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historicity-was-already-taken · 1 year

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Women of the Warsaw Ghetto

Keynote delivered in honor of Yom Hashoah, on the 80th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Event sponsored by the Jewish Federation of Dutchess County, New York.

The version of my talk below includes some pieces I had to edit out the live version for timing purposes. Majority of talk under a cut for reasons of: length, content relating to the mercy killing of children and the elderly, general genocide. I will also be posting a version of this talk to my instagram: @historicity_wasalreadytaken.

What I am about to read is an abridged version of Rachel Auerbach’s poem, “Yizkor, 1943,” translated from the original Yiddish, originally printed in David Roskies’ The Literature of Destruction: Jewish Responses to Catastrophe.

I saw a flood once in the mountains. Wooden huts, torn from their foundations were carried above the raging waters. One could still see lighted lamps in them; and men, women and children in their cradles were tied to the ceiling beams. Other huts were empty inside, but one could see a tangle of arms waving from the roof … At a distance, one could see mouths gaping, but one could not hear the cries because the roar of the waters drowned out everything.

And that's how the Jewish masses flowed to their destruction at the time of the deportations.

Sinking as helplessly into the deluge of destruction. And if, for even one of the days of my life, I should forget how I saw you then, my people, desperate and confused, delivered over to extinction, may all knowledge of me be forgotten and my name be cursed like that of those traitors who are unworthy to share your pain.

Who can render the stages of the dying of a people? Only the shudder of pity for oneself and for others. And again illusion: waiting for the chance miracle. The insane smile of hope in the eyes of the incurable patient. Ghastly reflections of color on the yellowed face of one who is condemned to death.

Condemned to death. Who could—who wished to understand such a thing? And who could have expected such a decree against … such low branches, such simple Jews. The lowly plants of the world. The sorts of people who would have lived out their lives without ever picking a quarrel with the righteous—or even the unrighteous—of this world. How could such people have been prepared to die in a gas chamber? The sorts of people who were terrified of a dentist's chair; who turned pale at the pulling of a tooth.

Even the sweetest ones: the two- and three-year-olds who seemed like newly hatched chicks tottering about on their weak legs. And even the slightly larger ones who could already talk. Who endlessly asked about the meanings of words ... Five-year-olds. And six- year-olds. And those who were older still—their eyes wide with curiosity about the whole world … Girls who still nursed their dolls off in corners. Who wore ribbons in their hair; girls, like sparrows, leaping about in courtyards and on garden paths … to whose cheeks the very first wind of summer seems to have given its first glowing caress. Girls of eleven, twelve, thirteen with the faces of angels.

And pious Jews in black gaberdines, looking like priests in their medieval garb: Jews who were rabbis, teachers who wanted to transform our earthly life into a long study of Torah and prayer to God. They were the first to feel the scorn of the butcher. Their constant talk of martyrdom turned out not to be mere empty words.

And still other Jews. Broad shouldered, deep voiced, with powerful hands and hearts. Artisans, workers. Wagon drivers, porters. Jews who, with a blow of their fists, could floor any hooligan who dared enter into their neighborhoods...You were swept away in the flood, together with those who were weak.

Grandfathers and grandmothers with an abundance of grandchildren. With hands like withered leaves … Who already trembled at the latter end of their days. They were not destined simply to decline wearily into their graves like rest-seeking souls; like the sun sinking wearily into the ocean's waves. No. It was decreed that before they died they would get to see the destruction of all that they had begotten; of all that they had built.

“I have so many names to recall, how can I leave any of them out, since nearly all of them went off to Belzec and Treblinka or were killed on the spot? … Absurd! I will utter no more names. They are all mine, all related. All who were killed. Who are no more. Those whom I knew and loved press on my memory, which I compare now to a cemetery. The only cemetery in which there are still indications that they once lived in this world ... I may neither groan nor weep. I may not draw attention to myself in the street. And I need to groan; I need to weep. Not four times a year. I feel the need to say Yizkor four times a day.

Remember, Oh Lord, the souls of those who passed from this world horribly, dying strange deaths before their time. And now, suddenly I seem to see myself as a child standing on a bench behind my mother who, along with my grandmother and my aunts, is praying before the east wall of the woman's section of the synagogue … And just then the Torah reader, Hersh's Meyer-Itsik, strikes the podium three times and cries out with a mighty voice … ‘We recite Yizkor.’

Auerbach composed this piece in November 1943, after the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto, after its Uprising, and after its destruction at the hands of the Nazis.

Born in 1903, Rachel Auerbach studied psychology at the University of Lwow. A talented and prolific writer, Rachel began her literary career in 1925, moving to Warsaw, home of the largest Jewish community in Europe, in 1933. She thrived there, among the city’s numerous theaters, publishing houses, cafes, art galleries, libraries, and museums; and socialized with the city’s Jewish intellectual elite.

When Poland fell to the Nazis in September 1939, Jewish historian Emmanuel Ringelblum recruited Rachel into the Aleynhilf, the Jewish “Self-Help” Organization of the Warsaw Ghetto. Ringelblum put Rachel in charge of a soup kitchen, a position which allowed her to observe a wide swathe of the ghetto’s inhabitants. In 1941, Ringelblum recruited Rachel into the Oyneg Shabbes, or “Pleasure of the Sabbath,” his underground group dedicated to documenting life in the Warsaw Ghetto as it happened, without analysis or commentary. He asked Rachel to write for the archive regular reports on her experiences in the soup kitchen.

In both these reports and her post-war writings, Auerbach described the ordinary people she worked with each day at that soup kitchen on Leszno Street. There was the efficient bookkeeper, Halina Gelblum, whose competence soothed the nerves of the rest of the staff. There was the sixteen-year-old Henie, who was always smiling and flirting with the boys who worked in the kitchen. There was Gutchke the cook; talented, yet often at odds with Auerbach’s fastidious approach to hygiene. She would sing to herself in Yiddish as she bustled about the kitchen, talk to the pots and pans, and test the soup with her fingers.

There was Dama, a once-wealthy woman who, as Auerbach wrote, had “been wearing for many weeks a black georgette cocktail dress, dragged down at the bottom in uneven tails, the seams plastered with nits; on her head a cloth jockey cap, yellow with brown strips, perhaps from some skiing costume; and over her shoulders, weighing her down, inseparable collections of large bags and small handbags stuffed with what few possessions she has left.”

Ringleblum so valued Rachel’s reports that he soon gave her additional assignments. One of these, was to conduct interviews with those who had escaped from the Treblinka death camp and returned to the ghetto. These escapees were brought to the attention of the Oyneg Shabbes through the work of two young female underground couriers: Chavka Folman, and Frumka Plotnicka—who once smuggled grenades, hidden in a basket of potatoes, into the Warsaw Ghetto. Those interviews became critical to alerting the outside world of the extermination of Polish Jewry.

After the War, Rachel—with fellow Oyneg Shabbes survivors Hirsch and Bluma Wasser—was critical to the recovery of the archive, which the Oyneg Shabbes buried beneath the ghetto in summer 1942, when the Nazis liquidated the Warsaw Ghetto, rounding up 90% of its inhabitants, over 300,000 individuals, and sending them by cattle-cars to their deaths at Treblinka. In April 1946, at a meeting held to commemorate the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising on its third anniversary, Auerbach—the only female speaker present—stood up, and said:

“We cannot rest until we dig up the archive. Even if there are five stories of ruins, we have to find the archive … I will not rest, and I will not let you rest. We must rescue the Ringelblum Archive!”

Eventually, through her persistence, and assistance from the Jewish Labor Committee in New York, the search began that summer, 1946. Thanks to Rachel Auerbach, the majority of the archive was recovered from beneath the ruins of the Warsaw Ghetto, and would become one of the most vital sources on daily life therein.

The Aleynhilf was not the only organization of its kind operating in the Warsaw Ghetto. Most homes in Warsaw were built in clusters of four, with a shared courtyard between them. During the initial occupation of the city, and the first months of the Ghetto’s existence, “house committees” began to emerge in these courtyards. The house committees provided to the clusters’ residents child-care, communal kitchens, and illegal educational and cultural activities. By April 1940, there were 778 house committees operating in the Warsaw Ghetto; by early 1942 there were 1,108, with 7,500 members between them.

One such member was a young woman named Hannah Fryshdorf, who would go on to fight in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, and escape the burning ghetto through the sewers under the leadership of Zivia Lubetkin, the highest-ranking woman in the Jewish Fighting Organization. In an abridged section of a talk she delivered after the war, “Memories of the Warsaw Ghetto,” Hannah briefly discussed the illegal educational activities conducted by the house committees; activities in which she took part. This source was provided to me by Hannah’s niece, Ettie Goldwasser; according to Goldwasser, this is the only public statement Hannah ever made about her experiences in the Holocaust.

She wrote:

What has not been spoken of is the important role the hoyf (courtyard) played in the life of the ghetto … Because the police curfew began at 6 p.m., effectively prohibiting anyone from leaving the apartment after that hour, life within the confines of the four hoyf walls took on unprecedented significance.

Let Genshe 33 serve as an example … Before the war some eighty families lived in this building. Though acquainted with one another, they did not socialize much. But during the ghetto years, over one thousand people—those who had been driven out of nearby neighborhoods and those who had originally lived in Warsaw outside the ghetto walls—were crammed into the building.

When curfew fell at 6 p.m. and the gates closed, people, including children, began gathering in the hoyf to walk around until late into the night. In the courtyard they exchanged news about daily life, discussed the miracle of surviving yet another day, and gave voice to rumors true and false, recounting them over and over. Gradually, the inhabitants of the hoyf became more and more intimately connected, and the hoyf itself actually became a shtetl.

Quite naturally there arose a wish for an organized cooperative way of life, and…it fell to a group of the older activists to organize and create a hoyf committee. The organizers felt that it was their responsibility to look after the spiritual and bodily well-being of those who lived within the hoyf's quarters.

The first job was to raise money for feeding the hungry, since there were people close to starvation. It was difficult, yet funds were found and a soup kitchen was started. Every day several women volunteered to work there, cooking and serving supper … One good meal a day saved dozens of families from starvation.

Some 40 teenagers would meet every evening in a small room and spend several hours together, talking, discussing, reading books … For a few hours each night they were able to forget their cares and their hunger; for a few hours they were young again. And these same youngsters took it upon themselves to be concerned with those even younger, helping them to live a little, making them laugh, sing, and play.

So a ‘children’s corner’ was created, a kind of ghetto school. During the day it accommodated the smaller children, and at night the 18-year-olds. And it was terribly hard work to deal with shivering and starving children in a cold unheated room for six or seven hours a day. How much ingenuity and effort were summoned by untrained teachers to keep the children interested, to keep them from running out into the streets to grab or steal something to eat. And what strength it took for the teachers, cold and hungry themselves, to stand for hours at a time, teaching kids between six and thirteen, in one room without educational materials, without toys.

But they accomplished their aims … Both teacher and student knew what awaited them should they be caught attending this clandestine school, but fear held no one back; no child gave up his or her place.

… Back then we put in so much of our heart and hard work; and this was a time when hundreds of people were dying of starvation and illness, when not a single household was without a member stricken by typhus … a time when the Germans snatched people off the street for work details and dragged young men from their beds at night … At this moment when energies were being depleted, it became important to find comfort, to give each other hope.

These house committees quickly became the center of public life in the Warsaw Ghetto. And more often than not, these committees were managed and staffed by female volunteers. And for most of these women, this was the first time in their lives that they were able to step into leadership roles. Many of them thrived, finding within themselves strength which they had never before had reason to access.

However, this change in women’s traditional behavior went beyond the confines of the courtyard. One such process is illustrated in the recollections of Feigele Peltel, better known to the world as Vladka Meed, a courier and arms-smuggler for the Jewish resistance, and later, a Holocaust educator.

During the siege of Warsaw in September 1939, the Jews and the Poles experienced a brief moment of unity as they rushed to their city’s defense. Yet, the food, water, gas, and electric shortages which accompanied the German siege put a quick end to this showing of camaraderie. As the Germans marched into the city, they fanned the flames of Polish anti-Semitism. For example, as they set up soup and bread lines for Polish civilians, they encouraged the Poles to drive Jews out of the lines with such statements as: “the Jews deprive the Poles of their spoonful of soup!”

On September 28, 1939, a cheerful Jewish man named Shlomo Peltel was standing in one of these lines. He’d encountered German soldiers during their occupation of the city in World War I, and had found them to be friendly and courteous. But, as he stood on that bread line, the Poles around him began to mutter that he was a Jew. As their mutterings grew louder, a German soldier grabbed Shlomo, pulled him roughly out of the line, and beat him. According to Feigele, his oldest daughter, this experience was traumatic for Shlomo, and, afterwards, he retreated into the family home “a broken man,” no longer able to support, provide for, or protect the family as he had in the days before the occupation.

Before the war, Shlomo had owned a modest haberdashery. When the store was struck by a German bomb in the early days of the invasion, the Peltels were able to salvage some of the merchandise; merchandise, which could be sold for cash on the black market. Those sorts of transactions, however, were only conducted in the parts of the city declared off-limits to Jews. The shattered Shlomo certainly couldn’t undertake such a mission, but Feigele, a Bundist activist with features more Aryan than Jewish, certainly could. And so, Feigele loaded up their wares, sold them on the black market, stood in the breadlines, and just like that, took on the role of family provider.

Shlomo was not alone. Finding themselves unable to act as breadwinners and protectors, Jewish men struggled, and often, failed to adapt, leaving their wives and daughters to support the family.

Further, men were the typical targets of Nazi forced labor round-ups. German gangs would seize Jewish men at random, and force them to engage in all manner of labor—from road construction to forest clearance—typically designed to exhaust even the most physically fit of men. These forced laborers were subject to random and brutal violence, and many died from a combination of exhaustion, hunger, heart failure, and exposure. As husbands, fathers, sons, and brothers returned from work assignments sick, beaten, and traumatized, and retreated into the home, their wives, mothers, daughters, and sisters emerged from its confines. As Emmanuel Ringelblum wrote in his diary:

Women’s perseverance—the main providers. Men don’t go out. When [a man is seized for forced labor], the wife does not let go. She runs after [the kidnappers], she screams and cries ‘please, Mister’—she is not afraid of the soldiers. She stands on the long line—some are seized to work … The beautiful hats have disappeared. In wartime [women] put on scarves. When there is need to go to [the Gestapo] the daughter or wife goes; in the worst scenario they stand and wait in the hallway … The women are everywhere since the [men] have been taken to all sorts of work … When a husband escapes … his wife has to be the sole provider. [Women] who never thought of working [out of their homes] are now performing the most difficult physical work.

While women expressed satisfaction, and indeed, newfound empowerment, with their new roles and responsibilities, the enforced starvation, terror, and poverty of daily life in the Warsaw Ghetto took their toll. Women abandoned their children on the front steps of orphanages and self-help institutions, in the hopes that there, their children might have a chance at survival. Some women worked as smugglers and prostitutes to provide for their families, often with the tacit approval of their husbands and parents. Once-wealthy women took work as house-cleaners, while female nurses and doctors worked relentlessly at the impossible task of containing the typhus, dysentery, and tuberculosis outbreaks which plagued the ghetto.

Some of these doctors and nurses described their own attempts to shield their patients from pain and suffering, even as the Nazis were forcing Jews onto the cattle cars which would bear them to their deaths. In her memoir, I Remember, Nothing More, Dr. Adina Blady-Szwajger recalled:

… Sister Mira came for me—I can’t remember her last name but I still see her face in front of me as if she were here now. And she asked me to go downstairs with her for a moment. When we left the ward, she said—and I can still hear this — ‘Doctor, please give my mother an injection. I can’t do it. I beg you, please. I don’t want them to shoot her in bed, and she can’t walk.’ So I asked her what was in the syringe and she told me it was morphine.

… We went to the first floor where the families of staff were ... And so, that grey-haired lady smiled at me and stretched out her arm. The sister put on the clamp. And I injected the morphine into her vein. And then I saw a few more people who didn’t have the strength to move. I asked Mira what we should do and she said: ‘Help them, surely.’ So we helped them, too. And by the window there was this woman, swollen from starvation, and suffering from circulatory insufficiency, and she kept on looking at us, pleading with her eyes. She was the last one we gave an injection to.

… When I left the room, I held out my hand and got two large containers of morphine. We didn’t say a word to each other, just squeezed each other’s hands, I think.

I took the morphine upstairs. Dr. Margolis was there and I told her what I wanted to do. So we took a spoon and went to the infants’ room. And just as, during those two years of real work in the hospital, I had bent down over the little beds, so now I poured this last medicine into those tiny mouths. Only Dr. Margolis was with me. And downstairs, there was screaming, because the…Germans were already there, taking the sick from the wards to the cattle trucks.

After that we went in to the older children and told them that this medicine was going to make their pain disappear. They believed us, and drank the required amount from the glass. And then I told them to undress, get into bed and sleep. So they lay down and after a few minutes—I don’t know how many—but the next time I went into that room, they were asleep. And then, I don’t know what happened.

These ordinary women rose to meet circumstances unimaginable to them even two years earlier. Their resistance was not of the military variety that comes to mind when we discuss the concept of resistance, but each act; each dose administered; each child taught; each person allowed to live one more day, was an act of resistance.

There were women in the Warsaw Ghetto who did engage in resistance as we typically think of it: as fighters, arms smugglers, spies, and commanders. And, despite what 80 years of novels, comic books, films, and theater would have us think, women were present and vital at every stage of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. I have already mentioned several of these women: couriers and arms smugglers Chavka Folman, Frumka Plotnicka, Hannah Fryshdorf, Zivia Lubetkin, and Vladka Meed.

The female couriers acquired guns, explosives, and ammunitions, smuggled them past the German guards, and into the Ghetto. They slept with chemical explosives and instructions for the manufacture of homemade bombs under their pillows, and smuggled dynamite into the ghetto through labyrinthine passageways of the factories which abutted the Ghetto.

In her memoir They Are Still with Me, Chavka Folman wrote of one such mission:

For a short while I lived in the same room with Tema Schneiderman … Under the bed was … a suitcase containing pistols and grenades … Tema and I brought the grenades to the ghetto ... Each of the girls hid a grenade in her most intimate place, her undergarments. From a suburb of the city we took a streetcar in the direction of the ghetto. I recall our odd behavior during the ride. Tema stood at my side and asked: ‘What would happen if a gentleman invited us to sit beside him?’ We broke into laughter; hiding our fear in this way…

Jewish Fighting Organization commander Yitzak “Antek” Zuckerman wrote that he would never forget the celebration which took place in honor of courier Frumka Plotnitcka when she smuggled the Jewish Fighting Organization’s first weapons acquisition—those basketed grenades—into the Warsaw Ghetto.

Stories such as these proliferate through the diaries, memoirs, autobiographies, and testimonies of surviving members of the Jewish Fighting Organization. Male and female resistance leaders alike made it very clear in their post-war writings and testimonies that no uprising could have happened without the women, many of whom were discovered, tortured, and murdered over the course of their missions. Indeed, a courier named Hasia began her underground work in a group of 23 women. Only five survived.

When the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising began on April 19, 1943, women served as sharpshooters, reconnaissance officers, fighters, and commanders.

Today, the 27th of Nisan, is the day of Yom HaShoah, as set by the Israeli Parliament in 1953 to align with the events of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Today, as we approach the 80th anniversary of that Uprising, we remember these women of the Warsaw Ghetto; their courage, their loss, and their resistance.

Thank you.

#holocaust #holocaust history #warsaw ghetto #warsaw ghetto uprising #yom hashoah

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ffxvficrec · 8 months

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by OhWormsNice Ignis would call himself a patient man. Growing up taking care of Noctis had ensured that he could be firm but not insistent; be accommodating without being indulgent; be patient without being a pushover. Ignis however, drew the line at sitting in a meeting room for over an hour waiting for the American’s senior staff of government to arrive with their president. ----------- None of the countries on the Eosan continent have made contact with the world outside since the Solheim era. Now with Noctis on the throne that silence has been broken. Lucis will enter the world stage and the world will have to grapple with the existence of magic, gods, and chocobos. Part one in a series of fics Words: 2235, Chapters: 1/2, Language: English Series: Part 1 of Noctis vs the media Fandoms: Final Fantasy XV Rating: General Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Categories: M/M Characters: Noctis Lucis Caelum , Gladiolus Amicitia , Ignis Scientia , Original Characters Relationships: Gladiolus Amicitia/Prompto Argentum/Noctis Lucis Caelum/Ignis Scientia Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting , Kinda , Fluff , United States , Ignis centeric kinda , Post-Canon , Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies , POV Ignis Scientia , Noctis Lucis Caelum Lives , Not Canon Compliant , The West Wing References , You don't need to know the West Wing , I was just watching a lot of it when I was writing it , Prompto will be there later , world building , Established Relationship , Politics

#final fantasy xv #ffxv #ffxv fic rec #final fantasy xv fic rec

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eavanyhuang · 10 months

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Teaching in Madness

Last night, among many of my other dreams, I made the decision to reorient my pedagogical relationship to the world. Teaching elite academics & white male (or white adjacent) unionists while learning from struggles on the ground, instead of the other way around which is the norm in academia. This way, my academic writing is pedagogical, and revision is merely a matter of making the content more digestable for an audience with slow pace and learning difficulties. And of course, always start with a more receptive audience, this way there can be a momentum to push the project forward. It is just that, sometimes your “students” drive you crazy, you know, the kind that is full of themselves and refuse to listen. This is the source of the madness and loneliness I experienced over the past two months. But it is perhaps the teacher’s job to be as patient as possible, even though the world suffers from the slow pace that the students are privileged enough to follow in their learning. And indeed, sanity is an ideological construct. When your students look at you like you are a gorilla in a zoo, that pedagogical relationship is twisted into a spectacle: you scream, they tune you out in laughters and apathy. How do you teach someone that madness is the only viable way of living in this world as we know it? I feel so fucking insane among grads in my department, among members of my union local, among academic feminists, and among unionists who are mostly cis men (especially those growing up as one of the dominant group in their society) and white or white passing women. Yes, when the whole world is insane you are just a gorilla walking among humans and their vanity. All of these remind me of the BCRW’s conference on “Living in Madness: Decolonization, Creation, Healing”.

