#allusions to xenophobia

[newbornwhumperfly]

ruthlessness is mercy upon ourselves…

sorry for this day’s entry being late! i wasn’t happy with it for a while but perfection is the enemy of progress, so! here it is! i promise the next installments will be in quick succession, it’ll be a fun time for all 😈💖😈

whumptober2024 • day 3 • set up for failure • fingerprints | wrongfully arrested | “i warned you”

CW: blood, dehumanization, conditioned whumpee, allusions to xenophobia

title insp. by “ruthlessness” from epic: the musical

~

He knew it. 

He knew it, he knew it, he knew it, he fucking knew it. God fucking damnit. Jorah’s hands are steel-balls, every muscle coiled, spring-loaded, because he’s not fucking shaking. 

He’s not - he’s clear-headed and he has to be, doesn’t he, because nobody else in this goddamn base is. Nobody else is seeing or thinking or using their fucking brains because Morja is not in cuffs already (or, better, with a bullet in his head), just standing, standing, before their Captain’s desk, still soaking wet with Claudia’s blood.

“I warned you.” Jorah breathes, hands planted on Brax’s desk, knuckles bleach-white with holding himself still. “Captain, I asked you not to let him go without me, without a goddamn security expert-“

“There was an expert, Cuthbert.” The Captain breathes, their hands pressed flat on the fine wood grain of their desk, “The expert was Morja.” 

“And you thought- I’m sorry, you thought he’d be good enough?”

Claudia is in surgery, getting head stitches, and what if she dies- 

Jorah clamps down on the chilling twist in his stomach, all that cold going back to his veins. That’s not useful to think about right now, Sarai’s got her, she’ll be fine. She’ll live. She’d better live. 

Or Morja is dead. 

“Yes, Cuthbert, I used my discretion here. Morja was the only one who knew where the training facility would be.”

“And that wasn’t, maybe, suspect to you, did you not think of security, Captain?-“

“He was the best choice to keep everybody safe.”

Jorah reels, chest heaving, the sharp fire of rage pressing down on his lungs. He’s so betrayed. This is such a betrayal because the Captain is standing there, tall and pristine and behind that desk which represents their country, their title, and Jorah can’t believe that someone like them could be so stupid. How could they have made such an error?

“It was my call.” Jorah grits out. “I’m this base’s security liaison, I am second rank, I review all potential security threats, this motherfucker is a security threat-“

“Easy, Commander-“

“Brax, I- how else do you want me to put it, this is a fucking lapse in protocol, those are supposed to be my fucking calls to keep us safe!”

Jorah’s voice rising to a shout, his professionalism unraveling, hands emphasize his point by laying on the desk. It rattles, the trinkets rattling together, a cup in its saucer. Brax’s glasses flash, their glasses pushed up, as they stand fully behind their desk.

“If you are suggesting I had poor judgement, Cuthbert, I trusted everyone on that team.” 

Their voice is cold, sharp, and Jorah has gone maybe too far, he can see that, but they aren’t listening. Jorah can see those dark, sharp eyes keep glancing over Jorah’s shoulder, keep trying to seek out that rat fuck, why does Brax care what comes out of him? Is this balance? Is this trying to be fair, to be measured? Can’t they see the threat?

They aren’t listening. 

“Captain.” Jorah rears back, a stagger of a step, his eyes burning. Throat clicking. He goes to attention in respect for their station, but his head shakes back and forth, jaw spasming as he tries to unclench his jaw. 

“Captain?” His eyes blur as he blinks, frustration choking him, voice pitched soft, shaky. “You- you didn’t trust my judgement? You didn’t trust me?”

That makes Brax seem to remember themself, drawing themself up to full height, their expression, so tight and narrow-eyed, seems to falter. They reach out to him and Jorah pulls away, wounded. 

“Jorah, that isn’t why I didn’t consult you before they left-“

“I just wanted to keep my friends, my unit, safe, Captain.”

“I know that, Jorah, I know that and I would never have let them all go if I had known there would be this much danger.”

“He hurt Claudia.”

Jorah’s voice crests on a pitch of tension, cracks with rage, a frigid ocean storm frothing inside him, and Brax’s jaw tics visibly, sucking in their breath sharply. 

“…You don’t know that, Jorah.”

But they don’t sound so sure anymore, their eyes flicking from the asset, stock still as bloody stone, and him, and Jorah digs in, presses, urgent and hoarse, leans over the desk again to plead.

“Just ask him.”

They both spin but Jorah is watching Brax as their hand comes up to touch the gold wire of their glasses, to steady the frames again, peering at Morja with a look that makes even Jorah go still. Searching, probing, an excavation tool, razor sharp attention all on one object, one singular foci. There is a hardness to their mouth which means disappointment, pondering, doubt. 

“Morja?” 

Asset, Jorah wants to scream, but he bites his cheek somehow as the fucker thuds to his knees, filthy, on their beautiful carpet, whimpering like a dog when he folds, hands (the red blood barely dried, caked and browning) clasped crosswise in front,  playing dead. 

“Stand up, Morja, I’m talking to you.”

“I’msorryCaptain.”

As with their usual platitudes that grate, sugar on a broken tooth, Brax corrects his apology, a that’s alright, Morja, stomach-turning reassurance for a killing machine. The stains of small red fingerprints on the asset’s cheek, bright in the lamplight, make Jorah’s nostrils flare. Claudia’s handprints. 

Did she clutch at Morja before he bashed her over the head? Did she claw at him in self-defense? Jorah imagines Morja and his fucking scar-gnarled hands looming over her and he wants to put his boot against that throat and watch his fucking eyes bug as he crushes and crushes and crushes until he’s no longer playing at going limp.

“Morja, listen to me carefully. Are you responsible for Claudia’s wound?” 

Their icy calm could cut steel and even Jorah feels himself straighten up as the asset wheezes. 

“Y-Yes, Captain.”

Jorah warned them all. 

“Did you…try to harm her, Morja?”

“I’msosorry.”

“Morja, tell me you didn’t hurt her?”

“Yes- y-yes. Yes, Captain, s-sorry, was m-me.”

Brax’s hands slip into their waistcoat and Jorah is close enough to see their fingers clench into fists, rounded knuckles pressing against the silk. 

“What happened, Morja?” 

Their voice is so soft and Morja whines like a dog scratching at the door and Jorah wants to vomit.  The asset sways like he wants to collapse, silence stretching between them, taut and humming. He shakes his head, more a jerk of his chin, and lowers his chin to his chest. 

Look them in the fucking face. 

“I failed.”

His arm wraps around his stomach, head turned away, for all the world like a penitent child confessing his candy theft. Red handed. Sorry for being caught, blood still under his nails. 

“Cap-Captain, I- I am sorry. I am sorry for- for obeying my- the enemy, an- Captain, I didn’t know-“

Poorly trained dog with sharp jaws. 

“I just obeyed, I followed orders, and- I’m sorry, I tried to- I did hurt her, it is my f-fault, and I did try to- I didn’t want to hurt her, I did, I did-“

Rabid.

“Someone on the other side told you to hurt her?”

“Y-Yes, anotéros. Captain, I’m sorry.”

“Morja…who’s side are you on?”

Teeth at all of their throats.

“…Idon’tknow.”

A knock at the door makes them all startle, the silence spiderwebbing from the pressure of intrusion as Cobi steps into the room, Pfeffer still bloody, those big hands trembling, eyes red and swollen, streaming snot and tears that he keeps swiping away. 

Jorah’s chest spasms, cold, no-

Cobi catches his eyes and shakes his head, sniffling hard, using a heel of his palm to scrub at his cheek. 

“Sarai kicked me out, to- to work better.” He croaks. “I- Um. Dunno how she is yet, sorry, J-man. Just dunno yet.”

His lips are trembling, sniffling even harder, and Jorah cannot fucking handle any weakness right now, not from any quarter, spins to Brax, rigid attention and crisp readiness. The only one in this goddamn base who’s prepared to handle a goddamn difficulty. 

“What would you like me to do with him, Captain?”

Three sets of eyes flash to Jorah, the only source of clean and calm in the room. 

Brax tugs at the buttons of their vest, hands smoothing and adjusting, a magnet to Jorah’s lodestone, and when their jaw sets, he feels a surge of pride and relief that they’ve made the right choice.

“First Lieutenant Cuthbert, Private Pfeffer, Morja will be remanded into custody until further testimony from Private Williams i- when she awakes. Morja, please accompany them until further notice. We will get this figured out.”

The asset’s blank eyes go wide as he gasps a little whimper that Jorah and his tools could never wring out of him, face blossoming open in a look that Jorah doesn’t have to guess at: fear.

Good.

Motherfucker should be afraid - he should remember what he is. They should all remember what he is. It might be bittersweetly bought but now they will. Now they know that Jorah is right about him. 

~

oh no, what will happen to morja now, i wonder? 😨👀🥺

taglist: @much-ado-about-whumping @haro-whumps @whump-tr0pes @wolfeyedwitch @suspicious-whumping-egg

@i-eat-worlds @whumpzone @straighttothepain @whump-me-all-night-long @whumping-every-day

@whatgoeswhumpinthenight @stoic-whumpee @thingsthatgo-whump-inthenight @whumpthisway @redwingedwhump

@tears-and-lilies @kixngiggles @liliability @whumpsterdraganies @scoundrelwithboba

[goodqueenaly]

I’m rereading F&B and find myself very confused about Jaehaerys’s proposed marriage candidates? They either seem self serving (which, understandable) or utterly nonsensical to the point of harming J’s future rule Rogar’s choice: Archon of Tyrosh’s daughter (unnamed) to forge alliances across the narrow sea Maester Benifer: a daughter of a neutral great house Daemon Velaryon: Elinor costayne (show Maegor’s supporters were forgiven) and adopt her sons (?wut even?) I kind of understand Benifer’s idea, but the other ones seem doomed from the jump.

I don’t know why Tumblr ate this ask but anyway here we go.

I think there are some logical explanations, at least on a surface level, to a few of the mooted nuptial matches. Alyssa’s proposal to have Jaehaerys marry into one of “the houses who had risen in support of Aegon the Uncrowned in the Battle Beneath the Gods Eye” follows her stated desire at the opening of Jaehaerys’ reign for violent vengeance against Maegor’s supporters; if Alyssa truly believed that “[Maegor’s] entire reign was unlawful and those who had supported him were guilty of treason and must needs be put to death”, then the clearest expression of that belief was to reward the supporters of Aegon the Uncrowned with the greatest possible royal marriage. By contrast, Benifer’s idea to appeal to one of the recently neutral Houses underlined his desire to have the regime move on from the factionalism and civil war of Maegor’s reign - particularly understandable on Benifer’s part, considering he himself had served and then abandoned Maegor before being recalled to court by Jaehaerys. Rogar’s choice doesn’t seem particularly related to his, Rogar’s, goals otherwise - we don’t really see him trying to forge alliances with the Tyrosh or any other Free Cities, or understand why he might have wanted to build ties with Tyrosh - though I took this match as something of an authorial wink to both Dany and our Aegon. Alyssa’s point that “[t]he smallfolk of Westeros would never accept a foreign girl with dyed tresses as their queen” recalls the dyed hair our Aegon adopts to disguise his identity (ostensibly, indeed, to honor his supposed Tyroshi mother), which he wished to have rinsed out ahead of his meeting with Golden Company (that is, when he revealed himself to be, allegedly, a Targaryen prince); too, Alyssa’s allusion to the “delightful” Tyroshi accent of the Archon’s daughter may echo Dany’s own apparently Tyroshi accent (and, of course, her ambition to be a queen in Westeros, despite a lifetime spent almost completely in Essos). (This dispute may also be a hint to the xenophobia and alienation experienced by Larra Rogare during the Lysene Spring and her marriage to Prince Viserys.)

