#U DRAW A LINE IN THE SAND WHERE IT ENDS N U BEGIN

[r0tt3n-gvtz]

wanna know a fun fact??? :3

they could prescribe u any illness u'd like if u define the symptoms of ur ailments >_<!!!!!!

and another,,,, u could sing a pretty malady like a black canary but a crow stll dont know the smell of carbon monoxide!!! X3c

alssooooo, a question!!! how many years have you been on that couch??? cuz yk... they could've quilted u in the throws by now....

[pretendingboyfriends]

click here to add yourself to the taglist!

A/N: heyyyyyy i know this took a long time to finish BUT shit happens and mental health comes before fanfiction. anyways, i hope u guys love this part and pls do not hesitate to send comments, suggestions, etc. when you’re finished and pls don’t forget to reblog!! also, thank u @sunflowers-styles​ and @fromyourstrulyh​ for beta-ing this part it would be a mess if u hadn’t <3

Warnings: angst, sadness, slightest bit of sexual tension, deidre being a bitch

Word count: 6.5k+

previous part . fic masterlist . fic playlist

Harry’s aching to talk to you. He still has no clue what he did wrong and he desperately wants to fix things, but you won’t even give him the chance–refusing to do so much as make eye contact with him when speaking. You’re humiliated. Not only because you wanted to kiss him, but also because you made it seem like he did something wrong. However, being your non confrontational self, you haven’t gained the courage to explain anything to him. Plus, you don’t want to make Deidre suspicious, so you force yourself to act just as casual as you had before and, of course, she hasn’t noticed a thing.

The day has been nothing out of the ordinary, you’re sprawled across the couch with your leg in the air, allowing your toe-nails to dry after their first coat of olive green nail polish. The weather is exceptionally nice and your hair is still wet from the dip in the pool you had taken earlier when the sun was significantly hotter than it is now. Harry left for groceries an hour or so ago and now you’re just waiting for Deidre to come out of the bedroom so that the two of you can go out and do something together.

“Okay, so-” She calls from the end of the hallway as she walks, “There’s this party tonight that the boys invited me to and I think you should come with me.”

You frown, swinging your legs back over the edge of the couch so that you can sit up straight and look at her. “What?”

She shuffles through the doorway in a crop top and skirt, her shoes clutched in her hand as she runs her fingers through her hair. “C’mon, It’ll be fun! We haven’t gone to a party together in ages.”

“I thought we were gonna go out together, just the two of us. Wasn’t that the whole purpose of this beach getaway? Just us spending time together?”

She shrugs, “I mean, we never really made a plan, it was just an idea.” 

“Well, that’s not fair,” You bite, standing from your spot on the couch and crossing your arms over your chest. “I feel like it was implied that we were going to hang out tonight and now you’re going to some party with people you barely know?”

She rolls her eyes, “We can still hang out at the party!”

“No, Deidre, because I don’t want to go to a party with a bunch of people I don’t know!”

“Oh, come on,” She groans, “Nobody knows anyone at these parties, we’re all just there to have fun!” 

“I still don’t want to go.” 

“Fine. I’ll just go by myself, then.” She huffs, hunching over to slide her shoes on.

You take a deep breath, “I don’t think you should go either.” 

“Oh my god,” She groans, “What are you, my mom?”

“No, I just think, as your best friend, that going to a party with a bunch of people you don’t know very well--a bunch of men you don’t know very well--isn’t a good idea.”

“It’s just a party, I don’t understand why you’re so worked up about it!” She yells, arms flailing around her in frustration as she walks across the living room to the door. 

You drag both your hands down your face, groaning in exasperation. “Deidre, you met these guys a few days ago and they’re asking you to get drunk with them. How do you not see how dangerous that is?”  

“They’re nice guys, they would never do anything to hurt me!” 

“You don’t know that!” You retort, “For all you know, they could be planning to drug you and drag you back to a room to do who knows what to you!”

You hear the honking of a car horn coming from the front of the house and she huffs, shaking her head at you as she leans forward and grabs her purse from the coffee table. “I’m leaving. I’ll send you my location when I get there.” And with that, she’s gone.

You’re left alone in the house, the only sound that can be heard is the choked sob that erupts from your chest as soon as the screen door slams shut behind her. Tears spill down your cheeks with each sob, your body collapsing into the couch before you drop your head into your hands. All you can feel is anger, frustration, and anxiety. You’re concerned for Deidre, however, you’re also infuriated with her. She’s selfish; so selfish, in fact, that she doesn’t even consider that you and her entire family might be affected if anything terrible happens to her. 

You sit there on the couch for what seems like decades, your body wracked with sobs as tears stream down your cheeks. Every emotion from the past few days has suddenly burst from within you and you’re unable to contain it.

Finally, after gathering your emotions as much as possible, you lift yourself from the couch and trudge to the kitchen for some comfort food. Swinging the fridge door open, your eyes almost immediately land on a large, unopened bottle of red wine.

“Fuck it.” You mutter, reaching forward and grasping the chilled, glass bottle by its neck. You place the bottle on the counter as you recklessly search for a corkscrew in one of the many drawers lining the countertop. Moments later, you’re mustering every bit of strength inside of you to open the bottle with the screw and after nearly 10 minutes of struggling, the cork pops out with a loud “THUNK”.

You sigh, reaching for the cabinet above you for a wine glass out of reflex, but you quickly decide against the use of a glass and gulp the liquid straight from the bottle. You know your behavior is reckless, but you can’t find a single part of you that cares. You need the pain and frustration to go away somehow and drowning them with an $11 bottle of wine would suffice for now. 

Dragging yourself out to the patio, you allow the thick, heady liquid to slide down your throat and settle into your empty stomach as you plop yourself into one of the chairs. A loud rumble of thunder in the distance draws your attention from the bottle, causing you to pull it away from your lips for a moment. You watch as a faint, almost unnoticeable, drizzle gradually turns into a steady shower and then into a heavy downpour. The scarce amount of people that had been on the beach when you first stepped out onto the patio are now shoveling all of their belongings into their arms as fast as they can to avoid being trapped in the downpour.

Soon, the beach is completely vacant. Not a soul is in sight and, oddly enough, you’re drawn to it. Nearly two-thirds of the bottle is resting warmly in your stomach at this point, so your decision making skills are not the most reliable, but something’s telling you to go out and sit in the rain. So, after chugging the rest of the bottle (and quickly rushing inside to use the bathroom because alcohol on an empty stomach is like a free pass to pissing yourself), you allow your intoxicated brain to wisp you down the patio stairs and into the thick, sopping wet sand.  

Your clothes have already begun to soak through from the rain as you stumble along the shore, but you can’t bring yourself to care. Your eyes are swollen and bloodshot from crying and your head is throbbing with every step you take. Then, you stop, allowing your body to drop down into the sand before looping your arms around your bent legs and tugging them to your chest.

It’s nearing dusk as you sit there, the sun slowly sinking further and further beneath the horizon behind thick clouds. Your clothes are completely soaked through by this point, but, in your drunken state, you can’t find a reason to care. Tears begin to spill down your cheeks again, mixing with the rain drops already pelting your face and you don’t even bother to wipe them away. Your chest feels numb from the sobs that incessantly wrack your body, but you can’t find the strength to stop. It feels like you’re trapped. Unable to escape the sinking loneliness that increases with every moment of every day and ignoring it only makes it worse. 

When you’d first agreed to the trip, you were given a sense of hope. You thought that maybe, if you were around people that made you happy, your loneliness would dissipate and you wouldn’t feel like this anymore; but it’s only become worse.

Unbeknownst to you, Harry is sprinting from his car with an armful of groceries to the front door of the beach house and swinging it open. He calls for Deidre, then calls for you finding silence within the house. He frowns, stumbling further into the living room towards the kitchen so that he can set the large, paper bags down on the table to relieve himself of their weight. He leaves the bags there and begins to search the rooms, finding each one of them empty and becoming even more confused. Lastly, he slides the patio door open to find each chair empty, the empty wine bottle sitting alone on the metal patio table. He steps out, shutting the door behind him before walking to the table and taking the bottle into his hands. The glass is still damp with perspiration, but there isn’t more than a few tablespoons of wine left sloshing at the bottom of the bottle. He places it back where it had been resting before as he lifts his head to look out at the beach. The downpour is so thick that it’s difficult to make out any sort of shapes, but when his eyes land on your figure in the sand, his heart nearly leaps from his chest. 

He calls your name as he bounds down the porch stairs and into the sand, jogging to where you sit with your knees pressed to your chest. You turn to him with a sorrowful expression, lip quivering uncontrollably with your weak sobs. 

“What happened? What’s wrong?” He stutters, dropping to his knees beside you with one hand on your back and the other on your knee. “Are you hurt? Should I call somebody?”

You shake your head. “M’alright.”

“It doesn’t look like you’re alright,” He frowns, reaching his right hand up to gently turn your face towards him. “Wh- why are you- what’s going on? Why are you out here in this weather all alone?” 

The rain is still incessant and it’s hard for either of you to see anything but you’re able to sense just how much Harry cares. You wipe your nose with the back of your hand and shake your head. 

“Dee went out,” You slur quietly. “Then, I had a bit of wine.”

“You’re crying.” He points out.

You shake your head again, avoiding his eye contact. “S’just the rain.”

He sighs in defeat, hand dropping from your face as he pushes his wet hair from his own. “C’mon, let’s get you inside.” He grasps your hands gently as he stands, pulling you up with him. You stumble slightly, falling into him and his arms reflexively wrap around your waist, mumbling: “Easy, darling.”

The unremitting mizzle of rain pelts against the both of you as he drags you back up to the house with one arm wrapped around your waist. Your head leans lazily against his shoulder and your body melts into his due to  the alcohol coursing through your veins. Keeping a tight grip on you, Harry quickly leads you up the porch stairs and back inside the house, careful to keep you from tripping over your own feet. 

The temperature of the house is slightly cooler than outside and you’re unable to keep your teeth from chattering as you step inside. Harry notices this.

“Stay right here, I’m gonna go get some towels.” He mutters, shuffling off down the hallway and leaving you standing soaked, shivering, and intoxicated in the entryway. He returns within a few moments holding a stack of fluffy pink towels (courtesy of the beach house owners), quickly unfolding one of them and wrapping it around your shoulders. You tug the fabric around yourself, teeth chattering as you take a deep breath and look up at him through bloodshot eyes.

“Thank you.” 

He nods, taking a towel for himself and leaning over to shake out his dripping hair. You step past him into the hallway, walking towards your bedroom with the towel still wrapped around your shivering frame. The house feels like it's spinning with every step you take, your hand pressed against the wall to support yourself as you guide yourself to the bedroom. You know Harry’s watching you, longing to ask you why you were out in the rain completely wasted, but you don’t feel sober enough to trust him or yourself. 

Stumbling into your bedroom, you shuffle through your drawer for some dry clothes, settling on an oversized sweatshirt and sweatpants. You don’t even bother with closing the door all the way as you peel the wet clothes from your skin, carelessly dropping them onto the carpet. After you successfully pull the sweatshirt on, you attempt putting on the sweatpants, discovering that in your drunken state, finding the correct leg hole is much harder than you anticipated. So, after struggling for all of one minute, you huff and throw them aside. 

“Need help?” 

You glance up from where you sit on the edge of the bed to find Harry leaning against the doorway, dressed in a dry t-shirt and sweatpants. You frown, “Were you watching me?”

“No,” He pauses. “I mean- just for a moment, but I swear I didn’t see anything.”

You nod slowly with a yawn, “It’s okay. I’m too drunk to care, anyway.”

He chuckles at that and watches as you stand, stumbling to the upper end of the bed and pulling the comforter down to make room for you to slide beneath it. You plop yourself onto the mattress with a yawn, patting the empty space beside you and looking up at him. 

He raises his eyebrows, “Y’want me to…?” You nod at his unfinished question, giving him a small, drunken grin. So, after a moment of hesitation, Harry walks over to the bed and climbs into the empty spot beside you with your eyes glued to him the whole time. He sighs, “What now?”

“Will you… hold me?” You request quietly, avoiding his soft, virescent stare. 

He pauses. There isn’t a single fiber of his being that doesn’t want to feel your warmth against him, arms looped around your waist, nose buried into the crevice of your neck; but he knows that you’re drunk and he can’t be sure that you won’t regret anything once the intoxication has passed. 

“Are you sure?” 

“Yeah,” You shrug. “Unless, of course, you aren’t comfortable with it,”

“I am, but you aren’t fully… ‘here’ right now and I don’t want you to regret anything.”

You sigh, “I think I’m sober enough to ask you to harmlessly spoon me to sleep.”

“Alright,” He nods, moving to lay on his side, head against the pillow. “C’mere, then.”

You smile to yourself, leaning over to switch the small bedside lamp off before allowing your body to lie against the mattress fully before turning to face away from him, waiting for him to wrap his arms around you. The hem of your sweatshirt rides up with your movement and, although you’re completely oblivious to it, Harry notices. His eyes focus on the soft skin of your hip and the thin fabric of your panties resting against it. Fuck. Swallowing the heavy lump wedged in his throat, he moves forward and loops his arm around your waist, tugging your back into his chest with a quiet grunt. 

One may assume that two people in this situation, given the status of your relationship being strictly friends (in the lightest sense of the word), would feel uncomfortable or awkward, but both of you, somehow, feel a sense of relief. Two long, breathy sighs emit from both of you in unison as your bodies fit together like two pieces of thread, meant to intertwine perfectly to create a beautiful piece of clothing. 

The two of you lie there in the dark silence, taking slow, deep breaths to calm your fluttering heartbeats as the tension builds. If you were sober, you definitely wouldn’t have even considered being in this situation, but since there’s nearly 25 ounces of liquid courage coursing through your veins, you’re unable to keep yourself from being brutally honest about what you want. Silently, you move your hand from where it rests on the mattress, sliding it over his hand that rests just between your stomach and ribs and taking it into your own. He feels your hand, but doesn’t say anything.

Every sense of your caution has been thrown to the wind at this point, so you don’t even consider hesitating when asking: “Do you remember that song that came on the other day when we were in the car?”

He’s caught completely off guard by your question and frowns. “I-uh, yeah, I remember. ‘Dancing With Myself’?”

You nod in acknowledgement, silence settling over you again for a few lasting moments before you speak again. “The other day when you were talking about the meaning of that song, how it sounds upbeat and happy but the lyrics are actually him talking about how lonely he is, it reminded me of myself…” You pause, sighing quietly, trying to blink away the inevitable tears. You can sense that he’s listening, though, so you continue. “I just- sometimes it’s hard for me to feel at home with people even if they are my friends, and there are many times when I just see myself with them and I just don’t even feel like I’m there. Like, despite being in a room full of people, like the song says, I’m dancing with myself, trying in vain to make myself look like the exact opposite of how I feel. It’s like I just have to go through life alone, despite the people around me.”

He’s quiet for a while and it scares you. Maybe you said too much. Maybe he’s uncomfortable. You squeeze your eyes shut, preparing for the tears to spill and then he speaks.

“Is that- is that why you were crying?”

“Partially,” You whisper, staring straight ahead into the dark room. Harry’s arm moves a little and then you feel his fingers brushing against your hand before lacing his fingers between your own without a word. His body presses closer to yours and you ever so faintly feel his lips against your shoulder for just a moment. 