In particular, I am juxtaposing David Graeber’s Pirate Enlightenment with La Marr Jurelle Bruce’s How to Go Mad Without Losing Your Mind. With da Silva, we know that the modern Subject of science and history is a construct that necessitates the death of racial others. This accounts for the various types of madness: phenomenal, psychiatric, emotional, and deviant, that Bruce documents in his book. Madness is clearly a product of the maddening “stage of (regulatory) exteriority” and “stage of (moral) interiority” of the modern text of self-determination that da Silva carefully laid out. As such, critiques of Enlightenment Reason is in no way a reinvention of the West, but a historical method that investigates the discursive production of the modern Subject. White anarchism has a tradition of bypassing the whole discussion of modern discursive power with its fetishism of libertarian sanity. With this there is something uncomfortable and culturally appropriative about Graeber’s claim that:

“the blanket condemnation of Enlightenment thought is in its own way rather odd, when one considers that this was perhaps the first historically known intellectual movement organized largely by women, outside of official institutions like universities, with the express aim of undermining all existing structures of authority. What’s more, if one examines many of the original sources, Enlightenment thinkers were often quite explicit that the sources of their ideas lay outside what we now call ‘the Western tradition’ entirely” (x)

This might be a good starting point to talk about the global supply chain of sanity and the draining effect on the global South.

#academia #research

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phoebosacerales · 3 years

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The 6th house in Astrology

I thought I'd just share this excerpt from "The Plague", which feels like a whole lesson on the 6th house, while also being very relevant in these times of covid-19. It says a lot more than I could ever try to say and explain about the joy of Mars.

"The word 'plague' had just been uttered for the first time. At this stage of the narrative, with Dr. Bernard Rieux standing at his window, the narrator may, perhaps, be allowed to justify the doctor's uncertainty and surprise, since, with very slight differences, his reaction was the same as that of the great majority of our townsfolk. Everybody knows that pestilences have a way of recurring in the world; yet somehow we find it hard to believe in ones that crash down on our heads from a blue sky. There have been as many plagues as wars in history; yet always plagues and wars take people equally by surprise.

In fact, like our fellow citizens, Rieux was caught off his guard, and we should understand his hesitations in the light of this fact; and similarly understand how he was torn between conflicting fears and confidence. When a war breaks out, people say: 'It's too stupid; it can't last long.' But though a war may well be 'too stupid', that doesn't prevent its lasting. Stupidity has a knack of getting its way; as we should see if we were not always so much wrapped up in ourselves.

In this respect our townsfolk were like everybody else, wrapped up in themselves; in other words they were humanists: they disbelieved in pestilences.

A pestilence isn't a thing made to man's measure; therefore we tell ourselves that pestilence is a mere bogy of the mind, a bad dream that will pass away. But it doesn't always pass away and, from one bad dream to another, it is men who pass away, and the humanists first of all, because they haven't taken their precautions.

Our townsfolk were not more to blame than others; they forgot to be modest, that was all, and thought that everything still was possible for them; which presupposed that pestilences were impossible. They went on doing business, arranged for journeys, and formed views. How should they have given a thought to anything like plague, which rules out any future, cancels journeys, silences the exchange of views. They fancied themselves free, and no one will ever be free so long as there are pestilences.

Indeed, even after Dr. Rieux had admitted in his friend's company that a handful of persons, scattered about the town, had without warning died of plague, the danger still remained fantastically unreal. For the simple reason that, when a man is a doctor, he comes to have his own ideas of physical suffering, and to acquire somewhat more imagination than the average. Looking from his window at the town, outwardly quite unchanged, the doctor felt little more than a faint qualm for the future, a vague unease.

He tried to recall what he had read about the disease. Figures floated across his memory, and he recalled that some thirty or so great plagues known to history had accounted for nearly a hundred million deaths. But what are a hundred million deaths? When one has served in a war, one hardly knows what a dead man is, after a while. And since a dead man has no substance unless one has actually seen him dead, a hundred million corpses broadcast through history are no more than a puff of smoke in the imagination. The doctor remembered the plague at Constantinople that, according to Procopius, caused ten thousand deaths in a single day. Ten thousand dead made about five times the audience in a biggish cinema. Yes, that was how it should be done. You should collect the people at the exits of five picture-houses, you should lead them to a city square and make them die in heaps if you wanted to get a clear notion of what it means. Then at least you could add some familiar faces to the anonymous mass. But naturally that was impossible to put into practice; moreover, what man knows ten thousand faces? In any case the figures of those old historians, like Procopius, weren't to be relied on; that was common knowledge. Seventy years ago, at Canton, forty thousand rats died of plague before the disease spread to the inhabitants. But, again, in the Canton epidemic there was no reliable way of counting up the rats. A very rough estimate was all that could be made, with, obviously, a wide margin for error.

'Let's see,' the doctor murmured to himself, "supposing the length of a rat to be ten inches, forty thousand rats placed end to end would make a line of...'

He pulled himself up sharply. He was letting his imagination play pranks, the last thing wanted just now. A few cases, he told himself, don't make an epidemic; they merely call for serious precautions. He must fix his mind, first of all, on the observed facts: stupor and extreme prostration, buboes, intense thirst, delirium, dark blotches on the body, internal dilatation, and, in conclusion... In conclusion, some words came back to the doctor's mind; aptly enough, the concluding sentence of the description of the symptoms given in his medical handbook: 'The pulse becomes fluttering, dicrotic, and intermittent, and death ensues as the result of the slightest movement.' Yes, in conclusion, the patient's life hung on a thread, and three people out of four (he remembered the exact figures) were too impatient not to make the very slight movement that snapped the thread.

The doctor was still looking out of the window. Beyond it lay the tranquil radiance of a cool spring sky; inside the room a word was echoing still, the word 'plague'. A word that conjured up in the doctor's mind not only what science chose to put into it, but a whole series of fantastic possibilities utterly out of keeping with that gray and yellow town under his eyes, from which were rising the sounds of mild activity characteristic of the hour; a drone rather than a bustling, the noises of a happy town, in short, if it's possible to be at once so dull and happy. A tranquillity so casual and thoughtless seemed almost effortlessly to give the lie to those old pictures of the plague: Athens, a charnel-house reeking to heaven and deserted even by the birds; Chinese towns cluttered up with victims silent in their agony; the convicts at Marseille piling rotting corpses into pits; the building of the Great Wall in Provence to fend off the furious plague-wind; the damp, putrefying pallets stuck to the mud floor at the Constantinople lazar-house, where the patients were hauled up from their beds with hooks; the carnival of masked doctors at the Black Death; men and women copulating in the cemeteries of Milan; cartloads of dead bodies rumbling through London's ghoul-haunted darkness, nights and days filled always, everywhere, with the eternal cry of human pain. No, all those horrors were not near enough as yet even to ruffle the equanimity of that spring afternoon. The clang of an unseen streetcar came through the window, briskly refuting cruelty and pain. Only the sea, murmurous behind the dingy checkerboard of houses, told of the unrest, the precariousness, of all things in this world. And, gazing in the direction of the bay, Dr. Rieux called to mind the plague-fires of which Lucretius tells, which the Athenians kindled on the seashore. The dead were brought there after nightfall, but there was not room enough, and the living fought one another with torches for a space where to lay those who had been dear to them; for they had rather engage in bloody conflicts than abandon their dead to the waves. A picture rose before him of the red glow of the pyres mirrored on a wine-dark, slumbrous sea, battling torches whirling sparks across the darkness, and thick, fetid smoke rising toward the watchful sky. Yes, it was not beyond the bounds of possibility....

But these extravagant forebodings dwindled in the light of reason. True, the word 'plague had been uttered; true, at this very moment one or two victims were being seized and laid low by the disease. Still, that could stop, or be stopped. It was only a matter of lucidly recognizing what had to be recognized; of dispelling extraneous shadows and doing what needed to be done. Then the plague would come to an end, because it was unthinkable, or, rather, because one thought of it on misleading lines. If, as was most likely, it died out, all would be well. If not, one would know it anyhow for what it was and what steps should be taken for coping with and finally overcoming it.

The doctor opened the window, and at once the noises of the town grew louder.

The brief, intermittent sibilance of a machine-saw came from a near-by workshop.

Rieux pulled himself together. There lay certitude; there, in the daily round.

All the rest hung on mere threads and trivial contingencies; you couldn't waste your time on it. The thing was to do your job as it should be done."

"The Plague", by Albert Camus.

#the plague #albert camus #hellenistic astrology #astrology #mars #6th house #traditional astrology #covid-19

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sweetestlamb · 4 years

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Green-Eyed Monster

Genre: Revenge romance? Is that a category? It is now.

Summary: Ju-Ri doesn't understand how a nice normal guy like Gang-Tae could fall for someone awful like Mun-Yeong, little moments into their relationship provide clarity and envy in equal parts.

Author Notes: We have already been so well-fed today, but here I am offering more food, if you’re a glutton then eat it all up! Thank y’all for voting for this one and making me temporarily table the High School AU, today’s episode has given me SO MANY IDEAS. SO MANY. So I will definitely be writing that this week, stay tuned!

p.s: I planned on being meaner to Ju-Ri but as a feminist it’s hard for me to shit on women no matter how much you irk my soul. I just want us all to succeed and not compete, especially not for men. But never fear, jealousy and mild torture is still here.

Ju-Ri avoids the front nurse's desk as she makes her rounds, checking on the patients and then checking on them again, better safe than sorry, anything to ignore the news that all her colleagues are chattering about in excitable voices. Gang-Tae and that woman. She doesn't understand how he could be with someone like her. Prior, to that witch crash landing into their lives she had considered her and Gang-Tae close, friends even. They didn't need to communicate often, they had moments of silence that spoke volumes, she told herself. It was only a matter of time until they.....

Then she had appeared. Like a bad dream.

Reeling him in on her line and despite his attempts to wriggle free, she captured him. Ju-Ri watched them circle around each other, him chasing after her every time she was on her war path and Ju-Ri couldn't help the frustration that washed over her as she wondered why? What was it about that woman that made everyone overlook all her glaring flaws? She was selfish, brash, and downright mean. Her touch was the killing blow to everything and everyone around her. She knew that in due time, the sweet caretaker would be next. She was like Medusa, staring too long would ultimately lead to your downfall.

These thoughts swimming in her mind caused her to walk right into them. In a sense. Turning the corner, with a grimace on her concern bitten lips she found the very pair she was ruminating about. Her eyes widen as she took in the scene in front of her; Ko Mun-Yeong had Gang-Tae cornered, their faces closer than was acceptable for the work place. His blush was apparent even from her distance, as if someone had taken a red paintbrush to his cheeks. Mun-Yeong smirked, leaning in even closer, until Ju-Ri was sure they were sharing a breath. The way he was panting made it clear that he was not getting an adequate amount of air. Her eyes tightened into a glare, of course that bitch wouldn't even let Gang-Tae breathe without hindering him. Vaguely she overheard their exchange.

"Mun-Yeong calm down, we can't do this at work. " He said to no avail, knees buckling as as Mun-Yeong dismissed his requests and placed a hand on his cheek dragging him dangerously close.

"This is your fault for being so pretty. I can feel your eyes on me when I'm teaching. It makes me want to end the class and jump you." She finished her suggestive statement with a snap of her teeth, her lips pursing as Gang-Tae swayed as if hypnotized. "Just one kiss and I'll leave you alone. I promise. I'll be a good girl." She pressed on, her words contradicting with the evil smile that spread across her ruby lips. He groaned in response, while she widened her eyes in mock innocence. Moving ever closer.

Gang-Tae stood stock-still, hands tightened in fists, a vein protruding from his heated neck, as the she-demon took his silence as confirmation, cupping his strong jaw into her hands, drawing him closer, closer, their lips on the cusp-

Before she abruptly threw the patient charts in her grasp on the ground. The crash echoing down the hallway, breaking the couple from their reprieve. Gang-Tae leapt back like he was on fire, dipping under and out of Mun-Yeong's evil clutches, absently straightening his placidly pastel uniform. Mun-Yeong on the other hand, did not seem the least bit bothered, turning much like the cat that almost got the milk. Her face lighting up when she spotted Ju-Ri, menacing smile covering her face, before the sound of her heels filled Ju-Ri's ears- who even wore heels to a hospital?- until they were face to face.

She paused to bend down and pick up the charts Ju-Ri had accidentally dropped and Ju-Ri pretended not to see how raptly Gang-Tae watched the smooth motion, his eyes hungrily examining the abundance of skin that was visible under her short pale lilac skirt. He licked his lips, lost in the sight before him. Ju-Ri coughed loudly, his eyes guiltily shifted away, intensely staring at the wall instead as if just noticing that it was here.

"Here." Mun-Yeong pushed the chart into her limp hands, "This is yours." And she heard the unsaid message, Gang-Tae is not. She didn't respond to the quip, snatching the charts from the outstretched hands and looking intently at Gang-Tae, shocked that he would allow this sort of behavior at his place of work. She turned away in annoyance at finding him distracted again. Mun-Yeong was smoothing out invisible wrinkles in her skirt, his eyes were fixed on the quick movements of her hand. Surprisingly enough, Mun-Yeong was the one to end this intolerable awkward moment, turning back to Gang-Tae and wrapping her claws around his thick neck, his ears pinking up at the sudden attention, as she stage whispered, "Next time, you won't be so lucky, these lips will be mine. " And with that she was gone, leaving him suspended in the moment before he shook myself and walked off without a word to Ju-Ri.

With a defeated grunt, she stomped off, maybe the patients needed a third check in.

After finding a nice pillow to scream into, Ju-Ri started to thinking rationally, their relationship was clearly purely sexual. Gang-Tae was such a shy guy, he was merely excited to be with someone as experienced as Mun-Yeong and okay, maybe if you squinted and looked sideways while hopping on one leg, one might consider Mun-Yeong pretty. She bristled at the memory of her very own mother expressing that, she wasn't that pretty. If anything she was terrifying and that far outweighed any external beauty. Ergo, it was only a matter of time before Gang-Tae reached this conclusion and the world would be right once more.

This was the only thought that kept her from violently scalping herself.

Unpacking her lunch, the familiar scents of her mom's home-cooked meal filled her senses, glad for a quiet moment. She ate, pointedly thinking of nothing and no one, until the chair across her was pulled out and occupied, thankfully it was only her mom, who she greeted with a tight smile. She was still coming to terms with the fact that her own mother had befriended her arch nemesis, for lack of a better term. This was after calling said woman; pretty, all but escorting Gang-Tae to her macabre castle and through her advice, helping them reconcile after he had finally escaped. It wasn't that Ju-Ri didn't want Gang-Tae to be happy, that's all she wanted, but she knew first hand what happened to those who got too close to Mun-Yeong, she was a walking danger ahead sign.

Why did no one heed the warning until it was too late?

They lapsed into small talk, how was your day? I made the dumplings you like, here have some. It was all too good to be true, that should have been her first sign that she should evacuate the premises. But she figured that they wouldn't be as shameless as to rub their relationship in her face, she was mistaken.

As she was looking up, she saw movement at the cafeteria's entrance, eyes landing on Gang-Tae unaware of Mun-Yeong sneaking up behind him, until she slid her arm through his larger arm, linking them with a broad smile. She said something to him that made him stumble over his steps, before righting himself and gazing down into her dark gaze. They stood there, unmoving, eyes locked, completely disregarding everyone around them, all but obliterating her appetite.

She waited for him to break the chain of their arms, as he had done in the parking lot, when she had made the mistake of looking back at the commotion behind her.

He didn't.

He allowed himself to be dragged by Mun-Yeong's smaller stature, until she realized with sharp realization that Mun-Yeong was traipsing to her table. Seeing her mother's answering wave and smile, an ice cold slap of betrayal hit her. Did this woman intend to take everything from her? She huffed in indignation, turning her body away from the approaching pair.

Her mother gently knocked her feet under the small table, that was about to feel even smaller. Claustrophobic,even.

She pretended not to notice and stuffed more food into her mouth, hoping that no one would try to engage her in a conversation.

Her mother greeted them, Gang-Tae, ever thoughtful, saw her reaction and quickly stated that they planned on eating outside, they just wanted wanted to say hi.

"Why can't we all eat together? I want to stay." Mun-Yeong innocently maliciously inquired, looking at her newest victim and Ju-Ri watched his jaw tighten out of the corner of her eye, he pulled her with their interlocked arms, the force resulting in their bodies colliding.

"Don't be silly, of course we can all eat together. I brought extra food for that very purpose, I don't want to see those atrocious sandwiches, that's not a real meal." Her mother stated, leaving no room for argument. Ju-Ri wanted to argue, to shout that she didn't want to be anywhere near her, they weren't friends and she didn't plan on acting like they were, damn it.

A chill washed over her as she considered the seating arrangement, her mother sat across from her, leaving an empty chair next to them both. She should have sat next to her before it was too late.

Gang-Tae shuffled awkwardly, also noticing the conundrum, before Mun-Yeong easily slid into the seat next to her mother, causing Ju-Ri's mouth to open in shock. Was she actually going to let Gang-Tae sit next to her? His eyes exhibited his surprise as well before he took the last remaining seat. Mun-Yeong smirked as if amused by her discomfort, before accepting the handful of food that was being pressed into her waiting hands.

They ate in relative silence, Mun-Yeong and her mother leading the conversation, she tuned them out, silently seething at the mere fact that they seemed so comfortable in each other's presence.

The loud clicks of chopsticks knocking against a surface made her look up and she watched as Mun-Yeong chased a slippery quail egg with to avail, lips curled in disdain as she cursed the elusive delectable treat. Gang-Tae's warm chuckle hit her ear, "Here, let me help." The fondness coating his voice made her stomach churn, as he delicately picked up and placed the egg in her bed of rice, Mun-Yeong smiled in return batting her eyelashes, "My hero."

In all her years of knowing Gang-Tae she had never seen him so attentive, unless it was with his brother. She wasn't the first person to have a crush on him, but like her all others had been denied. Gang-Tae was a mystery that didn't want to be solved, sweet and calm, but unattainable. Yet here he was soft and eager, doting over Mun-Yeong, who was now tapping her spoon against the bowl of beef, expectant look in her eyes.

He didn't react at first. Pushing the bowl closer to her instead, but she was relentless. Opening her mouth as she continued to click, eyes drilling into his face, until he backed down with a sigh, easily picking up the meat and bringing it to her bowl, only for her to bend her head and close her mouth around his chopsticks instead. With a resonating hum of approval, she took the meat, maintaining eye contact during the entire ordeal, which in reality lasted a few seconds but it felt like hours to Ju-Ri, forced to watch this inappropriately intimate moment. Gang-Tae coughed and shifted in his seat, long legs squeezing together, as Mun-Yeong smiled salaciously, licking her lips.

"I have to get back to work." She was glad when nobody called her out for leaving fifteen minutes before her allotted break was over.

Alcohol was her only friend. She picked up cases of beer, planning to drink herself into a stupor after the week she had. Everywhere she turned, they were there disgustingly wrapped up in each other, she dearly wanted to blame it all on Mun-Yeong and her obsession but....she watched him trail after her whenever she got too far. More than four feet was his limit. He would pace the hallway outside the room that was designated for her literature class, peeking in and fleeing with a blush when he was met by Mun-Yeong's jubilant smile.

She didn't want to think about them, not today, she just wanted to drown herself in her liquid friend and remember better days when Mun-Yeong was a distant memory.

So of course, she heard their voices as she ascended the stairs leading to her rooftop. Kicking the wall in anger, fighting the urge to throw a tantrum and fling her beer at their heads. If she wasn't safe in her own house, where was she safe?

Their quiet voices could be heard over the slight breeze in the night air, "What's wrong? You've been upset all day." Mun-Yeong's deep voice break the silence. No response came for long seconds, and she pressed on, "Are you upset about work?" Pause. "Is it your brother?" Longer pause. "What? Are you mad at me?" Another pause. Mun-Yeong must have seen something on his face because her resounding aaahhhhhh was loud and clear.

"Okay so you're upset with me? Are you mad that I tried to ravish you in the supply closet?"

Ew. She mentally told herself to never go in that closet.

There was no response.

"Okay not that, good because I know you liked that. All those delicious moans you were making made it clea--”

"You're still texting him." He thankfully cut her off, Ju-Ri was grateful as she felt her own cheeks heating up, mostly in shame. She knew she should leave before this conversation took any more turns but her feet refused to listen to her brain.

She tried to think of who this mysterious man was. How many hopeless men had Mun-Yeong trapped in her web? If she had so many men, why did she have to take Gang-Tae too? It just wasn't fair.

"Who?" She took a step up the stairs until she would see them, sitting close on the table, Gang-Tae's long legs dangling off the surface as Mun-Yeong sat crisscrossed facing him in a too-big shirt that hit her knee. It didn't take a genius to surmise whose shirt she was wearing, Ju-Ri thought bitterly, the only silver lining that it wasn't a piece of clothing they'd bought together.

Mun-Yeong had a butter wouldn't melt on my tongue expression on her face and Ju-Ri wanted to slap her again, why was she always playing innocent with him? She was anything but.

