burst out laughing and Jason feels his heart swell, the sound having become his favorite in the whole world, like listening to his favorite song. And he can’t help but join in your laughter too.

“Though I did drop my precious bowl of cereal.” He adds with an exaggerated pout and you laugh even more, making him feel a radiating warmth that not even the sun could equal to.

“Oh, poor Jason.” You say.

As your laughters finally slowly die down, you round the counter and lift your hands to hold the sides of his face, turning him to see the eye better in the light.

“Are you okay though?” You ask in a low voice, serious now, almost like a whisper.

And with your hands holding him, Jason thinks that he will always be okay, no matter if he's drowning or bleeding to death.

“Yeah.” He whispers back.

Were you this close just a second before? He can clearly see how the lights of the bookshop reflect in your eyes now.

“Did you put something over it?” He nods. You tilt your head, not sure to believe him with how he hadn’t really treated the wounds on his knuckles that one time.

“Some ice.” You manage to coax out of him and you shake your head and click your tongue in slight disappointment. 

“Not enough.” You say, and just like that one time, with the bookshop empty except for you two, you guide him into the break room by his hand, sit him down and bring the first aid kit. You take an ointment from it and stand in front of him. You look down at him, asking for permission with your eyes and he gives an almost imperceptible nod.

One of your hands takes hold of his face to tilt him to the light and the tips of your fingers on the other start applying the ointment softly to help with the swelling.

Jason’s hands twitch to place themselves on your hips to bring you even closer but he grabs his own knees instead. He doesn’t have the right to do something like that. It’s not like he’s your boyfriend.

No matter how much he might want to.

So he contents himself with looking into your eyes that are concentrated on his wound.

He can feel the warmth of your body seeping into his with how close you are and he can’t help but close his eyes to savor it even further. 

He has never felt safer.

The silence of the intimate moment is deafening in the best of ways. He would gladly stay like this forever.

But then, just like a crack of thunder, cold surrounds him once again as you whisper that you’re done and retract your hands from him. You wash your hands in the faucet of the kitchen part of the break room and Jason follows your every movement hypnotized.

“Better?” You say as you return and sit in front of him.

With you? Always.

“Yeah.” He breathes out and he isn’t lying. He can already feel the swelling going down. “Thank you.” 

“It’s nothing.” You say, shaking your head and shrugging your shoulders.

It’s like you don’t see how much you do for him, and not just for tending his wounds. Just everything in general. Your laugh. Your long conversations. And it kills him. It kills him that you may not know just how much he cares about you.

And it kills him even more that he doesn’t have the courage to tell you.

“Oh, I almost forgot.” You say and quickly get up to grab a heavy looking bag from the corner before coming back. “I went to my parents’ last weekend and I got these books that I thought the kids might like.” You start as you take the contents of the bag out and put them on the table for him to see.

He notices how you worry your lip and how your shoulders tense and he wonders why you’re suddenly like that. He then looks towards the several books displayed on the table in front of you two.

“Most of them are bedtime stories. My mom used to read them to me.” You start and then your small posture and uncertain tone clicks. You’re shy about this. Almost ashamed that he might think that this is something ridiculous.

As if he could think anything negative about you.

“They’re not much but I loved them when I was little.” You continue and as you tell him more about them, he can see with how much fondness you remember them and how excited you are to talk about them. The insecurity seems to leave your whole body as you get lost in your explanation of the books. 

Two of them are quite thick and you tell him that they have several different stories, from a prince and a princess that could only meet at sunrise or sunset since one of them could only be in the light of the moon and the other in the light of the sun. And that if they were exposed to the other light, due to a spell, they would die; to a story about a mother reading to his son.

Another couple of them follow the adventures of a mole at his house and at the beach and the books include a small mole cut-out that you move across the pages to make him follow the story. Another one is about a boy and his dog that go on a great adventure thanks to a magical blue balloon.

As he listens intently, he marvels at you. You really were the most thoughtful, kind and beautiful person that he had ever met and he couldn’t get enough of it.

He has to resist the urge to close the space between you and kiss you right there and then. But he decides against it. He liked how everything was going with you and he didn’t want to ruin it by suddenly rushing and risking everything.

Aside from the fact that you still didn’t know about a part of his life that he’s sure would make you push him away and send you running. Even though every time that he thinks about it, he’s considering telling you more and more, wanting to be completely sincere and honest with you, knowing how much you valued that.

“Sorry, that was a lot. This probably was a bad idea.” You say after you finish explaining all the books. You’re about to start picking them up to put them back in the bag when you feel his hand enclosing over one of your own, softly stopping you.

Your breath catches in your throat.

“No. These are great, Y/N. I love them and I’m sure that the kids will too. Thank you for sharing them.” He says looking into your eyes. You were sharing with him and the kids a very personal part of you that you held very close to your heart. And he wanted you to know how much he appreciated it.

He also gives your hand a small squeeze to show you how much he means his words and to encourage you. After a moment, you smile and nod.

“Tell me more.” He says.

At his genuine petition, you can’t do anything but carry on, your radiant smile matching his. “Okay.”

It had been a long time since you had played any of these types of games. But you really do not remember being so bad at it.

After the reading that day, the kids had suggested (or rather insisted) on playing hide and seek.

So here you were, running around the playground trying to find a good place to hide all while questioning your life choices.

Had you really been this bad at hide and seek as a kid? Then again, it is quite easier when you’re much smaller and you can fit almost anywhere. Try doing that as an adult.

You turn a corner of the nearby buildings, entering into a small passage between the back of it and a wall separating the playground zone from the rest of the block. You know that Lily has had to have finished counting already. You don’t have much time left.

In the passage there are some piled up crates leaning against the wall. You consider hiding behind them though you know that it’s not the best hiding place. However, you’re already here and you can’t risk going back into the open space of the playground if you don’t want to get caught.

Just as you start moving towards them a voice whispers your name.

You turn and find that the building has a small space that cuts into it with a back door. Due to the afternoon light, the space is covered in shadows and leaning against the wall you find Jason, hiding. 

You can’t believe that you missed him with his impressive build.

But the place seems to work as a great hiding place, almost in plain sight yet easy to miss. So, when Jason extends a hand inviting you into it, you don’t think twice before taking it.

Next thing you know, your back rests in one of the walls carved into the building that lead to the door and Jason is positioned in front of you in a way that, even if Lily were to pass by and notice you, she would only see him. At least at first.

Jason leans his head out of the space for a second to check if anyone is coming and then he comes back in front of you.

And then your breathing hitches in your throat when you realize just how close you are, even though there is plenty of space in the small opening of the building for you two to stand next to each other without problem. Yet both of you remain in your current position, not daring (nor wanting) to move a muscle.

Suddenly all your nerves are alive and buzzing, your senses heightened and all you can see, hear and feel, is him.

You're hyper aware of everywhere that he’s touching you.

His left hand on your waist.

His right arm at your side, brushing up against yours, shielding you from view.

Your chests almost touching each other.

Your hands on his shoulders, even though you have no idea how they ended up there. The urge to bring him even closer to you, practically irresistible.

You look up to find that his green gaze is already on you. Up this close you notice that there is a slight shade of aquamarine blue in them.

You feel lightheaded and dizzy but in the best of ways. It’s like you’re drunk, even though you have never actually drunk enough to feel like this.

You realize then that you’re drunk on him. You want to drown in him.

Then the scent of his cologne reaches you and you know that you’re intoxicated with this man in front of you.

And the best part is that he seems just as intoxicated with you.

You don’t know how you two get even closer but then his nose is brushing up against yours, your breaths mixing together.

He’s leaning a bit over you so maybe you should feel a bit crowded but you don’t.

You feel safe.

The safest that you have ever been. And the thing is that it doesn't even surprise you. Everything feels easy and safe and warm with him.

Like nothing could ever happen to you with him by your side.

And you’re absolutely addicted to the feeling.

Jason is breathless, as if he has just run a marathon. His breathing as heavy as yours.

Your heart feels like it’s going to beat out of your chest with how fast it’s going, thrill and anticipation pumping through your veins instead of blood.

Your gaze drops and you suck in a breath when he wets his lips.

Your own tongue darts out to mimic his movement on your own, when you realize that they’re already wet and that he was the one mirroring your previous action.

Your eyes go back up to his and notice that his pupils are dilated. You can’t help but think that yours look probably the same.

It seems like he’s asking a question with that mesmerizing gaze of his and your throat feels dry, as if you haven’t been able to drink water in days and the only person that can alleviate it is Jason Todd.

His gaze flits to your lips once again and returns to your eyes just as fast and they seem to be pleading you.

You can feel yourself nodding almost imperceptibly.

You’re not sure you have wanted anything more in your life. Your stomach flips.

You close your eyes, feeling the ghost of his lips on yours.

And then-

“Got you!” Lily’s voice rings out, like shattering glass, breaking the spell and bursting the perfect bubble that you two were in, before your lips are able to make any real contact.

And just like that, you deflate like an old balloon forgotten by a kid in a fair.

You have never been more frustrated in your entire life.

You squeeze your eyes shut, trying to regain your senses, letting your pounding heart beat out the drug that the proximity to Jason Todd is, in order to come back to reality.

When you finally open your eyes, Jason looks just as frustrated and disappointed as you.

Your faces part, putting distance once again between them though your hands remain on his shoulders and his remain on your waist. Part of yourselves still refusing to let go of what had been about to happen, both of your breathings still heavy and deep.

“Come on, it’s your turn now!” Lily exclaims impatiently. She’s too excited about being able to hide now to really notice what was going on between you two.

“We-” Jason stops at how hoarse his voice is and clears his throat. “We’ll be right there.” He finally continues, though his gaze is still fixed on you.

“Great!” Lily chirps and she leaves the way she came, Batbear like always, tight in her grip.

You watch her go and when you look back up at Jason both of you have shy and embarrassed smiles. Sad for the moment that has left and unsure of how to proceed now.

You both suppose that keeping things how they are is the best course of action so very slowly and very reluctantly your hands leave each other. Not sure what to do with them now, since they still feel like magnets being pulled towards each other, Jason runs his hands through his hair and you fix your already perfectly placed clothes.

But as you two make your way towards the center of the playground, you both are hopeful that the moment will come again.

The road might have a few bumps on the way but it still goes on.

Jason didn’t know how it had gotten so late. He had meant to stop by the bookshop earlier and hopefully, after you closed, go grab dinner with you, as you two sometimes did now. But he had got caught up with patrol stuff with Bruce and now he would be lucky if he managed to catch you before you left.

Thankfully, he’s able to reach the bookshop twenty minutes before you close. But when he enters, you are nowhere to be seen. 

Rose and Jimmy are behind the counter, chattering between them and just like every time that he went into the bookshop and you weren’t there, he felt his whole body deflate. The idea of seeing you always being his driving force.

But just like that other time when he entered knowing that you worked that day but Rose had greeted him, worry begins to settle in him. Had something happened that had made you change your shift? Were you sick?

“Hello, Jason!” Jimmy says when he and Rose notice him.

“Good evening, dear.” Greets Rose.

“Hello. Sorry, didn’t mean to bother, I know you’re about to close.”

“It’s okay, you’re always welcomed.” Jimmy answers.

“It’ll be quick. I just wanted to see if Y/N was here, I-”

“Does this look right, Rose? I feel like-” You say, emerging from the bathroom but then you freeze in your step when you spot him. “Oh, hi, Jason.”

But Jason is unable to answer, in fact, he’s pretty sure that he has forgotten how to breathe because he’s stunned looking at you.

You’re wearing a very nice dress that you must have changed into in the bathroom, and it’s clear that you’ve dressed up for something.

You look beautiful.

You always do but Jason has never seen you so formal and it stirs up something in him. For a second, he can imagine that he’s come to pick you up for a date.

But the joy of seeing you doesn’t last long as he feels his throat dry and he swears that he can feel sweat begin to form at the back of his neck and run down his back. It takes him a second to understand those symptoms and the unsettling feeling in his stomach.

Dread. Panic.

Because what if you actually do have a date?

Had he waited too long? Neither of you were any experts on relationships but it really felt like you two were working towards something. But what if it was too late now? What if he had let time drag on too much and now he was forever stuck in some kind of friend stage? Just like when he didn’t tell you about why he checked out so many children’s books and then it had passed so much time that it became awkward for him to do so.

His mind is in a spiral now, racing with thoughts. In one of your many conversations and hangouts after the very first reading with the kids and the diner, you both had mentioned that neither of you were seeing anybody. It was an off comment, something that you tell a friend without thinking too much about the implications of it.

But the idea hung in the air. The idea that the persons that you two were seeing were each other.

But still, neither of you had said that out loud.

And the thing was that you two weren’t just friends. Or at least that’s what Jason felt like and he thought that you probably thought the same. You two had a connection there and you were heading towards being something else. Slowly but steadily and surely, you were building something.

Right?

Suddenly, he finds himself revisiting every interaction that the two of you have ever had. Every longing look, every soft touch and that oh so wonderful moment while playing hide and seek where you two had almost kissed.

He couldn’t have possibly imagined all of that on his own, could he?

If he thought that the memory of holding your hand while he helped you down the ladder that one time had been haunting, it was nothing compared to that moment.

That moment that had plagued his mind every damn day since.

Everything about it, how you had looked at him, the smell of your hair, your hands on his shoulders, your slightly parted lips, added to everything about you from the very first time he met you, like your smile or the soft tone of your voice, creeping onto his skin and taking a resident place there. Like ivy, carving marks into him, down his arms and up his back, clasping and biting into him, leaving him red and scarred forever.

The difference of those imprints with the scars that he had gained over the years of crime-fighting and suffering was that they didn’t hurt nor weighed him down. Instead, they lifted him up, invigorated him and softly caressed his skin, like your hands taking care of his wounds, reassuring him that everything would be okay. That with you, everything will always be okay. They showed how much someone cared about him and valued him.

The difference being that he would wear your marks proudly. 

And Jason finally decides that he doesn’t want to walk on the tightrope anymore. He wants to let go and fall into the void, take a leap of faith and come clean to you. Tell you that he’s in love with you and that he wants to be yours.

He can only hope that you may lay a safety net beneath him to fall into.

And if he’s not that lucky, he would have another invisible scar added to him, from both crashing into the ground and from having at least tried. And even though that one would hurt, more deeply and a lot longer than any physical one that he may have, you would have given it to him, and he would welcome anything that came from you with open arms.

He doesn’t know how he’s going to do all of that but what he does know is that before anything, he wants to be honest with you. Tell you about being Red Hood. You deserve to know what you’re going to get into (if you even decide that you want to), before you two delve into something deeper.

The only thing is that you two are already there. Too far gone for each other, even though Jason doesn’t know that you are. The one thing that he is certain about is that when he tells you, it will change the foundations of the road that you have been building together.

What Jason isn’t so sure of is if it will destroy them, or make them even stronger.

But something that he does know, is that right now is not the moment for any of that.

So, for the time being, he settles with greeting you back and eventually saying:

“You look… You look great.” Even though that is an understatement.

You smile and shyly look down, your fingers playing with the skirt of your dress.

“Thanks.”

“You’re welcome.” He says, and while you two are busy looking at each other, you both miss Rose and Jimmy’s knowing looks and smiles. And before he can help it, he’s opening his mouth again. “So, uhm, do you have a date or something?” He tries to say nonchalantly, not wanting to sound too obtrusive, but the doubt killing him.

Your eyes widen and you chuckle, shaking your head.

“What? God no, just fancy family dinner. It’s my parents' anniversary. Since they’re visiting they decided to celebrate together.” You explain, and Jason can feel a wash of relief going over him, his racing heart calming down.

He hasn’t lost his chance.

“Oh, that’s nice. Congrats.”

You nod and grab your things, getting ready to leave before turning to Jimmy and Rose.

“Thanks again for letting me go early.”

“Of course, dear. And don’t worry about the dress, it looks perfect. You look lovely.”

“No problem, sweetie.” Jimmy adds before complimenting you too.

You kiss the couple’s cheeks in thanks before bidding them goodbye, Jason copying your words before opening the door for you.

As you two leave, you see Jimmy whisper something into Rose’s ear while putting an arm around her waist, bringing her closer to him. She chuckles and she kisses his cheek and Jimmy kisses her forehead in return.

Jason smiles at the fond interaction.

“They’re lovely, aren’t they?” You say, still looking at the couple.

“They are.” Jason says, already looking at you. You’re lovely too. “You’re going to the restaurant with your family now?”

“Yeah, I didn’t have enough time to spare after the shift to go back home so I had to change in the bookshop. My parents lend me their car in order to make it.”

Jason nods, trying not to look too disappointed at the fact that he can’t even offer to drive you there, and a comfortable silence settles between you, neither of you wanting to part ways yet.

But you have to go if you don’t want to be late so you sigh before speaking once again.

“I have to go.”

“Yeah.” Jason says, hands in his pockets. “See you soon then.”

“Bye.” You say and you haven’t taken two steps before Jason calls your name. You turn.

“You look very beautiful.” He can’t help but compliment you again.

You feel your whole face heat up.

“Thanks.”

You think about him the whole way to the restaurant but then again, when aren’t you not thinking about Jason Todd?

Jason has never been more scared in his life. Well, maybe he had, when he was in that damned warehouse. And then later, when he woke up after that without being able to recall who he was or where he was.

But this other type of fear... It's almost paralyzing, threathening to swallow him whole.

He runs as fast as he can, taking long strides, his rugged breathing making him have tunnel vision and only allowing him to focus on one thing.

You.

He hadn’t liked how close the situation had been to the bookshop from the very first moment that they had received the alert. Worry tight in his throat since he had always hoped not to ever have this kind of situation this close to you.

The bookshop’s neighborhood had always been one of the safest in Gotham, there were certain minor crimes, yes, which part of the city didn’t have them? But none of the rogues had ever attacked there.

You had once joked that you thought that the reason for it might be that some of the villains had family living there. You once even said that you could have sworn to have seen the Penguin accompanying an old lady that might have been his mother crossing the street.

Yet still, now an ACE Chemicals truck had been assaulted by Scarecrow and his henchmen. The truck wasn’t even supposed to be in the neighborhood in the first place, but the company and the police had received some information that an attack was being planned and they had decided to detour it.

And now you were in danger.

Jason keeps running with his hands clenched into fists that were turning tighter and tighter by the second.

He can feel sweat gathering on his forehead and he can almost hear a ticking clock hanging over his head as he puts some distance between him and the sickeningly looking mist of muddy green gas that had exploded in the truck.

The very same gas that was quickly spreading along the streets and that would reach the bookshop in a matter of minutes.

The first ones to arrive at the scene had been him and Tim, trying to control the situation until backup could arrive.

Scarecrow’s men were taking over the truck and before leaping into action, Jason threw Tim a look that even with the helmet on, Tim could perfectly understand.

If anything starts going sideways, I’m out of here. Going to her.

Going to you.

Tim was also aware of the fact of how close it all was to the bookshop and he just nodded, knowing how much you mattered to Jason.

They had been able to control the situation more or less as more and more police cars gathered around the truck. But then Scarecrow had finally made his appearance and everything derailed. At first, it seemed like they just wanted to steal from the truck but then something happened and the truck exploded.

Between the chemicals from inside the truck and whatever other things the villain and his gang always brought with them, the gas set off along with the explosion.

Scarecrow and his men scurried off immediately after, giving the feeling that that had certainly not been their desired outcome.

But the gas started spreading and they had no idea what chemicals were inside the truck or what the effects of it could be, but Jason wasn’t going to risk it.

And so, he took a quick glance at Tim, who already had his gas mask on, helping people on the street, and returning his gaze, Tim just nodded.

Go. We handle this here.

And with that, Jason set off.

The bookshop wasn’t actually that far away, just a few blocks, but Jason feels like he’s doing the longest run of his life and that time itself is slowing him down. He has also tried calling you but the line was already overloaded with all the emergency calls.

As he runs, he can hear through his intercom Steph and Duke shouting instructions to everyone nearby and Barbara guiding Bruce to track down Scarecrow.

His heart’s racing and when he finally catches sight of the bookshop, he feels like it’s going to jump out of his chest.

The sound of the door slamming open startles you in your place behind the counter. You turn your head to tell the person that had entered to mind their manners when you are met with a red stare that you had only seen in blurry pictures on the news and heard rumors about.

You take in a sharp breath as Red Hood closes the door and approaches you in quick strides. You freeze in your place, not because you are scared of him but because of the surprise of it. Especially when you look him over and your gaze can’t tear away from the brown leather jacket that felt so familiar to you.

Red Hood grabs your wrist, bringing you with him hurriedly into the break room. And though his grip is strong, you’re surprised to find that it doesn’t hurt at all. You can hear him talking and you know that his presence here can’t mean anything good, though not for you of course, you know that Red Hood wouldn’t hurt you, he didn’t hurt innocent people, but something must have happened.

However, you can’t seem to register any of his words, it’s like he’s saying something but you’re underwater, his words sounding muffled and jammed together.

Because for some strange reason you’re still fixated on his jacket.

He sets you down on the floor next to the sofa in the break room and crouches down in front of you. And then he does something that makes your brows furrow in confusion.

He calls you by your name.

How does he even know your name?

You want to ask him but everything feels so confusing right now, like a tornado spinning around you. You only manage to utter a weak “What…?”, before you can’t help it and your hands, with a life of their own, run over his arms, feeling the fabric of the jacket until they reach the lapels and grip them.

Your heart was already racing and your breathing labored from the whole situation but it seemed like they hadn’t reached their limit yet. Though you feel like they are surely about to do so. You can feel your heart go even faster as your mind begins spiraling with thoughts and you suck in a breath when the realization hits you.

Because this… This piece of clothing so characteristic of the vigilante in front of you, you had spent an awful lot of time staring and gawking over the man that wore it several times in your bookshop.

Because this… This is the very same fabric that your hands had touched while you had been inches away from kissing that very same man in an alley while you were playing hide and seek.

Because now that you were able to see it up close, you instantly recognize it.

How could you not? When you had spent so much time with its owner, laughing while you two ate lunch; admiring him when he found an interesting book on the bookshelves; feeling understood when you shared your worries with him; taking the opportunity to touch his arm anytime that you could, covered in this very same jacket, one of the few of this type that he owned; hoping that if you were to tell him how you feel, he would feel the same way; and wishing that you could kiss him without having to worry about the consequences?