Now, yes, some of the matches are less explainable, except (to a limited extent, anyway) outside of blatant personal ambition. Indeed, given that the Tullys and Celtigars barley hid their motives for pushing their familial relations as potential brides for young Jaehaerys, I am more surprised that no other families attempted to shove their pretty daughters in front of the king and/or Rogar. Yet these potential brides pale in comparison to Elinor Costayne, who was for my money the strangest choice. The oddity of her candidacy is heightened by the fact that her sponsor was Daemon Velaryon, a man who did not appear to gain anything by her potential elevation as Jaehaerys’ queen. While the argument that “Queen Elinor’s proven fertility was another point in her favor” might have carried some weight (considering King Jaehaerys, the only male-line male Targaryen left, would presumably needed to father an heir sooner rather than later), and the suggestion that Jaehaerys adopt Elinor's sons by Theo Bolling mirrors Sharra Arryn’s offer to Aegon the Conqueror during the Targaryen Conquest - another king with no offspring or obvious male heir - I am still baffled as to why Lord Daemon, of all people, would have supported the choice of a woman so publicly associated with Maegor’s tyrannical reign for his nephew’s royal bride. Perhaps this was just par for the course with Daemon, considering he had previously suggested that Maegor marry his own niece: just as Daemon had argued that by marrying Rhaena, Maegor would “unite their claims, prevent any fresh rebellions from gathering around her, and acquire a hostage against any plots … [Alyssa Velaryon] might foment”, maybe Daemon believed that a marriage between Elinor and Jaehaerys would link Jaehaerys to the claim of Elinor’s late (second) husband and his own official predecessor, and/or prevent any remaining pro-Maegor factions from rallying around his (unmarried) widowed queen. Still, it’s largely a bizarre notion acceptable only in the brevity with which it is presented; the story barely lingers on it, so neither should we.

The real point, of course, is to present a bunch of equally unpalatable (to Jaehaerys personally, at least) options in order to contrast them with the young king’s “true love”, Alysanne (heavy air quotes here). Since GRRM could not specifically duplicate The Accursed Kings here with the Jaehaerys and Alysanne story (as he does otherwise with Alysanne) - only copying the supposed love match, not the political advantage the marriage brought to the boy’s mother or the revolution against a tyrant king - he instead goes full romance, the sort of love versus duty that the author so enjoys portraying. As any number of his descendants will later - Princess Baela, the future King Aegon V, and indeed his own namesake, the future King Jaehaerys II, among others - the young Jaehaerys I rejects a potential diplomatic or otherwise dutiful marriage arranged by another (or multiple others) in order to wed according to the dictates of his heart.

[decepti-thots]

🔥 - linguistics & fandom (if you've time/enthusiasm)?

Attempts to do fanon worldbuilding around linguistics for eg sci fi/fantasy settings often falls prey to what I call the '1984 problem' (when I call it this I am doing so very facetiously, don't take it too seriously lol, 1984 is wrong about its linguistics at times but it also gets flanderized in the pop cultural perception into something it isn't). This is where a lot of people without more than a passing knowledge of linguistics have a very outdated, unnuanced view of linguistic relativity that veers into simple determinism; so for example, the old 'if people do not have a word for something they are or become literally incapable of understanding it in any context' idea. This gets especially thorny when people move into territory like, say, 'if an fictional culture has a lot of words for aggressive things and none for peaceful things, this will make the people who speak it 'naturally' more aggressive' which. Hm. Let me put it this way: lotta real life xenophobia baggage regarding ethnocentrism in linguistic analysis to be unpacked there. Loooot of it. To put it lightly.

But more broadly, the temptation to make linguistic determinism a part of SFF worldbuilding, where language vaguely 'defines' thought in a very rigid way, is very very strong and it's easy to see why! It's a very easy cultural worldbuilding shortcut that gives you a straightforward way to communicate to your audience, with very little work, both how and why your aliens are so very alien. Not only does giving them some exaggerated quirk in their linguistic systems serve as an extremely easy way to exposit some Underlying Truth TM of their cultures (many works of fiction famously involve a lot of people talking to each other a lot of the time; it will come up), it also lets you explain why without going into complicated social dynamics underpinning your fictional society it might take pages and pages of historical exposition to convey (or, you know, a lot of work throughout to more carefully imply through constant allusion and careful integration into the story and characters' worldviews, which is famously really fucking hard to do).

But uh. it's also a) usually hilariously inaccurate to any and all mainstream knowledge of how languages work, so linguists Will roll their eyes at it, and also b) as above comes with a ton of very real historical-and-present baggage around the way language has been used as 'proof' of the 'inherent nature' of certain cultures, so like. I do not think you should do this, even with a knowing wink about how you are being a little silly. TBH. Anything implying that the language a culture speaks can make them Peaceful or Violent or Better or Worse, no matter how obviously fictional and weird, is saying something about how you think language as a thing works, whether you like it or not. Would prefer if fandoms' attempts to do little linguistic fanon thought exercises stayed far away from that, tbh.

[stillness-in-green]

On Riots and Resolutions (Part One)

So, I got, unsurprisingly, a lot of asks about the heteromorph riot mini-arc, both in terms of how it was presented in the story and how fandom (my own posts included) responded to it.  In turn, this gave me a lot to research before I started shooting my mouth off about either topic, hence this being as late as it is.  Thanks as always for your patience, everyone.

I had intended to make this one big ask round-up, but I ended up with a few offshoots that didn’t really fit as a response to anyone’s ask in particular, but nonetheless struck me as significant enough to share.  Therefore, rather than having this be an unwieldy ask post/meta mashup, I’m going to split it into two parts.

The first post will use one specific ask, the one that really sent me into the weeds research-wise, as a springboard to talk about what cultural factors might have influenced Horikoshi’s writing decisions about the hospital attack, as well as some discussion of how the Western fanbase talks about heteromorphobia.  I’ll be getting into that past the cut below; there will also be some links at the end for sources and further reading.

The second post—coming soon!—will contain all the rest of the asks, which are somewhat more scattershot in nature.

Both posts skew heavily towards meta analysis: they’ll be about Horikoshi’s context as a Japanese creator writing for Shonen Jump, and about how fans—myself included—have responded to the resulting material.   Obviously there will still be some references to the actual events in the manga, but it isn’t the main focus.  If you want my in-depth opinions on the sequence in question, you can find my very opinionated opinions in my chapter posts.

CONTENT WARNINGS: Discussion of real-life discrimination (racial and otherwise) both in Japan and elsewhere, the historical construction of race, and theoretical considerations about how the idea of race might have been impacted by the appearance of quirks in-universe.  Also, some brief allusions to overwork in Japanese office culture and its impact on people’s ability to engage in/with activism.

On that note, if you haven’t seen me say so before, I’m white as white gets, and obviously writing from a U.S. perspective as well.  I’ve done my best to do my reading and be respectful in my wording, and I did run everything past a non-white friend before posting, but please do let me know if you see anything offensive. Some of these topics are ones that I already know people of color have pretty divergent opinions on, though—I was following the fandom response to this arc quite closely!—so do be prepared to encounter some reads that may differ from your own.

Hit the jump!

So, this is the ask that I looked at and immediately thought, “Oh, I’m going to need to do significant reading before I even start thinking about a response to that.”  Most significantly, I wanted to research what Japan, a famously homogenous country, even thinks of the idea of race.  Do Japanese people conceptualize it the same way U.S. Americans do?  If they view it differently, how does that view color what they think about race-based discrimination?  How, in turn, might that have influenced Horikoshi’s writing, and how might a greater understanding of his (potential) lens affect our own interpretations?

Well, let’s take a look.

Horikoshi’s Context: Racism vs. Xenophobia, Protest Culture, and How To Fight Discrimination

Racism vs. Xenophobia

Having now done some reading, here’s a very key thing to keep in mind: the vast, vast majority of Japan does not actually think the country has an issue with race.  Even the people who do talk about the discrimination faced by the country’s various minority groups almost universally do so in terms of xenophobia rather than racism.

For my purposes here, xenophobia can be understood to mean the fear and/or hatred of foreigners and foreign influence/culture.  Racism, conversely, will be discussed mainly in the context of a) the belief in the idea of race as a fundamental determinant of human traits and capacities[1] and b) behaviors stemming from that belief, especially the notion of the inherent superiority or inferiority of races in comparison to one another.  Note that this definition is distinct from the idea of ethnicity and ethnic discrimination; I’ll get into what distinguishes race and ethnicity in the Western fandom portion of this post.

Now, of course, outside the realm of analytical essays, all these issues overlap hugely.  I’m going to be talking about them as relatively discrete issues for the purposes of considering the experiences of individual characters within Boku no Hero Academia, but certainly where you find one, you’re frequently likely to find the others.

That all said, let’s return to the idea that Japan doesn’t believe it has a racism problem.

The reason for that is complicated, and intensely historical, but what it boils down to is that there is a lot more to being viewed as “Japanese” than simply being born in Japan.  The majority opinion in Japan is that being Japanese means having Japanese ancestry,[2] speaking the language fluently, understanding the culture, being a citizen, and so on.  This very blurred view of race, ethnicity and nationality means that all sorts of things can “disqualify” someone from, as one researcher I read put it, “Japanese-ness.”  And if one isn’t Japanese (e.g. because they have Korean ancestry or Ainu ethnicity or an American parent or whathaveyou), then, voila!  Discrimination can’t be racism; it’s xenophobia.

Basically, the government’s official stance is that Japan is a homogenous country, so there are no racial minorities for them to be racially biased against.  All those hafu and Zainichi Koreans and Okinawans and so forth?  Well, they’re not really Japanese, so the discrimination they face is about nationality.  Poor Japan is just so insular; its people don’t always know how to deal with outsiders.  But it isn’t racism, because racism would mean Japanese people judging other Japanese people on the basis of race, like white Americans judge Black Americans on the basis of race!  And Japan only has the one race, Japanese, so it just isn’t possible for them to be racist.  Even people who go out of their way to study discrimination in Japan, writing academic papers and news articles, still tend to use this framing.

It took me a while to get my head around that fairly tortured logic, and I sometimes still lose the thread of it.  Now, I can’t read Horikoshi’s mind, so I have no idea what he would say if asked, but let me take Rock Lock as an example.  If he were a real dude living in real Japan, it wouldn’t matter that he has a perfectly standard Japanese name and was born in Tokushima Prefecture, nor that he speaks the language and understands the culture.  He has obviously Black features, which would lead most of the people around him to assume that he has non-Japanese ancestry, and therefore that he isn’t “really” Japanese.[3]  Ergo, the mistreatment would be considered xenophobia, not racism.

Consider, then, how that might impact Japanese heteromorphs.  They speak the language, they’re born in the country, they understand the culture, they have Japanese ancestry, they’re citizens of Japan—it seems like they should check all the boxes, right?  But they still don’t look “Japanese,” which makes it very probable that there are people who don’t think of them as really being Japanese.  Indeed, the real anti-heteromorph hardliners are very explicit in thinking heteromorphs have something wrong with them in their very blood (see the invective spat at Shouji about his “dirty blood”), and as I said above, the wrong kind of blood is one of those things that can easily disqualify one from proper Japanese-ness.