“I’m sorry.”

You squeeze your eyes shut, letting the tears fall and trickle down onto the pillow where your head lays. “It fucking hurts,” You take a long, shaky breath. “It hurts when I can’t even tell my best friend about how I feel because I feel like I’m being selfish for giving her the weight of my issues.”

“You’re not being selfish,” He whispers, squeezing your hand gently. “If you’re hurting, she should be there for you no matter what. Just like you are with her,” He pauses for a beat, taking a deep breath. “I think you’re one of the most caring people I have ever met. You have always been there for Deidre even though recently she’s been a bit of twat to you.” 

“Yeah,” You chuckle at that and he breathes a small laugh, tightening his arms around you. Silence settles around you once more, and you think that maybe he’s fallen asleep but then he stirs and moves his hand from yours to tilt your face and body in his direction, leaning over you. Your eyes meet as he gently swipes his thumb against your damp skin, collecting the tears that had just escaped from your eyes with a small smile. Just as he is about to drop his hand from your face, you grasp him by the wrist, pressing his large palm to the curve of your cheek. His gaze flickers between your lips and your eyes, even in the darkness of the bedroom you’re able to make out each other’s faces and you see the edges of his lips curl up into the faintest smile. 

“Also,” You breathe, thumb stroking the skin of his wrist gently, “I’m sorry about the other night.”

It takes a moment for him to process what you mean, but when he does he shakes his head. “No, no, it was my fault. You didn’t want me to kiss you and I shouldn’t have crossed your boundaries like that. I’m sorry.”

“No, Harry, that’s not-” You sigh, “I just- I was afraid it would mess things up with Deidre and I was putting her feelings before my own, which I now realize wasn’t fair to either of us.” You motion between the two of you.

“I get it,” He nods, watching as you take his hand from your cheek and interlock your fingers between his. You’re still mildly intoxicated, so your confidence levels are also quite a bit higher than normal. Harry watches you in silence, the two of you mindlessly fiddling with each other’s fingers like it was the most normal thing in the world for you to do. And then he clears his throat. “So, you- you did want to kiss me?”

You pause, bottom lip slipping between your teeth as you look up at his face. “Yeah.”

“Hm… good to know.” 

Silence falls over the two of you again as you focus back on your fingers dancing against his. You want to keep talking to him; You want to say ‘fuck it’ and throw every bit of caution to the wind regarding Deidre, falling into this “scandalous” affair with her brother; You want to tell him how you feel, express every bit of longing you’ve had for him since the first day his dimpled smile met your gaze, but you’re finding it harder and harder to keep your eyes open, the alcohol in your system taking over and pushing you to surrender. So you do.

You yawn, “I think I should probably go to sleep now.”

“I can leave if you want…” He responds, lifting himself up from the mattress slightly, but you stop him with a quick shake of your head, tugging his arm back around your waist. 

“Stay until I fall asleep?” 

He smiles to himself, arms tightening around you as he nuzzles his face into your hair. “Okay.”

Harry hadn’t intended on falling asleep with you. He’d planned on waiting until you fell asleep and then would  sneak off to his own bed, but it’s morning now and the two of you are lying fast asleep in the exact position you were in the night before. His arms wound tightly around you, chest pressed to your back, and his nose pressed into the base of your neck. In a way, the warmth and peace his arms give you feel completely normal; like you’re long-term lovers, dozing in the soft morning sunlight, awaiting the new day.

The alarming screech of your ringtone rudely interrupts your slumber and causes you to lift yourself from the mattress and angrily slap your hand around in search of your phone. Finding it, you squint at the illuminated screen to see Deidre’s profile picture and name, you groan and push yourself to sit up on the mattress as you slide your finger across the screen to answer the call.

“Hello?” You croak, knuckling frustratedly at your puffy, sleep-filled eyes.

“Hi,” She sounds out of breath, almost frantic. “I know you’re probably still mad at me but everything is okay. I didn’t come home last night because I ended up passing out on Jeff’s couch after everyone left and he failed to wake me up, even though I told him to. But yeah, um, I’m sorry, I’m on my way home. Please don’t be mad at me.”

You should be mad at her, but it’s early and your hungover brain is making it harder for you to form any sort of emotion. “It’s fine. We-I fell asleep early anyways so I didn’t notice.”

She sighs in relief, “Okay. Well, I’ll be home in like 10 minutes,”

“See ya.” You mumble half-heartedly before the line cuts out and you’re dropping your phone into your lap with a yawn. Somehow, during that conversation, you’d completely forgotten the presence of Harry. That is, until he clears his throat and shuffles on the bed, causing you to turn and look at him. 

“G’morning,” He mutters, his deep, syrupy accent tainted with sleep. “Was that-?”

“Deidre, yeah,” You finish, rubbing your hands over your face. “She’s on her way.”

“Oh… then I should- I should probably get out of here,”

You nod and he pushes the comforter off of his body, sliding over the side of the bed and planting his feet against the carpeted floor. Once he’s left the room, you drag yourself out of bed to change into something a bit more appropriate.

Your memory of the night before is somewhat of a blur due to the amount of wine you’d consumed, but you do remember the things you said to him right before falling asleep; the way he touched and held you like you were his own. Your heart flutters at the memory of the way he brushed a fallen tear from your skin and spoke to you in a soft, soothing voice. You’ve deceived yourself by saying that this is just a crush, because it’s more than that and deep down you’re slowly beginning to realize it. 

After pulling on the clean, discarded sweatpants that, in your drunken frustration, had been left in a crumple on the floor, you make your way to the kitchen. Harry’s there already, spreading mashed avocado onto freshly toasted bread before lightly salting it with garlic salt and placing a perfectly fried egg on top. He’s humming to himself as he works to make more slices and you smile, clearing your throat to catch his attention.

He turns his head in your direction. “Oh, hey! Do you want one slice or two?” 

“Um, I’ll have two, please,” You respond, slowly making your way across the small kitchen to where he stands at the counter. “You didn’t have to make breakfast, though,”

He shakes his head as he sucks a bit of avocado from his thumb. “It’s no problem, really. I don’t mind.”

Just as he finishes his sentence, Deidre walks through the front door, calling: “Hello! I’m back!” 

You walk through the kitchen doorway to find her at the door, sporting the same outfit as she had been last night. Her hair is tied up into a messy bun, though, and her shoes are in her hand instead of on her feet. 

“Good morning,” You greet.

She tosses her shoes aside and smiles at you. “Hey, I’m sorry about last night. Can we talk later?”

“Yeah, sure.” You nod and give her a small smile back, lacking the energy to still be mad at her and giving into your tendency of forgiveness. 

As she follows you into the kitchen, she greets Harry with a quick ‘good morning’, grabbing a fully assembled piece of toast from him before scurrying off for a shower and leaving the two of you alone once more. It’s easier being around him now. There’s a hint of tension now, but it isn’t malicious or uncomfortable tension. You feel drawn to him even more than you did before and you can tell he’s feeling the same way. 

“God, Harry, that was so good.” You nearly moan as you wipe the crumbs of toast from your fingertips.

He smiles, swallowing and wiping the corner of his mouth. “M’glad you liked it.”

“You’ll have to teach me your cooking and baking skills someday,” You chuckle, subtly hinting at spending more time with him. 

He downs the rest of the coffee in his mug, humming. “I’d love to.”

You smile at him, standing to take your dishes to the sink and holding out your hand for his. He frowns and shakes his head. “None of that, I’ll clean up.”

“At least let me help.” You pout. 

He chuckles. “If you insist.”

You follow him to the sink, watching as he takes the dishes and begins to rinse them and hand them over to you so that you can place them into the dishwasher. There really isn’t much of a reason for you to be helping him, but you’re finding it hard to keep yourself away from him. The giddy flutter of your heart when his fingers brush against yours and the flirtatious smiles spread across your faces makes you feel utterly alive and you never want it to end. But, eventually, there are no more dishes to clean and you’re in desperate need of a shower, so he thanks you for your help and the two of you go your separate ways.

Cold, frothy water splashes against your bare feet as you walk along the sandy shore. Your sandals are dangling from your fingertips and your loose-fitted jeans are rolled up to your shins to allow a more comfortable stroll. The sun is just beginning to set, casting a peach hue along the crystal-like water as it rolls lazily back and forth. 

Deidre is a few feet behind you, collecting a lone seashell she’d spotted during her stroll. A quiet moment passes and then she’s beside you again, palm stretched out into your direction to show you the small, detailed shell with a glowing pride. 

“Oh, that one’s gorgeous.” You gush at its beauty, taking it between your own fingers to examine it further. It’s a small tulip shell, only about two inches in size, but its shimmery, pearlish gleam is almost breathtaking under the dim sunlight. 

“Think I’ll try to find another one and make them into earrings.” She smiles as you place it back into her hand. 

“Yeah, that’d be cute!”

The two of you have only just left the beach house in an effort to be somewhere alone so the two of you can talk things out. Deidre is silent for a moment, both of you ruminating the possible ways to begin the conversation. Then, she speaks.

“I’m sorry for leaving you like that yesterday, that wasn’t very cool of me.”

You smile a little, “Thanks. I’m sorry for getting so upset with you. I definitely could’ve handled that better.”

She nods. “Yeah. I think we both could’ve handled that much better.”

“Definitely,” You agree, kicking the damp sand with your bare feet. “I just think that, you know, you promised to spend time with me on this trip and I feel like I’ve barely seen you. And I’m glad you’ve made friends, but I’d kinda like to just spend time with you at some point.”

“Yeah,” She sighs, “I’m sorry.”

You turn to her, stopping in your tracks and opening your arms for a hug. “Are we good?”

“Of course.” She smiles and wraps you into a giant bear hug, causing both of you to stumble on the sand a bit. Both of you are giggling uncontrollably once you pull away, nearly falling into the sand beneath your feet. 

“I’ll race you back to the house,” You smile deviously, planting your feet in the starting position and waiting for her to do the same. 

She smirks and positions herself beside you. “Oh, you’re on.”

The two of you bolt towards the house at top speed, sand kicking up behind you in big clouds as scurry along the beach under the pale evening sunlight. 

You reach the house moments before her, immediately collapsing into the sand in front of the stairs to catch your breath. Deidre is quick to stumble up behind you, nearly skidding to a stop as she takes several big gulps of air through a laugh. 

“Still got it,” You wink at her, a similar image of the two of you in the same positions at a much younger age flashing across your mind briefly. 

She flashes you a mocking smile with a tilt to her head and then the repetitive ring of her phone in her pocket interrupts the moment. You watch as she tugs it from her pocket, sliding her finger across the screen and lifting it to her ear with a peppy greeting to the other person on the line. Immediately by the tone of her voice you know exactly what’s about to happen. She’s going to do exactly what she’s been doing since the trip began– or rather, since the two of you were teenagers– she’s going to sputter out a mouthful of excuses and then she’s going to leave.

“Okay, I’ll be out front in five minutes! See ya!” She says before sliding her phone back into her pocket and smiling at you. “That was Jeffrey and his friends, they invited me out again tonight and I promised I would go.”  

She doesn’t even fucking realize...

Sheathing your blinding frustration with a tinge of annoyance, you nod, motion up the stairs before mumbling: “Well, then, you better get going.”

Watching her scurry back up the stairs and into the house, your heart sinks into your chest. She’s so used to you just allowing things like this to happen that she doesn’t even realize how much it’s hurting your relationship and how much it’s hurting you.

After dropping your sandals there you find yourself wandering from the bottom of the stairs back out into the shore, lazily kicking at the shallow water whilst your arms are wrapped around your chest. It’s gotten much darker and people are beginning to filter out through the dunes, lugging their belongings or simply just walking hand in hand. 

The waves crash repeatedly with a lulling, crisp sound that drowns out all other sound in your ears. The air is warm and so is the wind as it swirls and whips around you, causing the loose fabric of your sweater to flap obnoxiously. 

Faintly in the distance, you can hear the screen door of the back porch swing shut and it draws your eyes back up to the house where Harry bounds down the stairs with a smile on his face. A smile just for you.

“Hey!” He calls, gasping for air as he jogs towards you across the sand. You wave back at him with a small smile, crossing your arms over your chest as you stand and wait for him to reach you. 

“Hi,”

“You alright?” He frowns, stepping closer to you. 

You sigh, fingertips pressed against your forehead in a weak attempt to hide your distress. “I- uh, yeah I’m okay.”

“Doesn’t really look like it,” He says, tilting his head to examine your face a bit better. 

You squeeze your eyes shut in an attempt to hold back the tears beginning to build at the edge of your lash line, taking a deep breath. “It’s just- fuck, Harry, she keeps doing it. She keeps telling me that she wants to spend more time together and then she just leaves me. And she doesn’t even fucking realize it,” You look back up at him in the dim evening lighting, wrapping your sweater clad arms around yourself. “Like- what am I supposed to do? She doesn’t listen to me.”

A pregnant pause follows when you finish speaking before Harry speaks. “I don’t know if you can really do anything. Deidre is going to do what she wants to do, regardless of how it affects you.”

He’s right. As much as you never thought you’d actually admit it to yourself, you know he’s right. It feels almost as if a weight has been lifted off your chest; a weight that’s been there since you and Deidre blossomed into teenagers and she gradually began to treat you this way. And then you’re looking back at Harry, gears turning in your brain at a pace that’s almost too fast for you to process. Then, without any sort of caution or judgement as to what it might result in, you’re surging forward pressing a hand to the back of his neck, beneath his mop of hair, and frantically pulling his lips against yours. 

It takes a millisecond for him to react, but then he’s kissing you back harder, long arms coming to wrap around your waist and press you into his chest as his soft, supple lips move skillfully against yours. Every long, heart aching year that passed that you had grown to care for him flashes through your mind; every smile he directed at you; every time he wrapped his arms around you in a giant bear hug, mumbling: “Nice to see you,” in your ear; every moment that you spent falling in love with him. 

He’s the first to pull away, arms unwavering from their place around you. “What about Deidre?”

You stare back at him for a moment before shaking your head, mumbling: “I don’t care.” under your breath, eyes flickering down to his lips before both of you are lunging forward once again. 

Both of you stumble around on the sand for a moment and then Harry falls back into the sand, ass first, bringing you down with him. The two of you are a fit of giggles and snorts as you land in the fluffy, damp sand, limbs tangled between limbs. You land with your legs straddling his slim waist, hands planted against the sand beneath him, hovering over him with a smile. He gazes back up at you with his own dimpled smile, his hands resting cautiously on your hips. He stares at you, studying your face as the two of you catch your breath before he says something that has your stomach twisting into knots and your skin bursting into flames. 

“You’re the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen,”

You lift one of your hands to cover your face, giggling nervously at his words as he lifts himself to sit in the sand with you in his lap. “I’m serious.”

“Why?” You whisper in response, hands coming to rest on his shoulders. 

“God,” He mumbles your name, “You might not see it, but I see it. And I’ve seen it since we were kids; since I was 18.”

You’re speechless, unable to form a full sentence to respond to him, so you just grab his face between your hands and latch your lips onto his again. You stay like that, lips dragging against each other’s lazily until the sun finishes setting and the only source of light comes from the bright glow of the moon. And then he pulls away again, hooded eyelids trained on yours. 

