#aesthetic. what a strange illusion it is to suppose that beauty is goodness.

[desanctii]

Walt Whitman “Song Of The Open Road” / Julie Kagawa “The Eternity Curse” / Michelle Hodkin “The Evolution of Mara Dyer” / Ed Ruscha, 1989 / Gayle Forman “Just One Year” / Maria Mazziotti Gillan “Ghost Voices”

[bellatrixobsessed1]

Light Disorientation

Azula Week Day 2: Azula Rare Pairs

Summary: Sometimes things distort in her mind. Sometimes she confuses the past with the present. Sometimes when she does, she is ugly in her mind.

Warnings: Mental Health Issues & Body Image Issues

Azula is not comfortable in her skin, more often than not it absolutely crawls. It helps very little that she is surrounded by such beautiful people. Katara with her mesmerizingly bright blue eyes and her deep complexion, Toph and her confident and charming smile, Suki and her toned arms and soft skin, Mai and her tall and elegantly willowy figure and TyLee with her...well, everything. Sokka has his muscular arms and a new collection of traditional Water Tribe tattoos. She doesn’t see Zuko’s appeal in the slightest but he has a vast crowd of giggling admirers. And while Aang isn’t exactly a looker, he’s got his heroics and his lovable mannerisms.

Perhaps, just a few years ago, in her prime, she had been something to look at and envy. But now...now she doesn’t want to look at herself even in passing. Her eyes have a bruised appearance, they are nowhere near as vivid as they had been. Her tangled locks aren’t so silky nor shiny. Her skin is drier somehow. In general, she thinks that she is muted, duller. She is hollow, her robes have a tendency to slide down her shoulders, more so than usual. And, unlike Aang, she doesn’t have a personality to make up for it. She isn’t approachable and endearing, her talents are terrifying. She has her itelligence but that never seems to matter anymore especially on the days when the clutter in her mind is too heavy for deep and critical thinking.  

She doesn’t like going on outings with the rest of them, no matter how well and forgivingly they treat her. She looks sloppy without the side by side comparison. With it...she cringes. Tonight she has subjected herself to the tortures of inferiority. TyLee had been so cheerful about the prospect of going to a party with her. The first one they’ve attended in ages. And she’d flashed that bright and cheerful little smile. That was all it had taken.

She is dressed as finely as she can be, but she doesn’t think that the outfit does her the favors she was hoping for and no amount of makeup seems to bring life to her expression. She is exceptionally dull with TyLee to her right and Katara to her left.

And by the middle of the party, they all have their own personal crowds. All except she. Azula’s stomach tickles with a discomfort that won’t seem to pass. She wishes that she was still beautiful or that she had some social graces. She wishes that she hadn’t let herself go so terribly far.

People pay her very little attention. And maybe she should be thankful for that. It means that they aren’t ridiculing her. That they aren’t informing her of things that she already knows, of the flaws she already sees.

She wishes that she had gotten better sleep, that she hadn’t chopped her bangs off, that she could muster up a better appetite, that she hadn’t started slacking on her training…

“Hi.”

She stares at her palms. She looks up to see that none of the crowds have dispersed, she wonders if she will ever get an opening to let one of the gang know that she is leaving. She thinks that she will slip out soon, they can find her at home.

She hears the clearing of her throat, “hello-o.”

Azula spares a glace over her shoulder.

The girl behind her waves, her face glows with a smile.

“What?”

The girl hums, “well you’re clearly the life of this party.” She drops down onto the couch next to her anyhow. “Is that why you’re alone?”

What a rude question. But it isn’t exactly untrue; she thinks that, among many other things, it is why she is alone now and always. She shrugs, “I guess. Probably.”

The girl rubs the back of her head. “Geez.”

Azula looks away from her again. Perhaps the girl will leave her alone if she doesn’t speak anymore. She isn’t so lucky. “Have you tried talking to anyone?”

Azula shakes her head.

“Why  not?”

She almost snapes, ‘because people ask too many questions.’ She only shrugs again and after a few moments she replies, “I guess that I don’t know what to say. People aren’t interested in Fire Nation history and battle strategizing.” They probably don’t want to be seen with someone so messy either.

“There are so many people here, you’re bound to find someone else that is.”

“Are you?”

“Nope,” the girl yawns, “boring.”

Azula’s face falls.

“But I’ll still listen if that’s what you want to talk about.”

She doesn’t want to talk about it. Or any of her other weird, and uninteresting interests.

“I’m Seicho, by the way.”

Azula nods, “why are you talking to me?”

“Well… you see, I recognize you. A while ago, before the war ended, there was a moment that has been haunting me ever since…”

Azula isn’t sure that she is following.

“And I had a few questions.”

“Such as?”

“You are princess Azula, right?”

She nods, though she wishes that she weren’t.

“And you did attend Chan’s beach party, right? That was you? The weirdo who laughs really loud and sets kuai ball nets on fire?”

Azula’s frown deepens. “What of it?”

“I just wanted to know why you put that drink on my head.”

“Your hands were full, where else was I supposed to put it?” It was quite simple really.

The girl laughs, “you could have held onto it or set it on some random table or something.”

She clears her throat, “your head was more convenient.”

“I...I guess…?” she laughs again. She stands up and for some reason Azula’s heart sinks. She thought that she might not be lonely tonight, but the girl has her answers and now she is...she is extending her hand out? Azula furrows her brows. “Do you know how to dance, princess?”

“I haven’t had a chance or a reason to learn.”

“It’s not that different from firebending, I’ll teach you a little something.” She offers.

If she knows what is good for her, she would stay out of the spotlight, keep attention well away from herself. The last thing that she needs is the entire party watching her decrepit body running clumsily through dance moves that she should have learned prior to attending. But she doesn’t want to be alone tonight. She isn’t sure what she will do if she is left alone…

She takes the girl’s hand. Azula doesn’t really want the attention. Not at all. The less eyes that take in her less than pleasing aesthetic, the better. But Seicho is a loud one. A bold one. And when she dips Azula back and pulls her up in time with the music for a third time she makes an announcement.

“I’m lucky!” She declares. “I have the prettiest dance partner in the room.”

She brushes Azula’s bangs out of her face--even, well trimmed bangs. Long bangs. And suddenly the illusion shatters. Suddenly her skin is soft with an even complexion. Suddenly her eyes aren’t so heavy and tired. Her frame is fuller and her lips uncracked. She remembers that she hasn’t been haggard and unhealthy in quite some time now. She remembers that sometimes things get distorted in her mind, that the past may layer itself over the future. She remembers that she is no longer fourteen and bound in chains. No longer sixteen and freshly emerging from an institution, exhausted and low.

She remembers that she is happy. This time when she looks in the mirror, the face that stares back at her is from the present; well groomed, healthy, and lively--albeit on the tired side tonight.

“Are you alright?” Seicho asks.

She thinks that she is, she is just...lightly disoriented. She needs a chance for her mind to catch back up to the present.  “I want to sit down for a moment.”

“Sure, princess.” Seicho replies, she guides Azula into a chair. “Would you like a drink?”

Azula nods.

They don’t hate her. Most people don’t. Most people are as indifferent as they ought to be. And they eyes that fall upon her aren’t judgmental, they are curious more than anything. She still isn’t a particularly social person, paradoxically, it is an invitation for more attention when she does attend parties.

Seicho holds out the glass, “just put it on the table this time, not my head, okay.”

“I think that I can manage.” She sips at the drink as the pieces shift back into place. She supposes that she should have known that she was having an off day when she overheard Zuko ask TyLee and Mai to keep an eye on her.

“So, what’s going on?” Seicho asks.

“Sometimes I…” She sets her drink aside. “Things get mixed up.” She points at her head. “I’m sure that you’ve heard by now…”

“Bits and pieces.” Seicho admits.

“Sometimes it feels like…” she furrows her brows, trying to articulate it. “Sometimes I go back to some of my worst days. Sometimes it’s full scale--I’m alone and I don’t have any friends. It feels like it anyhow. Other times it’s more of a blend.”

“A blend?”

“I know that they,” she gestures to the others, “are my friends.” It still feels strange to say, likely that is exactly what makes it so easy to forget when her head is not clear. “But I still feel like I did just after I was transferred to that facility.” Sometimes the image is so vivid in her mind that it appears in the mirror.

Seicho nods. “That sounds frightening.”

“I’m used to it.” It is a lie to make things less tense. Pity makes her uncomfortable anyhow.

“And that happened tonight?”

Azula nods. “It is a relief to know that I’m not a scraggly mess.” That she isn’t ugly and embarrassing to be around.

“It’s fine to be a scraggly mess sometimes.” Seicho replies.

“You didn’t see my haircut.” She grumbles.

“I’m sure that it was cute.” Seicho insists, ruffling her hair. “You have a pretty face, you can make it work.”

She shakes her head, “not then I didn’t.”

Seicho quirks a skeptical brow. She changes her approach. “Alright, fine, let’s say that you’re right…”

“I am right.”

“My point still stands. It’s okay to be a mess every now and again.” As if to accent her point she ruffles Azula’s hair entirely out of place. Azula grimances, this is something that she is still working on. Something that leaves her jittery.

“How about this?” Seicho offers. “You leave your hair like this for the rest of the night. If people treat you like shit for it then you can stick with your ridiculous standards.

“Ridiculous!?”

Seicho nods, “yes, ridiculous.”

Azula opens her mouth to protest. Seicho puts a finger to her lips. “You know what I think?”

Azula sighs, she has heard it so many times before from so many people from her therapist to TyLee. “That I’m perfect the way I am.”

Seicho crinkles her brows in disgust. “No! I think that you aren’t perfect, but it doesn’t really matter. You don’t have to be. If someone really loves or cares about you, they’ll look at your ugly haircut and decide that they like your pretty eyes enough to stay. They’ll acknowledge that you are uptight and cranky but they’ll stick around because you’re really smart and loyal.”

Azula swallows. “You’ve known me for maybe an hour…”

“And you leave some strong first impressions.” Seicho shrugs. “I was hoping that we can talk more after the party and I can see if I’m right.”

Azula’s stomach flutters. She has never been asked on a date before and she certainly hadn’t anticipated that to happen tonight. Agni knows that her lost and hurt fourteen year old self could have never conceptualized such a thing.

“That would be nice, Seicho.”

The girl grins. “Wonderful! Are you up for another dance?”

She lets the girl lead her back onto the dancefloor. Hair messy, dress slightly disheveled. And yet she feels much more confident than she had when she’d initially walked into the party.

[paleblood-skyler]

Some thoughts on my fascination with the horrible places in BB and DeS

...or how I learned to stop worrying and enjoy the swamp..?

Some area spoilers for Demon’s Souls, since that’s probably the least played one, as the Valley of Defilement got me thinking more about the role and strange beauty of awful places in Soulsborne.

In every Dark Souls game, you get some eye candy. Whether it’s Anor Londo, Heide, the Dragon Aerie, Irithyll, or the Ringed City, there are vistas of plain aesthetic beauty that serve as a sort of reward for getting as far as you have. But as I was trudging through the poison swamp in the Valley of Defilement, it struck me that Bloodborne and Demon’s Souls don’t really have an equivalent for that striking vista. It seems somewhat natural in BB’s case since it’s oriented toward horror and doesn’t quite allow for the same kind of jaw-dropping visual moments in the traditional sense. But DeS, while certainly oriented more toward horror than its Dark Souls cousins, is a similar medieval fantasy game that is composed solely of the absolute worst places one can find themselves in. BB and DeS have no straightforwardly visual respite, no reward of towering grandeur to appease the downtrodden adventurer. Prisons are succeeded by swamps, swamps are succeeded by toxic hamlets, and the putrid dregs of human life and society seem to go on without end. Everything has reached a ripe stage of decadence, and to possibly make matters worse, the player is here to advance the cycle of misery and violation.

Standing in the Valley of Defilement, you see all the imaginable and unimaginable refuse of humanity filtering into the depths, a place where some have found a home. It is inarguably vile with its slugs, plague-bearing rodents, and fetuses that have seeped slowly to the ultimate pools where they fester interminably. Yet I couldn’t help but feel that this place was at least very honest. The Souls games often have an infection of illusions, the evils of the world being the falsities and the lies thrust upon the masses by those with the power to manufacture falsities and lies. Then how strangely refreshing it is to be knee-deep in a swamp that is so unashamedly a true representation of what it is. There are no lies here, what you see is what you get. The Valley is both defiled and a site of infinitely continuing defilement, and yet there’s this nugget of realness and purity at the heart of it (even literally, if you know what I mean).

Miyazaki’s games quickly became infamous for the dreary depictions of their worlds, and in response to this he said something simple like “the alternative doesn’t seem realistic to me.” It was a very natural direction, and it’s indicative of a core philosophy that drove many aspects of the Soulsborne experience, including the challenge. The game isn’t interested in allowing the player to win and progress with ease--it’s much more interested in the process of figuring out an encounter, struggling with it, and eventually gritting it out and coming to an understanding that enriches the player. It’s such a natural direction that--if memory serves--Bloodborne’s pre-release material made next to no mention of the game’s difficulty. This is just a manifestation of the kind of idea that populates the world with prisons, swamps, and violated villages.

I’ve been ruminating on finding the definition of this core idea. You could certainly call it the scarcity of beauty, but this is something of a negative definition that focuses on the lack of a thing rather than the thing itself, which doesn’t feel Soulsish to me. Maybe most of all it can be described as the simple joy of the process and the dispelling of illusions. The joy of finding honesty in nightmare swamps; the joy of learning how to fight a tough boss; the dispelling of the illusion that reality is a way that it really isn’t; and the dispelling of the illusion that you can’t defeat the enemy. These ideas seem wonderfully eastern to me, as western thought by contrast is often preoccupied with results, rewards, and immediate pleasures. Eastern thought--specifically recalling Taoism, Buddhism, and Hinduism--by my shaky understanding, appears to be more interested in processes, the goodness of doing whatever one does, and the appreciation of whatever beauty happens to reveal itself on the way. The journey rather than the destination, I suppose. A beautifully manifested idea that truly distinguishes the likes of Souls from their western fantasy counterparts; encouraging one to appreciate the spectral shimmering and childlike demeaner of Rom upon her Moonside Lake, the humbling vistas of outer darkness opened by failed Great Ones, and the simple pleasure of learning the smallest of things--all because the world is tinged with heaviness, misfortune, and a deep sadness that makes the smallest and strangest of lights so captivating. I adore Irithyll, but lately I’ve been taken by this sense of “wholeness” and trueness that invisibly radiates from the blighted and dismal depths of these worlds. I’m so glad that of all the tropes, the horrible poisonous swamp is the one we can count on appearing in every Souls game--it’s rather emblematic of the way that they’re all built conceptually.

[kianakrystlewrites]

My Writing Journey

Hello my darlings ♡ Welcome to my blog! If you’ve found your way here, thank you so much for following me on my writing journey. It means the world to have you engage with me as I pave my way to publication. This post is something I’ve been wanting to write forever now, and I’m so delighted to share it with you. I believe when you reach a certain point during whatever path you’re on, it’s important to reflect on what brought you to where you are. For me, I am currently querying my first novel, LOVE LETTERS TO THE SEA (which will have its own blog post very soon). It has been such a challenging and reflective time for me, filled with mixed emotions and uncertainty. Regardless of the “bad days” when I am met with rejection after rejection, I am still so proud of myself for making it to this point. And believe it or not, there are “good days” too (like landing a spot on the Top 25 Pitches list for PitMad, and receiving full requests from agents I’m really excited about). And in those moments of success and fulfillment, I am always reminded of what started it all. 

Like most writers, I’ve always loved English. There’s no need to get into that. But unlike a lot of writers, I fell in love with language before I fell in love with storytelling. I think what triggered my love for the sound of words was getting my heart broken . . . by my first love, by my family, by my friends at the time. Literature, lyrics, prose . . . those were the only things that made me feel whole.  When I had nothing, I found comfort in how words fell off the tongue like honey and wine. It was like a secret language that only I could hear, which evoked a euphoria unlike anything else. When I’d read books like Romeo & Juliet or The Great Gatsby, I could feel myself turn pink with a warm glow. The prose from those stories struck me like a cord. It brought me to life. But there was one writer who shaped me above the rest, and she wasn’t even an author. She was a musician. 