Because this jacket belongs to the man that you’re in love with.

Because this jacket… This jacket belongs to Jason Todd.

And then everything clicks, how he works nights, the wounds on his knuckles, his occasional and strange run offs. Suddenly it all feels so blatantly obvious that you wonder how you didn’t see it before.

You know in your gut what it means but your brain is still catching up with everything going on around you to fully make sense of what your heart already knows.

For a quick second, the thought that maybe he shouldn’t wear the same jacket while patrolling and during his day to day, makes you want to start laughing. Though it’s true that unless you saw it more than once, several times and very close, no one would realize that they were the same jacket. But the reality of the situation around you helps you to rein in the inappropriate laugh.

And then your name being called again finally breaks you out of your thoughts, and the only thing that you can focus on is him.

Jason’s gripping your shoulders now, willing you to focus on him and needing to have some kind of contact with you to make sure that you’re okay. He moves frantically, his eyes quickly checking the front door of the bookshop through one of the break room’s windows that look into the main part of the shop, already seeing the mist of gas slipping under it, trying to calculate how much time he has left.

He’s been asking you if you’re okay and trying to explain what has happened but the sentences come out stumbled, his brain going faster than what his mouth can follow.

In his haste he doesn’t even register the change in the look of your eyes at your realization.

He knows what he has to do but he’s afraid of what it will entail. He wanted to sit down with you, tell you about being Red Hood and explain everything to you. He wanted to be hopeful that you may understand but now he doesn’t have the chance to let you know how he would have wanted to.

It feels like someone has pushed him from the tightrope beneath him, directly cutting it, or rather, that it has snapped over his own weight, not able to hold him and his secrets anymore, and now he’s falling and he can’t do anything about it.

And if you would have ever laid a net beneath him, he’s sure that you would cut a hole open in it now.

He’s about to break everything that you two have been working towards, a shattering earthquake destroying what once was a strong and beautiful road.

But it’s the only way to keep you safe.

And he would cut the rope sustaining him himself and willingly fall into the abyss if he had to to make sure that you’re safe. That’s the only thing that matters to him right now.

And that’s exactly what he does.

You watch perplexed as Red Hood takes the helmet off and you’re met with the sharp features and white streak that you love so much.

It really is him.

He’s Red Hood.

Jason is Red Hood.

Jason, who always seemed to be checking out children’s books, wearing leather jackets and making you smile like no one has ever done before.

Your Jason.

Out of the corner of your eye you see a weird mist start to seep through under the door to the break room that Red Hood- no, Jason, had closed after you two entered.

“Jason?” You whisper. He lifts his head up from where he’s been fidgeting with the helmet since he took it off to meet your gaze, and the broken look in his eyes makes your heart feel like it has been stabbed. “What’s going on?” He follows your line of sight and his eyes grow with worry.

“Scarecrow.” He mutters while turning back to the helmet, he pushes a few hidden buttons in it and you’re surprised to see how its panels shift, changing its shape slightly but still having a head-like form.

And then Jason turns to you, his hands lifting with the helmet towards your head.

Your face contorts with horror when you realize what he wants to do.

You immediately grab his forearms, pushing them down and therefore, the helmet too.

“What are you doing?” You say.

“I have to protect you. And we don’t know what the gas does yet so I’m not taking any risks.” He pushes the helmet towards your head once again but you repeat your previous action, preventing him from doing so.

“And you? What about you?” You ask desperately, the gas coming closer and closer towards you both.

Jason’s lips pull into a sad smile. “I’ll be fine.” He whispers. It’s like he has already resigned himself to something. You shake your head.

“No. I’m not taking it.”

“I have a spare small mask, don’t worry.”

You’re still so in shock from everything that you don’t realize that he’s lying, yet in the pit of your stomach you can already feel a pool of dread forming.

“But-” You start but he cuts you off.

“Y/N, listen to me. We don’t have much time. Do you trust me?”

Even with everything that has just happened, you don’t hesitate.

“Always.”

Jason nods and puts the red helmet over your head, the shifted panels allowing it to fit your head perfectly. Jason sighs with relief and looks at you fondly, his hands still on either side of your head.

Your hands come up to cover his own and he nods reassuringly. “You okay?” He whispers, and you nod.

Everything is going to be okay.

But then Jason starts coughing.

The gas has already reached you both and gathers at your ankles.

Your eyes widen and you reach for him as his hands let go of your head to support himself when he begins lulling to one side. “Jason!” You shout.

You can see his eyes losing focus, starting to get dizzy. While your breathing keeps coming in deep and clean thanks to the regulator built in the helmet, Jason seems to be gasping for air, like he isn’t getting enough oxygen or like his lungs are refusing what’s going in them.

And you finally realize that there never was a spare mask.

How could you have been so foolish?

You try to take the helmet off to give it back to him but it’s like it’s closed off. You press the buttons that you find on the underside at the back but nothing happens. You try everything but it just won’t come off.

Nothing.

You can’t take it off.

He must have locked it somehow, almost as if he knew what you would try to do.

You can’t protect him.

“I’m sorry, Y/N. I’m so sorry.” A cough. “ I swear I wanted to tell you.” Another one. “ I was going to.” He says between short breaths before finally collapsing onto the floor.

You grab him before his head hits the ground and you hush him gently.

“It’s okay. Don’t worry, it’s okay.” Now it’s you the one holding the sides of his face softly.

One of his hands comes up to hold one of your own, and you can’t stand the look of utter adoration and affection with which he gazes at you.

Because you can’t help him.

And his look is as if he would be content to go this way, knowing that at least you’re safe.

And your heart breaks all over again.

The room is covered in gas now and it’s not until your vision becomes slightly blurry that you register the tears welling up in your eyes.

You cry for help but there’s nothing that can be done now. You also try calling 911, not caring what will happen if someone sees that he’s Red Hood. You just need him to be safe. But the line doesn't work. Jason begins to close his eyes.

“Hey, hey, no.” You urge. “Stay with me, stay with me.” Jason opens his eyes once more, fighting to stay awake, but you can see in them how he’s almost gone, his consciousness slipping away from him.

“Please.” You whisper, fighting the tears.

And then his hand holding yours falls limp.

And with it, your heart does too.

You shake him, call him, scream at him to wake up but it’s no use. Tears run down your cheeks now, raked sobs breaking though your chest.

You even try to take off the helmet again but of course, nothing happens.

You feel for his heartbeat, it takes you an agonizing second to feel it but it's there.

Weak and slow, barely perceptible, but it’s there.

Although you fear that probably not for much longer.

Fear and dread run through you, you don’t know how to fix this. You don’t want to let him go but he’s being pulled away from you.

And then the door to the break room bursts open.

You look up and there Red Robin stands.

And the way in which he shakes his hair away from his eyes with a movement of his head while looking around the room frantically, trying to locate you through the mist, makes your breath hitch in realization for the second time in the last few minutes.

Tim.

Then he notices Jason’s unconscious body in your arms and when his gaze meets yours, even with the helmet on he knows what you want to say.

Save him.

Your shifts at the bookstore have never felt longer. You had become so used to him and come to rely on his visits so much that now, without him, they only drag on and on and on, something that had never even happened before.

Even before him.

Your only solace being that he’s alive.

You often have to remind yourself of that fact when the memory of the fear of losing him claws back at you.

Jason is alive. He is okay.

After Tim found you two, he launched towards Jason, checking his vitals and addressing his state.

He told you that he needed to bring Jason to the batcave as soon as possible and you had immediately grabbed Jason’s hand, refusing to let go of him and profusely saying that you were going with him.

But Tim had only shook his head, explaining how Jason would kill him if he ever allowed you to not go to the hospital for a check up.

But you had fought him with tooth and nails, saying that you weren’t leaving his side anytime soon and Tim had no other option but to give up.

However, just as Tim was calling for Steph to come and help him with Jason quickly, you passed out.

Whether because of all the emotions and stress of those five minutes (because yes, since Jason first entered into the bookshop to protect you, it had only been five minutes, maybe even less), or because due to the shifted panels in the helmet, some gas had managed to slip in, you didn’t know.

Probably more the later than the former but still.

Next thing you knew, you woke up in the hospital. Thankfully without the helmet, Tim having probably managed to unlock it.

Through the doctors, nurses, and the news on the TV in the ER, you learned that the gas was dangerous but thankfully non-lethal. In most cases, like yours, people in the neighborhood who had only inhaled a bit just felt dizzy for a few hours or passed out for a bit.

In other cases, the most serious ones, like Jason’s, people were put into a coma-like state, with the lungs rendered to a point of near-exhaustion. But with good rest and the appropriate care, they would recover soon with no side effects.

Batman had managed to apprehend Scarecrow and just like the vigilantes had suspected from the beginning, it wasn’t a deliberate attack but a robbery gone wrong.

They let you go of the hospital that very same afternoon, with instructions that if you felt any kind of dizziness to come back. After your family (and Rose and Jimmy of course) checked in with you, you were finally able to grab a hold of your phone that had been left in the bookshop.

You were met with a text from Tim, how he had managed to get your number, you didn’t know, but it probably had something to do with the fact that all the Waynes were part of the Batfamily.

Or at least, that’s what you figured, once you were finally able to think with a clear head and digest all of your recent discoveries.

The text said that Jason had made it to the batcave safely, that he had been treated immediately and that he was resting now.

You have never been more grateful for anything in your life.

But that had been a week and a half ago. And you hadn’t seen Jason since.

You felt like a part of you had been ripped out and taken along with him. The absence of a vital organ leaving you empty.

Probably your heart, since it had left your chest and leaped itself into Jason’s hands a long time ago.

The neighborhood had been deemed safe after the gas dissipated and you were back to your job like nothing had ever happened, just like how it often was after any incident with a rogue in Gotham.

Life just went on. Gotham and its residents as resilient as ever. The fight and survival etched onto their DNA.

If there ever was something to admire Gotham for, its survival skills were definitely it.

You had wanted to see Jason immediately, and you had even called Tim so that he could tell you more about Jason’s state and tried to see when you could go see him but then your mother had called.

Your uncle had had an accident at work and he would need surgery.

Though there was some risk, it wasn’t a extremely dangerous procedure. But if there was something that all of your family had in common and that was characteristic of all of you, was that if something happened to someone, every single member of the family would come running to be there.

And you knew that you had to be there, you wanted to be there, but it still tore at your insides having had to leave without having being able to see Jason. But your uncle lived on the other side of the country and you had to take a plane that very same night to be able to arrive before the surgery the next day.

So, you had called Tim back, telling him that you had to leave, how bad you felt, how sorry you were and that you would try to come back as soon as possible. But Tim assured you that it was okay, that they would all take care of Jason, that it would take him a couple of days to wake up and be fully conscious and that he understood (and that Jason would too) that you had to go.

You nodded, trying to hold back tears and muff your sniffling due to all the stress that had taken a hold of you due to all the recent events. Tim had calmed you down and promised you to keep you updated. Helping you just like you had done when you met him.

Thank god for Tim Drake. You’re pretty sure that you would have lost it if it weren’t because of him. His reassurance a sign of a friendship for a lifetime.

And so, you left. Everything went well with your uncle and you were glad to have been able to see your family for a few days since quite a long time ago.

But when you came back, Jason wouldn’t see you.

It took Jason two days to wake up from the coma-like state, though he had been getting better and better with each passing hour, and a full day of only eating and sleeping before he was able to return to normalcy.

Still, when he first woke up, the only thing in his foggy brain was you. He asked about you as soon as he opened his eyes and Tim told him that you were okay but that you had to leave for a few days due to a family emergency, and that you had called every day several times to check in.

Jason let out a sigh of relief. Both because you were safe and because he didn’t know how he would have faced you if you had been there.

He was sure that you hated him now. Despised him. Sure, you had called to see how he was, but that’s just how you were, caring and protective. But deep down, he knew that you had to resent him for having hidden being Red Hood from you.

He was sure that if he saw you, the first thing that you would do was scream at him and tell him that you didn’t want him in your life anymore.

And he wouldn’t be able to bear that.

He didn’t know how he could ever go back to a life without you.

That’s why he refused to see you everytime that you reached out after you came back. Letting his phone ring out when you called, later just sending a quick text saying that he was fine, that he was just busy with some things in order to not worry you. He knew that it was unfair and that he was being an idiot but he didn’t know what he would do if he saw you, even though he knew that he eventually would have to.

And yet, despite all of that, he still couldn’t bring himself to fully cut ties with you. He simply couldn’t. Needing you at least in some way in his life just as much as he needed air. As well as the fact that he knew that he couldn't do something like that to you, at least not without explaining.

It wasn’t until Tim cornered him and talked some sense into him that he realized that he couldn’t put it off any longer. 

When Jason enters the bookshop, a chill runs through him as he shakes the drops of water from his hair. He had dreaded every single step that he took towards the bookshop, a cloud of shame hanging over his head. And then the universe had decided that he wasn’t miserable enough and so that cloud of shame had quite literally started to pour on him. He couldn’t help but think that he deserved it but still, it sucked.

He usually liked rain. Just not when he didn’t have an umbrella and was tethering on the edge of sanity while trying to hold the composure that he had created to give him the strength necessary to face you. And certainly not when he was holding a hot chocolate that he had bought for you; having already lost count of how many times he had previously done so when he came to visit you, in a sad attempt at a peace offering, even though he was sure that you would dump it on him; but that now surely was just cold chocolate.

Shit. He really was going to look like even more of an idiot than he already was.

“Jason?” Your soft voice comes through, like an antidote calming him instantly and soothing all his worries. Your presence, like always, making all of his dark thoughts go away.

Though that peace didn’t last long because you were here now and he couldn’t run now. He had to do what he had come to do.

Even though he still wasn’t sure what exactly that was, no matter how much he had tried to prepare himself. Had he come to apologize? Explain? Beg for your forgiveness? He had no idea.

It didn’t matter anymore because as usual, all his thoughts and working brain cells flew out of the window when he was near you. This time even more so than usual since he had never gone this long without seeing you. He just stands there, soaked from the rain on the entrance doormat, like a wet cat begging to be let home again after causing trouble and running out.

And you’re just standing there, in the doorway of the break room, looking at him like you couldn’t believe what you were seeing, as if he was some mythological creature and you didn’t dare to move an inch, either in order not to scare him away or because you were petrified in fear, Jason didn’t know.

And he’s just rendered speechless. His breath taken away from him as he takes you in for what possibly is the last time, trying to commit every part of your beautiful self to memory, all of those parts that he already knows by heart, before you kick him out of the bookshop and out of your life forever.

“Yeah.” He finally responds.

Great, Jason. Very eloquent.

No turning back now.

He gulps.

“Hi.” He adds, trying to act with normalcy but he winces when he realizes that it doesn’t match the situation at all. There really is no way of making this any easier, is there?

He expects you to start yelling at him, push him, anything. But you just keep staring at him. And then:

“God, you’re drenched. Wait here.” You disappear for a second and Jason can’t believe what has just happened, a bewildered look in his eyes. He expected anything but that. But he obeys, doing whatever you asked of him in his very nature, trying to move as little as possible so that he would only drop water onto the doormat. You return quickly and hand him a towel after taking the hot (cold) chocolate from his hands so that he can dry up a bit. 

You put the cup onto the counter as he shakes his boots on the mat, dries his face and ruffles the towel through his hair. When he finishes you approach him once again.

“Here, let me take your jacket. You're going to freeze.” Jason feels like he’s on autopilot as he follows your every direction, like a sailor the call of a siren. Not daring to move a single muscle or do any abrupt movement other than what’s necessary, afraid of breaking whatever is happening right now.

You hang his jacket on the coat rack by the door to dry a bit and then you turn back to him.

There’s a moment of silence, the only noise being the rain’s soft pattering against the windows, the dark clouds filtering the setting sun, casting the bookstore in a gloomy atmosphere though the place still maintains its warm glow from the few lamps turned on with a yellow and orange glow.

The place is quiet, not a single soul in the bookshop except you two. Jason made sure of coming around closing time so that you could be alone, without any other customers interrupting and, even though he wouldn’t admit it out loud, the small hope of finding the bookshop closed and therefore having the perfect excuse to delay this another day.

But of course, the universe wasn’t going to have it. He never was that lucky.

Jason is so stupefied that he doesn’t move from the doormat as you take a couple of steps closer to him and look him over. Assessing him. Studying him. He avoids your gaze, not knowing what to do under your scrutiny.

He might as well be a cactus now with how rooted he is to the goddamn doormat. And then he sees how your feet join his on it and he can’t help the chill that runs through him once again, but not from the cold this time, but from your intoxicating proximity, so reminiscent of the one from the ghost kiss in the alley.

This is it, he thinks. This is when you finally push him from your life forever.

But then you surprise him once again, when without any trace of hesitation nor fear you touch his face. Sofly cradling it as if you might still care about him.

He doesn’t understand anything that’s going on right now. He has never been more confused in his entire life.

After so many months, Jason had come to know you in such a way, so intricately well, that he could read you like a book. Just like you with him. But now, Jason is seriously questioning that because he has no idea what is going through your mind right now.

He finally gathers the courage to look at you, still afraid of what he’s going to find, but you’re not even looking at him.

Your gaze is fixated upon the small cut at the end of his left eyebrow.

A reminder of the Red Hood duty from the night before. How he had managed to get a wound there even with the helmet on, he had no idea.

He sees your eyebrows furrow and your expression change to one of worry.

And then your hands run down his sides until they take a hold of his, inspecting them over after taking the towel from them.

And you sigh, disappointed in finding what you hoped not to be there. The skin on his knuckles broken once again.

Jason feels like a stranded boat, lost at sea, the water around him lulling him to its will.

That’s you.

The rain continues on as you turn slightly and flip the sign of the bookshop to closed before locking the door.

As a lightning strikes in the distance, flashing momentaneous light into the bookshop and illuminating your soft features, you take Jason’s hand and just like several times before, you drag him to the break room, but this time, instead of on a chair by the table, you sit him down on the sofa.

And he lets you. He gladly lets the sea take his boat wherever it wants to. Even if it’s to his own demise.

You take the blanket resting on the arm of the couch and drape it over him, making sure that it stays on his shoulders before you take the towel back to the bathroom and for the third time, you grab the first aid kit there.

You return to the break room and not even your shuffling steps make his lost gaze go towards you.

Despite his big frame you had never seen him so small, curled onto himself, head hung in shame; and it makes your heart clench. He looks deep in thought, grabbing the edges of the blanket so that it stays wrapped around him, as if he’s contemplating how to say whatever he has come to say to you.

But you don’t care. He could stay quiet the whole time if he wanted to.

Because at least he was here.

And honestly, your first instinct at seeing him back in the bookshop had been to run to him and hug him like your life depended on it and never let him go. But you had ultimately decided against it, not wanting to scare him away.

His presence there still felt almost like a mirage to you, after having gone so long without seeing him for the first time ever since you met him.

So, it was a very welcomed step from just sending you short texts letting you know he was still alive and well.

And you couldn’t blame him. Like always, you two worked by taking your own time, giving each other space.

And you knew that Jason had a lot on his mind after the gas incident. In the chaos of it all, he had told you that he had wanted to tell you about being Red Hood before and you wholeheartedly believed him, knowing that it wasn’t something that you could just tell anyone at any given moment. And now he had to deal with the reality that now you knew about that part of his life.

And you had a feeling that he thought that you would push him away for it. Resent him. When it couldn’t be further from the truth.

Because now you saw the whole picture that Jason Todd was.

And you know what?

He still was your Jason.

He still was the man that you were in love with.

Someone to whom you felt connected in a way that you had never felt before. Someone that was your friend and that always managed to make you smile. Someone that was always there for you when you had a bad day. Someone that reads to kids in his free time. Someone that tries to make this city better and protects its people as a vigilante. Someone who goes out of his way to visit you, a completely normal and ordinary woman who runs a simple bookshop. Someone that didn’t hesitate in sacrificing his own safety for yours.

Yeah, you were still very much in love with that man.

And if he needed some time to come back to you, that was fine with you because you knew that he wouldn’t just leave you like that. During the last few days you could even have sworn to have seen him peering through the windows into the bookshop in passing, but when you focused a bit more, he was gone. Or at least that’s what you hoped, the string pulling you two together too strong. 

No matter how much it had pained you to have the person holding your heart keeping you at arm’s length.

Because a day or two more of waiting and you would have stormed into wherever Jason was and told him how much he meant to you until that stubborn head of his realized how you weren’t ever letting him go.

You also hoped that he didn’t resent you, for not having been able to be at his side when he woke up. Something that you will never forgive yourself for, no matter how you knew that it couldn’t have been any other way.

You sit down next to him and place the first aid kit on the coffee table in front of the sofa, getting all that you will need to heal his wounds ready. You take one more look at them and your heart clenches.

You don’t like how he doesn’t seem to take full care of himself.

Because to you, Jason Todd was a treasure. A treasure that you will never be sure how you had managed to be able to find.

And he should be treated just like one.

And that’s exactly what you intend to do.

You follow the same process as the last time to take care of his knuckles, Jason quiet and avoiding your gaze the whole time, before moving onto the cut on his brow.

You raise your hand with a cotton patch to put some antiseptic on it and your eyes finally meet his. The green in them, like always, lighting up your insides, a forest in which you would gladly get lost in.

Jason looks at you as one of your hands takes a hold of his chin to tilt his head while the other one begins treating the cut.

And Jason feels like dying when he sees the flash of pain that crosses your eyes because he knows that he’s the one who put it there.

From the very first time that you healed him, he could see how you didn’t like seeing him hurt. Yet he still had let you see his wounds and tend to them more times after that.

He really usually does tend to his wounds. Except that very first time with his knuckles that he had been so tired he had only cleaned them. But after feeling your soft hands taking care of him for the first time, it was like he didn’t want his wounds healed anymore unless it was you the one who did it.

And so, subconsciously, selfishly and guiltily, he barely tended to them, just what was strictly necessary, a desperate attempt and blind hope of you maybe wanting to heal him in order to feel your delicate touch, that Jason was sure did a lot more for his wounds than whatever any kind of medicine could do.

Your touch not only mending his wounds but also healing his soul and soothing all the bad thoughts in his mind.

But right now, Jason wants nothing more than to get on his knees and do whatever you ask of him. Anything to make the slight hurt that briefly passes your eyes go away. Beg if it's necessary.