“Let me take you out. Like, on a date.”

You smile, “Okay.”

don’t forget to reblog if u enjoyed!!<3

taglist: @harryandthatgayvodka @first-one-that-i-see @summertimestyles @bopbopstyles @harrysclementines @emsthoughts @theresthingsthatwellneverknow @clorenafila @harries-gayvodka @harryspinkshoelace​@glitterwhore @lovemenowseemenever @dmcupcakexo @happydays @shut-up-and-smile @sisters-of-the-mo0n @fallingslowlyforu @cocoamoonmalfoy @moonlightmaliksblog @sunflowers-styles @harryspirate @slytherinambitious @sunflower6why @harrys-bitch @apples2019 @folkloreearthangel @yellwbrokenblue @sweetwatermelonsugar @harrystyles10 @flammedepigalle @harryinsweatersandbandanas @clean-and-claire @hes-sogolden @wearethedreamrry @froggystyles @marauderswhisperer @afterstylesmadeit @cassiopeiaskies @hufflepuff-always-and-forever @heusedtobegodsfavourite @itisafilthyworld @ursogoldenshan @xaftertastex @pretendsnottoknowthewords @imakillerqueengunpowdergelatine @iconicharry @rileigh1tpwk @stilljosiegrossie @harrystylesdoesntknowiexist@londonmademedoit @harrysleftchelseaboot @pinkpolariodgirl @svnflowervol-6 @tazismysuperfriend @harryspinkshoelace @niabeeah @styleslouvr @foreverandaday-1 @sunflwer-styles @omg-brad @me-a-hopeless-romantic @hhh33-3l​ @carolina-angel​ @beequeen8020 @caprisunstyles @stylesfics-xx​ @luminescencefics​ @bxtchboy69​ @myfavfanficsever​ @simplyrucas​

[syilcawrites]

yearning

Series: Fire Emblem Three Houses Type: One shot Main pairing: Dimileth (Dimitri & F!Byleth) Rated: T Genre: hurt/comfort, pre-ts Summary: An AU based on what happens after Jeralt's death (F!Byleth/Dimitri). Hope you enjoy!

“But the moment she walks out into the brisk cold air, the uncomfortable sensation seeps back into her veins, crawling up her chest. She’s surrounded by so many, yet…

She tilts her head up ever so slightly to see that no one is in front of her.”

A/N: Thanks for taking the time to read! This is my first FE3H fic, so I apologize if anyone is OOC. Just a self-indulgent variation of what happens after Jeralt's death! I'm weak for Dimileth ;-; 

(PS. i like to hc that the hug is parallel to when byleth hugs dimitri post ts after he holds her hand bc they would hug!!!)

You can also read this on ao3!

Yearning is a foreign concept, a concept that Byleth cannot grasp. It escapes through the crevices between her fingers like sand, dripping down into the darkness, disappearing.

She knew what it was when she saw it, years ago when it was just the two of them—just Byleth and Jeralt, Jeralt and Byleth. Trudging through mud and sludge during monsoon rains, through the dry, scorching hot desert heat, through the blissful warm dawn that peaked behind the vast mountains, they met all sorts of people.

When they stopped by a small village in the middle of winter, there was a woman who stood outside the door to her house, wrapped in a woolen shawl, staring out into the white abyss.

Her blue eyes were glassy, far away. Her lips pressed into a tight line as she hugged the shawl around her frail arms. She was so still, Byleth wasn’t sure if she was human or a statue. She couldn’t tear her eyes from her.

“What are you looking at, Byleth?” Jeralt asked, looking up briefly from his bowl of hot soup.

“That woman…” Byleth trailed off, pointing out the window. “What is she doing with her face?”

“What is she doing with her face?” Jeralt echoed back with confusion, leaning out toward the window now too. She heard him mutter a disapproval under his breath as he returned back to his seat. “She yearns for something to return.”

“Yearn?”

He paused for a moment, as he grasped to find an explanation that was as simple as it could be. “A desire, a want. Sometimes, it feels like a need.” Jeralt sighed, patting the seat next to him. “Come on and eat, Byleth. You’ll get winters’ chills from staying too close to the window.”

Byleth didn’t tear her gaze from the woman until Jeralt placed a hand on top of her head and turned it forward so that she was facing her warm bowl of soup. She had the urge to run out into the snow to give it to that woman.

And now years later, Byleth understands, as she holds Jeralt’s increasingly cold body in her arms.

At first, all she can do is let her tears drip onto his ashen face, as it mixes with the light drizzle of the rain.

Then came the emptiness that crept its way into her chest as his blood continued to spill onto the fabric of her clothes, soaking in his death.

“Professor?”

Byleth blinks, and instead of seeing Jeralt’s cold, decaying body in her arms, her student’s homework assignments are tucked snuggly in them.

“Yes, Dimitri?” Byleth hears herself say as she levels her eyes at his neck, finding herself unable to raise them.

“I… Are you… Have you eaten?” Dimitri fumbles with his words, his arms reach out toward her but retreat back just as fast.

“Maybe later.” Byleth steps to the side to walk past him, hugging the papers to her chest.

Rhea had told her to take the rest of the week off yesterday, but—

Byleth winces at the pressure building up in her head as she hurries back to her room. Several hushed whispers follow her trail, as if they’re chasing her, and the moment she shuts the door behind her the tears don’t hesitate to dribble down her cheeks. She clamps a hand over her mouth as sounds escape through her trembling lips, a sensation unfamiliar to the point where fear is etched into her heart.

“Rest if you must, child. Do not fight against what you are feeling.” Sothis’ soft voice soothes her increasingly jumbled thoughts.

Byleth wipes the back of her hand against her damp cheeks as she sets the papers down on her desk. Promptly after, she draws herself under her covers, staring out the window, as she watches the sky turn from blue to orange, then finally to darkness. The time lapse soothes her. She finds that focusing on the drifting clouds distracts her thoughts. Every once in a while though, steps shuffled to a stop at her door, but no one ever knocks.

Not until late into that night did a knock interrupt the silence in her room.

“Professor! It’s me, Annette…” Her voice trailed off at the end, quietly.

Byleth, stiff from staying in one position for hours, creakily raises herself from the bed, her joints pop from the stillness of her body. She can feel the flesh of her own self, but it feels like nothing in that moment.

Minutes must have passed, Byleth assumes, before she opens the door. It’s long enough to the point where Byleth wouldn’t have been surprised if Annette left, but she stands there, putting on her brightest smile.

“Mercedes and I have a gift for you!” Annette wrestles with the gigantic woolen blanket tangled up in her arms. “We were supposed to give this to you at the start of winter, but it became a lot bigger than we anticipated!” She smiles cheekily as she shuffles it into Byleth’s arms. “We noticed that your blankets are pretty thin…”

“Oh, thank you…” Byleth’s voice comes out raspy. She hugs it closer to her body, eating up the warmth. “…Do you have more?”

Annette’s hesitant eyes lit up.

The next morning, she wakes up extra early to prepare herself, to let the tears dribble down her cheek effortlessly as her face remains slack. The same unfamiliar emotion from the day before, when she came back from the classroom. One that was too hard to control, and so she decides it would be best to try to get rid of it before teaching class. Only two days have passed since his death, yet it feels like a lifetime without him.

It’s a simple plan to get her emotions in check, a plan that takes her three hours to overcome, and not even successfully at that. Redness rims the outlines of her eyes, apparent on her pale skin.

As she walks into the classroom, with her cheeks slightly flushed red from her constant rubbing, she feels the gaze of each and every student’s eyes on her. A heavy silence settles in the room as she sets down her paperwork.

The chattering and murmuring ceases as Byleth looks up toward her students. Her eyes are trained ahead of her as she feels their stares boring into her skin. She’s careful not to look directly at anyone. She has an inkling that nothing good would come out of it.

After what feels like grueling hours, a break from lessons is gifted upon her, and most of them shuffle out as quietly as they can. As they did so, the tenseness in her chest begins to rise once more at the realization of everyone leaving.

But one student lingers by the door with his fingers tapping the frame. The longer he stands there, the tighter her shoulders stiffen. The grip on her pencil becomes deathly as he takes a step back into the classroom, but the aching feeling in her chest pauses in growth.

“Professor?” His voice sounds careful, delicate.

It does nothing but anger her—the messy, tangled knots that had hung themselves inside her begin to tighten.

“Yes, Dimitri?” She says in a voice so strained that she notices he shudders slightly at the sharpness in her voice, but it doesn’t stop him from taking another step forward.

Whatever he’s about to say never comes forward, as his hesitance informs Byleth that he’s rethinking his initial thoughts.

“Will you look at me?”

She stops scribbling. She had stopped paying attention to what she was even writing the minute class ended. She sneaks a glance down at the paper. Sprawled on one of the student’s assignments is his name.

Jeralt.

Scribbled aimlessly, ripping through the thin material easily. She decimated someone’s assignment. And she could tell Dimitri had noticed it the moment she began writing once class ended.

Useless. All of this power stored within me and I was, am, still unable to do a simple thing.

She takes a moment to compose her thoughts, carefully placing them in areas where no one can seek them out, and averts her gaze from the paper to Dimitri.

Unlike Byleth, Dimitri is willing to display his emotions on his face—the way his lips form a thin line of concern, eyebrows scrunched up in worry, eyes…

His blue eyes, bright and brilliant, looking at her as if she is lost.

Byleth’s face grows warm from shame and she immediately glances back down at the torn paper. How can she, a mentor, a teacher, make a student feel the need to look at her with such worry? Was it pity?

Pity only reminds her of the newfound weakness that’s bloomed inside of her.

Just like the blood that bloomed on Jeralt’s waist, vibrant and displayed for all to see.

Could everyone see right through her? Fear pierces through her at the mere thought of being so naked.

“Perhaps another time, Dimitri.” Byleth closes her eyes as she stands up, forcing herself to let go of the pencil that’s choking from her deathly tight grip. “I have somewhere to attend, and I don’t want to be late—“ She swiftly gathers the assignments into her arms, keeping her eyes leveled just at his neck, like yesterday, to avoid his gaze.

As she passes by him, eager to get out, she’s stilled by the grip on her arm, his grip. Soft enough to break out of, if she wants to.

“Oh—! I apologize.” He immediately lets go, flustered. “I just—Professor, if you need to talk, I... we are here for you.”

“I’m fine, but thank you. I’ll see you tomorrow.” She doesn’t hesitate to leave, and never once turns back to look at him.

But the moment she walks out into the brisk cold air, the uncomfortable sensation seeps back into her veins, crawling up her chest. She’s surrounded by so many, yet…

She tilts her head up ever so slightly to see that no one is in front of her.

Later in the evening, Rhea deeply reprimands Byleth after learning that she had taught class during the past two days, demanding that she rest. But Byleth doesn’t need rest—she doesn’t want—

She doesn’t want to be alone.

But she can’t tell Rhea that. The words get stuck in her throat, so she simply nods and walks away.

The memory of the pale lady standing in the snow resurfaces to the forefront of her mind, reminding her of the little warmth she harbored within herself.

Byleth scoops up the two woolen blankets that Annette had given her and buries herself within them, relaxing herself into the warmth. Even when she begins to sweat, even when the air becomes uncomfortably suffocating, Byleth does not move.

Loneliness creeps up behind her during the darkest hours of night, when the Monestary is silent and sleepy. She watches the last light flicker off, leaving the buildings, the grandness of it, hollow.

She wants to hold on to that last flickering light, she doesn’t want it to go out. But every night it did, and it sunk her deeper into the fog.

She doesn’t come out during the daytime, ever since Rhea advised her to rest. She doesn’t answer the door when someone knocks, unless it’s Annette bringing her more woolen blankets. On most days it’s Dimitri at her door. He begins by knocking courtesly, announcing his arrival, and asks politely if they can speak. But as time progresses, he stops such polite gestures, and at this point, almost begs her to speak to him, to them, to anyone.

But Byleth stays under the comfort of her woolen blankets, only coming out to eat when the peak hours of the day have been long gone, or to walk to Jeralt’s grave so she can lean against it, to stare at the stars above them.

At some point, she can tell who is who by the way their footsteps echo outside her door. Dimitri’s is distinct, although the softest. Her door creaks whenever he approaches, as if he’s leaning against it. The thought of someone on the other side helps her head bob above the wave of darkness.

“Do you truly wish to stay in your room any longer than this, child? I’m sure your students are awaiting your return.”

Sothis’ voice rings in her head, the only other reminder that Byleth is still here, present in time.

“I am no good to my students right now.” Byleth merely whispers into her pillow. Useless.

The unknown yearning grows deeper and uglier inside of her, conflicting with the rational thoughts that usually keep her mind neat and tidy. She desperately wants to be with others, to drink in their affection as if she is a starved beast, but another part of her doesn’t want a brush of someones skin on her own.

Her wants and needs become muddled in the yearning, and the nights grow ever colder.

By the middle of the third week, she crawls out of her cave of a room later than usual. It’s deathly quiet as Byleth treks her way to Jeralt’s grave.

She settles on the damp grass, placing another flower on it.

She opens her mouth to say something, but nothing comes out. Nothing but emptiness escapes it. She grits her teeth as she clenches her fists. “I have nothing to say,” she manages to whisper out, staring hard at his name, engraved carefully on the stone. “All I wish for is your return. Nothing but emptiness and anger remains in me, and I’m afraid.” She’s afraid of becoming the ashen demon that follows her footsteps, it echoes throughout the Monestary, reminding her of who she is. It reminds her that no matter how much she tries tacking herself into this place, acting as if she can wriggle her way into an environment filled with such love and affection, she will never be able to understand such abstract emotions.

She makes her way to the other side of the gravestone, behind it, to lean against it.

The crunch of leaves behind her jolts her up from the depths of her mind. She flits her head around, her hand unconsciously hovers over the dagger attached to her hips.

An alarmed Dimitri stands not too far off from her with something in his arms--

One of Annette’s woolen blankets.

It almost drops as he awkwardly tries to adjust it so that it’s not threatening to hit the damp grass.

“I—“ He mutters something to himself as he fumbles with the blanket. “I was just about to give this to you, as I’ve heard you’ve been quite cold in your room recently. I also noticed that your room was slightly ajar… so I assumed… a-anyway! This is a gift from Annette, I heard you accept these whole heartedly.” He holds out the blanket toward her stiffly, covering his face.

“Did you think I’d open the door since you had one?” Byleth responds back, staring at the bundle in his arms. Her fists relax slightly as her attention focuses on Dimitri.

As he draws the blankets back to his chest, his face grows ten shades of red hotter than the last.

He flusters and stumbles over his words as he tries to come up with some believable excuse, but as he settles his gaze on Byleth’s blank, stoic expression, he lets out a sigh, his shoulders sagging.

“Actually, yes. Since she told me that you open the door whenever she’s there. Although she did say that you do close it immediately after accepting the blanket.” He tilts his head, offering a reluctant laugh. The simplicity of the act, for some reason, warms her. His laugh is something she hasn’t heard in a while.

Byleth casts her gaze to the ground. A silence ensues between them. “I do apologize for my actions the past couple of days.” She says slowly, unable to reach his eyes again. “Thank you for always stopping by. I’ve noticed you tend to sit by the door a couple hours every day.”

