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hotwings0203 · 4 years ago

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An Ode to the Unseen

Thinkin about readers who feel self conscious, readers who feel like they’re not happy with their weight, readers who don’t feel girly enough or feel too vulnerable because of whatever height they’re at. I’m thinkin about readers who suffer from body dysmorphia, who shy away from looking at themselves in the mirror to avoid seeing their scars, body hair or acne. This is for the readers who feel too submissive and feel like a pushover in their lives, and this is for the readers who feel like they’re too fiesty and not soft enough. It doesn’t matter if you feel like you can’t relate to the stereotypical tropes in writing, or if you feel like you can’t act like a perfectly constructed Y/N in real life, this ones for you💖

A/N: Hello to all reading! I made this on a whim just to tackle some of the insecurities lesser described characters in stories might feel, but this is in no way meant to exclude anyone at all! We all have beautiful bodies, and should own up to it even if we don’t always see the problems we face in writing. Some of these topics might be sensitive to readers or trigger memories that might be disturbing to others, so please heed the warnings! Also the Hawks prompt at the end gets pretty nsfw, so heads up for that hehe

CW: dubcon, manipulating, fluff, slight angst, EDs, body dysmorphia, kidnapping, abuse, degradation, some nsfw, yandere, language, insecurity

You’re ever feeling not particularly happy with your face or body because of an acne breakout, or a rash that won’t go away? Maybe a birthmark that you try to cover up with makeup? Even stretch marks or scars from surgery?

You can bet your ass shigaraki will notice the way you can barely glance at the mirror some days just so you don’t have to see your own reflection when it’s time to go to bed with him.

His obvious and intense stare makes you fidget and gets your skin crawling, but he says nothing that night when he holds you a little too tightly-tighter than most nights he’s with you. The sound of his raspy breaths lulls you to sleep, but when you wake up he’s already gone, out on another mission or at a meeting with the Yakuza.

You feel groggy and gross, and going to the bathroom just to look in the mirror again to see whatever ails your body and/or face does nothing to stop your groan of misery.

You do your business all while turning away from your reflection, not wanting to see a second more of your discontentment staring right back at you while you wash your face, brush your teeth, and meticulously do your hair.

Finally making your way downstairs to the bar, you sit on one of the barstools and hold your head in your hands, not wanting to meet anyone’s gaze and no doubt seeing their disgust at your ailment.

But you look up when a soft whirring sound and purple-black tendrils of smoke appear before you

“Young master L/N,” Kurogiri says. “Have you been feeling alright? You retired earlier last night and had the most uncomfortable of expressions on your face, I couldn’t help but notice.”

No matter how much you despised or were wary of Tomura, you knew his caretaker, Kurogiri, had your back. He was respectful of your space, and if he knew you weren’t in the mood for talking then he wouldn’t push you

And so you told him your predicament, opening up about your problem spot(s)

“It’s so embarrassing, Kurogiri. I feel gross and I feel like everyone’s looking at me,” you mumble, putting your head down on the cool polished wood countertop.

He’s silent for a moment or two, before the tendrils of his supposed hands warp into a small portals. They appear again immediately, producing a couple of bottles and place them in front of you.

You raise your head slightly at the sound of sloshing liquid and rattling pills as the bottles are lined up before you in an orderly fashion, and you eye them suspiciously.

“What’s this?” You ask, picking up a tube as your curiosity is piqued.

“Young master Tomura Shigaraki had warned me beforehand of your reclusive nature when you ponder on what cannot be controlled, and sent me a list this morning to pick up some medication that might help you, should you need it. He asked me to bring back every item as soon as possible, so you wouldn’t feel the need to procure anything by yourself and strain yourself unnecessarily.”

You scoff, not buying the surprising act of affection. “So, what, he’s just doing this so he doesn’t have to look at my disgusting (body part of choice) anymore? He wants to come back and see some perfectly molded pet to stare at all day?”

Kurogiri shakes his head, however.

“I know how the young master is perceived to many: abrasive, immature, and brash in his thoughts and actions. He has a long way to go in terms of maturing in the way he views things, and unfortunately he was not blessed with…the best of upbringings, so he truly doesn’t know any better, as you already know.”

You wince internally, feeling slightly guilty now.

“But,” he continues slowly, “he was not born with evil in his heart. He’s just bitter with society, and is desperate for others to know his pain and see the world for what it really is towards those who are suffering. That’s why he is so taken with you, young L/N. Before you came here, he observed your mannerisms and was thoroughly attracted to the way you could see through people’s surface level facades. Although your views on the world may differ here and there, he is desperate to show you that he understands your suffering, and that he’s there for you-“

“-yeah, well, he has a funny way of showing it,” you mutter darkly, memories of chains and dark rooms and various marks on your body flashing through your mind. Even if Kurogiri was telling the truth, it would take some time for you to come around and even begin to try to give yourself to Shigaraki. He was just too volatile, too rough and negligent of your wants and needs. He lashed out at everything you did, and made you feel like nothing you ever did was enough to please his shifty nature.

“Yes, I can understand you bitter feelings towards him,” the black and purple mass hummed in thought. “I have tried explaining how a human girl is to be treated, however, and he is slowly trying to learn. I feel as though he may feel embarrassed at times from his lack of knowledge at such simple social norms, and that is another factor of his frequent temper tantrums. He might be the leader of a powerful villain organization, but when he realizes he has no knowledge of making friends or keeping relationships, it’s an embarrassing blow to his ego. Especially with you, he is especially sentimental and touchy regarding topics that pertain to you. He often will sit here in silence after you two have a, uh, little spat, and hesitantly will seek my advice on how to make things up to you. ”

And you realize with a grimace that he’s right-there are days after you both have a big blowout(usually over the most pettiest of things, maybe you turned away from him while sleeping and he took it as a sign of disobedience, or maybe you didn’t greet him when he came back from an especially tiring mission and he used that opportunity to take his pent up stress out on you) that he’ll come back after storming out of the room only to creep back in hours later with various trinkets in his hand.

You’d be alerted of his presence when the pitch black room is blessed with a yellow ray of light from the opening creaky door as he enters, and you will yourself to continue breathing slowly, as if you were still asleep. But he’s so quiet and stealthy as he comes closer to you, it’s hard not to be surprised and flinch or jump when his arm reaches over you just to place one of your favorite snacks on the cracked dresser next to you.

It’s hard to keep your head down on the dusty pillow and keep your curiosity in check when you feel him breathing down your neck as he lays a stuffed animal on the blanket next to you, and you often wonder where he knows to buy such fragile and innocent things.

Your aesthetic that he so closely has memorized from each singular color to the details of your favorite patterns make a stark, disturbing contrast to his greying, deadly aura. It’s almost impressive that he pertains each gift to your taste when he’s feeling especially sorrowful

“But nevertheless, the master has asked me relinquish these to you as soon as you came downstairs. And, just between me and you,” he leans closer and you do too, finding yourself wanting to know this secret side of your captor even further, “he was muttering something as he left, something along the lines of not wanting you to feel like you had to use these products. I think he was trying to say that he never wants you to feel as though you have to make up any part of your body you feel insecure about to him. He wants you to stay the same way you always are, and if you never adjust to your surroundings here, then he at the very least wants you to be comfortable in your own skin, blemishes and all.”

“This may or may not come as a surprise to you, but he himself knows what it’s like to feel insecure about his own skin and body,” and it comes across so ridiculously innocent and striking to you that such a lethal character such as the infamous Shigaraki would have the same problems a normal, functioning member of society would have: skincare and body insecurity. But the lines, scratches, and scars that litter his face can attest to this notion. How often did he himself avoid looking in the mirror for, not wanting to see his translucent skin, the clawmarks that left bright, angry trails up his face and down the sides of his neck, the cracks in and around his lips and eyes? Is that why he left his hair down skit covered his face, and the hand on top covering him whole more often on than not?

And so you finally open the lid to the tube, testing the feel of its contents that promise your mutinous skin some time of relief.

The door suddenly bangs open, and the man of the hour himself slinks in, nails idly scratching the underside of his jaw as he mutters under his breath to himself.

He lifts his head and sees you and kurogiri at the bar, a tube of ointment in your hand , the lid opened in testing as the rest of his presents are in array all around you.

As if you were accepting them.

As if you were accepting him

He feels his face beat up and his deteriorating body starts to prickle and sweat. He merely scratches harder, his mumbling continuing as he slowly makes his way over to you

You watch his little unsure shuffled towards you, and you can’t help it when your heart twinges as you take in his hopeful yet cautious expression, no matter how hard he tries to stifle any vulnerable emotion

So, in a moments decision of truce you quickly lean forward to whisper to Kurogiri one last favor before turning to see a new light of your captor

“Before I go, I need some things from you, please. By tonight, do you think you could pick up some self care things at the corner store for me? I’m talking face masks, lotions, Vaseline, and hair products.”

“I think if I see him accept himself and care for the body he’s in least for one night, I could be happy in my skin, too.”

Feeling conscious about your weight, whether it’s over or under your preferred look? Please, don’t make Kiri laugh at your naivety

You groaned as you stood on the scale, the numbers reading back at you seeming more mocking than simple statistics

You weren’t meeting your preferred weight, and it was beginning to take a harsher toll on you now more than ever with Kiri around all the time

It was easier to ignore it when you lived by yourself in secluded bliss, where the walls of where you lived couldn’t talk or pass judgement about your eating habits, the times you did or didn’t keep up with yourself as months of promising to do the Chloe Ting workouts turned into forgetful reminders that dwindled down into barely passing thoughts.

Where you had your own, carefully chosen friends who could relate and share the secrets of their insecurities, the little area of pudge that just won’t go away, that upper area of their arms of legs that refused to build muscle even after months of eating straight protein and going to the gym.

You got to choose your own happiness, you got to choose if you wanted to spend countless hours scrolling through social media with your coworkers, gazing in envy at the hundreds of models people swooned over, or if you wanted to call it a day and eat a whole bucket of cookies and cream ice cream while watching a sappy rom com, just because it made you happy

But now, not so much

You could tolerate Kiri gradually distancing yourself from friends who he thought didn’t have the “best interests” for you

You could patiently follow the chipper rules of his house to wait for him when he got home, greet him at the door in nice clothes, and sit down to eat dinner with him

You even started getting used to having his eccentric, loud friends over who bustled and teased you around when Kiri invited them over for a boys night even if that “boys night” ended in them being hurriedly ushered out as he caught a glimpse of you in an accidentally-provocative apron

But your sanity and self worth was slowly started to snap like an overstretched rubber band when it came to trusting your body. Your mutinous, betraying body that just didn’t do what you fucking wanted it to do, that was constantly compared to the models friends Kirishima would bring around, like Mina and Jirou

They were angels, of course, so, so sweet to you

Constantly reassuring you that the new dress your captor boyfriend practically shoved you in in his eagerness to see you in red (his color) fit oh so well on you

They tried to convince you that no, the dress wasn’t stretched too tight on you to be considered healthy, and no, it didn’t need to be shrank in some places either

They tried, they really did

Unfortunately for them however, their relentless support didn’t hold a candle’s light to the body builders and Pilates instructors Kiri would model with for health magazines almost every month

They could never understand what it was like to be in constant doubt and shame when you feel your seemingly mismatched figure, their bodies reflecting healthy proportions in every nook and corner, skin and smooth and soft as a baby’s, with glowing reflections of perspiration

And you always seemed like the only poor unfortunate soul who sat in the corner, sulking and watching ripped muscles and leaned, toned limbs mingle amongst each other to socialize and effortlessly slide inside various apparel that of course fit their body and shaped them in ways you couldn’t even dream of

And it didn’t help that night after night, Kiri would hold you on his lap, bouncing his eager knee as he shoveled bite after bite of food into your unwilling mouth

He infantilized the hell out of you, convinced you were too naive and self-loathing to see your true beauty and how he had to take it on himself to show you what he saw in you

It made you feel pathetic, and helpless. Maybe that’s what you were though, maybe that’s really what he was trying to show you

You felt like you deserved it, anyways

So you stand there, on the weighing machine, feeling the last shreds of self confidence slip down and out of your body, akin to the light tears that splash on the marble bathroom floor.

“Babe? What’re you doing?”

Aw, fuck

You quickly brushed away your tears and stifled your imminent sobs to avoid being coddled as usual by the gentle giant who stood behind you

It frustrated him to no end, no doubt. It didn’t matter how often he’d sit you down and kiss you all over, letting you know how much he loved every precious inch of your body, it didn’t matter how gently he’d cradle your face to force you to look into his eyes just to tell you how beautiful you were, how lucky he is to have kidnapped you

It was never enough for your fragile heart, and he saw it in the way you flinched under his praise and shrunk under his loving gaze that raked over your body that he compared to an angel’s

As if you thought he was a liar, just saying it for your sake

As if you didn’t believe his words, as if you didn’t want to believe his words

As if you were disobeying him

“It-its nothing Kiri, just PMS,” you mumbled, the snot in your nose making you sound nasaly and shaky

“Your period was two weeks ago, and none of your symptoms have ever made you throw up.” He says with a raised eyebrow, his arms crossing as he leans against the doorframe

So he did see you slip out after dinner and head straight for the toilet, huh?