Lana Del Rey. 

Do I even have to say more?

I fell in love with Lana unlike any boy I’d loved before. Her lyrics seemed to understand me in a way no one else did, and I resonated with her as if she were my best friend. I think my true awakening was listening to her music (her song Video Games saved my life during my darkest hours). It was enchanting. Her music told stories, and I’d paint them in my mind. I’d imagine myself as the main character of her songs, and daydream about my downfall in a poetic, romantic way. It all seems very melodramatic now, but she is the main reason I decided I wanted to be a writer. 

I started with writing poetry, getting in touch with language and rhythm, familiarizing myself with how different words sounded next to each other. I think the biggest reason my prose is so lyrical now is because I was a poet before I was a fiction writer. But I didn’t want to just write poetry. I wanted to be an artist. I wanted be be like Lana. Her music wasn’t just music in my eyes. It was an aesthetic, a feeling, something so perfectly her that no one else could imitate it. Not even me. 

I fell in love with fairytales next. I vividly recall one sunny afternoon with my best friend Sydney.  We had spent the day at the beach, and when we came home, she read me fairytales on her bedroom floor. I remember wanting to escape, wanting to live in a dark and beautiful world where I was an enchantress and no one could hurt me. But I also fell in love with the lighter stories too. I wanted to be a princess. I still do. I wanted sweet days and sunshine and a prince charming who wouldn’t break my heart. Sometimes I would even think to myself . . . what if I’m supposed to be a princess on another planet?

Honestly, that was the first seed for LOVE LETTERS TO THE SEA. 

More thoughts came soon after: 

. . . What if my true love is already dead and he’s waiting for me on the other side? The side where I’m a princess! And on that other side, I’d be mind numbingly gorgeous! . . .

. . . Or, what if my true love has been dead for years and years, and only visits me as my guardian angel! We could never be together if that’s the case though . . . now could we? And that’s why I’m *doomed* to be single forever!!! . . .

But in the back of my mind, I always thought that idea was quite romantic. A guardian angel watching over me, in love with me. That’s why he never lets anything bad ever happen to me. He’s someone to protect me, someone to shield me from all the darkness I’ve been battling. 

And then came the dreams. 

I had a series of dreams every day for a week straight. It was always the same thing. I’d be drowning. I could feel myself dying, struggling to breathe. For some reason, the water was always beautiful, and I was strangely aware of that even while I was suffering. But then, this handsome man would reach down and save me, pulling me towards the surface. However, when we’d brake the water, I’d be in a different world. My dream world! The world where I was a princess, and I was beautiful! But most importantly . . . the world where I was reunited with my guardian angel. 

I knew I had to write this story. I had to! Only . . . I didn’t know how. I wasn’t ready. It was one of those concepts that felt too big to pull off in the way I imagined it. But I also knew that this was the story of my heart. It was rooted in my traumas, something beautiful birthed by all my darkness. Only, I was 16. I hadn’t learned how to properly feel all the things I felt. I didn’t understand it, I didn’t understand me. But I knew I wanted to write about this beautiful girl from my dreams, filled with emotion and chaos and . . . love. At the end of the day, she was always filled with love. 

I wasn’t bold enough to write the story of my dreams. And so . . . I daydreamed about it instead. I fell in love with the aesthetic of the story. I imagined the world first. I imagined her beauty. . . all of her dresses . . . her handsome guardian angel. I became obsessed with my main tumblr @bambi-la-bella  ♡ I wanted to live in the images I collected. I created mood boards. I imagined worlds within those photographs. I dreamt of her adventures. I created scenarios in my head.

My writing has always been vivid and cinematic. I have Tumblr to thank for that. I always knew my aesthetic was meaningful in some sort of way, and I wanted my art to reflect it through and through. Present day, I’m building a whole brand surrounding my aesthetic, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. 

At the time, I still never felt like I could be a writer. Not the kind of writer I wanted to be. I didn’t think I could create fantasy or fairytales. I did try my hand at storytelling though. But I never touched LOVE LETTERS TO THE SEA. I would always write these shitty John Green inspired contemporaries about manic pixie dream girls and runaway teens who’d road trip across the world, escaping their problems instead of confronting them. I’d write about girls like Effy Stonem and Alaska Young, who were broken and beautiful, but not in the way my dream girl was . . . unlike her, they were missing one thing. They weren’t filled with love. I didn’t know how to channel it. I didn’t know how to love myself. All I knew was that I was destructive. I was chaos incarnate. And I wanted to be free.

Senior year, I gave up on writing for good. 

I was extremely lost when I began college. It’s not something I want to get into, but I was so empty. Waking up every morning hurt. My second semester of freshman year, I decided to join a sorority. I was looking for friends, looking to feel like I belonged to something special. Only, I didn’t feel like I belonged . . . not really. I didn’t feel like myself. I don’t even really think I knew who I was at the time either. But I knew I wasn’t a pretty prefect instagram model. I wasn’t skinny and tiny like all my friends. I always felt a need to keep up with them. I wanted to look like them, act like them, be like them. I had no one else to look up to at that point. The thing is, they did made me feel special. When I was with them, I felt powerful, like nothing could hurt me. It was all an illusion. Deep down, I knew I wasn’t like them. Not in the way I wanted to be. 

Then I came across Gabriella Demartino, and everything changed. 

If you don’t know who Gabi is, she’s an American YouTuber who celebrates all things vintage, glam, and girly. I instantly became obsessed with her life and  style. I began dressing like her, doing my makeup like her, embracing things I actually loved. She made me realize I didn’t care about raves or frat parties. I wanted to go to tea. I wanted to watch the Nutcracker Ballet and go vintage dress shopping. I wanted sleepovers with champagne and Audrey Hepburn films on repeat. In my greatest fantasies, I imagined shopping at Chanel, living in Paris, dining at Laduree! . . . Gabi made me realize I wanted to create a life worth living. I wanted to be me. I wanted to be the girl from my dreams from that once upon a time. 

One winter day, Gabi posted this video she created for Christmas time. It was inspired by The Princess and the Pauper, and so whimsical to me. I wanted to live in that story. I wanted to twirl around in a lacy dress and munch on sugar cookies. I wanted to fall asleep by the fire with a ribbon in my hair and play dress up in her walk-in closet. I wanted to create something just like it. I wanted to . . . I wanted to write. After two years, I wanted to write. 

♡ a picture from the video that inspired it all ♡ 

Here’s the tea . . . when I began writing LOVE LETTERS TO THE SEA (which back then was called SWEET ROSE), I was working at a dead end job. And when I say dead end, I mean DEAD. END. We had no manager. Our shop owner rarely ever stopped by. Nobody really cared about what we were supposed to be doing (we were a bunch of 18-20 year olds with no supervision) . . . and there was a computer. Right where the cash wrap was. I was alone during my shift. We had no customers that day. And so, I began to write . . . and write . . . and write. I wrote until I had my very first chapter about Lila Rose Li. Everything I’d learned in high school culminated to this very moment. My lyrical prose. My aesthetic. And my story. (which at the time was VERY different). 

I was extremely proud of my first chapter! I wanted to share it with the world! I . . . I wanted to become an author. 

I wanted to become an author.

That was always a dream I had in high school, but I never thought that it would ever come true. Instead, I was in a sorority, trying to be someone I wasn’t . . . studying fashion, which I was failing at and hated . . . but most importantly, I wasn’t being true to myself. Being an author was a dream I had that felt exclusively . . . mine. 

I decided to take the whole writing thing seriously. And to do so, I told my friends so that they could hold me accountable. “Hey, I want to be a published author!” I said one day. I’m not sure if anyone actually took me seriously at the time, but I let them read my writing as I go, excited that I was writing for someone other than myself. However, Sydney would critique me as I went, which made me realize . . . oh shit. I’m still not ready to tell this story the way I want. Will I ever be ready? HOW will I ever be ready? 

And so, I took the biggest risk I could. The year before I was supposed to graduate college, I decided to change my major to Creative Writing. My mother cried. She thought I was being absolutely ridiculous. She told me she’d never believe in me until I proved myself to her (news flash: present day she supports my writing immensely and prays for me to get a book deal every single night). But at the time . . . I was a disgrace. I was the dishonorable child who didn’t care what mom and dad thought. It’s true. I didn’t care. I’d risk it all to become the writer I always dreamt of being. Even if that meant my family hated me. 

Despite the discourse with my family, this is still probably my favorite part of the journey — being a creative writing major, finding my people, my voice, and my best friend: @chloegracewrites  ♡ It started with dinner parties with classmates I’d met in CW 301. We’d sit around a cheese plate, drink wine, and talk about our story ideas. It was the most wonderful time of my life. I finally felt like I fit in somewhere after searching forever. But when I met Chloe . . . I can’t even tell you how it changed my life.

The day I met her I felt like we were two halves of a whole. We bonded over our love for Laini Taylor, and eventually had our first “creative writing date” where we just gushed about writing instead of actually writing. Most of my brainstorming was done with her. She helped me realize ideas I hadn’t even fully formed yet. In fact, I plotted the concept for my final version of LOVE LETTERS TO THE SEA with her just about a year ago (In August, when I started my final draft). When I think of becoming a serious writer, I think of Chloe. I think about how she pushed me, and how she was the only one out of my peers I trusted to make me better. But I’m getting ahead of myself. 

A lot happened before I actually started to get . . . good.  

I’m not going to lie, when I first started my creative writing classes, I thought I was hot shit. Unlike my peers, I already had a style. I had a story and an aesthetic and I had a voice. Only . . . I didn’t realize that voice wasn’t good. I used to cry every time we had workshop. I didn’t understand that my peers were just trying to make me better. It wasn’t until my teacher turned mentor (let’s call him MDL) lit a damn fire beneath my ass. He returned my first writing assignment to me. I was less than enthused by the grade. Of course, I cried. I cried and cried and was probably known as the girl who cried! But above all, I was pissed! I wanted to be better than this. I knew I was better than this!

I thought about my parents. I remembered everything I sacrificed for my dreams. I thought of quitting my sorority, of quitting fashion, of leaving all my friends behind to follow my own path . . . but most importantly, I remembered that I wanted to be a writer. And if I wanted to be a writer, I sure as hell had to take things seriously. 

My inner slytherin LEAPED out. I was vicious when it came to perfection. I would accept nothing less. In the end, I still cried. But I cried like Azula in the last episode of ATLA: upset that I didn’t win, upset that I wasn’t perfect. My obsession was sick, and yet . . . I was oddly proud of myself. I knew I’d stop at nothing to be the best writer I could be. I wrote twice every day: once in the morning, and once at night. Mind you, I had a job, went to school, and worked an internship at the time. Eventually, one of my professors broke me. He deemed me emotionally unstable. He called me a distraction to the rest of the class because of my perfectionism. And just like that, I realized how insane I’d gotten, and how obsessed with perfection I’d become. But even then, I was thankful. When I got kicked out of class, I scrapped my whole novel for the third time and began again. 

Another fire was lit, and I was going to prove him wrong. 

I decided I wanted to go to grad school to get my MFA in Childrens and Young Adult Writing at the New School in New York. Partially because this professor told me I wasn’t a “serious enough writer” for grad school and that I “needed help.” Boy did that make me mad! I’ll show you, I said to myself. I worked twice as hard, but this time, without the tears or self destruction. You know that scene in The Devil Wears Prada where Miranda tells Andrea “you’re not working hard enough” after Andrea bent over backwards for her job? Well I had that moment too. And just like Andrea, I collected myself, and worked harder than hard. I was basically the Elle Woods of the Creative Writing Department, and I HAD to prove myself. 

And boy, did I work hard as hell. 

Remember that other professor, MDL? Oh yeah. By the end of the year, he went from being critical of my writing to praising it. He even offered me a mentorship (mind you, this was super cool because he’s an award winning author). I won’t give away too much, but I am so thankful for his guidance. By the end of that semester, one of my peers had told me something I’d never forget. She said, “You know Kiana, I’ve always admired how seriously you take criticism. I’m impressed with how hard you work to become the best writer you can be.” I was so proud of myself in that moment. 

Although, I think I’m quite different now. After falling in love with my novel, it’s hard for me to accept anyone else’s opinion other than my own. But again . . . I’m getting ahead of myself. 

That summer, August to be exact, my novel was no longer SWEET ROSE. It was no longer DEVIL’S ROSE, or DEVIL’S ROSE 2.0. It was . . . LOVE LETTERS TO THE SEA. I remember blurting out my ideas for the rewrite to Chloe, and having them not make sense out loud. She seemed to understand me though. For some reason, I think she always has, even when I don’t think I make any sense at all. We talked over my plot, and when I sat down to write . . . it felt like the story I always wanted to tell.

A year after my chaotic semester of getting kicked out of class with a permanent W on my transcript, I no longer felt the need to go to grad school. To my surprise, I was proud of how I’d evolved (plus COVID happened lol). However, all of that hard work from last year still paid off. I got accepted anyways with 50% of my tuition covered. It was a merit scholarship based on my application alone (BASED ON MY OPENING CHAPTERS OF LOVE LETTERS TO THE SEA)!!! I was in disbelief! Take that mr. professor who said I wasn’t serious enough for grad school!

By the time I finished writing my novel in May of 2020, I felt like my story was a work of art. It was my story. The story of my heart. And I had finally created the version of it I’d always dreamed of. But again, I’m getting ahead of myself. 

Flashback to March of 2020, my life began to change even more. I joined writing Twitter pre-COVID, and found my community. With the pandemic going on, I began to create a lot of online friendships. I was connecting with so many other writers, and I learned a lot from them all. 

But my most successful online friendship wasn’t found through Twitter. It was through here on Tumblr. I was convinced I had met my soulmate: @wistful-giselle​  ♡ 

Speaking to Giselle felt like every Lana Del Rey song I’d ever listened to. It felt like reading Romeo & Juliet and The Great Gatsby for the first time again. She spun poetry unlike anything I had ever read (and is a great inspiration behind my prose). She reminded me that my writing isn’t just about the story . . . it’s about the language too. She inspired me to make sure every page was perfumed and lyrical, and before sending my novel out to readers, I did one big revision with her in mind. I wanted to impress myself, but I also wanted to impress her. She was the most talented writer I had ever met. 

Giselle ended up being the first person to ever read my novel from start to finish (and in a single sitting too). For that, she holds a special place in my heart. 

Then came my beta readers. Another person read it all in one sitting: Chloe. Then another. And another. And another. In total, five people read my entire novel in one whole sitting. I was speechless. I still am. Even my CPs flooded me with praise and compliments. I didn’t realize it at the time, but within two weeks, I thought that I was ready to query because of the successful response I had.

I believed in myself, and in my eyes, I thought my novel was perfect (especially because of the validation from readers). Looking back on it now, I’m not entirely sure I was ready. I think that perhaps I was overly confident. Maybe, I still am. 

I started querying in July of this year. I cannot even speak to the amount of rejections I received between now and then. People told me I was ready. They said that agents would swoop me up immediately. In fact, I thought I’d be agented in about a week or so! Boy was I wrong. That’s not how things work at all. 

This part of my journey is probably the darkest. I don’t think I was ever really prepared for it. Rejection, after rejection, after rejection came. I started to lose hope after only a month. I was confused. I didn’t understand what was wrong with my novel. I still don’t really understand it. LOVE LETTERS TO THE SEA is everything I ever wanted it to be. It’s everything I worked so hard at perfecting. It’s just like how I feel about Lana’s music: so perfectly me that nobody else could ever imitate it. I love my story. I think I always will. 

I know I might appear to be doing well on social media to some of you despite all of the rejections. To people who don’t know the details of my life, I probably even seem successful. During SFFpit, I was the top tweet of the whole contest with over 300+ retweets and 7 requests (there were more, those were just the ones that I was interested in). 

In the end, they were all rejections. 

I never wanted anyone to know that. I’m so thankful for my following, I don’t want to let anyone down. But at the end of the day, I also want to be authentic with my audience. I want you to know that even I fail.