He thinks that apologizing may be a good starting point.

“Y/N…” He begins but before he can go on any further you hush him, almost like you want to enjoy the silence and this moment of intimacy as much as possible.

Then you reach for the first aid kit again, taking a steri-strip from a pack that you had bought, along with some other extra items, knowing that the basics of a normal first aid weren’t going to be enough now that you knew that he was Red Hood.

You put it on the cut, careful of not hurting him. Jason watches you mesmerized, still not believing that you haven’t kicked him out yet.

Then, you take a normal band-aid to put over the strip, just to be extra safe but mainly because you want to see him smile.

“Is that a Hello Kitty band-aid?” He asks in disbelief, breaking the silence, as he watches you open the band-aid with the pink, red and white doodles.

“Yup.” You say as you put it, covering the cut and fully hiding it from view, Jason not putting any kind of resistance to it. And your heart clenches blissfully at the small smile that pulls at Jason’s lips. Oh, how much you had missed it, your own personal kind of drug. And you can’t help but mirror him too.

“Thanks.” He whispers once you’re done patching him up. You give a slight nod in return.

You pass your thumb softly over the band-aid to make sure that it doesn’t fall off and then you meet Jason’s eyes again, that look just like a kicked puppy’s. Shining with oncoming tears and wide in fear of what is going to come next.

“I owe you an explanation.” He finally says with a sigh of resignation and you shake your head.

“Jason, you don’t-”

“No, let me do this. I need to do this. It’s the least I can do, I owe it to you.” He says, taking your hands in his, one of which still was caressing his eyebrow and stares at them as he can’t help but begin to rub soft circles into the back of them.

Goosebumps raise all over your skin.

Jason takes a deep breath before he starts talking. It seemed like you still cared about him but would you still do so once he finally explained everything and told you the truth?

He didn’t want to get his hopes up. But he knows that he can’t delay this anymore. He doesn’t want to.

As he begins, a cracking thunder sounds in the distance, shaking the foundations of the road that you two have been building together to its core.

The question being, would it stand the storm?

You listen to him intently. He doesn’t look at you once, instead deciding to focus on your joined hands. Grabbing onto a last part of you before he lets you go forever.

“And I’m so sorry I didn’t tell you. I totally understand that you may not want to see me anymore. I betrayed your trust and that’s unforgivable. Some of the things that I’ve done…” He shakes his head. “I want you to know that I never meant to hurt you. Please know that. You mean so much to me. And even though it breaks me having to remove myself from your life, I know that it’s for the best.”

“Jason, I-”

“No, no. Let me finish please.” He continues ranting. “I promise you that I won’t let the feelings that I have for you get in the way. I will go out that door tonight and never come back again. I’ll let you get on with your life.”

You’re fairly sure that he doesn’t even realize half the things that he’s saying. It’s like he has opened a gate and now not only is he apologizing and telling you the truth about everything, but he’s also letting his feelings for you finally come to the surface, unable to stop himself. He’s so caught up in everything that he leaves them out in the open without even realizing it.

And you just want to smile. Because Jason Todd has feelings for you too. And he has just said it out loud. You try to conceal your beaming smile to not scare him away. He’s way too much into his own head now, spiraling around the fact that he has to remove himself from your life as some sort of self-imposed punishment and in order to at least spare himself a part of the pain that would come from you outright kicking him away.

But you would never do that. Because even with everything that he has just told you and the things that he hasn’t yet, because you know that his story is a lot longer than what an evening can hold and holds a lot more things and very much darker ones than what he has revealed for the moment, you still want to be here with him. You still want him in your life.

Nothing could make you want to stay away from Jason Todd.

Not even himself.

And if there’s one thing that you’re stubborn about is that you’re always there for the people that you care about.

You just need to make him see that. To make him see how important he is to you. And you’re going to do everything you can so that he does.

You call his name again, trying to center his attention back to you but he keeps rambling.

You can only think of one thing that might finally make him stop and listen to you while also making him realize how you feel about him.

You have never done something as bold as this before. And there’s still a knick of doubt in the back of your mind, but the mere possibility of Jason leaving and the fact that the safety line that you two had drawn about your friendship and your feelings is fully difuminated now after his unintentional confession, almost as if it had never actually been there, has you determined. You want to think that it would turn out right.

And if not, at least you would get to do something that you had wanted to do for a very long time.

So, after firmly saying his name once more, and one of your hands getting out of his hold and tilting his head towards you, just when his eyes finally, finally, lock with yours for a quick second, you press your lips to his.

It’s not a long kiss and there isn’t much movement but you hope that you’re conveying everything that you feel for him and more. You can tell that Jason’s caught by surprise but it doesn’t take long at all for him to slowly press his lips against yours, returning your kiss. He lets himself melt into it and you do too. You feel warm all over and then you both sigh against each other, the two of you having fallen off the tightrope and finding that not only there’s a safety net beneath you, but an infinite number under it, one after the other, in the impossible case that one might break.

A soft place to land, a warm embrace.

You think that you could die happily right now.

You part, not wanting to overwhelm him but just from that taste you can already feel yourself slightly dizzy in the best kind of way. You slowly open your eyes and see Jason already looking at you, not believing what has just happened. You take a deep breath. Might as well put the nail in the coffin now. Cement the road.

“I’m in love with you Jason. All that makes you be you. Including being Red Hood. And I’m not going anywhere. And I really, really hope that you aren’t either.” You whisper.

“I’m a mess.”

You tilt your head with a small smile. “Aren’t we all?”

“Are you sure?” He whispers back, caressing your hair, still giving you an out, a last chance for you to escape him and all his problems, before his instincts take over and he latches himself onto you forever and never lets you go.

You nod, not faltering in your resolve. “Yes.”

“I’m in love with you too. I love you.” He says next and nothing has ever felt so liberating. Jason feels light, floating. And all he wants to do now is say it over and over again, just in case that you might still not be aware of how much he loves you.

“Good. That’s very, very good. I love you too.” You giggle, pressing your forehead to his, your noses brushing each other. Jason grins.

“Can you do that again?” He asks, his gaze dropping to your lips, already knowing that the day that he goes by without tasting them will be torture.

Your smile widens even more, if that’s even possible, and you kiss him once again.

And again.

And again.

And again.

After that, everything stayed more or less the same. Jason kept coming into the bookshop several times a week, buying books and checking out some others.

Except that now, he also kissed you everytime he did so.

Except that now, you went on very official dates, not ones that could be mistaken by a friendly hangout.

Except that now, you paid a lot more attention to any news about Red Hood.

Except that now, you always patched him up.

Except that now, you spent nights in each other's beds.

And right now, you’re very confused.

Your brows knit as you try to understand what is in front of you. The computer screen showing the details of a book order that you had made for the bookshop a while ago but that hadn’t arrived, not making any sense.

You’re so concentrated that you barely register the jingle of the bell above the entrance door. Out of the corner of your eye you feel a figure come to stand in front of the counter.

“Just a second, please. I’ll be right with you.” You say almost automatically, trying to see if you can just wrap your head around what you’re reading on the screen, though you doubt that a few more seconds will make any difference. But still, you’re adamant to try.

“It’s okay. I’m just looking for my girlfriend.” The figure says and your head lifts up so fast at the voice that you should be worried about getting whiplash. But you don’t care.

Because there he is.

Jason Todd.

Your boyfriend.

You still feel giddy inside every time that you think about it.

You let out a small gasp before your lips twist into a wide smile and you might as well be The Flash with how quickly you round the counter and wrap your arms around his neck, hugging him tightly.

Jason’s smile is just as radiant as yours as he watches you come to him and gets ready for when you crash into him, wrapping his arms tightly around your waist and giving you a slight spin when your feet lift off the floor due to the force of your hug.

He closes his eyes and breathes you in while he hugs you and brings you even closer to him, if that’s even possible. Your bodies merged into one in your embrace.

Never in his wildest dreams would Jason have ever thought that he would find himself in this situation. One in which you rush to meet him glowing with happiness. One in which he gets to kiss you without the fear of being rejected and one in which he’s able to call himself yours. He never would have believed any of that when he stepped foot into the bookshop that fateful night, which he was sure would be the last time he would ever get to see you.

He still can’t believe how lucky he is to have you. He just can’t wrap his head around the fact that you want him. That you accept all of his demons and that you help him fight them. That you love him. He will never take it for granted.

God, he loves you so much.

Your feet touch the floor once again but he doesn’t let go. He lets his senses overwhelm with you, everything about you enveloping him and not letting him feel anything that isn’t you. Your scent, the feel of your hair tickling his cheek, your arms around him. He doesn’t want to ever let you go.

He’s finally home.

Two weeks and a half is too long without you.

You think the very same about him as you do the exact same with him, your senses taking every part of him in, committing him to memory once again, even though you already know them like the back of your hand.

The feel of his soft hair as you run your fingers through it, just like you had dreamed so many times before, the scent and feel of his leather jacket beneath your arms.

God, you love him so much.

You finally pull back and look up at him with stars in your eyes. And then, without sparing another second, he dips down to kiss you. Or you pull up to kiss him, you’re not sure.

The only thing that matters is that his lips are finally back on yours and that’s all you need to know. You kiss him deeply, savoring him after being apart for so long and he kisses you back just as eagerly, loving the feeling of finally having you back in his arms.

And just like everytime that you kissed, like the very first time, it feels like a dream. Because you still can’t believe that he’s yours and that you’re his.

It was a long time coming.

But it turns out that you two are still human and therefore still need to breathe, so you both pull away but only what is strictly necessary to regain your breaths. Your chests and foreheads are still pressed together and lips inches from each other, so close that you can’t tell which breaths are his and which breaths are yours.

Your fast beating hearts falling into the same rhythm, syncing once again, going as one.

One of your hands holds the side of his face, softly caressing his cheek, so smooth that he must have shaved that very same morning. You feel his grip on your waist tighten.

“What are you doing here?” You finally say between giggles, the drug of his proximity, like always, making pure happiness run through your veins.

“Wrapped the case early.” He answers breathlessly before not being able to resist anymore and kissing you again.

You can’t help the smile on your lips while you kiss him and you can feel another one pulling at his own. When you separate once again you smile at each other, your eyes shining with love and affection for one another.

Jason had left earlier that month to help Dick with a case in Blüdhaven for a few days but then the thing had gotten bigger and dragged them all the way to Metropolis, making his trip longer than what he had first anticipated.

And then earlier in the week he had told you that he wouldn’t be able to return until the end of it. But here he was. Holding you in his arms and kissing you on a peaceful Wednesday afternoon.

“Everything went well?” You ask, not daring to tear your eyes away from his, only perhaps to steal a quick look at his lips.

“Yeah. All good.”

Before either of you can say anything else or even try to kiss each other again, Rose, Jimmy and Charlie, all of whom had been chatting over coffee in the break room, emerge at all the fuss.

“What’s all this?” Says Charlie with a smile as you and Jason disentangle, though he keeps you tucked into his side with a respectful arm around your waist.

“Just a young lovers reunion, Charlie.” Answers Rose.

“Sorry for intruding on, kiddos.” Adds Jimmy.

“It’s okay.” You say.

“You must be this Jason that I’ve heard so much about.” Charlie comments.

“Yes, sir. And you must be the famous Charlie. Nice to meet you.” Jason answers while shaking his hand, though not before throwing you a glance that makes your cheeks heat up in embarrassment and hide your face in his shoulder for a second. So you talked about me too huh?

“You too. My grandchildren are going to be devastated that you’re with someone now, darling.” Charlie says jokingly towards you now.

“Sorry, Charlie.” You respond with an apologetic smile.

“It’s good to see you, sweetie.” Says Rose to Jason to which Jimmy nods in agreement.

“It’s great to be back home.” He answers and you feel his hand give your waist a slight squeeze.

Shivers run down your spine.

You look up at Jason lovingly, a gaze that he returns, and you’re so lost in each other that neither of you see the smiles and look of recognition that the elders have in their faces, having themselves experienced a love like yours that still lasted to this day.

“Go, honey. Take the rest of the day.” Rose offers. You turn to her surprised but you can’t help but to also be excited at the possibility of going out with Jason already. Maybe to see Lily and the other kids, since Jason hadn’t seen them since he left, though you had of course shown up to check on them and continue with the readings, or maybe to eat something at Millie and Ruby’s.

But you don’t care as long as Jason’s with you. There were so many possibilities and you two had all the time in the world. And you were going to seize every single second of it. You two had wasted enough time already.

You also already know that Jason’s either spending the rest of the week at your apartment or you’re spending it at his.

“Are you sure?” You ask Rose.

“Yeah, go have fun, kids.” Jimmy confirms. You thank them before smiling brightly at Jason and then going to get your bag and coat.

As you and Jason make your way towards the door, Charlie speaks up once again.

“You’re treating her right, I suppose.”

Jason looks at you as he opens the door of the bookshop before turning back to Charlie.

“Always.” He says without hesitating and Charlie nods, glad with his answer.

The elders watch you go, happy that you two have each other. They watch how Jason moves the hand on the small of your back to take your hands between his and blow into them to warm them up in the cold Gotham air. And how you then zip his jacket all the way up, adjusting the collar so that it would protect him as much as possible, both of you smiling and looking at each other fondly, before you disappear from their view hand in hand.

Because as it turns out, it isn’t really a surprise when the road stays as strong and sturdy as ever after that cracking thunder.

Because that night, the days after and over time, Jason told you everything. About his past, about his family. And over time all that you did was fall even more for him, loving every part, every scar that he decided to show you. And he did the exact same for you.

Because in the end, he still was your Jason, the kind and handsome young man who always checked out children’s books and wore leather jackets.

Please let me know what you think! Thanks for reading!

[rinkkuma]

୨୧ VALENTINE'S DAY WITH BLUE LOCK BOYS

ft. isagi yoichi, reo mikage, rin itoshi, nagi seishiro, & chigiri hyoma

tags. highschool au, established relationships, gn!reader, a bit of cussing, all fluff ! / author's note. just some cheesy highschool romance! sorry they're a little short, but i hope you enjoy nonetheless ^_^

ISAGI plans a date after school, and he cannot stop thinking about it throughout the whole school day. from when school starts to the final release bell. jumping for joy when it finally rings. he immediately sprints to your class to come pick you up, and the two of you begin walking to your destination. he takes you on a date to a nearby café that had a valentine's event going on. the café is decked out in an obscene amount of pink and red decorations that would've made your head hurt if there were more. of course, he lets you order whatever you like and pays for it. (he also feeds you whatever you ordered with a big grin on his face) afterwards, he surprises you with a flower bouquet and whatever you've been ranting about wanting for the past few months. an absolute sweetheart!

REO puts his gift into a large box. why? it's too large to the point where you can't fit it into your locker, so it forces you to carry it around all day so that everyone will know you're his. writes “from: reo” in big letters on all sides of the box so people can see from every angle. yeah, reo has been planning this for the past few months. honestly, the box is so big to the point that it's a little embarrassing to bring it into your classes, and some of your teachers question you. he makes it up to you because of how amazing his gift was. a bouquet with your favorite flowers, a stuffed animal, a gorgeous and one-of-a kind necklace, and a photo book with memories from the very beginning of your relationship. spoils you with lots of kisses all over your face as well.

RIN shyly buys one of those valentine's day candy grams that a club is selling. and no, it is absolutely not because he's scared to give it to you directly. just kidding, he is. this was the first time he was actually giving something to someone for valentine's day and he did not want to mess it up, so to be safe he decided to buy one and have the club deliver it. after you receive it though, he immediately runs to your class, asking if you liked it. he mumbles an apology for not giving it to you face to face, but you pull him into a kiss to reassure him that it was more than okay.

NAGI conveniently has first period with you, so he takes this to his full advantage. arrives to school earlier than you and puts his plan into action. bangs politely knocks on the classroom door before the teacher hesitantly lets him in 2 minutes later, and puts a shit ton of things on your desk. places a stuffed animal on your seat, a basket with your favorite snacks (with the addition of a few valentine's themed candies), and a heartfelt (and surprisingly neat) letter. nagi patiently waits for you to walk in. staring at the door and being disappointed when someone walks in and it's not you. when you finally arrive though, he is holding back a smile and looks away nonchalantly, acting like you had not walked into class. you make your way to your desk, already seeing the various gifts on your desk before placing your gift for nagi on his desk. he finally lets the breath out that he didn't know he was holding, and gives you a bear hug. (you almost sit on the plushie on your seat because of how small it was)

CHIGIRI dramatically sighs when you greet him in the morning with a smile on your face and a gift bag in your hand. why did he sigh dramatically, you ask? in your mind, you thought it was obvious that you two would be each other's valentine since you are dating, so you never formally asked him. yes, chigiri could've easily taken things into his own hands and asked you, but he chickened out every time he was going to ask you. yes, he could've just texted you, but he believed that was the wimpy way out. you give him a puzzled look as you hand him your gift, asking him what was up. he looks down as he mumbles, “youdidn'taskmetobeyourvalentine..” as he rubs the back of his neck. you laugh before you give him a smile and say, “chigiri, we've been together for a while. i thought it was a given that we were each other's valentine.”

inspired by this prompt list <3

[svsss-fanon-exposed]

Exposing SVSSS Fanon: 9/∞

LUO BINGHE HAS CURLY HAIR

Rating: FANON - UNSUPPORTED

Luo Binghe's hair texture in the novel is not described as either curly or straight. There is only one place where his hair texture is referenced at all:

Shen Qingqiu forced his eyes open and looked down, only to find a small head with a curtain of soft black hair. (7 Seas, Ch. 28)

The idea that Luo Binghe canonically has curly hair was likely cemented within western fanon because of the EN TL official art depicting his hair as curly. However, the depiction of Luo Binghe with curly hair as a headcanon originates before the Seven Seas novels were released.

There are multiple editions where the cover art depicts a wavy-haired Luo Binghe, including Burmese, Korean, Thai (though this one is only very slightly wavy, if it isn't just an atmospheric detail), revamped Taiwanese, and of course the English version, which is by far the most curly.

However, all of these releases occured in 2020/2021, which is after the depiction of Luo Binghe with curly hair was already popularized in fandom.

The most likely original source for this headcanon is the fact that Luo Binghe is commonly compared to a sheep or lamb:

Such a selfless and considerate attitude! For a moment, Shen Qingqiu could almost imagine that he was a cute and harmless little sheep grazing on the grass and playfully nudging Shen Qingqiu’s knees, bleating, “baa baa.” (CNoveluv, Ch. 33) With that considerate display of selflessness, for a moment Shen Qingqiu could almost believe that the individual before his eyes was still that bleating, grass-loving little lamb who had huddled behind his knees. (7 Seas, Ch. 6)

This is just one of many such comparisons made throughout the novel-- though the comparison is always made to describe Luo Binghe's personality rather than his appearance, it could certainly draw an association with curly/fluffy hair, and influence the way he is portrayed in fanart.

For example, this post by @/zeldacw from 2018 (a year after the first major EN fantranslation projects began) directly states that this comparison is the origin of that particular artist's headcanon and depiction. By that point in time, the depiction was not yet as sweepingly popular as it became later on, though there had been a few other depictions of curly-haired Luo Binghe by that point in time.

However, by 2019, a comment on the BCnovels translation was made which states: "Many of the fanarts of Luo Binghe that I have seen pictured him with soft curly hair. I’m quite fond of the idea actually, it gives him the innocent child-like image"

By this point in time, the depiction of Luo Binghe with curly hair has taken off enough to become common, but it is not yet assumed to be canon. It's reasonable to assume, though, that the cover artists followed off of this same trend in fandom.

Now that the official cover art of the books depicts Luo Binghe with curly hair, despite his hair texture never being directly stated in canon, the official art is taken to be a canonical depiction especially by new fans joining the fandom through these official editions, and by fanartists continuing to keep up with the trend of drawing Luo Binghe's hair as curly.

However, common fandom depictions give his hair an even curlier, fluffier, or coilier texture than the cover art does.

This has no basis in the novel's text.

One additional statement that is commonly tossed around as a source is that Luo Binghe's hair is described as fluffy. This is an incorrect statement-- nowhere in the novel, whether the official translation or fantranslations, is Luo Binghe's hair described as being "fluffy."

(many thanks to @verycharismaticdragon , @loxare , @mochhio , @nottherailtracer , @iwhateveryou , @danmeiireader for positing potential sources, and @furbygoblinxiv and @cum-villain for timeline sleuthing!)

I've heard it said plenty of times that all Chinese people have naturally straight black hair. This is not true (I say as a wavy-haired Chinese person who gets tired of the erasure sometimes). It's not common, but it's not as rare as people think-- but wavy or curly Chinese hair behaves differently from other ethnicities'. It's relatively coarse and stiff, has a tendency to be frizzy, and (at least in my own experience) almost impossible for there to be any kind of uniformity to the curl, and takes a lot of work to style well-- many Asian people with curly hair will just straighten theirs instead.

One could argue that because Luo Binghe's hair texture is never described as curly or wavy, then there is no reason to think that it would deviate from the typical straight hair. In my opinion, this is significantly likely. Without the EN art, I would certainly not imagine Luo Binghe to have curly hair, and would assume it was straight.

There are also Chinese beauty standards to keep in mind, which overwhelmingly favor straight hair.

Of course, because it is never directly stated whether he has or doesn't have wavy or curly hair, it cannot be said that it is against canon. Furthermore, his appearance has a bit of an idol-like air to it, and some idols do have wavy or curly hair.

Therefore, it is not impossible that Luo Binghe has curly or wavy hair. However, since it would be likely that an uncommon hair texture would be described directly if it were intended to be canon, and Shen Qingqiu's narration would almost certainly have mentioned it with his tendency to gush over LBH's appearance, it is not particularly likely.

There's not really anything wrong with depicting Luo Binghe as curly-haired, and it doesn't even directly conflict with canon-- however, if he does have curly hair, he would have curly Asian hair (albeit, curly Asian hair that miraculously looks as though he had used a complicated hair routine but really he just woke up that way because he is the Protagonist™)-- so if someone isn't familiar with the hair type, it wouldn't hurt to do a little bit of research before drawing/writing about it.

However fans choose to portray it, though, it should not be assumed that Luo Binghe's hair is canonically curly.