Busted

If he wasn’t so worried about you, he would’ve ditched the mild tone kept up for your sake and had you bent over one knee with a red ass just for lying to him

But from the way you quickly step off the scale and attempt to squeeze past him tells him you aren’t just being hard-to-get, you’re not in one of your resistance fits

And he thinks he knows exactly what’s causing you to not-so-subtly shift your eyes from the weighing scale back to your own body, as if you hadn’t already been doing that for weeks now

He just has to make sure

“Did someone say something to you?” He catches your arm and gently yet firmly prevents you from slipping past him outside the bathroom, away from him

“No, no, seriously I just felt sick, I think I ate something weird,” you try to laugh breezily but the waver in your voice does nothing but further increase Kirishima’s aching heart for you

“You sure? ‘Sure I don’t need to go talk to someone who maybe said the wrong thing to you?” And although his cheerful voice holds nothing but playful jest, the dark glint in his eye does nothing to indicate that all he wants is a friendly talk, especially when he tightens his grip on your arm and pulls you so close that you’re nose to nose with him, looking right at him with tears eyes and flushed cheeks

There’s no point in pretending anymore. He might seem like an airhead, but he’s not one of the city’s top hero because of his airy, gentle nature

“Ugh, no Kiri, no one said anything to me. I just…” you trail off, not wanting to feel the inevitable embarrassment you’ll feel when you tell him the truth

How disgusting you feel when you see his buff, toned, chiseled body that’s akin to a Greek God’s compared to yours

How you long to secretly have the right figure to one day be worthy enough to be deemed his partner in a modeling gig, just once, just to feel like you’re worthy of him and his equivalently built body, a body that reflects hard work and perseverance

Something you seldom see or feel in your own mass of distorted limbs

“What is it?” He pleads softly, begging you to let him fix anything for you, to let him be a man good enough for you

You look into his ruby red eyes that hold a puppy-in-love expression, and when you find only adoration for you in them, you can’t help yourself for falling into the trust and care you so desperately want in that moment

“I’m…so tired of not feeling good about myself. About feeling overweight, underweight, seeing bits of pudge and flab in one area and then seeing some thin and gangly areas in others. Like, I just want my body to be normal, to be healthy like all the people you model with. I feel like nothing I do or eat or wear makes my body look how I want it to look, and no matter how much I try it’s so hard for me to see the beauty of what you see in it.”

And finally you can’t bear looking at him anymore, so you squeeze your eyes shut and turn away

Much to his credit, he pulls you in and nestles your head against his chest, letting your tears and snot wet his tank top

“Oh hun, is that all this is?”

You roll your eyes and try to pull back from his chest, but he doesn’t allow it as he simply holds you there, shushing you and rocking you back and forth

“Kiri, that’s a pretty big thing for me.”

“I know, but…why are you so concerned about how they look anyways? I mean, that’s their job, right? To look good for pictures!”

“I don’t understand,” your voice comes out muffled against his shirt.

“What I’m saying is,” he chuckles and soothes a hand through your hair, “is that you shouldn’t compare yourself to people that have nothing to do with your daily life. Like, you wouldn’t compare yourself to a firefighter right? ‘Cuz thats their job, to save people, not yours. Similarly with models and shit, that’s their job to look good. You didn’t sign up to be a model, so you shouldn’t stress yourself to look like them. Plus, it’s not like it has any affect on what kind of person you are on the inside, you feel me? I’ve met some pretty nasty and rude people with killer bodies, but can you guess how much respect I had for them?”

You nod slowly, still not fully grasping his confusing logic but sort of getting the underlying meaning to it

“But it’s hard not to compare my body to theirs when you’re constantly around them.” You admit. “It feels like I’m not good enough either to be next to you when I’m just sitting on my ass, not doing anything” You grip his shirt and let the last of your tears out, accepting his soft and heavy hands stroking against your back and up and down your shoulders

“So? Do you ever see Sero or Denki modeling next to me? Or Mina and Jirou?”

He did have a point.

“No,” you say slowly.

“Exactly, because models and bodybuilders have a job to dedicate themselves to a life of working out. They do it because that’s what a majority of their life goes to get paid for. It’s all superficial, that’s not how the average person is, like the friends I mentioned. Otherwise the whole world would be full of people walking around with ripped abs and giant pecs. Could you imagine some lanky dude like Denki sporting a 12-pack and ripped pecs?”

“Hell no,” you laugh breathlessly, the image so horrifying to you both that you feel the vibrations of his boisterous laughter rumble through you and soothe your emotions.

“Now you’re getting it,” he speaks into your hair, the smell of your shampoo flooding his senses and getting him dizzy along with a treacherously rising boner

“Plus, what kind of man would I be if I picked my girl out just because of the way she looked? I mean, don’t get me wrong, you’re beautiful-no, beautiful can’t even begin to describe you. Your palms feel so soft compared to mine, your arms are so beautiful when my hands are wrapped around them, your thighs are just the right size, your stomach is such a comfy pillow for me to lay on, and don’t forget your plush, slick, tight pu-“ he rambles on and you can’t help but yelp and clap a hand over his overworked mouth as his shower of body positivity starts turning more lewd…attesting to the bulge you begin to feel pressing against your leg.

But it’s funny, you can’t seem to find yourself being mad at him as your face flushes and you see not ill-intent and perverseness in his warm eyes, but pure and honest devotion to you and to the words he truly means

It softens your heart, and you use a finger from the hand smushing against his mouth to lift and stroke the side of his cheek, conveying your gratitude to him.

It seems he understands, as he takes his forced moment of silence with patience and just looks at you, hoping this time you could really see what he felt for you.

“The thing is,” he says after a minute, gently taking your hand away and turning you around so that you both were facing the mirror, “I love you because of who you are. If I wanted to date some model, I would’ve done it by now, trust me,” and you swat your hand against his chest as he stifles a laugh and turns you to look at your own reflection in the mirror.

“I didn’t take you just for your body. I took you because of the way you smile, the way your laugh is so soft sometimes and then all roudy and crazy and loud the next. I love you because of how passionate you talk about the things you like, the way you deal with problems, the way you treat others. All these things make me want you, so damn bad.”

He lightly rocks his hips into your backside so you can really feel how much he wants you, and you let out a soft gasp

He doesn’t let you move, however, he just holds one wrist in his meaty palm and holds your jaw in the other, positioning you so that you meet his wondrous gaze in the clear reflection.

He knew he was never known to be the smartest in his class, having Bakugo drag him by the teeth to pass class itself, so he hoped you could overlook his lack of vocabulary that so desperately was trying to tell you that loving you went even beyond anything he could barely articulate.

Leaning towards your ear, his breath tickles your lobe as his sharp teeth graze over your goosebump-riddled flesh.

“And if it takes all night to show you how much you and your perfect body mean to me, I’ll gladly take out any words that don’t do the job and show you physically how I feel. And just the way you are, too.”

If there’s one man who could not give one less of a fuck about how dainty, small, feminine, or easy to handle you may or not be, it’s the birdman himself: Hawks

Running errands with him when he allowed it was hell, though it should’ve been a paradise you felt owed for.

It was bad enough that when you hesitantly asked him what would look good enough to wear when you walked next to him as the Number Two hero’s captive girlfriend, he merely shrugged and said “Whatever you want.”

Which was not of any help, due to his excessive mood swings and possessiveness spiking at the most seemingly harmless things, such as you talking to the checkout worker at a branded store, wearing a skirt that he deemed was for “sluts who put out for attention”, or even not looking directly at him enough when he was talking to you.

So just to play it safe, you decided to wear jeans and a cute blouse, one that you thought did well for your figure and yet remained modest enough for Keigo’s liking.

He gave you a warning look before opening the door outside, silently telling you to behave yourself in public

You always did, of course.

It was never enough to keep him less suspicious of you regardless.

Deciding to bag some groceries first, he kept a tight grip with your hand as you both inconspicuously tried to navigate the winding back alleys, avoiding people and waiting in intervals to pass the street

He had a black cap on with a red feather embroidered at the top, sunglasses and a beige and white jacket that had a high collar for covering his face-you might be lucky to have the freedom to wear what you wanted to a certain extent but Hawks wasn’t so lucky

His wings, of course, couldn’t be concealed regardless of what he wore

The two of you luckily manage to snag a few stores here and there, the groceries in both his and your arms weighing down on your bodies, his feathers doing little aid to help when his wings started sagging under the bulk as well

Which is where you both were finally caught by a gaggle of fangirls

You passed the cafe they gathered around outside, and barely had time to register their squints of suspicion at Hawks and his poorly-shrunken vermillion wings before you heard squeals of recognition coming from their group a couple feet back

He swore under his breath, crushing your hand in a death grip and attempting to speed up further away from them

But the Number Two hero wasnt fast enough for his own good, this time

It was almost inhuman how quickly they caught up to you and swarmed around, effectively cutting you two off from trying to escape

They shoved papers, phones, various body parts and markers in his face, trying to get him to sign each and every article they had on themselves

And poor you were caught in the midst of it, being carelessly jostled around as each girl tried to force her way closer to him

The volume of their excited devotion and praise of him was making your head hurt, and you wondered how Hawks was managing to put up such a flawless, easygoing smile and responding to all their questions and comments without having a panic attack or snapping at them

After a minute or two of pure chaos, with the help of numerous feathers the hero-now-victim finished most of the autographs.

“Well, girls, thank you so much for your support and time, but me and my lady should get going now-“

“-wait, that’s your girlfriend?” One asks pointing at you in disbelief

You give her a weak smile and little wave

“Yup, the one and only!” Hawks beams at you with pride, holding you in an endearing headlock

“Wow…you guys are so cute!” Another chimes in after a few moments of silence, and you try your hardest not to fall into your same old patterns, to not embrace your old thoughts and insecurities with such open arms

But old habits die hard, and they certainly aren’t dead yet

Especially when the first girl thrusts a shiny phone at you, fluttering her lashes and baring her teeth in a poor imitation of a smile. “Would you be a dear and take a picture of all of us with him?”

“Uhh, sure, yeah, no problem.” You decide that getting this whole ordeal over quicker would be the best option for you

But as quick as you want this to pass, you can’t help but take an extra second to see the difference in your hands and hers when you take the phone from her hand

While her smooth, small and soft hands are seemingly unmarked, her acrylics accentuating her feminine form, you feel as though your larger ones should hide in shame in comparison

You’re not a slob, not by any means when you go out with him. But what was previously just you feeling comfortable in your own skin of knuckle hair, cuticles here and there, and nails bitten short from the cold stand anxiety of living with such a volatile man starts to turn into a realization of how different you are to these people who are trimmed to perfection

You shake off the sinking feeling in your heart and back up with the phone as the rest of the girls and Keigo line up for posing

The details in the phone camera do nothing to ease your growing timidity

The screen reflects what you see right in front of you- smooth hair, not a frizzy strand in sight blowing with the wind, perfectly manicured hands that are so delicate and small compared to your boyfriends’ gripping his upper arms, desperate to feel the hero’s assets.

They’re all at a perfect height with him too, the heels and boots they wear so easily lining them up at his chest level so they have a perfect view of his pecs and upwards

All of them are so beautiful and uniform, so dainty and careful with themselves. If one of them said that they were dating Hawks, you’d believe that they were worthy of it too

You snap the picture and hand the device over, trying to hide your trembling bottom lip and frigid hands

The girls thank Hawks a plethora of times, give you some once-overs as well as slight sneers and faux waves, and you both head on your way back home again

You’re quiet that night while making dinner

It’s chicken pad thai, one of his favorite dishes handmade by you

No matter how shit you feel your cooking is, he insists you make him a 3 course meal while he takes a shower, leaving a feather behind to watch over you

Usually it’s fine, usually you ignore or absentmindedly swat away the plumage’s less-than-innocent rendezvous trailing around your body, floating behind your neck to tickle you, “accidentally “ falling in your shirt or wedging itself down your pants (no doubt commanded so by Hawks)

But today, it’s silent and still, precariously perched on the edge of the kitchen counter as it observed and picks up the various sounds and vibrations of your movement as you bustle around the kitchen

It picks up on the way you chop the onions a little too aggressively with your large, clumsy fucking hands

Another reminder of how different you are than the average Hawks Fangirl ™

How they sashay and swing their hips around in a perfect circle when approaching him, while you stumble and trip over your own damn feet, the epitome of clumsiness and gracelessness

The feet which never endow heels or boots often because of the height difference it gives you and Keigo, because of the way you try desperately to adorn different slouches and postures to not look so out of place and awkward around him

And while you’re stirring the pasta in its sauce, the feather also picks up on the rhythm of your shattered heart

Shattered so when you remember how the girls sneered at you because you weren’t femme fatale like them, how you just stood there like a fucking mannequin while they cooed well placed praise, and how eloquent sentences flowed from their tongue like honey

You could only wish you ever spoke like they did, or adopted any of their mannerisms that seemed so natural and effortless like them

Your aching heart thudded dully while you scrutinized your miserable self, and flared up into a kicking rate when you realized you shouldn’t even care what your captor or any of his fan girls thinks

In fact, this was all his fault.

You slammed your mixer down, tapping your fingers against the countertop deep on thought

The vibrations the feather picked up was the last straw of its patience, as it alerted its owner to come and address you

Mumbling under your breath at your predicament, you banged around pots and spoons in your anger, failing to notice the plumage silently join its approaching owner, the water from his shower dripping down his wet shoulders and hair

“What’s goin’ on chickadee? It sounds like you’re tryina’ tear down the kitchen.”

You barely spare him a glance over your shoulder as you take in his bare torso, only a towel wrapped around his midriff

“Nothing. Just finishing up dinner,” you mumble.

“It doesn’t sound like nothing. It sounds like your hearts racing a mile a minute. So I’ll ask you again- what are you so upset?”

He yanks a stirring spoon from your hand and uses his grand wings to turn you towards him, a condescending pout on his face as he amusedly takes in your furrowed eyebrows, heated up cheeks and shaking fists.

He wants to keep pushing me? Fine, then I can play his little game

“You wanna know why I’m upset? I’m upset because I’m here against my will, creating problems for myself that I never even wanted in the first place!”

You jab a finger into his chest and his eyes narrow at your impertinent tone.

“Now wait a sec’-“ but you cut him off immediately, nose to nose with him now as you continue to blare at him

“I’m upset because I never feel fucking good enough for my kidnapper. How pathetic is that? Any time I have to beg you on all fours like a fucking dog to go outside I end up regretting it, ‘cause all I see is how flawed I am!”

He’s staring at you with wide eyes now, actually bewildered at the turn your ranting came to. So it’s not just about being kept here against your will, you’re actually upset about not feeling good enough for him?

“Those girls today…they were so perfect and feminine and beautiful and they had such small fucking hands that would fit perfectly in yours like mine never do, and perfectly pedicured feet, and had such pretty voices, fuck, I mean I’d date them too if I were you!”

You ignore the rage and bafflement in his expression, he looks at you like you’re crazy and maybe for the moment you are as you keep mouthing off to him

“So why don’t you, huh? I mean I only go out with you a couple times a year, but you see them almost every day! Girls who have hair that flows like goddamn waterfalls, girls who you could pick up and throw around so easily or at least girls you’re not embarrassed of.”

“I’m clumsy, I can’t walk with grace, I’m not at a height that’s easy for you to look at me with or thats even considered sexy, I probably don’t even weigh anything around you that people would call worthy of being some fit bitch for you!”