His face grows another shade deeper.

“You noticed?”

“The door creaks whenever you lean against it.”

He mutters another string of words that she can’t make out.

Byleth raises her view from his lips to his eyes, and they lock on immediately. “Would you like to sit with me?” He went out of his way to find her, this is the least she could offer.

For once, a small smile rests on her rather chapped lips.

His eyes brighten.

“Of course!” He smiles ever so slightly, draping the blanket in front of Byleth, who stiffens in surprise at his gesture.

“It’s a bit cold tonight, I wouldn’t want our dear professor catching a cold.” He plops down next to her, arms loosely around his knees.

She had forgotten that she’s still in her night wear when she went out. How unsightly…

But Dimitri is no better, since he’s also in his nightly attire as well. Byleth frowns at the thought of him getting sick due to her negligent attitude toward her students, and raises up an arm, holding the blanket open. “We wouldn’t want you catching a cold either.”

He blinks blankly, as if he’s unable to process what she’s offering. Byleth scoots closer to him and drapes the woolen blanket over the both of them.

“This seems a bit… snug?” Dimitri laughs, almost robotically as he stares at the ground. He does not meet her gaze as she stares at the side of his face.

“Even better. Now the heat will be more concentrated.” Byleth nods in approval as she leans against the back of the gravestone. They sit there in silence.

After a while, Dimitri relaxes his shoulders. “I’m sorry there was nothing I could do.” He says, his voice soft.

“Don’t apologize. It’s not your fault. It’s mine.” Byleth takes no hesitation in taking the blame.

“Professor, of course not—“

“I had the ability to save him.” Byleth’s voice quivers as she recounts the memory, staring at the starry sky above them. “I feel…” She pauses, closing her eyes. “Unlike myself recently. I find it hard to process… a variety of unfamiliar emotions that I am experiencing.” Even saying that makes Byleth feel strange and alien, talking about… her emotions. More so the lack of understanding them. She always had Jeralt to turn to for these types of issues, but now… she is alone.

“Of course I’ll help you—all of us will always try our best to help you out, Professor. You must believe that.” Any sense of nervousness that is in him is replaced with concern. “You have helped and saved us countless times, and no matter what the issue is, if possible, I hope I can offer the some consultation, even if it is small.”

Byleth, for the first time in weeks, truly gazes into Dimitri’s eyes—pure and blue like clearwater. “Thank you for your sincerity, Dimitri. As always, you’re empathy is boundless.” She can’t help but smile at him, but his expression confuses her. Yet another gaze unfamiliar to her, another emotion that she cannot pinpoint.

He simply stares at her with an expression that makes her feel relaxed and sleepy, as if time itself has paused, and she returns his wholly attention.

“Why do you look at me like that?” Byleth whispers, her eyes searching his face for answers. Pure curiosity is written into her own. Dimitri blinks, as if he’s snapped out of his trance, finally aware of the way he was staring at her.

“It must be late, that’s why I was so careless…” he mutters to himself quickly, rubbing an eye with the back of his fingers. He sneaks a glance over at Byleth, who is still staring at him with innocent curiosity. Redness creeps up his neck as he averts his gaze. “Despite how I may seem, I’m not very good at expressing my emotions either.” He clears his throat, straightening his back.

“Then maybe we can both learn from one another.” Byleth concludes, exhaling. She returns her gaze up at the endless starbound view above them, watching her breath flutter into the cold, night air. “I’m in your debt, since you are keeping me company so late at night.” Again, she closes her eyes, letting herself feel the coldness wash over her exposed skin.

“Think nothing of it, I’m simply happy that you are getting fresh air.” He says, leaning over her. She notices the shift in heat as he comes closer, and the shifting of the blanket on her end. His fingers graze against her bare thigh, a touch so slight, but it is enough to make her realize what she needs.

She immediately opens her eyes to see him pulling away, his face flushed and his own eyes wide as he realizes that she’s staring at him. Before he can pull away completely, she wraps her arms around his neck, drawing him against her. The blanket slips from her shoulders as she presses her head into the crook of his neck, soaking in the warmth that he provides.

He immediately stiffens upon contact, with one arm up in the air, and the other placed against the gravestone to avoid falling completely on top of her out of surprise. His left leg is fit snuggly between her own, the other bent up. Along with the blanket, they were a tangled mess of limbs and cloth.

But Byleth doesn’t care, for she appeased the yearning that ached in her chest since Jeralt’s death—to feel the warmth of another human being in her arms, to not have the last thing she had held in them that of someone who is long gone from this world.

Dimitri does not move a muscle—he is sure that if he did, he would ruin whatever it is that she discovered. But something warm and wet touches his neck. With the sniffles accompanied by it, he wraps his arms around her, melting into her embrace as her body trembles. The sound of her sobs are quiet against his skin.

[slytherinbarnes]

Sub Rosa [42]

xiii. join or die

Pairing: Bellamy Blake x reader

Word Count: 3.0k

Warnings: a lil angst, a lil drugging for safe passage. 

Summary: the search for Luna begins, and you and Bellamy share a moment.

a/n: HELLO FRIENDS I AM ALIVE AND I AM BACK! WHICH MEANS SUB ROSA IS BACK TOO! so sorry I missed wednesday’s upload, but ya girl had no power or internet or 4g so there was literally nothing I could do. please read and enjoy number 42! we are nearing the end of s3, can you believe it?! anyways, I love u all you lil moons, and I hope you’re well! the taglist for this series is open! I hope you enjoy, please let me know what you think!!!

previous chapter // season masterlist // series masterlist

Bellamy maneuvers the rover through the woods as fast he dares, adjusting course every now and then according to the map in Octavia’s hands. 

This ride is one of the quiet ones, everyone tense with the idea that you might fail to find Luna, and fail to save your people. You turn and glance back at Clarke, who is sitting behind Bellamy, next to Jasper, turning the Flame over and over between her fingers. You can't tell what she’s thinking, but you’re sure it’s about Lexa, her expression sad and worried. 

Octavia spends much of the ride looking out of the small window on the back door, making sure Bellamy is following her directions. Bellamy sits wrapped up in quiet intensity, eyes locked only on the road around you. Jasper keeps checking the map and worrying over the distance, a fact that he reminds you of now. “It's been an hour since we passed the airplane wreckage. Seeing as we're using a map without any distances, it could be days before we reach the village.”

Bellamy’s gaze never leaves the road as he offers, “At least we know we're going in the right direction.”

“We're running out of daylight. We should stop in the sun and recharge the battery.”

You glance out the window at the rain that has been falling since the funeral last night, the clouds blocking any light from the sun. You mutter, “What sun?”

Clarke backs you up. “We keep going until it dies.”

Octavia turns away from the back, glancing at Clarke and correcting her. “We keep going until we get to Luna.”

Jasper gazes down at the map again, before looking over at Octavia. “What do you think she's gonna say when we show up asking to put an AI in her head?”

“Lincoln said she helps those that are in trouble. She'll help us too.”

Bellamy abruptly slams on the breaks, trying to avoid a fallen tree in your path, and the rover slides along the wet ground for a second before lurching to a stop. The move jostles all of you inside, and you brace yourself against the door the best you can, trying to prevent your head from slamming into the dashboard of the vehicle. 

You all gaze out the windshield at the tree, and Jasper mumbles, “You think she can help us find a better map?”

“We'll backtrack. Find somewhere where the trees aren't so-”

Bellamy is cut off by the sound of the back door opening, and you all turn just in time to see Octavia jump from the back, grabbing her pack and heading into the trees. You glance over at him and sigh, “Guess we're going on foot.”

You all bail out after her, grabbing your things, the rain chilling you to the bone as soon as you step out into it. Octavia takes off running and Clarke takes off behind her, the rest of you struggling to catch up until they abruptly stop and Octavia yells, “You hear that?”

You all freeze in place, listening hard over the sound of the rain, and as soon as you hear it, Clarke turns back to meet your gaze. You both answer, “Water.”

Octavia takes off again with Clarke right behind her, and their excitement reaches you, pushing you into movement. You follow behind them, ignoring Bellamy’s cry at your retreating figures, “Eyes sharp, they could be hostile.”

Octavia reaches the top of the hill, and turns to offer you and Clarke a hand as she yells back to her brother, “They're not hostile. Put the guns down!”

You all follow her as she leads you to a rushing river, the water churning harshly within it. She runs alongside the river, until it takes you to the edge of the forest, the woods opening up on a small shoreline and a large body of water. Octavia stops at the edge of the woods, eyes scanning the surroundings for any sign of the village. “Where's the village?”

But there’s nothing there, other than a small circle of stacked rocks, and water that stretches far beyond what your eyes can see. Octavia pulls out Lincoln’s notebook, checking the map, and you all crowd around her to see. She lifts her fingers to a drawing near the lower right hand corner of the notebook, the sketch matching the stacked rocks nearby on the shore. She whispers, “No, it can't be.”

She runs over to the rocks, following the line of the shore, and you all follow, stopping when you reach the center of the circle. 

“It isn't a village. It's just a bunch of rocks.”

Clarke whispers, “She's gone.”

Jasper looks between you, confused. “What do we do now?”

None of you say anything, just as unsure as the person next to you. Your eyes fall on Bellamy, but his gaze is locked on something behind you. You turn and look, seeing that Octavia has now wandered to the edge of the shore. She drops to her knees, looks up at the sky, and lets out a long, drawn out cry of frustration. You all watch her, feeling the same way.

-

Octavia returns back to the group shortly, giving out instructions on what you need for a fire. She sends you and Bellamy out for firewood, which Clarke stacks, and her and Jasper work on starting the actual fire. As you and Bellamy return with two armfuls of wood and set them down beside Clarke, you watch Octavia get a spark on her kindling. She carefully transfers it over to Clarke’s wood pile, and blows on the sparks until they grow into a flame. You look down at her, impressed, and Clarke nods in satisfaction. “Good. Okay, it'll be dark soon. We need to talk about what we're gonna do.”

Octavia is the first to answer. “We wait until first light, then we split up and search the shore in both directions.”

“I agree. Lincoln wouldn't have put this spot on the map unless it was important.” Bellamy reaches down to grab Lincoln’s notebook to look over the map, but as his fingers close around it, Octavia knocks it out of his hand and snaps, “Don't touch that!”

You and Bellamy exchange a look before he kneels beside Octavia, whispering, “Come on, O. How long?”

“I don't know, I can't even look at you. Because every time I do, I see Pike putting that gun to Lincoln's head. I hear the gunshot. I see him fall.”

You feel the heavy weight of grief as the memory flashes through your head, but you quickly shake it away as Bellamy counters, “I didn't kill Lincoln.”

“No, but he is dead because of you!”

Bellamy stands, and you can tell he’s upset, his body immediately tense. You all look away from the feuding siblings, trying to pretend you can't hear every word they’re exchanging. “I came to you, but you didn't take my help. If you had just trusted me I'd-”

Bellamy cuts himself off when Octavia breaks a stick and turns away from him, letting him know that she’s no longer interested in the conversation. He turns and walks off sadly, and you stand to follow him, but you pause in your tracks when the fire flashes green. You turn to look at it, Octavia and Clarke doing the same, before you all turn to look at Jasper. “What did you just do?”

“Nothing.” He shrugs, then lifts a small branch. “I just threw these in the fire.”

You see a look of recognition pass over Octavia’s face before she frantically grabs the notebook, and you ask, “What is it?”

She pulls the notebook open to the map, and pulls out a small plant pressed between the pages. She looks at it for a second, before tossing it into the fire, making it glow green again. You all exchange an excited look and laugh, mostly in shock, as Octavia mutters, “Signal fire. He was trying to tell us that this is how we contact Luna.”

Jasper stands from his spot, “I'll get more.”

You glance over at Bellamy, who is now further down the shoreline, looking out at the water, before looking back to your twin. You nod his way and she nods in return, before jogging off behind Jasper, “I’ll help!”

You trudge along the shoreline towards your boyfriend, your boots sinking into the wet sand slightly, making you stumble at times. He doesn’t look up as you approach, just looks out at the water and the darkening sky above it.

You come to a stop beside him, following his gaze to the rapidly setting sun, aided by the cover of the rain clouds. You stand in silence for a long while, until he whispers, “I've lost her.”

If you there were any more space between you, you wouldn't have heard the words. You turn towards him, already shaking your head. “Give her time, Bellamy. There may be blood on your hands, but it's not Lincoln's.”

He turns to look at you now, and you can see tears glinting in his eyes. “Some of it is.”

“You didn't want that to happen, and you tried to stop it.” You glance back at the fire, seeking out Octavia, who is still throwing branches into the fire, before turning back to him. “Octavia will forgive you eventually. The question is, will you forgive yourself?”

“Forgiveness is hard for us.”

You reach out for him, remembering the night that Dax tried to kill him. “If you need forgiveness to forgive yourself, I’ll give that to you. You’re forgiven, Bellamy, for everything. And if I have to tell you this everyday until you forgive yourself and stop feeling guilty, then I will. Because you’ve made mistakes, but that’s not who you are. We’ve all done terrible things for the people that we love, but those things don't define us.”

He nods, and the tears finally spill over and fall down his cheeks. He surprises you by pulling you into a hug, one of the first instances of affection he's allowed himself since you found him chained up in the cave. As his face is buried into the crook of your neck, he whispers, “Tell me about the stars.”

The request sends a rush of emotion running through you, the words unsaid in the last few weeks, despite the chaos that has been warring in Bellamy’s mind. As you pull away to tell him, you sense movement to your left, in the water, and you turn to glance that way. Bellamy does the same, and both of you share a look of alarm at the sight of people coming out of the water, weapons trained on you. Bellamy reaches for his gun and you reach for your knife, but neither of your hands make it to your weapons because you are both pulled to the ground by unseen forces behind you. 

They bind and gag you both, before pulling you to your feet and leading you over to the others. A small group runs ahead into the clearing, lifting their weapons towards Octavia, Clarke, and Jasper, and they all scramble to their feet as Octavia lifts her hands in surrender and yells, “No, no, it's okay.”

You and Bellamy are pushed into the clearing and knocked down to your knees, and Clarke looks over at you in panic. You nod your head, letting her know you're okay, just as one of the Grounders steps closer to Octavia. “Chon yu bilaik? Hakom yu don flag raun?”

Who are you? You’re able to translate his first question, but not his second. Luckily, Octavia’s answer gives you a good idea of what he was asking. “Ai laik Okteivia kom Skaikru en ai gaf gouthru klir.”

I am Octavia of the Sky People, and I seek safe passage. That’s when you realize, he must be asking why you signaled. As soon as the Grounder realizes you’re Skaikru, he switches to English. “Skaikru, bringers of death. Why should we give you safe passage?”

“Lincoln. He sent us.”

Even in death, his name holds power, because the man freezes in place before turning to the two Grounders behind you and Bellamy. “Ban emo gaga we, en lus ‘mo meika au.”

You don’t need to translate the words, because they immediately free your hands and pull you both to your feet. You both pull your gags from your mouths, and Bellamy turns to Octavia, quickly whispering, “What's going on?”

“I don't know.”