Sidebar: I said I’d talk about this back when it happened, knowing it was going to have to wait for exactly the kind of research this whole post needed, so I’ll address it here: “Folks with human faces just don’t get it!” Regarding the Spinner fans leveling this accusation at Rock Lock, those guys have clearly internalized the view that, despite them being human, their facial features are not human.  That’s a very obvious logical fallacy, but they wouldn’t believe it if they hadn’t been exposed to the view over a significant period of their lives, which in turn speaks to an ongoing issue with dehumanization of those with fully heteromorphic faces. I’ll point to characters that call heteromorphs by epithets like dog, lizard, frog-face, and so on as a clear demonstration of how that sort of rhetoric is widespread even among characters not otherwise portrayed as violent bigots.  Further, while the evidence points to such language being viewed as somewhat rude, it’s not so objectionable that most people raise a stink over it.  Of Shouji, Chief Tsuragamae, Spinner, Hawks, and every heteromorphic classmate that Bakugou has ever used an animal name on, only Spinner has ever protested.  Every other case has featured the heteromorph quietly letting the word pass by.[4] When even Certified Good Boys like Iida and Deku don’t think to say a thing about Shouto and Bakugou’s choices in phrasing, only to protest their surly attitudes, it’s a strong indicator that this kind of language is well entrenched. All that said, is, “Human-faced people wouldn’t understand what it’s like to be judged by their appearances!” a fair thing to yell at a Black guy?  Surely not.  But that kind of intra-minority shortsightedness (however misguided it might be) can be a real thing, especially when peoples’ own circumstances have gotten so dire, so I don’t think it’s an unrealistic accusation for them to be written as making. That, of course, brings us to the matter of Horikoshi’s own intentions in said writing.  Was he consciously writing the Spinner fans (and the rest of the mob by extension) as being blinkered by their own pain and lashing out at someone who probably does understand, better than a great many in his field would?  Or did he think the Spinner fans were right (at least in that specific accusation, if not in the broader act of rioting)? Further, if he did think they were right, did he put Rock Lock in that position to be intentionally ironic, some sort of, “Oh, look, even minorities can discriminate against other minorities, wow, isn’t that such a profound observation?” gotcha?  Or was having the target of the Spinner fans’ ire be Black entirely coincidental, the wince-worthy result of Horikoshi only having so many named Pro Heroes to spread around and Rock Lock being the one whose personality+power fit the needs of the scene best? Those questions come down to a) how aware Horikoshi is of what Takagi Ken would experience in real-life Japan, and b) whether he thinks that kind of racism(/xenophobia) still exists in his fantasy alternate future Japan.  Unfortunately, we just don’t spend enough time with Rock Lock, Mirko, Class B’s Rin, and so forth to be able to gauge that with any accuracy.  Like so much else about this plot, it feels much too specific to be accidental, but so tone-deaf that it’s hard to believe a thoughtful writer would do it on purpose.

Protest Culture in Japan

Something that struck me as I was researching this post and rereading the relevant chapters was that I never seem to hear very much about large-scale protests in Japan.  There were certainly historical ones!  I’ve touched on some examples of those before in my writing for this fandom, and I’ve seen enough anime to be aware of the infamous student protests of the late 60s.  But I don’t see much about protests in modern-day Japan.

That’s not to say they don’t happen—they absolutely do, and I’m sure there are things I miss because it’s not like I have The Mainichi in a daily news feed or anything—but my image of Japan was that it’s not a country that has a very strong “protest culture,” if you will.  I thought I should dig into that some, both to see if the impression was broadly correct, and for how the answers would reflect on this whole plotline.

Lo and behold, what I found was extremely telling.

To give a very brief summary, organized protests—by which I mean people with signs, mass gatherings outside government buildings, marches, that kind of thing—were indeed a bigger thing historically in Japan.  However, a combination of factors meant that they fell drastically out of use and have only started to rebound within the last fifteen years or so.

Specifically, protest in the 60s and 70s had become very specifically associated in the public eye with the New Left, a radical group inspired by the New Left movement in the West to break away from the “Old Left” represented by Japan’s Communist and Socialist parties.  Always prone to factionalism, the New Left eventually suffered several very public, very lethal, internal schisms and splashy scandals, all as they were also moving into terrorism—groups associated with the New Left were responsible for, among other incidents, two airplane hijackings and an airport attack that killed 26 people.[5]

One result of all this was that the people who had deeply believed in the cause were left very disillusioned, and those who had not supported it were left feeling even more justified in not having done so.  In both cases, the idea of protest—which had not even been successful at achieving its aims, on top of everything else!—was left marred by this association.

Add onto that, the Bubble Economy was coming into full swing, so by most metrics, Japan was doing pretty well—there wasn’t much widespread push to change anything when people at large were thriving.  And, yes, there was a measure of good old-fashioned government crackdown on the legality of the kinds of protest the New Left had been doing.

That was pretty much the state of affairs until the early aughts, when counter-culture movements started redefining what organized protest could look like, development that was pushed even farther along after the Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011.  Since then, protests have been gradually becoming more common; it’s still very much a movement in progress, though, and for a lot of people in Japan, old associations die hard.[6]

Notably, however, there are some places where organized protests never went away.  To this day, Okinawa has strong movements calling for the return of Okinawan land that’s currently being used for U.S. military bases.[7]  There was also considerable opposition from rural communities to a number of dam projects through the late 70s and on through the 90s.  The classic anime using those dam protests as plot fodder is, of course, Higurashi no Naku Koro ni, though so far as I can tell from some cursory research, the dam opposition group in Higurashi’s backstory was rather more successful than any real-life equivalent.

I trust it’s not difficult to draw the lines between those perceptions and Horikoshi’s depiction of the attack on the hospital: overly violent, led by extremists with suspect motives, and concerned with an issue that’s very pressing to people in rural communities while being largely invisible to people in big cities.

“Let sleeping dogs lie.”

In the course of my research, aside from all my findings detailed above, I did come across a quote that I wonder if influenced the resolution Horikoshi chose to write.  It’s the Japanese proverb Neta ko wo okosuna, which translates to, “Don’t wake a sleeping baby.”  Colloquially, the meaning is that if a problem is not currently being a problem, you shouldn’t stir it up by poking at it—our English equivalent would be, as the subheader says, “Let sleeping dogs lie.”

Other deployments as an adage aside, the context I’m most concerned with here is the way that it’s applied to burakumin discrimination (and how that, in turn, might reflect what Horikoshi thinks is the “right” way for characters to address heteromorphobia).

Basically, the idea is that if a discriminatory belief/set of practices is dying out, the best way to deal with what problems remain is to just—not talk about them.  Because it’s no longer an everyday fact of life, children today aren’t going to know anything about burakumin or anti-burakumin discrimination unless they’re specifically taught.  And so, the reasoning goes, if you simply don’t teach them, they will never learn.

Thus can discrimination be starved out of existence, or so people hope.  Obviously, it is wildly flawed rhetoric to apply that adage to discrimination, because people who discriminate will teach discrimination to their children.  Nonetheless, it’s a popular view in the mainstream, even one that was long endorsed by one of the biggest burakumin rights organizations, the Zenkairen.[8]

In that light, I wonder if we might consider it a possible influence in Horikoshi’s offered solution of, “Just be a Model Minority until all the problems go away.”  We can see this attitude reflected not only in Shouji’s resolve and his final words to the crowd in Chapter 373, but also in his decision to constantly wear a mask to cover up the proof of his assault.

Shouji knows what people will think if they see a heteromorph covered in scars; the fear he wants to prevent is not only that of small children who might think his face is scary, but also that of adults who would see his wounds and fear that his experience made him vengeful.  And so, it’s a conversation he just chooses to avoid instead.  If people don’t know about it, they won’t believe they need to fear it.

Of course, one can’t help but suspect that the reason, “Don’t wake a sleeping baby,” is popular in the mainstream view is because it conveniently lets the majority culture avoid talking about uncomfortable topics.  Japan notably has a huge cultural stigma about making people uncomfortable, so it’s easy for people who bristle when confronted with discrimination to point to the minority raising a stink as being the ones in the wrong.  That, too, is reflected in Shouji’s horrible accusation that the heteromorphs’ own actions will put their movement back thirty years.

I don’t have a lot of neat conclusions to draw from all this.  After all, you can’t just look at a bunch of polls of what any given group’s majority believes and then immediately assume that all members of the group are equally likely to believe the same.  I do think it speaks well of Horikoshi that he seems to be at least enough aware of discrimination issues in Japan to include a new but eminently predictable form of discrimination in his work.  If he, like many people in Japan, just believed that Japan didn’t have a discrimination problem at all, presumably he just wouldn’t have included heteromorphobia!  The kegare bit in particular feels way too specific for Horikoshi to have tripped his way into it.

That said, all of the ways that he chose to address the problem speak to a woefully outdated viewpoint—that protest is ineffective and prone to violence, and that the best way to deal with discrimination is to starve it with silence.  It’s incredibly striking that at no point in any of those chapters does anyone on the “right” side say that they’ll do anything about the problems facing heteromorphs.  The onus is, apparently, entirely on the oppressed minority to present themselves as such paragons of humanity that the bigots will be too ashamed to try to hurt them—heteromorphs can neither fight back nor count on their government to do anything for them.

Even having read and relayed everything that I now have, I’m still hard-pressed to say that knowing all that context makes me feel any better about BNHA’s “answer” to the characters involved in the hospital attack.

Meanwhile...

The Fandom’s View: Well, Is It Racism?

As far as the wording the Western fanbase uses, I agree that people shouldn’t just call it racism, straight out.  Heteromorphobia is a fictional construct that, for reasons of clarity and sensitivity, should not be conflated with an evil that people in real life, many of them readers of this very comic, suffer today.

That said, my experience is that most people who use the word racism in talking about heteromorphobia tend to add a qualifying adjective: “quirk racism,” “fantasy racism,” things like that.  It’s following the broad TV Tropes-style short-handing of plot elements like heteromorphobia as Fantastic Racism.  And that, unlike just calling it racism without further qualification, doesn’t bother me.  Let me pose a thought exercise to get at why.

Race is a debunked concept insomuch as it refers to the scientific categorization of humans into neat little boxes based on their physical traits.  In actuality, it’s a social construct, changeable based on the needs or biases of the people defining it.[9]

That said, people obviously still mean things when they use the word, particularly when the topic being discussed is racial discrimination.  In that context, race as distinct from ethnicity or nationality refers to the observable, physical qualities a person has—the color of their skin, the color and texture of their hair, the expected range of their eye color, their facial structure, and so on—and what category (codified to justify imperialism and slavery) those traits would lead that person to be sorted into.  A Black guy might be from the U.S. or France or Senegal—or Japan!—but he’s a Black guy, regardless, and any discrimination he faces based on those Black features is likewise going to be racism, regardless.

Conversely, nationality is obviously based in matters of nation—what country was one born in; what country is one a citizen of?  Ethnicity is a much broader term that covers culture, socialization, language, the values one is taught, sometimes things like religion and traditional modes of dress—basically all intangible or, in the case of clothes or language/accent, adoptable things.

Obviously, bigots aren’t always drawing clean lines like that, and society, too, has been moving away from the idea of race as a valid categorizational tool.  Insomuch as the concept still has a distinct meaning, however, that is the distinction: inborn, observable physical commonalities between different peoples that are distinct from other peoples; racism in this context is stereotyping and discrimination based on the belief in those traits.

That all said, how does that conception of race reconcile itself with heteromorphs?  In the understood sense of what is denoted by “Asian,” would someone like Gang Orca be considered Asian?  If he were vacationing in BNHA’s New York City, would anyone there assume he was Asian just by looking at him in a crowd?  Someone like the Sludge Villain, who doesn’t even have a bipedal body arrangement, is an even more extreme case.  Conversely, someone like Iida would still be easy to categorize.[10]

This gets you into questions that mirror discussion about racial discrimination in real life, like the idea of heteromorphs “passing” (the differences between a heteromorph like the Sludge Villain and one like Iida) or the ways in which some racial traits might be viewed as attractively “exotic”—especially in combination with other traits that more resemble those of the majority culture—while others are viewed as “ugly” (like how Hawks’ cool red angel wings have a far broader appeal than Spinner’s full-body scales).