At this, you sink to your knees in front of him, almost spent out. You can’t bear for him to see your face, no doubt scrunched up in tears and snot with mussed strands hovering around your face like you just got electrocuted.

Another thing to ridicule yourself about, a fucking crying face. You don’t want him to see another ugly trait about you that he no doubt will snicker about behind your back.

“Isn’t that why you never let me out? Because I’m not cute or good material for tabloids, right? I don’t look good enough or act right for the Number Two hero, and that’s why you’re embarrassed, right? It’s been so long since I tried to last leave so I know you trust me-that means the only reason you hate going out with me and covering yourself up is because you can’t stand to be seen with such a fugly-“

“That’s enough.” His cold voice booms louder than yours, and you startle at that.

“Look at me, Y/N.” The tone at which he speaks leaves no room for argument, but when you continue to look down he snarls and detaches a feather, forcing your head up with it.

“You keep calling yourself all these things, but don’t tell me that moronic is another word you’re gonna add on, right? I mean you can’t possibly be that stupid enough to believe all those things you just said.”

You glare at him, sure that this was just a way for him to get you to shut up.

“I thought living with the Number Two hero would let some intellect rub off on you, but I guess it’s the complete opposite, if anything. Because you seem to have forgotten your place in my house.”

You yelp when suddenly a multitude of other feathers zoom towards you, pulling at your limbs and clothes as they lift you into the air, suspended to a height a couple of feet above Hawks’ eye level.

He just stands there with an eerie smirk on his face as he watches you flail around midair, trying to regain your balance.

“It doesn’t matter if you’re 6’3 and have bigger hands than me.”

With a flick of his finger, the feathers are directed to slam your body into the ground, leaving you wheezing on your back.

“And it doesn’t matter if you’re 4’7 and fall over yourself every time I call for you.”

He stands above you now, hands in his pockets and he smiles down at your curled up body. You look at him cautiously, unsure of what he’s playing at.

“You’re mind because I want you. I want everything about you, your heart, your mannerisms, your soul, your movements-they all belong to me and only me.”

He crouches down to a kneel, gently running a hand through your hair before turning it into a fist and yanking your head up to face him.

“And there isn’t a goddamn thing that’s gonna stop me from having you, when I want, and how I want. You think you have a chance of leaving me, or me leaving you when I, in your words, ‘go out and see beautiful girls like that all the time?’ If I haven’t left you for them by now, I sure as hell never will.”

You decide for now to take the backhanded compliment about being able to leave in silence. In a messed up way, he was proving his loyalty, and right now you needed all the reassurance you could get.

“And why the hell do you care how you look in public anyways, huh? Are you trying to seduce someone?”

You frantically object, and he sneers at your desperation. “Good, because it should only matter what I think, and you wanna know what I think?”

You stare at him wide eyed now as he pulls your head closer to him

“I don’t give a flying fuck if you think you’re some foxy slut or if you feel like a clumsy oaf. Because you wanna know why?”

He starts unzipping his fly with a handy feather, and you mentally berate yourself for pushing him to a point where he has to ‘prove his love’ to you, knowing where this was heading.

“Because when you’re sucking my cock or lying underneath me, it doesn’t matter how tall or short you are. When I tell you to take your clothes off and hump my foot like the good little bitch in heat you are, I don’t care how much you weigh. I’m still choosing you to be my fuckmeat, my obedient play-toy when I want, and I’m doing it with all your ‘flaws’, aren’t I? ”

You cringe when his tongue flicks out against your earlobe and down your jaw, your endeavors of trying to shove him away proving fruitless as he just snarls and bites your neck.

“Even if you think you don’t have the prettiest, smallest, biggest, or smoothest hands, they’re still the hands I’m choosing to play with my balls, yeah? I mean, you should be proud of your fucking sexy and lewd body…look at what it does to me.”

He gestures to his exposed member now which is hard against your thigh. You bite back a whimper as he begins to tear open your shirt with one free hand as the other slips down your pants.

“So be a good girl and show me how proud you are of being mine.”

409 notes · View notes

omgviolette12 · 4 years ago

Text

Helena’s Skin

Chapters: 1/1

Words: 4500+

Pairing: Original female character of color/Tom Hiddleston

Warnings: Implied/Referenced Suicide, Implied/Referenced Cheating, Angst, Horror

I’ve also posted this on AO3

There’s pictures there, in case you want some bonus content.

Story Playlist, for optimal reading experience : Here

Phew..this plot bunny was running around for a HOT minute! I'm not sure what my obsession is with stories that deal with betrayal of some sort...but I think I'm just a slut for some angst. Also, I've been listening to a ton of silent hill soundtracks, which put me in the mood to write something depressing. And goodness is that game good. This story is largely inspired by it, with some of the dialogue, text, and locations from the original game interwoven with my story. I changed things up a lot to follow the flow of my narrative though.

-----

Tom dreamt of her again that night.

Pale, blue-tinted skin. Dark sunken eyes. Her stiff, swaying feet. He could even see the chipped red nail polish on her toes with clarity.

The cruel memory was always, without fail, in perfect detail.

Over the years though, he had slowly come to accept it. The pills never helped to stop the nightmares, and no amount of avoiding sleep was going to help his case anyway.

He liked to think of it as penance.

As always, he jumped up from the bed in cold sweat. And from the cross look on his girlfriend’s face, he must’ve woken her up on accident as well.

“I’m...I’m sorry Jen,” He turned a bit to rub at her naked shoulder, and hoped the action would coax her back to sleep, “ Just another one of those falling dreams..”

“Hmrrph..” She shrugged off his hand, and turned to face away from him. Thankfully, it didn’t take much for her eyes to close once again.

Tom sighed, and rubbed at his face tiredly. Whenever he had that dream...he could never fall back to sleep. It was as if all the emotions of that day were renewed, and it was hard to shake them off until morning.

His therapist suggested he acknowledge what he felt, during this time. The sorrow. The regret. The guilt. The gut-wrenching pain.

And if he were to be completely honest, it worked most days.

Often, he would find himself scribbling away at his personal journal at 3 am, nursing a cup of tea.

He wrote about how much he wished he could reverse time. The words he could have taken back, and the words he could have said instead. He wanted to tell her how much he loved her, and that he regretted ever leaving her.

Helena. Her name was Helena, but he could never bring himself to write it out. Just referred to her vaguely with pronouns.

But tonight...he couldn’t even bring himself to write. The dream was especially vivid this time around, to a disturbing degree. He could even smell the stench.

What’s worse, that smell was just as he remembered it three years ago.

Tom resisted the urge to throw up at the thought of it, and stumbled out of bed to the bathroom. He turned on the sink, and splashed the coldest water he could onto his face.

That probably wasn’t the best thing to do, either. He could still see her, swaying in that dark room against his closed eyelids.

His eyes shot open immediately, and he found himself dry heaving into the sink.

“Fuck…” he cursed silently, as his eyes began to well with tears.

It was going to be another one of those nights, and the only thing he could do was suffer through the dark memories until morning.

Slowly, he made his way to the kitchen. There was little tea could do at this stage, but it was a welcomed distraction.

“You’re really leaving...aren’t you?”

Her voice was soft, softer than it usually was.

All the yelling and screaming must have destroyed every malice she could have mustered in her body.

Her dark brown eyes were downcast, red-rimmed with sorrow.

“Lena. No...Helena. I never wanted for any of this to happen.” Although Tom intended to sound a bit caring, the words left his mouth with harsh coldness.

“I love Jen too much. Too much to stay...I’m sorry. Please understand.”

His wife looked up at him then. Her chapped lips trembled immensely with bridled anger. And even though her long hair was rather unkempt, he could still see the glare she sent his way through her bangs.

“Five...f..five years Tom. You’re r-really going to...to throw it all away for that..for..for her?”

Tears spilled from her eyes as she stuttered in anguish, and she fisted the fabric of her dress painfully as she continued, “ I... I love you so much, Tommy. I never meant anything I said...I was sick and -“

“Stop with that!” Helena was startled, and she stared up at him with wide eyes. Throughout their argument, this was the first time he had yelled so loudly at her.

His eyes were narrowed, shoulders squared. He was the embodiment of hostility.

“Don’t say things that you don’t fucking mean.”

Tom didn’t wait for her to reply. He grabbed his jacket, and left the house with a slam to the door. He’d pick up his belongings later, after he cooled down.

Although Helena infuriated him, he could never forgive himself if he hurt her physically. A part of him still loved her, even if it was small.

They were married for five years after all. He couldn’t necessarily forget it all, no matter how much he wished it was possible.

Their marriage...it was a happy one, at first. He remembered the day when he met her, how stunned he was by her beauty and tenderness.

He loved how her brown eyes looked against the sunlight, and the lone dimple that revealed itself when she smiled. He loved her gentle voice, when she would tell him about her day. Everything. He loved everything about this woman. Down from the hair, right to the toes.

However… things took a sharp turn for the worst when she became ill.

The doctors were clueless about what it was. It attacked her body so quickly and suddenly, no one could do much to help her ailing health.

Slowly but surely, she began to lose her glow.

Her smiling face was replaced with an ugly snarl, her body became skin and bones, and her kind words transformed into insults that aimed to shred at his heart.

She pushed him away with every chance she could, when all he wanted was to be there for the woman he loved.

So, who could blame him for straying?

Jennifer was kind, new, and beautiful. Everything that Helena was, but now wasn’t.

It didn’t matter to him that she was good friends with his wife. Surely, Helena would rather it be Jen than some stranger.

But now, she wanted to take back all those words of hatred, and backtrack like a coward. She begged for him to stay, despite all the times she pushed him away.

Her insults drove away the guilt whenever he went to Jennifer for solace. But if she decided to just take it all back now… where did that leave him?

Tom stewed like that for hours, walking about the neighborhood before he decided to make his way back to the house. It was late morning when he left, but the skies were already starting to darken.

Time flies when you’re upset, it seemed.

He readied and steeled himself to face her again. He was going to pack the rest of his things, and then leave.

For good this time.

But he hated that his heart still ached at the thought of it, despite everything that she put him through.

Tom entered the house cautiously, and searched for any signs of his wife. When he left, she was still sitting on the living room couch. Hours had gone by, so he wasn’t sure why he still expected her to be there.

Worst case scenario, she was in their bedroom. With how erratic she’d been acting lately, it wouldn’t be a surprise if she tried to prevent him from leaving.

Best case scenario, she was asleep in there. Her illness made her extremely weak, which caused her to sleep more often than not.

Tom found himself in front of the door, hand frozen on the knob.

He was tired, tired from all the fighting. If possible, he wanted to ignore her as he quietly gathered his things together.

With these thoughts in mind, he opened the door -

To the sight of Helena’s feet hovering above the floor.

“Tom, Tom? Thomas!”

He jumped from the kitchen table, and knocked his knee on it in surprise.

He grimaced, and looked up at Jennifer who gave him a worried look.

“Why are you out here? You even fell asleep..”

Tom looked around his surroundings, disoriented. He fell asleep?

He remembered coming to the kitchen to make some tea for his nerves. But before he realized it…

“I’m not sure how that happened...I’m sorry Jen.”

“..It’s okay, Tom. Are you feeling okay..?” She placed her hand on his forehead, her voice tinged with concern, “ You can call out sick, you know? Talk to me,”

Tom stiffened. He contemplated many times, talking to Jennifer about his dreams. But...she had been badly affected by Helena’s death as well.

She was friends with her, after all. Jen felt just as much guilt and shame that he did.

But Jennifer refused to talk about it, about her. Her way of coping was to forget Helena ever existed for her own sanity.

They were both monsters, monsters who drove the one they cared about to her death. They truly deserved one another.

Tom only shook his head at her question, and attempted to reassure her with a weak smile, “I’m fine, honest. But I’ll call out today...I’ve been working too much at the office.”

Jennifer didn’t pursue the topic any further, and returned his smile. “ Thank gosh, you’ve been taking way too many hours. Just relax for once,”

He watched as she moved about the kitchen through tired eyes, to fix herself some coffee. “There’s some mail on the table, by the way. I picked them up before I came in here.”

Now that she mentioned it, there was a small pile of envelopes on the table. He looked at them all indifferently, and dismissed the majority of them as junk or bills.

“..I’ll sift through them. Make me a cup as well, would you?”

He dragged the pile in front of him, and wiped his eyes to take away some of the droopiness.

He cracked his neck, and massaged his shoulder with a hand as he began to look through the mail. Like he expected, there were some bills, some junk… and..

A beige, worn out envelope that was sealed with red wax.

But the look of the envelope wasn’t what caught his eyes. It was the name on it that caused Tom’s throat to go dry, and his sweat to grow cold.

From: Helena

There wasn’t a return address, just her name.

Was this some sort of sick joke?

Unless it was possible for a dead woman to send letters, then the likelihood that it was his Helena that sent it was extremely low.

Still though...his hands wouldn’t stop shaking. Why did he feel so terrified?

First the nightmares, now this.

“Hey..everything okay?” Jen placed a steaming cup of coffee in front of him, and sat at the table, “You’ve been staring at that for a good minute now...is the bill that much?”

She took a sip of her own coffee, her voice lightly teasing.

“What? Oh, no, it’s nothing,” Tom quickly snapped out of it, and tossed the envelope aside as casually as he could, “Just some junk.”

Tom wasn’t sure what possessed him to take the envelope with him on his run.

Despite everything that told him to leave it closed, to leave it unread, he also felt the urgent need to keep it by his side.

He ran through a secluded park, with the envelope stuffed in his jacket pocket. If he was going to read it, he didn’t want Jennifer to know. Especially if it was actually from... her.

There was a drizzle earlier on, so the park benches were rather wet. However, he didn’t care as he plopped down to sit, and reached into his jacket pocket for the envelope.

A stray droplet of water from the overhanging tree fell on the envelope, as he sat and stared at it in silence.

Tom felt that he was probably overreacting. No, he most definitely was. There was no way on earth it was from his Helena. The same Helena who he still loved, to this very day. The same woman who took her own life that fateful evening.

He was only going to set himself for extreme disappointment if he hoped for that much.

Tom held his breath, and tore open the envelope without any regard for the wax seal.

And as he read its contents, the entire world came to a standstill.

In my restless dreams,

I see that town.

Silent Hill.