[spooky-pomegranate]

Eyes on Fire (pt 3)

*Enemies to Lovers inspired by the Year Zero music video*

Papa Emeritus II x Reader (18+) Word Count: 2.8k (Read on AO3) Last Part: (Part 1) (Part 2) Next Part: (Part 4)

Summary: Secondo recounts the best and worst night of his life. You are taken to a special place in the Abbey full of magic and perhaps something more sinister.

(Dividers by @wrathofrats)

When the tendrils of sleep blackened the edges of his vision and he slipped into unconscious Secondo often remembered that night.

Sin and revelry.

Opulence and greed.

Tradition and pride.

Failure.

He partook as his father had. As his father’s father had. As his father’s father’s father had. Like the men before him, Secondo played the part of a new Papa well on the night of his ascension and everything had gone to plan … until it hadn’t.

The Abbey had been dressed in his new colors. Emerald green banners hung from the halls, table runners of a similar shade decorated the dining rooms, and hundreds of flowering bouquets of green calla lilies scented the air. The siblings had affectionately dubbed the rapid overnight changes to the Abbey “The Great Green Wave.”

The festivities had started in the early morning. A feast was held in Secondo’s honor. Brothers, sisters, bishops, and cardinals had come from near and far to celebrate. They followed him all day, presenting him with gifts and showering him with praises. In the evening, he delivered his first Black Mass and unveiled the design of his piercing papal paints to an adoring clergy. They had cheered for him and sung his name. Secondo felt proud.

He was of course aware of the ulterior motives from some. Social climbers were everywhere and as Papa, his coattails would be heavier with more of them clinging on for crumbs of his power. But for the most part, on his ascension day, Secondo let pride rule.

But everything changed in the catacombs.

The night before his ascension day Primo, as the most recent Papa to rule, had come to his younger brother to explain what would happen down below… or at least what was supposed to happen down below.

The catacombs were the site of the last tradition Secondo would need to complete before officially becoming Papa Emeritus II. Primo explained that on an onyx altar deep in the catacombs there was an old leather-bound book. The book had been in the Emeritus family for as long as there had been a church. It was a gift to their family from the Old One himself, written in the blood of the fallen and created from the ashes of the ninth circle. But the book was more than just a relic of the underworld. As Primo explained, the tome was a link between the world of the living and the world of the dead. And on the very special night of a Papal ascension, the Dark Lord used the book to speak directly with the newly anointed Papa. Secondo would be able to ask Him questions and together they would establish a path for his papacy.

But when the time came and Secondo stood before the old book… nothing happened.

He read every page. And then he read them again and again and again and again. For hours, Secondo stared at the unholy text until his eyes burned and his head hurt. But he didn’t care. He didn’t move. Secondo pushed aside the pain, shoving it somewhere deep, and ignored his bodily needs. Eventually, the sun rose and the first day of his papacy began. But Secondo remained underground. He denied visitors, turning away assistants, ghouls, his father, and his brothers. He refused food, drink, and rest whenever offered. He stayed rooted to the same spot on the stone floor hoping that His voice would finally call out.

When Secondo missed the next evening's Black Mass rumors swirled around the Abbey. But he didn’t hear them. He remained in the catacombs for three days and four nights. He would have stayed longer, but the lack of food and water eventually took a heavy toll on his body and Secondo collapsed on the fourth night.

In the weeks that passed, Secondo began his duties as Papa. But every night like the moon to the night sky, he obediently returned to the catacombs. But no matter how hard he prayed or how much he bargained… it never happened.

As far as he knew, Secondo was the first Papa in a long line of Emeritus’s to enter his papacy without guidance from the One Below. The thought kept him up most nights. Secondo would toss and turn worrying about what he’d done to displease his Lord. He recounted every moment of his life hoping for a moment of clarity so he could amend and atone. But nothing ever came.

Stubborn as an ox however Secondo remained determined. In the waking hours, he scoured the church’s library for answers, reading books from the private Papal-restricted sections and ancient tomes long forgotten. He focused intently on his religious duties and presented as many offerings to the Old One as he could, indulging in sins he knew He enjoyed.

Day in and day out Secondo’s life became about service to his Master and so did his papal reign.

Secondo was aware his consuming attentions warped his reputation. He became known as a cruel and bitter Papa, but it was only because he pushed his flock to be their best when mediocracy was easier. Any assistant who missed evening prayer was replaced, any cook who forgot to bless his meal was reassigned, and any Ghoul who disrespected the Old One was returned to Him.

There were no exceptions. No exclusions. Except for one. Except for you.

A week had gone by since Secondo promoted his first Imperatrixes. They had been subservient, attentive, and sufficient. At each meal they had followed his instructions and served him according to the old traditions, lighting the sacred black candles and kneeling silently for his prayer. But for a week, you stood out from the rest. You didn’t want to be there. That was clear as day. You would hide in the shadows and keep your head bowed. And true to your word you hadn’t participated in a single offering. Instead, choosing to skulk out to the butler's pantry like a kitchen mouse at the end of each meal.

The rational part of Secondo wanted to send you back to Primo and his gardens. The more irrational part of him despised you….hated you, even wanted you out of the church. In your chambers you had been openly combative with him, speaking to him in a tone no one else dared. Santana’s how he had wanted to put you in your place then and send you out the door.

The gall. The god-forsaken gall!

And the way you had stepped to him and cocked your little chin up. The way your chest had puffed up like small prey pretending to be a big predator. The way you had squinted your bright eyes and crinkled your little nose. Lying in his bed he replayed it all again and again and again. For a week he fell asleep with only the image of your stormy eyes in his mind.

But Secondo never sent you to Primo. He never let that part of his mind win because he reminded himself of the fire. He reminded himself of how it had burned uncontrollably when you looked at one another. It had to have been a sign. Secondo was sure. Absolutely certain. In all the books he’d read Satan’s favorite way to message the living was always through hellfire. What happened in the dining room was surely the Dark Lord's first attempt to communicate with him. There could be no other explanation.

But since that night nothing else extraordinary had happened. In the daylight when you shared space no more hellfire erupted and at night when he returned alone to the book in the catacombs no words were spoken.

But ever-stubborn Secondo wasn’t going to let you go.

He had a plan. He would see the fire again. He would hear his voice.

“Get out.”

“What?”

“Leave us.” Secondo’s leather glove wrapped around your wrist and you felt your pulse spike.

“H-have we o-offended you, Papa?” Sister Rose’s voice shook. She along with your other Sisters hadn’t seen this sudden outburst coming. Everyone panicked.

“There has been no offense sorella but tonight I will dine with her alone.”

You started to speak when Secondo suddenly tugged you closer causing you to clumsily trip over the frayed edges of the oriental rug on the floor. The corners of your vision blurred in dizzying motion as you hurtled forward straight toward the corner of the large walnut table. You closed your eyes, bracing for the inevitable impact….but it never came.

Just as quickly as you had fallen the hand circling your wrist shot to your waist and pulled upright. In the dark, you felt the brush of silk robes and the surprisingly strong muscles hidden underneath them. You sharply inhaled. The air smelled of sweet tobacco and flowering incense. You listened to his breathing. Deep and steady against your ears. Calm like a river. For a moment, it was nice. To be held. To feel safe in strong arms. To have someone keep you close. To have someone protect you, even if it was from just a table. It was nice to be in someone’s arms. It had been so long.

But when he spoke the spell was broken and you remembered just who exactly was holding you tight.

“You are dismissed sorellas. Go in sin.” Secondo’s warm glove slid from your waist. As the last of your sisters excited the dining room, he moved slowly to the fireplace at the other side and stared into the flames. The scent of him lingered behind him. Sweet and smoky.

“Take a seat sorella.” You did as he asked and pulled out the dining chair closest to you. Secondo turned and tutted.

“No,” he said sternly shaking his head. “Sit here by my chair. There is much we need to discuss and I do not wish to shout all evening.”

Fuck.

Your heart banged so violently against your ribs that you worried the bones might break.

For the past week, you’d managed to avoid Secondo’s wrath by sticking to your duties and slipping away before he took one of your siblings. He’d never asked you to partake again but you worried now he’d changed his mind. If he was going to give you an ultimatum you were ready to pack your bags and run.

Never in a million years would you willing touch Secondo. Unless of course, he was keeping you from smashing your face into a table. But that was different.

“Of course Papa.” You obediently moved to the chair beside his. “Have I done something wrong?”

Secondo eyed you as he took his seat at the head of the table. His expression was cold, but you couldn’t read it further. His papal paint hid his true emotions.

“I have spent many hours thinking about our last discussion and I have…” Secondo paused and you balled your fist in worry under the table “Frankly sorella I have concerns.”

“Concerns Papa?”

“Si. I am worried that you have lost your way.”

Your mind raced with all the things you could have possibly done wrong. There had been nothing. You’d been the shining example of obediency. "Lost my way, Papa? I'm just trying to serve you and the Old One as best I can."

Secondo leaned back in his chair. “I understand that, but there's more to serving the Dark Lord than merely following instructions. You seem disconnected, almost as if you're not fully committed to our faith."

"I assure you, Papa,” you stammered, “my faith is unwavering. I simply want to honor your teachings and serve Him to the best of my ability."

Secondo looked at you for a long moment. His piercing white eye made you feel small… as though you were being judged by the Old One himself. "That may be the case, but I fear your mind does not reflect your words.”

You frowned and looked down at your hands. A strange tightness twisted in your chest. What was he talking about? You had been faithful and obedient, hadn't you? Sure you weren’t always the rule follower that some of the meeker and younger siblings tended to be but that wasn’t against His teachings. Free will was just as important as the prayers. So what if you’d snuck off to the ghoul dens and ate fruit from his pantry? What did that matter?

"I don't understand, Papa. What do you require of me that I'm not doing?"

Secondo took a deep breath. "It's in your eyes, sorella. There's a fire there, a defiance that tells me you're hiding something. Something you shouldn't be."

In your eyes? In your fucking eyes?!

What the hell was he talking about?

Your heart pounded in your ears, and you tried to hide the sudden fury that overcame you. You reached up to cover your face, attempting to smooth away any traces of your anger that had bubbled to the surface. "Papa, I assure you, I am not hiding anything.” Other than my consuming hatred of you. “And I have done exactly as you have asked."

“If that is true then I would like to ask one more thing of you.”

“Name it.”

“I want you by my side for every hour of the waking day. I want you with me always. Sorella… become my assistant.”

Any hope of reigning in your emotions burned alive. You erupted.

“I’d rather die.”

There it was.

You may have slipped on the mask of a brava sorellina for a week but Secondo knew…that wasn’t who you were. This was. Insubordinate. Reckless. A lost and wayward soul. Una diavolessa laid at his feet. A challenge given to him by Satan himself.

It all made sense.

He understood the fire now. It had been a sign from the Dark One. He’d put you here as a test. Secondo would need to lead you back into the light of the Morning Star. And no matter the cost he would pay it. He would redeem you by whatever means necessary. He would make you a shining member of His church an example for all to see. 

As Papa Emeritus the Second it was his duty and he would not fail… because through you he knew would finally be able to speak to the Old One. He just had to break you and mold you back together in His image.

And he would break you. 

“Eat up, diavolessa. I want to show you something.”

Dinner was unbearable, but somehow you survived.

Luckily the food had been delicious and the wine plentiful. Neither you nor Secondo had spoken until your plates and glasses were empty. Only then did he ask you to accompany him to the catacombs, and against all sound judgment you agreed. That’s how you found yourself deep underground with Papa Emeritus the Second staring at an ancient book on a black altar.

“Do you know what this is sorella?”

“No, Papa.”

“Come closer.”

For the second time that evening, Secondo’s gloved hand wrapped around your wrist and he tugged you closer, pulling you roughly toward toward the strange-looking book.

On its cover were carved images of demons and the Morning Star. The pages were thick and yellowed, and as Secondo opened them, you felt a chill run down your spine. You had heard tales of these ancient tomes, forbidden and guarded with great secrecy by the ranks of the church. They were said to contain powerful magic, capable of summoning demons and divulging the future. And there, in front of you, was one such book. You could feel its power. You wondered if it was alive.

“He wrote this didn’t he?”

Secondo nodded.

“Why are we here, Papa?”

“I want to read it to you.”

As Secondo began to recite from the ancient text, the air in the catacombs grew thicker, charged with an ethereal energy that sent shivers down your spine. The words were in a language you couldn't understand, a twisted blend of Latin and an unknown primal tongue that clawed its way into your mind. As Secondo continued, the torches flickered and dimmed, casting long shadows that danced across the walls like spectral figures. The ground beneath your feet felt uneasy and you knew the earth was trembling in response to dark magic.

You tried to pull away from Secondo's grip but his hold on your wrist tightened. You couldn’t breathe. You wanted to run. To scream. To beg him to stop. To hide from whatever was about to happen but just as you thought you couldn't bear it a second longer, a low rumbling echoed through the chamber and the lights went out completely. 

Then you were falling.

Down.

Down.

Down.

Somewhere in the distance, Secondo screamed your name. But just as suddenly as it had begun, it was over. You landed with a jolt on solid ground and the impact knocked the wind from your lungs. Gasping for air, you struggled to make sense of your surroundings. Everything was pitch-black. The ground beneath you felt like dirt instead of stone. Sulfur and ash wafted through the air.

"Papa, where are you? Papa? Secondoooo?!"

A deep voice roared from the darkness. “Do you miss him already child?” 

(Follow along on AO3 here) NEXT: PART 4

[when-wax-wings-melt]

Y'all wanted the presentation? Here's the presentation. Image descriptions are below the cut!

(technically this wasnt part of the assignment, which was "write an essay and read at least one full page to the class" so the reason why there's those huge blocks of text is because that is taken directly from the essay. i can condense things if I WANT to condense them)

[ID: 15 screenshots of a powerpoint presentation. The text is either white or gray, and the theme is various shades of purple, typically with bubbles of dark/light purple and images.

Slide one: Title reading "Keeper of the Lost Cities: A Love-Hate-Love Relationship, And What It Can Do To Your Psyche" with three images on the side. The first image is a meme of two stick figures, the first saying "kotlc lore is second nature to us rabid fans so it's easy to forget that the average person only knows the average special ability count and one or two vackers", the second figure saying "and valin, of course," and the first saying "of course." with text at the bottom reading "Even when they're trying to compensate for it, experts in anything wildly overcompensate the average person's familiarity with their field." The other two images are of Shannon Messenger, a white woman with blonde hair. The images are captioned "The dastardly mastermind behind it all" and "meet Shannon Messenger".

Slide Two: Title reading "Background" with a block of text and two images. The text reads "In total, the Keeper of The Lost Cities (KOTLC) series has over 7000 pages, split between nine and a half books (Book 8.5 was, uselessly, a novella) with a planned tenth coming in late 2024, and a graphic novel dropping in November. It’s the kind of series that hooks you the same way a fisherman hooks a fish: with a promise of a treat that goes very, very unfulfilled." The top image is the cover of the first keeper of the lost cities book, captioned with "book one of what will soon consume my entire brain for years and years and years" and the bottom image is a fish staring at the top image as if it is a tasty treat, captioned "Poor, innocent little 6th grade me".

Slide Three: A block of text reading "This is to say: KOTLC is a good series, at least at first. It’s certainly been my core obsession for a good (or bad) five years. It’s a hook because you can’t escape once you’ve begun. It’s my own personal brand of heroine, as Edward Cullen might say if Bella were a too-long book series that doesn’t resolve any plotlines or character arcs and instead piles more information on top of worldbuilding until contradictions are more plentiful than the packed main cast." An image of Edward Cullen from twilight is captioned "Me, apparently".

Slide Four: A small caption at the top reads "If the series ever ends you can call me Brant when Jolie asked him to leave the Neverseen the way I will burn down my house and kill everyone I love (haha just a joke to get us going)​" with an image of a huge explosion below it. Text reads, "Basically, KOTLC is a good series, but the idea of recommending it feels like I’d be violating several articles of the Geneva Conventions. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone. The thought of it ending is an impossibility on the scale of the apocalypse and I hope (I'd rather) the world ends before this series does."

Slide Five: Titled "Queer-Coding in the Lost Cities" with the image of Sophie Foster and Fitz Vacker on the side. Text reads, "The queer-coding doesn't just stem from Sophie’s dedicated denial of both her worth as a human being and her desire to kiss her pretty girl friends. A connection called a “Cognate Bond” is often referred to in the text as the closest two elves can become, emotionally and mentally. Cognates exist when two Telepaths (such as Sophie) have such a deep and unbreakable trust bond that they become more skilled together than they were apart. In creating and maintaining this bond, they have to complete trust exercises and not hold back secrets keeping them from total confidentiality. Sophie’s cognate is her friend (and love interest, and, debatably, ex-boyfriend) Fitz, whose romantic relationship was in a large part focused on their cognate one. Their trust exercises involve staring into each other’s eyes, holding hands, having matching rings, and Fitz telling Sophie that she’s the only person he can truly trust. Fitz also asks his father at one point if cognates are allowed to date each other— his father affirms the statement."

Slide Six: Titled "Queer-Coding: Qualden, Tiertice, and such other 🤨🏳️‍🌈 moments​" with the text, "Notably, Alden has the authority to do so since he himself was a cognate, only undergoing a nasty breakup— sorry, only losing the bond after his cognate, Quinlin, kept too many secrets. It’s implied that two other characters were once almost Cognates, only to grow too far apart when one of them, Prentice, has his sanity forcibly shattered and is locked in prison, leaving his (gay lover) best friend, Tiergan (code name Granite), to raise his son. The choice to parallel Fitz/Sophie, Alden/Quinlin, and Tiergan/Prentice was possibly not a conscious one, since Messenger has never attempted to hint at the existence of homosexuality before, but it still resonates with hundreds of queer teen readers who look at the portrayal of utter devotion and trust between two men and think, wow. this is what i see in myself.​" The image is a quote from Neverseen, reading "'What did you give him?' Granite asked, cradling Prentice like a baby. Prentice's head lolled to the side, his body limp and pale." / "Granite held Prentice tighter, whispering, 'It's going to be okay.'"

Slide Seven: Titled "Honorary Errol "I have five identities and they're all the true me" Forkle Mention​". Smaller text below reads "Strut it Magnate "I inspired Loki but don’t even ask about the horse thing" Leto!​" A picture of Mr. Forkle is next to a tumble post by me about Forkle being trans based on the Loki thing. The slide is decorated with several trans flags.

Slide Eight: Titled "Beauty Standards" with text reading "Speaking of things Shannon Messenger did subconsciously, it’s so painfully clear that this series was written by a white American woman that it makes me break out in hives. Messenger establishes very early on in the series that all elves, no matter who they are, are gorgeous in comparison to humans. For some reason that I’m sure has no correlation to Sophie and therefore Messenger’s personal biases (aka Western hetero/cisnormativity and gender roles), every single elven character is slim with clear skin and no glasses. For some reason, beards seem to be impossible for elves to grow naturally, since the only time facial hair ever appears on anyone’s face is when they take an elixir to change their appearance." An image of Sophie with her human family is captioned "Sophie with her ugly nasty disgusting human family apparently​".

Slide Nine: Text reading "Valin is a member of “the drooly boys” who, had they been “human, would’ve been skinny, with acne and braces. Since they were elves, they were fairly good-looking—or they could’ve been if they hadn’t slicked their hair into greasy ponytails” (Messenger KOTLC 170). It seems elves have evolved past the need for brown eyes, acne, crooked teeth, facial hair beyond eyebrows, and variations in body fat—not to mention most other features that make people unique. ​There is indeed a single elf who is fat and even has wrinkles (elves also don’t physically age past 30, fun fact). He alters his appearance with berries that swell his skin, making him the only unique body type besides Sophie’s human family, who are consistently thrown in terrible comparison to her new, movie-star-looking adoptive parents. The berries also make him smell, interestingly enough.​" Images of Councillors Zarina, Terik, and Clarette line the right side of the slide.

Slide Ten: Text reading: "By portraying the elves as the standard for beauty and then removing any pimple, stretch mark, fat roll, body hair, crooked tooth, big nose, or any of the thousands of features that add depth to faces and bodies, Messenger tells us that perfection lies in eliminating all “flaws.” She tells her young readers that they are desirable if they look like Sophie, or Biana, or Keefe—not Stina with her curly hair, or Dex’s too-skinny arms, or Forkle’s large stomach, or my human body.​" The family portrait of the Vackers is also there.

Slide Eleven: Text reading: "Mostly, what defines KOTLC is how it’s interpreted rather than the content itself. I look at Sophie Foster and see parts of myself, but that does not make her me. These characters always feel so painfully real, desperately relatable, as if Messenger cobbled together a main cast from bits of my life, but they are not. In the end, they are just characters. ​In the end, it’s just a series made for middle schoolers, in the same way the sun is just the sun, and the stars are just there to twinkle merrily and not to be explored.​" Sophie on the cover of Exile is also there.

Slide Twelve: Text reading "Literally the day after I finished this presentation a new Marella short story came out in the paperback version of Stellarlune (book 9). This is a quote in the short story:​" with a picture of the short story of Marella being gay about Linh. Also on the slide is "🚨🚨🚨Alert Alert!🚨🚨🚨​" "🤨🤨🤨🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍🌈⁉️⁉️⁉️⁉️​" and "Everyone is excited about Marellinh canon but I think she will simply never acknowledge it again.​"

Slide Thirteen: Just the text "Oh, By The Way, This Series Is Off The Walls Insane​"

Slide Fourteen: Text reading "Things that happen in this series: Alicorns have sex and then there is a graphic birth scene (but the Forkle as Loki thing is going too far 🤨)​, Love Interest confesses his feelings by telling Sophie he wants her to be assigned to marry him by the government​, An ogre bodyguard plays matchmaker with her charge and his crush (successfully)​, There's a guy who can sense "potential" except is definitely lying about this​, Villains die so disappointingly. So far we have "hit on head with rock" "smushed by door opened too quickly" "exploded" "fell into evil birthing sauce" (this last one was cool though)​, and A school principal becomes president​" Three tumblr screenshots and memes detailing other things that happen in the book are also there.

Slide Fifteen: THE END. A screenshot captioned with "Credits for the fake book 7 cover go to @/aphelea on tumblr​" shows a canva/booktok style fake cover for Flashback, with a dancing couple, a horse, and the words "he was a boy. she was a horse. could I make it any more obvious?"