Gang-Tae didn't fall for her act thankfully instead starting to stand up, anger clear in the sharp lines of his body. Mun-Yeong's hand shot out and pulled him back down onto the table, she crawled closer, then he sat motionless, eyes low on her face.

"Are you jealous? He's a friend now. We become close during our- she gestured to them- break. " His lips snarled.

"He likes you."

"So?" Mun-Yeong responded, "Why does that matter? I don't like him, not like that."

Gang-Tae seemed taken back by her answer, huffing and then deflating before whispering in a defeated voice, "I just don't like it. I don't like the way he looks at you."

A sultry giggle fell from Mun-Yeong's smirking lips, "How does he look at me? Is it the same way you look at me? Does it make your heart ache? Do you like me?" With each question, she moved progressively closer, until she was planted in Gang-Tae's lap. Legs straddling him as he grabbed her waist, as she momentarily lost her balance.

He let out a furious breathe of air.

"I don't notice because I'm only ever looking at you." And then with startling accuracy, her eyes met Ju-Ri's, she felt a chill run through her bones, "And I'm not the only one that looks at you. You work and live with someone who is always looking at you. I don't mind, because I know you're mine. When you lose control, just grab me and kiss me. I'm yours to kiss. Stop being jealous and enjoy the fact that you have me."

Gang-Tae's eyes roamed her lips, thumb running across the plush opening, "You're the only one I want to look at me too. I don't see anyone else but you, you drive me so crazy." With a swift pull, he grabbed her head, intent clear on his face. Following through on her offer.

She bolted down the stairs before she could see their lips join, but not before hearing the crash as Mun-Yeong successfully tackled Gang-Tae, wet noises loud in the dark of night.

She got black out drunk in her bedroom. Telling herself she remembers nothing the next morning. Ignoring the indecently large red marks that mars Gang-Tae's neck as they awkwardly stumble around each other, leaving the house at the same time.

The director berates them all in his office, Ko Dae-Hwan, Mun-Yeong's father had attempted to choke her yet again, this time following her class. Someone had forgotten that he was explicitly not allowed to take that class and brought him, and as she was exiting the room, he had thrown his body across the stretch separating them, crushing hands tight around her neck, squeezing out her last breath. All the patients had started screaming, the room a chaotic mess, until finally they'd been able to sedate him and pry her from his grip.

Mun-Yeong had fled the room with tear-filled eyes and a glare directed at them as they had been making sure all the patients, including her father were okay.

Looking down the line, she realizes that Gang-Tae was missing from this reprimand. He was on a break when the situation had taken place. It didn't taken long before he burst through the door, "Where is she?" He only had eyes for the director, frantic and ready to run at a moment's notice.

The director replied, "Nurse Byeol saw her go into the women's room." And he was off, not bothering to spare the rest of them a glance.

She was only going to wash her hands she told herself, she didn't care how Mun-Yeong was doing, she was always fine. She wasn't sure Mun-Yeong even had feelings. Remembering, the manic smile that had spread across her face the last time her father had attempted to end her life.

"I'm here, it's okay. You're okay." Gang-Tae's deep voice echoed on the bathroom walls, soothing and calm. "I'm sorry I wasn't there, I'm so sorry. I'll never leave you again. I will protect you." He promised resolutely, sounding like her suffering was physically hurting him too.

She shouldn't be hearing this. It was too intimate a moment for outside ears.

She turned to give them privacy, but not before hearing Mun-Yeong tearfully state, "It's not the first time. He tried to kill me when I was a kid, why does he hate me?" Her voiced cracked on the last word, and Ju-Ri ran out of the room, eyes dewy.

She watched with her heart in her throat as minutes later they left together, Gang-Tae asking to leave early, the look on his face clearly saying he would leave with or without permission, their fingers interlocked, as he pulled her limp body out of the hospital.

He briefly stopped to place a gentle hand on Mun-Yeong's head, whispering something only she could hear, bringing a wet smile to her face. It was so tender, Ju-Ri couldn't watch.

The scene kept replaying in her head for days, what was it like to have someone want to protect you that way? Gang-Tae lost all inhibitions when it came to Mun-Yeong, he was bold and brazen and fiercely protective. Hurting anyone who dared to hurt her. She overheard from Cha-Young, that he had demanded to be the one to stand guard whenever Mun-Yeong was leading her classes.

He had stormed into the director's office and ordered that, stating that he was the only one who could adequately protect her.

That was where he was know she supposed, she hadn't seen him all day, she walked down the hallway leading to the class needing to understand their relationship, what made Mun-Yeong so special? If she started acting like a bitch would that get his attention? Was he attracted to her because they were such opposites, lost dissonances who found their way to each other?

Her thoughts stalled at the scene before her, the hospital would need to be routinely sanitized.

Gang-Tae towered over Mun-Yeong, hands firm on her waist as she giggled and attempted to pull away, "What are you doing? You said we weren't allowed to do this here anymore. Why don't you have to follow the rules you create?" She eyed him coyly, twisting out of his hold, only for him to easily drag her back, slamming her into the wall. His hand cushioned her head.

"I told you not to wear this to work, you're supposed to teach them, not seduce them." He retorted sternly, eyeing her ensemble, Ju-Ri agree her outfit was completely inappropriate for work. She donned, a emerald pleated skirt that barely reached her thighs, soft diaphanous white blouse with a bow tied at the neck, white laced boots and frilly socks.

"I think I look cute, like a blushing school girl. I thought you would like it." She answered from under her thick, wispy eyelashes. Her soft pink lips, opening in wonder. The picture of innocence.

He growled and leaned into her space, "I like it too much, that's exactly why you shouldn't wear it. I might lose control." He fingered, the pleats, tugging the skirt down as if to lengthen it.

She nodded her head, smacking his hands off her skirt with a tsk. Before lifting up onto her tiptoes, blowing warm air gently on his face, causing his eyes to flutter close, "Good."

Then she walked sashayed away, skirt swishing with each swing and dip of her hip. One final coy look over her shoulder, blowing a kiss and then a cheeky raspberry. Pssssst.

He grasped the spot where she just was, watching her retreat with heated eyes, before finally letting out a frustrated, "Ko Mun-Yeong!" Before turning and entering the locker room with the reverberating slam of the door.

She didn't understand their relationship, didn't understand why Mun-Yeong deserved Gang-Tae and she didn't. Didn't understand how she made him lose control when nothing else could. Still didn’t see the appeal. But maybe it wasn't her place to understand. Maybe it was time to stop dreaming an impossible dream.

#itsokaynottobeokay #psycho but it's okay #its okay to not be okay fic #yall voted #here you go #I still don't like Ju-Ri #I really want to push her down stairs #But MY has grown so much #My girl counts to three now #She's a savage with a heart now #maybe the next fic

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rye-views · 3 years

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A Promised Land by Barack Obama. 8/10

I would recommend this book to my friends. I would reread this book.

There are certain things that Barack articulates that I’m thankful for. His over-optimism and feelings of eccentricity. I completely related to its isolating feelings even though it wasn’t the same situation and experience as mine. It’s nice to see something similar from someone different. I also liked his description of feeling everything in its entirety and how it was like a movie splice. I have felt this many times and it’s a beautiful way to describe it. I like how so much of what Barack says, thinks, and feels are so genuine and relatable. It's nice to see someone articulate and empathize this well, esp. from a man and a man in power.

I love learning that Michelle was disappointed by the situation caused by his choices at times. Other things were more important at the time and nice to see it be relevant.

It’s interesting to see the difference between this book and “Becoming.” They have different aims, but it still shows me a difference between a man and woman. I also notice that when men are described, it’s always physical. When it’s women, it’s more character and personality.

Crazy how intelligent and emotionally aware Barack is. When he stated how he couldn't just pick and choose the good things of Reverend Wright's church, I was like true and wow.

The things that Toot taught Barack is what someone should've taught me as I grew up.

Barack comparing the rides to Noah's Ark is amusing.

When he mentions translations of what the Big 4 are saying, I think about how we can't be straightforward in politics. Why not?

It took me forever to read this because I really wanted to absorb the knowledge. There's a lot of events that are covered and things I had no idea about. I love how this catalogues so much of history that were relevant to my lifetime.

Memorable Quotes: “gives even my roughest drafts too smooth a gloss and lends half-baked thoughts the mask of tidiness” “I needed to focus on only those things to come.” “Much of what I read I only dimly understood” “a bond between those who had once seemed far apart.” “Whatever it was, I knew I wasn’t ready.” “An America that could explain me.” “I suffered rejections and insults often enough to stop fearing them.” “Enthusiasm makes up for a host of deficiencies.” “Failure and want were all around you.” “It should have been enough.” “but my mother was never one to see hard work as anything but good.” “On top of my sorrow, I felt a great shame.” “There’s a physical feeling, a current of emotion that passes back and forth between you and the crowd, as if your lives and theirs are suddenly spliced together, like a movie reel, projecting backward and forward in time, and your voice creeps right up to the edge of cracking, because for an instant, you feel them deeply; you can see them whole. You’ve tapped into some collective spirit, a thing we all know and wish for – a sense of connection that overrides our differences and replaces them with a giant swell of possibility – and like all things that matter most, you know the moment is fleeting and that soon the spell will be broken.” “To be a workhorse not a show horse – that was my goal.” “I had become a mere conduit through which people might recognize the value of their own stories, their own worth, and share them with one another.” "Yes we can." “the personal really was political” “I had to listen to, and not just theorize about, what mattered to people.” “it wasn’t so much what he did as how he made you feel. Like anything was possible. Like the world was yours to remake.” “It’s hard, in retrospect, to understand why you did something stupid.” “In fact, you shouldn’t even count on my vote.” “What do you consider your place in history?” “I could take a punch. And I didn’t give up.” “I knew I could afford to be patient.” “but the only way for Daddy to disguise himself is if he has an operation to pin back his ears.” “Forgotten people and forgotten voices remained everywhere.” “the more troops would become targets of an enemy they often could not see and did not understand.” “The power to inspire is rare. Moments like this are rare. You think you may not be ready, that you’ll do it at more convenient time. But you don’t choose the time. The time chooses you.” “people were moved by emotion, not facts.” “Beneath the low-key person and deep convictions, he just plain liked the combat.” "defined not by what they are but what they can never be." "To the relief of his keepers, the bear became accustomed to captivity." "he understood better than most the complications of race, religion, and family, and how good and bad, love and hate, might be hopelessly tangled in the same heart" "She was one of those quiet heroes that we have all across America." "But I worry that my memories of that night, like so much else that's happened these past twelve years, are shaded by the images that I've seen, the footage of our family walking across the stage, the photographs of the crowds and lights and magnificent backdrops." "a keeper of values we'd once thought ordinary but had learned were more rare than we had ever imagined." ""It's going to be hard to get the public excited about food stamps and repaving roads," Axe said. "Not real sexy."" "This time I said nothing, admiring his occasional, almost endearing ability to state the obvious." "You must be under the mistaken impression that I care." "all of them unified only in their common desire to be somewhere else." "ready to die for eternal joy--or maybe just a taste of something better." "But make no mistake, it was weird." "the unspoken regrets." "my supporters lacked all conviction, while my opponents were full of passionate intensity." "Michelle was someone who started from the heart and not the head, from experience rather than abstractions." "I wanted to believe that the ability to connect was still there. My wife wasn't so sure." “The

audacity of hope.” "Sometimes your most important work involved the stuff nobody noticed." "forgotten under the accumulation of the new joys and paints that make up a life." "you learn to improvise to meet your objectives--or at least to cut your losses." "They would take for granted that their aunt was on the U.S. Supreme Court, shaping the life of a nation--as would kids across the country. Which was fine. That's what progress was like." "Did they miss the rhythms of ordinary life? Were they lonely? Did they sometimes feel a jolt in their heart and wonder how it was that they had ended up where they were?" "I reminded myself that every president felt saddled with the previous administration's choices and mistakes, that 90 percent of the job was navigating inherited problems and unanticipated crises. Only if you did that well enough, with discipline and purpose, did you get a real shot at shaping the future." "Was it possible that abstract principles and high-minded ideals were and always would be nothing more than a pretense, a palliative, a way to beat back despair, but no match for the more primal urges that really moved us, so that no matter what we said or did, history was sure to run along its predetermined course, an endless cycle of fear, hunger and conflict, dominance and weakness?" "meant to be a reminder--in a place premised on hate and intolerance--of the common humanity we share." "A man making up for things." "For war was contradiction, as was the history of America." "To be known. To be heard. To have one's unique identity recognized and seen as worthy. It was a universal human desire" "pleasures that cost nothing, belonged to no one, and were accessible to all." "I suppose, when the world slows down, your strivings get pushed to the back of your mind." "whether in my seeming calm as crises piled up, my insistence that everything would work out in the end, I was really just protecting my self--and contributing to her loneliness." "It was a lonely thought at a lonely time." "You never looked as smart as the ex-president did on the sidelines." "Get exposed to other people's truths, I thought, and attitudes change." "It wasn't often, I thought, that a true act of conscience is recognized that way." "their struggles and resentments troubling but remote." "are mere conduits for the deep, relentless currents of the times or whether we're at least partly the authors of what's to come." "contemplating the knife's edge between perceived success and potential catastrophe" "daily, unheralded acts of people who weren't seeking attention but simply knew what they were doing and did it with pride." "She makes me better as a person and better on the page."

#a promised land #promised land #barack obama #book #review #commentary #rye-views #8

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aconstellationofmemories · 4 years

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The Secrets We Keep: Prologue

Pairing: Laxus Dreyar & Mirajane Strauss (Miraxus) Rating: M for violence and language. Genre: Angst, mafia AU. Chapter Word Count: 1437. Link(s): AO3 Summary:

Laxus Revenge. It fuelled him through his depraved life. His entire being, dedicated to one single cause. For years, he acted patiently in the shadows, bidding his time to claim his prey. Now the time had finally arrived. Approach her, make her utterly in love with him, then shatter her – that was his plan. Until her hypnotising blue eyes drew him in, and he began to question his knowledge of her. Because those bittersweet depths were hiding something. And in his world, only two things were guaranteed. Either you kill your secrets, or they kill you. Mira Death, lies, manipulation. They lurked around every corner of her life, even flowed in the very blood coursing through her veins. Merely the mention of her last name was enough to cause eyes to widen and people to scurry. Naïve, pretentious, entitled. Those were just some of the names people called her for choosing to be different. But life was short. And in the dangerous world she lived in, everyone was a player racing to oust the other before the opponent terminated their life. Her own game had just commenced. Only this time, she wasn’t sure she could outwit them. Not anymore. Tick tock.

Author's Notes: The newly-crowned Queen of Foreshadowing is back! I bring with me my favourite ever FT ship after a long spell in my first ever ambitious multi-chapter fanfic! I'm also excited for this one as it revolves around a couple favourite themes of mine: angst, mafia and revenge. I binge romance novels on the second, but never actually wrote it. Please look kindly upon me in my first attempt at this project. (Or like signing for my death, currently being piled with exams and all that.)

Also that summary?? The best I've ever written.

As always, I appreciate every like and review!

Thank you @be-dazzled for nudging me to pursue this and @sweetmemories2606 for supporting me every step of the way. 💛

Tagging @sassyglassesbunny @adramaticbeauty - my original Miraxus gang. 😏

Slow but steady update. Spoilers will be released on the Miraxus Discord Server (find link on my tumblr profile) when available. Otherwise, feel free to message me!

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Laxus

Fake.

The adjective sneered from the forefront of his mind as he watched the models strutting down the white platform. Heavy makeup accentuated the elegant features of the slender women of all colours, making their cheekbones more defined and their eyes sharper than their original form. Eyeshadows of glittery monochrome shades further decorated their eyes to match their black and white designer clothes.

A smug, seductive look adorned their otherwise beautiful face, tugging an end of their luscious lips upward in a smirk. With their chins held high, they strode down the runaway, every single movement of their limbs expertly coordinated for nothing less than the best catwalk.

Anyone with a functioning pair of eyes could see that those women were gorgeous. His own roamed over the alternating models with slight interest, toying with the idea of tangling limbs with one of them in bed.

The thought didn’t last long.

That beauty of theirs which sent men to their knees and the women to turn green with envy? Most of it were carefully altered with the help of a needle or a knife in their futile quest for an image of perfection.

An image which had never existed anywhere in the universe except in the recesses of their insecurities.

In other words: fake.

Add in the charming attitude of a heaven-sent goddess who was too lofty for mere mortals, and any spark of lust his body felt toward them fizzled out.

Soft cheers erupted from the audience at the entrance of the next model, pulling him from his thoughts. His gaze travelled up the length of the woman’s black gown, appreciating how the sleeveless garment hugged her body and highlighted her curves. A strip of white cloth ran up her left side before its unblemished trail stopped below her armpit. Light blonde tendrils stood out against the black material at her torso, and led him up to the only medically untouched face in the line-up.

With delicate eyebrows of a darker shade of blonde, sparkling cerulean eyes and a button nose, her looks easily exceeded that of her colleagues. And those luscious, scarlet-covered lips...all they had to do was utter a word, and any men would bend a knee and do her bidding.

Mirajane Strauss.

Niece of the notorious Roman Strauss. Next in line to the throne with his only son, Marcus.

The beauty she radiated was unrivalled. Along with her good looks, the charisma she carried set a standard the other women could only aspire to possess.

She was a sight to behold.

But just like all things good and beautiful, inevitably, they wither and die.

Her attractive appearance, too, hid secrets – hers more twisted than her fellow co-workers. He found it unfortunate that underneath that stunning façade, ran the dark and dirty blood of the Strauss family.

Specifically, that of her father’s and her uncle.

Giovanni Strauss, her father, was infamous for being a merciless boss with more than a few screws loose and a twisted obsession with prostitutes. He didn’t hold any personal grudge towards her father; the tyrant was just another in a long list of evil and perverted bosses, his own father among them.

Though he would be lying if he said he didn’t feel some satisfaction to have stolen the last breath from the great Giovanni... His demise, after all, did propel the women one step closer to freedom.

But her uncle, Roman... He clenched his fists at the thought of the middle-aged man. Roman assumed the position as the boss of the Strauss family after his brother’s death and severed their ties with prostitution. Very little goodness existed in this world of theirs – if it even existed anymore at all – but Laxus personally preferred to keep innocent women out of it. Her uncle’s decision was unconventional, to say the least, and he could almost respect him for it.

Except.

Roman Strauss killed his mother.

The only good thing in his life – gone.

The bastard could die a thousand deaths and it still wouldn’t be enough to placate the monster inside who craved revenge.

Because he could torture him until he wished he was dead, kill him in the most gruesome way possible, and one thing would never change.

His mother would never return to him.

Mirajane might had been born innocent – at least, until life forced her hand in a world she never asked to be a part of. But by being a bloodline of Giovanni and Roman Strauss, she was cursed to a life burdened with the sins and debts of her predecessors. The good princess act she played was merely a means to disguise the impurities hiding below the surface.

A demon wearing the clothes of an angel – that was what she was.

She strode with her head held high, but balanced down with enough humility to glance at the audience in a friendly yet alluring manner. When she reached the end of the stage, the corners of her lips lifted up in a rehearsed small smile which somehow managed to appear sincere. Immediately, the dimly-lit attendees reacted to the visual – the men with smitten looks on their faces, the women a varied display of envy, adoration, and awe.

One could easily see why she was crowned the title ‘The Princess of Hearts’ by the media.

She pivoted on her heels, returning to the entrance, and he sucked in a breath when his gaze landed below her hips. Her smooth, creamy leg peaked out at him from the slit of her gown. The fleeting sight of her flesh involuntarily stirred up desires he despised to have for her.

Fucking hell.

In a rebellious act which broke traditional modelling, she glanced back as she walked and smirked. Flashes of light fired in rapid succession, each competing with the other for the best shot of the expression.

Oh yeah, the little demon definitely knew what she was doing. Not only that, she enjoyed every second of it.

He didn’t need to look at their camera’s memory card to know there had been over ten photos taken in those few seconds before she disappeared backstage. Neither did he need to possess supernatural powers to predict that she would grace the front covers of almost every – if not all – of the fashion magazines tomorrow.

The models gathered in a horizontal line at the entrance with the acclaimed fashion designer in the centre once the show was over. Grinning widely, he spoke into the microphone.

“I’d like to thank everyone who kindly graced my humble exhibition with your presence. The theme of this fashion show is ‘Darkness and Light’. People are of the opinion that these two can never exist together – one which I strongly disagree. By incorporating monochrome colours in my clothes, I hope people are able to see that they can co-exist without one extinguishing the beauty of the other.” He winked. “Because we all have a little darkness and light inside us, do we not?”

Thunderous rounds of applause rose from the audience at the end of his speech. His gaze swung from the ecstatic designer back to Mirajane, who seemed to be happy to be standing at the corner of the line.

His eyebrow quirked up. Odd. For someone of her status, he had expected her to dominate the centre.

She beamed a bright smile and waved to someone in the front row – a few people, actually. Roman returned her grin with a fatherly smile as he clapped his meaty hands along with the other attendees. His eyes instinctively sharpened at the sight of his mother’s murderer. Beside him, Marcus smiled proudly while applauding the success of the event.

Many would kill to be the receiving end of that brilliant and genuine smile of hers. Its effects were so widespread that it not only lit up her face, but the entire being of the receiver.

But he wasn’t a man in search for salvation.

He was the man people sought to be salvaged from.

Nobody saw his face knowing his identity unless they were about to meet their end. Never in his long years as a made man did he fail to escort them there personally.

He would see to it himself that the same plea to be spared would fall from her lips.

Make her weep – that’s what he’d do.