Of course, the problem with saying people like the Sludge Villain and Gang Orca can’t be categorized as Asian because they don’t look Asian is that it begs the question of what race they would be considered.  They don’t look like any existing human race, but they don’t much resemble each other, either: they both have recognizable eyes and teeth, and that’s about it.  So if race is determined by one’s physical features and how much they align with those of a broader group, then how does one go about assigning that to a heteromorph?

Are heteromorphs considered a race entirely of their own, a sort of broad catch-all for anyone in quirk society who has permanent non-baseline[11]-human features?  Or has the idea of “race” been largely cast aside because it’s too difficult to make fit the new humanity?[12]  It’s a pertinent question in determining whether we could rightly call heteromorphobia a form of racism in and of itself, as opposed to a discrimination more like anti-burakumin sentiment (which, as I’ve discussed elsewhere, heteromorphobia also has markers of).

It is a pertinent question, but I don’t think Horikoshi will ever answer it.  Indeed, thanks to the previously described way that Japan tends to conflate race, nationality, and ethnicity, I’d be surprised if he ever thought to raise the question to begin with!

That doesn’t mean that we can’t ask it, though!  Given that race as a social tool stems from the need to justify discrimination and subjugation, how might the idea of race have changed in the BNHA setting as both quirks in general and heteromorphs specifically became more common?  Would such obvious Others have sharpened the lines of division or blurred them?  Is there a checkbox for Heteromorph on official forms that ask about Race/Ethnicity?[13]  How much of a group identity do heteromorphs have, even ones who look very different from one another or hail from different countries?  If it exists, how would that group identity be meaningfully distinguished from the idea of, say, a global Black community?

BNHA depicts a world that is still, over a hundred years later, trying to pick up the pieces from the advent of quirks, and heteromorphic discrimination is simply another aspect of that same ongoing development, so it would be no surprise to find all sorts of different answers to these questions.  They would likely vary depending on a given culture’s view on how race differs or overlaps with ethnicity and nationality.  Even heteromorphs who share a community might disagree; minority groups aren’t monoliths, after all!

Anyway, that’s all deeply suppositional and well beyond the level most readers of the series are likely thinking about re: heteromorphobia, so to reiterate, I don’t think the evidence is there to just call it racism without any further qualifications, so fans should probably not do that—be respectful of the shared community space and all!

Neither do I think the idea is entirely groundless, however, so I don’t begrudge people their “quirk racism”s and “fantasy racism”s.  Plenty of people want to talk about the ways in which heteromorphobia resembles their own experiences with discrimination, so using shorthand that relates to those experiences rather than a made-up word that doesn’t express anything real, feels like a valid choice to me.

Look for Part 2 hopefully within the next 24 hours!

----------------- FOOTNOTES -----------------

1:  Phrasing taken from the Merriam-Webster definition of racism.

2:  When Japan incorporated Western ideas of race into its own understanding of the concept in the back half of the 19th century, it was largely interpreted to mean sharing a common blood, hence the huge importance of family line I have written about elsewhere when talking about e.g. the family registry (koseki) and the country’s chilly view on orphans.  In that period, the concepts of race and nationality were both being refined in order to justify Western imperialism, a threat to which Japan responded by rapidly modernizing into an imperial power in its own right, complete with its own ugly cocktail of ethnonationalism.

3:  And lest anyone think Japan is uniquely awful in this way, think about the way that people ask Asian minorities in the U.S. first where they’re from, and then where they’re “really from.”

4:  There’s also a discussion to be had about Hawks using that language for himself, as well as looping the highly unamused-looking Tokoyami into it.  It’s off-topic for this post, but suffice it to say that I don’t think we can ignore the glaring difference between Hawks’ upbringing and those of the other characters.

5:  The Lod Airport massacre.

6:  Oddly enough, it seems to be young people who are least likely to approve.  Overworked, unable to risk their livelihoods in the current cutthroat job market, and deeply jaded by both of those facts, the younger end of Japan’s adult population seems to be more likely to express their issues online, rather than in person.  One survey I read about suggested that belief in both the effectiveness and acceptability of organized protest increased with every age category, though in no cases was there a commanding majority in favor.

7:  The numbers are telling: the islands of Okinawa Prefecture make up 0.6% of the nation’s landmass, yet 75% of the U.S. bases in Japan are located there.

8:  It’s also fairly in line with a practice you sometimes see talked about in relation to media and big business in Japan when accused of using discriminatory language: word hunts, where the offending language is put on a list of forbidden verbiage so that people will stop complaining, but no further action is taken to address the offensive attitudes behind the words.  Thus, the underlying problems continue to exist, setting the stage for future word hunts.

9:  As, indeed, you saw when a bunch of people in Meiji-era Japan were figuring it out.  They got the idea from Western trade partners, decided they didn’t like what those Western trade partners assumed about “the Asian race, ” and so invented a narrative whereby their race was Japanese, which was like a unique and special kind of Asian, better than all other Asians.  Their Western trade partners, one assumes, went right on ahead with considering them as Asian.

10:  This analysis assumes that if you took Horikoshi’s stylistic “filter” off of the cast, and asked what they would look like in a more realistic depiction, characters like, say, Present Mic would still read as Japanese despite the fact that he’s depicted as blond.  There’s room for argument there, but that discussion is beyond the scope of this post.

11:  “Baseline” is a term you will see me use a lot when I finally get that big Heteromorphobia In BNHA (No, It Didn’t Come Out of Nowhere) essay turned out.

12:  If you think Re-Destro has any kind of point—and obviously I do—then it’d be a fair guess that humanity hasn’t gotten rid of the idea of race just yet. See that bit in Chapter 227 about society conforming to old ways of thinking even as humanity as a species has transcended that idea of normalcy.

13:  Or Origins or Categories or whatever kind of language the local census/tax department/medical facilities/etc. are currently using. Japan does not actually ask this question on its official paperwork, for what it's worth.

------------------ REFERENCES ------------------

1: Sociology Compass, Volume 7 – The Social Construction of Race and Minorities in Japan

2: Vox.com – Japan's blackface problem: the country's bizarre, troubled relationship with race

3: Kana Yamamoto – The myth of “Nihonjinron”, homogeneity of Japan and its influence on the society

4: Hastings Constitutional Law Quarterly, Volume 45 – The History of Japanese Racism, Japanese American Redress, and the Dangers Associated with Government Regulation of Hate Speech

5: Carl Cassegård, Social Movement Studies – The recovery of protest in Japan: from the ‘ice age’ to the post-2011 movements

6: Nippon.com – Why Are Japanese Youth Distancing Themselves from Social Activism?

7: Thisjapaneselife.org – On Living In the Wrong Neighborhood in Japan

[indigosfindings]

tiff thoughts part 4

escape from the 21st century was, like, riotously fun. it's far from thematically empty (the time travel aspect is not subtle about what it represents), but it's not especially thought-provoking either--it's very "style over substance", but god it's a fucking great style. the action sequences, the stylistic flips & tone shifts, the animated flourishes, the off-the-wall humour--all extremely fun & aesthetically coherent. it's not concerned at all with the scifi stuff being Mechanically Internally Consistent, but frankly it doesnt need to be. the pacing is breakneck, and when it's funny it's hilarious

the shrouds is as mystifying as it is a testament to cronenberg's mastery of tone. the marketing led me to expect a deeply grim, sombre, still film, and nothing could have prepared me for its surprising degree of levity--not to mention mystery-thriller elements--and especially the fact that these things dont make it any less provocative! at first it comes off as structurally incoherent (it doesnt even really seem to be about the shrouds!) but by the end i felt that it was tied together in a deeply satisfying way--the themes of feelings of ownership emerging in grief & the synchronicity of the mysteries of death with the mysteries of both tech & politics were both meaty & toothy imo. the use of ambiguity, while very Pointed, was greatly to the film's benefit, the design of the shroud itself was amazing, & it was well-acted--the biggest stylistic weakness was the repeated sense that the script seems to be written with an expectation that the audience isnt, like, paying attention ("terri, your sister-in-law" "terri, your wife's sister" "terri, the sister of your wife" etc etc etc)

the strange cuts short film compilation was overall extremely strong! my thoughts on the 6 shorts:

gender reveal was fun and had a pretty biting sense of humour, but it was held back by the sort of narrative/structural directionlessness that's unfortunately common in short films--it's one of those things where the "writing prompt" is basically the entire story.

the sunset special 2 was EVERYTHINGGGGG. the audiovisual design is so fucking off the wall that i was barely suppressing the instinct to shriek for the whole runtime. it's creative in its critiques of both advertising & vacation culture, and it manages this with one of the craziest aesthetic sensibilities ive ever seen. i am OBSESSED. the sudden allusion to resident evil drove me insane. a short film crafted with the soul of the bug

the beguiling was tight & sharp. enamoured with the idea of racefaking-as-horror. extremely accurate in its skewering of a specific Kind Of Guy. it's tense, contained, well shot, & well acted. the director apparently has a feature in the works, and im extremely excited

don't fuck with ba was solid. i liked how campy, stylized, & over-the-top the action was, and while the multilingual premise was fun (i LOVED the use of subtitles) it mostly parsed as, like, set dressing. the whole thing felt less like a coherent, self-contained short and more like a pitch or proof of concept for a movie.

stomach bug was pretty good. the body horror element is good, & empty-nest syndrome combined with xenophobia made a really intriguing vector. the sense of boiling tension is palpable

never have i ever was, like, fine? i guess? the entire premise & execution (1st-person POV of a woman being kidnapped and murdered) plays heavily into the sorts of cultural anxieties that orbit the true crime sphere, and those dont really do much for me. before the screening the host warned that the final short of the set was "unrelenting", "extremely scary", etc (and consequently like 20 people walked out before it came on!) but in practice it was so tame and pulled so many punches that it really wasnt that scary at all lol

[fantasyinvader]

I'm watching V, the 1983 miniseries, right now after having finished the book it was based on, It Can't Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis.

The book was based on Lewis's wife's experiences in Germany during the rise of Hitler. She saw him come into power and how quickly he changed the nation. She also saw what was happening in Italy and Lewis compared it to some of the things being said in America during the Great Depression. It was written before WWII came about, and was meant to serve as a warning. A warning about the threat of charismatic leaders who use the system to empower themselves, as well as the importance of fighting such figures. President Buzz Windrip manages to win the 1936 election through promises of aid, fixing the economy, and a lot of prejudice against blacks and Jews. His followers are organized into his own militia, and using them he quickly concentrates all power on himself. He betrays his allies, gets people to turn on their neighbours who criticize him, turns people against learning, causes a lot of people to flee to Canada and other countries (where the population begins getting sick of taking in refugees), even sets up work and concentration camps. His supporters even begin arguing that democracy was an old-fashioned system and that America needs to get with the times and have a dictator. Towards the end, his regime begins making moves to conquer Mexico, he believes that the Americas are his by right of manifest destiny and that he'll be their emperor, before his strategist turns on him, leading to America going into another civil war. It also heavily goes into the nature of propaganda and information control.