In March of 2020, I started with 200 followers on my Twitter account. By September of 2020, I’d grown my following to 1,000+ followers, which I am so thankful for. I know that number may not seem like a lot to some people, but as someone who has never had a rapidly growing following, it means the world to me. I love everyone who supports me more than they’ll ever know.  

I see everything. I notice how many of you there are who tell me you can’t wait to see my book on the shelves. I see your praise and encouragement and support. I read all of your messages. I respond to every one, or at least I try. Sometimes I don’t feel like I deserve it. But I am so, so thankful for it all. It’s the reason I keep believing in myself, even in my darkest hours. 

All I’ve ever wanted is to feel seen. 

And I do. I feel seen by all of you. But I also feel like a fraud sometimes. The truth is, even I get rejections. A lot of them. More than you would think from the outside looking in. And yeah, it hurts. It hurts because I love my story. It hurts because I believe in myself. It hurts because you believe in me too. 

So why aren’t I there yet?

I don’t think I’ve ever felt true heartbreak until now. Querying is the most vulnerable, brutal thing I’ve ever put myself through.

But it does get better. There are some good days too. You might think I’m just being dramatic since the present day marker of this journey actually ends on a very happy note. But that’s the thing about querying. It’s up and down, up and down. It’s unpredictable and scary and it takes a lot of guts to do. But enough on that. 

This post is getting long, so I’m not going to go into detail about pitch contests. All you need to know is that I participated in a huge contest called PitMad, and to my suprise, I made it into the top 25 tweets of the contest, with 400+ retweets and about 8 agent requests. 

And even more surprising, I f*cked up my queries on accident, and still received several fulls 3 days later (lol). My point is, maybe it’s not all about being “perfect”.  Maybe it’s about having a story you love and believe in, and finding the right match for it. 90% of my rejections are based on my story “not being the right fit.” It doesn’t mean my story is bad. It just means I haven’t found the right person to represent me. I know I have a strong story that I love deeply, and that others love deeply too. It wasn’t until my fulls started coming in that I began believing in myself again. Thankfully, I have a group of wonderful people who never once stopped believing in me, even when my light dimmed out. (you know who you are ♡). 

I don’t know what the future holds. I don’t even know if my fulls will turn into offers. All I can do is believe in myself, and know that my story is good enough for someone to want to represent it. And hey, if it doesn’t work out, I can always revise. I did it once before . . . in college, when I was still pushing myself to grow. Sometimes I forget that we never really stop growing. There is always room to evolve. 

Maybe I was right to believe in my novel so fiercely. Maybe I was wrong. 

Honestly, only time can tell. I have a hopeful feeling about my recent requests, and I am very excited about the agents viewing my work. But I also know how devastating querying is. I don’t want to let myself down. Falling from grace and reaching my lowest lows has taught me that I’m not perfect. In fact, there’s no such thing as perfect. I am constantly evolving, and this isn’t the end of my journey. 

It’s just the beginning. 

Love Always, 

        Kiana  ♡  

[desanctii]

sad-house-of-mortality‌:

Image by Flüchtig hingemachte Männer

[chrysalispen]

lycoris (minor divergence AU, 5.0 spoilers)

in response to the prompt “what if Hythlodaeus had accepted the title of emet-selch, and the WoL instead met Hades?”

I wrote this in three days (mostly while heavily drugged LMAO) so it’s not.... my best work ever but I like it for what it is. Fic is beneath the cut.

=======================

Nestled within a seemingly fathomless expanse amidst the fringes of the western seas, the Tempest is not exactly what one would call a comforting locale. Its depths are rife with sailor's tales: stories of sirens and storms and ships called to their deaths, even in the days before the Flood brought deadlier creatures to Kholusia's shores.

For a creature like Emet-Selch, a man relegated to furthering his god's work within the myriad hidden places of the Source and its reflections for long years, it will do.

Of course, his choice of abode upon the First is not wholly based upon sentimentality. Sometimes he fancies he has all but forgotten what it is like for the touch of light not to sting his skin; he can bear it when he must but sees little point in deliberately exposing himself to discomfort.

Amber eyes track the rippling ribbons of refracted light that shimmer several fulms overhead, fingers of stark white softened into a glow by the water like knives dulled from use. It is just enough that the seafloor wherein he has rebuilt his most abiding memory does not lie completely shrouded in the darkness of the trench. By its dim illumination does Emet-Selch study the skyline he has built with the critical lens of a master sculptor, seeking any perceived flaws and carefully setting any misgivings aside. For better or worse, the die is cast and his choices made. This final act of creation: completed.

It wants now only for a single soul to darken its doorsteps.

~*~

She is glad to have parted ways with the others briefly, even for investigation's sake.

Although not inclined to lie by nature, she is nonetheless quite aware that her condition has deteriorated farther than any of the other Scions are like to have realized. The corona of light that had flickered at the periphery of her vision has all but overtaken her sight. Blinding white and gold accompanies the pain in her stiffening limbs which has been a constant companion since awakening in the Crystarium.

She pushes herself to a sitting position, then with a supreme act of will regains her feet. Her stance wobbles- perilously close to overcorrecting- but with time and care she is able to keep her balance, and in short order, the Warrior of Darkness finds herself once more stumbling down the vast and near-empty paved streets of an alien city: a city populated only with a single man’s memories of the dead. It is a lonely, lonely path. But that loneliness carries, in itself, a sort of bleak comfort.

Wandering up and down the paved streets of Amaurot’s neat, gridlike layout- or at least the bits that fit into the ocean trench with such suspicious seamlessness- she does not realize her feet have carried her off the beaten path until a bone-deep fatigue gives her cause to grip the cool metal of a fancifully wrought archway for support.

There is, to her surprise, still beauty to be found in this place upon further inspection. The public park she has stumbled upon is a welcome sight and a well-appointed affair at that. Mazes of green painstakingly curated and compelled into obeisance, framing the abstraction of metal sculpture. Flowers of every conceivable color, tall and comfortable-looking trees planted for shade as well as aesthetic.

For the first time since they had rounded the continental shelf and glimpsed the tall spires rising like bony fingers from the darkest depths of the ocean trench, the Warrior feels calm. Something about this place imparts a certain measure of serenity. There is a particular sort of love that has gone into its recreation, a love that is very nearly tangible.

And, somehow, also very familiar.

Fingers trailing through hawthorn and salvia- and a good dozen varieties of flowers her eyes have never seen, on the Source or elsewhere- she meanders in an aimless amble, plagued not only by the Light leaking into her vision but also the feeling that she is searching for something indefinable.

The massive tree in the center of the park brings her to a halt.

There is no other of its kind to be seen anywhere nearby. It stands aloof from the other greenery, silent and ancient and proud--its boughs bent, upon closer inspection, with the weight of many years--much like a certain Ascian of her acquaintance. The Warrior of Darkness finds herself drawn to it in a way that defies understanding.

Gently she reaches for the tree and places one palm upon its enormous trunk. Caresses the roughness of its bark with her fingertips--

-----Mortal agony warps its way through her bones and the sound of fracturing glass rings in her ears as the Light surges.

Biting back a cry of agony she convulses around it, crumpling to the ground, head in her twitching hands as the pain becomes her world. Amaurot fades, distant and unimportant, into her periphery, and upon her tongue, she tastes copper and ozone.

No no no no, not here, not now, not like this--

*I beg your pardon? That’s my tree.*

The resonant chime of the ancients’ tongue, edged with just the slightest hint of annoyance, pierces the cacophony of ravenous hunger and the spasms of her limbs so thoroughly that she… is distracted.

The pain fades and her vision, nearly white, is almost clear.

The figure is as indistinct as all the others -- tall, translucent, almost intimidating -- but something about this one is different. The other shades she has encountered acknowledged her only in the broadest of senses, treating her more as an interruption to the tasks they were set, rather like watching worker mammets forced to move aside an obstacle.

No, this shade seems more present than the others somehow. She can feel something more substantial behind the black holes of the mask peering down at her- something, that is, beyond initial surprise and a sort of mild, rather tolerant annoyance.

“It’s a very large tree,” she manages a weak smile and pats a bottom-sized dip in the root system at her side. “I think there should be plenty of room for both of us.”

The shade tilts its chin to one side, almost like a bird. She fancies she can feel the weight of a stare upon her, silently judging her appearance alongside her words-- but at length, it sits, albeit with abrupt movements that lack the artless grace she had observed among the other figures.

For a long time, they do not speak but simply accept each other’s company with varying degrees of amiability. The Warrior looks out upon the streets beyond the hedges and watches the blurred outlines of the city's shades going about what she can only assume would have once been their daily business, although a keen eye would note that there is not much change in their behavior over time. They are in a perpetual loop of the same discussions, the same paths, the same tasks, over and over.

At length, she hears the soft chiming once more, the words unfolding within her mind in the same instant. Terribly polite of Emet-Selch, she thinks with a hysterical sort of good humor, to at least provide a means of translating his people’s speech.

*So, you've come from out of time - apropos, all things considered. I don’t believe I’ve seen you before,* the shade muses. *...Not in this form, at least.*

The statement is as confusing as it is disarming.

“This… form?” she echoes, but her only answer is another question.

*You’ve come to see Emet-Selch, I take it?*

She tenses. That is all the answer that seems to be necessary.

*Ah.* With a noise that seems to translate as a laboring sigh, the shade’s cowled head comes to rest against the tree trunk. *Your timing is unfortunate. The city is deep in preparations to face the Doom. You’ll be lucky to see him before all is said and done.*

“So I’ve heard.” There is no change in what she can see of the giant’s expression, but she can sense that it was the expected response. “...If I may ask, how did you know I was here to see Emet-Selch?”

*Oh, come now, you needn’t worry about me,* the shade shrugs. *I’m not really here, you know. Well, I’m here but I’m not -present,- as it were. Nor are any of these others.*

“Are you... I mean, you’re not a spirit, are you?”

*Am I to assume you mean a wandering soul? Certainly not. We’re all just memories; naught of real substance, I’m afraid.* An amused titter as the shade stretches, catlike, before rolling its head towards her. *This is an Amaurot upon which the Doom has yet to descend- if it ever does.*

She leans forward and wraps her arms about her knees, hugging them to her chest. The only person - so to speak - in the entire city that actually seems capable of a real conversation and she has no real idea what to ask.

Might as well start with the pleasantries. “What’s your name?”

The black sockets of the mask seem to bore through her flesh and straight into her soul, and although it should make no difference she feels strangely exposed. *...Asking the important questions at last, are we? You can call me Hades. Don’t bother asking any of these others; they’d not be able to give an answer at all.*

“None of the others can really talk about anything beyond superficial matters,” she agreed. “Though I’m curious as to what makes you different. You certainly look the same as they do.”

*Knowing Emet-Selch, he likely had me on the mind while he was creating this overwrought simulacrum of his.* One large hand lifts in a lazy, flippant, and startlingly familiar wave before tucking itself behind Hades’ head. *He always was tediously sentimental. Although I suppose I should be flattered.*

“I’m not sure I follow.”

*Doubtless he thought I would see through the illusion--my sight pales in comparison to his, mind you. But he would know that. We were good friends once, he and I.* A familiar, rueful half-smile tilts the shade's lips. *Although I am no less ephemeral than anything else he’s summoned from his memory. I assume he told you what happened?*

“After a fashion, yes.” She plucks at a blade of grass. “He spoke of a calamity, and how the brightest of his number - yours, that is - came together to summon Zodiark.”

*Not the most accurate summary, in truth, but I suppose it will suffice,* Hades sniffs.

The Warrior listens, with all of the patience for which she is so famous upon the Source, as he speaks. The burning pain of the Light is almost nonexistent in this odd man's presence, and that alone is sweet comfort.

Emet-Selch must have thought highly of this Hades. He is wholly unlike the kind and gentle giants seeming content to drift through empty streets, unaware of the fate that awaits them; he recounts the Ascian’s lecture with an air that could be generously termed sardonic: brusque and laden with quipped observations about how ‘tiresome’ the other man could be, yet in a way that makes obvious their long years of acquaintance. Affection lies just beneath his exasperation, and she finds herself warming to Hades quickly, sour as he seems.

He is blunt-tongued and eccentric, but still kind in his way. She cannot help but like him.

*Needless to say, there were those who didn’t take kindly to the suggestion that we ought to continue sacrificing souls to Zodiark’s appetites, and felt that we ought to make our peace with the new lives we’d created. They summoned Hydaelyn to counter Him. So for the first time in anyone’s memory, we were divided on our course of action---*

“And you fought,” she says, sadly. Sorrow burns in her breast for this man and his fellows, a gentle people who had never known strife if Emet-Selch were to be believed. “He told me.”

*Then you know how it ends.* Hades’ smile fades, and though she half-expects another testy remark, there is none forthcoming. The shade's head shakes slowly, side to side. *So he continues to labor in Zodiark’s name, then.*

“Not for any lack of attempts to thwart him, I assure you.”

*Don't apologize. I should hardly expect otherwise. He’s an obstinate ass,* Hades says flatly, *and that’s only one of his many flaws. Though I imagine it serves him well in this regard-- if none other.*

Despite herself, she laughs.

“I would say it doesn’t even begin to describe him. You can’t imagine-- well, no, I guess you can if you knew him well. Although…”

*Although...?*

She stares at her hands, only able to see a blinding white outline, and does not answer. She does not trust herself to answer.

Sometimes I see a glimpse of a kinder, gentler man, beneath it all. And now- now I find myself mourning the loss of a person I never knew.

If he senses her hesitation, he gives no outward indication of it.

*I’m sure he still intends to carry out his plan.* His eyes might be hidden in the depths of that mask, but she doesn’t need to see them. There is a certain degree of sorrow in his words, blunt as they are. *Mind you, he can commit all manner of cruelties when it suits him to do so now, but he was very different once. Friendly. Compassionate. Very willing to admit his mistakes and seek counsel where warranted. He would take the burdens of other souls upon his own shoulders without a second thought if he felt his aid necessary. Occasionally I found him infuriating, but always he had the purest of intentions.* Each word falls upon her ears with a heavier weight. Hades sighs. *This is a terrible burden he has chosen for himself, make no mistake- and it is all the worse for knowing his temperament is so ill-suited to carry it.*

The quality of the filtered light through the water has changed - the color, the angle, albeit only slightly. It is one of the few ways anyone has in Norvrandt of tracking the time. Evening has fallen.

As if realizing it himself, Hades seems to stir from a sort of reverie, as though their chat is a dream and she is the shade.

*It’s starting to get very late, you know,* he says, rather briskly. *Shouldn’t you be off to get your permit? I’m certain he’s waiting on you.*

“I… yes. Yes, of course.”

Slowly and carefully the Warrior stands, bracing her weight against the tree. It is a nigh-herculean effort to regain her footing; she is desperate to lie down somewhere and try to sleep, but sleep despite her exhausted state has brought neither rest nor peace. The Light lurks just beneath her mortal shell, a predator waiting for its prey to falter.

Time is shorter than she had hoped it would be.

Still, she smiles.

“Thank you for speaking with me, Hades.”

That impatient flip of a wave again, and now she is quite certain she has seen Emet-Selch make that precise gesture a time or two. *If answering your questions assures me a peaceful nap, count me happy to oblige.*

She has almost made it on her slow, staggering feet to the hedgerow when Hades’ voice chimes once more at her back.

*Before you go---there is one more thing. One… minor thing.*

The sadness underscoring his words gives her pause. She turns around.

Hades is not lazing beneath the tree with his back propped against its trunk as she had left him. He too is standing. The giant's gait lists to one side beneath the heavy boughs, and he seems to be looking at something beyond her.

*Who... is that standing next to you?*

She blinks. A glance backwards and to her left shows Ardbert, watching but still keeping a discreet and carefully polite distance, waiting for her to finish her rest and catch up with him. “I... that’s...”

*...Never mind. I suppose it hardly matters, does it? ‘Tis a soul, if a faint impression of one--and the same shade as your own.* That birdlike tilt of the chin. *The color of it… I would know it anywhere. And so, I imagine, would he.*

Her gaze sharpens. The note of longing in the shade’s voice is unmistakable.