After all, what better way to inflict revenge on Roman other than first breaking his beloved niece’s heart?

His lips tilted up in a smirk, his eyes gleaming with a predatory look.

Let the show begin.

#miraxus #laxus x mirajane #laxus dreyar #mirajane strauss #fairy tail #my fanfic #angst #au #multi-chapter #mafia #best summary I've written #so excited for this Miraxus Mafia AU multi-chapter fanfic!!#slow update tho #also has one of the best descriptions I've ever written #getting better at writing!

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scientificphilosopher · 4 years

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I’m still learning how to be an effective ally in the pursuit of social justice. Part of this, for me, comes through figuring out how to best support other allies, how to effectively engage with them, even when they’re not as well-versed in the issues as I’ve become through many years of education. I often ask myself this: How can I balance meeting people where they’re at while also holding people responsible for their ignorant and harmful actions and beliefs? Is there a place for compassion and patience toward well-meaning allies, even when they unintentionally harm others?

What I want to focus on for this blog post is the phenomenon of what I’m calling “anxious allyship” — what it is, how it manifests in certain spaces, and what I do to prevent myself from both being an anxious ally and driving others into anxious ally behaviors via things like gatekeeping.

Anxious allyship, in short, is the tendency for well-intentioned allies to shut down and fail to meaningfully engage with social justice work — be it online or in person — out of fear of saying something wrong or appearing ignorant or racist. Now, it’s important to keep in mind that there are MANY reasons why an ally might fail to show up. There are various elements at play that lead to white people’s fear of appearing ignorant or racist in the first place. For the sake of this blog, I want to focus on how this crops up in online spaces full of predominantly white, left-leaning allies and the tendency for these spaces to partake in gatekeeping (though much of what I’m talking about can extend beyond just conversations with allies — that is simply what I’m focusing on for now). By gatekeeping, I mean for members of these spaces to be overly hostile toward people who are presumably not as knowledgeable in the topic or who say problematic things. In some cases, this type of gatekeeping results in driving people out of the spaces or even harassing them. This type of gatekeeping can be seen as self-righteous bullying, both deliberate and unintentional. At its core, it’s shaming people for not knowing what you know and using that to drive people out of an online space. Again, this can be done with the best intentions. Sometimes gatekeeping occurs out of righteous indignation, to really show that problematic fool how wrong and ignorant their views truly are. More often than not, though, it’s done for the sake of showing off; it’s done to signal to others just how knowledgable and committed of an ally you truly are. To be clear, I am not speaking about justified criticism or the moderation of certain spaces in the service of keeping discussions civil. There are often good reasons to call people out; there are good reasons to react with anger or exasperation; there are good reasons to ban people from certain online forums or refuse to take the time and effort to have a fruitful discussion with them. Just because an ally has good intentions doesn’t mean they are immune to criticism. The road to hell is paved with good intentions, as William James said. No, what I’m talking about is white folks lording their knowledge over fledgling allies for reasons like sanctimony and virtue signaling.

Just to be clear as possible, I want to emphasize what I am not saying throughout this post. I am not saying that there is no room for anger (there is). I am not saying that I shouldn’t call people out — allies or otherwise — for their harmful ignorance (I should). I am not saying that patience and effectiveness should always be the primary focus when engaging with allies. I am not saying that there is a singular way of doing any of this. The last thing I am interested in is tone policing. I am, instead, advocating for a pluralistic approach, and that means leaving space for people to be angry, enraged, unresponsive, disengaged, or any other manner of reaction. It is not my place to say that one should not react in anger or ridicule to a well-intentioned but harmful comment simply because it might not be the most effective way to engage with that person, to get them to understand or change their mind. Express your anger if you're angry. Be angry. There is a whole helluva lot to be angry about.

Instead, I am arguing that overprivileged people such as myself should, perhaps, harbor some sense of responsibility in thinking about how to respond in ways that are more inviting to allies based on where they’re at in their educational journey, especially since it has increased potential for maximizing effectiveness and minimizing anxious ally behaviors. I am coming at these issues from a very different place than a lot of marginalized folks. It does not require as much emotional labor for me — an overprivileged white male — to discuss race with people as it might for many people of color. As Audre Lorde — a queer black woman — put it, “Frequently, when speaking with men and white women, I am reminded of how difficult and time-consuming it is to have to reinvent the pencil every time you want to send a message.” White men should, I think, be more willing to sometimes take on the time and effort to reinvent that pencil, especially since other white men are more willing to see us as “objective” and authoritative merely by merit of our maleness and whiteness. In a clear case of cosmic irony, white men will listen to other white men, even in regard to realities like racism, about which we tend to be utterly inexperienced and grievously ignorant. And to further the injustice of that irony, those very white men are the ones who are more likely to harbor power and social capital, thus the ones who can leverage our platforms in ways to most swiftly bring about systemic change. That is why I think those of us in privileged positions have a moral responsibility to learn to engage effectively on these issues.

Still, I’ve certainly found myself attacking people on social media, sometimes looking for that mic drop moment, and in hindsight, I realize I was doing it simply out of self-righteousness or to look smart to my virtual onlookers. If I had taken time to step back and evaluate what was motivating me to say what I was saying, I would’ve recognized that unproductive performative allyship showing its face. I don’t want to lend my energies to creating spaces that are needlessly hostile to people, including other allies. Spaces that are highly judgmental of their participants will engender performative behaviors precisely because people become anxious that they will mess up and get shamed for it. Not a feedback loop I want to amplify.

So, what can I do? Well, I don’t know, exactly. Probably a lot of things. One thing I try to do when interacting with other people who might be in the early stages of exploring their privilege or learning about race, gender, oppression, etc., is that I remind myself of my own journey. As an exercise in perspective and compassion, I reflect on the fact that education is largely a privilege. I have been absurdly lucky to learn the things I’ve learned, to have the resources and support in my life, the patient and empathic teachers. I remind myself of all these privileges, privileges that are not present for many people. Next, I meditate on the many ignorant, problematic beliefs and behaviors of my younger self. I was still me, just a version of me who was oblivious to the fact that a world existed outside the scope of my perspective. I harbored deeply racist, sexist, homophobic, and self-serving beliefs — because I was raised in a deeply racist, sexist, homophobic, self-serving culture. We all are. And I still grapple with these things today, and I imagine I always will. Of course, it is emblematic of privilege that some of us learn about oppression in more academic, impersonal ways, rather than having to confront its realities on a day to day basis. For overprivileged folks such as myself (and, really everyone to some extent), learning about the experiences of marginalized identities is an ongoing journey. None of us comes fully equipped. I remind myself of these things in order to temper my criticism with kindness and compassion. It is an exercise in humility and empathy.

I’ve also alluded to “effectiveness” throughout this post. How can I most effectively engage with other allies? Exercises in compassion and humility are good for me for a variety of reasons. They are humanizing. They are perspective-giving. They are, also, practical. I care deeply about social justice and I want to do what I can to keep privileged eyes and hearts on progressive change. One strategy that I find particularly effective is to meet people where they’re at, ask questions, and engage with them as if they were sitting in the room next to me. I try to remember that this computer screen acts as a veil of anonymity, which gives me a felt sense of licensing in treating people more coldly or harshly than I otherwise would.

So, in discussions with fellow allies, I try to exercise compassion and humility, while still keeping an eye on effectiveness. But this post isn’t solely about what I personally do to prevent others from becoming anxious allies. It’s also about how I try to recognize and combat the anxious ally in myself. Personally, I try to steel myself against some of these more toxic tendencies by practicing these things:

Being Okay With Mistakes. In fact, I have to work to get to a place where I embrace my mistakes. I have to be ok with being dumb and ignorant much of the time. I have to embrace the fact that I will mess up plenty. I have a wrinkly monkey brain and I know somewhere in the vicinity of none percent about the world. I am human, I am fallible, I am ignorant, and my understanding of reality is inherently limited by insulating and unequal social systems. One of the most insidious symptoms of privilege is how its benefits tend to be concealed from those who reap them. White people don’t need to think about racism; men don’t need to think about sexism; able-bodied people don’t need to think about accessibility, etc. This is all expected and understandable; it’s how we respond when our privilege is challenged that matters.

Staying Open and Receptive to Criticism. Ok, so making mistakes is inevitable. What do I do once I realize I’ve made one? How am I responding? An unfortunate reality for marginalized identities is that they too often have to undertake the emotional labor of teaching privileged identities all about these issues. This is not fair. It shouldn’t be this way. This makes it all the more meaningful when I get called out for saying something offensive, ignorant, racist, sexist, or bigoted. My initial response might be embarrassment or shame, and I might take refuge in my intentions: “That’s not how I meant it!” But this is defensiveness. This is symptomatic of what Robin DiAngelo calls “white fragility.” More to the point, it’s a bad interpersonal habit. As Cori Wong points out in her TEDtalk on feminist friendship, you would not react with hostility if a friend lets you know you had a big ol’ booger hanging out your nose in public. You might be embarrassed at first, but you’d ultimately thank your friend for speaking up so that you could take care of it (by wiping it inside your shirt like every warm-blooded American would). The same goes for people pointing out my mistakes in regards to social justice. My ultimate response, regardless of my intentions or initial emotional reactions, should be to listen and to give thanks. I have, after all, been presented with an opportunity to learn more.

Engaging With the Literature. Okay, so I’m willing to make mistakes and I’m willing to listen when people say I’ve messed up (at least some of the time). Is that enough? No. There’s still plenty left to do — and I cannot simply count on the emotional labor of oppressed peoples to figure out what to do next. Thankfully, I have incredible resources at my fingertips. I have YouTube channels, I have article after article after article, Instagram feeds, Facebook pages, books, books, books. There’s so much to learn and it can feel overwhelming to get started, but it’s never too late. There’s no better time than now. (I will also be making a blog post that provides a more extensive list of resources.)

What we have now, as mentioned by activist Maya Rupert, is a climate where the only people who are readily talking about race are those who know the least (vis-à-vis Dunning-Kruger effect) and those who engage with it regularly or professionally. The center has collapsed, with too many well-meaning white people sitting in anxious silence, thus reinforcing the very status quo they’re concerned with challenging. This is not an atmosphere conducive to collaboration, democratic and egalitarian participation, and effective mobilization. As an ally, I hope to do what little I can to correct this. I want to encourage other allies to take the leap of getting engaged. Advocating for spaces that are less hostile to newcomers is only a tiny piece of the puzzle, of course. But I think it’s a good step toward combating white fragility, white inaction, and anxious allyship — though white folks must recognize that it is our ultimate responsibility to undertake this.

In short, I want to be mindful of my impact, whether I’m criticizing people for virtue signaling and engaging in counterproductive ways, or I’m the person being accused of that very thing. I strive to foster allyship environments that are more welcoming and more willing to meet people where they’re at, while also fostering a willingness on my end to make mistakes while remaining open to feedback and staying committed to learning and changing. That’s just me though. In the end, a pluralistic approach to effective social engagement is likely what’s needed. It’s not realistic or productive to prescribe a one-size-fits-all approach to such dynamic and prismatic realities. On top of that, it’s clear that what I’ve talked about so far is just the beginning. A single angry Facebook post does not an activist make. Activism is more than simply learning about a topic; it’s getting involved in ways that lead to direct social and political shifts. It’s taking concrete steps. This requires more than reading a book or posting a hashtag (though these are not necessarily meaningless steps either). Remember: this is just the beginning.

Are you an ally of these movements? Are you nervous about engaging with folks, looking stupid or making mistakes? All understandable. The key? Make mistakes! Look stupid! Wade into the muck of it. Get messy. But just be sure to LISTEN and LEARN while doing so. Put down those defenses. Own your ignorance. Don’t center discussions on your own emotional well-being, but don’t render yourself paralyzed to the point of doing nothing either. Engage. Speak up, speak out. Explore ways to be an effective activist. Understand that social justice work is ongoing. You do not arrive into a state of enlightenment. You have to keep fucking up and keep learning. The reward? A better planet. Keep up the momentum, you messy, ignorant ally, you.

#long post #blog #the scientific philosopher #antiracism #anticapitalism #social justice #nich

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chiseler · 4 years

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Stolen Faces

Cinema is an art of faces, almost a religion of faces: on screen they loom above us, vast as a mother’s face must appear to an infant. We can get lost in them. The deepest thrill the movies offer may be the opportunity to gaze at human faces longer and with more unabashed, lover-like intimacy than real life regularly allows. Most often, of course, we gaze at beautiful faces, though cinema has its share of beloved gargoyles, mugs with “character” rather than symmetry. But the uncanny power of faces onscreen also anchors films about disfigurement and facial transformations, about masks and scars and plastic surgery. These stories summon all the fears and taboos, desires and unresolved questions swirling around the human face. Do faces reveal or conceal a person’s true nature? Can changing someone’s face change their soul?

Deformity is a staple of horror films, of course, from classics such as Phantom of the Opera and The Raven (in which the hideously afflicted man played by Boris Karloff muses, “Maybe if a man looks ugly, he does ugly things”) to surgical shockers such as Eyes Without a Face. But plot twists involving faces that are damaged or corrected, masked or changed, turn up with surprising frequency in film noir as well, where they are related to themes of identity theft, amnesia, desperate attempts to shed the past or recover the past. One of the grim proverbs of noir is that you can’t escape yourself. There are no fresh starts, no second chances. But noir also demonstrates the instability of identity, the way character can be corrupted, and stories about facial transformations harbor a nebulous fear that there is in the end no fixed self. If noir is pessimistic about the possibility of change, it is at the same time haunted by fear of change—fear of looking in the mirror and seeing a stranger.

The Truth of Masks

Two films about men who literally lose their faces take the full measure of the resulting ostracism and crushing isolation—and what men will do to escape it. Hiroshi Teshigahara’s The Face of Another (Tanin no Kao, 1966) is based on a Kobo Abe novel about a scientist named Okuyama who has been literally defaced by a chemical accident. We never see what he used to look like; he spends half the film swaddled in bandages like Claude Rains in The Invisible Man, ferocious black eyes glinting through slits. Obsessed with people’s reactions to his appearance, he lashes out bitterly, insisting that all his social ties have been severed, including his conjugal ties with his wife. She tries to convince him that it’s all in his head and that her feelings haven’t changed, but her revulsion when he makes an abrupt sexual advance convinces him that she’s lying.

Okuyama believes that a life-like mask will restore his relationship with his wife and his connection to society. He has evidently not seen The Face Behind the Mask (1941), a terrific B noir in which Peter Lorre stars as Johnny Szabo, who is hideously scarred in a fire. This tragedy and the ensuing cruelty of strangers transform him from a sweet, Chaplin-esque immigrant to a bitter criminal mastermind, even after he dons a powder-white mask that gives him a sad, creepy ghost of his former face—more Lorre than Lorre. The mask is merely a flimsy patch on the horrible visage that spiritually scars Johnny, and though it enables him to marry a sweet and loving (and perhaps near-sighted) woman, it can’t reverse the corrosion of his character.

The doctor who makes a far more sophisticated mask for Okuyama does so because the project fascinates him as a psychological and philosophical experiment. He speculates about what the world would be like if everyone wore a mask: morality would not exist, he argues, since people would feel no responsibility for the actions of their alternate identities. (His theory seems to be borne out by the consequences of internet anonymity.) Unlike the one Johnny Szabo wears, here the mask bears no resemblance to Okuyama’s original looks, and the doctor believes the new face will change his patient’s personality, turning him into someone else.

When the mask is fitted, it turns out to be the face of Tatsuya Nakadai, one of the most striking and plastic pans in cinema history. With only a little help from a fake mole, dark glasses, and a bizarre fringe of beard, Nakadai succeeds in making his own features look eerily synthetic, as though they don’t belong to him. Sitting in a crowded beer hall on his first masked outing in public, he creates a palpable sense of unease, keeping his features unnaturally still as though unsure of their mobility, touching his skin gingerly to explore its alien surface. As he gradually grows more comfortable and revels in the freedom of his new face, the doctor tells him, “It’s not the beer that’s made you drunk, it’s the mask.”

Abe’s novel contains a scene in which the protagonist goes to an exhibit of Noh masks, highly stylized crystallizations of stock characters and emotions. In Noh, as in other traditional forms of theater that use masks, the actor is present on stage but vanishes into another physical being—men play women, young men play old men, gods, and ghosts. In cinema, actors impersonate other characters using their own faces—usually without even the heavy layer of makeup worn on western stages. Movie actors are pretending to be people they’re not, yet if we judge their performances good it means we believe what we see in their faces. When an actor’s real face plays the part of a mask, like Lorre’s or Nakadai’s, this strange inversion—the real impersonating the artificial—has a uniquely disconcerting effect.

At the heart of this disturbing film lurks a horror that changing the skin can indeed change the soul. Okuyama tries to hold onto his identity, insisting, “I am who I am, I can’t change,” but the doctor insists he is “a new man,” with “no records, no past.” In covering his scar tissue with a smooth, artificial skin he eradicates his own experience, and with it his humanity. The doctor turns out to be right when he predicts that the mask will have a mind of its own. Suddenly endowed with sleek good looks, Okuyama buys flashy suits and sets out to seduce his own wife. When he succeeds easily, he is outraged, only to have her reveal that she knew who he was all along. After she leaves him in disgust he descends into madness and random violence. He has become the opposite of the Invisible Man: a visible shell with nothing inside

Okuyama’s story is interwoven with a subplot about a radiation-scarred girl from Nagasaki, whose social isolation drives her to incest and suicide. Lovely from one side, repellent from the other, she looks very much like the protagonist of A Woman’s Face. Ingrid Bergman starred in the Swedish original, but Joan Crawford is ideally cast in the 1941 Hollywood remake directed by George Cukor. Half beautiful and half grotesque, half hard-boiled and half vulnerable, Anna Holm spells out what was usually inchoate in Crawford’s paradoxical presence. A childhood fire has left her with a gnarled scar on one side of her face, like a black diseased root growing across her cheek and distorting her eye and mouth. Crawford makes us feel Anna’s agonizing humiliation when people look at her, which spurs her compulsive mannerisms of turning her head aside, lifting her hand to her cheek, or pulling her hair down.

Also perfectly cast is Conrad Veidt as the elegant, sinister Torsten Baring. Veidt went from German Expressionist horror—playing the goth heartthrob Cesar in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and the grotesquely disfigured yet weirdly alluring hero of The Man Who Laughs—to an unexpected late-career run as a sexy leading man in cloak-and-dagger films such as The Spy in Black and Contraband. When Anna turns her head defiantly to reveal her scar, Torsten gazes at her with a gleam of excitement, even of perverse attraction. She is confused and touched by his kindness and gallantry, helplessly trying to hide her sensitivity beneath a tough façade. Her broken-up, uncertain expressions when he gives her flowers or kisses her hand count as some of the most delicate acting Crawford ever did. Anna assumes that Torsten, the penniless scion of a rich family, must want her to do some dirty work, and she turns out to be right, but he also genuinely appreciates the proud, bitter, lonely woman who faces down her miserable lot through sheer strength of will.

People are horrible to Anna, nastily mocking her wounded vanity and her attempts to look nice. “The world was against me,” she says, “All right, I’d be against it.” She has found the perfect outlet, blackmailing pretty women who commit adultery. In one of the film’s best scenes, the spoiled and kittenish wife she is threatening retaliates by shining a lamp in Anna’s face and laughing at her. Anna leaps at the woman and starts hitting her over and over, forehand and backhand, in an ecstasy of hatred. This savagely satisfying moment is derailed by the film’s first grossly contrived plot twist, as the encounter is interrupted by the woman’s husband, who happens to be a plastic surgeon specializing in correcting facial scars. He offers to operate on Anna, and once the bandages are removed, in a scene orchestrated for maximum suspense, an absurdly flawless face is revealed.

The doctor (Melvyn Douglas) calls her both his Galatea and his Frankenstein: he views her as his creation, but isn’t sure if she’s an ideal woman or an unholy monster, “a beautiful face with no heart.” Her dilemma is ultimately which man to please, whose approval to seek: the doctor who believes her character should be corrected now that her face is, or Torsten, who wants her to kill the young nephew who stands between him and the family estate. This overwrought turn is never plausible; it is always obvious that Anna is no child murderer. What is believable is her erotic thrall to Torsten, the first man who has ever shown an interest in her. Crawford is at her most unguarded in these moments of trembling desire; Cukor remarked on how “the nearer the camera, the more tender and yielding she became.” He speculated that the camera was her true lover.

Anna undergoes months of pain and uncertainty for the chance of being beautiful for Torsten, and there is a marvelous shot of her gazing at herself in a mirror as she prepares to surprise him with her new face, brimming with hard proud joy. But he winds up lamenting the surgery that has turned her into “a mere woman, soft and warm and full of love,” he sneers. “I thought you were something different—strong, exciting, not dull, mediocre, safe.” In this same speech, Torsten reveals himself as a cartoonish fascist megalomaniac, which fits in with the film’s slide into silly, flimsily scripted melodrama, but sadly obscures the radical spark of what he’s saying. Anna’s character is shaped by the way she looks, or rather by the way she is looked at by men; the disappointingly conventional ending sides with the man who equates flawless beauty with moral goodness, and against the one man who was able to see something fine—a “hard, shining brightness,” in a woman’s damaged and imperfect face.