V is a spiritual successor to the original story, and kinda reads like a wet dream for Edelgard's supporters. Human-looking aliens arrive, make themselves out to be benevolent, really begin taking over in the shadows while making themselves out to be the victims, turns out they're lizard people seeking to enslave/destroy humanity. While the themes of resisting totalitarian forces is still there, the threat switches from an internal one to an external one and brings with it it's own connotations. Rather that the fragility of democracy and how it can be abused to put the wrong people into power, instead it's an alien invasion story but there are also genuinely good aliens as well who help humanity so it's not complete xenophobia. But it's also very on the nose with it's allusions to Hitler. There's the good resistance, and the humans who collaborate with the aliens.

But, if we look at Houses it feels like a spirtiual successor to the original novel as well as a flip on V. As the creators said, the world of Fodlan was made to support Silver Snow's story. The resistance group isn't the humans fighting the alien lizard people, those guys are the imperialists seeking to conquer the entire continent under a flimsy pretense of liberation. Edelgard is charismatic, with symbols tying her to the idea of attraction, yet her victory is supposed to be the one leading Fodlan to tyranny. She's the one collaborating with the shadowy evil group that are really behind the world's problems, and makes use of propaganda. The twist on V, however, is that the game goes the same route as the original story, the threat is not an external invader (except if you play VW or AM, where Imperial forces try to conquer other nations and the player's army has nobles who collaborated with Edelgard's forces for their own benefit). The threat is HUMAN, and the aliens are actually benevolent however they are used as scapegoats, othered by those who view them as lesser animals to themselves, much like how V used scientists as the scapegoats or It Can't Happen Here is not subtle that Windrip will basically reenslave black people while going after the Jewish community.

Of course, you can always be a collaborator yourself in Houses. Buy into the propaganda, side with Edelgard because her path looks attractive, believe her empty promises and ignore the evidence that you've been played. Houses gives you that experience as well, though this was undermined by the translation.

Our society has warned about potential Edelgards time and time again. It's nothing new. I mean, ffs we just had a two-movie adaptation of Dune for crying out loud. Yet people think they're punk rock for joining her, not understanding that they've become puppets of the system.

[zinogirl]

I see a lot of the complaints about Fallout 4 and about half of them are nothing complaints

like no, Preston is not that annoying. And a good chunk of the hate he gets is likely cuz he's black.

And settlement building is not that tedious or whatever. If you're playing the game normally you should have almost everything you need.

There's some complaints, and criticisms, that are entirely valid, that i agree and disagree with.

I think retconning lore isn't really lazy. If it's in service to the story, or the setting, then minor details like the fallout divergence, which has always been vague, and is not based on the invention of the transistor, which does exist in Fallout, don't really matter that much, and should be seen as flexible.

Now, the institute is extremely stupid. You create what is supposed to be the future of humanity, what is supposed to redefine what humanity is, and then you treat that creation like a slave, or an appliance.

The brotherhood of steel also is portrayed as a very evil, xenophobic faction. Yeah, that existed xenophobia in previous games, the non-canon Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel, and in Fallout 3. I can't remember how the Mojave chapter treated mutants of any kind in New Vegas, so I can't comment there. But there is a precedent for the Brotherhoods xenophobia in Fallout 4. But, there was still nuance within the other games in their presentation. The brotherhood in 4 is an evil, colonialist fascist group. If you are not with them they at best ignore your existence and at worst will extort or murder you for your crops.

I also think fallout 4 leans too heavily into its retro-futuristic, American, 1950s-60s silver age aesthetic. There's also, in my opinion, too many allusions to the great war, or concept of nuclear bombs, especially in the radio songs. I know that's weird to say given the premise, but the other games at least had restraint in verbally shoving the nukes down your throat, they let the setting and visuals do the work for them. It's a nuclear wasteland, we don't need seventeen songs on the radio about bombs, or using bombs as metaphors.

Then there's roleplay. As a Fallout game, a franchise that is first and foremost an RPG setting, Fallout 4 wholly fails in its presentation of the sole survivor being a vehicle for the player to roleplay. An established personality, voice, backstory, make the job of roleplaying extremely difficult. I've seen some argue that the Sole Survivor before and after the bombs are two different people. And I understand that argument. But your trauma, your experiences, do not take away that you are still the same person who went through those things. Seeing your spouse get shot, seeing your baby get kidnapped right in front of you, will change something in you, for sure. But that doesn't evaporate your past, it doesn't make who you were vanish. You will still think, react, talk, based on who you were, and who you are now. So trying to assign original attributes to this character, is next to impossible. And to say nothing of the voice. Nate and Nora's voice actors, i don't know their names, are great, I'm sure. They give a pleasant, passable performance. It's perfectly good, perfectly serviceable, but a fully voiced protagonist in a roleplaying game is incredibly detrimental to the roleplay aspect of that game. It creates an existing voice that will inevitably differ from the imagined voice of the character you want to play. Even if your character would choose a dialogue option presented to you, like the good option, and say the exact line nate or nora says, their speech patterns and tone are going to be different.

That's my rant, later.

[lachaparraa]

Woman

⚠Tw: violence, discrimination, controlling behavior, racism, xenophobia, mentions of femicide, genocide, death, threats, allusions to rape, superiority complex, abuse, manipulation, they should stop romanticizing a man like Muzan⚠

+18

Women in general:

Muzan holds a utilitarian and contemptuous view towards women, primarily seeing them as tools to achieve his objectives. He does not view women as equals, but rather as inferior beings whose main utility lies in their ability to procreate and, in some cases, as a source of sustenance.

Despite this, the man is intelligent. He knows how to use his appearance and charm to manipulate women, taking advantage of his charismatic nature when it suits him. Muzan can present himself as a kind and attractive man to gain the trust of his victims before revealing his true nature.

He feels a certain attraction towards strong and powerful women, but not in a romantic or respectful way. Instead, he sees it as a challenge or something he must dominate and control. He enjoys breaking the spirit of women who show strength or defiance towards him. Therefore, Muzan also shows a guilty pleasure for virgins or "innocent" women, and he wouldn't hesitate to simply take the woman he desires by force; resistance is part of the thrill for him.

Contradictory to the previous point, Muzan finds the vulnerability and weakness of women especially despicable yet endearing (simply due to the biological attraction he feels towards women). Muzan hates any sign of weakness, whether physical or emotional, and tends to punish any display of it severely. Women, unfortunately for them, were considered weak in all aspects in ancient Japan, so yes, Muzan is very likely misogynistic.

Although he can still show a certain degree of favoritism towards women who prove to be useful or loyal to his purposes, this favoritism is fleeting and based solely on their momentary utility, not on genuine respect. This interest is accompanied by Muzan's controlling nature, as he uses fear and intimidation to keep women under his control. This includes explicit threats of violence, using his power to cause pain, or promises of protection that quickly turn into threats of abandonment if his will is not followed.

Feminist women:

(The Feminism has many branches so I will only write about Muzan's behavior regarding radical feminism 🤓)

Muzan deeply despises women who are radical feminists, viewing their pursuit of equality and female emancipation as direct threats to his authority and dominance, shaped by the era in which he grew up and lives. He believes that radical feminists challenge the established order that he seeks to maintain. Instead of seeking to understand the motivations behind feminist activism, Muzan uses his power to manipulate and punish women who defy him (femicide). He may emotionally manipulate them, promising support or leniency before harshly "punishing" them for their actions.

Given this, Muzan responds to manifestations or acts of radical feminist protest with disproportionate violence. He does not tolerate challenges to his authority and believes any form of rebellion must be brutally crushed to maintain his control (femicide or genocide).

While Muzan may be drawn to strong women in general, this changes somewhat when rebellion or strength is directed against him. He finds women who display strength and determination in their fight for equality particularly irritating. This reflects his own insecurity and fear of losing his position of power to individuals he considers inferior.

Foreign women

Muzan is a racist; overall, he views women as inferior beings, but adding that these women were foreign would lower their value even more. Muzan has a nationalist and patriarchal outlook in general, so he considers foreign women to be much more inferior and useless compared to Japanese women.

As mentioned, it's highly likely that he feels a fascination for women, but this would be more morbid or twisted towards foreign women (also depending a lot on the country they come from). He would probably be much more controlling and brutal towards foreign women, taking advantage of their cultural naivety.

Among the countries whose women Muzan would likely have more contempt for, the United States would probably be one. This is due to its culture and values being very different from those of Japan during the Taisho era. Muzan might see American women as representatives of a society that he perceives as decadent, vulgar, and morally corrupt from his traditionalist perspective.

Also included are countries like France, Germany, or the United Kingdom, which during that time had more liberalized and progressive societies in terms of women's rights and gender equality. Muzan might view these places as where women have too much freedom and individual power, which could threaten his patriarchal and authoritarian views, thus earning his disdain.

Even within Asia, countries like China during that time, influenced by revolutionary movements and social changes, could represent a source of disdain for Muzan due to women's emancipation and equality movements that may have emerged there.

By other side, Muzan would likely treat women from countries like South Korea, and certain specific aspects of China and Taiwan, more favorably. In these places, traditional gender norms and family structures play significant roles, which could be viewed favorably by Muzan due to their emphasis on preserving traditional gender roles.

Also, certain countries in the Middle East and parts of Africa and Latin America that maintain more conservative and patriarchal social structures could be seen as "decent" by Muzan. Countries like Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, or Venezuela reflect traditional values of female submission and strict family hierarchies.

Conclusion

Muzan is a misogynistic, racist, and in summary, dangerous "man". He has no consideration for anyone, and someone's gender will not change that; it simply makes it worse.

Hi! I hope you liked these headcanons about Muzan and his behavior towards women. I aimed to make them as realistic and faithful to the anime as possible.

Gracias por leer!😸🤍

[mmmmalo]

The list so far, which mostly consists of jokes. Some are stronger reads than others, most are in development

The "pr0n0unced h0ll0wness" of Aradia's vowel-replacing zeroes might refer to how most vowels go unwritten in the Arabic writing system (and other Semitic abjads). The "hollowness" between consonants are literally "pronounced". Bonus points for how you can flip the "d" in her name to get Arabia

Tavros's quirk might refer to how Arabic represents glottal stops. He speaks "IN A SORT OF, uHH, fALTERING MANNER," and is later randomly revealed to have a secret quirk where he replaces the letter "i" with the number "1". If you superimpose a quirk that visualizes vocal pauses and one that draws attention to long glyphs, you could surmise that the comic is riffing on the alif أ, which is used to represent glottal stops at the beginning of words? This is honestly the weakest among these imo

Sollux's Gemini theming with the 2's and double-ii's seem to function as allusions to the destruction of the "Twin" Towers on 9/11 -- he destroys his sky-scraper looking computer with a flying weapon and stares at the "blood" (honey) on his hands. Echoing this architectural terrorism > lament progression, Sollux deletes all of his viruses/bombs in a fit of shame after he blows up Karkat's house. (Of course his LISP is still a programming joke, just as Mituna's 4chan quirk is a reference to Fortran. There's a lot going on)

Nepeta's is a little abstract: she begins all of her messages with a severed head :33, giving all of her blood-colored messages an aesthetic of threat, of coercion, that complements the authoritative aesthetic of her bestie Equius's command arrow D-- >. The first time we meet Nepeta, she sends this severed head while blowing a kiss to Terezi -- a vaguely threatening mode of romantic overture later repeated by the other Heart player Dirk, on two separate occasions. When he sends the robotic head to Jake, it has two main outcomes: Jake will henceforth be Terrorized whenever he goes outside, and Jake now has a psychic duplicate of Dirk living in his head. These two outcomes intersect under the banner of “psychic colonialism”, ie terrorism, violence as a mean of implanting oneself upon another’s mind. This aspect of Dirk was already implicit in Nepeta's quirk.