You promised me you'd take me

there again someday.

But you never did.

Well, I'm alone there now...

In our 'special place'...

Waiting for you...

Waiting for you to come to see me.

I know I’ve done some terrible things to you.

Something you’ll never forgive me for.

I wish I could change that, but I can’t.

I just...didn’t want you to see me like that anymore.

That ugly, repulsive me.

I was so angry all the time, and I

struck out at everyone I loved most.

Especially you, Tommy.

That's why I understand if you hate me, even now.

But I want you to know this.

I'll always love you.

And I want to see you, no matter how long it takes.

I’ll always be here…waiting.

With love,

Lena

He remembered her handwriting. Her letters were always scribbled elegantly, but felt rushed at the same time. This was written by her. There was no doubt about it in his soul. He could even hear her gentle voice as he read it.

The emotions Tom currently felt was like a kaleidoscope. Confusion, hope. Sorrow, fear. And above all, excitement.

Excitement, at the small, unlikely chance that she was still alive.

Even if it didn’t make sense, even if it went against all reason. Even if he had been the one to pull her dead body from the ceiling himself.

If he had the chance to see her again...just once more…

He was going to take it.

-----

Tom vaguely remembered that town she spoke of, in the letter.

Silent hill.

They went there once, for their honeymoon. It was a foggy little town, ways out in the middle of nowhere. Although it was scarcely populated, it was beautiful.

Helena had a strange obsession with the town, and she begged him constantly to take her back. But he was the type to enjoy the hustle and bustle of people, and the town was far too quiet for his liking.

Quiet to the point of being unsettling.

So although she begged him practically every year, he would always dredge up some excuse as to why they couldn’t go.

But now here he was, on his way to that very town against all sense.

“This place...isn’t it a bit too creepy for a resort?” Jennifer’s voice broke the silence in the car, and reminded him that he was not alone. Her eyes were trained outside the window, with furrowed brows.

Tom ground his teeth in frustration. He couldn’t come up with a proper excuse, as to why he wanted to leave so suddenly without arousing suspicion.

So...he disguised the trip as a mini-vacation, for the both of them. It would have been extremely preferable if he came alone... but he’d figure something out, eventually.

“It’s supposed to be a quiet, peaceful getaway. We’ve been needing some of that for a while now,” Tom said, in a nonchalant tone. “Besides, it’s only for a day or two.”

“Eh...I guess,” Jennifer still sounded thoroughly unconvinced, as they passed by the dilapidated welcome sign of the town. “I just thought it’d be, I don’t know...well kept?”

“It’s a part of the charm.” Tom wasn’t sure if he wanted to convince her, or himself with that statement.

Jen had a point. It’s been years since he came to this place, but he remembered that there was a decent amount of people that lived here.

Although the area was indeed very quiet...it definitely wasn’t a ghost town like he was seeing.

They were well inside the town now, but they still had yet to see anyone. The oppressive fog didn’t help matters either. He glanced down at the map on his lap, just to make sure they were going in the right direction.

“Hey...do you think we should just turn around? It looks pretty abandoned,”

Jennifer worried at her lip, her expression uncertain.

“...Like I said. A part of the charm. We’ll see some people, eventually.”

He could feel her anxiety from the passenger seat, and it started to affect his own mood.

The only thing that kept him from turning the car around, was Helena. The prospect of possibly seeing her again was too great a temptation.

But the question is...where was she, exactly?

Helena mentioned something about a ‘special’ place in the letter. That she’d be waiting for him there. But there were just so many possibilities… because this whole town was their special place.

Did she mean the park, by the lake? They would spend hours sitting on the bench...just the two of them, staring at the water. In their own little world.

Could Helena truly be alive...waiting for him there? The man who betrayed her so cruelly?

“Tom...Tom!!”

At Jen's sudden screech, Tom hit the brakes immediately, which caused the car to lurch forward violently.

He looked at her, as his heart thrummed against his chest, “What, what is it!”

“There.. right there, there was... there was..!”

She looked absolutely terrified, as she stared outside of the passenger window.

“Jen, calm down! What did you see?”

She didn’t look at him at all, and continued to stare outside the window, “In the fog. I saw a lady..and she.. she looked like… she was just right there..!”

Tom couldn’t make sense of what she wanted to say at all. He pinched the bridge of his nose, and addressed her once again, “I know you’re paranoid, Jen. But please, just calm down. It was probably just a resident.”

He really wished he came here alone all the more.

Jennifer was really shaken up, for whatever reason. And she went silent for the rest of the ride. Though, he certainly wasn’t about to complain about that.

Eventually, they saw a large building in the distance, right alongside the lake they’d been driving by.

Lake View Hotel. The same hotel where he stayed with Helena, on their honeymoon.

“...We’re here.”

Tom parked right by the curb of the sidewalk, a reasonable distance from the building.

But...something wasn’t quite right.

When he first came here with Helena, he clearly remembered that the hotel was on the other side of the lake, and they had to cross it with a rowboat. It was surrounded by a body of water, after all. And it was only accessible by a boardwalk.

However, the building was on this side instead. Completely opposite from what he remembered.

He decided not to think too deeply about it, though. Years had passed, and things might’ve changed.

“Wait, we’re getting out here?!” Jennifer asked in disbelief, her voice raised. The area was run-down, foggy, and quite frankly, disgusting. Tom couldn’t even blame her for her discomfort.

“Yes, Jen. There’s nowhere else to park,” he said, and exited the car first. “Come on, before it starts to get dark.”

Jennifer left the car with extreme hesitancy, and crossed her arms to hug herself. “Tom...this...this is like a freaking ghost town! Are you sure we can’t just...go somewhere else?” She tried to reason with him...but it was like he was another person entirely when he replied.

“If that’s what you want to do, I won’t stop you. Take the car.” He answered curtly, and began to walk ahead of her.

“I...what? Wait, please, Tom!” She ran up to him, and grabbed his arm, “What do you mean take the car?! You know I can’t drive. And I can’t just leave you behind! This...this isn’t like you,” Jennifer attempted to turn him towards her, but he remained stiff.

“...Did you ever really know me, Jen?”

When he finally looked at her, Jennifer took a step back due to his scary expression. “Because I don’t think you do. Not like Lena did anyway.”

“Len...Helena? Why..what does she have to do with this?!”

Jen immediately went on the defensive, and matched his hostile energy.

“She has everything to do with this! You were her friend, and she was my wife. Yet you refuse to even talk about her-”

“She killed herself! She left us behind! Even before that, she treated you like shit! She broke your heart...and I was the one who picked up the fucking pieces!”

The argument had escalated extremely quickly. But Tom didn’t care.

“How..how fucking dar-”

Tom didn’t even get to finish his sentence. He had blinked his eyes for even less than a second.

And then she was gone.

Tom was stunned, and didn’t register what happened.

His mouth was left open as the sentence died on his lips.

“Huh..?”

He looked around disoriented, whiplashed, and confused.

What? How? Where..What?

These were the questions that ran rampant inside his mind, as he looked about frantically for the woman he was just fighting with.

Jennifer was just right there, in front of him. He even remembered her angered expression clearly. But he had barely blinked his eyes before she disappeared into thin air.

She didn’t even scream.

Tom’s bones were weak from fear and confusion. He felt nauseous.

“..Jen? Jennifer? Jennifer!” He began to walk ahead, almost running, and screamed into the fog.

He walked around the area, and yelled her name like that for what felt like hours. But what answered him back were the endless echoes beyond the mist.

“Where...where the hell..?” Tom was out of breath, his body wrought with fear and exhaustion. He brought his hands to his knees and hunched over.

He came here to find Helena. He just wanted to see his wife again, to talk to her one last time. Even if it were some sort of delusion he concocted to stay sane.

But now..even Jennifer was...

He tried not to think about that possibility. Jennifer had to be alright. She had somewhere in this godforsaken town.

Tom looked up from his knees, and up at the large building ahead. Lakeview hotel.

He was going to start there.

Inside the hotel was a stark contrast to the rest of the town. While the outside was in a state of disrepair...the inside of the hotel remained untouched by time. In fact...it was just as he remembered.

The only difference was...the lights were almost dim to the point of darkness, and he needed to use his phone light for added visibility.

“Jennifer..? Are you in here?” Tom called out, as he walked the halls of the hotel. He passed the receptionist’s desk, and moved towards the elevator in the distance.

Despite the apparent lack of proper electricity, it still seemed to function perfectly.

According to the elevator, there were six floors in total.

And without hesitation, he immediately chose the third floor.

Jennifer could have been on the first two floors, for all he knew. He could have searched every room, every corner.

However..he and Helena stayed in room 312 for their honeymoon.

It was a beautiful room, he remembered. There were large windows, and the view of the lake was extraordinary.

As Tom felt the elevator move, and watched as the numbers slowly rose to three...he recalled a memory.

“Goodness...isn’t it beautiful, Tommy?”

Tom watched as his beloved sat by the window, her hand pressed against the glass.

“I’m so glad we came here...it’s peaceful.”

He laughed, and moved closer to sit next to his wife. He draped his arms around her shoulders, and pulled her closely to his chest.

“I think it’s a bit too peaceful, though. I’m not sure how you convinced me to come, but,”

Tom breathed in the scent of her hair, and closed his eyes. “I agree, it is beautiful. Hazy and mysterious, just like a dream. It reminds me of you.”

Her embarrassed laugh echoed throughout the room, and she nuzzled her head further into his neck. “Hehe...you’re such a charmer.”

She tightened her arms around his body. Her next words were whispered faintly, but he heard her clearly through the quiet of the room.

“But if this is a dream...I don’t ever want to wake up.”

Tom stood inside the room. By the large window, was a figure.

Her hair was a short, dusty blonde, and she wore a white floral dress.

The same dress that Helena wore that day on their honeymoon.

However...his wife was far from blonde.

The only blonde he knew was Jennifer.

“Jen..Jennifer? Is that you..?” She turned to look at him, instead of the window.

As soon as he saw her face, his suspicions were confirmed.

“Oh.. oh thank goodness,” Tom breathed a sigh of relief, thankful that his hunch was correct. He didn’t know why she suddenly appeared in this room, but was pleased that he found her this quickly.

“Jen, you were right. We..we shouldn’t stay here…”

Jennifer only looked at him with a confused expression, and approached him with an air of worry.

“Tommy, did something happen to you? Are you...confusing me with someone else?”

Tom looked at her like she was crazy. “What? Jen, what are you on about..? And why are you wearing that..”

Jennifer had never, not once, referred to him as ‘Tommy’ in the three years they had been together. That was Helena’s endearment, and no one else’s.

She giggled, the sound of it melodic and gentle. “Oh, Tommy...you were always so forgetful. Remember that time, when you got lost trying to find our room at this hotel? I almost had to call a search party!”

She laughed once again, this time unrestrained. He recognized that beautiful laughter.

“Aren’t…” Tom’s throat felt impossibly dry. “Aren’t you Jennifer?”

Jennifer went silent. Her smile deepened, and her eyes darkened from their previous shade of blue.

“It doesn’t matter who I am. I’m here for you, Tom.”

He didn’t move an inch as she approached him.

Slowly, she removed the straps of her dress.

He allowed her to take his hand, and she placed it on top of her naked chest.

Tom didn’t realize it, but his face was drenched with tears. He squeezed the softness of her flesh, and his nails dug to the point it drew blood.

It was warm. He held his blood-stained fingers up to his face.

Before him, stood a woman with dark brown eyes, that would reflect beautifully against the sun.

Before him, stood a woman with the gentlest voice.

Before him, stood a woman with long dark hair, that ended right below her shoulders.

Helena smiled a sickly sweet smile. She took his hand once again, and moved it to cup her face.

“...See? I’m real.”

#tom hiddleston #tom hiddleston fanfiction #tom hiddleston fic #Tom Hiddleston fandom #loki fanfiction #loki fanfic #silent hill #silent hill 2

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cake-writes · 5 years ago

Text

Little Lies (Iceland)

Pairing (For This Chapter): Bucky x Reader

Chapter Warnings: Angst, Smut, Dubious Consent, Punishment, Praise Kink, Oral (Giving), Suicide Attempt, 18+

Summary: You went to Bucky when you wanted punishment. He’d be rough with you because he understood your self-loathing, and he’d leave bruises on your hips that wouldn’t go away for a week. You loved it. He didn’t.

You went to Steve when you wanted reassurance. You went to him because he liked to whisper sweet, sweet things into your ear as he made love to you. He’d tell you that you were perfect and amazing and beautiful. Then you’d get your fill, just far too much of it. He cared too much.

It all came to a head when the three of you went on a mission together. You’d done it a hundred times, even during this mess of a situation, and still neither of them was any the wiser. Your little lies always slipped right through the cracks - until one night, they didn’t.

Master List

November 2015

Winter in Iceland was an extraordinarily harsh, biting cold. The bitter chill in the wind sank deep into Bucky’s bones, but he knew it well. He’d acclimated to the freezing weather in Siberia, not to mention the many years he’d spent in cryo, but your small body didn’t handle it nearly as well.

The two of you were inside a small cabin in the mountains with double-glazed windows and a fireplace. One of the locals kept it for travellers and tourists. The two of you were neither, but you’d been given the keys all the same.

Despite the many layers you wore for this mission, you were still shivering from the cold. The moment he went to offer you his jacket, the slightest hint of tenderness, you shot him a look as if to say: Keep your distance, Barnes. Know your place.

He did know his place, and it wasn’t to be gentle with you. It was the opposite. The fact that you wouldn’t even let him help warm you up was evidence enough. You didn’t want any affection from him. You never wanted it. You only wanted to be hurt, punished for reasons he didn’t know.

What Bucky did know was that you hated yourself. If he could relieve you of some of that loathing, even just a fraction – soothe your troubled mind and whatever worries ailed you – then he was more than willing to do that for you. He was willing to do anything for you.

He tended to the fire while you changed out of your wet clothes in the only bedroom. It didn’t matter that there was only one bed. You’d been sleeping together off and on for a few months, now.

You slowly stripped off your soaked clothing, covered in fresh snow, and lay it all out to dry. Inside your duffel bag was a tangled mess of clothing to dig through: your shirts and tac pants and socks and underwear were all mixed up with Bucky’s, but it didn’t matter. You were used to sharing a duffel with him, because it made things just a little easier having one less bag to lug around.