A Stolen Face (1952) follows a similar premise, much less effectively, and reaches the opposite conclusion. Paul Henreid plays a plastic surgeon who operates on female criminals with disfiguring scars, convinced that once they look normal they will become contented law-abiding citizens. He gets carried away, however, sculpting one patient into a dead ringer for his lost love (Lizabeth Scott plays both the original and the copy) and marrying her. His attempt to play Pygmalion backfires, since the vulgar, mean-spirited and untrustworthy ex-con is unchanged by her new appearance: she is indeed “a beautiful face without a heart.” That is a succinct definition of the femme fatale, a type Lizabeth Scott often played and one that embodies a fascination with the deceptiveness of feminine beauty. In The Big Heat (1953), it is only when Debbie (Glora Grahame) has her pretty face rearranged by a pot of scalding coffee that she abandons her cynical self-interest to become an avenging angel, fearlessly punishing the corrupt who hide their greed behind a genteel façade. She has nothing left to lose; pulling a gun from her mink coat and plugging the woman she recognizes as her evil “sister,” the disfigured Debbie asserts her freedom: “I never felt better in my life.”

Blessings in Disguise

Sometimes, people are only too happy to lose their faces. Dr. Richard Talbot (Kent Smith), the protagonist of the superb, underappreciated drama Nora Prentiss (1947), sees the bright side when his face is horribly burned in a car crash. He has already faked his own death, sending another man’s corpse over a cliff in a burning car. In a neat bit of poetic irony, by crashing his own car he has completed the process of destroying his identity, and no longer needs to fear he’ll be recognized. Losing his face is a blessing in disguise—or rather, a blessing of disguise. But the disfigurement is also a visual representation of the corruption of his character: his face changes to reflect his downward metamorphosis with almost Dorian Gray-like precision.

Car crashes are a kind of refrain in the film. The doctor’s routine existence veers off course when a taxi knocks down a nightclub singer, Nora Prentiss (Anne Sheridan), across the street from his San Francisco office. Talk about a happy accident: the nice guy trapped in an ice-cold marriage to a rigid, nagging martinet suddenly has a gorgeous, good-humored young woman stretched out on his examining table. Nora may sing for a living, but her real vocation is dishing out wisecracks (her first words on coming to are, “There must be an easier way to get a taxi.”) When the doctor mentions a paper he’s writing on “ailments of the heart,” the canary, her eyelids dropping under the weight of knowingness, quips, “A paper? I could write a book.”

It’s hard to imagine a more sympathetic pair of adulterers, but the doctor is so daunted by the prospect of asking his wife for a divorce that it seems simpler to use the convenient death of a patient in his office to stage his own demise and flee to New York with Nora. It’s soon clear, though, that some part of him did die in San Francisco. Cooped up in a New York hotel room, terrified of going out lest someone spot him, the formerly gentle man becomes an irascible, rude, nervous wreck. When the faithful and incredibly patient Nora goes back to singing for Phil Dinardo (Robert Alda), the handsome nightclub owner who loves her, Talbot becomes hysterically jealous. Unshaven and hollow-eyed, he slaps Nora and almost kills Dinardo before fleeing the police and heading into that fiery crash. He becomes, as the film’s evocative French title has it, L’Amant sans Visage, “the lover without a face.”

When his bandages are removed, he is unrecognizable, wizened and scarred, his face a creased and calloused mask. His own wife doesn’t know him, and when Nora visits him in prison his damaged face, shot through a tight wire mesh, looks like something decaying, dissolving. He’s in prison because, in an even neater bit of irony, he has been charged with his own murder. He decides to take the rap, recognizing the justice of the mistake: he did kill Richard Talbot.

This same ironic plot twist appears in Strange Impersonation (1946), albeit less convincingly. This deliriously far-fetched tale, directed at a breakneck pace by Anthony Mann, stars Brenda Marshall as Nora Goodrich, a pretty scientist whose glasses signal that she is both brainy and emotionally myopic. She is harshly punished for caring more about work than marriage: her female lab assistant, who wants to steal Nora’s fiancé, tampers with an experiment so that it explodes, burning Nora’s face to a crisp. Embittered, she retreats from the world, and when another woman, who is trying to blackmail her over a car accident, falls from the window and is mistakenly identified as Nora, she seizes the opportunity to disappear, have plastic surgery that miraculously eliminates her scars, and return posing as the blackmailer, to seek revenge. She goes to work for her former fiancé, who strangely fails to recognize her voice or her striking resemblance to his lost love.

The plot plays out as, and turns out to be, a fever dream, but this last credibility stretcher is too common to dismiss as merely the flaw of one potboiler. Plots involving impersonation and identity theft rely not only on unrealistic visions of what plastic surgery can achieve, but on the assumption that people are deeply unobservant and tone-deaf in recognizing loved ones. A film that underlines this blindness with droll irony is The Scar (a.k.a. Hollow Triumph and The Man Who Murdered Himself, 1948), a convoluted but hugely entertaining little B noir in which Paul Henreid plays dual roles as a crook on the run and a psychologist who happens to look just like him. John Muller, pursued by hit men sent by a casino owner he robbed, stumbles across his doppelganger and decides to kill him and take his place. All he needs to do is give himself a facial scar to match the doctor’s. Only as he is dumping the body does he notice that he has put the scar on the wrong cheek—the consequence of an accidentally reversed photograph. But the irony quickly doubles back: Muller decides to brazen it out, and in fact no one notices that the doctor’s scar has apparently moved from one side of his face to the other—not even his lover. (Joan Bennett glides through this awkward part in a world-weary trance, giving a dry-martini reading to the script’s most famous lines: “It’s a bitter little world, full of sad surprises.”) The assumption that people pay little attention to the way others look or sound seems directly at odds with the power that faces and voices wield on film, and the intimate specificity with which we experience them. But noir stories often turn on how easily people are deceived, and how poorly they really know one another—or even themselves.

In The Long Wait (1954), perhaps the most extreme case of confused identity, a man with amnesia searches for a woman who has had plastic surgery. Not only does he not know what she looks like now, he can’t even remember what she used to look like. Since the movie is based on a Mickey Spillane story, he proceeds methodically by grabbing every woman he sees, in hopes that something will jog his memory. The film is fun in its pulpy, trashy way, provided you enjoy watching Anthony Quinn kiss women as though his aim were to throttle the life out of them. Quinn plays a man badly injured in a car wreck that erases both his memory and his fingerprints. This is lucky when he wanders into his old town and discovers he is wanted for a bank robbery—without fingerprints, they can’t arrest him. Figuring he must be innocent, he goes in search of the girlfriend who may or may not have grabbed the money and gone under the knife. It’s an intriguing premise, but the ultimate revelation of the right woman feels arbitrary, and the implications of all this confusion of identities are left resolutely unexamined. Nonetheless, there is something in the film’s searing, inarticulate desperation that glints like a shattered mirror.

Under the Knife

The promise of plastic surgery is a new and better self, the erasure of years and the traces of life. Taken to extremes, it is the opportunity to become a different person. Probably the best known plastic surgery noir is Dark Passage (1947), in which Humphrey Bogart plays Vincent Parry, who visits a back alley doctor after escaping from San Quentin. Parry was framed for killing his wife, so the face plastered across newspapers with the label of murderer has become a false face that betrays him. A friendly cabby who spots him recommends a surgeon who is he promises is “no quack.” Houseley Stevenson’s gleeful turn as the back-alley doctor is unforgettable, as he sharpens a straight razor while philosophizing about how all human life is rooted in fear of pain and death. He can’t resist scaring Parry, chortling over what he could do to a patient he didn’t like: make him look like a bulldog, or a monkey. But he reassures Parry that he’ll make him look good: “I’ll make you look as if you’ve lived.”

During the operation, Parry’s drugged consciousness becomes a kaleidoscope of faces, all the people who have threatened or helped him swirling around. His face is being re-shaped, as his life has already been shaped by others: the bad woman who framed him and the good woman who rescues and protects him, the small-time crook who menaces him and the kind cabby who helps him. Faceless for much of the movie, mute for part of it (he spends a long time in constraining bandages), Vincent Parry is among the most passive and cipher-like of noir protagonists. When the bandages finally come off after surgery, he looks like Humphrey Bogart, and the idea that this famously beat-up, lived-in face could be the creation of plastic surgery is perhaps the film’s biggest joke. But Vincent Parry remains an oddly blank, undefined character, and he seems unchanged by his new face and name. In a sense the doctor is right: he only looks as though he’s lived.

The fullest cinematic exploration of the problems inherent in trying to make a new life through plastic surgery is Seconds (1966), John Frankenheimer’s flesh-creeping sci-fi drama about a mysterious company that offers clients second lives. For a substantial fee, they will fake your death, make you over completely—including new fingerprints, teeth, and vocal cords—and create an entirely new identity for you. There is never a moment in the movie when this seems like a good idea. The Saul Bass credits, in which human features are stretched and distorted in extreme close-up, instills a horror of plasticity, and disorienting camera-work creates an immediate feeling of unease and dislocation, a physical discomfort at being in the wrong place.

Arthur, a businessman from Scarsdale, is the personification of disappointed middle age, afflicted by profound anomie that goes beyond a dull routine and a tired marriage. When the Company finishes its work—the process is shown in gruesome detail, to the extent that Frankenheimer’s cameraman fainted while shooting a real rhinoplasty—the formerly nondescript and greying Arthur looks like Rock Hudson, and has a new life as a playboy painter in Malibu. He’s told that he is free, “alone in the world, absolved of all responsibility.” He has “what every middle-aged man in America wants: freedom.”

At first, however, his life proves as empty and meaningless in this new setting as it was in the old; even when the Frankenstein scars have healed, he remains nervous and joyless as before. After he meets and falls for a beautiful blonde neighbor, who introduces him to a very 1960s California lifestyle, he begins to revel in youth and sensual freedom. Yet something is still not right; at a cocktail party he gets drunk and starts talking about his former existence—a taboo. He discovers that his lover, indeed almost everyone he knows, is an employee of the company or a fellow “reborn,” hired to create a fake life for him, and to keep him under surveillance. His “freedom” is a construct, tightly controlled.

Arthur rebels, making a forbidden trip to visit his wife, who of course does not recognize him. Talking to her about her supposedly deceased husband, for the first time he begins to understand himself: the depth of his alienation and confusion, the fact that he never really knew what he wanted, and so wanted the things he had been told he should want. Seconds is a scathing attack on the American ideal of a successful life, a portrait of how corporations sell fantasies of youth, beauty, happiness, love; buying into these commercial dreams, no one is really free to know what they want, or even who they are. Will Geer, as the folksy, sinister founder of the Company, talks wistfully about how he simply wanted to make people happy.

There is a deep sadness in the scenes where Arthur revisits his old home and confronts the failure of his attempt at rebirth—beautifully embodied by Rock Hudson in a performance suffused with the melancholy of a man who has spent his life hiding his real identity behind a mask. Yet Arthur still imagines that if he can have another new start, a third face and identity, he will get it right. Instead, he learns the macabre secret of how the Company goes about swapping out people’s identities. Seconds contrasts the surgical precision with which faces, bodies, and the trappings of life can be remade, and the impossibility of determining or predicting how or if the inner self will be changed. For that there are no charts or diagrams, and no knife that can cut deep enough.

by Imogen Sara Smith

#Imogen Sara Smith #The Chiseler #stolen faces #joan crawford #noir #secondrock hudson #lauren bacall

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seriouslyhooked · 4 years

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Feels Like This (Part 6)

Emma Swan is a once lost girl who is now making good. She has made a way in the world for her and her young son, Henry, and after years of hard work, Emma is in her last stretch of schooling for the career she’s always wanted. Unexpectedly, she finds herself in a tiny nation no one’s ever heard of for her last year of study. She knows nothing about the place except that it’s beautiful, has a world-renowned child life program, and is filled with possibility. Meanwhile, Prince Killian is hardly happy with the title he received at birth. As the second in line for the crown, Killian has long tried shaking his royal duties. He built a career in the royal navy, and has stayed out of the limelight, but his ship has been called to port indefinitely at the request of his brother, the King. Fate (in her many forms) brings Emma and Killian together and the resulting fic is a cute, fluffy, trope filled romp featuring heart felt moments, a healthy dose of insta-love and an assured happily ever after. Story rated M and will have 12 parts. Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5. Available on FF Here and AO3 Here.

A/N: Hey everyone – so I will start this chapter by saying we have quite a bit of intrigue happening here. Some of you may not be thrilled with where I am leaving things, fair warning it is not the fluffiest of places, and some may even call it a dreaded cliff hanger, BUT I promise that the next chapter for this story is already prepped and will be ready for posting next weekend. You will all be way happier with me in the next few chapters, but in the meantime, I hope you still enjoy the fic and I can’t wait to hear what you all think!

How the fuck did it come to this?

The question had been plaguing him since the moment he left Emma’s side yesterday afternoon and landed in the middle of a political minefield, and he was no closer to an answer about how to get out of this giant mess.

Of course, he knew the facts: yesterday his brother had called him to parliament, a place where Killian very rarely played a role. He hadn’t been there in years, and even then, it was only a formality, but this time he was summoned through some antiquated process no one had ever heard of. What ensued thereafter was nothing short of a disaster. His mandated presence was initially thought to be merely a stall tactic, but then everything flipped and suddenly his brother lost control of what was supposed to be a historic day for the passing of landmark legislation.

Since taking the throne, Liam had been working diligently to change the very system of governing in Montenarro. He wanted more representation for the people, and to have more democratic processes in spite of the presence of the monarchy. He’d worked tirelessly for years to endear his cause to a largely unresponsive parliament, and finally he believed he had enough votes to make a bold and substantial change. He’d even made sure to cover his tracks, getting every signed-on lord to publicly state their support of the bill, but it turned out there were traitors in their midst, and when Killian arrived it became a full-blown spectacle filled with anger and hostility and nonsense.

For nearly an hour Killian bore witness to the political betrayal and the humiliation that followed. A group of usurpers, led by a Viscount with a long held vendetta, proceeded to fill the hallowed halls of parliament with lies and slander and speculation. Most of it actually centered around Killian, and all of it was completely preposterous. These lords were ‘suspicious’ of his absence from public life since being discharged from the navy, of his hesitancy to return to his role as Prince, and of his lack of ‘direction.’ The men went on and on about what kind of message it sent to the people when leaders failed to lead and represent the interests of the citizenry. It was absolutely ridiculous and infuriating. He’d been out of the military for one month – one month! – and apparently failing to return to center stage in that time made him untrustworthy and ‘wayward.’ There was absolutely no consideration for what he’d gone through in serving at all. In the end it didn’t matter – he was always a prince before he was a man, and expectations didn’t waiver, no matter what he’d given to this country or its people.

Liam, to his credit, was absolutely furious, and he’d made sure to lambast the men who criticized Killian, pointing out their dishonor and their disrespect for men and women in uniform. He reminded them all of how out of touch one must be to assume that a man or woman who’d been on active deployment and been party to war would want to just jump back into the fray with no caution or hesitations. Every soldier was different, and every single one of them deserved respect when they’d fought valiantly and enduringly for the country’s safety and interests. It helped Killian to hear his brother’s candid disdain for these men and their actions, and though they had never really discussed the ghosts of Killian’s service, it reminded Killian that Liam understood and that he valued the sacrifice he made all these years. But still it all came to nothing. The lords did not bow to any call for decency, the bill never was presented, the motion was halted, and despite how ridiculous it all was, a nefarious dialogue had been started. Now some people were curious about where Killian was and what he was doing, putting Liam in an incredibly uncomfortable place. In fact, it was so bad a situation that he’d done something he had never done before – he’d gone back on a promise he made to Killian.

That reneging of his word was the ultimate show of dishonor in Liam’s eyes, but it didn’t help Killian that his brother was sick over this choice. Killian was still being sacrificed in a way for the sake of saving face, and the way it would be done meant that Killian was, for lack of a better phrasing, royally screwed. He was totally and completely fucked, because right now, within the next, oh ten minutes or so, he’d be leaving with his family in the royal precession headed for the capital. It was one of the nation’s most cherished holidays, a celebration of independence and military success, but Killian had missed it for years and intended to miss it this year as well. He hadn’t felt ready for such a moment, loud, rambunctious, and public as it was. He’d been nowhere near crowds like this in many years, and the sound of fireworks and sparklers might trigger something in him, along with the high intensity of the crowd itself. But when Liam requested this, Killian kept those fears quiet. He was ashamed to admit that weakness, and now he was making a huge public appearance, one of the largest of the year. Still in spite of all the anxiety that would come just from the processions, it wasn’t even the worst part. No, the worst part was that – through the agonizing stupidity of his own choices – he still had not told Emma the truth.

This lack of disclosure did not come from lack of trying. He’d been forced to remain in chambers in Parliament without his phone until almost midnight, and by then it was too late to call her or go and see her face to face. Emma was asleep for the night and he couldn’t bring himself to tell her in a voicemail. He’d then decided to go to her this morning, but there was physically no way for him to do so. Every route, and he did mean every route, from the palace to her house was blocked off for the processions or being monitored by the media. It was truly nightmarish. As such, he’d done the only thing he could think to do. He wrote out his feelings to her, his worries and his confession. It was long, it was ugly, but it was real. In the letter he apologized profusely for never telling her the truth. He acknowledged that any pain she would feel was his fault and his alone, and he practically begged her to give him another chance. As soon as it was written he entrusted it to one of Jefferson’s team and he waited twenty minutes for confirmation that it was delivered to her home.

The seconds ticked by while he waited for her reply, slowly and terribly, and finally he caved and sent her a text. It said he was thinking of her, and reiterated his intention to talk to her more tonight. Now here he was, hours later, and he’d still heard nothing. He was in excruciating pain, and the only thing worse than not knowing where Emma stood was that he was forced into the customs and practices of this holiday. He was made to go along with a song and dance he hated, and now he was wearing his royal regalia, feeling a fool and a sham and a downright wretch.

“That collar is not going to get any more comfortable for fidgeting with it,” his grandmother’s voice said, drawing his attention back to where he was, outside waiting for the procession to begin from the castle grounds.

His mother and grandmother were set to ride in the coach as he and Liam rode behind them on horseback, but his grandmother wasn’t interested in complying with the order to sit patiently and wait until the very last minute. Instead she ushered him towards her, and began straightening his royal suit. She tidied all his medals and the pins of his military service, and made sure each line of his jacket was crisp and clean. It was clearly something she’d been doing for many years, and the action came naturally to her, so much more so than for Killian.

“For someone who detests the charade of royal life, you really do look so handsome.”

“Thank you, Gran,” he said, but he didn’t mean it. The words were kindly given, but impossible to value when there was so much else he was desperate to engage with.

“But there’s something more, isn’t there? You’re worried about this. Why? Because it’s been a while?” He shook his head. “Is there somewhere you’d rather be?”

He bit back the retort that there were about a million places he would rather be, but she knew his feelings. “There’s a woman isn’t there?” Bloody hell, how had she figured that out?

“Aye,” Killian admitted after a moment’s hesitation. It was no use hiding from his Gran. The old woman was like a blood hound, drawn into the smallest scent and hell bent on tracking until the truth was out.

“And you’re missing her now, are you?” his grandmother said with a nod. “Good. Real loves never bloom for the faint of heart. A good dose of yearning, and a little bit of missing your fair maiden won’t kill anyone. It’s just one day, dear.”

“It’s a bit more complicated than that, Gran.”

“Things usually are. I’m assuming she’s not from any of the royal circles. If she were there’d be far more chatter afoot. Not a one of those ladies of court can keep a secret. It’s positively ludicrous.”

“She has nothing to do with this world,” Killian agreed, woeful at the fact that she might reject it, but so glad Emma was not like those other women. She was so much more wonderful for being real and genuine. He would never change a thing about her. It was everyone else who should change as far as he was concerned.

“She’s uneasy with you being a prince, isn’t she?”

“She will be.”

“Will be?” his grandmother asked, her brows furrowing together in a look of actual concern. “I’m sorry, my dear. I don’t understand.”

“She didn’t know, Gran. She’s not from here. She’s a woman I met at the Institute. Her name is Emma.”

“Emma,” his grandmother said, nodding, like this announcement of his affection for a stranger who worked at their family’s charity was the most natural thing he’d ever said to her, despite the fact that he’d never mentioned to any of his family how much Emma meant to him. “But what do you mean she didn’t know? You mean about the holiday service?”

“About any of it. She didn’t realize I’m a prince. I’ve only just told her this morning in a letter.”

“That’s not possible,” his grandmother said and then her hand came up to cover her mouth in what could only be described as horror. “Oh my word. You’re serious. This morning? A letter?! Killian, what were you thinking?!”

“I wasn’t,” he admitted, running a hand through his hair in distress. His grandmother’s agitation only added to his own. “I’ve gone about things all wrong, Gran. I know that.”

“Explain it to me, Killian. Make me understand. How did it come to this?”

“I don’t know. I really don’t. At first I thought she knew who I was, and then she didn’t and it was selfish of me not to tell her-,”

“You can say that again,” his grandmother quipped, seemingly annoyed on Emma’s behalf though she didn’t even know her. “Foolishness. Pure foolishness.”

“I know I’ve messed up. I’ve known it all along, but if you knew her, you’d understand. I didn’t want to risk it. Emma defies explanation. Special isn’t the term, for she’s so much more than that. I know it was wrong not to tell her front the start, but I just wanted…” He trailed off, knowing it was useless trying to explain.

“You wanted to be yourself, without the title and the attention,” his grandmother said with a sadness in her voice. She knew his heart in this, and she felt for him, but tragically it changed nothing. “Oh my boy, my dear, sweet Killy, this is quite a mess to be in.”

They were both quiet for a moment, thinking to themselves, and Killian felt sick to his stomach at all that he’d done. This was truly all his fault and the guilt was beginning to unravel him. His grandmother though, was not yet done figuring this out. “So what did she say about it all? How did she take the letter?”

“She hasn’t responded,” Killian said hopelessly, bringing his phone up to check again. Yet again, nothing. Silence from his Swan.