Karkat doesn't seem to have Arabic-tinted speech affectations, but there's a one-two gag implying he's doesn't understand the local language: his sylladex (his syllable index, ie dictionary) encrypts an object and renders it totally inaccessible (ie incomprehensible), whereupon he turns around and is likewise befuddled by a book of the local programming language. I'm inclined to think his position as troll Jegus is responsible for his incomprehension -- the story is playing with American xenophobia, so the almost quirkless "normal" voice is Christian-coded.

Kanaya doesn't seem to have Arabic-tinted speech affectations either, but the remark "You Tend To Enunciate Each Word You Speak Very Clearly And Carefully" almost sounds like a passive-aggressive jab at everyone else's quirks -- she even takes a moment to make fun of the accents of Feferi and Eridan when they talk, thereby asserting her relative "normality". As the Virgin Mary troll, this likely serves a role akin to Karkat's

Entering the heresy zone: Terezi writing in the "NUM3R4LS OF THE BL1ND PROPH3TS" works as a simple statement of her writing in Arabic numerals, by way of implying the visions of the prophet Muhammad were false. In line with John's pithy description of Jegus as "bearded male human, who was magic" we find early references to Islam in a book of magic tricks: Harry Anderson's playing cards have a Rub el Hizb on the back, and the author's assertion that Anderson should climb in a tree and bake some cookies is a reference to the "Keebler" elves that puns on Qibla, the orientation of oneself towards Mecca for prayer. These references draws Islam into orbit of the comic's periodic assertion that magic is fake as shit.

Vriska's "black oracles" are a synonym of Terezi's "blind prophets", hence the "PUZZLING GUARANTEED INACCURACY of their predictions" -- it's another jab at the prophet Muhammad. Having the Virgin Maryam (who is asserts herself via her quirk as a Normative Voice) chastise Vriska for her 8-ball based superstitions (wouldn't your "bad luck" go down if your cleaned your room) strikes me as veiled religious condescension -- the surface depicts a Rational repudiation of vague Superstition, but implicitly we have a Christian figure chastising a Muslim figure.

Equius's 100 quirk, widely understood as a reference to the "cent" in "centaur", is also a pictograph of a camel. The first hint was Hearts Boxcars, whose fetish for the "humps" and "tail" of the heart symbol implicitly sexualizes camels. Diamonds Droog's grayscale sexual fantasies are fulfilled when Cans punches him into a black-and-white supermarket, and HB is accordingly sent to a horse calendar adorned with a quote from an "Arabian proverb" to signal the horse's camel inflection. This overlay of horse/camel perhaps explains why wild musclebeasts stalk the desert surrounding Kanaya's oasis. At any rate, Equius's horse fetish seems to function as a way of politically neutralizing the epithet "camel fucker", a slur against Middle Easterners. (Lil Hal makes another joke on this theme that is too long to reproduce here)

Gamzee's quirk doesn't have an obvious analogue. At best I might surmise that the WhImSiCaLiTy of his text suggests that melismatic, wavering tone common to Middle Eastern music, but the closest example of that in Homestuck is the Gregorian chant for the Warhammer of Zillyhoo? though admittedly Gamzee features in that flash... There's a more robust association between clowns, weed, and Islam that draws Gamzee into its orbit, but its difficult to summarize. Read these two posts about turbans and "stoning", please.

The resemblance of Eridan's quirk to a certain feature of Arabic was noted above, and his obsession with wizards and the question of whether magic/miracles are real fold neatly into the above discussions of "male bearded humans" that are religious figures.

Feferi is quirk is proving slippery -- as best I can figure, the trident in her quirk serves a purpose analogous to Nepeta's severed heads: embedding "Poseidon's Entente" (a reference to Sleuth Diplomacy, which simply guns people down) creates an aesthetic of threat. Her embedded Pisces symbol ) ( may also draw attention its counterpart on her forehead, which again suggests "psychic colonialism" by way of mind control? All while being vaguely Orientalist through its invocation of the third eye

To the growing list of feasible Arabic origins for troll quirks: learned from Duolingo a moment ago that the name David can be rendered as دوود or Dawwud, which seems vvery Eridan.

[travelling-on-the-octopath]

Hello! Since you are a Claude fan I wanted to ask something that maybe you could better explain from your own perspective. When I first played VW, I was confused by Claude saying he felt like an outsider because he doesn't belong in either Fodlan or Almyra. Like, I get that life sucked in Almyra cuz he's mixed race. But, like, nobody in Fodlan is capable of realizing that he's half Almyran. And he doesn't face any prejudice against him in Fodlan because nobody thinks of him as Almyran. (1/2)

Because the game treats his Almyran prince status as this huge, stupid secret, it robs Claude of the opportunity to actually face, well, any negative reaction in Fodlan at all. Only Lorenz and his dad don't trust Claude, but that's because he's the heir of house Riegan. The Golden Deer love Claude and never show prejudice or bias at him. And Claude never suffers prejudice like Dedue, Petra, Cyril and even Shamir discuss from being known foreigners. It feels like a dissonance for Claude (2/2)

I've been knighted as a Claude fan fkdhskal. My day has come! But on to the ask:

I think it's important to remember one very crucial thing: in Fódlan (and the real world, but sometimes fantasy games are Bad), race ≠ nationality. Claude doesn't get flack for being of a mixed heritage, or Almyran, because no one...knows he is. He doesn't face the same hardships as the other foreign students/occupants of the monastery because he just looks different than the majority, rather than admitting to being from over yonder.

Claude feels like an outsider because to maintain his status as Just Your Average Fódlan Denizen, he can't be honest about who he is. His secrets, in this case the ones that are keeping him alive, exacerbate his difference from others. It's like--have you ever been a part of a conversation where you don't really know what's being discussed, but you stick around and play along as if you do, because you don't want to admit you don't know? It's along the lines of the isolation that's wrought from that; you certainly know you don't fit with this discussion, and sooner or later everyone else is going to catch on too. Maybe a better example, and one I can personally speak to, is sexual orientation. I can pretend just fine that I'm only attracted to men, and if I Behave Accordingly, no one will ever be the wiser as to my bisexuality. I won't earn a side eye or face any displeasure brought on by my existence. But it would still be a lie. I'm still one wrong move from garnering the reaction I would have gotten if I'd just flat-out admitted to being queer. I'm not free from prejudice; I'm lying to evade it. And the latter is fucking exhausting, and isolating, and awful.

Claude is much the same. It's less that he doesn't face the same hardships as others and more that he's been put in the (un)fortunate position to lie about it. Because there is nothing good to be had about hiding away certain parts of you in a corner, knowing if someone peeks around your shoulder, they'll see something they might not like. And seeing as things like that are the very fabric of one's existence, that's easier said than done.

We end the game (sans epilogue/ending cards) without Claude being able to admit to who he is and where he comes from, because Fódlan isn't quite ready for that yet. Because he's pedalled as hard as he could on this side of the border, and it wasn't enough; his ideal world of no prejudice/xenophobia is still out of reach, which means he can't be completely honest yet. He calls on the Almyran army easily enough in two routes, but that's just a step up from his usual allusions to Not Being From These Parts; there is no room for him yet, and that takes a toll on a person.

TL;DR: Claude's lack of obstacles created by prejudice is a result not of dissonance/his uniqueness, but rather his creating a whole new path paved with untruths, to the detriment of his feeling like he belongs. To anyone who could make his life here hard, he's not an Almyran that gets special treatment; he's a quirky Fódlan noble who has his finger in several pies, and one of them seems to be Almyran.

[duchess-of-mandalore]

Let's talk about Bo-Katan and that scene with Boba Fett in The Mandalorian.

(After all, I've spent most of my time as a Star Wars fan defending one Kryze sister from charges of racism and elitism ... what's one more?)

A lot of people like to think that this scene complicates the conversation that we’ve already had regarding Almec saying that Jango Fett wasn’t a Mandalorian. That maybe Bo is elitist the way he was (though she certainly does not consider herself a New Mandalorian). I have some thoughts on that here and why Almec’s xenophobia and potential elitism should not be taken as reflective of the rest of the New Mandalorian views on the matter. However, this is a very different conversation.

This conversation, regarding Jango’s son, Boba, does not concern itself with the idea of foundlings and adoption into the culture. It’s not Bo expressing an elitist view. Instead it’s a very Star Wars related topic: clones. Bo knows that Boba is a clone. She does not recognize him by his armor, but only by his voice, which is when she says “you are not a Mandalorian.” Boba tells her that he never said he was. 

Now this is interesting. In my mind this issue issue should be cleared up. Boba does not consider himself a Mandalorian and he has not claimed to be. His father was, but Mandalorianism is not an inherently hereditary thing. Though it hasn’t been confirmed in the new canon yet, it’s likely that FIloni and Favreau are still working off the idea that to be a Mandalorian means that you have to swear the Resol’nare, the six tenets of Mandalorian culture. To do so is a person’s confirmation into the Mandalorian culture. However, it’s very unlikely that Boba ever would have done that. 

Inclusivity is an important topic and something to be praised. However, exclusivity is not inherently a prejudiced quality. To have any identity, you must fulfill certain requirements. A couple of years ago, I wanted to be a librarian. My mother was a librarian, I worked in a library, and I even took one class on library sciences. But if I showed up at an event hosted by the American Library Association and said “I’m a librarian,” they could say “No, you are not” since I don’t have any of the certifications to back that up.

Boba likely does not meet the requirements to be a Mandalorian. But the fact that he doesn’t claim to be one says that he actually knows and respects that. Almec was not a reliable narrator on the topic of whether Jango was a Mandalorian, but Boba should be taken as a reliable narrator in his own story and that of his father.

Further, like his eight million clone brothers, Boba has never lived in the context of the Mandalorian people. He lived with his Mandalorian father, but after that, he led a relatively solitary life as a bounty hunter and then alone on Tatooine. He has not served the greater good of Mandalore, and that doesn’t seem to be even something on his mind, given that he has written off Mandalore the planet as unworthy of reclamation (which is what drives Bo’s indignant “You are a disgrace to your armor”) and that he seems to be more interested in pursuing his own notoriety as a . . . crime boss, I guess?

But again, Bo doesn’t see him as Boba, the clone-son of Jango; she sees him as a common clone trooper. And Bo certainly has a reason to hold a grudge against them. Yes, they did help her take back Mandalore in Season 7 of The Clone Wars, however, Order 66 happened almost immediately afterwards, and we know that Bo only held the throne for a short time (likely weeks or months) before Palpatine and his armies -- made up of the same clones that helped her retake Mandalore -- descended on her once again for not capitulating to his rule. 

Bo would have “heard that voice thousands of times” in the clones that infiltrate Mandalore on behalf of the Empire (I’m also willing to bet this is an allusion to something we will see in The Bad Batch, which Bo-Katan is heavily rumored to be in). We can assume that she was either forced into exile or that she escaped the planet before she could be killed. But this shows that Bo does have an understandable reason for holding such a grudge against the clones. In fact, this must have been even harder because it’s likely that Bo does know that Jango was a Mandalorian. 

That makes it all the worse because the clones do all have a connection to Mandalore, and yet, they cause the exile of the Mandalorians from their homeworld, and likely contributed to the “glassing” of the planet that Boba mentions as well as the Great Purge, which we know happens after Bo’s second attempt to reunite the tribes. but they turn against what could be seen as their planet all the same.

In Bo’s mind, it’s likely that she does recognize that the clones have a connection to Mandalore . . . and yet they turn on Mandalore all the same. When she hears Boba’s voice, that animosity all comes out, but it has nothing to do with Boba, who Jango was, or whether Boba’s the son of a foundling.