You had your own clothes, but you’d always liked Bucky’s long-sleeved henleys. They were soft and warm and you pulled one on. You didn’t ask. He wouldn’t care. Whatever was his was yours, an unspoken truth that neither of you would ever admit.

You brought the sleeve at your wrist to your nose and inhaled. It smelled just like him, like spice and pine and snow. To you, he smelled like home – a fleeting thought you immediately discarded.

After you pulled on a fresh pair of underwear and some sweatpants and socks, too, you made your way back to the den where a half-full bottle of alcohol sat on the coffee table. Next to it was a single glass, already filled with two fingers of whiskey. Bucky had poured it for you.

He was staring into the fire, lost in thought, slowly rolling his own glass back and forth in between his fingertips. If it was anyone but him, you’d have assumed that he hadn’t heard you arrive, but you knew that he had when his fingers stilled.

“You don’t like it, do you?” you asked softly, sitting down next to him on the sofa. Your thigh brushed against his, and your hand was a gentle comfort on his shoulder, one he leaned into just a little.

When he glanced over at you, about to ask what you meant, the words caught in his throat. He didn’t need to ask. You already knew. You always knew. He hated coming to such cold, frigid places because it reminded him of his past. It reminded him of things he didn’t want to remember. Hydra. Torture. Death.

He didn’t answer. Instead, he took a drag of whiskey.

“This isn’t Siberia,” you reassured him, sliding your hand from his shoulder to the nape of his neck, where your fingers gently smoothed away a few sweaty strands of hair sticking to his skin. “It wasn’t you.”

Bucky slowly took in every single feature on your face – from your forehead, to your perfect brows, to your soft lips – but he focused primarily your eyes, those gorgeous, sparkling eyes that read him like a book. Sometimes, he felt like you knew him better than he did. Other times, he was made well aware that you didn’t.

“I know,” he responded, gently bringing your hand down from his neck so that he could press a kiss to your palm. Your skin was so soft and warm against his chapped lips and it was in that moment that he realized how lost he would be without you.

God, he loved you. Every single part of you. Even the part that used him so easily.

You used him, but he let you. He liked to think that he used you, too, but that was a lie.

When you slowly pulled your hand back to your lap and away from his affection, he knew you’d done it purposely, as if to make the same point you always made.

Know your place.

He wasn’t allowed to get too close, but he did. He always did. You brought his walls down so easily, and then you blamed him for letting them down to begin with. As if he had a choice. As if he had any choice at all not to fall in love with you so much that it threatened to consume him.

When Bucky polished off the rest of the glass, the alcohol burned his tongue and throat – burned away the words he so desperately wanted to say.

The evening came and went. The two of you shared a dinner of military rations, tasteless and bland. He didn’t have much of an appetite. Neither did you. You both forced it down anyway.

While the whiskey took the edge off and you talked with him some, conversation was minimal, just a few short exchanges of words. You asked whether he’d reloaded his rifle and if he was running low on ammo. He had, and he wasn’t, and he casually reminded you to clean your Beretta because that particular model had a habit of jamming in such cold temperatures.

He was, of course, well aware that you knew your way around your weapons and he half-expected you to bristle at the implication that you didn’t. He might have even wanted you to, just a little, because he wanted to know that you could feel something, anything, anything at all.

But you didn’t. You took your handgun apart right there on the coffee table, just for him. You cleaned and polished every piece so thoroughly that by the time you were done, the two of you had finished off the bottle of whiskey.

He went to bed sometime after ten, left you on the sofa, focused intently on the screen of your tablet as you wrote up some mission notes.

He didn’t tell you he was going to bed.

You didn’t bid him goodnight.

Sometime after one, Bucky woke to the sound of silence.

You weren’t in bed with him. He didn’t really expect you to be. You slept together off and on – literally and figuratively – but sometimes you purposely took another bed as if to remind him that it was nothing more than a casual arrangement. You never let him get too close.

This was one of those nights. There wasn’t another bed, but there was a couch in the living room. He’d left you there earlier, and he figured you’d probably fallen asleep there, too.

The only light in the darkness came from the full moon. He made his way from the bedroom back to where he thought you were. It was pointless, really; he knew you’d be nearby, but he still wanted to know that you were still there.

The fire had gone out at some point. You’d told him that you’d tend to it, but you hadn’t.

You weren’t on the sofa. You weren’t in the living room at all.

When he spotted you out on the balcony, the sight chilled him to the bone.

It was a steep drop off the side of the mountain. The valley dipped low into a frozen river, and the tall trees were covered in snow, glistening in the moonlight. While the view would normally be breathtaking, not tonight it wasn’t.

You were leaning over the railing just a little too far.

The only thing you were wearing now was his red henley – no jacket, no sweatpants, no socks or shoes. The way you were leaning over, on your tiptoes, offered him a peek of your black panties, something he normally would have enjoyed but all he felt was dread. There was no doubt in his mind that you must have been freezing, but for some reason the cold didn’t seem to be bothering you at all.

You were more focused on whatever was so interesting out there in the darkness. All he could see was the forest.

The crunch of his boots in the fresh snow made your spine straighten, and you swiftly pulled yourself back. It was almost like he’d caught you just before you did something stupid.

You wouldn’t.

Would you?

“Hey, doll,” he said softly, placing his warm hand on your ice-cold shoulder. You’d been outside for far too long judging by the chill on your skin, but you weren’t shivering like you had been earlier. “Why don’t you come back inside?”

For once, you didn’t argue with him. Instead, he led you back inside in what was a particularly unsettling silence. Your breathing was too steady, too even for what you’d just been doing. The fire was out, but it was still much warmer inside than out and he hoped that it would help bring you back to a normal temperature.

Bucky sat you down on the sofa and wrapped a thick blanket around you.

You didn’t say a word - didn’t want to talk. That much was obvious. He’d seen you upset before, seen how you processed horrors and death plenty of times, but this wasn’t that. It was different. Worse. He didn’t know what had caused it, but it must have been something bad.

He didn’t pry.

You didn’t even notice when he pressed a hot mug of tea into your hands. Only when he helped you bring the brim to your mouth and you instinctively took a sip did you finally realize that it was there. The familiar taste of warm black tea with just a hint of cream and sugar melted on your tongue. He made it just the way you liked.

You didn’t thank him.

Bucky wrapped his arm around your shoulders, and for once, you didn’t pull away. You let him hold you - only for a little while, only until your tea was gone and along with it, your rare moment of weakness.

When you’d had enough, you didn’t say a thing, just shrugged off his arm and went back to your tablet to finish up the rest of your notes. It was almost like you’d just taken a quick tea break.

Bucky took that as a sign to leave you alone again. He didn’t particularly trust you to be by yourself, but he knew that you didn’t want his company anymore. Not tonight.

Right before he went back to bed, he stopped just short of kissing your forehead. His lips just barely ghosted against your skin. You allowed it.

He found it difficult to get back to sleep, but at some point, he managed.

You spent another hour trying to type out a single phrase – ‘mission report’ – but the only thing you could focus on were the horrors of your past.

Half past four, Bucky woke to the feeling of your lips around his cock. A soft groan escaped him from it, at the knowledge that you’d been working downright magic on his body before he’d even woken up. Your perfect mouth was wet and so, so hot, and your tongue slid around him so expertly – let alone the way your perfect hands worked every inch of him. You knew his body so fucking well and it drove him insane.

He took in a sharp breath, his head lulling back as his fingers slid into your hair. He didn’t need to grip hard, or even assert dominance; you just felt so fucking good and he needed to touch you, needed the slightest bit of intimacy in knowing that you were still right there after what he’d witnessed on the balcony.

You pulled back enough to lick every inch of him, and then you took him all the way down your throat which ripped another groan from him. “Jesus, sweetheart—”

You responded with a particularly hard suck that sent him reeling. In his dazed, half-asleep state, he couldn’t hold back anymore and spilled into your mouth, gasping, painting your lips and tongue with hot ropes of his cum.

He looked down at you with half-lidded eyes and watched as you licked up every fucking drop like the goddess you were. And, to him, you were a goddess. He’d happily worship you every day if you’d let him – but you didn’t. Not even when you’d been on the brink of something so dangerous tonight.

As you straddled his hips, he reached up for you, pulled your head down for a kiss. It was sloppy, full of passion and desire and anything he could ever want from you – except the one thing he wanted most.

He rolled the two of you over, then, so that you were on your back, staring up at him with those gorgeous eyes that seemed to see right into his soul. Your hair was sprawled out around your head like a halo, but you were anything but an angel and a few strands of it were caught on your lips. He brushed them away with the pad of his thumb before he leaned in to kiss you again.

With you under him like this, letting him touch every inch of you, he particularly relished in the feeling of your breasts – so soft and perfectly moulded to his hands. His hand slid down your side to pull one of your legs around his waist, and he slid inside you far too easily. You were absolutely soaked for him, slick and hot and wanting.

The moment he was completely inside you, you whined against his mouth. He swallowed the sound as he kissed you gently, leisurely, like the two of you had all the time in the world to experience this. It wasn’t just plain fucking, not this time. He was making love to you – sweet, gentle love like he so desperately needed right now. The bitter cold here was just like Siberia and it brought back memories that only you could make him forget, just like he always did for you.

His hips rocked into yours and you writhed under his body, moaning his name, tangling your fingers in his hair, pulling him down for another kiss, another touch. He whispered into your ear sweet words of praise, told you how good you were for him, how you took him so well and god he needed this, needed you—

And then you shoved him off of you so quickly that it blindsided him. You didn’t have super strength or serum or any other ability other than your brevity of wit. He weighed at least twice as much as you, but your small hands had pushed him away like he was nothing.

To you, he was nothing.

“Don’t do that, Bucky,” you hissed at him in a way that almost made his heart still in his chest.

It was another brutal reminder. Don’t get too close.

Every part of him wanted to cry out in protest. He wanted to be close to you. He wanted to be gentle. He wanted to love you, but you wouldn’t let him.

“Why?” was all he could manage to ask, and even on just that single word his voice still wavered.

“If you won’t fuck me,” you spat, like pure acid, “Then I’ll find someone else to do it. It’ll be easy.”

Those words shattered something inside of him. You didn’t do gentle. He knew that. You never did, and yet you’d been so receptive until he got too close once again, said something stupid, said he needed you like the fool he was. He needed you, but you didn’t need him. You never did. You never would – even when he’d seen you so broken earlier tonight. Even when you were just as broken as him.

He wasn’t proud of the bitter, angry way he reacted to your nasty words. His fingers curled around your hips, and he yanked you up and threw you onto your knees. He hated how easily your skin bruised so easily under his fingertips. He hated how much you loved that it did.

The way he shoved himself inside of you with no warning was brutal and punishing. He wanted to stop at your hiss of pain, but he didn’t. He pushed through it and made you take every thick inch of him because that was what you wanted. You wanted to scream and cry, and he made you do that, too. You begged him to punish you, spank you, ruin you, break you – and he did.

He slapped your ass until it was raw and red and hot tears were streaming down your face. He pulled you back by your hair and bit your neck, your shoulder, left bruises there, too – until he couldn’t bear to hear another sob and he shoved your face down into the pillow. He ordered you to shut your god damn mouth, and you thanked him for it. In between your gasps and sobs and cries, you fucking thanked him.

This was what you wanted. You wanted it rough. You wanted to be punished.

You never told him why.

After you’d come three times from being used so brutally and he’d shamefully filled you to the brim, you left him alone. You made a point to sleep on the sofa that night - not in bed with him.

There was no aftercare.

You didn’t need it, but Bucky did. He desperately needed it, but he knew his place. He couldn’t get too close.

No, instead he felt further from you than ever before.

Master List

#steve rogers x reader x bucky barnes #steve rogers x reader #bucky barnes x reader #little lies

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baby-babushka · 6 years ago

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Home

Also on AO3: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16875354

Kylo Ren couldn’t find a real reason for anything. It all felt meaningless, like an impulse with no concrete foundation. It felt las if the world was crumbling beneath his feet, that the polished duraglass floors would buckle, send him hurtling into space, never to be seen or thought of again.

He almost wanted it. Almost.

But that would make things even more meaningless, if possible. Everything he had done would be for naught. All those years, gone in an instant. He couldn’t let himself do it.

And he felt so alone . Stubbornness reared its ugly head, refusing it, refusing the truth. He was lonely, and aching for touch. But no one could touch him, the Supreme Leader. He was isolated on the throne, wrapped in leather and fine wool, suffocating slowly.

And he should have been happy, happy to be alone, in power and wanting for nothing.

But he wanted , how how he wanted.

He wanted her .

He had begged. He wanted it so badly. He wanted her by his side, somehow, somewhere.

Sometime.

But as his bare hand slid down the duraglass separating him from the vacuum of space, sometime felt so far away. Time was nothing but numbers, and the hours and days rolled by, one after another, each identical and even more tortuous than the last. Monotony pulled him away from the window, back into a wall.

The durasteel was cold, so cold against his clothed back. He shivered, letting himself fall gracelessly to the floor, propping himself against the wall. He couldn’t even find it in himself to stand.

A choked sob burst forth, echoing in the dark room. Hunching forward and gripping his chest like a lifeline, months, years of tears ran down his cheeks, his neck, under his collar, over his sternum. Gripping himself hard enough to bruise, a soul-wrenching cry was torn from his throat, almost inhuman. He didn’t feel human anymore. He felt like a creature, a monster with delusions of grandeur, but everyone saw through the charade. They saw him how he was.

A monster .

Another roar escaped him as a pain shot through his ribcage, sharp and aching, like his very cells were being torn apart. Pale skin flushed and slick with tears, he was shaking. Like a little boy afraid of the dark.

He wasn’t afraid, he yearned for it. He yearned for the absoluteness of it, the certainty. That this was the path, what he was meant for. What he was supposed to do. But he couldn’t do it. Something within him, something he couldn’t name kept pulling him back from the edge of what he so desperately wanted. He failed, he kept failing. Always failing.

He had failed his mother. He had failed his mentor. He had failed Snoke. And he had failed… he…

A calloused hand drifting down his face, and hazel eyes filled with tears and forgiveness, before his father’s leather and cotton clad body fell down, down...down...down…

Ben?

He wanted this to end. She was like a ghost, as he should be too.

“Ben!”