“She probably needs time,” his grandmother said sympathetically. “And you’ll give her just as much time as this procession lasts before seeing her.”

“But the events after -,”

“Are not your concern,” his grandmother said vehemently. “You are hereby excused from those.”

“Gran, it’s not that simple. Viscount Mabrey -,”

“Viscount Mabrey can hang,” his grandmother said with a viciousness he’d never witnessed. It wasn’t refined but it was real, and he agreed with the assessment entirely. As the man who was leading this circus of speculation about his life, Mabrey was Killian’s worst enemy at the moment. “And I don’t care what Liam says. You shouldn’t even be here. Making you choose between Emma and the family… It’s just cruel, never mind undignified and unfeeling.”

“He doesn’t know about her,” Killian said and Gran laughed. She actually laughed and shot him a look like he was foolish.

“Are we speaking of the same Liam, your elder brother? The King of this country and sovereign of this crown, not knowing every last detail at play in his kingdom? Unlikely. No, he knows about her. Jefferson will have told him,” Gran said, prompting discomfort in Killian’s gut. Then she appeared to look a bit more forgiving as she weighed the possibilities. “Though perhaps no one has realized her ignorance on your origins. I certainly didn’t know.”

Killian’s brow furrowed at her comment, but his confusion was distracted by another question from her. “Did you ask her to come here at all? To see you? What are we to expect?”

“She was never planning to watch the procession, and I can’t imagine she’d want to now,” Killian confirmed, reiterating what Emma had told him previously. “She and her son were planning to go to the beach for the day, and no matter what state she may be in,” his throat closed up at admitting that she’d be hurting because of him. “Emma would never break a promise to her boy. They’ll likely miss the whole thing.”

“Mmm,” his grandmother replied. The hum was so noncommittal it only added to Killian’s agitation. But then she turned to him and looked serious. “Well you answer me this, Killian, and be warned if you lie not even the Gods of old can help you, do you truly care for the girl?”

“Yes.” In fact, caring for Emma was an understatement. His feelings, new as they were, went so much deeper than that.

“Do you love her?”

“Yes,” he admitted, knowing that this bond he felt to her was not a fleeting sort of fancy. He did love Emma, for all her many pieces. The way she loved helping people, the nurturing way she always had, the light in her eyes, the lilt of her laugh. She was perfect and good and true, and he never had any hope of deserving her, but damn did he want to. So badly it left an ache in his chest.

“And is there anything you won’t do to make this up to her?”

“No, ma’am,” he replied firmly, knowing that promise was absolute.

That was part of what was killing him now. He wanted to go this instant and beg forgiveness like a man. To look her in her eyes and explain to her how this had all come to be. Yet he couldn’t even give that to her. He was bound by a duty to his family, and he had never resented that duty more in his life. Even now he considered the merits of being here. He could go, show her how much she meant to him, and how she’d always come first from now on. But doing that would only humiliate his family. It would add flames to the fire and mean giving up the loyalty he’d always had for the people he was closest to.

“Good.” She answered, nodding her head and clapping her hands together in a matter-of-fact manner. “Well, dear, sometimes people make bad choices, and when they do, they must make amends. That’s all that can be done. You must do everything you can to make this right. It’s as simple as that,”

“That’s it? No sage counsel or particular detail on how to go about it?” Killian asked. He was desperate for guidance here. Should he call her? Should he wait? Should he go to her? What was he meant to do? What could be done at this point?

“My dear, the mistakes of men are frequent and seemingly unending. A queen does herself no favors getting mired down in them,” she said with a sigh, not helping him with the reminder that he was among those mistaken men. But she shook her head and then affectionately patted his arm in a sign of support. “Just remember this: your heart always knows which way to go. You’ll make this right, and when you do, I’d like to officially meet this young woman. All right?”

“Okay, Gran.”

With a quick pat to his cheek, his grandmother turned and entered the carriage with his mother who was watching curiously. The two of them shared a few words, but Killian didn’t pay much mind, for at the same moment Liam descended from the palace and things began moving rather quickly. It was time for them all to depart, and Killian could only gear himself up for what would be a painful few hours and hope that everything would somehow be okay.

…………………….

Waking up this morning, Emma had to admit to herself that she was really and honestly happy. The feeling was somewhat new for her, certainly in such a bold and front and center way, but after yesterday with Killian it was impossible to feel otherwise. The hope that he’d inspired in her and the heat that she still felt all these hours later, all prompted a smile she let loose as soon as she woke, and that had stayed with her all morning. To know that this man who had her tied up in knots felt the same way made her feel like a kid with their first crush. But despite the strange fluttering in her chest that came and went, and the constant distraction that her mind seemed plagued with these days, she didn’t actually hate it. If anything, Emma craved this feeling, loving that for the first time in so many years she felt eager to take a chance on something and someone other than herself and her son.

She’d been ready to take that step a while ago, feeling the draw to Killian for some time now, but after yesterday and that kiss, she was totally lost. She may be guarded, but Emma Swan was no fool. She could admit defeat when beaten, and right now her interest and her hope that this might be something real and true had won out. Hours later she could still taste him on her tongue. She felt the silky strands of his hair on her fingertips and the hard lines of his body pressed against her. The heat and the spark between them was all consuming, and the look in his eyes when they broke apart and he promised he’d see her soon -

“Mom, do you think I should bring my snorkeling mask or my regular goggles?”

Emma jumped at Henry’s question, which forced her out of her daydream so quickly she had whiplash. She shook her head, reminding herself that this was not the time or place. She was on Mom duty right now and she was supposed to be packing their lunch and snacks for the beach. But last night, when she was alone and all her responsibilities were met for the day, she’d allowed herself to imagine what could have happened if things were different. Would the moment have lasted longer? Would it have ended at the preserve?

“Mom?” Henry asked, his brow furrowed in confusion at her continued distractedness.

“Sorry, kid. Let’s go with snorkeling. It’s been hard for you to find the space to do that to this point, but I think today you’ll have the room to try.”

Henry agreed with her thinking and raced back to his room to grab his things while Emma chastised herself for her wayward thoughts. Now was totally not the time to be caught up in thoughts of Killian, hard as it might be to resist. She and her kid were spending the day together and she needed to focus on that. Henry and her had planned this outing all week, and she wanted to be present with him, even if a niggling though in the back of her mind wondered what it would be like if Killian was coming too. She already knew that Henry and he would get along. Killian had a way of making every kid he met love him, and her son was smart. He read people even better than she did, and Henry loved a good story, which Killian had plenty of.

“Someday maybe,” Emma whispered aloud as she packed the sandwiches in their temperature-controlled bag, but she knew there was no maybe. If things headed where she hoped they would, Killian and Henry meeting would come to pass, and probably soon. But for now, she’d soak in these precious moments with her kid and enjoy a little R and R down at the seaside.

Placing all of their picnic supplies in one bag and double checking that her tote had sunscreen, books, and other things they’d need down by the water, Emma stayed focused on her task. She took comfort in the mental checklist she had going, and when she was confident that they had everything, Henry appeared, carrying his snorkeling gear and smiling a megawatt smile that made her heart so happy.

“You have everything you’ll want for the day?” Emma asked and when Henry nodded she gave him another chance to double check. “Remember we won’t be home until late.”

“I know, Mom. We’re still going to the Center for a visit right? Cook said she’s making that fancy chocolate cake again!” Henry said, nearly as excited by the prospect of this dessert as he was for their beach day.

“Yup. I already told Marco to expect us. Dinner will be served at six thirty.”

Henry threw his fist into the air in some kind of celebratory move and Emma laughed at his antics, shaking her head and looking to all the stuff they had to get out the door and to the coastline. “And you’re totally sure you don’t need to see the parade? It may be fun,” Emma suggested, but she secretly hoped Henry would want to stick to their original plan.

“No way! Beach beats parade every day of the week. Especially this beach. It’s the best!”

Emma appreciated her son’s dedication to sunshine and the seaside. Truth be told, she and Henry had been burned by enough New York parades to be a little jaded. They always sounded like a whole lot of fun in theory, but there was a huge crowd of people which Emma never loved, and at every event there were people who just wanted to get wasted. It was pretty stressful as a parent, and Henry never really liked the noise. He was a quieter kid and preferred more peaceful moments, which were rare when living in the city. As such, they tended to avoid big events like this and made a habit of being wherever the masses weren’t. Today they’d decided the beach might be a good option. They’d managed to go a few times since arriving, and it was always fun but busy. Today they may have more space to themselves, and both she and Henry loved the idea of a beach to themselves.

It was still wild to Emma that they lived in a city with such easy access to a coastline, and not some questionable harbor view, but glorious, magazine worthy beaches. Everyone who lived here acknowledged that they were a hidden gem, and Emma knew if the world ever got wind of what they were missing in this tiny country then flocks of people would descend. She hated to imagine that though, since most of the charm of this country came from its authenticity. There were no touristy gimmicks or ploys. People here were just people, welcoming and friendly, not driven by a dollar. It was totally refreshing and deserved to be preserved and protected. It also made Emma think all the time that maybe she was doing Henry a disservice living in New York. Montenarro wasn’t really a viable option forever, at least she couldn’t bring herself to hope they’d be that lucky, but there must be other places in the US where she could find a job that had more of these things they loved. They’d miss Mrs. and Mr. H, but they were retired now and always talked about their want to travel. Who knew, maybe something could work out?

“Okay Mom, I’m ready to go. We better get a move on.”

Emma took in Henry all decked out in his beach gear and ready to trek across the city and she bit back another hearty laugh. Her boy was an adventurer through and through. He loved anything that felt like a quest and right now he was harnessing all the energy of kids in the throes of some magical imaginary universe. She loved his propensity for this kind of excitement, so she attempted to match it, gathering her things and saluting him as their leader as the left the apartment and locked the door behind them.

As they headed out, Emma couldn’t help thinking that she hoped the kids at the institute were having a good start to their day. This year none of the children would be attending the parade. Apparently there were some issues in years past with some older kids running off to meet friends and younger kids getting lost in the hustle and bustle of the festivities. It turned out to be a logistical nightmare for the staff, and so they decided they’d have their own celebration at the same coves along the cost that the older kids had driven to weeks back. Almost everyone, save the very little babies, would be going, and Emma and Henry had been invited as well. She’d come so close to saying yes, especially when she thought about seeing Cecelia and the others enjoying their day at the beach, but she knew there was a lot of time left to share such memories with them all and that tonight they’d join everyone for dinner and some fun and games. For now, she wanted to make sure her son felt special and supported. He was such a good sport about being in camp all the time while she worked and went to school. She didn’t think that he resented it even a little, but she felt like her first duty was to be a good mom and to give Henry the attention and affection he so rightly deserved.

“Excuse me, Miss?” a woman with bright red hair asked just by their front door. Emma recognized her peripherally. She’d definitely seen her in the neighborhood before. “Are you Emma Swan?”

“I am,” Emma said, and the woman let out a relieved breath. “Can I help you with something?”

“Yes, I’m sorry. My name is Merida. I live just there,” she pointed to the other house out here on the side street. “We received this this morning – or well my daughter did. I love the girl but if you catch her half asleep, she’ll say anything to shut you up and head on back to bed. Anyway, a royal courier came to deliver this earlier, asking for an Emma Swan, and she swore that’s who she was, took it, and then promptly fell asleep. I’m so sorry for the delay, I only just saw the thing in her room. But I promise it was never opened. As you can see the seal is still very much intact.”

“It’s no problem,” Emma said accepting the letter which was addressed in beautiful script. It had her name on it and a seal on the back with the same lettering as the foundation. She smiled, thinking it must be from the kids. They were so excited for their celebration today that she could totally see them making fancy invites and using an institute seal for adornment. She also didn’t think anything of a ‘royal courier.’ That was a thing in Britain too, right? It was the queen’s post or something. Countries with monarchies were just cute like that.

“Oh good, hopefully it’s nothing too timely,” Merida said with relief. “But either way you best believe my Iona received a stern talking to this morning.” Just then a bang came from Merida’s house and they all looked over there. Emma and Henry were concerned, but Merida only sighed and shook her head. “Those blasted boys of mine will be at it again. Dead set on turning every last hair on my head gray. Anyway, apologies again, and perhaps we can have you two over some time. I’ll do my best to wrangle this motley bunch before you do, aye?”

Merida made the offer even while jogging back into her house and Emma and Henry barely had time to say sure before she was back inside. They turned to each other and just shrugged, laughing. Then Henry pointed to the letter. “What do you think it is?”

“Probably something from the institute. But nothing that can’t wait for the beach,” Emma replied, and Henry smiled, following her down the lane in the direction of their plans.

Slowly but surely they made their way down the roads, but the more they walked, the more the patterns of foot traffic began to change. When they started, there were very few people along the street, but the further they went the fuller the streets became. Soon they were overrun with people, and admittedly all of them seemed to be having a great time without any kind of discernable drunkenness or issues.

“Wow, today must be a bigger deal than we realized,” Henry said, his eyes taking in the same sight as her, which was their increasingly familiar neighborhood flooded with happy parade goers.

“No kidding. Are we sure this isn’t the berry fest you read about?”

“They’re called montecaris, Mom. And no, that’s in August. It lasts a whole week. Today’s about a battle that happened a long time ago or something.”

“Must have been some battle,” Emma said. Looking back at Henry, she was struck with worry that he might feel like they were missing something big, especially when confronted with the throngs of people out here celebrating. “We could probably put the beach off a bit if you wanted to watch…”

“No way! I’ve got a full day planned and we’re already late. We gotta get going.”

Emma agreed and stuck her hand out for her son, more as precaution than anything else. With the crowds growing so dense she didn’t want to get separated from him. Henry understood and stuck close to her, but Emma noticed that the people congregated out here today for the celebrations were so much kinder and less intrusive than people back home. This might be a big party for people, but it wasn’t at the expense of families and non-celebrators. No one was taking things too far, and it made maneuvering through the streets much easier than expected, which Emma appreciated. They actually made great time, all things considered, but towards the end of their journey they hit a roadblock, quite literally.

“The road’s closed, but how will we get to the beach?” Henry said with a sad effect that reminded Emma of when he was younger. He never whined, her son, but he did get a teensy bit dramatic. It had much more impact in her opinion, and the pang of sympathy she felt at his disappointment had her rethinking this strategy.

“Excuse me, miss?” Emma asked a woman who looked to be walking with her own young children. “Do you have any idea how we could get to the beach?”

“The footbridge is still open,” the woman offered. She pointed them in the right direction and Emma remembered seeing it a few times while coming in and out of the city. It wasn’t far from here, and she and Henry were grateful for the insight. They made their way in that direction, and by chance they had to walk the parade route to get there. As such they were seeing so much of the parade while still heading to the beach.

“Kind of feels like the best of both worlds, huh Mom?” Henry asked and Emma nodded. It was really something to be sure, and as they walked they saw all sorts of processions. People in traditional dress dancing, musicians, acrobats. There were soldiers dressed up in old regalia and veterans from wars long past, but it didn’t seem like anything out of the common way. Only when the footbridge was in sight did the air seem to change around them and the whispers all began.

“They’ll be out soon, Mama,” a little boy said jumping up and down. “King Liam and his horse!”

“Yes, darling. They’ll be here any moment. Look, here they come.”

Henry was the one to stop moving at this point, drawn into the promise of seeing actual royalty in the flesh. Emma stopped with him and looked out into the street, feeling a flutter of intrigue as she did. Watching the procession at this stage felt like stepping into a movie. There were guards in their stately dress and horses with people she assumed must be some kind of current soldiers. All of the steeds they rode in on were darker, but behind them were white stallions drawing a carriage. Wow, she thought those were a figment of imagination. People really rode in those? Emma supposed they must, and then she got a good look at the women in the cart and she was convinced they must be royalty.

The way these two women were dressed was pristine and beautiful, and both women wore tiaras in their hair that reflected the light so beautifully in the summer sun. From what she could tell, both of them were older, though one was raven haired and the other had shifted to a silky silver. Emma wracked her brain trying to remember what she’d heard in passing about the royals. She knew there was a reigning Queen before who was much older, and apparently good friends with the Queen in England. She’d stepped down from her post years back, however, and now there was a King. She’d seen him, King Liam, on magazine covers in the grocery store. He was young, but always looked so serious, and Emma imagined he must be somewhere here too.

Sure enough, when the carriage passed there were two black horses, both giant, like Clydesdales. Both had royal riders as well, and Emma knew the first one was King Liam. He looked just as serious now as he had in the photos, and Emma wondered if it was hard to be King. It must be all-consuming, but still, a smile wouldn’t kill anyone, would it?

“Wait, Mom, that’s the King!” Henry said, his attempt at a whisper coming out comically loud. “He’s so big. I bet he’s super strong.”

Emma couldn’t argue with the assessment, and the stateliness of the man looked even more imposing in his formal regalia astride a horse. But there was something about him that was familiar. The darkness of his hair under his crown and the square of his jaw evoked something in her, and so, she realized, did the particular shade of blue of his eyes. She had trouble placing it before, but now she knew they looked like Killian’s. How strange that she should think that. She was only reminiscing the other day that she’d never seen eyes like his anywhere before.

Intriguing as the connection was, Emma didn’t think much of it. Instead her eyes moved to the other horse, and immediately her heart lurched. Was that? Oh my God, that was Killian! Her Killian, and he was…

“Prince Killian’s here this year!” a young girl said on the street beside them with awe. “Wow he really is handsome, just as handsome as King Liam, don’t you think, Mama?”

“Undoubtedly, dear,” the mother said but Emma barely heard them. She was stuck with the glaring and absolutely crazy realization that the man she’d been circling around for weeks, the man who’d kissed her senseless only yesterday, was a Prince. Like an actual, full-blown, royal. She was stunned and shocked, so thrown by this twist she hardly knew which way was up. All she could do was take this in and try to make sense of it all.

From where she stood in the crowd, Emma could see that Killian was dressed in the same uniform as his brother. Medals of valor covering his coat to a much higher degree than the King, so much so they almost didn’t fit. Despite being astride a horse, everything about him looked impeccable. The lines of his clothes were crisp and unforgiving, and his form on the stallion spoke to extensive experience. Still, she couldn’t say he looked comfortable up there. His expression was not nearly so serious as Liam’s, but Emma could see his uneasiness, even if it was subtle. Many others may not realize, but Emma saw pain in his eyes. Even now, when thrust into confusion and disarray, Emma felt like she could read him. He was uncomfortable up there, being ogled at by so many people and hearing all the noise and celebration. Still he was gorgeous, looking gallant and regal and all too good to look away from.

Seeing him this way filled her with a chaotic sense of conflictedness – on the one hand she still saw the same man she felt herself falling for, but on the other hand he’d shielded the truth from her. He was a prince, a freaking prince! And she was… well just Emma. It made her sick to her stomach to think about how much must separate them. She’d already felt the pressure of that just thinking he was rich and foreign, but throw royalty into the mix and she felt unbelievably foolish. This could never work. She was delusional if she thought that the two of them could amount to anything more than a mere flirtation given everything, and a wave of dread and despair crashed over her. She felt feint from the mix of sadness and betrayal and her heart was pounding in her chest. Panic began flowing. She had to get out of here.

As if her distress called to him in some way, Killian’s attention diverted from the procession and he looked into the crowd. In a matter of seconds his gaze found her, and she saw the look on his face, feeling the impact too acutely. He was surprised by her being there, and then looked pained himself. She was too stunned to move, but he didn’t feel the same. He stopped his horse, and looked about to climb down when a voice called out to him.

“Killian!” It came from the King, Emma and Killian both looked to him and Liam looked to Emma before turning back to Killian and shaking his head. “Not now.”

Emma didn’t know how to take that. Was he saying not now as in ‘not now, we’re in the middle of a parade here’ or as in ‘not now with your inappropriate and unacceptable life choices’? The former made sense to Emma, but the latter was what she was afraid of. Here she was, a totally normal person, a single Mom from another place with no freaking clue he was even a prince. What was Killian even thinking when it came to her? She was dying to know but also too afraid to face it. Killian, meanwhile, looked liable to go against his brother but he ultimately looked to her and she read the greatest wish of his heart as clear as day.

I know I fucked up, Emma. I know this is crazy, but please let me explain. She even watched his lips move and she read his words “please, Emma.” Her heart clutched in her chest. She closed her eyes unsure of what to do and then Henry pulled at her hand. Emma broke her attention away from this earth-shaking revelation and looked to her boy.

“You okay, Mom? You look a little funny.”

“Uh, yeah, Henry, I’m fine. Just a lot of people,” she offered emptily. She hated to lie to her son, but what could she say? Something like, don’t worry kid, I just think I have a date set with the Prince and even though it’s completely insane and he hid this from me, I can’t bring myself to hate him? Or maybe, to be honest I was actually falling for this man, like really falling, and I don’t know if I can stop even though I have to because we live in different worlds and I feel like my heart is breaking in my chest? No that wouldn’t work either, so a lie it was.

“You want to go home?” He asked and Emma shook her head, knowing that home was just about the last place she wanted to be. She needed distraction from whatever the hell this was, and if she added disappointing Henry to the list of things she’d done today, she’d never get past this.

“No way.”

“Okay! Last one to the footbridge is a rotten egg!” Henry said, taking off, and Emma spared one last look at Killian before she left.