Edit: Also, none of this is meant to deny that in this scene Bo-Katan is still a condescending and snotty brat. Not at all. But to be fair, Boba’s not a plaster saint either. They’re both complicated characters with complex motivations. That’s what makes them both interesting, and it’s possible to like both of them at the same time, while calling out their faults and recognizing what has led them to be the way that they are.

[queerryan]

book recommendation.

The black tides of Heaven, by Neon Yang (they/them). It's about Asian non-binaries who do magic and join a machinist's rebellion to defeat their mother's dictatorship.

Book Synopsis: Mokoya and Akeha, the twin children of the Protector, were sold to the Grand Monastery as infants. While Mokoya developed her strange prophetic gift, Akeha was always the one who could see the strings that moved adults to action. While Mokoya received visions of what would be, Akeha realized what could be. What's more, they saw the sickness at the heart of their mother's Protectorate.

A rebellion is growing. The Machinists discover new levers to move the world every day, while the Tensors fight to put them down and preserve the power of the state. Unwilling to continue as a pawn in their mother's twisted schemes, Akeha leaves the Tensorate behind and falls in with the rebels. But every step Akeha takes towards the Machinists is a step away from Mokoya. Can Akeha find peace without shattering the bond they share with their twin?

The Tensorate Series

Book 1: The Black Tides of Heaven

Book 2: The Red Threads of Fortune

Book 3: The Descent of Monsters

Book 4: The Ascent to Godhood

Tw: Maternal abandonment; blood; violence; allusion to ethnic persecution, racism and xenophobia; Discussion about cultural and religious differences. (No transphobia in this universe)

[compelleddual]

Hey everybody, content warnings for We've Been Waiting (3.18) are up. As with most of our heavier episodes, we recommend checking the warnings before listening to the episode, and we'd like to remind you that we post them on wednesdays! Stay safe.

[indigosfindings]

@themountainking98 this is an interesting thought! id only ever seen it argued as "it's hate, not fear" but i couldnt rule out that a mental illness association is a motivating factor, so i tried looking into it...

(the first thing im noticing is that this isnt quite as "short-lived" as i thought... wiktionary's got examples of 'queermisia' in some pretty notable sources (incl unis) from 2018 through 2022--i could swear id encountered it empirically prior to 2018, but memory is unreliable etc)

this page (the name "misia pledge" is making me giggle btw) is the most in-depth look at the terminology i can find (note that there's no date (at least not one i can see on mobile) so it's difficult to pinpoint the relationship (reflective, generative, etc) of this page to the overall trend) and it's pretty upfront wrt stated motivation:

but there are two allusions to mental illness:

(sidenote--the spiel about how "homophobia" and "xenophobia" could be Legitimate Mental Illnesses, But A Professional Would Need To Diagnose Them is, like, a flawless snapshot of the ways that psychiatry is deployed in these discourses. this reads like a parody)

but overall this article's most repeatedly voiced concern is re the "accuracy" of '-phobia'

(incidentally according to etymonline 'homophobia' had previously been used to mean "fear of humans". mildly interesting)

anyway (opinion time lol) both "phobia means fear" and "phobia means mental illness" are, like, ultimately the same grievance--they both express a (pedantic, prescriptive) concern about etymological accuracy above everything, & consequently they both reflect magical thinking wrt the relationship between lexical history & present-day usage. if we want to be uncharitable we could even call prescriptive defensiveness of greek morphemes reactionary (this would be unproductive, but it would also be funny)

and the thing is, i DO think there are some instances where a person's use of one term over another is revealing of bias, thought processes, intentions, etc (eg consider what's implied when somebody refers to a trans woman as "they" rather than "she")! but imo in this case: (1) the sanctity of '-phobia' is a silly thing to defend, (2) the words transphobia, xenophobia, homophobia, etc are so well-established atp that there's zero risk of a person acting in good faith missing the meaning of these words Because Of Their Neoclassical Composition, (3) i cant envision potential benefit that would justify the herculean task of "manually" replacing one term with another, & (4) like many (most?) english-language verbiage replacement efforts, it foregrounds an individualist & anglocentric complaint in favour of any structural or material (or remotely useful, frankly) examination. one more screenshot to hammer that home:

im obsessed with this, i keep reading this paragraph and losing my mind. when the benefit proposed by the (seemingly) most thorough (extant) resource is a single paragraph (not even a long one!!) claiming that this Word Swap will help "educate others," "raise awareness", and "create a more inclusive and just society" (lofty claim!!) without offering even One word to explaining How or Why this will happen, that should kind of signal how profoundly unserious it all is lmao

we all remember mogai & batpanda & whatnot but imo the most underrated discursive twist of that era was the short-lived push to problematize the words "homophobia" & "transphobia" because of the -phobia suffix (seemingly ceding rhetorical ground to the overwrought "im not homophobic because im not SCARED of gay people" line??) so a handful of people started saying things like Homobigotry and Queermisia

[entitynumber5]

iceberg blues

this fic is basically one long jonmartin road trip but with depression and angst and yearning!!!!!! here’s the link to ao3: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30788036. or you can read it below the line!!! <3

Content warnings: depressive episodes, disassociation, panic attacks, discussions of death and mortality, grief, emetophobia, economic anxiety, intrusive thoughts/images, very brief allusions to transphobia and xenophobia (in the context of UK politics), swearing, passive suicidal ideation, food, disordered eating, mention of hospitals, smoking, addiction, arguments, brief references to coercive relationships.

Martin has been sitting at his desk, shivering in his coat, for over half an hour. Still enough that the automatic lights have switched off for the night, one by one in an imploding cascade down the corridor he can see from his desk. Tim and Sasha left a while ago, and Martin had put his coat on and promised he would been right behind them, he was just going to check his emails one last time, when he’d seen Sasha had sent her part of the report on Naomi Hearne’s statement to him. He doesn’t know how to explain why he opened the document and scrolled through to Evan Lukas’s death certificate. But here he is. Stuck and staring.

He doesn’t want to be here. He doesn’t want to be staring at the death certificate of a man he doesn’t even know. Since Naomi Hearne’s statement two days ago, Martin has been—well, off. He wishes he had a better explanation, but his creativity has jumped ship, apparently, and either a wall springs up every time he reaches for a way to name what he’s feeling or it is energy he doesn’t have to waste, forcing his mind into forming words.

It feels like there’s a balloon inside his chest and no matter how much he expands his lungs, no matter how many deep breaths he takes, he can’t make it smaller. He’d vomited, when he got back to his flat on the day of the statement; yesterday, he had opened the cupboard and stared at the ingredients but been unable to make himself make anything. On the Tube to work, when a stranger looked at him, just in passing, Martin had wanted to cry, and that feeling lingered with him but nothing came of it except an odd sort of internal tension, like a headache.

Yet at the same time, there’s something so dull about it all. He can feel the boredom in his teeth. The blunt edge of a knife, never drawing blood. Why does it matter? Why does it need to be a big deal?

It isn’t, as far as Martin’s concerned. No one else has noticed, and sometimes he doesn’t either. Sometimes it just slips his mind that this isn’t how he feels all the time. Even now, staring at the computer screen, he almost forgets that he’s cold, that it will be dark outside. That it’s Friday, and he usually calls his mum on Friday because the care home gets fish and chips delivered, every week, a whole event, and it’s easier for them both if she has a proper excuse not to answer.

“Martin,” Jon says.

Martin jumps, but his movements are slower than he expects. His shoulders lift enough that the waterproof lining of his coat makes a high-pitched scraping noise, but he can’t move the hand that’s on the mouse to close the document in shame he knows distantly he should feel.

“Martin,” Jon continues, looking somewhat confused, as if he’d already said his name a number of times. There’s a hint of defensive disapproval in his expression. “You’re still here.”

Martin tries to talk, but his voice croaks as if from disuse. He clears his throat and tries again. “Yeah. Just, um… finishing up.”

“It’s after seven.”

“You’re also still here,” Martin points out.

Another time, he thinks he’d be embarrassed by the remark. He should be feeling that hot, sharp lance of fear that this might be the fireable offence. But there was nothing in his tone except the monotone stating of a fact, and the phantom embarrassment is so vague he doesn’t even feel guilty about its reason for existing.

There’s a short, soft huff of laughter. Martin drags his eyes to Jon’s face, just in time to see his expression of defeated amusement before it disappears.

“Yes, well, I have my reasons.” Jon averts his eyes and doesn’t elaborate.

Martin turns back to the computer. It should be simple, moving the mouse to the corner of the document, pressing the red cross, shutting down the computer for the weekend, off-off, at the wall and all, not standby or Rosie would moan about the Institute’s already-failing green initiative. But he just can’t do it.

Jon lingers.

“Is… something wrong?” Martin manages to ask.

“I need to lock up,” Jon replies, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. He lifts the small ring of keys in his hand as if in justification, a supply of proof. “Unless you would like to spend the weekend in the Archives, I suggest you leave in the next five minutes.”

“Oh. Right. Yeah, I—I’ll just—let me just…” He moves the mouse to the corner of the document, hovering, but he can’t bring himself to click off it. Suddenly, he doesn’t want to go home. He desperately doesn’t want to go home.

“Sometime today, please, Martin,” Jon presses.

Martin forces himself to close the document. The balloon in his chest feels very big. In his mind’s eye, he can still see Evan Lukas’s death certificate. The clinical recital of the cause, the dates echoing around in his mind. He feels like he might, at any moment, abruptly blurt the words out loud.

“S-sorry.”

“Yes, well,” Jon bristles, “I do have somewhere to be.”

Martin wishes dully that Jon wasn’t here. He could just pull the computer plug out of the wall and be done with it, although his fingers feel numb and he’s not sure he has the strength. Or rather he does have it, it exists, just not within reach.

Martin goes through the motions of small talk, nonetheless. A kneejerk courtesy that reminds him of all the commutes home he can’t remember, the familiar going-through-the-motions, arriving at your destination unharmed, but having done so on muscle memory alone.

“You do?”

“I do.”

“Right.”

Jon lifts his eyes to the ceiling, as if he had considered rolling them and thought better of it. He takes a moment before he speaks again. “Actually, I had planned to drive to Wormshill this evening. There is a detail in Miss Hearne’s statement that I would like to check myself.”

“You’re going to Kent?”

“Yes,” Jon answers defensively. “It’s not far. A two-hour drive, at most.”

“But it’s—you just said it’s after seven.”

“Because I have an obligation to ensure my employees are not in the building after hours. What you do with the rest of your evening is none of my concern.”

Martin nods. The motion carries him away for a moment, and he gets lost in the gentle repetitiveness of it. He’s definitely nodding for longer than is acceptable��everything is taking longer than acceptable, today—and he should be embarrassed, but its vaguely soothing, a blip in the otherwise flat, linear trajectory of his mood.

Jon sighs. Loudly. “Is there anything unsaved on this computer?”

“No,” Martin replies, “Don’t think so.”

“Good,” Jon snaps, and then promptly switches it off at the wall.

Martin stares at the blank screen. He can just about make out his hollow reflection. “Oh.”

Jon is still standing there. “Martin…”

Martin hums in acknowledgement.

“There is—well, there’s the matter of the Institute’s health and safety guidelines, which stipulate that any employee conducting research in the field after seven p.m. must be accompanied by at least one other person,” Jon says, rushing but still somehow managing to keep the deep, unimpressed tone. “Ordinarily, I would disregard such bureaucratic nonsense, but I, uh, I rather suspect I’ll be receiving a complaint from Miss Hearne, and I’m—reluctant, I suppose, to attract any further attention from Elias.”

Martin doesn’t understand what Jon is trying to say.