The man reaches into his jacket and pulls out a small pouch full of vials. He passes one to each of you, the cloudy yellow liquid swirling within the bottle as Clarke asks, “What is that?”

“Safe passage.”

Jasper gives the man an inquisitive look. “What does it do?”

He says nothing, just passes the bottle to Jasper, who takes it. Octavia uncaps the bottle and immediately pours it down her throat as Bellamy protests, “Octavia, wait!”

“I trust Lincoln.”

The Grounder looks at the rest of you. “If only she drinks, only she goes.”

Jasper glances over at the rest of you. “See you on the other side.”

And then he swallows the contents of his bottle. Clarke comes to stand at your side, all of you looking between each other when Ocatvia suddenly drops to the ground, out cold. Jasper mutters, “Oh crap.” And then he is the next to fall. 

You, Bellamy, and Clarke all look between each other and your two fallen friends as the Grounder watches you. “Last chance.”

The warning is enough to put you in gear, and you look between your lover and your twin. “Together?”

You uncap your bottle and they follow suit, both whispering, “Together.”

You all swallow the liquid, and you wince slightly as the bitter liquid washes over your tongue and down your throat. You lower yourself to the ground, tugging the other two down with you, all of you staring at each other, waiting to slip under. Clarke is the first to fall back, her eyelids fluttering before she hits the ground. You turn and look at Bellamy, your vision closing in around you, watching as his eyelids flutter too. You both fall back at the same time, reaching out for each other as the world grows black.

-

You wake up feeling warm. 

Your eyelids feel heavy as you pry them open, and you realize the warmth is from being pressed between Clarke and Bellamy’s sleeping bodies. They wake up at the same time, and you can hear Jasper and Octavia stirring nearby. 

Your head feels heavy as you look around, trying to gather your bearings, unable to tell anything other than the fact you’re in some sort of rusty metal box, and sunlight is streaming in through various holes around you. You pull yourself to a sitting position, watching as the others do the same, and Bellamy rasps, “Where the hell are we?”

Octavia reaches back, looking for her weapon. “My sword's gone.”

Your eyes fall on the empty holster on your thigh, and you mutter, “My knife is too.”

Clarke digs in her jacket, pulling out the box for the Flame, sliding the lid back to ensure that it’s still there. You see her sag with relief, so you know it’s still in place, and she tucks it back inside her jacket. Octavia starts to pound on the walls, panicking, and a second later, a door at the end of the box swings open, letting in a flood of bright sunlight. 

You all have to lift your hands to shield your eyes, watching as a backlit figure walks inside the space, towards you. As she gets closer and you can get a good look at her, her curly hair and smooth skin, fabric billowing around her from the soft breeze that accompanies her, Octavia simply states, “Luna.”

Luna looks between all of you, before her eyes stop on Octavia. “Where’s Lincoln?”

“Lincoln’s dead.”

Clarke adds, “Lincoln said that you would help us.”

Her head cocks to the side. “Did he?”

“Luna, you're the last of your kind. The last nightblood.”

A faraway look passes over her face. “So Lexa is dead as well.”

“Her spirit has chosen you to become the next Commander. Titus entrusted me with the Flame to give to you.”

Luna answers Clarke slowly, as if she’s speaking to a child. “Then he should have told you that I left my conclave, swearing to never kill again.”

“You don't have to kill. To lead is your birthright, how you lead is your choice.” 

She reaches into her jacket, pulling out the container for the Flame. She slides the lid back, revealing it to Luna. “I recognize the sacred symbol, but what is that?”

Clarke pulls the Flame out of its container, holding it in her hand, trying to pass it to Luna. “This is the Flame. It holds the spirits of the Commanders. Of Lexa. Will you take it and become the next Commander?”

“No.” She closes Clarke’s fingers over the Flame, before turning and leaving the box, walking out into the bright sunshine. 

You all exchange a worried look before running after her, yelling, “Wait!”

As you step out into the sun, you have to blink against it a few times, allowing your eyes to adjust. When they do, you finally see why the sun is so bright. Because it is reflected off the water around you, the ocean, stretching out on all sides of you. You spin in place, looking out at the horizon, searching for land, but finding nothing other than bright blue waves. 

You see the others at your side, doing the same, all of you in awe of your surroundings. You glance back at the box that was holding you prisoner, recognizing it as a symbol from the past: a shipping container. Upon further inspection of the structure all around you, you realize where you are. You turn to the others, voice full of awe, as you tell them, “It’s an oil rig. Luna’s clan lives on an oil rig.”

-

next chapter

[kyufiber-moved]

siren!san

member: san / ateez

genre: fluff, angst

word count: 3k

summary: you keep dreaming about the same boy, but is it really a dream?

You keep seeing a boy in your dreams. 

It’s always the same.

You’re on a rocky seashore. The wind beats waves against the shoreline, spraying water across the rocks, and you can smell the salt in the air. And yet, despite the heavy sea foam and pounding waves, you can see him. Just below the surface, he’s suspended and staring up at you; blinking. His eyes are deep brown, wide with curiosity, and his hair is the color of faded seaweed, strands floating around his face like a watery halo. 

As soon as you try to move closer or speak to him, you wake up, there’s cold sweat running down your back and the smell of salt water curiously lingering in your bedroom. 

Curiously, because you live at least twenty miles inland. 

You attribute it to your overactive imagination.

It’s been a few weeks since you’ve had the dream, and thoughts about the dream have all but left your mind, instead replaced with those of the daily routine.

Until last night. 

It — he — is all you can think about after you wake up. 

No matter how much Febreeze you spray in your room, the scent of salt water finds its way through, invading your senses. 

“Grandma,” you speak in a low tone, almost hoping she doesn’t hear you from where she’s rocking on the other side of the porch.

“Hm?” she responds absentmindedly, hands busy with crochet needles. 

“I had the dream again,” you start. “but it was different this time.”

You’re on the same rocky shore, and the waves are battering the rocks more aggressively than ever. You see the water spraying up at you, but you feel nothing besides the breeze running its fingers through your hair. 

Your eyes know where to look. He’s always there; this time isn’t any different. But usually, he stays there. 

You don’t dare move or speak, not wanting to dream to end so soon. 

Something in the back of your mind registers that something is off. Maybe it’s the colors or the waves. Something is different.

The foam clears for just a moment, and there is he, just below the waves.

And then, almost as if in slow motion, he begins moving. Up, up, up, until he breaks the surface. Water droplets cascade in all different directions, slipping down his face and down his bare chest, to his—

The shock almost knocks you off your feet.

He has a tail; a watercolor blend of blues and greens, creating a formless pattern that vaguely reminds you of a messy tie-dye. 

You shouldn’t be as dumbstruck as you are, since — you keep telling yourself — this is all just a product of your subconscious. Surely, that’s what it is.

You’re so focused on his tail that you hardly notice he’s moving closer, not until his hands are on the rocks near your feet. You crouch down, your body moving on its own, and find you can’t help but stare at his features up close and not distorted by water. 

His hair is dark green, darkened by the water, and every feature seems too perfect to be human. 

He reaches for you, fingers trace the side of your cheek, and his touch is startlingly cold. 

He draws back. 

And then, he’s extending his open hand to you; an invitation.

You know you should be scared, but you aren’t. His eyes fill you with warmth, and so you take his hand. 

In a split second, he tugs you into the water, and then you awake with a gasp. 

Your grandma pauses to look over at you, eyes serious. “Different how?”

Your hair was soaking wet when you woke up. 

“Just... different.”

She sees right through you. 

Slowly placing her half-crocheted scarf on the table beside her, she beckons you forward. “Come here,”

Cautiously, you do.

“Don’t listen. Resist the call. They’ll try their best to entice you, but you must resist it, do you hear me?”

You frown. “It’s just a dream, Gran.”

“No, no. You don’t understand, pumpkin. It’s far from being just a dream. You’re having physical responses to your dream you can’t explain, correct? For example, your room smelling like salt water when you wake up.”

A knot of fear twists in your stomach, and you hope she’s pranking you. “How... did you...?”

“It’s real,” she squeezes your hands, and you can see the worry in her eyes. “Whoever you keep seeing. They’re real.”

You shake your head vigorously. “This is ridiculous. How can that be true? Mermaids aren’t—”

“Not mermaids,” she cuts you off, voice quiet. “Sirens.”

The word itself causing the knot to twist even further, and you feel faint nausea tugging at you.

“Y/n, listen to me,” her voice is urgent. “You have siren blood. They always find their own. But absolutely, whatever you do, you cannot give in. Promise me.”

Your thoughts return to that of the mysterious boy — or rather, siren — and how deeply brown and magnetic his eyes were, and the unexplained warmth you felt when you looked into them.

You nod. “I promise.”

Intending on holding to the promise you made to your grandmother, you’ve tried the past few days to distract yourself. And — for the most part — you have.

The buzzing of your phone gets you out of your head.

wooyoungie — 12:12 PM

have u checked the gc??

to: wooyoungie — 12:12 PM

no should i have

wooyoungie — 12:13 PM

yes smh 

mingi invited a bunch of us to his family’s beach resort

you in?

You look up from your phone, your eyes glancing off in one direction as your thoughts begin to race. 

It’s just a trip with friends that happens to be at the beach, one voice whispers. It’s not like you’re seeking the siren out.

Another, more sensible voice pipes up the back of your mind. This is blatantly breaking the promise you made to your grandmother, it says.

It’s not hurting anyone, and you can’t let your friends down...

You’re putting yourself in danger and breaking trust while you’re at it.

Another ding from your phone jolts you back into reality.

wooyoungie — 12:15 PM

y/n?? 

Without hesitation, your fingers glide over the keys to form your response.

to: wooyoungie — 12:12 PM

i’m in.

When she asked where you were going, packing up your small suitcase, you told the truth. Well, most of it.

You are going on a trip with friends, and you are going to Mingi’s family resort, but that resort is not in the mountains like your grandmother thinks.

Lying now, are we? The sensible voice speaks up, and you stamp it down, silently justifying that it’s not like you’re seeking the siren out.

Wooyoung nudges you from the adjacent van seat, and you turn from the window to look at him. 

“What’s got you all in your head, huh?”

You flash him a cheeky smile. “Just thinking about how I hope I don’t get stuck in a room with you,”

He scoffs, plastering a pout on his face. “Rude. I’m a very good roommate, thank you very much. You wish I’d be your roommate,”

“Sure I do,” You roll your eyes, the corners of your lips quirking up. “I love being woken up at 4 in the morning by your earthquake snores.”

“I don’t—!”

“We’re almost here!” Yunho cuts in from the front, presumably not keen on hearing the two of you start bickering again. “Who’s excited?”

The distraction works, and Wooyoung’s attention flips off of you like a switch. 

“Mingi, is the food good? Can I be your roommate? Are they any cute girls? Do our rooms have good views? Are our rooms close to each other?” The questions shoot out of his mouth, rapid-fire. 

“Yes, no, ye—”

“Why not?” Wooyoung whines.

“Because,” Mingi coughs, staring out the window. “y/n wasn’t lying when she said you snore,”

“I do not—!”

“Oh, look a cute girl!” Yunho interrupts again, and every one of the other boys’ heads swivels to look out the window.

You can’t help but let out an exasperated sigh.

After what seems like too long, the van finally comes to a stop and the several of you in the car pile out. 

You hear Yeosang murmur something that sounds like an awed, “wow,” and the rest of you mimic his sentiments. 

Towering palm trees dot the ground, and the landscaping is immaculate, with perfectly trimmed bushes and tropical flowers. Small paths of rocks lead around the sides of the building and straight up to the main entrance.  The resort is gorgeous, and you haven’t even seen the inside yet. 

Mingi grins, hauling some bags out of the trunk. “Go check in at the front desk and tell them you’re registered under Song Mingi.”

Later that night, you lose the game of rock-paper-scissors and end up sharing a room with Wooyoung, much to your dismay. That being the reason you’re the only left awake, unable to sleep due to the loud grunts and snores coming from Wooyoung’s bed. 

After far too long of staring up at the dark ceiling, you finally slide the covers off your bare legs. 

Your eyes adjusted to the darkness of the room long ago, so you navigate to the door with ease. Each room is a small hut lining the edge of the beach, and so when you slip out the door, your feet hit the sand. 

The moonlight illuminates the shoreline, bouncing off the waves as they ebb and flow. You’re mesmerized for a few moments. 

You blink out of your trance and pad quietly down the beach. Your mind wanders, and you don’t even realize you’ve walked at least a mile down the beach until a sound pulls you out of your thoughts.

A splash. Not the gentle lapping of water against sand, but the splash of water spraying against rocks. 

You blink and raise your head.

It’s the same beach as the one in your dreams. 

You swallow. Partly in fear, partly in disbelief. You must be dreaming; you must be. 

Closing your eyes, you squeeze them shut for several seconds, but when you open your eyes, the beach is still there. 

Unthinkingly, your gaze wanders to a familiar flat spot just beside the shore. As soon as your eyes find it, the force pulling you forward is stronger than any willpower you have. 

One, two, three steps forward. Four. 

You can’t help yourself. 

There’s an invisible force drawing you closer and closer, and you can’t do anything about it, even if you wanted to.

As you near the rock, a pang of fear grips your chest. One that whispers, if you stand where you stood before, will he be there?

Four steps away.

Will he be there? 

Three steps.

Waiting for you?

Two. One.

The hair on your neck stands up straight, and a shiver runs down your spine. Your foot rises, and as soon as it lands on the dark rock, everything goes black.

Your eyes fly open.

You sit up, only to find yourself back in your bed, with the gentle morning sunlight streaming in through the curtains. 

Wooyoung is dead to the world, tangled in a heap of covers in his own bed. 

Your heartbeat speeds up as the memory of what feels like only moments ago hits you. You aren’t sure if it was a dream or if it was real.

It’s only then that you notice something.

Your own, sandy footprints leading from the door to the bed where you now lay. 

Your heart stops.

No matter what you do, you can’t forget about the events of the night before. It seems like a distant dream, and yet everything is so incredibly vivid. 

The guys have noticed your change in demeanor; your distance and absentmindedness, and so when you state that you’re going to bed early, none of them stop you. 

Knowing that your roommate stays out late into the night, you have no worries of him finding that you aren’t in your bed.

You head straight for the dark beach, purpose in your stride. 

You need to remember. You must. 

Something is going. It’s right there, and you’re reaching for it. It’s brushing your fingertips, but when you get too close, it’s ripped away.

At first, it was simply curiosity. Now, it’s a hunger. 

Why can’t you remember anything from the night before? Who is the boy you keep seeing? Can you even call him a “boy”? 

You’re so lost in your thoughts, you don’t realize you’ve reached the rocks until you’re nearly on top of them. 

There’s nobody there, just the smooth stone and the faint moonlight peeking between the clouds. 

You hesitate, worried that if you take another step forward you might wake up in your bed again.

It’s a battle with yourself, logic battling curiosity. Just as logic is winning, a voice rips you out of your thoughts.

“You’re back.”

Your head shoots up to see someone sitting on the edge of the rocks, staring at you. Him. 

You’d recognize his features anywhere, but the voice isn’t quite what you expected. You aren’t sure exactly what you expected. 

“You’re probably confused,” he murmurs, eyes wandering. “it’s for your own good. You shouldn’t even be here.”