*Well, don’t let me keep you.*

His arms fold into the sleeves of his robe, and there is something soft there in the slackened bow of his lips, something that makes her breath catch. They curve upwards, in the faintest and most self-deprecating of smiles. It is the expression of a man that has any number of things to say, and no time to say them.

In the end, he says nothing, and the moment passes. She turns away.

She is met with Ardbert’s stare of open confusion upon reaching the elaborate masonry of the park walkway. “Who were you talking to?”

“Oh, I--”

There is nothing and no one under the tree. It stands a lone sentinel in the center of its clearing just as before, quiet and undisturbed.

The Warrior of Darkness exhales.

“Just an old friend,” she says.

[redrumcinemastories]

“Bad luck isn’t brought on by broken mirrors, but by broken minds.”

I think Luca Guadagnino is absolutely brilliant. The way in which he created the masterpiece "Call Me by your Name", the romantic and utterly euphoric love story between two males, to remaking "Suspiria", the terrifying horror film about witches ! When I was young I watched the 1977 "Suspiria" by my hero Dario Argento. Seeing that film for the first time is what inspired me to divulge deep into the world of film. It made me look deeper into Argento and his films. I became obsessed ! I watched the trilogy that "Suspiria" belongs to such as "Inferno" and "The Mother of Tears", called Three Mothers trilogy (Le Tre madri) . In the different films Argento speaks of three different witches. "Susperia" the witch is Helena Markos. Mater Suspiriorum, the Mother of Sighs, is the oldest and wisest of the Three Mothers. Her given name is Helena Markos. She is also known as The Black Queen. Her powers include those of invisibility, illusion casting, and telekinesis, however they are proven insufficient due to her enfeebled state. The story behind the witch is shown In The Mother of Tears it is revealed that before the events of Suspiria Elisa Mandy (

Daria Nicolodi

), a white witch, sought to challenge Markos' evil might. The two battled in Freiburg, and Markos slew both Elisa and her husband. However, Elisa was able to weaken Suspiriorum into the hag-like state seen in Suspiria. According to Father Johannes (

Udo Kier

) in the third film, the battle left Suspiriorum "a shell of her former self". Elisa's daughter Sarah would later defeat Mater Lachrymarum in Rome.In the 2018 remake of Suspiria, the role of Mater Suspiriorum is played by

Dakota Johnson

. Helena Markos is depicted as an ancient, disfigured, centuries-old crone impersonating Mater Suspiriorum in order to maintain control over the coven and acquire a new, younger body. Mater Tenebrarum, the Mother of Darkness, is the youngest and most cruel of the Three Mothers. Her true name is not given; her home is located in New York and was christened in 1910. As shown in Inferno the character is portrayed by

Veronica Lazar

. She masquerades as Professor Arnold's nurse for much of the film. At the climax, Mark Elliot (

Leigh McCloskey

) descends into the bowels of her home to confront her. He learns that Arnold is, in fact, the architect Varelli, and essentially Tenebrarum's slave. Tenebrarum's bloodlust would ultimately be her own undoing, as one of her victims, a maid, was inadvertently responsible for the house catching fire in the midst of her death throes. Mater Lachrymarum, the Mother of Tears, is the most beautiful and powerful of the Three Mothers. Like Tenebrarum, her true name is unknown. Inferno suggests that her home in Rome, may be located near No. 49 Via Dei Bagni - the Abertny Foundation's Biblioteca Filosofica - when Sara (

Eleonora Giorgi

) notices a strange sweet smell in the air. In The Mother of Tears, Lachrymarum's home is revealed to be the

Palazzo

Varelli. Lachrymarum is portrayed by Israeli actress

Moran Atias

in The Mother of Tears. After the deaths of her sisters, the witch has been hibernating, and is awakened when Sarah Mandy (

Asia Argento

) opens the urn in which her most powerful relic, a red tunic, is stored. As her minions wreak havoc on the city above, Lachrymarum hides below ground in the catacombs of her Palazzo, regaining her strength. She is defeated when Sarah Mandy discovers her subterranean lair and rips and burns her tunic, causing the Palazzo to collapse. Lachrymarum is killed when an ornamental obelisk from the top of the building crashes into the ceremonial chamber, impaling her.The symbolism behind the story of the evil witches is supposed to portray the cruel nature of women. As a woman I resonate with the idea of symbolically being linked to a witch. Women can be cunning, plotting and devious. But as that is the negative side of being a witch, women also have a great capability to be filled with magic and we learn to become better with age as we strengthen our magic and become masters of it! We can do great good and great evil with our womanly magic !

The remake of Suspiria

The remake by Guadignino is truly inspiring because of the fact that I love the original and the remake equally, and some even prefer the remake; which hardly ever happens! I think the composition of the cinematography is aesthetically incredibly nourish. Visually it is beautiful. The soundscape is incredibly eerie, along with the soundtrack by Tom Yorke, makes the film have a mood that is undeniably recognisable.  It is a unique masterpiece that echoes Guadignino's ingenious directors signature. Dakota Johnson playing the main role was also totally incredible. She trained hard for the role by doing hours of dance practice every day. She learnt how to stretch her muscles in order for them to move in that geometric witchy kind of way. Her innocents in the beginning allows the creepiness of the ending to really sink in. Something to not forget is the unique special effects that were flawlessly done. As a whole I think the film is perfect. It incorporates so many excellent qualities that come together harmoniously. I am thankful we have this horror-show artwork at our fingertips. 

[chinatea]

Jikook AU #3. (WIP)

Tags: Supernatural AU, Prince Jimin, Innocent Jimin, Sand Master Jungkook, Sand, Lots of sand, Deserts and Dunes, Aesthetics, Dreamy, Stalking, Seduction of the Innocent, Dark Ending.

(Updates will be irregular and short, tbh, because this is a short fic, I dunno why I’m splitting it even further, but you gotta do what you gotta do sometimes. Will be posted on AO3 when done.) 

(THIS IS A NON-PERSONA FIC, OKAY. YEAH, I WRITE THOSE, TOO.)

Part 1. 

The king has been writing letters for as long as Jimin remembers.

Their kingdom is dying, but here, in the safety of the palace, it is but a muted echo, a whisper shared in secrecy between the serving folk.

Jimin was born in the palace, raised in the palace and is destined to die here, too. The outside world is as ephemeral to him as a dream, existing only in the meandering stories of his mentors. The stories of warm people and treacherous dead ends, hidden among the streets so narrow one could barely squeeze through. He wishes he could experience it all, if only for a day, breathe in the smoky spices of his people, drown in the daily hubbub of a bustling bazaar, but come next morning, that dream escapes through the cracks of the ancient walls somewhere Jimin could never possibly follow.

For he is the youngest prince - he belongs here. As moon belongs in the sky, as fish belongs in the sea.

(Here, in the world of sand and wind, the sea, of course, is nothing but another dream wisp.)

Being the youngest means to bring luck and good fortune into the family. That is his sacred duty. The reason he is alive. That is also why he is prohibited to ever leave the palace grounds. The moment his feet brush the stones that are not of the palace, his family is doomed. Or so the story goes - a mere legend but who would dare to disobey and taunt the Fate herself? People in power are most superstitious.

Fettered he may be, still, Jimin has been raised with kindness, his wishes indulged, his whims obeyed - all but one, of course. The affairs of the outside world have also been kept out of his concern. The king and his letters, the occasional visitors, his brother’s sudden disappearance and his mother’s tears - all of that existed in a different world from his. Might as well be another dream.

He has his own reality, instead - his routine devoted to studies. Music, dance and sacrilegious reading. Tending to his mind as well as his body. He is the soul of the palace and his beauty reflects the vitality of their dynasty that has been prospering for a thousand of years now. Truly, the gods have been gracious.

It’s not often he is called to the great hall, the heart of their palace, where the king holds his daily sittings. Oftentimes Jimin feels lost in such a vast open space, a tiny speck surrounded by massive columns that soar high and imperious as in a vain attempt to bring them closer to the sun - they say the titans build them, long before humans were even in the picture. That is why they’re so humongous. That is why every word uttered travels great distance before echoing off the stone, magnifying it in intensity.

It’s no coincidence that only the king is allowed to speak in full voice here, the rest of them resorting to humble whispers. And Jimin barely utters anything at all. He’s only ever invited to play an instrument - a lute or banjo. And Jimin loves doing it. It brings a smile onto the king’s face - his father’s face.

The day he’s summoned again makes his heartbeat quicken just so. As much as he’s removed from the matters of their kingdom, he is not completely oblivious. Not long ago, his ears have caught a whisper of a whisper - something is happening outside the walls. The City’s walls. Somewhere far away where only dreams dwell.

Spurred by his curiosity, he hurries out of his midday bath, giddy with excitement as his attendants wrap him into layers of gauzy fabric, their movements ritualistic and solem. As much as he’s impatient, he understands that the youngest prince is the soul of the palace, hence he must look impeccable, especially in the eyes of the outsiders.

The sight that greets him in the great hall upon his arrival, however, dampens his spirits. The king seems...Jimin can’t really ascribe an emotion to his face. Maybe it’s grief, although Jimin could never be sure - grief exists in a place beyond his comprehension. He only knows the occasional melancholy of things.

Wordless, Jimin bows and lowers himself on one of the pillows by the king’s elevated seat, reserved for the members of the royal family - they are the only people who can remain seated in the king’s presence, the rest of the court keeping their distance respectfully, their heads lowered.

As he picks up a light lute, ready to start on a melody that his father finds most pleasurable, he’s immediately hushed with a brisk wave of the king’s hand, his eyed lidded in deep thought. Jimin’s fingers stay still, barely touching the strings, as the silence becomes their only music.

“Bring him in.” The king’s tired voice is barely above whisper. It barely cuts through the heavy silence of the hall.

Jimin waits with bated breath as the thudding of marching footsteps reverberate through the space like thunderclaps. It’s sinister and Jimin has half a mind to slink back into his chamber - the comfort of his books and blankets, only his curiosity gets the better of him.

The man the guardsmen bring forth is not of this land, that much is certain. His clothes are well-traveled, dusty from sand and grime, his looks have a rough edge to him, which strangely only adds to his handsome allure. Jimin has never seen a foreigner before, let alone so striking, that he allows himself to just stare, agog, at the stranger, along with the rest of the court.

“What good a single man would do us?” the king mutters under his breath, as if musing to himself. “I asked - I begged - for an army. Is this how my brother owes his debts?”

The stranger smiles at him and it’s not a kind smile - it’s not an evil smile, either. But there is something wicked behind it, something ancient - the smile of a man who knows many secrets.

“I am the army.”

Spoken with the conviction that cannot be wavered. Jimin doesn’t doubt it for a second, but the king slams his fist on the armrest in fury as a round of gasps rolls through the crowd. The king never - never - shows anger.

“How dare you mock me.”

Unperturbed by the outburst, the stranger, then, brings up his hand and opens his palm - a handful of sand dust piled in the center of it. Jimin almost leans off his seat in order to get a better look; almost rolls off it, a silent gasp of surprise caught in his throat when the sand rises off the palm, shaping up into a miniature whirl, its enchanting dance leaving Jimin riveting with awe.

A wave of whispers disturbs their court. Even his mother, ever the serene matron, loses her composure for a moment, lips parting in wonderment.

The king, however, begs to differ.

“Am I supposed to be impressed with your parlor tricks?”

“Perhaps not,” the stranger admits. “But are you sure you are looking in the right direction, my king?”

He points, then, towards the murky horizon, many eyes following the smooth flow of his hand, as if enchanted - there are gasps. There are voices, murmurs of wonder.

Jimin rises on his knees to peer beyond the open balcony into the vastness of the desert, encroaching onto the city from all sides. There is always something predatory about the sands, the dunes holding them in their clutches, waiting for the day it could swallow them all. And today...

Jimin is startled to realize that it might not be as far-fetched a truth. The sight leaves him invigorated as he takes in the sand columns in the distance, streaming down from the skies, all of them mirroring the dance of the little whirl on the stranger’s palm. They are too far to cause any real damage to the city walls, but if they were to reach them, the city would be left in ruins, no doubt about that.

Jimin shivers, as the cold fingers of tangible fear grip at the base of his spine.

“Are you impressed now, my king?” his voice runs as smooth as the sand between his fingers the moment he lets his hand fall - the distant whirls dispersing just as effortlessly, evaporating into the thin air. “Or maybe you think it’s some kind of trick? An illusion? Maybe you want me to raise one in the middle of this hall?”

“No. I believe you.”

The king’s face is pale, hands gripping painfully at the armrests of his throne. He looks like a tired old man. “If you swear to protect my land, you can have any reward you want.”

“I’m sure we can arrange on a suitable price.” The stranger’s eyes find Jimin’s, for the first time, burning through him like incense - it leaves him breathless. “In due time.”

“What should we call you, magician?”

“Jeongguk.”

The name is carried through the hall in reverence - Jimin, too, can’t help but test it out on his lips, soundless to anyone but Jeongguk himself as his dark eyes burn through his very core, sparkling feelings that leave his limbs heavy, pinned to the ground - it frightens him.

He darts before he can change his mind, leaving his flute and his family behind - escaping while all eyes are on the newcomer. Once out of the Great Hall, he sprints all the way into his private quarters, uncaring if the guards see him run like their palace is on fire. His step is light and muted. He doesn’t look back even if he desperately wants to - even if he feels eyes on him. Many, many eyes watching him - the feeling doesn’t dissipate even in the safety of his own bedroom.

Somehow he doesn’t doubt for a moment, whomever this man may be, he’s here to stay.

---------------

And this is end of the only decently written part for now. Sighs.

[desanctii]

[imaginetonyandbucky]

All I Need is the Air

A/n: Chapter refers to the Scarlet Witch in some less than friendly terms. She’s not onscreen at all.

“Can’t you just do your bibbity bobbity boo schtick on him?” Tony perched on the branch over Bruce’s head, which gave him the illusion of being taller than the couatl. That was all it was, an illusion, and Bruce smiled tolerantly. He probably knew exactly what Tony was up to and letting him do it. They’d been friends for a long time.

Winter had stayed outside for a while, long enough to let Bruce look at him. Displayed his back, his wing, the stump end. With Tony’s gentle coaxing, Winter had let Bruce touch him, once, lightly, to test the strength of those muscles in his shoulder. Then, while Tony and Bruce discussed the logistics of the artificial wing, Winter seemed to lose interest. He scratched in the dirt for a while, at ease under the shelter of the coatl’s shadow.

Truly, no one had to be watchful; anything with even half a nose stayed out of the way of the winged snake. Bruce was both enormous and very serpent-like, eighteen feet long, at least, with a very long tail with a massive talon on each of the bifurcated ends. He moved, sinuous and graceful, with the same mesmerizing sway of the cobra and he was able to calm his prey with the same side-to-side movements. For a while, post Tony’s imprisonment; Tony had relied on Bruce’s soothing, hypnotic behavior to calm him, to let him rest. Strange, to rely on a predator that could have eaten him in a single gulp and had room for a whole nest more, but Bruce was one of the rare ones.

A predator that chose to recognize the intellect and souls of prey species. Bruce fed entirely on beasts, animals with no tool-building skills or community. “We must feed,” Bruce had told Tony, in the beginning, “but the thinking creature can make choices not to be cruel.”

After scraping up a few handfuls of grubs and beetles, Winter had taken his snack back into the nest to eat. The poor avian had not offered to share, which would have been polite, and Tony would have politely refused, but he couldn’t blame Winter for a lack of manners. Where would a slave have benefited from society?

“He’s traumatized, and he’s been in the tender care of Hydra for a long time. I wouldn’t be surprised if they used some form of their own hypnosis to keep their slaves docile,” Bruce pointed out, bringing Tony back to the present. “If I start trying to put him under, it’ll work, but you’ll also lose all the ground you’ve gained, getting him to trust you.”

“I can’t believe you want me to go to the witch,” Tony grumbled. He had history with the Scarlet Witch, and none of it was good. For that matter, Bruce had history with the witch, and his history was decidedly worse.