In his eyes she saw everything, grief, sorrow, an attempt at about a million apologies. This was wrong. He had really messed up and she was hurt by his choices, but despite it all a small voice in her heart told her not to run. She should give him a chance to explain, as hard as that might be. She deserved those answers, even if he didn’t. With her mind made up, she wanted to convey to him that this wasn’t totally over but only then did she realize that the parade had stopped. Everyone was distracted by something in the main carriage, but it wasn’t emergent. In fact, the people were laughing, but Emma had clearly missed the joke. She looked back to Killian, whose eyes were trained only on her, and without any more delay she nodded, a silent show that she would listen even if she was hurt and confused. She only saw the beginning of his relief take form, before heading back to her kid, and though it was incredibly hard not to look back, she pushed forward, knowing that right now she couldn’t engage with whatever was happening. It was just too much to contemplate and too overwhelming to consider without knowing the whole truth.

……………………………..

Oh, Dear Lord in Heaven, what a day it had been.

Public outings were always tiring to Queen Eleanor, despite her lifetime of participating in them. But today was especially energetic, and that was putting it kindly.

She still could not fathom how in the world her grandson had been so thoughtless. How could Killian think that keeping the truth for this long would be okay? Surely, he realized that the longer he waited to tell Emma who he was the worse it would be. And then today, seeing the moment where Killian and Emma noticed each other out there in the precession, was like witnessing a car wreck before her very eyes.

The fright she’d had was instant, and she gripped onto Meera’s arm so quickly her daughter-in-law had thought her ill. Then Meera looked to the crowd and saw Emma too and she herself was tense and worried. It was all so terrible. The shock on the poor girl’s face, the hurt in her eyes, but there was more too. There was strength there, and feelings under that hurt that did give Eleanor a bit of hope. Everything wasn’t lost, but it was getting damn close. Killian tried to go to her, as he damn well should, but then Liam scolded him, keeping him there. It took everything in Eleanor not to snap at her eldest grandson for interfering.

“It’s not safe, your majesty,” Jefferson whispered to her from his position close by, reading her frustration. “She’d be a target if the public takes notice.”

“Oh – oh - oh barnacles!” she said with frustration, before inspiration struck. “Stop the carriage!” she cried to the attendant and immediately he did.

“What are you doing?” Meera whispered, alarmed at the break in protocol, but hoping for a good explanation.

“Buying them some time. Keep watch of them. Be discrete but don’t miss anything. We need every detail we can get,” she whispered, before turning to the street and waving her hand to a nearby man. “Excuse me, sir, I just wanted to say your cap is absolutely delightful.”

The man was stunned at her comments, and he should be. This was absolutely untoward. Royalty never did anything like this, but damn the customs. This was her grandson’s life, his future, and she’d do anything she could to see it aided and improved. When the man on the side of the road collected himself, he smiled and blushed, an uncommon sight for a man of at least 65 years of age.

“Please, your majesty. Take it.”

“Oh I don’t think I -,”

“It would be an honor,” he said.

“Are they good?” she asked Meera quietly.

“Just a bit more time. Her son’s perked up now. What a beautiful boy. Reminds me of Killian at that age.”

“Focus, Meera.”

Eleanor nodded to the security team and the man came forward. Offering her the hat. She smiled at it, taking in the tacky mess of patriotic color and appreciating it for what it was – a colorful distraction from the moment. She made up her mind to commit to this idea, and the crowd gasped as she put it on her head and then laughed happily. Some people even cheered at her attire, praising the new look that must make her look positively ridiculous.

“Okay, we’re good,” Meera said and Eleanor smiled graciously to the man who’d provided this opportunity to distract.

“Thank you very much, sir. A happy holiday to you and yours,” she waved pleasantly before telling the footman to drive on.

She’d then proceeded to commit to this charade for the rest of the outing, taking different gifts from parade watchers across the city. Even Meera engaged, accepting some colorful beads and a flag from some children who brought them forth along the way. She didn’t dare look at Liam the entire time, but she knew, even if it was unusual, that this would be a win for the king in the long term. The people had responded marvelously, and she’d managed to help both her grandsons in their quests at the same time, thank the Gods.

As soon as they arrived back at the palace, Killian was off like a shot, readying himself to go see Emma. They spoke with him briefly inside the palace before his departure, but she didn’t dwell on those important words now. Eleanor still didn’t know where he’d eventually find her or if he already had, but she hoped he would. Now though, hours later, Queen Eleanor was hiding out, trying to avoid another conversation that must eventually come.

“So are you going to tell me what that was all about today?” Liam asked, causing her to jump from where she was in the quiet of the library. Her hand came over her heart instinctively and she scowled at him.

“You take great liberty, my dear, scaring an old woman like that.”

“I take liberties?” he asked with a laugh. “Gran if this is another of your jokes, I’ll tell you now I don’t understand it and I’m not amused.”

“I know, my dear, but I just had to do it. Killian and Emma needed time.”

“You know about her?”

“Know about her, who do you think found her in the first place -,” Oh blast it! She wasn’t supposed to say that. Rats, now she had to tell him everything. This was not what she’d wanted at all.

“So you and Mum, you’ve been planning this,” Liam said some time later when the truth was revealed. “You’re matchmaking. Does Killian know?”

“No, he most certainly does not.”

“He’ll be furious when he finds out.”

“The moment she forgives him he’ll be nothing short of ecstatic.”

“And so that’s when you’ll tell him?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Gran.”

“Liam,” she parroted, knowing she sounded like a child but not caring.

“Bloody hell, Gran, I don’t know how you manage it,” Liam said, shaking his head as a low chuckle rumbled from his chest.

“I manage this family with the wisdom, grace, and know-how of a professional, Liam. You’d do well to remember that.”

He muttered to himself some things she couldn’t hear, but then he squared his shoulders and grew serious. “Look, Gran, as long as you promise not to interfere anymore, I will keep your secret.”

“When you say interfere -,”

“Gran, leave this to Killian. He needs to do this himself. Please.”

“All right dear, I will leave it alone.”

“Good. And you and Mum better not be planning anything like this for me.”

“You really think there’s just another woman who happens to be at the institute who would also be perfect for you?”

“No,” Liam laughed, forgetting the promise he asked for in the face of what he saw as a lunatic notion. Little did he know there was such a woman, and the ball was already in motion on that front as well. Still Eleanor did everything she could to shield that from him, attempting to appear the frazzled grandmother instead of a scheming assistant to cupid. Before he could press her further, a knock sounded at the door, Jefferson appeared, and Liam was called away. “We’ll finish this discussion later.”

“Not bloody likely,” she whispered under her breath and Liam raised a brow.

“What was that?”

“Nothing, dear. Nothing at all.”

Post-Note: Okay so there we have it. I keep making these chapters so much longer than I think I will, but there’s just so much I want to accomplish. I know it would have been better for everyone’s anxiety levels if I had Killian and Emma talk things out in this chapter but there simply was not time. Not to worry though, next week’s installment will definitely have that and I think you’ll all forgive me for my slight cliff hanger when you read the next chapter. Anyway, I would love to hear what you all are thinking and I appreciate every comment and review and message you guys have sent the past few weeks. It’s so awesome to have you all with me in this and I genuinely hope you’ll stick around to see what’s coming next. Anyway thanks so much for reading and have a great rest of your weekend! -Emily

#captain swan #captain swan fic #captain swan ff #captain swan au #cs fic #cs ff #cs au #cs fluff #cs angst #cs royals #cs royals au #prince killian #killian jones #emma swan #the whole storybrooke gang #ouat au #feels like this #feels like this au #feels like this 6

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thecatprince · 4 years

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Stages and Stars

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Read on AO3

Relationships: Eventual Prinxiety and Eventual Logicality

Warnings: None

Summary: Roman auditions for a musical, meets a kind stranger and bonds with Logan over books.

Authors Notes: Sorry for the long wait guys. All the support is wonderful though! I hope you like this chapter.

Reblogs > Likes

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Chapter Four - The Library

Roman entered the town theatre hall, butterflies in his stomach. He knew that once he got on stage he would be perfectly fine, but right now he had pre-audition nerves. He held the flier for the audition and a sheet with his details on it. The local theatre company was doing Wicked this spring and Roman wanted nothing more than to be a part of it.

He sat down where instructed by the young lady sitting at a table and looked around. About 20 or so other people were waiting, all with sheets like the flier instructed. There were a couple of women about the same age as Roman, several men who looked a lot older than him and a few other people, young and old. Roman waited patiently until his name was called, nerves building in his stomach.

He always had a decent amount of confidence in his acting, and this was no different. He knew once he got up on stage he would be fine. More than fine, he would be fantastic. He took a deep breath to calm his nerves.

When his name was called Roman got up and entered the audition room. It was a large room off the hallway, opposite to the main theatre space. In the middle of the room there were three people sitting at a table. The lady in the middle gave him a large grin, the man on the right nodded at him kindly and the woman on the left gave him a small smile. Encouraged by this, Roman handed them his sheet with his details and the pianist his sheet music and then began to sing.

As Roman sang, all of his nerves began to melt away. He always felt the most confident when singing or acting, or just being on stage, and this was no exception. He made his way through the song with minimal mistakes and left the audition room feeling rather exhilarated. The lady at the table in the hallway said the casting list would be up in 7 days and that he would also receive an email letting him know if he got in. Roman left with a smile on his face, his confidence boosted by his performance. In this moment he didn’t care whether or not he got in, or whether he only got ensemble, it was a joy to perform again after the stress of moving.

Roman walked through the town, wrapping his coat around himself more firmly as a chilly breeze swept through. He caught sight of the local library, somewhere he had been meaning to check out ever since he moved here, and thought that now would be the perfect time, as a respite from the cold.

Roman entered the library and was immediately hit with the warmth from the building and the smell of books. It was his favourite smell in the world, and if he could bottle it he would. As it was, he tried to savour the scent as much as he could. He took off his coat and tied it around his waist to avoid overheating, and started to peruse the shelves. Roman could never get enough of books. He had always been an avid reader, devouring books when he was younger as a way to escape the horrors and hardships that plagued the real world. He loved being able to disappear into different worlds, to be able to join in the battles alongside his favourite characters, to watch the journeys of the people in the stories, to believe in the magic of worlds other than his own. Roman’s imagination was his limit and it was fuelled from the stories he read and the plays he performed.

Roman let his finger run across the spines of the books on the shelves. This library had a surprisingly good selection, and he saw a bookshop near the cinema that he would have to check out as soon as he could. He picked out a couple, and then a couple more and more and more. He knew he might not be able to get through them all before they were due to be returned, but he didn’t care, for the more the better. He couldn’t see where he was going over the pile of books he had in his arms and so it was inevitable he would bump into someone. Luckily the man he did bump into was very kind, and helped him pick up the books that had fallen out of his arms.

“I’m so sorry,” Roman said for about the fifth time as they picked up all of the books on the ground. The man just smiled.

“There is absolutely nothing to be sorry for. These are a lot of books, I am not surprised you bumped into someone.”

“Still, it was rather rude of me to bump into you and you have my sincerest apologies.”

“It’s cool, but I will accept your apology,” said the man with a chuckle. He extended his hand for Roman to shake. “My name is James.”

“Roman.”

“What a name! It is very nice to meet you Roman. So, I can see you like reading.”

“Yeah! Reading and acting, basically anything that can help tell a story. I love being able disappear into a world other than our own,” Roman said, smiling enthusiastically.

“You like acting?”

“Like is a bit of an understatement. I live for it. There is nothing I love more than the thrill of the stage. Sorry, I don’t know why I am telling you this.”

“No problem. I love acting as well, so I get it. It is very nice to meet a fellow actor. There were some auditions this week for a new show, did you go?”

“Yes I did! I actually just came from an audition. I gave it my best shot and even if I am just ensemble that would be fantastic. I think it is really cool that there is a local theatre community here!”

“I auditioned as well, so maybe you and I will be in a show together.” James handed Roman the last of the books. Roman smiled.

“Looking forward to it!” he said.

The two men stood up, Roman now holding all of the books he had dropped. “Here, take my bag to put the books in. We don’t want you bumping into any more strangers do we?” Roman gave a slight chuckle and took the bag that James had offered him. “Thanks.” James gave Roman a small wave, and Roman watched him go, a smile on his face. Roman turned around to continue down the aisle and almost bumped straight into another person. Except this person was very familiar. “Logan?”

“Oh, Roman, hello.” Logan greeted. “Weren’t you going to an audition?”

“Yeah, I just came back from it. What are you doing here?” Roman asked, then realised that there was really only one main reason to come to a library. Logan gave him an accordingly confused look, evidently thinking the same thought, and gestured to the books on the shelves. “Right, that was a stupid question. Ignore that. Anyway, I didn’t peg you for fiction type, nerd.” Logan gave an amused laugh. “I’m not normally, but I thought I would at least look at the selection. I came here to see what astronomy books the library had. Unfortunately, that particular section is particularly small, but I did find a couple of books I found interesting. I must admit, I am a bit surprised by the amount of books you have there, but you have mentioned an interest in reading in the past. Do you have a bag for those books?”

“Yep.” Roman responded, showing the bag in his hand. He placed the books on the ground and starting putting them in the bag. “Reading has always been my passion. That and acting. I just love being able to escape into another world!”

“Interesting. I love books for the information they are able to convey. Fictional works have never really grabbed my attention in the same way, but it would make sense that someone like you would like them,” Logan stated.

“What do you mean someone like me?”

“Well, you have tendency to be dramatic and over the top and you look and act a bit like you came straight out of a Disney movie. I was merely observing that way you act means that an assumption one may make about you is a love of fiction, specifically fantasy, although I could be wrong,” Logan said calmly, as if the whole matter was simply a case of obvious deduction.

“I mean, you aren’t wrong. I do love fantasy, and Disney is a passion of mine. Have you by any chance read any murder mysteries?”

“No. Why?”

“You are giving me serious Sherlock Holmes vibes at the moment. I have a feeling you would like them. Especially Holmes, but I am sure you would probably like Poirot. Here,” Roman said, walking down the aisle towards the crime and mystery section. Roman picked out a couple of books and handed them to Logan with a smile. Logan took them and read the blurbs of each. “These are some of the best detective novels I have read. The Hound of the Baskervilles, one of the most famous Sherlock Holmes books, which I think you will enjoy. Then we have The Murder On the Orient Express and The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, both Hercule Poirot books by Agatha Christie. These are two of her best, although And Then There Were None is said to be her best work, although I prefer these two. Anyway, I think you will enjoy these,” Roman finished, with a smile on his face.

Logan gave the books consideration. They couldn’t hurt to read, and detective novels were generally rooted in science and logic, two things he loved. He nodded, and Roman gave him an enthusiastic smile. The two checked their books out and walked back home in the cold, carrying their books with them.

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#cat writes #stages and stars au #prinxiety #logicality #sanders sides fanfic #human au #ask to tag

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gatheringbones · 4 years

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Janelle M. Lavelle, “Turning The Glass Corner: Southern Sensibilities & Dykely Connectedness”, from Finding the Lesbians: Personal Accounts From Around the World, The Crossing Press, 1988:

["One ritual for dyke connecting is this kind of indirect, gradual establishment of "guilt"-by-association. Names, places, activities of an increasingly obvious nature are offered by each party, tit-for-tat, as trust builds: a carefully-danced step, individual to individual, touching ever so gently on shared connectors. Such skills are especially important to develop because many traditional avenues of conjunction like organizations and liberal social groups seldom work for meeting people here. The last Social Movement that successfully developed here was the formation of the Confederacy; it didn't work, the participants got burned, and southerners haven't trusted any idea that involves assembling more than ten people since.

The few groups that have struggled here are seldom fertile lesbian ground. Our National Organization for Women (NOW) chapter, for instance, was hopelessly homophobic for most of its existence (that seems, thank heavens, to have finally changed). They knew who I was; but they were profoundly uncomfortable when I appeared as an open lesbian, particularly with other open lesbians, at any of their events.

Such dyke-fearing groups seldom function as a bridge. But on one occasion, even NOW pulled through. The group's president called me one day, circling like a dog looking for a place to sleep as she told me about a woman, a recent transplant from Indiana, who had contacted her the night before. The woman was having "trouble with her roommate," the NOW lady said, "and you seem to know a lot of people with roommates...." Her voice trailed off into a panic. I feigned ignorance for a few minutes to see how awkward a place she would work herself into. Her embarrassment seemed so bottomless, however, that guilt got the better of me and I helped her out by explaining that the answer was yes, I am a lesbian, and that she could give the Indiana lady my phone number if she wanted to.

She hung up in a grateful rush. The Indiana woman, accustomed to NOW chapters that were melting pots of lesbian sensibility, was indeed having "roommate trouble": her middle-aged lover of twelve years had taken up with a 19-year-old rugby player. She turned out to be quite pleasant despite the angst of the break-up, eventually accustomed herself to southern life quite well, and is still a friend.

Other unlikely means for beaming across the Carolina distances for contact with friendly women exist. Accepting a southern identity as a lesbian means many things, not the least of which is a respect for other people's limitations. We are graced with an easy intertwining life here that women in other parts of the country struggle daily to achieve. Sometimes such complex associations seem like a gift; other times it feels, as one friend says, more like living with bees in one's head— too tight, too confining, too hard to escape the stupidities of one's past because reminders (both human and non) constantly surround us. Everyone really does know everyone else around here.

This interconnectedness does have one important advantage: non-lesbian people, male and female, are a primary source for finding new and exciting dykes. Gay men, for instance, have been invaluable: my male Front Page editor has connected me to at least 30 wonderful new women of every imaginable lesbian description in the last year, often with me kicking and screaming about how I'm just "too shy" to call a total stranger on the phone about some lesbian news story. "CALL HER," he finally insists, demanding some woman's deathless comments on a pending story. It works every time.

Gay men are essential for snagging invitations to the most interesting parties; for supplying useful gossip about which female flower-shop patrons send flowers to other women with "love" and "forever" in the note; and for escorting lost lady lab technicians, whose sexual identity is in the formative stages, to post-theater restaurant dinners. Patricia, my Significant Other, often inspires a unique protectiveness and love in otherwise shallow fey young men. They reward her by taking her under wing and introducing her to other shy women who will benefit from a totally non-threatening lesbian presence (we call this her "lost puppy" ministry).

A fact of life in the Carolinas is that most gay organizations involved in useful, as opposed to merely social, activities are sexually integrated. This is always a horrific shock to women who come here from Smith College demanding female-only groups. We natives have to explain patiently, as often as necessary, that the transplants are going to have to learn to appreciate gay men’s particular virtues on some level, or their lives will be sadly limited. Gay men love to matchmake, are often better at spotting dykes than dykes themselves (conversely, I myself have yet to err in a suspicion about a potentially gay man; maybe one sex can smell that the other ain't the least interested), and will feed a person if she's broke if she will exert herself to be moderately entertaining. In the south, at least, gay men are an all-around useful concept.

Another important factor in forming lesbian associations here is non-gay women. Soon after I left my husband, a straight woman friend named Lola met me at the only predominantly-female bar in town. She liked to dance without getting hit on by leeches, so she periodically visits the gay nightspots. Having only recently been cured of my bout with the heterosexual virus, I did not know a soul there, so Lola introduced me around the place. The female bartender, in a state of passive lust for Lola's motherly body and bedroom eyes, was eager to believe that any friend of Lola's was de facto a friend of hers. She presented me to the other regulars, thus vouching for my acceptability, and the group of us eventually formed a loose confederation we called Phi Nu Delta (Friday Night Dykes) to support us through the early 1980s when Reagan took over and life as we knew it seemed in increasing jeopardy. (...)

None of these approaches rates high on the Political Correctness scoreboard. But there is a special radicalism in treating dyke-finding like any other social interaction. By insisting through our behavior that lesbianism falls within the wide realm of southern eccentricity, dykedom becomes part of the unique southern dailiness that allows life here to flow more mellowly than in colder climes.”]

#lesbian literature #janelle m. lavelle #history stuff #terra preta

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thecoleopterawithana · 5 years

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The Beatles and Dysfunctional Family Roles

Humans are social animals. When one lives in a group, each has a part to play. A role in this great play that is life, if you will.

All the worlds a stage,

And all the men and women merely players:

They have their exits, and their entrances;

And one man in his time plays many parts.

— William Shakespeare, As You Like It, Act II, Scene VII.

These sets of adequate behaviors are determined by the expectations of everyone around us, eventually becoming internalized through socialization. This means that the role we play is also context-dependent, and should change and adapt according to different times and spaces. It’s only when we become too fixed in certain dynamics that there is a problem.

Humans are master profilers. We have to quickly know what role our scene-partner is playing, after all. Furthermore, we also have a tendency to generalize. To forget that these are merely parts and others and ourselves are much more complex than the character they present at any given situation.

Thus, humans are masters at creating tags (long before the ‘hash’ prefixed it). Each Beatle member has been attributed, from their very first days under the public gaze, a very specific part: the Smart One, the Cute One, the Quiet One and the Funny One.

Like most labels, they are informative to a degree, which becomes limiting when one assumes that’s all there is to know. And even though there were infinitely complex individuals behind these fan nicknames, it’s curious how even within the band, in the privacy of their hotel rooms, these four young men fell into a very structured dynamic with very specific roles (which with time became stifling).

But it is wise to remember that the Beatles were more than a band.

They were a family.

This was something that they always identified with very keenly. They were brothers. (Of course, on top of this dynamic, John and Paul had the added complexity of also feeling like they were married.)

But for now, let’s look upon them as the children that they were: four brothers in one big adventure. It probably pays to follow their self-denomination and examine what part each member played in this dynamic. And because I used the word “dysfunctional” in the title, let’s first establish what it entails.

One of the main distinguishers between healthy and dysfunctional family dynamics is just how fixed these structures are.

In any given family the individual members fulfill and act out roles….

While in healthy, functional families these roles are generally fluid, change over time, in different circumstances, at particular events and are age and developmental appropriate, in dysfunctional families the roles are much more rigid.

In a healthy family members are integrated and various parts may surface at different times at no threat to the family system. In functional families the roles are interdependent.