“What happened last night?” 

It bubbles out of your mouth before you can stop it. 

“I sent you home. You shouldn’t be here.” He repeats, his eyes steady and unblinking.

“Why shouldn’t I? You’re the one that’s been invading my dreams.”

“It’s my nature. Sirens need their soul partner to keep them alive.”

“Your... what?”

“Soul partner. The human equivalent would be soulmate. For every siren, there’s another siren whose soul is half of theirs. They share one soul, and without their other half, they wither away and die. The only way to find your partner is through dreams.

“But I’m not... I mean... I’m not a siren... right?”

“No. But you have siren blood, meaning you have a siren soulmate.” 

Your head reels from all this new information coming at you. 

“My—my grandma...” You rub your temples. “she said sirens are dangerous and that I should stay away from them. Why?”

He casts his eyes sideways towards the choppy sea. “Because once you bond with your soulmate, you can’t return to your old life.”

“Then... then how do I have siren blood?”

“Sometimes— very rarely— sirens join their human partner on land.” he murmurs. “They tend to die young, however, as their bodies need the sea.”

A sudden memory washes over you, one from your childhood. 

“What happened to Daddy?” a younger you asks, staring up at your mother. 

She smiles wistfully and brushes a strand of hair out of your face. “He was sick, baby. He died before you can remember.”

You swallow. “Oh,” 

It comes out as a whisper.

“Now, do you understand? Why you should stay away?”

You set your jaw. “Will you die if I do?”

The boy— the siren— studies you, his eyes twinging with something that could be exasperation. 

As you two stare each other down, something twinges in your chest. You aren’t quite sure what it is. 

Maybe it’s the distant look in his eyes, or the way his damp hair lies on his forehead, or the sharpness of his jawline when it’s set. 

“Why do you care if I die?” 

“I care about people’s lives,” you reply. 

“You’re lying,” he sniffs. “Why do you care if I die?”

Biting the inside of your cheek, the words rise out of your throat before you can stop them. “You’re my other half, and I can’t explain it, but I’m drawn to you. And I don’t know what would happen if you faded away.”

“I do,” he says stubbornly. “You’d get to live a normal human life.”

“You’re acting like you want to die,” you huff, irritated. “I understand the risk perfectly well.”

“Fine.” This time, any trace of teasing is gone. He’s dead serious, and you can feel it. “Come here.”

You quail at the sudden firmness of his voice, and your confidence trickles away. “What’s going to happen? When I... bond with you?”

“I know what you’re thinking, and it’s not anything like that. You’re going to get into the water and the process will begin. You’ll become a siren.”

“Sirens don’t.... eat people or anything, right?”

He glowers. “Do you want to do this or not?”

You nod. 

“You’re sure? You’re leaving behind everyone and everything you know and understand.”

“To save your life.” You nod again.

“You’re lying again,” he shakes his head. “Come here, and get into the water.”

You do.

A hiss escapes your lips at how cold it is, but you’re distracted when the boy appears inches away from you.

“Soon, the cold won’t affect you.” he murmurs, taking a hold of your neck. 

His lips touch yours, and although the cold shocks you at first, the feeling that comes after makes you forget everything.

A sense of peace washes over you, and within a split second all the turmoil in your mind floats away. The cold water begins to feel like a warm blanket wrapping around you, swaddling you, and the air begins to feel much too dry on your skin. 

An odd feeling begins to take over your legs, making them tingle, and it vaguely registers that you must be becoming a siren. 

Your chest feels heavy, the air in your lungs dry. You need water. 

And then, the kiss deepens and all of his— San, is his name— memories wash over you, like dreams. An odd feeling takes over your chest; one you can’t pinpoint or name. 

After what could be hours or seconds, San pulls away. 

You blink, staring into his brown eyes. 

He holds out his hand, and you take it. And then you both disappear below the surface. 

A newsreel plays on the TV in the quiet grocer. The blonde announcer is saying something about a missing girl.

“—disappeared without a trace on a beach vacation with her friends. Sources say that her behavior had been off before her disappearance, with no obvious reason to why. Police currently have no new leads, but don’t believe there to have been foul play involved— ”

An elderly woman stands at the counter, staring up at the television with a blank stare. 

“Ma’am?” The cashier prompts gingerly. 

The woman’s attention is shifted from the screen, and a polite smile is plastered onto her face. “Oh, I’m sorry. Just these, is all.”

[heythereunderoos]

Medium: Charcoal

Pairing: Kidnapper!Tony x Peter Parker Word Count: 2327 Warnings: Stockholm syndrome, kidnapping, foul language

Peter tried his hand with various mediums. He had attempted painting with water colors and acrylics and oils, then he had decided that it hadn't suited him much. He was by no means a bad painter, but there just wasn't anything that particularly suited him. He had tried so many different brushes with different bristles in different sizes with different paints and nothing looked right. Nothing felt right. Drawing was his strong suit.

When Peter drew the medium could be as cruddy as a Crayola crayon, it hadn't mattered because maneuvering the utensil across the page felt right.

When Peter was taken from May, away from home and to wherever home was now, with Tony, drawing was one of the only things that had remained constant. It kept Peter grounded and calm and had ultimately allowed him to become acclimated to his new life with Tony.  Peter drew with whatever Tony could provide him, and was genuinely grateful that he was concerned with his well being.

Peter couldn't sleep on nights like these. Honestly? Nights like these weren't any particular night, they were just nights in general. Peter blamed his insomniac tendencies on the fact that Tony had took him at night.

It was especially chilly that night in the apartment and Peter was attempting some colorful calligraphy with a Tombow marker he had splurged on. His eyes were trained on the fluidity with which his hand had crossed the page, and he supposed that was why the sound of the apartment door opening had remained entirely unnoticed to him.

"Harley?"

Peter jumped, his hand jerking across the page, and disrupting the beautiful string of letters on the page. With trembling fingers, the boy capped the marker and turned around in his chair.

"U-Um, h-hello sir? I-I'm Peter. P-Peter Parker."

The man stared back at Peter with a kind of yearning and desperation that captured Peter's artistic eye and he'd hoped to convey those emotions in gray scale.

"Harley." The man repeated, but his tone altered slightly, rather than lilting in question in ended abruptly to indicate fact.

"N-No," Peter shook his head gently, twisting the cap on the marker to give his hands something to fidget with as he spoke up softly, "my n-name is Peter. Peter Parker.

When the man stepped forward and his large calloused hand wrapped around Peter's wrists, he had wished that May didn't work the night shift. That he had stayed out with MJ or was building Legos with Ned. He had wished he had been anywhere but here.

As he was pulled to his feet, the pink marker fell from Peter's fingers and a sharp cold object was pressed into the side of his throat. He tried hard to fight the grimace that graced his features.

"You're coming with me, Peter Parker."

When the memory faded from behind his eyelids, he glanced over at the man that laid in the bed they shared. Peter's eyes looked over the stubble that peppered his jawline, his parted pink lips that were slightly parted and the way he could see the breath the older man inhaled then exhaled. He noted the way Tony's eyebrows tugged together and the whimper that escaped his lips. Then as if on cue, the man sat upright and turned over in one singular motion, his hands reaching for Peter.

"Pete." His dark brown eyes were wide with worry, and he shook tenderly, heaving in air, as a trickle of sweat cascaded down his neck and traced the harsh line of his collar bone.

Peter took the older mans rough hands into his gently, and gave him a soft smile.

"I'm right here, Tony." The older man nodded, and took his bottom lip between his teeth, as if in thought. Peter released one of his hands and used it to cup his cheek.

"Go back to sleep, and I promise I'll be right here when you wake up." The boy's smile widened as the man seemed to snap out of his trance and continue nodding, allowing Peter to lay him back gently as he ran his hands through the man's graying locks.

"I'll always be right here." Peter whispered, both content and slightly solemn as he carded his fingers through Tony's hair.

The boy watched silently, continuing to card his fingers through the thick strands of Tony's hair as the man slowly succumbed to the grips of sleep. He sat there for a while longer, continuing to play with the hair beneath his fingertips, before he gently shifted off the bed.

When Peter's insomnia became especially bad, he found it eased him to wander the house. It allowed his body something to do, and gave him things to ponder as well.

Peter had been here for a long time. He wasn't entirely sure how long a long time was but he could say with certainty it had been at least a year since Tony had brought him here. Since he had seen May. Or been out with MJ. Or had built a Lego set with Ned.

He shook those thoughts out of his head as he began wandering the house aimlessly. His mind began wandering into dark places, as his feet shuffled, and suddenly he found himself face to face with the door to the basement.

In all his time here, Peter hadn't gone near the basement. Tony had told him it was off limits, and he was too scared to look.

His eyes traced the door. It was a pretty standard white door with a sharp black trim and his insomnia toyed with the notion of twisting the knob and discovering the secrets that were buried beneath his quaint new home.

Surrendering to his inquisitive nature, the boy gripped the knob pushed ever so lightly as the door squeaked open. Peters eyes stared into the darkness as he took a shaky breath as he searched for a light switch. His fingers fumbled against the cold damp walls, and he released a breath he hadn't realized he'd been holding when the light flickered to life.

Warily, the boy made his way down the creaky, wooden steps and began taking in his surroundings. The area was surprisingly empty, a table covered in boxes to his left, and a few empty bins to his right. As his bare feet came into contact with the cool concrete floor, his eyes began adjusting to the dank room. With a sigh, he allowed his feet to lead him to the corner of the room with the numerous boxes piled atop each other, stacked neatly upon an old, worn wooden table. His eyes traced over the dust covered boxes, and eyed one that had words scribbled in fading black ink.

Scrapbooks and Photos

Peter stared for moment, before his hands reached for the box, taking it into his arms before he collapsed onto the cold for, placing the box before him. Inhaling through his nose, he puffed his cheeks and blew most of the dust of the box, before peeling the flaps back. Inside was a large green leather book, that Peter carefully collected in his arms before he situated himself with his legs crossed and placed the book in the nook of his legs. He flipped open the cover and his eyes traced over the first page.

Tony, Pepper, and Harley present to you, our family scrapbook.

At this Peter falters.

A family? Tony had never mentioned a family. Then again, Tony hadn't revealed much to Peter despite the longevity of Peter's stay. He shook of the nagging thought that Tony knew far more about Peter than the reverse and continued to flip the pages.

Tony and Pepper are Wed!

Peter looked at the picture of a slender woman with milky white skin and citrus-y orange locks hid beneath a veil, and her blue eyes that stared at Tony's bright shining smile as if he hung the stars in the sky. Peter couldn't help but smile at the joy that emanated from the picture and turned his eyes to the next page where another caption was written in tiny neat handwriting.

Pepperony in Honolulu

It was printed Polaroid of the woman, Pepper, Peter presumed, and Tony with fruity drinks embellished with paper umbrellas laid in the sand, both of them positively vibrant. Peter chuckled at the goofy look on Tony's face as he clutched the thick page between his fingers and turned it over. Peter read the captions of the pictures put on one page before glancing over at the empty page, as if a picture had fallen out.

Pepper has a bun in the oven!

Harley Keener Stark is born

The baby boy, Harley, looked impossibly small cuddled up into Tony's chest, and Pepper looked absolutely physically defeated in the background of the photo, but the light and joy residing within her ocean blue eyes was undeniable. And the love ingrained within her features, the way her eyes crinkled and stared so passionately down at her baby bump in the other photo made Peter's heart swell. This boy, Harley, whoever he was was truly loved by the two of them. Peter continued to flip through the pages, glancing over the captions as he watched Harley grow older whilst simultaneously watching his parents' love for him develop to even greater heights. Then something peculiar happens. The images stop. There are no captions, no more photos. The scrapbook simply ends and Peter is left completely puzzled.

What happened to all that love? So much adoration just...gone?

Peter shakes his head and closes the scrapbook, setting it down on the floor beside him as he sifts through the remnants of loose photos that lie within the box. Peter stares at pictures of Pepper and Tony in college, their baby photos, photos of first dates, and old friends, and yet there is not a single other picture of Harley.

Then Peter starts to put things together and he runs upstairs to grab his sketchpad and his withering piece of charcoal. After collecting his items, he rushes back down the stairs and flips the scrapbook open to the most recent picture of Harley he can find. It's an endearing one, one where Harley's hair is a mess of curls and his cheeks are round with baby fat adorning a smudge of grease on the top of his right cheek, and his smile is undoubtedly contagious. Peter then flips open to a fresh page in his sketch book and his fingers grip the charcoal as he begins sketching out guidelines. Formulating a scene for the photograph in front of him as his hands work on quickly creating a new image.

"Harley!" Tony would call, his hands stained with grease as he worked on another gadget, just for fun this time, not for business. The small boy would come bounding in the room, practically bouncing towards his father with the biggest smile on his face.

"Daddy!" The boy would respond, with his baby fat fists opening and closing to create a grabbing motion that the father would only assume would mean that the child wanted to be picked up. Tony would smile with a gentle roll of his eyes as he wiped the grease off on his already tarnished pants and reached for the small boy under the arms. The boy would giggle and squirm because he was ticklish and simply because he loved his fathers attention.

"Have you been messing with Daddy's things again?" Tony would accuse the boy, and Harley would shake his head with fervor, insisting he had done no such things, and Tony would nod in faux understanding as he swiped the grease from his son's cheek, and held the finger in front of his sons bright blue eyes.

"So this has nothing to do with Daddy's things, now does it?" Tony's eyebrow would raise in accusation and the boy would release a fit of giggles as Tony attempted to tickle the truth out of him.

They would be happy.

There would be so much love.

Peter came to as he finished the rendering. It was of Harley at Peter's age. His jaw was strong, similar to that of his fathers, but his eyes were kind, like that of his mother and Peter sighed gently.

Wherever Harley was, he hoped he would like it.

Peter signed it off in the corner, and stared at the haunting image, not even hearing the thudding of footsteps.

"Peter?! What the hell are you doing down here? I told you to never, ever--" Peter's eyes found Tony's as Tony's grip locked like a vise around his thin arms and Peter grimaced.

"You don't ever come down here, understood?" Tony spoke with urgency and then his eyes turned fiery as he saw the open scrapbook.

"You were being nosy and thumbing through my things?" Peter grimaced, but nodded, and fumbled for his sketchbook.

"B-But look what I m-made for you," He smiled softly as he placed the sketchbook in Tony's free hand and his eyes didn't hold that desperation that Peter saw so very long ago. No, they were fiery, and then as his eyes crossed of the image repeatedly, Peter saw his eyes nearly identical to that of those photographed within the scrapbook. Filled with only love and adoration, and then they turned glassy and the sketchbook fell from his hands as he wrapped his arms tightly around Peter.

"D-Do you like it?" Peter whispered, locking his arms around Tony's neck. The older man shook gently from the sobs that wracked his body as he nodded with vigor.

"It's beautiful baby boy."

Leaning away from him subtly, Tony chuckled as his thumb found the younger boy's right milky cheek, using the finger to swipe away the smudge of charcoal on the top.

And finally the story clicked in Peter's head.

Harley was gone, and Pepper had left. Tony was all alone and when he found Peter that night, randomly trying to burglarize their apartment, he saw the uncanny resemblance and all that love? All those memories of nothing but adoration stored within those photographs? It had to go somewhere.