“She’s trying to make amends,” Bruce pointed out. “And she’s an herb master. She’ll be able to mix something up to ease Winter’s pain, and let us help him.”

“But why do I have to go?” Tony was plaintive, whining like a child and he knew it. The Witch gave him a serious case of the creeps, and he didn’t want to leave Winter alone for the few days it would take to make the trip.

“You know why.”

(more below the cut)

Bruce didn’t like to talk about it, but when the Witch had torn him loose from reality, he’d done quite a bit of damage to a nearby village and the elves had still not forgiven him. He couldn’t forgive himself, so Tony supposed that was reasonable. The elves, however, were not allowing Bruce near their territory, and the route around would take weeks.

“All right, all right,” Tony finally caved. “I’ll go, but not now. I need to stay. Winter… needs someone around. He gets all… lost in his head. I don’t want him to wander away and get hurt.”

Tony would never, ever put limits on where Winter could go, or what he could do, and he didn’t give voice to the situation in terms of Winter running away, even though it was sort of what it would be. It wasn’t up to him; if what Winter needed was to leave, to find his own way, Tony would fight to the death for him to have that opportunity.

At the same time, he was pretty sure that the former slave would wander off, if someone wasn’t there to take care of him. Not because he thought Tony would want to chain him down, but because he was still scared and trying to deal with the huge reality that was a life without chains.

Tony knew that feeling; he’d been captive for a much shorter period of time, but when he was finally free again, he’d felt ill at ease in his own skin, going for long, brutally exhausting flights until his shoulders burned and his eyes were blurry, just because he could.

And Winter couldn’t even do that. Not yet.

Freedom wasn’t free. And there was going to be a cost involved, because there was no way Tony was just going to let the poor man wander, lost and alone, without even the means to defend himself.

“I should have a prototype ready by the crescent moon,” Tony said. “I’ll go after that.”

“You might want to show him,” Bruce said, reaching up with one overly large finger to tap Tony’s chest. “So he knows that he can trust you.”

Tony scowled, putting his hand over the arc reactor. He wasn’t ashamed of his adaptations, but avians looked at him with pity and disgust when they saw what he’d done to himself. And there had been those who tried to steal it for their own gain. Never again.

“You are meddling,” Tony accused Bruce, because it was true.

“I am only giving direction to your thoughts,” Bruce said. Which was also true. “You’d come to the same conclusions yourself, given time.”

Tony was gone to the market, bartering for food and supplies. It was, Tony said, one of the hardships of being a blacksmith. He had less time to forage. So, trading at the free markets was required. When Tony had mentioned it, Winter felt a deep seated shame: he was taking charity, siphoning off Tony’s supplies and giving nothing back. Exactly what the avians knew he would be doing, and exactly why they would kill him.

He kept thinking he should leave. But that was death, and Winter hadn’t yet decided that death was preferable. If not leaving, Winter should find some way to be useful on his own. To bring something into Tony’s nest. He would forage, he decided. He could do short patrols around the nest, scratch up grubs and worms.

Winter crept into the forge; Tony had invited him there several days before, but Winter hadn’t been able to bring himself to move into the weirdly lit room whenever Tony was there, banging on the metals. The sounds reminded him too much of the mines, the smell, the way smoke hung in the air.

He thought, perhaps, he might find a weapon here, something to keep him safer while he worked for his keep.

But also, curiosity drove him there, now that Tony was gone.

See what it was that his labor had bought for Tony, see what it was that drove the other avian to spend so much time there, among the heat and stench and glowing, orange light.

Tony had cleared a space along one wall; dozens of sheets of thinly woven cloth with inked designs were hung there. Winter examined each, closely. They looked like… wings? With sharp edges and impossibly straight feathers.

Winter stretched his fingers out and brushed them along the drawings -- he hadn’t seen much art before. Enough to know what it was, in a memory that wasn’t a memory, a dream that had happened, although it often seemed like those memories had happened to someone else. Some other Winter. The one called Bucky.

Tony had a lot of tables in his forge, covered with tools and bits of his heated rocks. Bins full of the stuff he called iron. Thin, impossibly tough vines of it -- wire, Tony had said -- and sheets and little knobs and nodules.

Winter lifted one of the thin pieces, held it up to the light. It glittered seductively; a thin rod up the center and hundreds of delicate barbs stuck out at precise angles.

“It’s a feather,” Tony said, and Winter nearly dropped it in shock. “Artificial, of course. A prototype. Unfortunately, iron molded that thin, it doesn’t hold its shape for actual flight; the material’s just… not well suited for that particular task. Decorative only. Maybe, once we get the flight model working, I can add some in, just for the aesthetics of it.”

“I’m sorry,” Winter said, putting the feather back down on the table. “I didn’t mean to pry.”

“No, no, that’s fine. It’s for you, eventually. Come on, wanna look at the newest model?” Tony went to another table and whipped a large sheet of cloth off--

A wing.

A full framework, metal… wing.

It was…

Beautiful.

“I still have some adjustments to do,” Tony said, apologetic. “It’s not ready for a test flight, not yet, but soon, soon, I think I’ll have it, and… come here, don’t be shy, let’s see how it fits.”

Winter took a few, tentative steps forward until he could touch the wing. “For me?”

“Of course, for you,” Tony said. “Do you see anyone else around here who needs one? No. This is for you, everything I’ve been doing is for you. Now, we might want you to work-- actually, that’s a good idea, you’ll need to get those muscles back in shape. I noticed you walk a little… hunched over, I know, left over from protecting your stump but--” Tony reached and Winter couldn’t help it, flinched away, his wing coming up to shield him. “It’s all right, I’m not going to hurt you. I’m just wondering if your stump’s strong enough to bear the weight of it, right now. Come here, come here, sit, sit. I’ll strap it on and we’ll see how it goes. I mean, for actual flight, we’ll need something a little more durable, but that’ll come after we test.”

Winter found himself pushed -- gently, so gently -- onto a bench. There was a hollow tube end that slid right over the stump with a leather harness that went around Winter’s chest to hold it in place.

“There, flex that, see how that feels,” Tony encouraged him. “Once you get used to that, we can add in the rest of the framework, and then hang your flight feathers onto it.”

Winter stretched; he’d barely moved the coracoid bone, all that remained of his wing, at all. With nothing on there, flapping the stump around had always made him feel nauseated, scared. His shoulder ached, just from moving it a few times, but he could move it, and the weight of the metal cap felt…

Good.

“Yeah, that’s the ticket,” Tony said. “We’ll want to work that out, a sort of… remedy routine or something, to make sure you get your strength back. No sense in getting you in the air if you can’t stay there, am I right?”

“You…”

Winter couldn’t breathe suddenly. He had been so overwhelmed by the way Tony jabbered at him, Winter hadn’t thought all the way through the implications. “You think I can fly, again? With this…”

“Contraption?” Tony suggested the word. “It’s certainly possible. It’s a theory, right now. But hey, gravity is a theory and look how well that works.”

“When?”

“As soon as you can lift and support the entire wing structure,” Tony promised. “Which should give me some time to make sure we have a kite for you.”

“A what?”

“I refuse to build something this beautiful and perfect and have you crash into the ground on a test flight,” Tony said. “So… a backup kite; a glider. With an automated deploy system, in case of critical failure.”

Winter nodded, slow. He wasn’t sure he needed a glider, whatever that was. If he was given this impossible, burning hope of being able to fly again, he was positive that he’d rather crash into the ground than lose the hope.

He tipped his face toward the sky, and even unseeing, he felt lighter, somehow.

“Tell me what to do.”

Once Winter had seen the wing, had gotten Tony to explain it to him, it seemed there was nothing Tony wanted to do more than talk.

The first few weeks that Winter had been in the nest, Tony had avoided him, as if disgusted by Winter’s wingless, crawling, revolting self.

But having seen the wonders that Tony created, given that skill its due adoration, it seemed Winter had won himself a place. Tony was alone, and avians, well, avians craved flock, didn’t they? Tony had been alone for a long time; he refused to say how long, refused to say why, beyond the fear most avians had of fire.

Winter wasn’t much a flock, but he was something, and Tony had been jabbering at him non-stop ever since.

Enough so that Winter had stopped cringing away and had started listening.

Tony had a sweet voice and the way his whole face animated when he was speaking, he was like the sun and the stars and the moon all at once.

Beautiful.

Which in turn was wonderful and tormenting at the same time. Winter would have stayed at Tony’s side, just to listen and watch and learn. But Winter had nothing to offer in return. No skills beyond that of digging rocks from the earth. He was useless. There were a few things he’d managed to find that he could do to help. Winter was strong; stronger by far than most avians; working the mines had given him arm strength and tougher bones than most of his kin. Winter could carry a load at least twice as heavy as what Tony could manage.

And Tony, it seemed, needed a keeper. Someone to bring him food, make sure he drank. Kept an eye on how many were left of those wretched little coffee beans that Tony ate constantly to give himself alertness beyond the normal means of avian endurance. Gently chivvied him away from the forge and into his nest to sleep.

“What is this?” Winter asked one day, finding a set of red-painted gloves; thick and plated, yet flexible. Winter couldn’t help running his fingers over the gauntlets, to feel the minute articulation in the joints. Each glove had a brilliant blue plate in the center of the palm, like a jewel.

“An experiment,” Tony said. There was a fey, suspicious light in his eyes, like he wanted to snatch the gauntlets away from Winter.

Winter took a cautious step away, putting his hands behind his back. He knew, instinctively, that his spine was curling, that he was lowering his head, don’t look at me, don’t notice me, I didn’t do anything.

“Hey,” Tony said, and he was a lot closer than Winter expected. “It’s okay, look. I just… avians don’t like it when I remind them how unnatural I am. But… you deserve better than that. I’m sorry, that’s a me-thing. I’ve learned not to share too much of myself with people.”

“It’s hard to unlearn,” Winter responded, because he knew that feeling, he knew it all the way down to his bones and the airsacks inside them. “But I don’t think you’re unnatural.” He waved a hand at all the wonders of Tony’s workshop and forge.

“You haven’t… okay, okay,” Tony said, taking a few deep breaths. He pulled off the leather apron he was wearing, then another, shuddering inhalation. “If I can’t trust you, I can’t trust anyone. Right?”

“You can trust me.” Winter put his hand on Tony’s arm, feeling the smooth skin, the play of muscle underneath. The way Tony was shaking with tension.

Tony nodded. Popped the shoulder clasps of his shirt and unbuttoned the side. Winter had wondered, before, about the covering. Most avains didn’t bother to wear any chest coverings, unless it was brutally cold. The material got in the way of flight, and they were awkward to put on and take off without help. Tony’s shirts were buttoned in such a fashion that he could take them off without too much trouble, or fouling his feathers.

When he finished, he straightened, and Winter suddenly understood why Tony always wore one.

The device that shone out of the middle of his chest was like nothing Winter had ever seen before. Luminescent, perfectly round, it was embedded there, held in a metal socket, glowing and making that soft whirring sound that Winter had caught the edges of before, but didn’t understand. It was… like a star. A shimmering jewel in the night sky that whispered secrets that Winter couldn’t possibly understand.

“What is it?” He reached out, wanted to touch it. Was it warm or cool? What did the surface feel like, ridged or silken smooth? He raised his eyes to look at Tony’s face. “It’s beautiful.”

Tony grabbed Winter’s wrist, his grip strong, steady. For a long moment, they stood like that, Winter unsure if he was being pushed away, and then Tony drew him in, slowly, until his fingertips rested against the pulsing machine.

“It keeps my heart beating,” Tony said. “Saved my life. I built the first one in a cave with a box of spare parts for humans who’d kidnapped me, wanting me to make weapons for them, the way Howard made weapons.”

“Humans?” Winter asked. He didn’t know humans were actually real. They were creatures of myth, legend. The origin, perhaps, of all the demihumans, nagas and avians and even such creatures like Bruce… or Pierce.

Tony nodded. “They exist. They exist and they’re brutal and uncaring and they live to make war on each other. The things they did, to make me do what they wanted--”

“You don’t have to speak of that,” Winter told him, because he already knew what it was to be worn down, made into a servant, a tool, through pain and loss. “I know… I know what they did to you.” He didn’t, not the details, but he couldn’t help but flex the stub of his wing. He knew. He knew too much.

“So, I built the arc-reactor, to keep my heart beating,” Tony said.

Winter wondered if Tony realized that he was still keeping Winter’s hand trapped over the reactor. He didn’t say anything, didn’t try to pull back. The reactor was strange, but it wasn’t frightening.

“And then I built these,” Tony said, releasing Winter and pulling on one of the gauntlets. He stretched his fingers out, then attached a little set of leather-wrapped wires to a plug on the side of the reactor. “And I killed every single man who got in my way.”

He whirled on one foot, aimed at a target dummy at the end of the forge. A shimmering light built in his palm, like he’d captured a star and was offering it to the gods. A bolt of light, faster than thought, burst from his hand, and the target dummy whumped backward, caught fire and smoldered fitfully. “Repulsor cannon,” Tony said. “A weapon unlike anything my father created. I… I could level a city with this, if I wanted. Too much power. But I can’t unmake it. So, I keep it here, keep it safe. Keep it away from everyone. There are avians who would want me to use it; they still come, sometimes, try to persuade me to their wars and their raids.” Tony swallowed hard. “Like the one where they brought you to me. I’m sorry. I should have gone. I should have helped you.”

“You’re helping me now,” Winter said, because that was the truth.

“I’m a coward,” Tony said. “I’m hiding from everyone, from everything, because I don’t like what I’ve become.”

“I like what you are,” Winter said, because it was all that he could offer.

“Yeah, thanks, sweetheart,” Tony said. He stripped the glove off, put it back on its table and covered it. He gave Winter a sweet smile, went back to what he’d been doing, and they didn’t speak of it again. But Winter noticed that, if they weren’t expecting guests, Tony was not as quick to pull his shirt on in the morning, and sometimes Winter found himself watching.

Sometimes, in the late evenings, Winter would sing to Tony.

It was nice to sing, Winter found. He’d never considered himself a particularly talented singer. Sometimes those slaves with lovely voices had been taken off, to sing for the foreman, and those few lucky ones were better fed, worked less hard, than the rest. Winter had never been taken, so he didn’t think his voice was all that special.

But Tony insisted that he liked it. It was soothing, was what Tony claimed, and if it was something that Winter could do to help, to earn a place, he would sing until not a note came from his throat, would sing until he lost his voice entirely.

Not that Tony would allow it; he seemed unexpectedly concerned for Winter’s health, comfort, and well-being.

Still, singing. And bringing Tony food. Those were things his aves friends could do for him. Winter needed to be able to do something more. Better. Earn his keep.

His fingers twitched in the direction of the wing; under the sheet where Tony kept it when they weren’t directly working on it.

They hadn’t quite made a practice flight yet; everything was pushing up from the ground. Hard-flight. And Winter could push himself up a few feet, before fluttering back down safely.

Child’s play.

Most adult avians took off from the treetops, gaining momentum, using air currents to their advantage.

If Winter could fly, he could scavenge further, bring back more, faster. Tony was gone, to town, trading for supplies. Something Winter could do, if he could fly.

He’d unwrapped the wing before he could talk himself out of it.

Tony had helped him with the buckles and straps, but Winter knew how it was done.

“Sir, I advise against this in the highest possible manner,” Jarvis, the little aves, fluttered around Winter’s head, bobbing up and down like anxiety given form.

“I can do it,” Winter protested, flapping his hand at the little bird.

“There are near uncountable accidents waiting to happen, if you attempt a solo flight without proper oversight!”

“Sometimes you gotta run before you can walk,” Winter said. He couldn’t help the smile; it’d been too long since he felt this light, this weightlessness. Even a month ago, he would have cringed back, hidden away from anything, even an aves the size of his fist, who’d spoken to him in such a commanding tone.

“That does not make sense, sir,” Jarvis continued tweeting, dodging Winter’s flapping hand with ease, “nor does it apply in these particular circumstances. I do with you would reconsider--”

Winter finished buckling the wing up. It was heavier than a normal wing, given the construction materials, but Tony had weighted the harness to keep Winter stable in flight, centering the excess weight for balance. There were a few drag-weights for his tailfeathers as well; heavier wings needed heavier rectrices for steerage.