He froze, and all sound faded away. The only sound was their heavy breathing.

“Don’t...don’t call me that,” he croaked. His voice was rough, and he knew his eyes were reddened and swollen. He couldn’t bear to look at her, hiding behind his sweat slicked hair.

“I’m not going to call you anything else,” Rey said, no doubt crossing her arms defensively. “Not until you prove to me you’re not Ben Solo anymore.”

“Is that why you’re here? To see how far I’ve fallen?” he snapped, raising his head to look at her. He didn’t miss the way both their breaths hitched at seeing each other. “Well congratulations, you’ve won. Ben Solo is dead . Now leave me alone.”

She stayed silent, but her beautiful face was masked with defiance. She looked well. Strong. Healthy. He remembered when he had carried her in his arms on Takodana and to Starkiller. She was so lithe, almost frail.

“Leave me,” he commanded as best as he could, steeling himself and standing. He noticed the flush high on her cheeks, much like the last time she had seen him topless. It almost felt like a victory. She approached, her footsteps silent. Her arms flexed in their crossed position.

“No,” she responded, leaning slightly when she said it. He almost wanted to smile at her confidence.

“You left me before, why won’t you leave now?” he sneered, walking past and intentionally bumping into her shoulder with his own. And the shock of the contact, the energy passing between made him want to stop, to remain touching her. But he forced his legs to continue his path, before sitting down on the wide, dark bed.

“You know that was different,” she ground out, turning and clenching her fists at her sides. “We both know I couldn’t have stayed.”

“I don’t know that! Tell me!” he burst, standing. “Tell me why!” Unbidden tears welled in his eyes, but he willed them not to fall. He f ailed . Her eyes glistened as he approached, trying to seem intimidating. Of course, she stood her ground, as always. His left eye twitched.

“My friends were dying!” she replied, gesturing. “I couldn’t let that happen! And you ignored me! I-I couldn’t…”

“You barely know them! And you promised me! You said I wasn’t alone! And what did you do? You crushed me when you reached for that damned lightsaber!” You crushed my heart...

“Oh, well excuse me for trying to arm myself in a hostile situation!”

“How was it hostile? I was asking...I was asking-” I wanted...

“You wanted conquest, something I don’t stand for-”

“I wanted to be with you!” It finally tumbled out of his mouth in a flurry of emotion. They both stopped. “I still do,” he admitted quietly, his eyes roving over her confused expression.

“I was with you! I was in the same room as you!”

He had to make her understand. She needed to. She had to. How couldn’t she know ?

“And on that thought, I’m practically with you right now! And all you wanted was me as an ally, a weapon, a prisoner-”

He lurched down, grabbing her flushed face and smashing their lips together in an unpracticed kiss. As his mouth moved over hers, she squirmed before stilling, and opening herself to him slightly. She seemed to remember herself, pushing him away, her hands scrabbling across his chest until she succeeded.

“We shouldn’t...we shouldn’t do this,” she whispered, hands still on his heaving chest. She looked down, studying the way their skin could meet despite the vast distance. She lifted her finger slightly, before settling them as she said,”Not now.”

“You don’t…” he stepped back, letting her touch fall away. He scrubbed his eyes, turning away. He clenched his fists at his sides. “You don’t want me. And you shouldn’t.”

“You’re right,” she admitted. He was about to demand that she leave, let him wallow in his misery alone, when she continued. “I shouldn’t. But I do.”

He swallowed.

“Ben,” she said softly, her hand brushing his shaking hand. “Please...come home.” Her eyes were glistening in the light, and his heart felt like it had taken a tumble. “Come home,” she repeated, gripping his hand tight in both of hers.

“I have no home,” he whispered in a broken voice. She shook his head, continuing. “Monsters don’t have homes.”

She let out a sigh, setting her forehead over his chest, which trembled at the contact.

“You…” he felt her swallow. “You have me .”

“Rey…”

“Let me be your home, Ben.” Her eyes met his, and he felt like he was going to be swept away by her, by the swelling feelings rolling off of her. Things he hadn’t felt in years, all from her.

“I-I can’t...I’ve come too far,” he said weakly as his eyes began to sting. “It’s too late for me-”

“No!” she burst, giving a weak hit to his chest. The tears were flowing down her cheeks, and she was gripping his tunic so hard her knuckles were turning white. Like she couldn’t bear the thought of letting him go. “No, it’s not too late, please, Ben. You deserve a real home, you don’t deserve what you have now. I can...I can feel it all. Please, leave this behind and come home to me.”

He worked his jaw. This felt...this felt an awful lot like giving up. But he had done that a long time ago, so would it really matter if he gave up again? She was so warm against him, and he was so afraid of going back to his cold, lonely room.

She breathed shakily, not able to meet his eyes. As he sensed everything she was feeling, everything she was thinking, he realized something, and his tears finally fell once more.

She already was his home.

Tenderly, he cradled her face in his hands, their eyes meeting.

“I...I think you’ve been my home from the very beginning,” he whispered, watching her inhale sharply, her force signature pulsing and bleeding into his. He ducked down once more, capturing her lips in his. She hummed into the kiss, wrapping her arms around his neck. His hands found themselves curling around her waist, pressing her closer, closer still. He pulled away reluctantly, resting his forehead against hers. “I need to know you’re right, Rey. Show me, show me why I can come home. Please.”

She pulled him down and showed him to the stars and back.

It felt an awful lot like coming home.

#cw: thoughts of suicide #reylo #fanfiction #implied smut #is that a thing #post-tlj #force bond #forcetime #first kiss #rey of jakku #kylo ren #ben solo #bendemption #star wars #writing #babushka writes #(finally)

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my-dear-hammy · 7 years ago

Text

Falling Through Time: Book 1

Masterpost

Jamilton Series Masterpost

Basking in Candlelight

Part Twenty-Eight:

----

Warnings: None

----

June 10th, 1804

Hamilton stood on the doorstep of the Presidential Manor early in the morning and knocked. A couple moments passed before an extremely tall person answered the door decked out in pajamas, pushing his curly hair out of his face.

"Alexander?" Jefferson asked, surprised. Hamilton wasn't prone to visiting early in the morning. In fact, he didn't visit very much at all.

"You actually answered the door in your pajamas," Hamilton pointed out, a smile creeping on to his face.

"Well, I did win the presidency, that was our bet, remember."

Hamilton grinned, remembering the bet they made forever ago. "Can I come in?"

"Of course!" Jefferson jumped out of the way. "What are you doing here anyway? Is there some business you need to discuss with me?" he asked as Hamilton stepped inside and removed his coat.

"No. No reason at all. I just came to see you."

"Oh?" Jefferson said, a hint of suspicion in his voice, "That doesn't happen often."

Jefferson shut the door behind him, "This way," Jefferson said, steering Hamilton through the hallways. Jefferson led them into the library. It was an environment familiar to them both,a place where they could both relax with ease. The stressed seemed to roll off Hamilton's shoulders in waves as he pulled out a book and studied it before replacing it.

"Are you sure there isn't something you wanted to discuss with me? You seem to have something on your mind," Jefferson asked worriedly, watching Hamilton fiddle with the books absentmindedly.

Burr's letters in Hamilton's pocket suddenly weighed him down. "No, I just wanted to spend some time with you." Hamilton smiled closing the distance between them, wrapping his arms are the tall man's neck.

Jefferson stared down at Hamilton suspiciously, not quite believing him. Something was definitely wrong, but he would have to trust Hamilton to tell him when he was ready. His hands settled on Hamilton's hips, "If you say so, mon amour(my love)."

Hamilton pulled Jefferson down and kissed him lovingly as he was pulled closer to the warm body that held him. "I've missed you," Jefferson's lips hummed against his own. Hamilton smiled and pulled away.

"Play for me?" he asked.

Jefferson blinked down at him, "You want me to play for you?" Hamilton nodded, "I didn't think you liked music all that much."

"I adore your music."

Jefferson grinned and raced off for his violin while Hamilton curled up beside the fire. Jefferson returned shortly with a beautiful, polished violin made of the finest wood. He placed it to his chin and slid his bow across the strings. The notes whirled around Hamilton, sinking into his heart where they would reside forever. He tilted his back and absorbed everything and committed it to memory. The way Jefferson moved so beautifully, so gracefully as his delicate finger masterfully shaped notes. The way his hair fell around his face, the way his muscles moved under his shirt. He's heard this song before, in fact, he learned to play it on the cello for Jefferson so they could play together. Too bad he didn't have a cello or he'd show Jefferson right now but he supposed it would have to wait until tomorrow.

After awhile, Hamilton stood and embraced the man that held his heart. Jefferson held him back and they stood in each other's arms, just holding onto each other, the fire warmed his skin and Jefferson warmed his soul.

***

Jefferson was still worried. The way Hamilton held him earlier, it was as if he was holding on for dear life, trying to memorize everything about Jefferson. He looked over at the man that slept beside him, even in sleep he looked troubled. Rolling over, Jefferson draped his arm over Hamilton, holding him close, hoping he could chase away whatever troubles ailed him, and fell into the clutches of sleep.

Only to be brought back out of them by the scratching of a quill.

"Alexander? Come back to sleep."

"I have an early meeting out of town," Hamilton replied solemnly.

Alarms bells went off in Jefferson's head. "It's still dark outside," he insisted.

"I know, I just need to write something down."

"Why do you write like you're running out of time?"

"Shh."

"Come back to bed, it can wait."

"I'll be back before you know I'm gone."

"Come back to sleep."

"This meeting's at dawn." With that, Hamilton left. Jefferson tried to reason that it was normal business. Hamilton tended to start his day absurdly early, this was no different. But he knew in his heart something was wrong. For one, Jefferson's eyes landed on the coat Hamilton had left behind. He jumped out of bed and dug through Hamilton's coat and pulled out a bundle of letters.

"From Burr?" Jefferson opened them up and read through them. His heart dropped. Then it thudded froze when his eyes caught on the papers Hamilton had been working on. Hamilton never left his work behind. His fingers shook as he picked up the letter and read through it, each word making his chest grow tighter and tighter. No. Threw it down, changed into clothes in two seconds flat and raced after Hamilton.

----

#Jamilton

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maraschinocheri · 8 years ago

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Title: Chine-collé Pairing: Grantaire/Montparnasse Notes: The last of four, from Chiaroscuro to Crettatura to Contraposto.

Sleep comes for even the most restless of men, though it is under no obligation to stay long with the unwilling or worse. Montparnasse wakes twice in the night; first in a fit of coughing that shakes Grantaire from his dreams as well, the tenderness of a time or two before leading him to press his hands, warm and wide, against Montparnasse’s back and shoulders until the noise and horror stops. Grantaire’s sheets are fine, but they can bear the small spatters of blood and what-have-you; they have after all seen much worse. But Montparnasse’s expression as he catches his breath is one Grantaire couldn’t find the courage to capture in art even if he wanted to: the young man's shock and fear at the realization that he cannot control what is happening to him; his eyes wide with pain and exhaustion—this should not be committed to Grantaire's memory of Montparnasse’s face; not now, not ever.

“Go to Combeferre,” Grantaire tells him, gently but firmly; it has so often been the best way to speak to him at all. “He is a better doctor than philosopher, I promise you, but still both, and he will help you find some peace, if not perfect health.” Montparnasse closes his eyes and nods, falling again beside Grantaire, his skin flushed and hot.

“I am beyond the last and do not look for the first,” he whispers against Grantaire’s skin. “But I will go, monsieur; there is something I need from him more.”

Grantaire does not press for more; before they slept, he and Montparnasse came to no agreement beyond awareness that they both care too deeply for men who are less resigned to their fate than running toward it, who will set themselves alight before they allow the world to burn on as it has. Grantaire reminded Montparnasse that neither of them has any power to persuade anyone from this fight, and neither has been able to accept any genuine welcome to join it thus far. This is not entirely true, but Montparnasse does not need to know what offers Grantaire has made, what ways he has tried and for the most part unintentionally failed the others, and himself; let Montparnasse instead believe him kind enough to let these men go to their deaths without the burden of his presence and skepticism.

“But you will go to their barricade,” Montparnasse had said, his eyes narrowed and red but no real anger left within him. “You will die, believing in nothing but that you cannot live without them.”

Grantaire had not answered him at first, choosing rather to reach for the glass of wine he already knew was down to dregs; not even the old certainty of his full glass there for him now. At last he spoke, low and soft, and hoped he would be heard.

“I would let you steal everything I had if you would leave me that one truth, Montparnasse. For my sake, pretend you have done so already.”

Montparnasse sleeps again, but Grantaire does not, for a long while. Earlier tonight he had sent Montparnasse to the little room where Grantaire has stored years of work, years of his heart and mind on paper and canvas and wood and cloth. He’d done so to distract Montparnasse from wanting to see his still only half-finished portrait, and distracted Montparnasse had been—distracted, angered, sickened, and finally desperate, surrounded by fallen pictures of those both he and Grantaire loved, albeit in such different ways.

Perhaps Montparnasse is owed his portrait, Grantaire thinks, just as it is now; perhaps this is the last night he will spend with Grantaire, and as such should be paid for his time and work and the gift he’s given Grantaire in the last months, while all else that brought light to his world began to darken, little by little. But as long as Grantaire has not finished this last portrait, there remains that work; there remains a goal, there remains a task. There remains Grantaire himself, a man if not in full, then at least more than what he is among the others: rust against sharp steel, fallen dust beneath strong and polished wood.

So if not the portrait, what then? Montparnasse has stolen a sketch from him before, but that was so early in their work, before Grantaire had committed him most kindly to paper and his bed. He has earned more now, and as Grantaire sinks back into sleep, he understands exactly what.

The second time Montparnasse wakes, his touch is curious on Grantaire’s chest, careful and longing. Grantaire ignores the warnings of his mind that the comfort Montparnasse needs is not that what he wants, that they will find no cure in each other for what ails them.

Still, as Montparnasse removes their clothes, Grantaire understands what he is doing: memorizing Grantaire against these sheets as Grantaire has memorized him in art, looking to fix an image that may go forever unfinished as well. Grantaire catches Montparnasse’s hands, his fragile wrists, and turns him—slowly; this work cannot be rushed—to his back, pressing his lips to every part of Montparnasse he can reach. Montparnasse chatters under his breath, not a word of it meant for anyone but himself, and so Grantaire pretends not to hear until it is his own name in the air between them, first soft and sweet, then like a curse between Montparnasse’s gritted teeth.