Peter was his new love.

[ecotone99]

The Lonely Road [HR]

If you ever passin’ through the town of Clearwater, come by the bar, the Corner Pocket, for a drink and some mighty good food. The owners, Dave and Mary Puckette, know everybody, and if you need a room or some gas, they’ll get you to the right place. The Richards, Frank and Sammy, own the only bed and breakfast in town, it’s twenty-five dollars a night, but you have to eat breakfast with them in the morning, and help with the dishes. Mark and his son, Mat, own the gas station/car shop, and are real helpful and friendly with almost anything you could need. If ‘n they can’t fix it, they’ll drive you out about fifty miles to the nearest bus stop, free of charge. The grocer and pharmacist, Abby, sells the best strawberries in Clearwater, but stay away from the corn. If you want good corn, or squash, talk to David and Sarah, the big farmers just a hop skip and jump from the edge of town.

We don’t have much in the way of entertainment, but every saturday we have and arts and music day in the town square, with picnic lunches and pies sold by Tom Clabbot, he owns a pastry shop on the opposite corner of the Corner Pocket. Come out on October 20th for the harvest festival, with hayrides and apple cider, pumpkin or apple pie, and fresh ice cream. It mayn’t be much, but we’re a small town, with only an elementary school, with a handful of teachers, and that’s mostly a daycare if anything. We send our young’uns to the big school in the bigger town thirty miles away. It’s mighty peaceful here, and if company and hospitality is what you’re after, boy, you’ve found yourself a place. We only have one clear rule, outsides the law, and that’s you’ve gotta stick to the main road. You can keep on driving, pass right through with a blink and never know that we were here. You could stop for gas and ask for the fastest way back to the highway, and the answer is to keep on driving through. You’ll be sternly warned to stay on the main road, and not to go wandering off.

We’re a peaceful, happy folk, but if you mention that old, dark road that stretches off into the woods past the farm, you’ll put a stop to the fun right quick, and nobody wants that. You just stick to the main road, stranger, and everything’ll be alright. What’s so special about that lonely old road, you ask? Good luck getting an answer to that question.The last traveler who came through here asked the same thing, and nobody ever saw him again. A few days later we found his car tire by the woods, and that was the end of that conversation. Oh, I very much can leave it at that, youngin’ I’ve said too much as it is. These old bones don’t have the strength to handle the fright. Oh, settle down, settle down. If you’re so dang determined, go talk to Hank Fletcher. Oh, he doesn’t live anywhere, he’s the town drunk, and he usually is out by the Corner Pocket til it closes. If you hurry, you’ll find him, but you’ll have to buy him a few drinks before he’ll talk. Hank is the only one that ever went down that road and came back, he hasn’t talked since Sheriff Briggs fond him twenty years ago, shivering, and scared white, with horrible wounds all over him.

Now, what are doing back here? I thought I told you… Oh, he didn’t want to talk, even drunk? Fine, I’ll talk, if only to keep you from doing something real foolhardy. All I can give you id the legend, of course. All us kids grew up with the stories and warnings, you see. Well, no, I didn’t go down there, I wanted to keep my head, which you don’t seem to want to do. You keep interrupting and I won’t talk. Now, where to start? Well, I’ll go to the beginning, back to when this country was just starting out, wasn’t really a country yet, I suppose. See, there was an indian tribe that lived out here, the Wyandot. They were wary of the white man when he first came over, and the white man didn’t much care for the Wyandot. There was a whole lot of fighting, with both sides escalating and becoming more and more evil. One day, the Wyandot Chief and Oliver James, the settlers leader, met to draw up a truce, as there had been heavy casualties on both sides, and they were tired of war. They decided to draw a line in the sand, the Wyandot would stay on one side, the settlers on the other. That worked for eighty years, till Oliver’s son died, and his son, Benjamen, blamed the Wyandot. The truce was broken when Ben and his troops snuck into the Wyandot camp and slaughtered every man, woman and child. Except for the Wyandot Chief, that is.

He had been away, on a solo hunting trip. When he came back, and saw his people murdered, he went crazy, and swore revenge. At this point, Ben had moved his people into the forest, and started taking wood, building a fort for defense. The Wyandot Chief couldn’t fight back alone, so he used some kinda connection to the earth or other nonsense, and bonded his soul to the trees. The forest fought back for him, destroying the fort, and everyone but a few settlers that hadn’t gone along with Benjamin’s plans, and stayed at the old camp.

The trees are alive in there, son. On quiet nights, you can hear what sounds like the trees are walking around in there. Not just the trees, the moss, the flowers, even the wildlife had gone crazy in there. IT’s been like that ever since. In 1956, somebody tried to expand the town, despite the townsfolk warnin’ ‘im, and well, the town’s still the same as it’s been. Stay on the main road, and you’ll be fine, grab a pint at the Corner Pocket, spend the night at the Richard’s, but whatever you do, don’t go off the beaten path. Now, as it’s gettin’ late, why don’t you come in for supper? We’re having birch beer and vegetable soup.

submitted by /u/Canoe-Maker [link] [comments] via Blogger http://bit.ly/2Z3uq87

[how2to18]

CARL SKOGGARD IS a writer who lives with his partner, Joe Holtzman, along with their dogs in a converted cow slaughterhouse outside of Hudson, New York. Picture a metal chain that dangles down into the kitchen foyer with a substantial hook and track that runs the length of the room, and a concrete floor with little grooves where blood was meant to pool and flow … 

But this is hardly the most eye-catching element of their home — which is more like a technicolored compound, with giant papier-mâché animal head busts mounted on the walls, furniture upholstered with prints of lily pads and rabbits giving birth, and everything from radiators to electric strips to ceiling panels painted in bright patterns, reds and yellows. Holtzman, the designer, was also the founder and editor-in-chief of Nest: A Quarterly of Interiors, the celebrated and now defunct design publication with a cult-like following. Throughout its run between 1997 and 2004, Carl penned much of the magazine’s singular copy and wrote many articles — often unattributed. 

More recently, Carl has turned to translation. Beginning in 2015, he published English versions of several lesser-known works by Walter Benjamin, including an obscure poetry collection, Sonnets (2015), which the philosopher wrote to a young man he was in love with. In October 2016, Carl published a translation of German film theorist, critic, and Frankfurt School essayist Siegfried Kracauer’s novel Georg (2016), and he’s nearly completed bringing the author’s second book, Ginster, into English as well. 

Last January, when he was out in Los Angeles, Carl and I sat down for a cocktail at the Langham Hotel in Pasadena, where we had a conversation about how he ended up spending his post-Nest days obsessing over early 20th-century German writing.

¤

CARL SKOGGARD: It was a chain of circumstances, really. I was 59 or 60 years old. I had finished working at a musicology day job — database work — where I had been for 30 years. I also had been working at Nest magazine, as a caption writer and, occasionally, I’d do a feature story. When all of that started coming to an end, people who knew a bit about my writing from Nest started coming at me with projects — not projects that I would have necessarily chosen. This was all back in the fall of 2007, when I was in Berlin. On the nightstand in my bedroom there was this book called Berliner Kindheit um neunzehnhundert — Berlin Childhood around 1900. I knew nothing about it. I knew who Walter Benjamin was, vaguely. So I read a bit of it, and thought it was fascinating. It was also very hard to understand, but I knew it was in some sense beautifully written.

PETER NOWOGRODZKI: What about it was fascinating?

It was somehow able to draw you in, but at the same time you didn’t really know exactly what you were reading. You know? It was just kind of incantatory. I decided to look it up, and I found out that there was an existing translation — which I looked at. The tone didn’t appeal to me. The tone that’s given to the persona — this kind of anonymous child who is really Walter Benjamin. He’s styling himself as this participant in an anonymous childhood in a certain place and time. So I thought, I’ll do a translation of this. That’s actually how this translation business started for me. Simple as that.

So you started with Berlin Childhood — and then how did you land on Georg?

Land on him … I did the three Benjamin’s that are primarily autobiographical. The last of those three was a book of sonnets, which no one had ever translated. So that felt good. I should add that all of these books have extensive, line-by-line commentary. They’re close interpretations. So a few years later I was again in Berlin. In the same person’s house where I came across Berlin Childhood. She’s a film student, finishing her doctorate, and she had been reading Siegfried Kracauer. She said to me, “You ought to think about translating this — this is really funny. It’s never been translated” — referring to one of the two novels by Kracauer. I looked into it and saw that it was very quick paced and, as I came to think, cinematic; kind of satirical in a 1920s Otto Dix style. Like George Grosz, those people. It was just such a fine portrait of the tumult and confusion of the 1920s, seen through this subject who is basically anonymous.

That particular history — that tumult and confusion — feels oddly relevant right now.

Very much so. God, I can quote from my own blurb here:

Kracauer’s “Georg is a panorama of those years” — the post–World War I years in Germany — “as seen through the eyes of a rookie reporter working for the fictional Morgenbote (Morning Herald). In a defeated nation seething with extremism right and left, young Georg is looking for something to believe in. For him, the past has become unusable; for nearly everyone else he meets, paradise seems just around the corner. But which paradise? Kracauer’s grimly funny novel takes on a confused and dangerous time which can remind us of our own.

That’s about it, you know?

Maybe I was reading this into it, but it seemed as though the author had a certain contempt for Georg. If not contempt, then certainly a judgmental distance. Georg is portrayed as this naïve idealist.

He’s an everyman. People generally are confused, and can’t see around the corner too well …

Do you think Kracauer had empathy for the character? It seemed almost a satirical cartoon of that person.

Well, it’s strange. It’s very true, that it’s satirical. On the other hand, there’s a great deal of his own specific personal experience in the book. He might have felt that he wanted to distance himself from it. In the novel, Georg, who is in his 20s, would like to have a relationship with a young man, Fred, barely in his mid-teens. It’s interesting — there’s no prudery in this, but he has the character experience a denouement where he finally discovers that this boy is not interested in him in this way. Of course, the boy was very admiring of him as an older person who took an interest in him — but it has this sort of comic undoing. Georg and this boy go on a vacation together and that’s what happens, he realizes he’s built this kind of castle on the sand.

But the actual fact of the matter is that Kracauer himself had a relationship with none other than Theodor Adorno. He met Adorno when he was 14 or 15. Kracauer was 25 or so. And they used to read Kant every Sunday. And they stayed friends their whole lives — it was one of these sort of bitchy relationships, you know, prickly and with ego in it. I can actually identify with Kracauer. This younger Adorno, in later life, became very well established. At the center of their type of intellectual life. He would write letters to Kracauer and say things like, “Well there you go, you don’t need to be so defensive.” It was one of these things where I always identified with Kracauer. He was vulnerable.

So how do you think Kracauer would have regarded Georg, even if it is sort of a semi-autobiographical character for him?

He gives Georg many of his most important personal traits. His shyness, his wanting to withdraw. As he reached manhood, World War I ended, Kracauer was sort of casting about, and he ended up becoming a newspaper reporter, and then very quickly becoming a powerbroker in his position at the leading liberal paper of the time. He must have been very ambitious. And here at the beginning of the book, Georg is always saying he wants to make a mark on the world. But what’s more obvious is that Georg is tremendously shy, and he wants to flee situations all the time. And, you know, this is obviously autobiographical. Then on the other hand — again — he makes Georg into an ordinary person. Kracauer was clearly an extraordinary person. How could he have gone from walking into the equivalent of The New York Times and then three years later hiding out in a back room deciding whose essays and criticisms would get published. There must have been something remarkable about him.

Did you identify with Georg?

I just identified with his general ability to be wounded by the right sort of person.

But then his earnestness keeps getting sort of put to use by other people with more clear agendas or beliefs.

He’s actually attracted to Catholicism, and I think there’s another parallel with Kracauer there. Kracauer flirted with Catholicism. You know, after World War I, everyone was feeling like the world had fallen apart. Politically it was all in turmoil, particularly in Germany, but elsewhere, too. And there was a wide movement in intellectual life and in the arts to find a way of reestablishing order. You can see it if you go to the Norton Simon Museum and look at the Picassos from the 1920s — his neoclassical interest; the placid, simple forms. You can see that impulse. Kracauer was interested in what a religion could provide — something like Catholicism — in terms of getting you something you could live by.

In your personal commentary at the end of the book, you refer to Georg as a “divining rod.” What do you mean when you say he’s a divining rod? What is he leading us toward?

He’s looking for what holds promise. For getting us out of the mess we’re in. And, also, in his case, what he can seize on to become a person, to make a difference.

And he doesn’t find that. Isn’t that sort of the dysfunctional divining rod? Or do you think he does find what he’s looking for?

No, he doesn’t. The end of the book is so obvious. Professionally he’s a fool, because he is working at this sophisticated newspaper that’s using all kinds of tactical maneuvering to position itself in this turbulent world — and he’s writing articles that are unwittingly just the thing the paper wanted …

He keeps accidentally serving the agenda of these bureaucrats.

Without even thinking, “Oh, I’ve done it this time.” He comes in and they explain to him patiently why it was another stroke of genius on his part. But then at the end he gets a little carried away with his general critique of capitalism. And, of course, the newspaper is borrowing more funding from bankers at this point. The Frankfurter Zeitung actually did sell half of itself to I. G. Farben, the world’s largest chemical company, headquartered in Frankfurt. The company was broken up after the war because it had done so much to facilitate the war effort — made the gas that they used in the concentration camps, everything. It’s never discussed in the novel, but that’s in the background here. That’s why this Doktor Petri that you read about in the novel is in such a bind — he’s trying to pretend that he’s still such a good liberal democrat, and yet he’s taking money from these big industrial interests to keep the paper afloat. And Georg walks into that and makes a big mess of things by offering this big critique of capitalism at the bank director’s house. And then he finally speaks the truth in the most significant, general way, and gets fired for that.

Right, so we have Georg as fool professionally. And then Georg as failed divining rod — I guess I thought at the end there was meant to be something redemptive …

Kracauer wrote this book between 1930 and 1934, and in 1934 he had to leave Germany and set up in France, where he was trying to interest French publishers. In the précis, he says that Georg is “disillusioned but now he’s wise.” That’s what he wanted to think. I think it is a little more artistic than that. Sometimes you’re more artistic than you can be in your précis, when you’re trying to boil it down. Because I thought that Georg, first of all, could change his mind again. That’s the thing about him, he was never committed.

Right at the same time Kracauer wrote this novel, he wrote a well-known short book about the white-collar masses, which were a burgeoning sector of the economy at the time. And Kracauer was watching them — he was in Berlin at the time, from 1930 to 1933, working for the Berlin bureau of this paper. And he got this idea that the white-collar worker was ripe for being lured by fascism. Because they had this fragile status that could be disrupted at any moment, and they could be sent plunging toward a proletarian status, without even any unions to back them up or help them.

And he was right.

Yes. And this is Georg’s situation in the last chapter, when he’s moved to Berlin and he’s looking for work. He’s been fired by the paper. There’s that wonderful passage at the end where he’s just sort of flowing down the main boulevard of the western part of the city, the bourgeois part of the city, the Kurfuerstendamm. It’s just this sort of apocalyptic scene where he leaves the upper reaches that are still very sedate and quiet and firmly in control of the wealthy. He goes down and down and down, and then you’re in this river of office workers who are hungry and angry. Ants crawling on the street. You’ve got this lurid atmosphere, and the weather suddenly changes and becomes stormy. The book ends right there. There ceases to be any further mention of him in the last pages. And then there are two more pages of description but you feel he’s gone, lost. This all relates to that book that Kracauer wrote at the same time about the white-collar worker. Because Georg is a white-collar worker.