Winter climbed out onto the second landing flet. He stared up at the sky and let his body take over. He spread his wings; both of them responded beautifully to the movement of shoulder and back. Just standing there, wings raised, felt more like freedom than anything else ever had.

All I need is the air. Bring me that horizon.

Winter jumped.

** note: Snakes do not actually hypnotize their prey; they can’t blink and the head-motion they use is a way for the snake to accurately gauge distances. The weaving motion a basket cobra does is because the flute player is wobbling the flute and the snake (frequently defanged) is feeling threatened. That being said, this is a story, and the snake-as-hypnotist fits in with Hydra’s brainwashing motif. 

[yi-dashi-a]

//The first P-P-P-P-Public Transport Drabble in a while, I think? Needed to purge the dumb creative writing assignment from uni from my system with some Yi Parent fluff. Nothing better than writing about two dead ass people, amirite?

  Something something spending all that time hunting Jhin makes a Wuju Master a sappy boy, especially when you see so many families get fricked off while you’re away from your own. Sad wife also, because the other side of the equation is complicated too.

Dearest and Most Esteemed Mystic,

I write to you in the hopes that this letter finds you in the best of health. Better health, hopefully, than caring for me with your ceaseless devotion would have you in. Zhyun weather treats us all well, but the demon of the lands terrorizes the people still. I dare not to recount the things I’ve seen in my wandering, but let it be known that I am reminded every day of you, our own family, and the safety and sanctity we enjoy where others do not. Though we take no part in active investigation anymore, we at least hope our coordinated efforts with the Kinkou shall end these predations soon.

But to you, my wife, I say with certainty: Not a day goes by that I don’t see a flower, tree, bird in the sky, or even the aesthetic dance of shadow that doesn’t remind me of your boundless beauty, grace, and every redeeming quality I’ve been in awe of for the last forty years of my life. None of these compare to that which you encapsulate of course, and you might even think me senile if I see you in all places like I do. But, I suppose, I simply miss you, Huan. I’m refreshed by the chance to travel, but it’s nothing but a chore without you by my side. I’ve been pressing flowers, as the land allows, so I hope these will bring some of this adventure back to you.

I’m composing a play, in fact, about this entire ordeal. Writing things down when my Master isn’t around to chide me. Nothing of the blood and sorrow of these lands selfishly, but of a demon who sought to keep loves apart, and who thwarts his letters with ill thoughts. I’ll have your name remembered somehow, Huan. I’d weep if it went unrecorded to history like so many other wives of Wuju Masters. Hopefully, when I return, you’ll like it enough to watch me put drum beats and dance steps to the story?

With a heavy heart though, I must close this letter, for I only have so much parchment with which to write. I know you much prefer these trinkets than the personal ways we have always communicated at distance, so keep this well if you so desire. Burn it otherwise. Do whatever it is that makes you feel better. I look forward always to the day which I return to your side.

Always, and always,

Yi Chao

Always, and always.

That was, funnily enough, how he always signed his letters. Always with some reaffirmation of their life long bond, and then the always, and always. It made her giddy, in a teenage lover sort of fashion. Even if most would call her elderly, his words had their way of resting upon her heart and revitalizing her spirit. She hugged the ragged letter close to her chest, hoping the words would imprint on her forevermore. Though as if the writing was tactile to her, her fingers on the back face of the parchment noted a discrepancy in texture. When she turned the pages over, her brow raised as she scanned what appeared to be odd notation. Something she thought she should recognise, yet the meaning escaped her.

“Chao, your ways astound me, at times.” She remarked to herself, not braced for a reply,

“They astound me too, if I’m honest.” A gasp left her before her cordial nature could suppress it, and she recoiled from the source a moment before she could take the man in properly. In all her reading, she hadn’t felt illusion sweep her away,

“Chao!”

“Good evening, Wushi Mu.” He offered with the slightest smile, a warm expression that only grew when she leapt for him with arms out wide. Though there was a fantastical quality to his visage -- he felt more like a plush toy than a man of flesh and magical prowess -- she took him in her embrace all the same.

“This isn’t fair, Chao.” She whined into his chest, “I’ve told you, don’t use your telepathy unannounced. It’ll make me cry.”

“I’m sorry.” He laughed, of all things, “I just had a twinge in my mind. I felt it across Ionia. You were reading a letter of mine and feeling sad. I couldn’t help myself.”

“And I can’t help myself either, Wushi Fu.” Finally, Huan rose from the depths of her embrace, looking up to the man and his forever creased featured, hoping he didn’t notice the new wrinkles on her own, “You write me such niceties, and they both satiate my heart and hollow it. I’ll miss you so long as you’re gone. It can’t be helped.”

“Soon, I’m hoping...” He took in a deep breath, though never seemed to sigh it out again, “If we don’t resolve the matter soon, there won’t be any more people left in Zhyun to slaughter. It becomes more uncomfortable the less we’re able to help, though the Kinkou and their students seem sympathetic to our efforts as they become more exposed to the things we’ve been dealing with for years.”

“Years...” The word just came out, like a silent prayer to the Stars and All that another year wouldn’t pass her by alone. In her mind as he was, his expression saddened with hers, the weight of loneliness threatening to crush them both.

“Soon, Huan. I promise.” Chao said it, but the reality of how unsure he was echoed within their private quarters, “I’m trying my hardest.”

“Saving lives...”

“Yes...”

In equal parts remorse and sympathy, they stood there a time in the comfort of each other’s arms. How selfish she felt, that she wanted for more than just this. Most weren’t so lucky to be magically inclined, and fewer to be so gifted from birth. The fact she could hold him at all, even in her mind, should have been enough.

Yet it was never enough. How selfish she was.

“Oh, I must ask.” Words came back to her in time, and she elected to make them the most passing of conversation, “What is this notation on the back of your most recent letter? Should it be something I can understand?” His brow quirked a moment, but in time it morphed to realization, then another rare smile.

“I must have forgotten and written on some parchment I was using. It’s music. A composition I’d been working on, for my cover. Let me go a moment.” She complied, reluctantly, and he spirited away from her with the grace of a half step. The Wuju Master stood apart from her, heels together, and with the flourish of an invisible veil his clothes morphed before her eyes. From the robes of a Master, to the patchwork furs of some traveller. There were colourful patches and adornments in his poncho here or there, with bells and beads to accent, and even the odd accents of face paint to his person. Most interestingly though, was the long necked, stringed instrument that lay slung over his shoulder, like nothing she’d ever seen before.

“Master and I travel as a pair, regrettably.” Chao began, retrieving the instrument just as it came to her mind, the bow of the thing resting in his other hand, “But he was receptive enough to ensure that, when in cover, we travel as a bardic pair. It at least brings some joy to people as the Demon lurks, and it’s given me the chance to pick up this.”  He drew the bow across it idly then, with earthly deep sounds filling the wooden space, “I didn’t think I’d have much interest in stringed instruments, and I’m not sure I do now. But it was all the Zhyunian council could lend to me, so I’ve been composing instead of sleeping, as of late.”

“I’m happy for you!” She proclaimed, palms clasped, “Despite the circumstance, I’m happy you can do something creative with yourself.”

“And my Master only protests in the slightest.” The smile, this time, was a gorgeous thing to see. Any smile when talking of his father was a blessing, “But all this talk of me. I’m not partial to it. I want to hear of what you’ve been up to. Of how our children’s families fare… and how much our son squanders our influence while I’m not there to scold him.”

“These things can wait until my letter arrives in your fingertips.” Huan replied, tapping her nose with a finger and drawing closer again, “Right now I have you in front of me, with all your embellishments, and a piece of music no less.” She waved the parchment before him, notation his way, “You can’t expect me not to ask you to play?”

“I’m not very good, you know.” Chao retorted, though she immediately shook her head,

“Nonsense.”

“I play if only to supplement my story telling. I merely hope that people listen to the story more than the music.”

“Then tell me a story. Please, Chao.” She retreated to her lonely sleeping mat, sitting upon it astutely. His brow quirked in a particular way, but she just sat there waiting.

“Huan…” He offered in time, before he shook his head, “You’ll not rest until I’ve made an embarrassment of myself.”

“It’s just you, and me, and that strange instrument of yours, Poet. There is plenty we could do or say, but I just want to see you play.”

“Is it you who is the poet, or is it I?” They both shared in a laugh, but with no other place to go all the man could do was sit and play.

And what did he have to worry about? This wasn’t real. All of this was an illusion brought forth in her mind by his magic. If he so wished, ever note could have been one sent by the Stars, so divine that she would never hear another one better until he drew the bow back again. But he was honest with her, and for that she enjoyed the music so much more. There were mistakes, and notes where his fingers didn’t quite hit the mark of where the note should lie, but the fact it was him made it special. He told not much of a story in the end, just content in focusing on how his hands manipulated the two strings.

She could have let him go on with the sliding tones and deep, chaotic rhythms of the strange thing that looked only like a bowl with strings attached, but such wasn’t meant to be. Even he, with his eyes closed and rocking motions entranced by the sound, seemed content to continue until an interruption stayed him. Movement caught Huan’s eye, right in her peripherals, of a flourishing doorway curtain.

“Mother, Father…” Groaned a young woman, eyes heavy with the time of night and an infant protesting under her robes, “It’s good to see you, and to hear you, but if you’re going to do things like this, please be considerate for your children that are just as sensitive to your mind games as Mama.”

“Er… Good evening, Feng.” Said the man, stopping dead in his melodies,

“Good evening…” She grumbled, “Please do things like this when mothers with babies don’t have to sleep?”

“I’ll be more particular with my mentalism next time. I’m sorry.”

With that, she grumbled off, baby still babbling unawares at her breast. The parents merely exchanged glances for a time, before both of them summoned a grin.

“What a beautiful family we have.” He commented on a mumble, leaving his instrument on the floor.

“Careful. Such compliments might keep people up at night.” Huan chuckled.

“I hope they do, in part.” He replied, “It’s not often I’m of a mind to give compliments… but perhaps I must keep the recital for the rare moment I have time during the day?”

“Just hold me, before you go, Chao?”

And he did, this time with more weight behind his skin. The man might as well have been there as she held his image as tight as she could. Yet with a kiss to her forehead, her grip slowly became filled with just air. Quietly, he and his sounds, his music, and peculiarities, faded away, and all she had left of him was the parchment penned in his hand. She hugged it, then, harder than she knew she was able. Hoping that, as he returned to his own consciousness, he’d feel her embrace all away across Ionia. Damn the Demons, and damn the politics.

All she wanted was her family to be whole again…

[andthcmaiden]

tag dump 002.

[solivar]

WIP: Ghost Stories On Route 66

aka the one in which Hanzo is an expatriate art student whose life just got wildly complicated, Jesse is an occasionally leather-clad and frequently beleaguered NPS ranger, weird stuff is going on in the desert south of Santa Fe, and it’s all because I can’t write a plotless porny one-shot to save my life.

Also: this is all @gunnslaughter ‘s fault.

Chapter Two is now complete and I’m going to start posting to AO3 in the interests of making sure nobody misses any important bits.

The first thing he became aware of, once he realized there were things to be aware of, was the voice. It was a beautiful voice, rich and dark and warm, and the mere act of hearing it was the sweetest comfort he’d ever known, better than laying under the  kotatsu on a cold winter evening and watching the snow fall gently over the garden in the deep blue of the twilight, better than the exquisite release of tension as he loosed an arrow on the firing range, better than finding the precise shade of color to fully express the mood he attempting to evoke in his work. It wound around him and through him, buoying up his mind and soul on arms of song, and at that moment he realized the voice was singing, a song whose words he did not know, in a language he did not recognize, but which he understood nonetheless: it was calling him back, and he let it take him, up out of the dark-cold-nothing.

He became aware, next, of the solidity of his own existence, of the flesh and bone, blood and skin, that made up the body in which he lived, and of exactly how much that body hated every single thing about him and itself at that very moment. His head felt fragile, brittle, like an overbaked piece of clay sculpture fresh out of the kiln, waiting for the clumsiest intern in the Fine Arts department to come along and jostle it just hard enough to set off a chain reaction of events that would end in screaming, ambulance sirens, and intravenous sedatives administered en route to a mandatory seventy-two hour psych hold following a spontaneous attempted murder. It wasn’t quite pain so much as the threat of pain, the suggestion that the slightest hint of movement, necessary or otherwise, would result in a physical punishment vastly at odds with the severity of the offense, and so he concluded that holding still was likely the kindest thing he could do for himself. The rest of his body assisted by virtue of feeling as though it were carved from a single slab of lead or osmium or some other incredibly dense substance that would require genuinely heroic human efforts to heft around, thereby fully justifying his decision to behave as a basically sessile mass. Also helpful: the knowledge that something was holding him down. Well, okay, maybe not holding him down in the sense of restraining him from actually doing anything but someone definitely had their hands on him. Pressed to his chest, as a matter of fact -- his bare chest, it felt like, because that was definitely some skin-on-skin warmth transfer happening, callused, long-fingered hands spread across the breadth of his pectoralis major, tips of the thumbs just touching. Someone’s weight was settled firmly astride his hips, a sensation that would have been emphatically erotic under pretty much any other circumstance but at the moment did not seem to carry that connotation and none of the relevant equipment seemed interested in picking it up.

Still. Someone was touching him. He supposed, in a vague and not particularly enthusiastic way, that he should be at least a little bit concerned with that. Not enough to put any effort into stopping it, but enough to actually determine what was going on. That seemed like a reasonable idea. Yes, yes it surely did.

This is going to suck beyond the telling of it. The thought articulated itself verbally from amidst the inchoate mass of hazily good intentions, sending a frisson of dread through the threadbare fabric of his being, the essence of realism making itself felt. Then, before the essence of realism could graduate to the essence of fuck no, don’t do that, you’ll hurt yourself, he opened his eyes.

His eyelids parted with a sensation like silk tearing along a sharply folded seam. Until that moment, he would have sworn that eyelashes did not actually contain any nerve endings; afterwards, he would never again be so certain, because at that instant each one felt as though it were an exquisitely sensitive filament of something extremely fragile that shattered into a million shards of agony as they parted. His eyes watered, uncontrollably, reducing everything to either a dark blur or a bright blur of acid-washed torment as he blinked furiously in an effort to clear them, breath catching in his throat as something, probably a shriek of some variety, tried to claw its way out of his chest. He took a deep, heaving breath and the hands on his chest lifted away, the weight astride him shifted slightly, and sound he realized he’d been hearing all along stopped.

“Hanzo?” He knew that voice -- it sounded like he felt, rough and broken, as though its owner had been talking, or singing, for hours without cease. “Can you hear me?”

He blinked, thrice, and the blur cohered: Ranger McCree, leaning over him, painted knuckles to navel in...tattoos? It couldn’t be tattoos, he’d seen the man’s arms before, the pattern on them a thing of intricate and interlocking geometric forms, there was no way he would have overlooked it. He swallowed, hard, and found his lips and tongue and throat completely unequal to the task of making even the smallest sound.

“Oh, thank all the gods that ever were.” The look that crossed his face was a thing of pure and perfect relief. Hanzo could have sworn there were actual tears in his eyes. “I thought I’d lost you.”

Lost? Moving his jaw set off a warning throb in his temples, the promise of more to come if he wasn’t careful, and he closed his eyes, trying to force the insides of his skull and the current situation to come together in any way that made sense, to no particular avail. One of the strong, warm hands that had until recently been resting on his chest moved up to cup his face gently -- so gently he leaned into it, so warm and so comforting he would have reached up to pull him closer if he could have.

“You need to rest. Really rest. This took a lot out of you and I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I never should have taken you with me.” It came out a husky rasp, almost directly against his ear, and both those hands framed his face, warm chapped lips brushed his forehead, and he wanted to ask what there was to be sorry for but already the strength he needed to do so was fading, the weight of physical and mental exhaustion pulling him down into a gray and sensationless place where no pain could reach.