/end id]

[wyattjohnston]

uh oh - mat barzal

summary: you and mat didn't work out. it's not an issue, really.

word count: 1,361

main character: feminine!reader

inspired by: uh-oh by tate mcrae

The body pressed up against yours was hot; the leg between your thighs applying a delectable pressure. None of it felt quite the way you wanted it to but it was all for show so did it really matter? There was one pair of eyes you wanted to see you, one pair of hands you wanted to touch you; you just needed to make him want it just as bad.

A hand brushed under the loose material of your barely-there top, the touch only barely registering even when it was accompanied by warm breath against your neck. You looked up subtly over the guy’s shoulder, just to smirk when you saw the heated look being sent in your direction.

Mat looked furious.

Mat who broke up with you.

Mat who you still wanted even though you knew better.

The guy pressed up against you had no idea that you weren’t interested in him and, or that you weren’t even really checked in to what he was doing. It wasn’t getting any better as time passed, despite how hard he was clearly trying to get something going.

His whispering in your ear was the final straw, killing any illusion you had convinced yourself of. You looked over his shoulder once more, and let out a longing sigh when you, again, saw Mat looking directly at you. It was the wrong time to sigh because the guy took it at as a sign to pull you closer; it didn’t change the speed at which you extricated yourself from him and made a move towards the club’s exit.

Mat was long gone by the time you reached where he’d been standing but you weren’t worried about where he’d gone. He would be where he had been every other time you’d followed him out of the club, opposite the line waiting to get in and acting as if he wasn’t waiting for you at all. That was okay because you always walked right past him and made him follow you.

You felt his breath against your ear, a shiver rolling down your spine. It was no surprise what came next and you were rolling your eyes before Mat even started speaking.

“Took you long enough.”

Uber was a mistake.

It was too easy to get anywhere you wanted after a few drinks, no need to stand on the street and hail a taxi, no need to try and make a phone call to book one, no need to let anybody know that you’re out the door and going somewhere you shouldn’t.

The streets to Mat’s place were all too familiar; burnt into your mind over the course of your relationship and only becoming clearer after it ended.

Your watch buzzed and, despite knowing exactly who it will be and what the texts will say, you turned it upwards and watched as texts flooded in from your best friend.

Are you kidding me rn

Again???

Babe you cant keep doing this

You took it off your wrist to stop the next texts and, when you were let inside Mat’s apartment, it was dropped onto a table with your purse and your phone to be ignored and forgotten.

And easily forgotten it was when you laid eyes on Mat properly, your face screwing up unthinkingly when you were confronted with a haircut you never wanted to see.

“Did your mum like your school photos?”

Mat’s face morphed—previously filled with nothing but lust, it shifted into him biting his lip to hide the lopsided smile that otherwise would have taken over. He exhaled, a laugh lingering around the edge of it.

“You can chirp me all you want,” Mat said, unwaveringly cocky and just a little sleazy, “but you’re still here.”

No response came out of your mouth because nothing formed in your brain. You made direct eye contact with him, instead, silently daring him to keep talking. He read the unspoken threat that you’d leave and set his own jaw with a small twitch of his eyebrow.

“We done talking?”

Another weekend, another party, another bad decision.

You’d been given a talking to when you resurfaced at your apartment; your friend sitting at the small dining table swearing she hadn’t been waiting for you. It didn’t make a difference. Not when you already knew that going anywhere with Mat was unhealthy.

The house party invite had been unexpected but not unwelcome and you put together an outfit that appeared to not be trying too hard—appeared. You weren’t making an effort for anyone in particular, it just felt like the right thing to do.

Seeing Mat across the room—his head low as he leant into a conversation with a woman you didn’t recognise and a Truly held not too far from his face—let you know that the feeling to dress up had been because of him. He was sufficiently distracted with his flirty chat, nothing that worried you and nothing that couldn’t be changed, so you wandered around the house and into the yard to find a cooler before scrutinising the décor as you so loved to do.

Your friend showed up not long after, pulling you into the bathroom so she could finish applying her makeup after rushing from work. The quick rush away from the main party area was a blessing, especially when you looked quickly back over your shoulder and locked eyes with Mat.

“Are you drunk already?” she asked you when you appeared beside her in the mirror.

“No?”

“You sure? Your chest is so red.”

The heat rushing through your cheeks had been hard to ignore but it was at least hidden by your makeup. You may have been a little drunk on the White Claws you’d double parked because you hadn’t realised that the redness had creeped down to your bare chest.

“So,” you said, trying to be casual and trying to delay the rest of your sentence until your friend wasn’t mid-application of eyeliner. “Mat’s here.”

Even if you hadn’t been staring into the reflection, you would have known your friend was glaring at you. You looked away, regardless.

“Just get back together with him if you’re going to keep doing this.”

You shook your head, laughing to yourself. You didn’t have to remind her that there was a reason you and Mat hadn’t worked the first time; that all the sexual chemistry in the world couldn’t fix the communication issues neither of you would take the time to fix.

Leaving the bathroom, you understood it was too early to find Mat. You did want to enjoy yourself and spend time with your friend before you let eye contact with Mat linger for any longer than a few seconds. That didn’t stop your mind from wandering to thoughts of how the rest of your night would go.

When you were reaching deep into the cooler to find a drink that was actually cold, hands came to rest on your waist. When you stood up straight, there was a chest pressed closed against your back.

“Are you stalking me?”

“You should be so lucky.”

You turned around, Mat never moving to give you much space at all, and yourself staring at his mouth. You made eye contact for a brief second before your eye darted around the backyard and into the house to see if anyone was watching—one person, maybe, though they very well could have been drunk and staring into nothingness. It wouldn’t matter if they were, the people who knew both of you knew more than enough that seeing you so close wouldn’t surprise them.

“We getting out of here or you going to avoid me for a little longer?”

“Depends if you were done flirting with the chick with the braids.”

Mat looked back into the house, his eyes didn’t linger long enough to show any sign that he’d seen the woman in question, and, when he was looking at you again, he was smirking. His hand slid into yours and, before you knew it, the can you’d pulled was dropping to the ground and you were being led out the garden gate.

Please consider leaving feedback—reblog and write in the tags or send an ask, I’m not fussed. I just want to know what you’re thinking!

tag list:

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[perfectwitchcrown]

Allusions in Make the Exorcist Fall in Love

So far in Make the Exorcist Fall in Love there’s been a lot of allusions to various texts. I thought it might be fun to compile all the ones people have noticed so far as far as I've seen. Some of these are more speculative than others and I will update as I go along. Also, I read Ekuoto as free first read chapters on Mangaplus so unfortunately I can’t go back and check much so this is largely through memory, so if anyone has anything else to add I would greatly appreciate it! All I’ve got is a few screenshots and a dream. If I get anything wrong feel free to correct me! I’ve organized this in order of allusions I’m confident about to allusions I’m less so confident about.

CW: reference to sexual violence

Dante's Divine Comedy and Vita Nuova: Dante Alighieri

This one is pretty obvious since there are characters directly named after the characters figured in Dante’s Inferno. It’s been a long time since I read it, but other details are also taken from the text, such as the frozen center of hell where Satan is located.

Lmao Leah from the Bible (who is probably Leah’s namesake) also shows up in Dante’s Divine Comedy apparently in Purgatorio.

Ok also super important to Dante retellings r Beatrice, who’s used as a symbol of divine love and is instrumental to Dante's journey through hell, purgatory, and paradise, so of course Ekuoto Dante advises Priest to fall in love lmao. So far though there hasn’t been a direct Beatrice in narrative (which there might never be one since the text has already made the Dante-Virgil connection an active choice of Virgilius's to reference the Divine Comedy rather than just an allusion by the author).

To be so real though I figure that Vergilius is probably also intended to be the Beatrice in this narrative.

The points I would draw attention in support of this would be these: 1. Beatrice is the woman who Dante has been in love with since early childhood but unable to ever be with because they both married others. Ekuoto Virgilius and Dante have known each other since childhood, and have something going on. 2. Beatrice is, like Virgil, one of Dante’s guides (through part of purgatorio and paradiso) 3. We still don’t know what Virgilius’s name was before he took that one on. Beatrice does not have a masculine form in current use and I tried finding some sort of nickname that would work and was unable to do so. However. Beatrice’s name is rendered in Japanese as ベアトリーチェ, and Beato is at least a surname. Then again, I’m not sure anyone has both a first name and last name except for Imuri so far???

"Book of Tobit"

I wasn’t familiar w this one so I didn’t notice it until I saw posts pointing it out, but the Asmodeus flashback was a retelling of the book of Tobit. Other people have already done analysis of this so I’d recommend checking other’s out. Unfortunately I failed to save the link to any of them so I can’t pass any along :’) Belfagor arcidiavolo: Machiavelli

Another one that I wasn’t familiar with but have seen people referencing. As above, I recommend checking out other’s analysis. "Those Who Walk Away from Omelas": Ursula K. Le Guin

The Brothers Karamazov: Fyodor Dostoevsky

Ok major spoilers and I also highly recommend this book, but also, its super long so I don’t blame anyone who chooses not to read. This book is about the most disgusting father alive and his three, maybe four, sons: Dimitri, Ivan, Alyosha, and maybe Smerdyakov (rumored to be an illegitimate son). Most of the action follows Alyosha, who is the youngest and probably the most idealistic character in the novel, at least in the beginning. Alyosha starts out as a novice in the local Russian Orthodox monastery under the purview of Father Zossima, an elder who really emphasizes love in religious practice. There's a series of chapters that cover a theological debate between Ivan and Alyosha.

In this theological debate, Ivan is arguing not that God doesn’t exist, but that the foundation of the world as understood by Christianity is something he fundamentally rejects.

Quotations from the Signet Classics edition:

“I don’t accept this world of God’s. Although I know it exists, I don’t accept it at all. It’s not that I don’t accept God, you must understand, it’s the world created by Him I don’t and cannot accept” (Dostoevsky 266) - “If all must suffer to pay for eternal harmony, what have children to do with it?....I understand solidarity in sin among men. I understand solidarity in retribution too; but there can be no such solidarity with children. And if it is really true that they must share responsibility for all their father’s crimes, such a truth is not of this world and is beyond my comprehension” (Dostoevsky 276)

“Imagine that you are creating a fabric of human destiny with the object of making men happy in the end, giving them peace and rest at last. Imagine you are doing this but that it is essential and inevitable to torture to death only one tiny creature—that child beating its breast with its fist, for instance—in order to found that edifice on its unavenged tears. Would you consent to be the architect on those conditions?” (This quotation, although from a different translation, is the one that inspired Omelas - I think the bowling alley theological discussion between Virgilius and Priest bears some similarities to this conversation. Its not a debate about the existence of god, but rather a debate whether or not the world envisioned by Christianity is inherently unjust or not. Demian: Hermann Hesse

“The bird fights its way out of the egg. The egg is the world. Who would be born must first destroy a world. The bird flies to God. That God's name is Abraxas”

Potential references but tbh they’re a bit of a stretch:

“Book of Martha”: Octavia Butler

"Book of Martha" is an Octavia Butler short story in the Bloodchild collection about an ordinary woman who is visited by god one day who tells her to choose one thing to change about people to try and make the world a better place. It’s a very short read and I’d recommend reading it before you read the next sentence where I’ll spoil the end.

She eventually decides that the thing to focus on is people’s dreams. Specifically, to give them the things they desire most within their dreams, in the hope that people will be less violent to each other in real life. A stretch, but Octavia Butler comes from similar recommendation circles as Ursula K. Le Guin (feminist science fiction authors with overlapping periods of activity) so I don’t think it’s impossible for the most recent chapters' use of dreams to hold some sort of inspiration from this short story. Again, this one is a pretty big stretch, as the idea of dreams to escape reality is pretty common.

The Monk: Matthew Lewis

Ok! So! Demon seduces a person is like not at all an original story (The Daemon Lover, Cazotte’s The Devil in Love, etc etc). BUT! The Monk is specifically a story that’s like. What if there was this extremely virtuous young man who has never lived in the outside world ever because he was raised in the church as an orphan and then the devil sent a demon girl to seduce him.

I have not finished the book yet so I can’t comment in depth on it other than to say the concept is similar but the execution so far is very different (It's a fairly misogynistic text. Ambrosio turns evil in ways that I doubt Priest will because thematically they’d go completely against the story. Also, The Monk is veryyy lurid in terms of Lust is Evil!!! And will turn you into a murdering maniac!!!! Because evil women are out there seducing you!!! Whereas so far sexual desire in Ekuoto has been handled as a perfectly natural thing, but complicated by religion, patriarchy, trauma, etc.)

This is all I have so far but I'd be interested to see if anyone else has any other ideas!

[phoenix-is-the-hottest-thing]

Some people need to understand queer coding opens character identities and relationships up to a solid queer interpretation, but that doesn’t equal “this character 100% fits my headcanon and if you disagree you’re a [REDACTED]”

From a literary analysis perspective, as long as your interpretation is reasonably evidence-based it’s valid. As this is fandom, I’d add “sincere” to that since unlike an academic setting we get bad faith actors but that’s it.

So, to have a valid “interpretation” you have to do the work in good faith, and you have to be able point at the text to support your interpretation. If you can’t, or don’t want to, that’s a headcanon, and it’s totally fine.

“But this character is a lesbian she likes a girl!” There’s more to queerness than straight and gay. You could reasonably interpret a girl who likes another girl as plenty of different things:

Lesbian

Bi

Ace/aro and something else

Straight and closeted trans

Straight and lover is closeted trans

And so on.

So when you have an interpretation, someone might tell you, “I think this other thing.” The polite way to handle this if you don’t like it is to say “that’s so cool we can see different things in the ambiguity of art”. Maybe blocking each other if you dislike their interpretation that much.

That’s of course unless you both want a debate to further refine your understanding of the text or just like to argue or whatever. Which is fine! As long as it’s not overly bitter or whatever, it’s fun to discuss.

“So how do I know which interpretation is more canon than another?”

See, that’s the thing, you can’t. Canon is kind of shaky in the first place. The canon is just what’s written that’s recognized as true/correct text, not the way to understand it (and not what the author says is true, some people take Word of God as canon because it allows the following of one concrete interpretation instead of acknowledging multiple, but strictly speaking it is not). You can only interpret the canon.

For example, 4-komas bonuses of serialized manga are usually non-canon because they are jokes and not meant to be taken seriously as a part of the story’s text. That’s what canon actually is for, originally it’s to talk about which books are genuinely part of the Bible and which are to be deemed offshoots that shouldn’t be taken as a Catholic Church-endorsed religious text.

I guess that’s what gets people confused? That there’s no actual truth to imagined worlds, only what happens in the eyes of the beholder when they interact with art?

Because that’s what it means, canon often has nothing to do with who’s “actually a lesbian” short of them saying it directly. An onscreen wedding is said to “make a couple canon” precisely because there’s only so many ways you can interpret a wedding, but all that means is that the text says they’re together at a point in time. One way I can think of having a canon sexuality would be a canonical character sheet, or an omniscient narrator saying so, but everything less is basically an interpretation.

Note that interpretation obviousness can go from “that’s a stretch but I like it”, to “you only need eyes to see it”, they’re both still interpreting. Even a character talking sexuality technically only makes canon that they’re willing to say so, but that’s when critical thinking comes in.

If you hear a character say “I’m a married lesbian” and think “they’re just confused” with no evidence, you look like an idiot. You absolutely can argue which interpretation is more valid or likely by pointing out inconsistencies, stretched evidence, or that one interpretation has a higher volume of evidence/etc. This is how you avoid relativism and “nothing the text says matters” trolls.

Occam’s Razor is another way you might be tempted to try and determine whose thesis is stronger. This technique works through figuring out which interpretation requires the least amount of assumptions (saying something arbitrary is true as a basis) but it doesn’t make anything canon, or more interesting, it’s not a concrete sign of superiority. Just means it has stronger fondations.

However… your interpretation being stronger, more popular, better worded etc. or you thinking someone else’s is immoral, stupid, etc. doesn’t give you license to be a bully, to call people names, to dox them, dig up dirt to make them look worse, and so on and so forth. Thinking you’re right and they’re wrong does not make you above basic respect, politeness, or consequences. You’re not better than everyone else.

As a child, I used to think I was always right because I was logical, and I clearly made logical sense so there was no way for there to be a logical reasoning that arrived at a different conclusion. (Newsflash: Child me was very wrong! Sometimes multiple things can be equally valid! And even if they were not equal, that didn’t give me license to deride people publicly!)

Queer coding is by its nature interpretative. Coding is the author leaving hints about their characters by using a “code”. Some hints, almost everyone in your section of fandom might have the exact same interpretation about. Some hints might be dead obvious. Some hints might leave you overjoyed. Some hints you might ignore because they make you uncomfortable.

Some people will disagree with you about how they interpret the coding, or might even just state that they believe people have a right to interpret the canon however they want, even in ways you don’t like. That is normal. That is not a threat to your interpretation.

Don’t be a petty cunt about it.

Essentially,

[saintsenara]

Hey!

My main takeaway from your unhinged ships series - which provides me with limitless entertainment btw so thank you for your service - is how intricate your knowledge of the HP series is!

I'm kind of in a weird limbo rn where I have a great love for this world and the series but JKR's behaviour in recent years has completely turned me off the whole thing. I've been too disheartened to engage with the canon material in any real sense for years, but your exploration of it is kind of rekindling my interest. Do you have any thoughts on this?

Also, is HP like your niche or do you possess an encyclopaedic knowledge on any other works of literature or pop culture phenomena? This is just pure curiosity on my end.

thank you very much for this anon! it's extremely sweet.

how to reconcile being a part of this fandom - and, especially, how to be in a corner of the fandom which places more emphasis on the text than others - with jkr's decision to become a bigot is a question i'm sure we've all spent a lot of time on, and it's one which is going to have an inherently subjective answer.

my personal view is that she'll never get another penny out of me - i'm persevering with my original copies of the books, judiciously sellotaped; i won't engage at all with the upcoming television adaptation; i've not seen the fantastic beasts films; i wouldn't go and see cursed child; i wouldn't play hogwarts legacy; i don't buy merch and so on - but that writing my little stories and yapping away on my little tumblr is fine, because it's an engagement with the series which, no matter how much it focuses on the text she wrote, is still mine rather than hers.

but - of course - there are entirely reasonable arguments against this position, in either direction. someone who does engage more with jkr's post-radicalisation output could justifiably say that - since i've written stories involving delphini, who only exists because of cursed child, the fact that i've never seen or read the play is irrelevant and my insistence that there's a meaningful distinction between enjoying the expanded world of the series and enjoying the expanded world of the series in a way jkr materially benefits from is performative nonsense. someone else could justifiably say that jkr benefits [directly and indirectly] from all fandom engagement, even if that fandom engagement is critical of her and even if it doesn't financially support her - the upcoming television adaptation, for example, wouldn't have been greenlit if hbo didn't think it would get an audience, and the continued vitality of the harry potter fandom undoubtedly contributed to their belief that it would.

neither of these arguments are wrong - although neither is objectively correct either. each of us has to form a subjective opinion, be ok with it, and be open to changing it as time passes.

and i do genuinely think that engaging with the text as a text - something else i bang on about all the time - is helpful when it comes to reconciling everything.

i know it sounds very pretentious [and i also suspect that many people think the series isn't "well-written" enough to justify such pretension...] to say that the fandom needs to get better at embracing a variety of methods of reading the text and understanding the author's relationship to it.

this isn't me saying that anyone who wants to get into fandom needs to be able to rattle of the names of literary theorists, or be able to give an answer to "the series is historiographic metafiction: discuss".

[although if anyone would like to try and argue in favour of that proposition... i'd shriek.]

what it is is me saying that the dominant way of reading the text in the fandom - which is to focus on the reader's emotional response [and, above all, the reader's emotional response in childhood] - can end up giving jkr quite a bit more authority in how we engage with the series than she deserves. it's why many of us might say that we feel she's "betrayed" or "taken something away from" us, for example - and it's why many of us might feel that she's forced us into approaching the series in ways which decentre the canon material.

and this is - obviously - a completely legitimate way of engaging and responding. but there's also a lot to be gained from thinking outside of our emotional responses about things like the genre conventions which govern the series, the tropes and archetypes it uses, its language and syntax, its existence as something standalone, the other works of literature which influence it, and the social and historical context in which it was written. treating the series as "just" some books reduces jkr's authority over our response to it - and while the argument that this doesn't mean anything in the real world, since all she's going to care about is that people are reading her stuff, is an inherently reasonable one, i do think it has real-world benefits to us in how we square the circle of enjoying the text.

more controversially, though, i think it's also worth thinking about the personal context in which the series was written.

for me, the author is dead based on whether or not i need her to be. i don't think that the only valid interpretation of a text is the author's intended one, and i don't think that the only valid interpretation of a text is one dependent on matching parts of the story onto the author's biography. but i do think it's important for readers to know both what jkr understands the text as saying and what has happened in her life that bleeds through into it [such as the way her difficult relationship with her father and her experience of her mother's terminal illness undeniably influences the series' prioritisation of sacrifical motherhood and certain coolness towards fathers]. this doesn't mean agreeing with - or even empathising with - her by any means, it's just another tool in our arsenal when it comes to thinking of the series as no more or less special than any other piece of literature, and jkr no more or less important to our interpretation of it than any other author.

and i think it's worth saying that she doesn't seem to be someone who's bothered when fans say that she doesn't understand her own text or that she's lost the right to speak about it or that the fandom has taken it back from her - which is also why when people say that non-canon shipping [especially of queer pairings] must piss her off i think it's just cope - because she can spin that as these people being childish and unwilling to face reality.

but she does seem to be bothered by people who say "yeah, i know that's what you think and i know that's what you intended... but i disagree and you don't have the right to dictate otherwise".

[this is why - i think - she gets so frothingly pissed-off by daniel radcliffe's immaculate stance against her anti-trans bigotry. he's always very firm in saying "she can think what she wants, but - firstly - this isn't about what she thinks privately, it's about what she does publicly and - secondly - i think she's completely wrong and i'm not going to change my mind just because she wants me to", and she obviously doesn't like the fact that this is much harder to spin into the narrative that she's being "oppressed" and "victimised" than she'd like...]

the text is just a text, and she's just one woman, but our ways of reading are infinite and important and ours. the new horizon in literary theory is "fuck her, we ball".