Now that you’ve had this kind of intimate relationship with Kracauer’s texts and writings, what are your feelings toward him?

Well, I’m not one of those people who, in translating, feel like they’re in direct contact with the author. I only feel in contact with his voice and literary rhythm, and his way of turning on a dime in sentences, his spoken and unspoken ironies. I feel in touch with him in that way, but I don’t feel like I know him as a person.

Do you lose track of yourself in that process?

No, you can’t. I came up with this idea for what translating is like. You’re in a certain place at a certain time and someone gives you a bucket. And it’s filled with water, but there’s a leak in the bottom of the pail. The further you walk with it, the more it leaks and the more water you lose. What are you going to do? You’re going to have to add some more water of your own to keep the bucket full.

Does that produce a sense of anxiety?

Well, I’m at peace with it now. I just think that’s what it amounts to. You’re actively participating in what comes out. You’re not faithfully registering. That’s not really what’s going on. When I first started translating, I thought that’s what I should be doing. And I thought I’d like to be particularly careful about preserving the syntax, mirroring syntax. What happens is that, you absorb the whole, and then you can selectively draw on it when you are faced with a problem.

Once you were in the position of choosing a creative pursuit, why did you go with translation instead of —

Writing myself? You’ve got to ask my doctor about that. It feels like there’s some fundamental act of making up a whole world and making up people that I guess I don’t like or I don’t feel able or entitled to do.

Interesting that you’re also saying the particular piece of the translation that’s the most exciting is the part where you take the liberty to sort of cut loose from the author and do your own thing.

Correct. My own personal experience of it is that I’m sometimes quite miserable. These are not easy texts here. I should mention that I have one or two people in Germany who will help me with problems and difficult passages. They assure me that these Kracauer and Benjamin texts are very difficult. Kracauer in particular is very idiosyncratic, a hard nut to crack sometimes. So in the beginning, I’m always very unhappy. Do I really know what he’s trying to say? It’s like knocking on a wall looking for studs, and it’s hollow, hollow, hollow. I can tell when I don’t understand something. But then you become comfortable with it, because there’s nothing to find behind that wall. After that phase of not feeling too happy about it, you feel like you probably understand what there is to understand. And then you get to this phase of refining, and toward the end it’s as if you’re making it sing. I’m always very happy with that, when I get to that point. And then I always forget everything else. It’s like a car accident: you forget how bad it was once you’re over it.

¤

Peter Nowogrodzki lives in Los Angeles. He is an editor at FENCE. His work has appeared in the Guardian, The Paris Review, Triple Canopy, and elsewhere.

The post “You Ought to Think About Translating This”: A Conversation with Carl Skoggard appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

from Los Angeles Review of Books https://ift.tt/2legcPo via IFTTT

[hellstate--rp-blog]

↪ b a s i c s ;

N A M E: Noah Ashbury A G E: 26 P L A C E   O F   O R I G I N: Malibu, California G R O U P: None F C: Matthew Daddario

❝ My life amounts to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean. Yet what is any ocean, but a multitude of drops? ❞

↪ p e r s o n a l i t y ;

P O S I T I V E   T R A I T S: devout ; scrupulous N E G A T I V E   T R A I T S: enigmatic ; self-conscious

↪ b i o g r a p h y ;

L I F E   B E F O R E   T H E   O U T B R E A K:

From the very beginning, Noah Ashbury was used as a tool to bring happiness and joy to others. Everything, even from before he was born, was like a fairy tale. The couple met in high school and grew up only houses apart from one another. His father was a man of his word, loyal, intelligent, and athletic. His mother was the one who put everyone to shame when it came to school, finishing at the top of her class. Together, they became an unstoppable force, the high school sweethearts that everyone admired and loved. After high school, the two of them carried on with the rest of their lives, his father becoming a lawyer and his mother following the path of many different jobs and hobbies. Eventually, the two were married and soon enough, had a child. The family lived in a house on the side of the PCH, their backyard being the vast expanse of the ocean. As a child, his parents would take him out to the beach, setting up towels and blankets from their infant to crawl and lay down on. With the blissful sounds of waves crashing on the shore and the seagulls calling out to one another, Noah would find himself at peace and in a state of complete and utter happiness. Every year, he became more aware of his surroundings, more in tune with the ocean and nature. His parents, who had been surfing the Malibu beaches since they were kids, had always encouraged his interest in the ocean. As soon as he learned how to swim, his father began to take him out to the water and taught him how to surf. With every second that passed, he learned and grew better and better at it. Sure enough, Noah quickly became trusted to go down to the beaches alone, the hardest task for him being the tricky and difficult trip through the sand while he carried the bulky surfboard with him. But still, his parents never failed to go out with him every once in a while to watch him surf and give him pointers on how to improve his abilities. The beach had become his safe haven, the place he went to feel good and to forget about all of life’s troubles. Every day after school, it became a routine. Rush home, finish his homework, change into his wetsuit, and run out to the beach where he could be reunited with the one thing in life that made sense. Outside of this, Noah faced difficulties with other people. While many would assume that his chipper demeanor would be well-liked, Noah experienced something completely different. His inability to stand up for himself and draw the line when things got too bad had often left him in troubling situations. The other boys in his class would terrorize him at school, constantly belittling him and putting him down. However, his parents and grandparents had made things clear from the beginning. They made sure that he knew the importance of kindness and because of this, things remained the same. But as long as he had the ocean, things would be okay.

The day had gone without a hitch, his day at school seemed better than usual and his ride home being much quicker than it ever had been. For the day, things seemed to be looking up. However, when he got home, he was greeted with police cars outside of his door and officers speaking with his crying mother. There had been no sign of his father and immediately, his mind began to race with everything that could have happened, but still, he was able to self-soothe and convince himself that his worries weren’t true. They couldn’t be. But once his mother had realized that he was home, the truth quickly came out. His father, who had been on a business trip in San Diego and was not supposed to come home until later that night, had gotten into a head-on collision with a drunk driver. Everything from that point seemed to move slowly. The days grew longer, his appetite dissipated, and his mood lowered. At twelve years old, his father had passed away and he was left without any closure, without a chance to say goodbye to him. As the years passed, Noah found himself with a feeling that he couldn’t quite shake. It was an all-consuming sadness that filled his entire being and made it harder for him to function. Going to school, doing homework, and even surfing became too tiring for him. Finding happiness and the light at the end of the tunnel seemed pointless, but he continued on with life, acting as though nothing was wrong. For the most part, he was able to fool his friends and allude his mother from the truth. But as his grades began to slip and his attendance dropped, she began to worry for her son. His mother’s solution to the problem was sending him to a therapist once a week. Each session carried out the same routine: they say hello, he sits on the couch, and for the next hour, he sits in silence, refusing to answer the therapist’s questions. His behavior was worrisome, but never to the point where they even considered a higher level of treatment. This carried on for nearly three years before Noah reached his breaking point. There was no specific incident that triggered it, rather it had built up over time and finally became too much. He found a bottle of his father’s old prescriptions still sitting in the medicine cabinet and stole a bottle of vodka from the liquor store down the street. Coming home early from school, he stuffed a handful of pills into his mouth, using the vodka to wash them down. Slowly, nausea and drowsiness overcame him until he drifted off peacefully. It wasn’t beautiful, nor was it poetic. When he awoke, fluorescent lights filled his vision and his mother sat in the corner of the room, fast asleep. The next few weeks went by slowly as he was quickly swept away by an EMT and taken to the nearest hospital. There, he spent day after day going to various groups. Community, art, recreation—it all felt so trivial, so demeaning. The ever-present pressure to open up to his therapist and to his peers was overwhelming for him. Eventually, he gave in and before he knew it, he was out of the hospital and back at home.

Very little changed after that. The only differences were his mother constantly worrying over his mental state, the medications he was now being forced to take, and every sharp object, pills, and alcohol being locked away from Noah. While he didn’t like any of these things, he did learn to cope with it and just accept his mistakes for what they were. The therapy sessions continued after but were still the most difficult thing for Noah to deal with because he didn’t know how to think for himself or even feel for himself. He only knew how to be there for others and how to put on a smile. He spent that summer catching up with his credits and the following year, he graduated from high school. Noah’s life had begun to get back on track as his daily routines steadied themselves. Surfing became his passion once more and he was able to participate in competitions during the summer between high school and college. With his freshman year just around the corner, Noah’s anxiety levels raised and with it so did his intake of alcohol. Parties that he had never really enjoyed before seemed to be the answer to all of his problems and before he knew it, Noah had been sucked into the life of being a frat boy. Noah hid his mental illnesses from his peers, hoping that if he did, he would continue to be accepted as one of them. He did everything in his power to avoid being alienated as he once was and in doing so, began to get into trouble with his school and the local cops. Noise complaints, underage drinking arrests, and threats to be kicked out of his school became a reality. However, none of this was enough for him to ever get his act together. Even with his aspiration to become a marine biologist, Noah was unable to fully apply himself to the educational program. One day, he received a call from his mother requesting to have lunch with him. For the most part, he was able to hide the problems he was facing at school, but he still worried that she only wanted to meet with him to scold him. Instead, she revealed that she had been diagnosed with stage four breast cancer. This came as a shock to Noah and gave him the push he needed in order to do better. He decided to quit his fraternity and move back into his house with his mother so that he could help take care of her. He buckled down with his studies and did the work that he needed to do in order to graduate. Noah moved forward, studying to receive his master’s in biology. He managed to get an internship with a marine biologist where he was able to do more hands-on tasks. Despite his mother’s illness, Noah was happy.

L I F E   D U R I N G   T H E   O U T B R E A K:

From his time at the hospital to his success in his master’s program, Noah’s life had done a complete one-eighty. He continued to care for his mother and drove her to all of her appointments. Noah returned the love that she had shown her and dedicated himself to making her feel comfortable. While he knew her time on earth was dwindling, he also felt that if he gave her enough love, she’d be alright. One day, he sat beside her bed with a newspaper, reading to her all of the current events so she’d be updated. It was something that had become a tradition for them and reminded them of when the roles were reversed. On most days, there was nothing extraordinary to read. However, as he opened up the LA Times newspaper, he immediately focused on the headline. It was something about a virus and at first, it merely piqued his interest. He read it aloud and after, the two talked about the legitimacy. There were jokes here and there about zombie outbreaks, but in their hearts, they knew that things like that only happened in movies. Hardly even a day later, panic had taken over the city of Los Angeles while Noah and his mother were on their way home from the doctors. At first, it started out with a long line of traffic that was worse than usual. Then, crowds of people were running, scattered like ants. Noah didn’t know what to do so he had his mother jump on his back and he carried her as far as he could. Scenes of brutal violence and gore had haunted the two and Noah was forced to do whatever he needed to do in order to protect his mother. Within a day, they made it back to their house in Malibu. Quickly, they packed their bags and loaded up his father’s old car with all of the food that they could find. Together, they journeyed further into the Palisades where they unpacked their bags and found a safe place to live. Secure and isolated, they didn’t have to worry too much about the dead finding them. They did, however, have to fend off against those attempting to steal their resources and take over their house. Noah was determined to keeping his mother alive for as long as he could which enabled him to act with violence instead of kindness. Only a few months into the outbreak, Noah’s mother passed away. For the first time, he was alone and without a single person there to comfort him. He buried his mother alone and shortly after, decided to venture east.

It wasn’t long before Noah came across another survivor. It was a man who knew a lot of survival skill and luckily, was very generous. The man gave Noah a bow and arrow and helped him improve his skills while Noah agreed to teach him more things about first aid. From there, a friendship grew. They became close and though they had only known each other for a few months, felt like family. As they traveled further into the center of the country, raider groups became more common. For the most part, they were able to pass by without any problems. But their luck had to run out and when it did, a group of raiders attacked them, hunting them like animals. Noah’s partner in crime told him that he’d hold them off and urged him to continue running. Reluctantly, Noah followed orders and ran as fast as he could, for as long as he could. He waited months for his friend to find him, retracing his steps and leaving notes but nothing seemed to work. Eventually, Noah had to face the fact that he was most likely dead and it was all his fault. While the old Noah would have given up and thrown in the towel, the new Noah refused. His mother, father, and friend had died and Noah wanted to survive for them and make them proud. So he carried on, traveling town after town, city after city, state after state. Nearly a year into the outbreak, he came across a new problem. He was unable to find any more of the medication that he was taking prior to everything and now had to learn how to live without them. The feelings of depression and suicidal ideation began to resurface once more, and while he didn’t try to do anything bad, the fantasies were still there. Negative thoughts that put him in bad lighting filled his mind and the neverending train of insecurities ran amuck. There was now no one there to talk to or confide in and the overwhelming sense of helplessness filled his body. He was on a whole new level of self-hatred, one that he had not yet experienced.

L I F E   A F T E R   T H E   O U T B R E A K:

As life grew tiresome, Noah began to give up on things. Hunting for food was no longer as urgent and even making sure he had a weapon no longer crossed his mind. Every survival instinct that he had built up over the years had been knocked down. But talk of a city named Cheyenne surfaced and he heard stories of survivors being together and living as one. Noah took this as a sign and decided to go to the city to see for himself. It took months, but finally, he reached his destination. Noah was quickly taken into the Cheyenne State Capitol family where he took on the job of a carer. Out of all the challenges Noah has had to face, nothing was as difficult as it was to pull himself together in the presence of everyone else. He knew his life was hard but compared to everyone else, things for him were easy. Because of this, Noah took it upon himself to be the one to make things better. Over the course of a little over half a year, Noah had become comfortable with them. For some people, caring about so many people and being cared about in return would be a good thing. However, for Noah, this was dangerous. It opened up a door of co-dependency and before he knew it, he was unable to be happy without the help of another. Making them happy made him happy, but it also exhausted him. He grew tired and in a last minute decision, Noah packed up his bags and left the people that he had grown to love without a single word. For the first time, Noah was doing something for himself and while it was a difficult thing to do, he stuck by his actions and stayed away from the city. He ventured out into Colorado alone, quickly settling down in Fort Collins. For a couple of weeks, he was happy. Noah no longer needed to worry about anybody but himself. He didn’t have to do anything for anyone and was able to take care of himself. Sure, it was selfish, but it was also the much-needed break that Noah had subconsciously longed for. His mental health improved as the days went by but still, even with all of the stressors being gone, Noah found himself missing them. All of those people who cared for him and who he cared for were all the way in Cheyenne, probably under the impression that he was dead. Guilt began to eat away at him and before he could stop himself, Noah’s things were packed up again and he was hot-wiring a car to get back to Cheyenne. Though he had only been gone for a few weeks, Noah felt like a complete stranger again. His camp that he had come to love had lost people and gained people and because of this, Noah felt that it was pointless to return there. Instead, he decided to try life as a rogue. That way he could live close to his friends, but still, have the ability to be on his own and not constantly worry about the people he lived with.