*

When Hanzo finally woke up it was completely and all at once -- admittedly, not an unnatural or even unusual event, considering he was normally the first person up and out on any given day. The strange part was that, for at least the second time in recent memory, he was looking up at a completely unfamiliar ceiling: large wooden beams, carved their lengths with repeating geometric motifs, picked out against the dark wood in vivid red and gold, white and ocher, latillas of paler wood laid perpendicular between each beam. Absolutely not the ceiling in any room of the three bedroom condo he rented with his brother, his brother’s boyfriend, and his brother’s two least objectionable classmates. For a long, long moment, he stared blankly up at it, appreciating the aesthetic qualities, the way the lighter wood of the latillas gave the illusion of the ceiling being higher than it actually was, the way the carvings drew the eye the whole length of the room. Dusky, Santa Fe red walls almost bare of adornment except for a few framed photographs. Three tall, slender windows, not quite floor to ceiling, framed in rough wooden lintels carved and painted in the same patterns as the ceiling supports, exterior shutters closed. The light he was using to see came entirely from the kiva sculpted into the corner nearest where he lay, a low fire burning behind an iron mesh grate. A standing wardrobe, a chest of drawers, a single chest at the foot of the bed, the bedstead itself, all of heavy, dark, old wood.

A bed. He acknowledged to himself that he was laying on a bed, which seemed...strange, for some reason. He couldn’t quite put his finger on why, or why that disquieted him at some level. It wasn’t an uncomfortable bed -- his feet weren’t hanging off the bottom, for example, and from his position in the middle of the mattress, he was in no danger of rolling off either side. Said mattress felt, to him, at least semi-firm, the pillows were several and not yet to the point of being slept flat, the blankets warm and soft and enveloping him completely -- he almost felt as though he’d been tucked in. He shifted slightly, stretching his wonderfully pain-free spine, buried his face in a pillow and the scent that rose from it was cedar-sage-spice and a single blinding instant he remembered where he was if not how he had come to be there and all-but teleported out of Ranger McCree’s bed.

Ranger McCree’s bed.

He was sleeping in his rescuer’s bed.

A frantic look around secured the calming information that he was, in fact, alone. A well-padded chair and footstool sat between the bed and the fireplace, a rumpled blanket and a throw-pillow still providing evidence occupation, though how recently he couldn’t begin to guess. A glance down showed him still dressed in soft-washed comfortable sweats, tee-shirt, socks, so whatever had caused him to be upgraded to the full bedroom accommodations had not, apparently, involved any other upgrades or side-grades or grades that would earn him weeks of helpful suggestions from Genji about what he should have done in this situation on the chance that he made mention of this to his brother, which he absolutely would not, ever. The bedroom door was against his back and, moving slowly and with care, he worked the wrought iron latch and slid it open an inch, to peer out into the hallway. It was, in fact, the same hall that led to the bathroom and the kitchen beyond, walls painted the cheerful yellow that caught and kept the sunlight. In the kitchen, the dishes were done and sitting in the rack to dry, but the quality of the light coming through the windows had changed, reflected rather than direct, much later in the day. He drifted to the arched doorway that separated the kitchen from the room of all purpose and found his host sitting at the dining table, back to him, a map spread out in front of him pinned down at each corner with a basalt block carved in the shape of an owl, a stack of reference texts, two college ruled notebooks, and a package of pens. From the angle of his head and neck, he was examining it; from the angle of his shoulders and his spine, he was not enjoying what he was seeing.

Hanzo took a breath to speak but before he could expel it, someone landed a thunderous knock on the door and a voice, deeper than the ranger’s by a whole octave and twice as raspy announced, “Garden of the Desert, special delivery!”

The eyeroll was clearly audible in the ranger’s voice. “It’s not locked, Gabe!”

“It fucking should be!” The windowless door swung open and a mass of swirling, hissing smoke, curling shadows, flickering dark wings flowed inside, the door slamming firmly shut and all the locks lining it flicking shut behind it. Hanzo retreated a step, two, blinked, and the smoke-shadow-wings resolved into a human shape: a man, tall, broad shoulders and chest only barely disguised by the loose black jacket he wore, silver-dusted black hair and scarred dark skin and eyes that burned darkly crimson in the shadows of his hood. He was, incongruously, carrying a plastic shopping bag that he deposited on the table directly in the middle of the map; the ranger promptly moved it aside. “So distracted that you’re neglecting basic physical security precautions, now? Does this have anything to do with the call I hear you made over to Roadie?”

“I am wearing twelve reasons why anybody who tries to come through that door uninvited is going to have a genuinely bad day.” The ranger replied, tone amused. “And y’all are still too young to be this much of a gossipy old fart.”

“I’m going to parse that out into an overall complement, for your sake.” The newcomer -- Gabe? Gabe with the glowing red eyes? Was Gabe actually a smoke monster? Hanzo had no idea and was too paralyzed with shock and indecision to either guess or scream or retreat -- pulled out a chair and dropped into it. “Spill it, kid. You’ve got six kinds of doom written all over you.”

The ranger -- Jesse, his name is Jesse, you can think his name, it’s Jesse -- scrubbed his hands over his face, shoulders dropping as he did so. “Yes, it’s got something to do with the call I made to Roadie. And the order I just made so -- “

“Custom blended to your precise specifications by Ana’s own hands, new tea bell inclusive. And a fresh bottle of that shampoo Jack makes that you love so much.” Gabe grinned and, for a completely horrifying instant, his mouth stretched entirely too wide and contained far, far too many sharp white teeth to be anything identifiably human. “For the record: Jamie called and asked if I’d be willing to ride shotgun so you can presume I already know about the broken-down car at the outer edge of the Red Zone. So just cut to the chase and tell me how it got there.”

Jesse pushed an object otherwise concealed behind the bulk of his body across the table: the dedicated shot composition camera that usually lived in the pockets of his bookbag. “Art student from the city. Per his testimony on the topic, he left Santa Fe on Friday morning for a day of inspiration-seeking among the ruins in the near vicinity of Shiprock -- both Shiprocks. While he was out there in the desert between the town and Tse Bit’a’í, he started experiencing technical issues with both his gear and his transportation. The GPS unit he was using completely freaked, dragged him somewhere around two hundred miles out into the Red Zone, and then almost back to safety before the car finally gave up and died. He walked, in the middle of the night, up from the edge and knocked on my door.”

“And you, of course, let him in.” Asperity thick enough to taste.

“He made it past the boundary maze.” Jesse replied, irritably. “Nothing purely from Beyond could get through there without -- “

“Without wearing enough stolen human flesh and blood and skin to pass and then come in here and tear your head off.” A hiss. “You are the entire reason I have gray hair right now, kid.”

“So you keep sayin’.” Dryly. “In any case, he did not tear my head off and, after describing the situation to me, I realized that our known zone of disruption is now way further to the west than it was even three months ago -- “

“And that whoever’s supposed to be monitoring the outer ward boundary is half-assing it pretty hard because everything they’re interested in protecting is still under Tse Bit’a’í’s shadow and nobody thought to call you so you could pick up the slack.”

“-- and that it might be developing some explicitly malevolent intent, because it dumped my guest almost on top of a nest of naayéé. An unusually active during the day nest of naayéé. Fortunately it was cold that night or he’d never have made it here otherwise.” He rested his head in his hands and, for an instant, he looked so utterly weary it was all Hanzo could do not to step into the room and try to comfort him. “And, of course, I screwed up at least once myself because when I went to check the car and see if I could avoid calling Roadie and Jamie, I took him with -- “

“Wow.” There was an entire lifetime of unsurprised nonreaction in that syllable.

“And he got a glimpse of one. In the rearview, so it was just the reflection but -- “

“Buuuuuuut it was enough to make you regret not leaving him here. Where he would be safe. Safer than anyplace else for dozens of miles all around.” Hanzo realized, in that instant, that there actually was someone on Earth more lethally sarcastic than his brother and it was sharing the room with him right now. “The next time Jack’s dog has puppies, you’re getting one. Maybe more than one. As an encouragement to stop adopting human strays.”

“Thank you so much for your understanding. I just spent the last...what day is it…?”

“Tuesday.”

“Tuesday!” Hanzo shouted, shocked out of his quiescence.

“I just spent the last three days singing his soul back into his body and then stitching them together again.” Jesse jiggled the bag gently. “Which is why I’m going to need this for him when he wakes up.”

“Oh.” Those burning crimson eyes flicked in his direction. “Well. You might want to see to that as a priority, kid, because he’s standing over there having an out of body experience and possibly a nervous breakdown.”

“Wh -- “ The ranger spun in his seat and locked eyes with him in the motion -- in any other circumstance, the look of dismay that crossed his face might’ve been comical. “Dammit, Gabe.”

“I see that my work here is done.” The smog monster/second most sarcastic human on Earth rose, dropped a fatherly pat on the ranger’s shoulder, and made for the door. “Coming over for fajitas tonight? We’re making enough to feed Reinhardt, so there’ll be plenty for you. And company, if he’s of a mind.”

“We’ll see.” The ranger growled -- really growled, his voice was gravelly enough for it just now -- and rose from his chair, hands outspread as though showing himself unarmed, despite the weapons he still wore, approaching slowly.

Hanzo bumped into the sink counter and realized as he did so that he was retreating, reflexively, that he could feel his pulse pounding in his throat, feel the breath catching in his lungs, his field of vision trying to tunnel at the edges. What he said cannot possibly be true, the calm voice of reason that ever and always sounded like his father murmured soothingly in the back of his mind, because it is impossible. None of this is possible. You are --

“I am totally losing my mind, aren’t I?” Hanzo asked, out loud. “Something really terrible happened to me out in the desert, and you’re just waiting for the ambulance to arrive. Go ahead. You can tell me. I promise I won’t freak out.”

“Something really terrible did happen out in the desert but, all things bein’ equal, it wasn’t as terrible as it could have been and, no, you ain’t losin’ your mind.” Softly, gently, and moving with the sort of slow care you’d use to avoid startling a skittish, injured animal. “And freakin’ out is a perfectly reasonable response, so if you do I promise I won’t hold it against you.”

“Good to know.” A warm, strong hand came to rest in the small of his back and, before he could stop himself, he buried his face in the angle of Jesse’s neck and shoulder and clung as he shivered, convulsively, unable to stop through any desire of his own.

Warm, strong arms closed around him, carefully, holding him closely enough to offer comfort and support, loosely enough not to tip what was threatening to become a genuine panic attack over the edge, a pretty neat trick the still-rational part of his mind was forced to admit. The hand not anchored to the base of his spine caressed his back in long, slow strokes and came to rest in his hair as the frantic pace of his breath finally moderated itself. The not-at-all-rational part of his mind wondered what that would feel like without the impediment of clothing and that was all he needed to find the strength to step back, to bring himself back under control. Jesse, taking the cue from him, let him go.

“What happened to me?” Hanzo asked, catching his rescuer’s dark eyes and holding them.

And, to give him the credit he deserved, he didn’t look away. “The naayéé are...not of this world. Never have been, never will be, but sometimes they find their way here, one way or another. The ones you saw the other day are particularly unpleasant to encounter because of the effect they generally have on people. They’re predators. Lazy-ass predators, actually, that mostly like it dark and mostly like it hot and they generally don’t come out in the daylight or the cold, so I really didn’t think we’d see any of them but…” He gestured helplessly. “Yeah. Again, I’m sorry. I didn’t want any of this to happen to you, it was completely my fuckup and -- “

“Jesse.” Hanzo interjected, with what he felt was admirable calm. “What happened to me?”

“They tried to eat your soul.” Jesse replied and immediately took a step towards him and rested a comforting hand on his arm. “Yanked it out through the sympathetic connection forged by the reflection you shared for a minute but I stopped things before it could get any further than that. It just took a while to coax your body and spirit back together -- you were in a couple different kinds of shock and it took some time to convince you that I wasn’t going to hurt you, too. Which was perfectly understandable given the circumstances.”

“I...see.” The still-rational part of his mind was screeching in high-pitched distress; the rest, however, was finally achieving an inner state of equilibrium that permitted him to hear and process this information without falling into any further pieces. “So I am...outside my body now. As your friend said.”

“Yes and I apologize, again. Gabe is pretty much made entirely out of antisocial tendencies at this point in his existence.” The comforting hand came to rest in the small of his back again. “We should probably put you back.”

“How can you be touching me if I’m not in my body?” Hanzo asked but nonetheless permitted himself to be guided down the now quite dark hallway.

“Circumstances have required me to master a number of fairly esoteric and nonstandard survival skills over the years.” Again, oh so very dryly as he opened the bedroom door.

“That’s not -- oh. Oh my.”

His body was, in fact, still laying in the bed, chest rising and falling in the slow, steady rhythm of sleep, hair spread almost artfully across one of the pillows, the firelight casting the planes of his face in coppery light and shadow. He blinked and took a deep breath and with a sudden, vertiginous wrench his perspective shifted and he was laying on his back in pillows and blankets and staring up at a carved and painted ceiling. With a certain amount of effort -- his thoughts felt laggy, like medicine head to a degree previously unheard of by modern science, and it took some time to convince his limbs to cooperate with one another -- he managed a sitting position against the headboard. Jesse sat on the edge of the bed and poured him a glass of water from the carafe sitting on the bedside table, which he consumed in a three swallows, and a second, which he drank more slowly.

His voice, when he spoke, was rusty with disuse. “It’s really Tuesday?”

“Tuesday afternoon. Almost evening, actually.” Jesse replied and offered another glass of water.

“I missed class. More than one class. I never miss class. I’ve got a midterm paper due tomorrow and two exams next week. My brother might actually be worried about me by now.” He accepted the glass and sipped at it slowly. “Something from another world just tried to eat my soul.”

“It’s a lot to take in.” Ranger McTalentForUnderstatement admitted, looking anywhere but at him, Hanzo noticed and, not for the first time, regretted that he’d let Hana talk him into that particular haircut, though he couldn’t really blame her for the piercings. “If you want, I’ll drive you home tonight -- I’ve got a call in to a local mechanic with the equipment required to retrieve your car -- “

“Roadie?” Hanzo asked, because asking questions and receiving answers made the whole situation feel at least slightly more real.

“Roadhog. It’s his nickname, real name’s Mako, but he likes to say he’s wanted in too many places to go by it.” Jesse glanced at him, grinned, looked away again. “He and his partner Jamie run a salvage and rebuilding operation off the highway about twelve miles north of here. They do most of the work that keeps my little fleet of gas-drinkers functional. They can certainly get your car back and probably in working order without too much trouble, so long as Jamie knows beforehand not to make too many...alterations.”

“I’m not certain I could afford that.” Hanzo replied carefully. “I was supposed to have it back on Sunday and I can just imagine what kind of fees -- “

“Don’t worry about affordin’ it.” In the sort of tone that didn’t really brook anything in the way of argument. “Are you hungry?”

His stomach was knotted entirely too tight to even consider the concept of food. “Not really, no. I just...would like to go home.”

“Of course.” Jesse rose and offered his hand; Hanzo accepted it, because his prevailing state of awkward and uncoordinated made getting out from under the covers and to the side of the bed more of an adventure than it should have been.

Getting to his feet was likewise a thing of extraordinary gracelessness and, for a horrifying moment, he felt like a newborn giraffe with legs too long and too ungainly to be real that also happened to be coming into the world on the deck of a ship about to sink into heaving, churning seas. He clung again, as the floor tried to tip sideways and knock him over, and his host submitted to the indignity with kindness and patience.

“I think maybe you ought to keep the sweats for now, just to make this as painless as possible.” Jesse suggested, a hint of humor with no trace of mockery in his eyes. “Let’s get you to the living room and I’ll bring the Jeep up.”

Walking got progressively easier the more he did it and so, while his host was out bringing around the vehicle, Hanzo tottered around the room gathering his things together: the plastic bag went in the bookbag, the folded stack of clothes went on top of that, Jesse’s gloves came out of his jacket pocket, and his jacket went on his body. The Jeep, as it turned out, was an actual, modern hover-vehicle painted NPS white with the green stripe and shields. On the way out of town, north on the unnamed, unmarked road that was once Highway 14, he pointed out the sights -- the town itself was once a more frequently sought-out tourist attraction, was still a national historic site, and had the cluster of carefully preserved mercantile buildings, saloons, even an old church, to prove it, along with younger, but equally abandoned, structures clustered around the edge of town, only a handful of which were still occupied. That handful consisted entirely of the Garden of the Desert, a compound of four greenhouses and a sprawling two-story Pueblo Revival hacienda, fully enclosed behind an adobe-and-fieldstone wall, the name of the place spelled out in jewel-bright mosaic on the arch over the main entry gate.