The various roles in a healthy family are parts of every person….

Healthy families in general retain functionality when individual members ‘leave’ the family system through ‘moving out’, starting their own families or even death of an individual member.

By contrast,

In dysfunctional families the roles are almost a form of continuity or stability of the family system, stifling development….

Members must submerge parts of their personalities and take on a role so they are less of a threat to the family system that must be kept in place. In the case of a dysfunctional family all the roles are characterized as co-dependent.

In a dysfunctional family each member takes a role, and/or is assigned one, to make up the whole which is the family. Rather than a family of fully (yet age appropriate) persons, the family system gears to create just one: the family itself.

In dysfunctional family systems when an individual member leaves, this creates an (almost) irreparable hole in the existing system… This is why dysfunctional families are often so enmeshed. The system needs all members to function as a unit, not as a community.

— “Healthy vs Dysfunctional Family Roles”, Out Of The Storm.

It displeases me to dish out a diagnosis, for the line between healthy and unhealthy is often quite subtle.

But it’s hard not to argue that at times the Beatles tended towards the rigidity of a dysfunctional family. They have the resulting tensions and fallouts to prove it. Just the simple premise that the stability and continued existence of the family unit (the band) was more important than the wants and needs of its individual members is a sign of how prone they were to imprisoning themselves for the good of the whole.

In 1981 Weischeider identified five archetypes that children are assigned, originally relating to her work with alcoholic families. Since then the terms have evolved to cover other types of dysfunctional family systems: including the presence of other kinds of addictions; untreated mental health illnesses; sexual or physical abuse; fundamentalism or rigid dogmatism.

But what are these Dysfunctional Family Roles?

The Golden Child (The Hero)

This family member devotes his/her time and attention to making the family look “normal” and without problems. The Hero can mask or make up for the dysfunctional home life. Over-responsible and self-sufficient they are often perfectionistic, are over-achievers and look very good - on the outside. The parents look to this child to prove that they are good parents and good people. Their goal in life is to achieve “success”, however that has been defined by the family; they must always be “brave and strong”. The Hero’s compulsive drive to succeed may in turn lead to stress-related illness, and compulsive over-working. They learn at a young age to suffer the sadness of a parent and become a surrogate spouse or confidante.

While The Hero saves the family by being perfect and making it look good, the golden child may struggle to live up to his status. In a Narcissistic Personality Disordered (NPD) family, The Golden Child is the recipient of all the narcissistic parent’s positive projections, and is their favourite child. The golden child is usually victim of emotional and (covert) sexual abuse by the narcissistic parent. (S)He is also witness to, and sometimes takes part in, the other children’s abuse. Many specialists believe that witnessing your sibling’s abuse is as damaging as receiving it.

The Caretaker (The Enabler)

Another descriptive word for this type of codependent family role is “the Caretaker.“ This is also a role a child can fulfill, especially in case the other parent/caregiver has not resigned to enable the dysfunctional Addicted or Narcissististic parent. The Enabler feels like they have to keep the family going. Over and over they take on the addict’s problems and responsibilities.

The Enabler is the martyr of the family, and often supports not only the dysfunctional behavior, but also a prime enforcer of the codependent roles that everyone else is required to play.

You often see this role in a family where the functioning of (one of) the parent(s) is impaired in some way, i.e. mental illness, substance abuse or a medical disability. This child will attempt function as the surrogate parent. They worry and fret, nurture and support, listen and console. Their entire concept of their self is based on what they can provide for others.

The Enabler protects and takes care of the problem parent so that the parent is never allowed to experience the negative consequences of his or her actions. The Enabler feels he or she must act this way, because otherwise, the family might not survive. The paradoxical thing about The Enabler’s behavior is that by preventing the dysfunctional parent’s crisis, he or she also prevents the painful, corrective experience that crisis brings, which may be the only thing that makes the dysfunctional parent stop the downward spiral of addiction…

[Note: The Caretaker is often the “intra-familial counterpart” of The Golden Child, which can overlap and be played by the same person.]

The Problematic Child (The Scapegoat)

The Scapegoat is the “problem child” or the “trouble maker”. This family member always seems defiant, hostile and angry. The Scapegoat is the truth-teller of the family and will often verbalize or act out the "problem” which the family is attempting to cover up or deny. This individual’s behavior warrants negative attention and is a great distraction for everyone from the real issues at hand. The Scapegoat usually has trouble in school because they get attention the only way they know how - which is negatively. They can be very clever, may develop social skills within his or her circle of peers, and become leaders in their own peer groups. But often the groups that they choose to associate with are groups that do not present healthy relationships. The relationships he or she experiences tend to be shallow and inauthentic.

The Scapegoat is sacrificed for the family. The Scapegoat will be the “identified patient”. Scapegoats come in many different flavors, but two common ones are: 1) the picked, weak or sick child; or, 2) the angry, rebellious problem child who is constantly getting into conflicts. They are often self-destructive, cynical and even mean.

In an NPD family, The Scapegoat, or no good child is the recipient of the narcissist’s negative projections. They can never do anything right. The name ‘rebel’ implies that the child has chosen this role, which is debatable. The Scapegoat is usually victim of emotional and physical abuse by the narcissistic parent.

The Quiet One (The Lost Child)

The Lost Child is usually known as “the quiet one” or “the dreamer”. The Lost Child is the invisible child. They try to escape the family situation by making themselves very small and quiet. (S)He stays out of the way of problems and spends a lot of time alone. The purpose of having a lost child in the family is similar to that of The Hero. Because The Lost Child is rarely in trouble, the family can say, “He’s a good kid. Everything seems fine in his life, so things can’t be too bad in the family.”

This child avoids interactions with other family members and basically disappears. They become loners, or are very shy. The Lost Child seeks the privacy of his or her own company to be away from the family chaos. Because they don’t interact, they never have a chance to develop important social and communication skills. The Lost Child often has poor communication skills, difficulties with intimacy and in forming relationships. They deny that they have any feelings and "don’t bother getting upset.” They deal with reality by withdrawing from it.

In an NPD family, The Lost Child just doesn’t seem to matter to the narcissist, and avoids conflict by keeping a low profile. They are not perceived as a threat or a good source of supply, but they are usually victim of neglect and emotional abuse.

The Clown (The Family Mascot)

The goal of The Family Mascot is to break the tension and lighten the mood with humor or antics. (S)He is usually “the cute one.” This child feels powerless in the dynamics which are going on in the family and tries to interrupt tension, anger, conflict, violence or other unpleasant situations within the family by being the court jester. The Mascot seeks to be the center of attention in the family, often entertaining the family and making everyone feel better through his or her comedy. They may also use humor to communicate and to confront the family dysfunction, rather than address it directly. They also use humor to communicate repressed emotions in the family such as anger, grief, hostility or fear. This behavior is lighthearted and hilarious, just what a family twisted in pain needs — but the mascot’s clowning is not repairing the emotional wounds, only providing temporary balm. The rest of the family may actually try to protect their “class clown”. The Mascot is often busy-busy-busy. They become anxious or depressed when things aren’t in constant motion. The Mascot commonly has difficulty concentrating and focusing in a sustained way on learning, and this makes school or work difficult. (Hence they also referred to as “The Slacker”.)

They often have case loads rather than friendships - and get involved in abusive relationships in an attempt to “save” the other person. They have very low self-worth and feel a lot of guilt that they work very hard to overcome by being really “nice” (i.e. people pleasing, classically codependent) people.

— “Dysfunctional Family Roles”, Out Of The Storm.

Since then a sixth type is sometimes also considered:

The Manipulator (The Mastermind)

The Manipulator takes their experience of their hostile environment and uses it to their advantage. They capitalise on the family situation and play family members against each other. This individual will quickly become adept at recognising what the actual problem the parent suffers from. They’ll understand which one is the enabler, and which one is co-dependent.

Manipulators exercise this knowledge to control and influence family members. They’ll do it covertly, not directly. They never want to get caught. Gradually, they’ll learn what triggers the parents and their siblings and they will take shots at all of them…

Manipulators can turn into bullies, those who harass people and get a kick out of it. They are unable to form healthy relationships. If they are in one, they will be controlling with a partner who has low self-esteem.

They will only think of themselves and what they can get out of others. They feel that the world owes them for their lousy childhood and will go about getting it by any means.

— “6 Dysfunctional Family Roles People Take without Even Knowing”, Learning Mind.

It is not always clear-cut what role each member has been assigned, and the positions can change over time (normally as a result of the loss of one of the members). But people are inherently complex and multi-faceted. They have within themselves bits of each archetype. The unhealthy factor derives from the attempt to fit and perform one single one-dimensional role.

For example, John clearly acted up The Problematic Child publicly, but privately he also certainly had elements of The Dreamer; not only on the sense of being imaginative and introspective but also in his tendency for escapism and withdrawing from reality.

Also, when the fear and pain affected him the most, he became desperate enough to play The Manipulator. He did this from early on, but with the help of Yoko (who I now think, as a result of her particularly difficult childhood, became a “primary” Mastermind herself) he became even more effective at it from 1968 onwards.

JOHN: I did a job on this banker that we were using, and on a few other people, and on the Beatles.

Q: What?

JOHN: How do you describe the job? You know, you know, my job – I maneuver people. That’s what leaders do, and I sit and make situations which will be of benefit to me with other people, it’s as simple as that. I had to do a job to get Allen in Apple. I did a job, so did Yoko.

YOKO: You do it with instinct, you know.

JOHN: Oh. God, Yoko, don’t say that. Maneuvering is what it is, let’s not be coy about it. It is a deliberate and thought-out maneuver of how to get a situation the way we want it. That’s how life’s about, isn’t it, is it not?

— The “Lennon Remembers” interview, by Jann Wenner for Rolling Stone (8 December 1970).

In regards to the occupied archetypes, often one member has to fulfill more than one role. But because the structures are incredibly rigid, they can only perform one role at a time. This can cause even more internal stress as a result of not knowing which facet is being demanded of them at any given time.

Paul seems to have needed to balance being both The Golden Child and The Caretaker. This could explain his apparently parental role, alternatively characterized as masculine (Paul being a God/Father-Figure) or feminine (Paul being called the mother of the group). The gendered side of it relates more to society’s associations with these responsibilities (being “successful, brave and strong” = father’s job; taking care, “worry and fret, nurture and support, listen and console” = mother’s job), than I believe was ever consciously played by Paul himself. He just had a responsibility void to fill and he did it.

It is also crucial to understand that these dysfunctional dynamics are “transgenerational.” Meaning that “individuals reared in dysfunctional families tend to gravitate toward 'dysfunctional’ partners and create dysfunctional families of their own.”

This leads me to believe that it’s very likely that the Beatles replicated a dysfunctional family when they got together because they each individually came from dysfunctional families of their own. Or rather, one of the reasons why the Beatles got together in the first place was because they each came from dysfunctional families of their own, and thus were attracted to individuals who shared these patterns.

I loved my association with John and Paul because I had something in me which I recognized in them—which they must have or could have recognized in me, which is why we ended up together. And it was just great knowing there’s somebody else in life who feels similar to yourself.

— George Harrison, interviewed by Alan Freeman for BBC Radio 1 (6 December 1974).

Maybe this is why John, Paul, and George were such a strong front-line on their own but needed Ringo, and not Pete Best, to finally complete the set.

It may also be another factor as to why John and Paul bonded so tightly, as Paul knew how to “handle” John and John wanted to be taken care of. (There is of course much more to the dynamic; this is just one of its possible facets, which was at risk of becoming draining and a source of tension when to fixed in this co-dependent state.)

Again, it is hard to make an objective evaluation of the dysfunctionality of the Beatles’ biological families. There wasn’t so much awareness of the unhealthiness of some dynamics at the time, so many of the participants may even lack the words (or the will) to describe them. But the symptoms seem to be present. I believe that alone makes it worth looking for a potential cause.

Also, these attempts to create fixed dynamics for the stability of the family unit all seem to happen as a response to the inner inconstancy and instability of the forces governing the unit itself (normally the dysfunctional parental figure, but maybe can be extended to the life-circumstances themselves). For example, could severe financial instability be enough to create these patterns?

Either way, we can find in the Beatles’ childhood sources of dysfunction easily enough.

One that makes a common and expected appearance, in a liquor-filled Liddypool, was drinking, particularly in Ringo and John’s childhoods.

Ringo

Johnny Starkey would play a crucial role in the raising of his grandson, and by all accounts he was a full-on “wacker” (a much-used word for working-class Liverpool men and boys), being a drinker, laborer, gambler and brawler.

— On Ringo’s grandfather, John Starkey. In Mark Lewishon’s Tune In (2013).

Elsie, Harry, relations, friends and workmates would drink and sing through the evening until closing time, and then, well bevvied, tumble into Elsie and Richy’s tiny terraced house where the party carried on—more singing, more drinking, more swearing, Johnny and Annie Starkey on banjo and mandolin, the steam rising ever higher into the night… The boy would always remember singing at home “not in front of a coal fire but in front of a bottle of gin and a large bottle of brown,” emphasizing the point that, as many children have experienced down the years, the bond of good-time music and booze was significant. Years later, he would admit, “My parents were alcoholics and I didn’t realize it.”

— On Ringo’s childhood. In Mark Lewishon’s Tune In (2013).

Dingle people actually had much in common with cockneys. Both were poor and working-class, both were predominantly English/Protestant, both suffered terrible bombing at the hands of the Germans, and both liked a good drink and boozy sing-song. One big reason Harry fit right at home in Liverpool 8 was because he liked nothing better than to go to the pubs and clubs, get a few ales inside him and sing.

— On Ringo’s stepfather, Harry Arthur Graves. In Mark Lewishon’s Tune In (2013).

Richy took the job because he still harbored hopes of joining the merchant navy… But the job also had another attraction: booze. Richy was now a confirmed drinker. Regular exposure to alcohol in and around the home was an influence, and it was what many boys did anyway, swear and smoke and drink at the first opportunity.

— On Ringo’s second job at the tramp steamer St. Tudno. In Mark Lewishon’s Tune In (2013).

John

He was an ale drinker, but once he started drinking he’d drink anything. If there was a bottle, he’d stay with it.

— On John’s father, Alf Lennon, as told by close friend Billy Hall. In Mark Lewishon’s Tune In (2013).

Alf Lennon didn’t begin the new decade very well either. The Dominion Monarch docked at Tilbury before Christmas, after which he tomfooled around London with a few shipmates, waiting for it to sail again in mid-January. Alcohol was surely a fixture, opening time to closing with bottles between sessions…

— On John’s father, Alf Lennon, as told by close friend Billy Hall. In Mark Lewishon’s Tune In (2013).

John’s time with Julia was also complicated by the presence of “Twitchy.” His relationship with Bobby Dykins was not all bad but neither was it particularly rosy. Pete Shotton isn’t the only person to recall him as an alcoholic…

— On John’s “step-father”, Bobby “Twitchy” Dykins. In Mark Lewishon’s Tune In (2013).

John, of course, had the added factors of possible mental illness in his mother, and the abandonment by his parental figures (Alf, Julia and Uncle George).

Paul

Paul also had the loss of his mother and all the upheaval it brought. I’ve talked before how I thought the suddenness of Mary’s death and Jim’s inability to be visibly strong enough in the face of it, made Paul feel like he could not rely on the people around him to always be there, and that he needed to protect himself and be independent.

But now I wonder if there weren’t other possible sources of instability, that made him feel the need to take on responsibility even more strongly:

Though given such a strong foundation, Jim could not be spared from a further vice. For Jim McCartney was something of a gambling man, fond of betting on the horses. He once got badly into debt, though for reasons that at least had motives other than selfishness; his mother, Florence McCartney, who was capable of coupling a strongly matriarchal role with a fondness for humor of a most prurient nature, was badly in need of a holiday.

— In Chris Salewicz’s McCartney (1986).

Jim McCartney also enjoyed a drink, but would never permit himself to become so intoxicated that he was no longer in control of his own actions. That he should always maintain his self-respect was one of the principles of his existence, and one which he later passed on to his sons.

— In Chris Salewicz’s McCartney (1986).

The McCartneys had money worries. After the war, Jim’s job at the armaments factory ended and he returned to the cotton exchange, as a salesman for A. Hannay and company, but the war had changed everything; the cotton market was in chaos, and lie was lucky to bring home £6 a week. It meant that Mary also had to work and it was always a cause of slight embarrassment that she earned a higher wage than he.

— In Barry Miles’ Many Years From Now (1997).

Yet the education that Jim McCartney offered his sons was not always conventional; they couldn’t help but notice his inability to pass a slot machine without putting a coin in it, or the way he would give quadruple measures of undiluted alcohol to guests. Later, when the boys were in their teens, he would show them how to get away with drinking underage in pubs, slipping them the cash to buy rounds of drinks.

— In Chris Salewicz’s McCartney (1986).

Mum was a working nurse. There wasn’t a lot of money around – and she was half the family pay packet. My reaction was: ‘How are we going to get by without her money?’ When I think back on it, I think, ‘Oh God, what? Did I really say that?’ It was a terrible logical thought which was preceded by the normal feelings of grief. It was very tough to take.

— Paul McCartney, in Ray Coleman’s McCartney: Yesterday & Today (1996).

The boys went to stay with Jim’s brother Joe and his wife Joan, while friends and relatives tried to calm their distraught father, whose first thought was to join his wife.

— In Barry Miles’ Many Years From Now (1997).

A Hard Day’s Night had its London premiere on July 6, 1964, the day before Jim McCartney’s birthday… Then, as midnight chimed, Paul drew his father over to him. “Happy birthday, Dad,” he said, and produced a painting—perhaps the one mentioned to the Telegraph magazine—of a horse, which he handed to Jim.

“Thank you, son. Very nice,” muttered the somewhat confused father. (Later he was to tell Thomas Gaule about it. “I thought, ‘It’s very nice, but couldn’t he have done a bit better than that?’”). Then Paul revealed that this was a painting of the £1,050 racehorse, Drake’s Drum, that he had bought his father.

“You silly bugger,” was Jim’s joyous reply.

“My father likes a flutter [bet],” Paul said. “He’s one of the world’s greatest armchair punters.”

— In Chris Salewicz’s McCartney (1986).

Again, it’s hard to definitely label a situation problematic, but the impact it has on a developing person is more relative to how the person experienced it than to the experience itself. But perhaps Jim’s gambling habits, the family’s financial insecurity, Mary’s death, Jim’s consequent suicidal depression and/or possible self-medication with alcohol, all lead to the creation of an unreliable enough parent that the son had to occupy such roles.

Also, it would be remiss not to mention the use of bodily punishment during their upbringing, which made enough of an impression on the McCartney brother’s that Mike would mention it often and Paul would never speak of it; until the early 2000′s, when he remarked how his father hit him across the face at 16/17 and he finally stood up to him and dared Jim to do it again. (I am getting ready a post specifically on it, so I hope to explore this subject further there.)

George

George’s situation is a bit harder to tell. He seemed to be the one most aware and most averse to his title as The Quiet One. Maybe it’s because he felt it was ill-fitted. He wasn’t the quiet one after all, among his own family:

I found Harry reticent and quiet; Lou was loud, vivacious, not shy at all—there wouldn’t be silence in the room when she was there—and George was bubbly like his mum. They all bounced off each other and would do anything for anyone, and they all had a wonderful sense of humor, George especially. I threw a strop one day and threatened to walk to Budleigh Salterton. I stayed away a bit but all I really did was go to the loo and kill some time before coming back. After that, whenever George went to the loo he’d say, “I’m just off to Budleigh Salterton…”

— Jenny Brewers, a family friend. In Mark Lewishon’s Tune In (2013).

But maybe the silence was meant to be read as stoicism in his more public persona:

George was cool. He dressed as an individual and often to shock, to goad reactions—usually admiration from his peers and dismay from adults. He could be quiet, and sometimes grumpy, but he was always honest and never intimidated or afraid, standing up for himself verbally and physically. “He was cocky,” Paul would say, admiringly. “He had a great sense of himself. He wasn’t cowed by anything.”

— In Mark Lewishon’s Tune In (2013).

Whatever it was, George fit right in with the rest of them and easily slipped into his role, even if he was also the first to overtly buck against it. He clearly wanted to expand beyond these parts in a play they had created within the Beatles, these fixed dynamics for the greater good of the band, which he now felt stifled by:

Q: What was the conflict with Paul? I don’t understand.

GEORGE: It’s just a thing like, you know, he’d written all these songs for years and stuff, and Paul and I went to school together. I got the feeling that, you know, everybody changes and sometimes people don’t want other people to change, or even if you do change they won’t accept that you’ve changed. And they keep in their mind some other image of you, you know. Gandhi said, 'Create and preserve the image of your choice.’ And so different people have different images of their friends or people they see.

— George Harrison, interviewed by a New York City radio station (25 April 1970).

Perhaps the Beatles, the family unit, needed to collapse in order to free its members of the fixed dynamics they had built the band upon. Maybe it was time to grow and evolve beyond the images of the people they were when they met as teenagers. And because they were different, but their images of each other often didn’t match, there was tension.

Still, I don’t think this automatically means that it was impossible for them to ever be good friends again, work together again or even reform. Everything is possible if one just chooses so.

It would certainly be different. It would not be the same. But that would be good.

[This post was born out of conversations with the wonderful @ljblueteak and is an exploration of the concept introduced by Michael Gerber in the follow-up discussion to the Hey Dullblog entry “John and Paul, Friends and Rivals”.]

#We were a family #the beatles were just four guys that loved each other #johnny #macca #geo #ritchie #jim mccartney #mike mccartney #Alfred Lennon #introduction #elision #yoko ono #allen klein #meta #my stuff

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