Not once has he called Grantaire by name like this; not once has Montparnasse broken rules he made himself and would not bend even under Grantaire’s exasperated sighs. There is no more Monsieur, no more distance between them, and to his surprise Grantaire is frightened enough by this to release Montparnasse’s wrists for a long and terrible moment before he threads their fingers together again, and hard.

“You said I must stay still morning,” Montparnasse whispers then, his voice an amused and exhausted rasp. “I knew you would not let me go now.”

Grantaire has long since accepted what comes over himself in the strange, uncomfortably worshipful aftermath of fucking this dangerous, beautiful young man; he has learned not to let his thoughts linger longer than his eyes on the gorgeously shattered and spent creature breathing heavily under his hands as they stroke down and across damp and trembling skin. Montparnasse may be just as deadly a piece of work bared and on his back as he is layered in damasks and stolen daggers, but he is lovely, too, his eyes soft if still cloudy when he forces them open to watch Grantaire watching him.

“I have something to give you,” Grantaire tells him, his palm warm on Montparnasse’s stomach. Montparnasse gathers his hand in both of his own, and brings it to his lips. The touch almost steals the rest of Grantaire’s words away, but he presses on, wanting perhaps to say them aloud more for himself than for Montparnasse. “Something, rather, I thought you might take.”

It is a moment before Montparnasse stretches and smiles sweetly; he is a thief at heart, and Grantaire has proven himself nothing if not able to appeal to all of his many desires. “What more do you suppose I want, M— “

Grantaire catches the rest of it on his own lips, afraid to hear Monsieur or anything like it from him. “For us to be friends, now and in the end,” he murmurs, holding Montparnasse’s surprised, glassy stare. “So do go find your knife.”

Half-dressed again and returned to the room of paper and canvas and wood, Montparnasse does not seem much interested to be there; if anything, he shrinks back against Grantaire’s comfortable, urgent press forward against his back. It is dark enough without candles that they must move carefully, but between the little moonlight and long memory, Grantaire brings them first to a stack of small canvases where he finds the last among them, then leads Montparnasse by a fold of his borrowed nightshirt’s fabric to the window.

The moon does as much harm as gives help; the moment Montparnasse’s eyes have adjusted to its light enough to see the drawing of himself asleep, he looks as if he might turn away from it forever. Grantaire’s hold on him remains firm, and he will not let Montparnasse look away completely; instead he guides Montparnasse’s hand to trace lines Grantaire took every tired pain to create months before. Montparnasse looks healthier asleep in the drawing than he does awake and on his feet now, and that is not lost on either of them; it comes to Grantaire suddenly that that is half the gift he wants to make of the little portrait: to show Montparnasse what he was not long ago, and could be again.

“I will not do this,” Montparnasse says. Grantaire can see that his hands are shaking, that the knife he holds in one may fall at any moment.

“No, you will not,” Grantaire tells him. “At least not alone.”

It is not long work to cut the drawing away from its frame, but still, every second of it seems an agony to Montparnasse. The tearing of fabric so surprised by the violent touch of knife rather than brush, the strength of Grantaire’s hand as it guides Montparnasse’s inch by inch, the persistence of the blade against the resistance of its master—all of it breaks Montparnasse in the end, and he barely catches the drawing as it falls into his hands. The knife clatters to the floor and goes unrecovered while Montparnasse looks for breath and at Grantaire, the expression on his face so like the horror of earlier in this room, but then it is gone again, replaced by a flush of sadness before Grantaire finally breaks their stare.

“Montparnasse—”

“What would you have me do?” Montparnasse asks him. “I will see Combeferre, I will make amends to Feuilly, I will give you anything—”

“You have—” Grantaire nearly chokes on it, scrubbing his face with his hands before he speaks again. “You have given me more than enough. Do those things, Montparnasse. Go to Combeferre and he will know how to make you well again as much as you are willing. Go to Feuilly and tell him you accept what you cannot understand. Do these things, but then you must let us go.”

“To your barricades, to your fires and your death—”

“To hell, if it pleases you,” Grantaire says. “But let us go.”

The words are on Montparnasse’s lips to tease another drink before they sleep, another turn in Grantaire’s marvelous bed, another chance to make things better if not perfectly right between them. But words are not enough anymore, and they are tired, too tired to drink or fuck again, or do more than rest against each other where they are, in little moonlight and long memory. Minutes pass before Montparnasse kisses Grantaire slowly, reverently, then pulls away from him and disappears, not even the closing door giving his departure away. Grantaire will never see him again in the flesh, of that he is sure; but there is always the portrait, there is the indentation in his mattress and the flash and flare of Montparnasse’s eyes and smile forever burnt in his mind. That is enough—that must be more than enough.

It would be a lie, however, to say Grantaire does not wish Montparnasse back; if he heard the familiar knock at his door, he would welcome Montparnasse here again without a thought even as he told him once more to leave. But Montparnasse will not return, of that Grantaire is sure as well; who would, so encouraged away? And he has errands now, a purpose more than Grantaire could give him. Combeferre and Feuilly together will bring him peace, as Grantaire has perhaps brought him what he will one day recognize as joy.

Grantaire might have brought him more, another time, but Montparnasse is now surely—and better—expected elsewhere.

#fic #grantaire x montparnasse #montparnasse #grantaire #my 10Kth post good lord surely it had to be a fic

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rolex821-blog · 5 years ago

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mrmichaelchadler · 7 years ago

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Bright Wall/Dark Room April 2018: "The Force that Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower: On 'A Little Princess' and 'The Secret Garden'" by Corbin Dewitt

We are pleased to offer an excerpt from the latest edition of the online magazine Bright Wall/Dark Room. The theme for their April issue is "Magical Realism," and in addition to Corbin Dewitt's essay, it also includes new pieces on "The Double Life of Veronique," "3 Women," "Her," "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," "Wings of Desire," "Streets of Fire," "Stranger than Fiction," "Jane," "A Life Less Ordinary," "Portrait of Jennie" and more.

You can read previous excerpts from the magazine by clicking here. To subscribe to Bright Wall/Dark Room, or purchase a copy of their current issue, click here.

It begins in green, deep green, accompanied by a low persistent hum that seems to rumble from within, as though heard from inside the resonant chamber of a huge stringed instrument. A golden-yellow script, seriffed with arabesques and meant to appear exotic though the words it spells are Warner Brothers presents, fades in, fades out. Then the voice—a girl's, American, soft but inflected with the canny singsong of storytelling: "A very long time ago, there lived a beautiful princess...in a mystical land...known as...India." Sitar springs up, shimmers. The title, golden-arabesqued too, blooms gold against the green.

Cut to two years earlier: A different girl, in a different film, leads a boy into a walled garden to ask him if it is dead. The boy and the girl snap their way through a tangle of branches, dull brown-grey. He takes a knife from his pocket, slits the bark, peels it back to show her what’s beneath. “This part’s wick,” he says, the music of his Yorkshire accent floating through the register just above adolescent voice-crack tenor. “See the green?”

It’s there—barely there, but there, a pale sliver amid the nothing-colored sticks and the dry grass and the dark russet knit of the girl’s hat. “Wick. What’s wick?” she asks.

“Alive,” he answers, with a shrug and a little smile. “Alive, as you or me.”

The girls are Sara Crewe and Mary Lennox: Only children, wealthy, white, 11-ish, born and raised in India under British colonial rule, and, long before appearing in the scenes detailed above, the heroines of novels by British-American author Frances Hodgson Burnett. The films are A Little Princess and The Secret Garden. Released in 1995 and 1993, respectively, neither holds the distinction of first adaptation. It would be difficult to draw any simple connection between the original author of the stories and the two directors tasked with reimagining them a century after publication (although, if inclined to use magic, which can collapse any difficult task into a simple one, all three—like me—were born with sun in Sagittarius).

One, Alfonso Cuarón, a young man from Mexico City, had only a single feature-length directorial credit to his name—1991’s Sólo con tu pareja, decidedly not a children’s movie—when he found himself facing the opportunity to make A Little Princess. Initially indifferent, he sat down to read the script and, as he told The LA Times later, it was "like it was vibrating. Like it was glowing. I was at Page 17 and I called my agent, and said, 'I've got to do this movie.'”

The other, Agnieszka Holland, read and reread The Secret Garden as a girl growing up in Warsaw during the final years of Stalin’s rule. Already well established as an auteur focused on overtly political stories, like 1990’s Oscar-nominated Europa Europa, Holland wanted a chance to reimagine the book that spellbound her as a child. “'I was very tired of the big subjects—the dead, the war, the Jews, the communists,” she told the UK Independent in 1993. “I decided I wanted to spend one year in The Secret Garden.”

Thus the stories begin. Sara��cherished, imaginative, and preternaturally serene—must leave India for an all-girls boarding school in New York, as her beloved father Captain Crewe has been called away to serve in the Great War. Mary—dour, stiff, unloved, and unloving—survives the earthquake that kills both her negligent parents, and sails to England to live with her next-of-kin at a gloomy manor called Misselthwaite.

Sara of Burnett’s book is black-haired, green-eyed, unpretty in the parlance of children’s books, i.e. secretly more pretty than girls whose prettiness smacks of something standard-issue. In Cuarón's film, she’s played by Liesel Matthews, real-life heiress to the multi-million dollar Hyatt Hotels fortune, who more closely matches Burnett’s original description of Sara’s doll Emily: "naturally curling golden-brown hair, which hung like a mantle about her, and her eyes...a deep, clear, gray-blue, with soft, thick eyelashes which were real eyelashes and not mere painted lines.” As Mary, Kate Maberly manages the slow softening from rude, miserable orphan émigré to cautiously joyful friend with such grace and aplomb that she whirls all the way around the circular gauge of visible child-actor technique to arrive back at the beginning, where you dare to wonder whether she's acting at all.

Both girls were industry unknowns prior to casting, and, perhaps more critically, both faded from the public eye as swiftly as they entered it, choosing to decline passage into the world of career acting and thus into a different kind of magic tale, that of the child star. Their present-day anonymity relieves their performances from the burden of later celebrity—no need to watch for the sparkle of fame earned, then seized or squandered. You can just pay attention to what they're doing, and to the worlds they move through, alongside them.

The worlds are green, and they mirror their girls. Like Sara, A Little Princess carries its carefully considered, more-than-real palette and its sympathetic magic as fixed certainties, so self-assured that neither seems a conceit. Cuarón’s team constructed an old-fashioned soundstage universe, stretched its proportions to mimic the vaulted hugeness of the world as seen in childhood, and colored it all in green. The effect looks less Emerald City and more sepia-toned photograph, copper softness patinated into subtle shades of moss and chartreuse. In the film’s production notes, cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki explained that "green is the only color in the spectrum that can be lit in either warm or cold tones; that kind of flexibility gives us a range of emotion to work with on every set." As such, the look of the film is artificial, but not in the least cartoonish—the olivine sateen and curlicue embroidery of the girls’ school uniforms glow against a backdrop of browns and tans and creams, grounded by the solidity of “real black stockings and real black boots,” as costume designer Judianna Makovsky put it.

Like Mary, The Secret Garden is a film that greens by degrees—as the murk of English winter thaws to spring, she thaws too, and grows brighter alongside a dappled infinity of leaves and flowers and fields. The visuals are looser, less constructed, more naturalistic; I am reminded of Hayao Miyazaki, another master maker of magical childhoods, who, in an interview with Roger Ebert, explains the crucial function of silence in film. “If you just have non-stop action with no breathing space at all, it's just busyness,” Miyazaki says. “But if you take a moment, then the tension building in the film can grow into a wider dimension.” In this fashion, scenes of strict realism become a kind of magic. Whole minutes pass devoted to whispering curtains of ivy, candlelight and shadow yawning across walls, the snap and flutter of birds’ wings. “The house seemed dead, like a spell had been cast upon it,” Mary narrates in voice-over as she wanders the halls of Misselthwaite, looking like a ghost herself in a white nightgown and rubber boots, but the house appears to the viewer as a labyrinth of lively faces, watchful tapestries and polished-wood gargoyles, and its halls echo with low moans issued from an unseen source. Every frame seems to breathe, recalling the era of childhood when any place or object or creature stood ready to reveal itself as a secret living being—that is to say, wick, alive as you or me.

One gets the sense that every moment in these films, green or otherwise, is wick. Many films for children flatten the world, rather than deepen it, such that adults find them unwatchable; these two stories honor the truth that adults and children live in the same world and simply see it differently. Take out a knife, peel back the bark, and you’ll find all sorts of forces flowing underneath.

Death is here; a bellowing elephant, a popped black balloon, a creaking wooden swing, a soldier’s limp hand smeared with mud. Sex is present too, though held at a distance: the aura of mystery that cloaks Mary’s dead mother and her secret twin; the drip of silliness that ripples the smooth flow of storybook romance pursued by Miss Amelia, the boarding school’s blowsy and soft-hearted second-in-command, who lusts after the milkman—when he comes to the kitchen door she pants, trembles, extends the rack of empty bottles like a hand to be kissed as the girls in her charge look on and laugh. The boys of Misselthwaite aren’t milkmen yet, but they’re on the way: Colin Craven, Mary’s haughty, ailing cousin and the source of the manor’s ghostly wails, has skin like a sweating glass of skim milk held up to sunlight, bluish-translucent and unwholesome; Dickon, a young Andrew Knott plush with dimples, is the cream off the top of the pail, purest product of hot-breathed animals and the clean grass of the Yorkshire countryside, rich in the sense of nourishment rather than capital. (A friend and I once theorized that every man in the world can be typed as either a Colin or a Dickon, and if you imprinted on either as a child you’re fated to find something of their spirit in anyone who turns your head afterwards. Guess which one I liked.) Holland’s adaptation treats their relationships with Mary with the requisite subtlety and intensity: in late-childhood, almost-adolescent friendship, sometimes grabbing someone’s hand is nothing, but sometimes a force of mutual curiosity shivers in the air like a wall of ivy waiting to reveal hitherto unseen doors.