“Jack and Gabe and their gradually expanding pack of mostly-tame hellhounds call that place home. It’s pretty nice, actually. Gabe’s antisocial tendencies don’t influence his interior decorating decisions.” A pause. “Well, okay, they don’t influence them much. And he’s a damn fine cook, all other considerations aside. They both tend the greenhouses, though Jack and Ana -- that’s the neighbor up the valley, lives in the hills with her husband, Reinhardt -- do most of the alchemy, for want of a better term.”

Hanzo thought of unnaturally willful smoke and curls of shadow and far too many sharp, white teeth and the question was out of his mouth before he could stop it. “Gabe isn’t...completely human, is he?”

Jesse glanced sidelong at him and was silent for a long moment. “I wondered if you saw that while you were…” Another, longer silence. “That’s...kinda not my story to tell. I can say, with total confidence and all joking aside, that I would trust him with my life, and a lot of other people’s lives beside. But, no, he ain’t. Neither is Jack, he just wears it better. If you’re ever in a position where you need help -- like the kind of help you got from me, but I’m not available, there’s nobody better to call upon, and that’s a promise.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.” Hanzo found a smile actually crawling onto his face and he let it stay. “So the...blend...you got from them -- it’s some kind of medicine?”

“Yes. The kind of injury you’ve suffered is tricky to heal -- your body and your soul have to grow back together and, right now, you’re vulnerable to...relapse is such a stupid word here but...that’s kinda what it is. Your spirit’s still only lightly tethered to your body. Your body’s vulnerable without your spirit in it. All of you is more susceptible to weirdness in your sleep, as we just saw.” They reached the junction with the actual charted highway, traffic coming and going in each direction. “You should take that once a night, just before bed, for seven days. It’ll help strengthen the bonds, heal the spiritual wounds, make you...not forget, exactly, but make the memory less of a scar.”

“That’s good, because I would prefer not to forget.” Hanzo, greatly daring, rested a hand on Jesse’s shoulder, lightly, and snatched it back. “You saved my life, and for that I’m grateful.”

“I -- “

“Quiet.” Hanzo smiled ruthlessly. “You saved my life, and I do not want to forget that, or you.”

“It’s probably for the best if you did.” They were, Hanzo realized, approaching roads, and landmarks, that were thoroughly familiar now. “I can’t order you to stay away from the desert down south but, for your own safety, you should absolutely do so. Something out there decided you were interesting enough to mess with personally -- something out there might’a gotten a taste of you and might’a liked it and that? That’s dangerous, more dangerous than I can probably make you appreciate just now.” Softly. “I don’t want anything worse to happen to you, Hanzo. Please don’t invite it in the front door.”

“I will try not to do so.” His temporary home loomed out of the twilight -- for an instant, it was on the tip of his tongue to ask how Jesse knew the address, realized he’d probably gotten it from his driver’s license, and struggled to find something else to say as they pulled up to the curb. “Where -- where would you suggest I go, then?”

“Black Mesa’s one of the most beautiful places there is -- and the mountains north of Los Alamos, particularly at this time of year.” Jesse reached over and unlocked the doors, activated the hazard lights and, before Hanzo could fully process what he was doing, got out and opened his door for him. “Promise me you’ll take care of yourself.”

“I promise.” Hanzo hefted his bag over his shoulder and stood clear of the door. “And I will take your advice to heart, as well.”

“If you’re still not feeling a hundred percent after the week is out, call me.” Jesse pressed something into his hand as they walked to the door of the condo together. “I’ll do whatever I can to help, that’s my promise.”

“Thank you again.” Hanzo paused with his hand on the exterior identification lock. “Would you...like to come in? For coffee?”

“I’d best be gettin’ back, but thank you kindly for the offer.” He tipped his hat, and Hanzo’s knees tried their hardest to transform into bendy gelatin again, successfully enough that it was all he could do to stand and watch as he walked back to the Jeep and pulled away.

He was, in fact, still standing there holding onto the lockbox when the front door flew open behind him, a shadow fell over him, and his brother demanded, in a voice that promised something immediate and horrific for someone if he didn’t like what he heard, “Where. The actual fuck. Have you been?”

[marisdoner]

Iskra Lawrence Shared a Compelling Message About Body Dysmorphia and Disordered Eating

No need for the flu shot use The Hydrogen Peroxide Ear Treatment

We all know Iskra Lawrence for breaking down society's standards of beauty and encouraging people to strive for happiness, not a number on the scale. The body-positive role model has appeared in countless Aerie campaigns with zero retouching and is always posting inspirational and motivational messages on the 'gram.

In her most recent post, in honor of National Eating Disorders Awareness Week, she opened up about her struggles with body dysmorphia and disordered eating. "I want to combat the stigma around this mental illness," she wrote alongside side-by-side photos of herself. The photo of the left shows Lawrence airbrushed and Photoshopped to an almost unrecognizable degree; on the right, a photo of her today, rocking a bikini on the beach, truly happy with being "perfectly imperfect."

RELATED: 9 Body Positive 10-Year Challenge Posts That Will Leave You Feeling Inspired

Photo: Instagram / @iskra

RELATED: Iskra Lawrence Didn’t Hold Anything Back When Posting This Unedited Photo of Her Cellulite

"I wish I had known that Photoshop and retouching didn't make me perfect or beautiful," she wrote. "Also that I didn't have to be a 'male fantasy.' Look how posed the pic on the left is, how squished my poor boobies are. This was again another societal fantasy I thought as a woman I was expected to be." 

Lawrence spent years of her career as a model, thinking she was supposed to look a certain way in order to fit in. "When I started modeling, I was so focused on the scale, so focused on looking a certain way, that I didn't even realize I had a mental health issue," she previously told Shape. "I was working out so hard, to the point where I was dizzy and my eyesight would become blurry. I was obsessively writing down how many calories I was consuming, and my diet was so poor that I was constantly tired and would often fall asleep in the middle of the day. Despite that, mentally, I always felt like a failure because I could never reach the aesthetic or standard I'd set for myself or what I thought society expected of me."

RELATED: Cassey Ho Created a Timeline of "Ideal Body Types" to Illustrate the Ridiculousness of Beauty Standards

RELATED: Iskra Lawrence Just Posted the Most Hilarious Photo of Her Eating a Burger in Her Underwear

Blinded by obsession over changing her appearance, Lawrence was ignoring all the signals her body was giving her. "It was basically screaming that I was hurting myself, but I continued to ignore it until one day, something just clicked," she said. "I stopped trying to alter what I looked like and accepted my body as it was. With that, I also gave up on dieting, restriction, and everything else that was damaging my body and self-esteem."

Since then, Lawrence has worked hard to become comfortable in her skin. One of the most valuable lessons she's learned is that she's worth so much more than what she sees in the mirror. "I've never felt more beautiful or sexy just being the real me, and knowing that I'm loved because I'm me not some fantasy or perfected illusion," she continued to share in her post. "That my value wasn't based on a set of measurements, a number on the scale or the size I wear."

RELATED:  Iskra Lawrence Just Posted the Same Photo Before and After FaceTune: 'The Real You Is Good Enough'

Today, her goal is to continue sharing that inspiring message with women to encourage them to love their bodies as they are and to have more open and honest conversations about disordered eating and self-image. "I know now that my body is mine and therefore perfectly imperfect and my home to be cherished," she wrote. "I'm grateful I'm here to tell my story when there are too many lives being lost from this mental illness. I hope that someday you share your story because we need more representation when we talk about eating disorder recovery. Sending you all so much love and hope that you will tell yourself today and every day that you love yourself too."

If you or someone you know is struggling with an eating disorder, NEDA's toll-free, confidential helpline (800-931-2237) is here to help.

To get our top stories delivered to your inbox, sign up for the Healthy Living newsletter

This article originally appeared on Shape.com

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Iskra Lawrence Shared a Compelling Message About Body Dysmorphia and Disordered Eating was originally posted by Health Nutrition And Strange Science News

[doublenegation]

Too Early

Being too early in a night club feels like dying young. You can see the whole thing stretching ahead of you, all the things yet undone sort of fading in a distance you will never reach.

Only young men seem to go early, stuck somewhere between the cloak room and the toilet, struggling for what was it again? The night is still young. Too young, like it will go on forever until suddenly it no longer does, and here you are -- stuck waiting for something, anything to happen.

There's a faux arcade machine in the corner, lonely and not exactly retro -- I might be the only person in the room who knows what it fails to properly reference, 90s rave aesthetic weirdly displaced by an 80s that never was, begging for change, any change, loose change, admonishing responsible drinking while sporting that accursed deer mascot, rendered unlovingly in a wireframe aesthetic that never was, unartfully ripping off that drag-and-release mechanic killed by ludic literacy and a terrible tendency towards complexity but lacking any understanding of what it's for.

Very videogame. Like a real videogame (made by love, with love), it doesn't know what it is except perfunctory and limited, potential delimited by a marketing budget and ... zero ambition? It feels unfair to judge, I'm sure the good kids at Chloroplast Games with their weak blob logo would have preferred to excel, to push a boundary or two.

But here it is, in a corner, across from the bar, most likely unseen by anyone but those who miss the bathroom queue, make a right too early, find themselves in an alcove populated only by that herbal alcohol mascot and their own misunderstanding.

I suppose part of my ennui stems from going to a rock'n'roll club an hour too early. I should have learned by now -- the party is at least half an hour away, maybe an hour even! And rock? Do I even listen to rock unironically? Am I in a position to judge this scene as anything but maybe something I missed out on ten years ago?

Hard to tell, I suppose I ended up here because the other place was shut and this seemed to have, well, open doors and some people. Maybe it was the girl who briefly held my gaze before her boyfriend arrived and pulled her back to reality?

She might have preemptively lied to me, suggested an impossible connection or at least given my half-drunk mind the illusion of one, her gaze a reminder of what I need but don't know how to get in this strange city with its strange people and strange ways.

I mean, this is just playacting anyway -- I'm not really out tonight, I'm just investing in a potential future, seeing what's up, how it's hanging, so I'll get to sleep okay tonight and not lie awake staring at the ceiling waiting for sweet nothing to embrace me so another day can promise me things it can't keep.

There's supposed to be a dance floor, but it's empty. I paid to access this emptiness -- a pittance to be sure, but it still obligates me to try, I guess, to pretend like I'm out and about; seeing town when I'm really just waiting for tomorrow, the real deal, a potentially chance date with a hairdresser who thinks it's funny she can't pronounce my name.

It's nearly as expensive too. A quarter hour of work to spend what, a couple of hours in this cellar with its post-rock and empty dance floor and cockroach I just stepped on because my peripheral vision is way acute and I can't help myself.

Tomorrow is the real deal, the real illusion, the current fantasy, the affirmation that I'm doing something other than typing out future blog posts on my phone in this cellar on this park bench as far as I can get from that Jägermeister fauxcade game only I can put in its proper cultural context.

We're 30 minutes into the cellar life and there is still hardly anyone here, meaning my initial assumption is wrong -- there's no life after midnight. It happens at some witching hour yet to pass, one I might not even get to see before I decide I've had enough and go home to find that sweet bedtime I've lied about wanting to avoid, like I've lied to myself about the severe blonde at the bar looking at me, like I've lied to myself about maybe being in the mood for rock'n'roll.

Turns out my gut feeling is true -- rock'n'roll is a state of mind divorced from the presence of that cultural touchstone rock'n'roll. If I like rock'n'roll, it's because I like that confidence and that swagger and that noise and not because I strictly enjoy real guitars and real drums.

The other people literally just left, which lends me courage to stay just a little longer to see what they will miss, if anything. I like the idea of exclusively witnessing potential lost to others. It's my inner hipster god justifying itself -- to boldly go where no man thinks there's any fun to be had, to hope that the DJ is not as lonely as me, on this early November night in a city I don't know.

Hey, worst case I have produced my most spontaneous piece of prose in whoa, a long time, wrapped in my language, a critical language, one that is knowing and distant in lieu of knowledge and distance, wrought under the very limited auspices of autocorrect. And it only cost me a fraction of the expensive alcohol I bought as soon as my invoice was reimbursed this very afternoon, the sweet Mammon I've waited for all week, months worth of rent and -- well, this.

I might be too advanced for this chance experience. I might need something less haphazard, something I know I want instead of something I maybe think I need. Healthy, though -- I have chosen to be disappointed in an effort to discover myself.

The DJ is doing good. Maybe because it's empty. He's wringing out some noise I haven't heard before, like he's loving it despite being unheard -- maybe because he's unheard by anyone but me here on my park bench that doesn't belong here in this place I don't know.

Once upon a time I would have paid for two people to nearly enjoy this emptiness but now I only spent what, one percent of my monthly fun-budget having this epiphany, this realisation that you can't win 'em all but you can reflect very, very eloquently on that belated epiphany, that sudden realisation that your princess is in another castle.

A couple just stumbled into the cellar. They are ... well, nearly gone again. They are not sitting down to write essays and reflect upon the empty dance floor. They went towards the toilets (or maybe the fauxcade machine, my view from here is limited) and then vanished.

No, this is just a trial run, a ... premature anti-climax, a preemptive disappointment before tomorrow's big whatever, the real club night where maybe I'll find my hairdresser in the crowd and we will kiss desperately because we're no longer young and want some beauty while we can still offer some of our own.

I will be on drugs and I will listen to music more suited to my state of mind, to my ironic distance, nothing as forceful as rock or whatever this undead amalgam should be called. I will lose myself even if it's not to her.

The couple found the benches too. I suppose that is the death-knell, the final proof that I am not an outsider here as I touchscreen-type this little screed. I am just ahead of my time, settling into the non-event I could see not unfolding before me even hours ago, even before I left my new home to find something new, something I'm not bored by or angry at yet.

They are smiling and laughing. They have, like me, paid to be here and like me they are making the most of their bad investment, listening to the really quite great music and trying to ignore the fact no-one else is.

Entrance came with a free drink. I should go to the bathroom then claim it and have a cigarette. Maybe I will emerge to find the dance floor filled. Or maybe I will sow the seeds of that throat cancer I so desperately hope won't eat my voice before I get famous.

Either way, the new me is yielding something, rock'n'roller or not. This is something. This would not have happened just a week ago, and the price is very, very low compared to the cost of all those empty moments I have wasted these last few years.

Love is a lonely thing, and the more time I spend alone the more I come to understand, accept and -- yes -- kind of relish in it. The couple are talking over the loud music and I am typing this on the world's worst typewriter as I bury my rock'n'roll persona and head past the advergame, past the empty dance floor, towards the toilets so I can emerge and provoke that cancer I hope will pass me by and grab someone else by the throat so I can live forever.

Hey, unlike the DJ, I am free to leave. And in the grand scheme of things, I am paid more for my time here than he is.

On my way out, I stop for that smoke. A cute Italian girl asks me whether there’s anyone dancing downstairs. I let her know it’s dead. She’s disappointed, since she wants something -- anything -- but reggaeton. I argue in favour of reggaeton, my contrarian streak flaring up like a shooting star, and she thinks I’m funny.

I leave, and I get all the way home (which is only a ten minute walk, granted) before I realize I am drunk and I am not sleepy, and I decide fuck it, I might as well stay out. I head back.

She’s not there anymore. I convince myself this was just a trial run. Tomorrow is hairdresser day, and I need to be awake, alert and in a party mood for that. I am only half-convinced, but really -- I don’t have much else to believe in. So I live and I learn. And I won’t go out too early again. Except maybe tomorrow because I wanna be there before the place fills up so I can spot her or she can spot me and I can say hi, I’m here, just like I said I would be, and she will smile and it will be like tonight never happened.

[desanctii]