[when it comes to "do i have a good memory?" the answer is "yes, but for purely useless information". when the question is whether that good memory relates to other pieces of pop culture, i'm either very lucky or very unlucky - depending on where you stand on such things - that the fandoms for hit millennial sitcoms don't seem to be large... otherwise i'd clearly be spending all my time writing epic nick/schmidt or liz lemon/jenna maroney romances and/or being cancelled for being in george michael/maeby nation...]

[raayllum]

Hello! One thing I’ve been excited about by Runaan’s return is that he clearly knows something of Aaravos- which may or may not mean Ethari does. It could due to a number of factors, so narrowing down a why is difficult: dragon guard friends; working as the assassin leader directly reporting to the dragon monarchs; some kind of work related he must have seen places when out killing people experience (dark mages having Aaravos links is rather established); or else Xadian specific trivia/cultural lore Rayla either hasn’t heard to to interest, obscurity or being somewhat othered over her parents post the dragon guard’s failure so tales about Aaravos were suddenly taboo with his artefacts possibly missing. But, irregardless of how to a degree, in consideration of texts blurring out Aaravos’ name in Katolis in earlier seasons I’m really hoping we get something more in expansion of how Xaadia tells what went down (hopefully paralleled with what Aaravos is saying to Claudia!) and think there’s a possibility to make Runaan’s revival pull extra narrative weight efficiently!

Also Runaan calls the mirror a fate worse than death before then sort of dying in season one and that’s sort of answered as it’s Aaravos’ way to access the living world from his prison a bit sure but that is still a thing that expansion on would be delightful to see.

But the reason I thought to use an ask format is your beloved cube- it was taken at the same time as the mirror and is a magical artefact. So, I must ask if your forensic following of it’s every screenshot has you thinking Runaan may give insight into the key in any way or at least recognise it too! There’s no pressure intended, of course, but I thought it may be up your alley oohing and aahing to at least read and it could do no harm to direct your way enthusiastically.

I think realistically Runaan didn't/doesn't know more than what Lain and Tiadrin presumably did (hence trying to get one of the Dragonguard to take the egg, but they were still going to stay behind; in my mind, this was because of the mirror). They knew the mirror held something dangerous and awful ('worse than death') and possibly that it was a Startouch elf, but I'm not banking on them knowing his name considering that even Janai—a queen and descendant of Aditi (which makes me think that Aaravos wasn't even suspect in her death at the time) with the resources of the Great Bookery—didn't know him by name.

In my mind we've largely gotten Xadia's take on things (Zubeia) from someone who would have context. I think if we're going to get another lore drop that's not from Aaravos himself (as he'll have to explain some things to Claudia and Terry in S7), it'd reasonably be tied to Kpp'Ar given that he was participating in "ancient" magics / knows something about the Staff of Ziard (Aaravos' gift) that Viren never has. There's also other clues in supplementary material (book 2 novelization, Puzzle House graphic novel) that Kpp'Ar knows more about stuff related to Aaravos and deep magic than we've seen so far.

I think Runaan is out of the coin for 3 main reasons beyond just "Runaan gets to reunite and be happy with Ethari" (which is, to be fair, a decently good reason all on its own):

Xadia has to prove that it's not like the Cosmic Council. And they can do so, because Runaan changing will likely reflect the Silvergrove changing, and moving away from a place where they're willing to literally and/or metaphorically murder children (hi Ezran and Rayla respectively)

Runaan coming back is going to challenge Ezran and his efforts towards peace / breaking the cycle in a way that it is unlikely another character could.

Runaan is there to provide either a contrast or guidance to Rayla when it comes to love vs duty. He put duty above all else and seemingly regrets it, believing that it turned him into a monster, and this may help Rayla put love over duty next season (and thereby save Callum + humanity's hopes for primal magic by extension).

By being here he's absolutely going to further / already has furthered certain themes or ideas (father-daughter relationships, parent-child reconciliation, knowledge of the Moon arcanum and life/death which may be very important next season) but I don't think any of him as a character is particularly tied to knowledge about Aaravos more than what the main cast currently knows. I think Callum (and maybe Kpp'Ar) with help from Ezran (bc Orphan Queen royal lineage) or Zubeia could know or discover something about the cube going forward; I expect Callum to have fully solved That Mystery by the end of S7.

[sopranoentravesti]

Not directly inspired by anything except for *gestures vaguely at the surrounding shitshow* but I do think more people could stand to read this article by Dara Horn about Roald Dahl from 2021.

I’ve included text of the article as well, under the cut. And to head off the whining of those who will perceive this as an attack on their favorite children’s book writer or whatever: read the damn article. This isn’t about “cancelling,” someone for being bigoted (hell, if I boycotted books or plays because the author was virulently antisemitic, there would be precious little to read). It is about understanding a really dark part of human psychology that is at play in conspiratorial thinking— which of course is at the heart of antisemitism— that Roald Dahl capitalized on. Developing a more mature sense of morality, rather than indulging in the bloody politics of blame and vengeance is crucial.

There’s nothing quite like the realization that what you thought was an empowering work of art is actually a 200-page exercise in trolling. It took me more than 30 years to figure out that I’d been trolled by Roald Dahl.

Dahl, who dominated juvenile publishing when I was growing up, revealed himself late in his career to be a vicious antisemite, who thought “powerful American Jewish bankers” ran the US government. He told the New Statesman that “there is a trait in the Jewish character that does provoke animosity, maybe it’s a kind of lack of generosity towards non-Jews. I mean, there is always a reason why anti-anything crops up anywhere; even a stinker like Hitler didn’t just pick on them for no reason.” This was in 1983, the year in which Dahl published The Witches, his 13th novel for children.

Apparently, Dahl had been an antisemite his entire life, but it didn’t prevent him from being essentially canonized after his death in 1990, and it didn’t much affect my thoughts about him either. I had adored his books as a child, and I’ve never taken much interest in the now-obligatory grunt work of connecting artists’ personalities (often horrible) with their works (sometimes great). And although Dahl was not only an antisemite but also (and even more damningly these days) a misogynist and a racist, he hasn’t been canceled yet. Who doesn’t love Roald Dahl, or at least his stories?

Hollywood certainly does. The most recent Dahl adaptation, which began streaming on HBO Max this Halloween season, is called Roald Dahl’s The Witches (note the value of the authorial brand), directed and written by Robert Zemeckis, with the help of two younger Hollywood powerhouses, Kenya Barris and Guillermo del Toro. It stars the high wattage Octavia Spencer, perhaps best known for her Oscar-winning role in The Help, and A-lister Anne Hathaway, not to mention the voice of the comedian Chris Rock. In fact, this is the second big-budget version of The Witches, the first having been a 1990 film starring Anjelica Huston.

But The Witches was on my mind long before I’d heard about the new movie. It was one of my favorite books when I was a child, one I read repeatedly and pressed into the hands of friends. I was eager to share it with my own children and hesitated only because, as a child, I’d also found it somewhat terrifying. But when I read it aloud to my eight-year-old son last month, I discovered that it was far more terrifying than I remembered, and for entirely different reasons.

The key to Dahl’s success as a children’s author lay in how he pitted children against adults, making children into a beloved underdog class whose moral victory lay in vanquishing their powerful exploiters. His heroes are blameless boys and girls tortured by diabolically abusive adults, whom they destroy in outrageous revenge sequences of the sort even the most fortunate child occasionally fantasizes about. In James and the Giant Peach, for instance, the orphaned James, enslaved by his villainous aunts, squashes them to death with the titular fruit. In Matilda, a kindergartener uses magic powers to terrorize a school principal who routinely locks children in a nail-studded closet. In Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, the starving Charlie, living in the sort of poverty that would make Oliver Twist qualify as a one-percenter, inherits a fantastical candy factory—but only after a book-length morality play in which wealthy children and their entitled parents are absurdly tortured and maimed. In George’s Marvelous Medicine, a boy forced to care for his heartless grandmother concocts a potion that makes her shrink and disappear.

In short, Dahl is like a modern Charles Dickens, except instead of social justice and spiritual redemption, Dahl’s books offer only revenge. Kids, like all emotionally and morally stunted people, eat this stuff up. Dahl tapped into something primal and hideous in the human psyche: the desire of disenfranchised people to feel righteous precisely by demonizing others. As a kid, I bought this too. The sheer sadism of it went right over my head until I shared these books with my children and saw how I’d been punked. And The Witches was the worst.

The Witches is about a boy who is orphaned in the opening chapter—pity points are always crucial for Dahl—and then adopted by his loving Grandmamma, a kindly old lady who fills him in on a little-known scourge. Witches, she explains, are real. They are demons disguised as women, and their sole purpose is to entrap and destroy innocent children through their diabolical magic. One unfortunate boy, for example, went off with a witch and returned unharmed—but later hardened into a stone statue. After vanishing with a witch, a girl reappeared only in a landscape painting in her family’s home, changing positions whenever the family wasn’t watching and even aging as years passed. (That one haunted me for decades.) Other children are “disappeared” in ways worthy of an Argentine junta. Kids better watch out.

One summer on a beach vacation with Grandmamma, our hero wanders into a hotel conference room occupied by a group calling itself the “Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children.” In fact, it is a coven of witches discussing their latest plan, a potion designed to turn children into mice. They discover the boy and immediately mouse-ify him, but now that our talking mouse hero knows where they keep their potions, he and Grandmamma hatch a clever plot to administer them to the witches themselves. Hijinks ensue, evil is vanquished, and although the narrator remains a mouse, he doesn’t mind. He and Grandmamma embark on a crusade to take out the witches of the world, and he never has to go to school again.

The book chimed perfectly with the stories of “stranger danger” that other 1980s children and I were constantly fed in state-mandated school curricula, but it made that threat delightfully preposterous—and manageable since all one had to do was believe that certain adults were actually demons with recognizable tells. It was a highly rewarding fantasy. After all, it was clear to me, as it was to every young reader, that even adults who didn’t molest children in shopping malls were nonetheless conspiring against us, making us do dehumanizing tasks like making beds and taking tests. The book was empowering. With its frisson of secret knowledge, it made us feel righteous and invincible. Unfortunately, revisiting it as an adult revealed that the book was cribbed from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion—and helped me understand, for perhaps the first time, antisemitism’s seductive appeal.

“Witches,” Grandmamma explains, “are not actually women at all . . . They are demons in human shape.” How do you spot one? Well, since they’re demons, they have toeless hooves instead of feet and claws instead of fingers, disguised by fashionable shoes and gloves. You can’t spot those, but you can spot their “larger nose-holes than ordinary people” (the better to smell you with, my dear). But the real tell, of course, is that witches are bald—which is why a witch always wears “a first-class wig,” which she puts “straight on her naked scalp.”

As I read this aloud to my enthralled son, it was hard to miss how much these witches resembled women in, say, Stamford Hill (the London version of Borough Park). It was also hard to miss how much they resembled caricatures from Der Stürmer or a medieval blood libel. Was I overinterpreting?

You be the judge: “Wherever you find people, you find witches,” Grandmamma tells her innocent grandchild. “There is a Secret Society of Witches in every country. . . . An English witch, for example, will know all the other witches in England.” If this was too subtle, Grandmamma clarifies: “Once a year, the witches of each separate country hold their own secret meeting. They all get together in one place to receive a lecture from The Grand High Witch of All the World.” The boy’s question about this fun fact is, at this point, predictable: “Is she rich?”

Grandmamma replies, “She’s rolling. Simply rolling in money. Rumour has it that there is a machine in her headquarters which is exactly like the machine the government uses to print the bank-notes you and I use.” The boy then asks, as any normal child would, “What about foreign money?” You already know the answer: “Those machines can make Chinese money if you want them to.” Here, the boy turns skeptical: “If nobody has ever seen the Grand High Witch, how can you be so sure she exists?” Grandmamma counters, “Nobody has seen the Devil, but we know he exists.” All of this isn’t merely true, we are told, but “the gospel truth” (the italics are Dahl’s). After all, Grandmamma “went to church every morning of the week and she said grace before every meal, and somebody who did that would never tell lies.” As Grandmamma warns her dear boy, “All you can do is cross your heart and pray to heaven.”

Alas, crossing his heart and praying to heaven doesn’t protect our hero from his encounter with the Elders of Witchdom, at which point Dahl drops all pretense. The Grand High Witch, we learn, “had a peculiar way of speaking. There was some sort of a foreign accent there, something harsh and guttural, and she seemed to have trouble pronouncing the letter w. As well as that, she did something funny with the letter r. She would roll it round and round her mouth.” The Grand High Witch, in her Yiddish accent, explains to her secret society how they will lure England’s children by buying high-end sweet shops and poisoning the candy, since “Money is not a prrroblem to us vitches as you know very well. I have brrrought with me six trrrunks stuffed full of Inklish bank-notes, all new and crrrisp” (italics mine).

Few children can resist the lure of witches. My son loved the book so much that he wanted to see the movie. Perhaps you are wondering: is the 2020 Hollywood version, whose creators unsurprisingly included plenty of Jews, antisemitic? The short answer is no, or not exactly, but that’s also the wrong question.

Adapting from a source this hideous was never going to be easy or entirely uncontroversial, and the new film has already been slammed for portraying limb differences as evil (instead of the claws mentioned in the book, the film’s witches are depicted with missing fingers). Despite that tone-deaf choice, it’s clear that the filmmakers were aware of the book’s larger problems. To their credit, they knew they had to fix something, and they went big: instead of contemporary England, Roald Dahl’s The Witches takes place in 1968 Alabama, and the protagonist and his grandmother are Black (Octavia Spencer’s Grandmamma is even a voodoo healer). Unlike the 1990 movie, the witches no longer have big noses and are, in fact, racially diverse. At first, this does seem poised to dilute some of the book’s inherent awfulness: when a Black witch attacked the protagonist in an early scene, I had high hopes for a story where “evil” was depicted solely through Marvel Universe methods of pancake makeup and special effects. But that scene proved to be half-hearted tokenism, since the rest of the film focuses almost entirely on, to use the current term, white-presenting witches—and most tellingly, what really distinguishes witches in this film is that they are rich. As we watch a flashback of the lily-white and fabulously dressed Anne Hathaway as the Grand High Witch attacking an impoverished Black child in a 1920s Alabama shantytown, Grandmamma tells us that “witches always prey on the poor.”

This class warfare idea is utterly absent from Dahl’s book, but it perhaps unintentionally provides a trendy update to his rather old-school racial antisemitism: the idea that a secret society of fantastically wealthy “global elites”—often, but not inevitably, Jews—prey on the poor. This means that bigotry against them, rather than being retrograde, is, in fact, a fresh and righteous way of “punching up.” Instead of just protecting innocent children, this new Grandmamma now also shares her truth to defend the downtrodden, like every righteous nutjob tweeting about the Rothschilds or George Soros. In the book, nothing much happens with the Grand High Witch’s counterfeit cash. But here Grandmamma commandeers it at the film’s triumphant end and hands out hundred-dollar bills to the hotel’s exploited Black employees.

If this sounds tedious, it is. Roald Dahl’s The Witches is wretched less because of the book’s wretched premise than because it is a conventionally lousy children’s movie, full of Hollywood pieties (in the climactic scene, Grandmamma actually lectures the Grand High Witch about the Power of Love), canned stereotypes and recycled animation. That doesn’t mean kids won’t love it, of course. As Hollywood knows well, everyone loves a good conspiracy theory—and that’s the problem.

My kids laughed their way through the movie’s animated mice and cookie-cutter triumphs, enjoying everything that conventional children’s stories do best—reinforce their audience’s expectations, vanquish villains, and make powerless people feel superior. Conspiracy theories make for great stories, but in an era when a nontrivial proportion of the American electorate apparently believes in the QAnon conspiracy theory that a secret cabal of satanic pedophiles preys on American children and the country, I couldn’t help feeling that this film was, at the very least, ill-timed.

It is so easy, after all, to believe in a conspiracy, so self-indulgent, so appealing—and, as I now finally understood, so much fun. Watching this mediocre and unremarkable movie left me shockingly ill at ease, precisely because it was so mediocre and unremarkable. My discomfort was compounded by the knowledge that the eight-year-old me would have loved it too, not knowing any better. Few children do. In the elaborate, magical long game of luring innocents into handing over their hearts, it turns out that the Grand High Witch was actually Roald Dahl.

[beguines]

There was little opposition from inside the profession for the atrocities that were to follow. This is because the psychiatric profession saw these pursuits as furthering their branch of medicine, progressing biomedical ideas on the mind and the "treatment" of mental disordered patients, and—in the language of medicine under the rationale of biomedicine—in the best interests of their patients. Internationally, German psychiatry was well established, highly influential, and often considered to be at the cutting edge of new theoretical and research endeavours.

Nearly, 40 years before the Nazis came to power, in 1895, the psychologist Adolf Jost published his book The Right to Die (Das Recht auf den Tod). In it, he argued that: "[i]n cases of incurable suffering the State can say its interest and the interest of the person concerned demand equally a quick and painless death, but it must be left to the patient to decide between life and death. In the case of mental patients this right reverts to the State, and the diagnosis of incurability is sufficient in itself to justify killing."

Jost's discussion on the state's right to kill the "incurably ill" was not out of place with the growing interest in eugenics across the psy-disciplines in western society. The book was followed in 1920 by the highly influential text, Permission for the Extermination of Worthless Life (Die Freigabe der Vernichtung lebensunwerten Lebens). Co-written by the lawyer Karl Binding and Alfred Hoche, a psychiatrist, the book argued for the "mercy killing" of those who were seen as an economic and social burden on the state, including "the incurably ill, the mentally ill, the feeble-minded, and deformed children". Hoche gave the example of his own psychiatric institution, which he claimed was filled with people who were "incapable of human feeling and hence could have no sense of the value of life". Permission for the Extermination of Worthless Life is widely credited with introducing the eugenic concept of the "life unworthy of living" and utilised a language that would inspire the National Socialists in due course. Burstow remarks that it was no accident that psychiatry so directly inspired Nazi ideas around genetic purity and racial hygiene; "[v]ested with police powers," she says, "this was the profession whose job it had always been to protect the 'fit' from the 'unfit'. This was the profession who had taken the lead in the early theories of degeneration."

Bruce M.Z. Cohen, Psychiatric Hegemony: A Marxist Theory of Mental Illness

[smiting-finger]

[Director’s Commentary] a harmony between qin and se

As promised (to like two interested people lol), here’s my commentary to accompany a harmony between qin and se, some of which has been retrieved from discussions in the AO3 comments section.

CHAPTER 1

This being Wei Ying’s story, the first chapter is entirely an introduction to her. I’ll let the text mostly speak for itself, but some additional thoughts:

She is, first and foremost, a very unreliable narrator when it comes to  herself.

Despite what she says, as a direct equivalent to “number 4 most eligible bachelor in the Jianghu”, she is actually considered to be a solid choice for a daughter-in-law (mostly because of how well she’s managed to hide all her quirks from the public eye). She also has more than one young male admirer because she is, in fact, an attractive lady The main thing working against her is the circumstances of her birth and the related lack of connections/assets.

Auntie Yu and Uncle Jiang have received a few overtures from interested parties already, but they’re still using the excuse of “Eldest daughter must be married out first” while they figure out the quality of offer they can settle for (which admittedly does include consideration of the potential benefits to the Jiang family).

Her embroidery is fine, if you ignore the fact that she’s constantly embroidering unconventional patterns: Jiang Cheng has most certainly received more than one troll hebao, and there have also been many an embroidered flower or cloud pattern that bears a suspicious resemblance to something outrageous (no penises because Wei Ying is a Proper and Good Girl and has never seen one until the bedroom books, but almost certainly an unflattering caricature of Jin Zixuan’s face, and the occasional rude Chinese character - always with plausible deniability, of course).

Broadmindedness is for women who have become disillusioned with the mortal coil. Which is to say: Nuns. She takes another bite of meat: I’m not sure if I was right in assuming that it was common knowledge that Buddhist nuns are vegetarian, but if I wasn’t - Wei Ying is definitely Making a Statement here. (And also making a secondary reference to the Chinese use of "vegetarian" to mean someone who is easily bullied/taken advantage of, which Wei Ying is most certainly not.)

Girls of the era were sometimes educated at home by private tutors, and were also often educated by their older brothers.

We know that Wei Ying had a private tutor (whom she shared with Nie Huaisang), but I also think Jiang Cheng would have had an influence on her too, despite technically being younger.

Being afforded a much more formal and comprehensive education (despite being perhaps less suited for it), he would have shared all of his books and learnings with Wei Ying, and that is why she so often references martial arts/military writings and ideas (much more so than the Jiang Yanli of this universe would, being older) - a reflection of Jiang Cheng’s interests and their relationship as more-or-less-same-age-peers within a gendered family hierarchy.

On Nie Huaisang and Nie Mingjue, it bears saying that their upbringing and situation in life here is just as unconventional as Wei Ying’s, if not more so.

Whereas in the earlier Tang Dynasty, women often openly ran their own businesses, Song Dynasty society had become more restrictive in relation to women’s freedoms, so that had become a much rarer occurrence.

My rationale for Nie Mingjue bucking the trend is that her mother was a capable woman with no tolerance for harem politics, and so ruled the Nie household with an iron fist. When her health begins to decline, instead of risking the wellbeing of her household and single di daughter on the goodwill of the next-ranked concubine, she simply starts passing responsibilities directly to Nie Mingjue, who proves capable enough that her father starts giving her business-related tasks as well.

By the time Madam Nie dies, Nie Mingjue is acting mistress of the house and there is no room to argue that any of the responsibilities should be taken from her.

Nie Mingjue being the only child in the entire household, her father also thinks it makes sense to involve her in the family business, and he starts preparing to find a man to ru zhui (入贅) marry into their family, thanks to the (universal?) principle that wealthy people can largely afford to do whatever they want.

Then Nie Huaisang is born and her concubine mother dies in childbirth. Nie Mingjue, having inherited her mother’s distaste for harem politics and distrust for her father’s concubines, simply takes Nie Huaisang into her own courtyard and sees to her upbringing herself.