When conflict enters, it is not as a supernaturally powerful nemesis to be battled but as garden-variety human cruelty and indifference, much harder to weed out. The closest thing these movies have to villains are Miss Minchin, school headmistress, and Mrs. Medlock, Misselthwaite’s head housekeeper—played with waspish grace and iron-grey pompadours by grande dames Eleanor Bron and Maggie Smith, respectively. As front-line enforcers of socioeconomic boundaries, Minchin and Medlock snip at their charges as though they were privet hedges, pruning the curiosity and openheartedness of the children in their care towards more callous and correct adult behaviors.

Moments after Sara arrives at school, she is chastised for trying to befriend Becky, the school’s scullery maid. Cuarón cast Vanessa Lee Chester, a black actress, in this role, bringing new dimensions of particularly American tension into the moment when Sara ventures upstairs to say hello and startles Becky, who drops the ice she’d been using to soothe her throbbing feet and says, “Begging your pardon but we’ll both be in trouble if you stay.” Through earlier scenes of Sara’s life in India, we are meant to understand that she’s accustomed—encouraged, even—to socialize across divisions of class and race, giving her a veneer of righteous empathy that obscures details like, for example, what she and her father are doing in India to begin with. Miss Minchin icily tolerates Sara’s whimsical disregard for such social conventions insofar as her father’s checks keep clearing; when a black-suited solicitor appears to explain that Captain Crewe has been killed in action, she slams down the piano lid mid-ragtime razzle-dazzle, sends Sara’s schoolmates scurrying, and explains to the stunned girl that she is now a penniless orphan who must work for her keep alongside Becky. Exiled to the servant’s quarters up in the attic, Sara finds a piece of broken chalk and draws herself a clumsy circle of protection, then curls up on the floorboards and sobs for her father. No one answers. The camera lingers on the room’s cavernous darkness, the pouring rain outside, as if demonstrating the universe’s indifference. It’s a moment that harkens back to Minchin’s earlier jibe about Sara’s blithe insistence on making up happy endings for every story: “I suppose that’s rather easy for a child who has everything.”

Mary, on the other hand, demonstrates a calcified certainty in her place in the world, standing stiff and stony-faced in the opening sequence as two unnamed Indian women dress her in lilac linen. She tries this same pose on Mrs. Medlock, only to become hotly embarrassed at the latter’s expression of incredulity that she cannot dress herself. "My Ayah dressed me," she says, as though such an arrangement were a law of nature. Unimpressed, Medlock sets her back with a curt reminder that she won’t be dressed by servants now that she’s come to England—“we’ve far too much work already,” she says.

That work, of course, comes from maintenance of the vast estate in addition to caring for the bedridden Colin, whose own imperious commands and temper tantrums keep the staff at their wits’ end. Behind all Medlock’s fussiness and anxiety, and all Colin’s attention-seeking morbidity, lies the specter of Colin’s father, Lord Archibald Craven: a remote Byronic shadow whose grief-stricken indifference casts a pall of misery over the house. When Mary finally sees him to ask, circuitously, permission to revive his dead wife’s garden, he waves her away with a spindly aristocratic hand. “Take your bit of earth,” he says to her, “but don’t be foolish enough to expect anything to come of it.”

To my adult eye, these films have become stories about class, race, colonialism, patriarchy. That Sara and Mary are wealthy and white is integral to understanding their stories; the upending of their previously stable social hierarchies is what drives their narratives forward. The lives of the laborers necessary to create Sara’s world seem indistinguishable from her own until she’s forced to inhabit their circumstances herself; Mary, on the other hand, learns to see her servants as people in the country where they’re white. Meanwhile, their lives hinge on the whim and resources of the men in their worlds. Cuarón and Holland both lay out moment after moment depicting the decidedly unmagical forces underpinning the worlds onscreen and off—so much for Holland’s exhaustion with “the big subjects.”

The other major force in these worlds is magic. Unlike the universe of, say, Harry Potter—where magic is linked to questions of heritage and education, and functions as an element or resource over which mastery is encouraged—Frances Hodgson Burnett's worlds posit a magic already present everywhere, in all substances. As Sara knows and Mary learns, this magic becomes accessible to anyone capable of recognizing that if this immanence is real, they’re already part of it, and not the other way around.

When magic in these films crosses from implicit to explicit depiction, it’s often accomplished using India as a vehicle. The most striking visuals of A Little Princess appear along with Ram Dass, manservant to the school’s wealthy next-door neighbor. He illuminates the austere green universe of the film with the colors of Sara's remembered India: bright cream, warm orange, glowing gold. Nowhere is this imagery more iconic than in the scene of the saffron yellow breakfast. Sara and Becky, banished to bed after being promised a day of starvation as punishment, fall asleep make-believing a feast and wake to find their barren attic room transfigured into a sunshine-colored dream: billowing curtains of silk, quilted robes, gilded slippers, vases of sunflowers, table laden with gleaming china and silver trays of sausages steaming in the morning light. Ram Dass gives them a wordless nod of acknowledgement from the window next door. This moment is more beautiful to recollect than any of his stilted, vaguely mystical dialogue, or indeed than the moment Sara wiggles her fingers and chants at a cruel classmate in order to cast, in her words, “a little curse I learned from a witch back in India.” Mary’s India is yellow-orange too, dim and dull like the flickering firelight in the scene where she and her companions cast a spell around a bonfire to call Colin’s father back from a trip abroad. They, too, wiggle and chant, playacting at exotic witchery.

Such inclusions of India, in myth and fragment and stereotype, can accurately be summed up with the term cultural appropriation, but to do so risks oversimplifying. To the contemporary eye, it’s clear the thorny questions of identity—of who tells which stories, and how, and why—had not yet grown to flourish in public discourse as they do today. That the most cringe-inducing moments happen where the films depart from their original source material only tangles matters further—for example, Cuarón’s choice to include a portion of the Ramayana as a frame story recounted by Sara becomes a choice to paint Liam Cunningham, the Irish actor who plays her father, a lurid indigo so he can double as Prince Rama. If the film were to be released now, it’s easy to imagine the discursive spiral weighing the positives of representation and attempted inclusivity against the clumsy overreach and exotification present in the final product. Then, of course, there are the source texts themselves, written by a white woman who’d never even been to India. The stickier truth is that both Mary and Sara are canonically from there—as white colonizers, yes, beneficiaries of systemic exploitation and cruelty, but also raised by women whose stories shaped them, seeped into them, regardless. As Mary and Colin put together a puzzle depicting a map of the world during a rainy day, she tells him that when it rained in India, her Ayah used to tell her stories—like the one of a boy who lived with cows but kept a whole universe down his throat. Incredulous, Colin presses her to explain how such a thing could be possible. “It doesn’t make sense,” he says.

“It doesn’t have to make sense. It’s the idea of it,” she counters.

“It’s so stupid,” he says, tone tightening into his customary derision.

“No it’s not,” she says, her tone tightening, too. “It’s magic.”

“You can’t really be that stupid,” he says.

“I am not stupid,” she says, shoving the puzzle back at him, scattering the pieces of their unfinished picture of the world. “You just don’t understand. You don’t want to.”

What is green is new, is inexperienced. I admit that my heart belonged to these movies before I was old enough to grasp the flat facts of them, let alone the world around them: A Little Princess is the first movie I ever saw in a theater, so in a way it is the movie, bound forever to the memory of what going to the movies means, a memory less of the mind and more of the muscle, rooted in that breathless moment when the lights go dark and the throat tightens at the first strains of music. I remember these films with my whole body.

When my mother tells the story of bringing me and my best friend to see the film together, the standout anecdote comes at the movie’s denouement: a harrowing, high-gothic escape across dizzying heights between two top-floor garret windows, where, lashed by sheets of rain, Sara lowers a slippery plank out of the attic to flee Miss Minchin and a cadre of black-suited police. As Sara's boots slipped and clacked on the shaky board, my friend and I leapt from our seats to cheer her on, crying YOU CAN DO IT! YOU CAN DO IT! and thrusting our hands towards the screen to channel our pure belief. Our words echo back to me in the terse murmurs of Mary and Dickon urging Colin to take his first few unsupported steps across the garden. You can do it, they say, you can do it, low and firm and certain, like a spell. Sara's board tumbles into thin air, but her hand snaps up to grip the wet concrete sill and she hauls herself bodily out of free-fall; Colin, half-crouched and cautious, stumbles across the picnic blanket and into Dickon's wide waiting arms and a lamb bleats and the three children shout with joy; at 3 years old, I sobbed in the dark cinema aisles with fear and wonder and relief. Now, having watched and rewatched, I am amazed to find that something in me still lights up every time: green, of course, meaning go go go.

It is not about what happens, in the end. Many fairytales end in death and ruin but in Hollywood a fairytale ending means happily ever after. At one point, jaded, I convinced myself that the impossible endings to these films—Captain Crewe back from the dead; Colin and his father healed, physically and spiritually—invalidated their beginnings, their beauties. In my reality, any promise of salvation feels unrealistic if it wears the shape of a father; beyond that, there’s the bitter certainty that thinking beyond the confines of the story necessitates remembering the joyous resolutions won’t last. No magic can erase the conflicts and forces that will ultimately tear their protagonists out of the world of childhood magic and into an uglier world of adult realism.

It’s this last truth that drives the stories towards their conclusions—a fear that the adults in the story will behave in accordance with this knowledge and fail to see the magic, fail to see how a universe could fit in a human throat, fail, in other words, at empathy. What would a realist say? Take your bit of earth, but don’t expect anything to come of it.

Or, perhaps, as a derisive Miss Minchin tells Sara: “It's time you learn, Sara Crewe, that real life has nothing to do with your little fantasy games. It's a cruel, nasty world out there and it's our duty to make the best of it—not to indulge in ridiculous dreams, but to be productive and useful!”

Sara acknowledges she understands this. But as Miss Minchin turns to go, satisfied at having instilled the lesson at last, Sara says, quietly: “But I don't believe in it.”

“Don't tell me you still fancy yourself a princess!” Minchin says, face twisting into a mask of incredulous fury. “Good god, child, look around you!”

“I am a princess,” Sara says, stepping forward. “All girls are! Even if they live in tiny old attics, even if they dress in rags, even if they aren't pretty, or smart, or young, they're still princesses—all of us!”

I have never once seen any woman get to the end of this scene dry-eyed—including, actually, Miss Minchin, who slams the attic door and, by the light of an iron candelabra, wipes angrily at her wet cheeks. Everything about the speech is too corny, too dramatic, too ridiculous and yet—and yet. To hear in tones of clear conviction that your circumstances do nothing to diminish your worth does not feel ridiculous at all.

Roger Ebert, reviewing The Secret Garden, said "watching it is like entering for a time into a closed world where one's destiny may be discovered." Any fairytale is like this: Suspend your disbelief as you listen to what you know cannot be real, then emerge transformed. You can hear "all girls are princesses" and understand its meaning as a series of beautiful surfaces, thinking yes, each of us deserves the status, the hair-bows, the yards and yards of yellow silk, the attention, the accolades, the father-protector, the huge bedroom with carved sandalwood doors flung wide to the lush and sprawling estate in India, built with money and security that has materialized from means and processes and dull details with which we need not concern ourselves. This would be, as Miss Minchin says, “to indulge in ridiculous dreams.”

Or you can hear "all girls are princesses" and then hear what comes after it, an idea that is simpler but in no way easier: that every human person is in possession of an undeniable essential dignity—“even if they dress in rags,” Sara says, “even if they’re not pretty, or smart, or young”—and it is the duty of any person alive in the world to recognize and honor that dignity in every other. When peeling back the bark this way, the moral is less about claiming what one is owed, and more about learning to see not only how a universe could fit down a human throat but how, in fact, it’s already there. There’s a universe inside every human throat. You just have to be willing to understand.

The most beautiful scene in either of these two films, in my opinion, is one that occurs halfway through The Secret Garden, as spring comes to Misselthwaite. It’s a time-lapse sequence: roots dig into earth and flowers unfurl into air with visceral, almost flesh-like liveliness. Crocuses, harebells, daffodils, roses—petals split wide, multiply. A monarch butterfly pulls itself from its sticky chrysalis. Light and shadow race over the mauve-brown moors until they flush into sudden, gorgeous green.

It was this scene I thought of years later when I first encountered Dylan Thomas’ poem:

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees Is my destroyer. And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.

Time, here, seems a destructive force, ready to crush youth into decay, health into sickness, a living body into a corpse at which the worms go. It’s easy, when talking about childhood, to slip into a similar stance—we grow older, familiar spaces shift, simple stories open into complex ones. The passage of those first green moments can feel like a loss.

But there's a beauty in returning to old places and finding them changed. The rooms of buildings known years ago seem to have shrunk, but the trees outside have gotten taller. It's the beauty of time made visible, tangible—the beauty of finding not only a change in the world around you, but within yourself, too. Each time I watch these movies—though I know them by heart—I live the impossibility of my earliest memories returned in flawless clarity. Some moments have come to feel like too-small rooms, cramped and uncomfortable, but some have burgeoned and bloomed into arrays of beauty I never could’ve imagined when I was a seedling myself.

These stories insist that the aliveness of the world is irreducible and everywhere, that it moves through everything, and that despite this, it is often invisible to us. Sara, as a storyteller, and Mary, as a gardener, discover ways to bring that aliveness to light. I no longer find redemption in the hermetic promise of happy endings; instead, I see it in the muddled, moving centers, in the gestures and attempts the girls make to channel the magic into something that can be shared, even as their attempts are met with indifference. The process itself is enough.

A storyteller does not invent, but reinvents, taking familiar elements—dirt, water, light—and transforming them into something new. No magic is bound to occur with raw material; sometimes a mound of mud in the sun is just that. But with the right conditions, and a scratched seed, sometimes something grows. Movie-making, as a form of storytelling, could just as easily be called photosynthesis: images of light, strung together in sequence, blossom into something beyond their beginnings.

A Little Princess is a little princess because, as Sara says, all girls are princesses. The Secret Garden is the secret garden because, as Mary says, if you look the right way, you can see that the whole world is a garden. Their stories, their roses, live beyond and outside them. Thomas’ poem ends at the worm, but worth remembering is what happens after: The worm eats the corpse in the winding sheet (and the poet in turn), excretes rich dirt. The blood and wax of the body, sucked in by silvery roots, sprout back up, twice digested, as a plurality of new green fuses. We die. The story continues without us. Realistically, the perpetual process of change is the only magic there is.

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