And then their father dies, Lan Xichen takes the opportunity to propose marriage to Nie Mingjue (ostensibly as an elegant way to lend her a man’s countenance and legal authority to run her business, but the successive pregnancies speak for themselves), Nie Mingjue accepts and then decides that the new Nie family heir will be Nie Huaisang and there is no one around to stop her.

There’s definitely social disapproval (e.g. Madam Jin’s “I know she’s always done things differently” in Ch 3), but not enough to matter. Because wealthy people can afford to do whatever they want..

Enter Lan Zhan (in spirit):

Some of the original professions I considered for him were physician and herbalist, but the thought of doing period-accurate traditional Chinese medicine research ended that dream within 2.5 seconds.

In today’s terms I see him as demisexual, but in Song Dynasty mindset, there is no “sexuality”; there is “stuff that I like” and “stuff that I gotta do”. So he’s fully committed to making it work for the sake of his duty to the family, but also his responsibility to provide his wife with a decent quality of life. (And he is particularly sensitive to the latter, having witnessed his mother’s experience.)

While he'd initially hoped to follow in his Uncle's footsteps and stay single for life, now that marriage is unavoidable, his attitude towards it is very similar to Wei Ying’s, in being “That's life, we gotta make the best of it.”

He doesn’t fully appreciate the extent of the problem, but:

To-date, he has had very minimal interaction with any sort of same-age friend or peer.

His brother does most if not all of his emotional processing for him, mostly by talking him through his thoughts and feelings. This started as the very-Chinese “explain to your child after every situation how courtesy and social mores preserve everyone’s feelings and Face”, and just … never stopped. Probably because Lan Zhan didn’t have peer-interaction to do the rest of the emotional educating.

CHAPTER 2

Again, while Wei Ying speaks for herself, some general notes:

The grip of his hand in hers is strong, if a little damp. Which means that her husband is either nervous or also sweating a river in three layers of robes: He is not nervous, only dutiful. It is 100% due to the layers of robes and the hot, hot sun.

Red wedding banners … which are disappointingly standard, with nary a tea pun in sight: When their sons get married in the distant future, there are SO MANY tea puns.

Her groom, she notes, has wiped his hand at some point. Which means that he’s either a thoughtful man, or a fastidious one. Or a man who has thoughtful and fastidious servants: Lan Zhan is absolutely the thoughtful and fastidious one.

“Why does the groom look so grim?” someone asks from somewhere to her right. “Maybe he’s been forced into the marriage,” comes the answer: That is just Lan Zhan’s face, he bears no particular resentment towards the arrangement of the marriage. He trusts that his uncle has made the best decision possible under the circumstances and certainly he thinks that it’s better than either of the other options.

Lan Zhan has never had wine before, so despite knowing that the Lan family doesn’t drink, he doesn’t actually know why. This is part of the reason why he drinks the toast (the other part being the social pressure that Wei Ying successfully employs).

When they have children, there are some that inherit the Lan constitution, and others who can drink two whole cups before also succumbing to the Lan constitution. Wei Ying is very sad about this, but concedes that they do come by it honestly.

Lan Zhan’s wedding night thoughts:

Not sure if it A) was a real thing, B) is a modern-sensibilities thing (like many Cdrama leads being committed to one wife), or C) is a "Complying with TV Codes Thing", but I've seen/read quite a few stories now where the husband chooses not to push for wedding night consummation because his new wife will be scared, stressed, tired, etc. This means that the couple spends a bit of time co-sleeping and getting used to each other before doing anything. I see Lan Zhan starting out along those lines, and his consideration would have been much appreciated if his wife had been someone like Jiang Yanli. Unfortunately it is 100% wasted on Wei Ying.

So he walks into the room with the noblest of intentions, is confronted with the shock of Wei Ying, and PANICS:

First there are the Lan vs Jiang family cultural differences, i.e.

The "We Are Always Decorous" Lan family vs the "Decorum when in public, at-home manners very different" Jiang family

Lan "I will only very gently try to negotiate your boundaries" Xichen vs ...Jiang Cheng/Yanli/Auntie Yu/Uncle Jiang, who are personal-boundary-chaotics in very different ways

Second, in terms of Lan Zhan’s general social experience:

He has one (1) friend, who is his brother and who is very emotionally considerate.

He has not interacted with a woman in an intimate/domestic setting since the death of his mother (excluding servants, but that’s different). His experience with women is probably limited to the branch family aunties, and maybe daughters of their social circle who he sees for two seconds from across the room, when everyone is on their best behaviour, and they never speak.

He has never interacted with any person alive like Wei Ying in any setting. She called him PRETTY and TO HIS FACE, she chases people, she has contraband goods, she has POCKETS-

Third, there is the additional layer of shock provided by the expectations Lan Zhan had of what “a new wife” would be like, which Wei Ying is … not.

She was going to be a shy, retiring maiden (I think the “unkidnappable” fact just did not compute and he just mentally shelved it).

And unlike Wei Ying, who had the whole breadth of her human experience as “possible range for how much of a fucking weirdo my husband might be”, it never occurs to Lan Zhan to be curious about her because his image of his future wife is pretty much a dress wearing a face and it hasn’t really occurred to him that she might have any personality - or UNREPRESSED personality -  beyond her role and his obligations towards her.

He had this idea of how he was going to be a Dutiful Husband (making sure his wife doesn't go hungry on the wedding night, making sure that her maidenly sensibilities are respected in negotiating bedroom activities, making sure that she maintains a comfortable position in the household, making sure that she gets the dishes she likes to eat even if he doesn't eat them).

Then they were gonna treat each other "with the respect accorded to honoured guests" (another Ye Olde Chinese Thing), and eventually become a peaceful, comfortable couple.

Almost none of it is going in the way that he'd planned and he doesn't have a Plan B because he DIDN'T KNOW PEOPLE COULD BE LIKE THIS.

And now HIS MAIDENLY SENSIBILITIES ARE BEING OFFENDED-

In regards to Lan Zhan’s Filial Procreative Duty:

It's not that he's unaware of it, but there's not as much urgency for him. He doesn't need a son to solidify his position in the household, his own brother has two sons already so the line isn't in danger and he can always adopt the second nephew as his heir, he knows that WY is only 17 whereas the average age of marriage at the time (according to the english-language internet) was 18-20 for women.

He does intend to try for a child with her eventually (for her sake), but HE JUST REALLY WANTS TO START BY BEING FRIENDS FIRST (*/ω＼*)

CHAPTER 3

On Lan Zhan’s side:

It goes without saying that after Lan Zhan flees his bedroom on the morning after the wedding, he heads straight to his brother for his regular dose of emotional processing.

Lan Xichen spends the entire conversation highly amused and trying to keep it hidden under a suitably sympathetic expression.

And then he gently-but-firmly forces Lan Zhan to go home, which Lan Zhan does mutinously

Upon their arrival home, Lan Zhan only stops briefly in his study before heading straight back out on business (or, as Wei Ying half-suspects: “business”): It is most certainly “business”. Lan Zhan is finding any excuse to avoid her because he does not know how to deal with her and he’s a little bit afraid of her (and the danger she poses to his chastity).

Lan Zhan says nothing to Lan Qiren because it is all too mortifying.

Lan Qiren, who still seems to vaguely disapprove of her, despite being the one to agree to this marriage in the first place: While he hears no specifics, Lan Qiren’s propriety-related spidey-senses are tingling nevertheless, and so he starts to observe Wei Ying with extreme suspicion.

Lan Xichen also finds this highly amusing.

Hence Wei Ying noticing that “There’s something about the curve of his eyes that means he always looks mildly amused…Wei Ying is not sure whether this is how Lan Xichen presents generally, or if it is something specific to her.“

(It’s definitely specific to her. He thinks she’s great for his brother and therefore great in general)

Otherwise, Lan Zhan actually does like Wei Ying, despite all of the shocking things about her (He just doesn’t know that this is what he’s feeling, since he’s never felt this way before :’D).

Also maybe he’s used to the people he likes expressing their affection for him via some level of teasing (his mother, to a lesser level his brother).

Lan Zhan is watching Wei Ying as closely as she’s watching him (or even more so) - enough to know that she’s smart, and that there’s more to her than the incompetent wife image she’s projecting (which is why he’s not interfering … beyond a certain extent).

Other notes:

Wei Ying herself is so fully focused on the branch family aunties and how far she needs to escalate to get them to make a move that she probably hasn't given two thoughts to thing else. So there's almost certainly a parallel Mianmian POV to this story that's filled with constant nail-biting about what everyone else thinks of her mistress and the possibility of Wei Ying escalating so hard that they won't be able to fully reverse the damage afterwards.

Secret tunnel + secret storage room: Wei Ying absolutely finds 193847548495 future uses for these after this story is done.

Babymaking is 100% a genuinely high-key concern for Wei Ying, since producing Lan Zhan’s heir is how she secures lifetime economic/social/etc security for herself (that said it is not the MOST urgent issue at this stage, since she first needs to ensure that there is a safe environment to bring the baby into).

(I am high-key channelling "The Promotion Record of a Crown Princess" and "Greetings Ninth Uncle", here. Dowager is very much the life goal for All Women - when it's not Revenge - as far as my own shameful background in consuming Chinese historical romances is concerned.)

In terms of inheritance (keeping in mind that I am far from an expert, and my main source is a lot of historical Cdramas and Cnovels):

There was some amount of flexibility in when to formally split a family and therefore its shared resources:

If there are enough resources to support a split, then a patriarch dying is a good opportunity for brothers to go their own ways without any negative social implications.

If there's a big enough falling out between brothers or between fathers and sons, then it might happen even while Dad's still around.

If you're collectively funding a scholar to get into government and bring a valuable political connection to the family, then maybe you stay together even after Dad is gone.

And the division of property (including property in common) wasn't automatically an "eldest son takes all" situation either.

For the Lan brothers in this story:

The formal economic rational for them not splitting the business yet is that they need the business to fund a government career (Lan Qiren and Lan-papa were intending to maintain a similar arrangement before Lan-papa prematurely died)

But the actual reason is probably Lan brotherly love :'>

The branch families inherited other things, or maybe a different branch of the business when Great-grandpapa Lan died, but then they fucked it! and had to come crawling back to Lan-papa for a lifeline.

Wei Ying knows enough going in (from Nie Huaisang and general gossip) that whenever the brothers finally split (maybe after proxy-dad Lan Qiren dies), Lan Zhan is walking away with a handsome part of the business. Now that she's seen them in close quarters, she knows that Lan Xichen might even cede all of it, at the end of a soppy and embarrassing "no, you!"-"no, you!" fight between the brothers

Rivalled only by the parallel fight between the Nie sisters about whose kids inherit the restaurant empire, and then Nie Huaisang declares her intention to stay a spinster and adopt Nie Mingjue's second son as the Nie heir and then it's chaos.

Or maybe they can grow a tea empire and someone’s children can stay in Lin An and someone else’s children can go establish dominance over a different city.

CHAPTER 4

Lan Zhan’s side of things is coming through more clearly in the text now (I hope), but some notes nevertheless:

Then, she sends some to her husband’s study to serve him as a mid-afternoon snack, and to remind him of her continued existence: By this point, Lan Zhan has realised that he like-likes Wei Ying, so he’s very much aware of her continued existence already.

This gesture on her part seeds a hope that she might at least be receptive to his overtures, if she doesn’t yet feel the same way about him, and the pork-and-ginger-with-extra-ginger dumplings are him trying to take what he thinks is their courtship forward (“In thanks for the pastries … They were delicious.”).

Growing up with Lan Qiren and Lan Xichen and no other friends, it never occurs to him that Wei Ying might not be fluent in the Lan communication method of “indirect statements from which the audience correctly infers implied meanings”.

That the pastries turn out to be for a plot is a small bump in the road that is overcome by all of the “just for you” foods Wei Ying overcompensates with when he finds out.

“Do you…Never mind”: Lan Zhan would never say ‘DO U LIKE ME’, but this is him starting an overture that is (slightly) more direct and then not knowing how to continue and fleeing the scene.

Wei Ying modestly yields to her husband’s leadership, and that is why they spend the evening stopping in front of every opera singer, acrobat or other street performer who crosses their path: Young Master Lan Zhan conducting a thorough study on “what my wife likes”.

The direct consequence of this outing (as mentioned in Ch 5) that Wei Ying is Seen to have Lan Zhan’s esteem is also very much intentional on his part, because Lan Zhan is also thoughtful and efficient like that.

Other notes:

Since making lotus seed paste is a tedious, thankless task that normal families pay other people to do: My love-hate letter to lotus seed paste. I mostly know about the process for making it because I briefly considered making it myself during the first COVID lockdown. This desire lasted approximately 20 seconds into the first instructional youtube video I watched. But it is still delicious.

They pass yet another group of burly, scruffy men - all of whom are carrying an array of mismatched, chipped and obviously-scavenged weapons: foreshadowing for Wei Ying’s realisation in Ch 8, lol.

CHAPTER 5

Notes on Lan Xichen’s Moon-Viewing Party:

She can at least cow them into submission with Auntie Yu's beady-eyed stare: This is far from the only thing that Wei Ying has picked up from Auntie Yu. If anyone were ever to mention how like a real mother-and-daughter pair they can be sometimes, they would both be extremely appalled.

Lan Zhan has been watching Wei Ying since their arrival at his brother’s house to make sure that no one wrongs his wife (though with a credible amount of discretion, so no one else has picked up on anything beyond the boundaries of what is socially acceptable for a besotted husband). So while she has been busy noticing things going wrong, he has noticed her noticing things going wrong, and as soon as she starts taking action, he moves in to support her.

“Xiao Ping can go.” is the result of Lan Zhan finally finding an opportunity to step in after an extended period of patient waiting.

“Guanren,” she gasps in surprise: The possessive part of Lan Zhan (which is most of him) very much likes it when Wei Ying calls him that.

Lan Zhan discovers this night that he has a massive “bae helping other people” kink, and an equally massive competence kink.

At some point, Lan Zhan goes to his brother for advice on how to court his wife beyond his current “giving her things she likes” strategy, and receives the suggestion that maybe he should show her the things he’s good at too.

This births the “chrysanthemum wine + qin-playing” plan.

Continuing so late into the night that they fall asleep together is not an original part of this plan, but Wei Ying doesn’t seem upset by it and Lan Zhan is not one to retreat when he can advance, so it’s big wins all around.

Worth noting that while Lan Zhan does like his early bedtime in general, his particular insistence on xu shi (as noted by Wei Ying in re: “Her husband has revealed himself to be surprisingly fastidious about the strangest things as of late”) is not actually for health/moral habit reasons.

It also births the “Wei Ying [stumbling] across him in mid-song at an unusually high frequency” plan (which slightly predates the “chrysanthemum wine + qin-playing” plan).

And it is also why ultimate wingman Lan Xichen makes sure to mention poetry and Lan Zhan’s proficiency at it when he visits. It is very much not the only time he does something like this.

Other notes:

Which makes it even funnier that Lan Qiren so very obviously dislikes her: He does not, in fact, dislike her.

But he is experiencing trauma flashbacks from his interactions with Wei Ying’s mother back in ye day (/touches his beard protectively).

He is also burning with the passionate drive created by finally meeting a worthy challenge.

Every time one of his texts comes back annotated, he probably does the Tom-Hanks-Laptop meme of rubbing his hands and wiggling his fingers in preparation for writing his rebuttal. Except instead of "happy", his expression is "happily seething".

It bodes well for her ability to educate his nephew's children before they begin their formal education - if only he can get her to learn restraint and reform her character first!

So he is determined to succeed in fixing this one, this time! (He won’t).

Lan Xichen notices his uncle putting almost more energy into educating Wei Ying than his actual students and is highly amused.

Over time, Lan Qiren notices that verbally sparring with Wei Ying on various topics has improved the quality of his corresponding Academy lessons, and that he sometimes even discusses her takes on texts. This mildly infuriates him, especially when he receives expressions of admiration from students and parents for the depth of his scholarship and teaching.

Sometimes the result is that Lan Zhan gets a sudden and unexpected lecture on controlling/educating his wife and neither he nor Wei Ying can identify what she’s done to deserve it.

(Sometimes this is further complicated by the fact that she has committed too many potential affronts to pick just one.)

Uncoded notes have already been conclusively proven to be a terrible idea, and Wei Ying and Nie Huaisang do not already have an established code (Wei Ying cannot believe that they do not already have an established code; in reflection, it truly is an unforgivable oversight): They establish a code after everything in this story is finished, but they use it so infrequently that they keep forgetting it.

She would have loved to have used the opportunity to discuss Meng Yao instead, but when Wei Ying had mentioned her name, Nie Huaisang had simply hummed noncommittally and made no move to add anything further: Nie Huaisang’s initial reason for not involving Wei Ying in her own counterscheming against Meng Yao/Jin Guangshan is that Wei Ying has enough to deal with in re: the branch aunties and much fewer resources to draw on. This turns into “Wei Ying had better save her energy to focus on growing some emotional understanding of herself and her husband”, because that situation is dire. And then Meng Yao and Jin Guangshan escalate so far that it turns into “this is my personal grievance and requires my personal vengeance, and I will not risk having my bloodthirst restrained”.

Uncle Jiang had stopped him in the street and expressed his wife and daughter’s desire to see Wei Ying: A brief apology to Jiang Yanli who features very minimally in this story because while Wei Ying visits her a lot, she is also taking pains to stop her beloved sister from unnecessarily worrying about her by not mentioning anything serious at all and painting a very rosy picture of her married life where she “only has your run-of-the-mill teething problems, hardly worth talking about, except could you do me this one favour and send this wad of joss paper over to my residence in your name?”.

Jiang Yanli politely keeps up her end of the social fiction but is, in fact, still worrying. She deals with this by making and sending over a lot of nourishing food.

Wei Ying pulls the bundle out from a drawer and is struck by a sudden and completely uncharacteristic wave of self-doubt. This is odd and completely inexplicable - she’d been so confident in the quality of her gift only a shichen prior; she has no idea why she feels so nervous about it now: This is the point at which any other person might notice that their feelings for their husband run deeper than they’d previously thought (if they hadn’t already realised at many points before this), but Wei Ying is special. Lan Zhan, unfortunately, manages to pick up on the “any other person” part, but not the “Wei Ying is special” part.

There’s a sudden clatter, followed by Xiao Ping swearing and they startle apart: This is deliberate on Xiao Ping’s part. There are branch spies watching!

On Scheming Abilities:

Nie Mingjue, as the eldest di-daughter of a wealthy household who has only ever been second to her parents in terms of authority, has never needed to scheme in her life, and is used to dealing with everything straightforwardly. After she marries, Lan Xichen doesn’t have concubines and Nie Mingjue is too wealthy/powerful for the Lan relatives to otherwise interfere with her, so she never has to change (and is therefore completely unprepared for Meng Yao).

Similarly, Lan Xichen has zero scheming skills (although he will need to acquire some to survive in government, probably)

Lan Zhan has acquired more skills than his brother, by way of greater involvement in the family business and having to deal with the branch families. His involvement with Wei Ying, however, is fast teaching him that he is also very much a novice.

Nie Huaisang, a shu-daughter (although I never managed to explicitly say that anywhere in the text) and Wei Ying, a servant-born foster daughter, have acquired scheming skills due to the precariousness of those positions in life. These include:

Being targeted by and winning power games against people within the household

For Nie Huaisang, perhaps her father’s concubines or the servants loyal to them - either as a way to get to Nie Mingjue, or just directly.

For Wei Ying, maybe some of Madam Yu’s close maids feel aggrieved on their mistress’s behalf, maybe some of the servants resent Wei Ying for having a better position despite being equal to them in terms of birth.

Winning power games against people in their social circles who look down on them (Nie Huaisang for being a shu daughter, Wei Ying for being servant-born).

Needing to scheme their way out of feminine hooligan-related scrapes from their youth, of which there were many.

CHAPTER 6

Can’t find much to say about this chapter. Just that:

Treating Wei Ying to almost half a shichen of her own lecture on the importance of rewarding loyalty to old servants: Wei Ying remembers this with great clarity during the confrontation and associated fall-out (“Loyal people are difficult to come by; I would hate to deprive them of such a precious resource.”).

Miss Cang had been diligently using those accomplishments to slowly and subtly appeal to the similarly-accomplished Lan Zhan not one year ago: On the other hand, Lan Zhan could not pick her out of a lineup if his life depended on it. Wei Ying asks him after the first time she and Miss Cang have a run-in and receives a very genuine response of “???” “????????????” She chooses not to mention that to Miss Cang either.

CHAPTER 7

Lan Zhan received a bit of abuse in the comments of this chapter (:’D), which came as a bit of a surprise to me. I suppose I have the benefit of clearly plotting out my son’s perspective for my own understanding of the story, and Wei Ying’s perspective limits the ways in which his side of the story can be conveyed, so that’s what I’ll address.

Lan Zhan is not angry, his feelings are hurt.

He's invested 110% in this relationship and he'd thought Wei Ying felt the same until she hit him with the joke about divorce, and now it's like "she's built herself an exit strategy, is standing with one foot out the door and none of my feelings or actions-to-date have mattered enough to outweigh that".

For any Legend of Minglan viewers, the parallel with Gu Tingye’s “You’re leaving yourself an escape route!!” is very much intentional.

You can see a bit of this hinted at in Lan Zhan’s “You don’t even know”, which indicates that all of Wei Ying’s theories on what she has done are wrong.

While Lan Zhan is particularly sensitive about divorce for some understandable mother-related reasons (which means that there's an additional "how could she think that of me? does she know me at all?" in there), he has an additional contextual defence: most women would not joke about divorce, at least before the marital relationship is solid enough that everyone knows it’s obviously a joke.

Meanwhile, Wei Ying has thrown the joke out there on the back of some solid evidence that she has some real viable alternatives for supporting herself, so for all Lan Zhan knows, she might actually go.

Given his limited emotional-management tools, Lan Zhan is working it out in the best way he knows how:

Firstly going to see his brother

Secondly by hiding away and nursing his wounds while he awkwardly tries to process his feelings, calms down, takes stock of the situation and decides what he wants to do about it.

He can't actually come out and say "I'M UPSET BECAUSE YOU DON'T LOVE ME!", hence: making his brother promise not to tell her, and his brother agreeing because lol yes that's quite embarrassing.

So we can see in: “But her efforts are only met with her brother-in-law - while smiling in a way that seems as if he’s laughing at her even more than usual - simply telling her not to worry, and that his brother’s anger will doubtlessly burn itself out any day now“ that:

Firstly, the problem is something that Lan Xichen can be amused about. We’ve already mentioned the embarrassment factor, but beyond that, the nature of the problem is not that serious. Lan Zhan in the throes of heartbreak is melodramatically thinking “SHE DOESN’T LOVE ME”, but Lan Xichen is astute enough to suspect that Wei Ying is maybe a bit emotionally dense, and is probably not as unmoved as all that.

Secondly, Lan Xichen recognises that the problem is something that Lan Zhan needs space to work through himself, and that there’s nothing to be done on Wei Ying’s side.

Mianmian’s “refusal to tell Wei Ying” is explained in Ch 8, but it’s worth noting here that loyal maidservant Mianmian would never refuse to tell Wei Ying something important. What actually happens of course is that Mianmian keeps insisting that Lan Zhan is in love with Wei Ying, and Wei Ying keeps refusing to believe it and then she finally says “Fine! Don’t tell me then!” and Mianmian is like /o\

Susu genuinely doesn’t know though, lol. She’s a bit younger, not as emotionally mature.

Nie Mingjue also genuinely doesn’t know (Lan Xichen hasn’t told her because he knows she’d just call Lan Zhan an idiot to his face).

Nie Huaisang does know, but after hearing about Mianmian’s valiant attempts, she decides it would be better to take a more slowly-slowly angle and show Wei Ying how much Lan Zhan likes her instead. With mixed results.

Even given all the above, Lan Zhan is very much invested in protecting Wei Ying’s public standing and reputation:

We can see this in his insistence that she stays at home, so she doesn’t become a convenient target or sacrificial fall-guy  during the family proceedings.

Nie Mingjue further explains his fears in her conversation with Wei Ying about the Lan elders and their treatment of Lan Zhan’s mother vs herself.

We can also see it in “While he does not ignore her, precisely, Lan Zhan also never lingers in her company a moment longer than strict decorum would require”: Lan Zhan is still demonstrating to the servants and the public that, at the very least, her position as his wife should be respected and all related benefits afforded to her.

And of course he’s still sleeping in their bedroom.

Both the Lan brothers underestimate the emotional impact that this will have on Wei Ying, because neither of them has correctly understood how emotionally invested she is or how emotionally invested she realises she is. (In their defence: neither has she.)

This assumption is shored up by the way that she stays pretty upbeat and flippant, especially in the way she goes about trying to make amends. Not yet understanding her, they take this to mean that she’s feeling sorry and a little awkward, but otherwise is unaffected.

Lan Zhan’s points of realisation that he's hurt her are "Forgive me anyway - I can't bear it" and finding her curled up in bed. “I have an engagement” is true, but it is also him needing some space to process this new knowledge. At this point he:

half-caves to the decision that he'll just love her anyway and not give her any excuse to leave, and

half-comes to the realisation that actually, maybe Wei Ying really doesn't know about his feelings or her own, so he's going to need to recalibrate.

There were a few comments along the lines of “this could have been resolved through direct communication”, and while that’s true to some extent, I feel like direct communication in the context of relationships and feelings is a very modern-Western value that doesn’t necessarily have the same application here.

I do fully accept that despite its setting, this is a modern story, for a modern audience. But even so I think the non-modern setting and context (in addition to Lan Zhan’s particular personal situation) make it a little unfair to blame Lan Zhan for not starting a heart-to-heart outpouring of feelings. (Though of course this is my personal opinion.)

Even in my modern-but-still-Asian family, there’s a much stronger culture of being expected to read unspoken meaning from social situations, and in turn being able to expect that other people do the same. The cultural conflict is, as Jay Chou once sang in the song “Cliff of Love” (lololololol): You say that I am like a child, delighting in always leaving you guessing. I say that you’re the one who is like a child, always needing me to spell things out for you.

Semi-relatedly, I think there’s a “child of asian parents” meme about your parents apologising by bringing sliced fruit to you instead of saying anything with words. I have imputed this to Wei Ying and Lan Zhan.

In very general terms, I would also say that we as a Chinese family have a much weaker culture of “you did this thing that violates my boundaries, I will tell you and expect you to change your behaviour” and a much stronger culture of “you did this thing to violate my boundaries, I must manage myself so that unacceptable boundary violations do not happen in future”. I have on some level imputed this to Lan Zhan.

There is also a much stronger culture of avoiding things that are embarrassing (as the person who might be embarrassed, as the person who might cause someone else to be embarrassed, and as a bystander who might worsen the embarrassment by bearing witness). There’s a lot of “not mentioning and just moving past these things by unspoken agreement”. I have on some level imputed this to … everyone in this story. 

The entire story, but this sex scene in particular, have been my manifesto on My Beef with Historical CNovels (which I recognise is sometimes about censorship and not the authors’ artistic vision). In terms of the sex scene this includes, but is not limited to:

Only the dudes or top dudes being horny or up for it (or being the 80 in an 80/20 split in who is horny/up for it)!

The relative passivity of ladies/bottom dudes in bed!

JADE STICKS (didn’t manage to get a reference to CHERRY NIPPLES in, but THOSE TOO)!

Lack of preparation and the resultant pain!

The lady/bottom “not being able to get out of bed for 3 days afterwards”!

The fun relationship tension/dynamics disappearing after a pivotal point where the couple variously gets together/gets married/has sex!

CHAPTER 8

Without guidance from questions in the comments, some general notes:

“It matters not,” he murmurs when they break apart: This is Lan Zhan both recognising that Wei Ying is not mentally/emotionally ready to believe the actual answer, and also genuinely meaning that it doesn’t matter anymore.

It’s also probably quite obvious right now that this Lan Zhan knows he’s not very verbally demonstrative and so he compensates with physical affection instead.

This also means that he’s very cuddly with their children when they’re born, and 100% takes A-Yuan everywhere with him, including on business.

While Lan Zhan directs her from his place behind her, seated with his chest pressed flush against her back: Lan Zhan would have been one of those children who is independent and standoffish in public, but a total cuddlebug with his mum in private. And so in addition to the above, the result of being touch-starved for over a decade following his mother’s death means that he fuses himself to Wei Ying at every (private) opportunity. It’s not that he doesn’t touch her in public, but it’s all very hand-on-elbow proper and decorous - until the moment they cross into a place with any amount of privacy and then FWOOM.

Wei Ying has wondered more than once whether she might one day bully Lan Zhan into sitting in the circle of her arm, while she appreciates fine wine as the ancestors intended: It definitely happens, and takes minimal-to-none bullying.

If her friend is suspicious enough of Meng Yao to interfere in her sister’s household, limit Meng Yao’s access to Nie Mingjue and attack Meng Yao’s father, then why has she done nothing to Meng Yao herself?: Nie Huaisang started out leaving Meng Yao every opportunity to come clean about what Jin Guangshan wanted her to do. If Meng Yao had had a change of heart and done this at any point while her disruptions to the household were still minor, Nie Huaisang would have happily worked with her to get her due from the Jin family (and then relocated her to somewhere suitably removed from Lan Xichen). But then Meng Yao proves that she is willing to completely sell Nie Mingjue out for her own gain, and now Nie Huaisang is giving her enough rope to hang herself.

And so Wei Ying spends the latter part of the evening half-lying on Lan Zhan’s bare chest: This behaviour begins as the result of Wei Ying misunderstanding something she hears (probably from Uncle Jiang’s men) about post-nut clarity. But it is in Lan Zhan’s interests to encourage it, and it doesn’t actually impede the thought process, so it continues.

“I didn’t mean to,” Nie Huaisang says in a small voice, to no one in particular: Going to leave this open as to whether Nie Huaisang is telling the truth or not.

The coroner’s report will attribute the cause to a combination of the incense burning in the room and the herbal tonic that he has been taking to replenish his yang qi for the past year: Meng Yao’s last gift to a father she has known all along was using her too.

[meeravandaseera]

Introductory Waterfolkology literature or books Masterlist

This is a list of books which, in my opinion, tend to be swell for introducing waterfolk, for example merfolk, mermaids and mermen and the like.

All of them are pretty good to get introduced into waterfolk only. While I still have many more in my shelf, most of them are pretty limited for getting introduced. What I refer to is being thrown into this topic like being thrown into a cold pool. "Beyond Faery" by John T. Kruse for example only explains British waterfolk and not all the other ones that one should know about. Basically, I cherry-picked some books for this list. I wrote down some of my personal pros and cons, mostly like a bullet list. Questions are welcome. My personal favorites are more on the surface of this list. Cited sources, accurate information, included lesser known or mentioned information (this is more based on my own intuition from what I have read on what is "mentioned less", take it with a grain of sea salt), and different topics are a high-priority, yet folklore being a more major one. I'm pretty critical, but that is because I have a soft spot for more accurate and reliable sources that cite their information and whatnot. Some information in even the greatest literature tends to be biased. I do sound pretty dry here, but I cannot turn the tide for this one, sadly.

Many are well-researched meanwhile others are not so much. Of course no book can include literally everything when being more general about this topic. Some are older, but still have accurate information because usually folklore is something that is not based on the most up-to-date information, yet some information is. They are not meant to be one's one and only source because most do never manage to portray something in the entirety, leaving information out or giving us wrong information. Literally almost all of them include the false sighting of John Smith. That's why such a wide variety of literature is pretty good. Some books are out-of-print. I got many second-hand.

All of this is my own opinion and one should also read other reviews when sea-riously considering what to get. There are so many of these and one should really think twice about what one should get, at least physically. One can try to lend a book from a library or get it in E-Book format, of course.

>>Mermaid and Other Water Spirit Tales From Around the World<< by Heidi Anne Heiner:

Pros: Essential and satisfies my critical side. A treasury of more accurate and literal accounts of waterfolk in folklore taken from more direct sources. (Obviously not the original sources, but mostly the directly translated ones). Even includes full older articles like "Sea Fables Explained" or the waterfolk section of "Superstistions of the Sea and Sailors". Includes various notes on sections in order to add or explain some things about each sourced text. Directly cited sources. Includes lesser known waterfolk like the Kaffirs of Xhosa belief on pages 732-735. Includes many different versions of some tales like the ones of "The King's Son and Messeria". Includes ballads and all their different versions. Is not afraid to leave direct, lengthy and repeating things inside (It is okay to sum such lengthy tales up, but I am happy that such a book exists when one needs to check the actual account).

Cons: Some language of the past might make it harder to understand some sources. Need to look up some vocabulary. Stories like "The Little Mermaid" or "Undine" included within the sea of oral tradition, out of the tide.

>>The Penguin Book of Mermaids<< edited by Christina Bacchilega and Marie Alohalani Brown:

Pros: Essential. Scholarly and descriptive. Includes direct and accurate source texts and important notes to explain a source or to describe it. Makes it clear what is literary and what is not by giving it a separate section. Has some lesser known literary tales. Includes many lesser known waterfolk like the karukayn from North Australia or Persian watermaidens. Cited sources nicely.

Cons: Only includes one version each for the ballads.

>>The Mermaid Atlas: Merfolk of the World<< by Anna Claybourne and illustrated by Miren Asian Lora:

Pros: Quite essential as it dives into a wide range of waterpeople from across the world's waters with a substantial fishing net cast into the sea of these books. Mentions more obscure waterpeople like the lamiak, Ji-Merdiwa, Sumpall, Avatea, Lobasta, Peru waterfolk etc. Introduced me to many of the aforementioned waterpeople from obscure depths and uncharted waters. Illustrations are nice to look at and they do depict them well to an extent. Succinct, yet descriptive about each type of waterperson. Includes sightings and makes it clear that those featured are only some of them.

Cons: No sources for any information are stated and one is left to search by oneself in order to get the full wave. Included one literary waterperson, namely the little mermaid and mixed it up with all the other ones from oral tradition. It's a bit out of the tide.

>>Mermaids: The Myths, Legends & Lore<< by Skye Alexander:

Pros: Includes many lesser known waterpeople like Squant the sea-woman to whom it introduced me. Goes into folklore, but also symbolism and other topics alongside. Mentions lesser known waterfolk sightings. Many obscure waterfolk depictions, but only all of them in teal. Has somewhat good reference pages.

Cons: Some things are mentioned twice. No direct sources cited for any sections alongside for the depictions. Information tends to be scattered around and mixed together in the book and thus is not very easy to follow.

>>Merpeople: A Human History<< by Vaughn Scribner:

Pros: Essential. Partly made available online on articles like "What Merpeople Say About Us" on Nautilus, "Mermaids and Tritons in the Age of Reason" on the Public Domain Review and also some interviews. Descriptive, academic, scholarly. Written by a historian. Dives into many a many of obscure sightings and puts forth many ideas on that topic. Has much information on all the different frauds and includes much more obscure information. Goes into some folklore and influence on pop-culture with many great examples. Great waterfolk depictions, including some lesser known ones. Sources cited for depictions and information. Explains the fraud of John Smith's "sighting".

Cons: Does not include all too much folklore from around the world, covers only more basic knowledge in that section. Primarily only focuses on sightings and hoaxes etc.

>>Solving Mysteries with Science: Mermaids<< by Lori Hile:

Pros: Dives into sightings and theories including answers on the existence of waterfolk. Has somewhat lesser known information, hoaxes, and sightings. Covers why one might have believed in them. Has some folklore still. Succinct.

Cons: Mostly only about waterfolk sightings and hoaxes.

>>Sea Enchantress: The Tale of the Mermaid and Her Kin<< by Gwen Benwell and Arthur Waugh (1961):

Pros: Academic, scholarly, and very well-written. It's descriptive and written by scholars, obviously. They were members of the British Folklore Society and devoted several years to research this topic alone. Somewhat essential. Many diverse topics ranging from the shallow takes on waterfolk that they are "only sirenians" up to different sightings and folklore from the entire world. Includes lesser known waterfolk like the Finnish Aino in the Kalevala and the nixen in the Nibelungensage from Germany or the almost obscure Jalpari of the Punjab district in Kulu in India's mythology. Includes a small variety of diverse depictions ranging from illustrations to sculptures, but only in black and white. Has a list of waterfolk depictions in British cathedrals and churches. Dives into some more 20th century popular waterfolk media.

Cons: Sometimes only describes waterfolk with not-so-much detail. Short sources are cited, but not always, only rarely. Has a tendency to be more talking about European waterfolk than others, especially those of the British Isles. Fewer waterfolk from other countries. Does not acknowledge the misconception of Dagan, the supposed fish-god. Just assumes that Dagan is a fish-god while he most likely is not, more of an agriculture god.

>>Mermaids: Art, Symbolism, and Mythology<< by Alex Müller, Christopher Halls, and Ren Williamson:

Pros: Academic, thorough, and scholarly. Written by scholars. Includes a big list of references and sources for the depictions. Dives into different topics like the ancient waterfolk of Mesopotamia and Greece, waterfolk in early Christianity, some sightings and explanations, art and modern 21st century influence. It has many nice and essential depictions from the past and even sculptures. Describes in neat detail how some depictions came to be and where they are featured etc. Has a graph showing how the sirens changed from half-bird to half-fish with many variants.

Cons: No directly cited sources in the text. Mostly only more well-known waterfolk.

>>Mermaids<< by Beatrice Philpotts:

Pros: Descriptive. Has nice waterfolk depictions including lesser known ones. Goes into folklore and sightings with some hoaxes including answers. Some lesser known information like the supposed sea-god incarnation of King Chen.

Cons: Almost no directly cited sources. Information is quite mixed together.

>>The Mermaid Handbook: An Alluring Treasury of Literature, Lore, Art, Recipes, and Projects<< by Carolyn Turgeon:

Pros: Dives into many things from folklore to 21st century fashion and pop-culture like the name above suggests. Sources cited for the depictions and some of the texts included like smaller poems. Includes few lesser known older depictions of waterfolk. Mentions some somewhat not very well-known waterfolk like Dahut of the city of Ys or the Ben-Varrey. Some interesting speech or interviews by people on the topic of waterfolk like "A Young Man's Guide to Picking Up Mermaids".

Cons: No directly cited sources in the folklore section, not even in the back. I was quite surprised by that. While it does have a bibliography, it does not give direct citations. Does not always cite depictions on those large two page spanning ones. Mixes "The Little Mermaid" and "Undine" literary tales to the oral tradition folklore seaction with the Melusiné, it's a bit out of the tide. On page 86 it says that "it's impossible to catalogue the endless types of glitzy aquatic hybrids that exist in almost every culture", that is not very true because Theresa Bane, for instance, made a whole encyclopedia of humanoid mythical beings from the entire world. If one is daring to do so, it is possible.

Notes: Cozy list of seaweed at the end, it's nice. Interesting DIY projects.

>>Scaled for Success: The Internationalisation of the Mermaid<< edited by Philip Hayward:

Pros: Available online on ResearchGate. Descriptive. Dives into many topics like folklore and pop-culture. Includes lesser known information like about the Filipino sirenas that they could control water etc or the types of yawkyawks like the ngalworreworre of the Wugularr people in North Australia. Dives into 21st century media that have not been regarded by the Western world. Diverse. Good bibliography. Lesser known depictions included.

Cons: There tend to be no directly cited sources. Some depictions have low quality.

>>Seduction and the Secret Power of Women - The Lure of Sirens and Mermaids<< by Meri Lao:

Pros: Descriptive and academic. Goes into mythology of the sirens and their interesting evolution. A bit of other Greek mythology waterfolk alongside. Includes many interesting and more obscure aspects and theories. Has some information about waterfolk aside from the European ones. Includes some obscure waterfolk like the Morrigan from the swamps of Pilgar. Section on sightings with some lesser known information like those sightings of Sicilian seamen. Many interesting lesser known depictions of waterfolk. Cites sources for depictions and some information.

Cons: Language is more complex, need to look up vocabulary. Does not go into many different waterfolk from around the world. More basic knowledge on general waterfolk, but more complex knowledge focusing only on the sirens. No directly cited sources for some information.

>>Creatures of Fantasy - Mermaids<< by Kathryn Hinds:

Pros: Goes into folklore from around the world including some lesser known waterfolk like the Halfway People, the watermaid of St. Brendan or the mermaid of the Iona Isle in Scotland. Dives into some sightings. Has some lesser known depictions.

Cons: No cited sources for information and depictions. Mixed up a sighting with folklore from other countries at the back. Mostly shallow and not all too many details included.

>>Mermaids and Mermen<< by Shannon Knudsen:

Pros: Goes into folkloric waterfolk from the world in folklore also with some lesser known ones like the Gwenhidwy, Halfway People or adaro. Includes information like sightings and frauds such as the more obscure Filipino incident of waterfolk being claimed to be held in a lab in 2009. Some vague pop-culture at the end.

Cons: Not much detail and quite shallow in some aspects. No cited sources, only very vague references.

>>Mermaid Folklore<< by Elizabeth Andrews:

Pros: Includes lesser known waterfolk like the yacaruna. Has some interesting sightings included. Depictions do represent the waterfolk well to an extent.

Cons: Mixed up sightings with folklore oftentimes. Literally no cited sources. Includes much literary information that it does not discern from the folklore. Misconception about shellycoat being humanoid, John T. Kruse in his "Beyond Faery" clears up that it's just a foal. In some tides it's more of a fictional retelling. Sometimes hard to read when text is printed on images of paper notes on the paper. Least suggested.

[innerchorus]

Remembered that the word(s) mage/magus/magi has roots in Persian and decided to look it up, and whaddya know, interesting shit!

“Magi (/ˈmeɪdʒaɪ/; singular magus /ˈmeɪɡəs/; from Latin magus, cf. Persian: مغ pronounced [moɣ]) were priests in Zoroastrianism and the earlier religions of the western Iranians. The earliest known use of the word magi is in the trilingual inscription written by Darius the Great, known as the Behistun Inscription. Old Persian texts, predating the Hellenistic period, refer to a magus as a Zurvanic, and presumably Zoroastrian, priest.”

×

“The word mágos and its variants appear in both the Old and New Testaments. Ordinarily this word is translated "magician" or "sorcerer" in the sense of illusionist or fortune-teller, and this is how it is translated in all of its occurrences except for the Gospel of Matthew, where, depending on translation, it is rendered "wise man" or left untranslated as Magi, typically with an explanatory note.”

And then I was like, well, the hell is “Zurvanic”? And

“Zurvanism is a fatalistic religious movement of Zoroastrianism in which the divinity Zurvan is a first principle (primordial creator deity) who engendered equal-but-opposite twins, Ahura Mazda and Angra Mainyu. Zurvanism is also known as "Zurvanite Zoroastrianism", and may be contrasted with Mazdaism.”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zurvanism

I don't know what I'll do with it but!!! Very interesting!!!!!

Oh yeah, as someone who often thinks about Team Zahhak mages vs the priesthood in Arslan Senki, I'm aware of this and it's definitely of interest. Tanaka doesn't give us a Parsian word for mage but does use some terms for priests / priestesses (kahina, priestess, see the term 'kahinat', and magpat, a high priest, likely taken from 'magu-pati' / 'mobad' the first part of which obviously shares an origin with mage/magus/magi).

In terms of ArSen, I've talked about the similarities between the priesthood and the mages before. Of course, there are differences, but it's clear that the priesthood also have an understanding of magic that goes beyond that of even the most well-educated Parsians, even though aside from communicating with the jinn they don't actually use it (except for perhaps as a countermeasure against malicious magic, though this isn't something we see directly in canon). The mages of Team Zahhak don't seem to openly define / refer to themselves as priests, but in terms of function and how they essentially view Zahhak as their god, isn't that exactly what they are? It's telling that when Kishward and Zaravant first discover the underground space used by Team Zahhak in Book 12, Kishward comments on its similarity to a temple, leading Zaravant to wonder where the 'priests' are, and the fact that it's later referred to as the 'dark temple' both in the narrative and dialogue serves to emphasise this further.

The overlapping nature of the historical term and the way that the nature, doctrine and abilities of Team Zahhak and the priesthood seem to mirror each other is something I think about a lot, especially because of Gurgin! Yes, it was inevitable that I was going to mention him in this post, but it feels very relevant because here is a character who was occupying one role, and left it in favour of the other ...but did he ever really stop being a priest?

(This is also why, although I obviously wish the eventual outcome had been different, I liked his conversation with Guiscard in Chapter 108.)