“What I’m trying to say, Martin,” Jon continues, “Is that while I would much rather conduct my investigation alone, it might be pertinent to have company. If only to share the burden of driving.”

In the computer screen, Martin’s reflection doesn’t react to Jon’s statement. His eyes are cloudy, out of focus behind his glasses.

“Fine,” Jon huffs, “I’ll be direct, since nothing else seems to be getting through: Martin, will you come to Wormshill with me?”

Martin must say yes, because the next thing he knows, he’s still shivering in his coat but he’s outside, standing next to Jon on the steps of the Institute while they wait for the taxi that’s going to take them across the river to the car hire place in Croydon, apparently the only one willing to loan a vehicle on such short notice and at this time on a Friday. In his own coat, jaw set against his own shivers, Jon keeps stealing sideways glances at Martin as if expecting him to bow out of the bizarre excursion at any moment.

It occurs to Martin that maybe he should give Jon an out. A reason to go alone, since that’s what he seems to want. Now that Martin’s outside, at least, he thinks he can make it home. He can drift through the weekend, try to sleep off the feeling sitting heavy beneath his skin so that he can plaster on a smile again for Monday.

“Jon,” Martin says, “I can’t drive.”

Jon’s face snaps fully to Martin’s. “What do you mean, you can’t drive?”

“I mean I—I never learned how?”

The car was one of the first things they’d sold, when they could no longer afford to top up the meter, and when he’d turned seventeen, it had been too much money and too much time away from his mum to take lessons, even though so many jobs stipulated—illegally, he’d been told by one disgruntled employee at the Job Centre—that he needed a licence to apply. He knew his mum resented the lack of transport. She would complain about the tins getting dented or the fruit bruising on the bus journey back from the supermarket. Martin would take on extra shifts to cover the taxi costs to and from hospital appointments. But otherwise, they were stuck. There was no way around it.

Moving into London had helped with getting around, but not so much with money, and it had been a sort of comfort to Martin that mostly no one expected you to own a car or even drive here. Until now.

“Why didn’t you say something—?” Jon begins, but at that moment, the lights of the taxi slice through the darkness and a white Prius jolts to a stop in front of them, the driver giving an impatient toot of the horn to get their attention.

“I—I’m sorry,” Martin says. “I thought you knew.”

“How on earth would I—?” Another blare of the car horn. Jon makes a disgruntled sound and starts off down the steps. “Just get in the taxi.”

Martin stares down at him. “What—but I—are you sure?”

Jon, with his hand around the door handle, looks expectantly back at Martin. “Yes, Martin, just—come on.”

In the taxi, Martin sits on his hands as his mind lists restlessly between the vivid, intrusive image of opening the car door for no reason and the worry that he should be making conversation, before settling back into familiar numbness. Jon doesn’t make conversation either, which Martin supposes is a relief. The driver fields a number of calls during the journey and ends up doing enough talking for the both of them.

Jon pays the taxi driver with the Institute credit card when they reach Croydon. Martin stands on the pavement and watches the back lights of the Prius fade into the distance, the way you might watch to check someone gets into their house safely after you walk them home, because he can’t really think of what else to do until Jon demands, “Are you coming?”

Martin jogs after Jon, catching him up just as they reach the car park of the hire place. Jon tells Martin to wait outside, so he waits outside with his hands tucked into his pockets and wonders idly if Jon has picked up on his quietness. And if Jon has noticed, does he think it’s a relief, not having to suffer Martin’s small talk, his stammering inquiries and useless observations?  

About ten minutes later, Jon emerges with a set of keys and a collection of paperwork. He barely glances at Martin, making a beeline for the car parked nearest the door, a yellow Citroën.

When Martin stops beside the car, waiting for Jon to unlock it, Jon snaps, “It’s all I could get on short notice.”

Martin stares over the roof of the car at Jon. Is Jon embarrassed because the car is yellow? Because it’s a Citroën? Martin feels like he’s missing something. “I didn’t say anything.”

Jon just huffs and climbs into the car. After a moment, Martin follows, ducking inside and settling into the passenger seat. Jon hands him the paperwork, somewhat unceremoniously, and Martin takes it and places it in his lap and doesn’t say anything about the fact that Jon has given the hire company a false name. Which likely means he has a fake ID. Which is a can of worms that Martin isn’t sure he’s ready to open.

They drive for a while in complete silence. Jon’s driving is a little shaky, at first. He stalls three times in the space of five minutes, and at one point gets flipped off by a teenager hauling Deliveroo via bike. Martin laughs, despite himself, a small huff of air through his nose—it’s a start, he supposes.

“Would you prefer to take the wheel?” Jon snaps and when Martin’s face drops, he adds. “I thought as much.”

Martin sinks back into his seat, the laughter forgotten. He stares out of the window at the other cars and wonders where their occupants are travelling—back to their families for the weekend? When Jon has to merge onto the M25, he clings to the steering wheel so tightly his knuckles turn white, and Martin wishes he hadn’t laughed earlier.

On the motorway, at least, Jon seems to settle into the familiar motions of driving and eventually reaches for the radio, tuning into Radio 4. They’re broadcasting a political debate, and Martin tries to watch without being caught as Jon’s face twists or he snorts at a particularly egregious comment from one of the participants.

“Who’s that?” Martin asks, surprising himself, when Jon rolls his eyes for the fifth time—he’s counting—at the same voice.

Jon blinks, turning momentarily from the road before returning to his eyes-ahead vigil of the motorway. He rolls his lips, like he’s pushing down a retort about Martin’s ignorance of politics. After a while, and a sixth eye roll, he says: “That’s Ann Widdecombe.”

“Oh,” Martin says, “She was on Strictly.”

Jon once again looks like he wants to launch into a lecture about Martin’s witlessness. Instead, he says, in that dry voice of his: “Yes. She has also been a particularly insidious member of the Conservative Party for forty years.”

“Right. Of course. I know that.”

“I should hope so.”

“I didn’t vote for her,” Martin tells him, “On Strictly.”

Jon doesn’t say anything.

“Or in the general election,” Martin adds.

“Not least of all because you don’t live in her constituency.”

“I mean I didn’t vote for the—”

“Yes, Martin, I understood what you meant.” Jon pauses. “And for the record, neither did I.”

There’s a very long stretch of silence after that. Martin wants to point out that he used to watch Question Time with his mum, before she moved into the care home, plus he’s trans and what little family he has left are Polish, so it’s not like he can be ignorant about the UK’s political climate, and just because he’s not some Oxford-educated prick who listens to Radio 4—but what’s he trying to prove, really? It’s a waste of energy, and the lull of the car and the cold pressure in his chest quickly extinguish the flare of indignation.

A radio drama about wartime Britain replaces the debate, and Martin tips his head against the window. He can make out the sound of the words, but not what they mean, and the inside of his mind feels like the road ahead: a blur of sharp asphalt and red-white light, the kind of place where it’s not safe to stop. He feels vaguely sick.

Martin thinks about the weekend again. He wishes he could sleep through and wake up feeling better, feeling real. He wants so badly to pause this feeling and pick it up when he’s ready to deal with it. A break. He just wants a fucking break, so badly that the tight-throat tension of tears he knows he can’t shed is back. He closes his eyes, in case Jon notices, and plays with the paperclip holding the contract for the hire car together.

He doesn’t know if he falls asleep fully or just drifts, but the next thing he’s really aware of is the slam of a car door as Jon climbs back inside. Inside? Martin squints at him through the sickly light of the streetlamp outside the car as Jon manoeuvrers his way back into the driver’s seat while holding a cardboard tray of drinks and two greasy paper bags. He hands one of the bags to Martin. It’s warm in his hands, almost burning, but he doesn’t think to let go.

“Where are we?” Martin asks, detached from the question, uncaring of the answer.

“Just outside of Maidstone,” Jon replies, balancing the drinks tray on top of the clutch with meticulous precision before gesturing with far less accuracy in the general direction of the service station. There’s a glowing sign indicating the presence of a Costa and a number of other chains. “Do feel free to use the, uh, the facilities.”

“I’m fine,” Martin mumbles, “But thanks.”

Martin realises he can’t remember the last time he used the facilities, as Jon so delicately put it, even back at the Institute. It should be embarrassing, but even this is hard to care about. There were plenty of opportunities, at work, to get up and make a cup of tea, or to reach into his rucksack and pull out the water bottle he’d bought with the markers specifically to remind him to drink at regular intervals. But he just… didn’t. And he’s dehydrated, clearly. And he doesn’t care.

“Right,” Jon says, looking like he would rather be anywhere else, “If you’re sure.”

Martin has no idea what to say to that. Jon saves him the effort by clicking the radio back on without starting the engine, and the midnight news drifts from the speakers in a deep, sombre voice that makes Martin feel intensely tired.

Jon clears his throat. “I hope you like cheese and tomato.”

Martin blinks Jon’s shadowed face back into focus. The lights are strange, transient—the orange glow of the streetlights interspersed with violent flickers of white as new arrivals pull into the car park.

“Cheese and tomato toasties, that is,” Jon adds, “That’s what’s in the bag.”

“Oh. Oh.” Martin blinks again, almost dizzy. “Thanks. I—I do. Like cheese and tomato toasties. What do I—how much were—?”

“You really don’t need—”

“I insist.”

“It’s fine, Martin.”

“But—”

“I bought it with the Institute credit card,” Jon interrupts, blunt. “If you would like to thank Elias for the cheese and tomato toastie on Monday, be my guest.”

It’s not really funny, but Martin finds himself giving one of those pathetic, half-formed laughs again. Jon looks momentarily surprised before he smiles and turns away.

Martin eats by rote because what else is he supposed to do? There’s an odd safety to mirroring Jon, following his lead. And so Martin does just that. He doesn’t taste the cheese and tomato toastie, and he can’t even tell if there’s sugar in the tea Jon hands him from the cardboard drinks tray, but it sits warm in his stomach, reminding him he hasn’t eaten anything other than crackers for nearly two days.

When Jon begins to drive again, the radio is playing a reading of a book about a Spanish painter Martin has never heard of. He feels like he owes Jon, in some way, for the cheese and tomato toastie, no matter who actually paid for it, and so he decides to remedy his previous disregard for Radio 4’s programming.

“This book sounds interesting,” Martin announces. There’s not much in his voice—no confidence, no real presence—but at least he’s saying something. “I can’t believe I’ve never heard of this Velázquez guy.”

“It’s Velázquez,” Jon corrects, although his pronunciation sounds no different to Martin’s.

“It’s a shame it’s the final episode,” Martin presses on, even though it’s painful. “Would have been nice to have a bit of context, you know?”

Jon hums in disinterest. “I suppose.”

This brief attempt at conversation is uninspiring, to say the least, so Martin instead resorts to an even more ridiculous line of inquiry. “Did we just pass a sign for Leeds Castle?”

“Yes,” Jon says, although he seems somewhat more engaged this time.

“But we’re in Kent.”

“Well-observed.”

“So why is it called Leeds Castle?”

“Well, there’s actually some debate as to why. In the Doomsday Book…”

Martin’s not watching the clock, but if he was, he would know Jon talks for a full twenty-three minutes about the etymology of Leeds Castle. It’s oddly soothing. Like a repeat of the emulsifiers at the ice cream parlour, except they’re not sitting across from each other, they physically can’t make eye contact, and there’s distance and darkness enough between them that they can both drop the performance. Martin doesn’t want to be looked at, to be seen, but he feels grounded by Jon’s voice. And Jon doesn’t stop every few minutes to make sure he isn’t being a nuisance, that he isn’t stealing time that others will resent the loss of.

They’ve made it to the Kent Downs. Martin supposes he should ask what it is they’re here to investigate. He manages it, and watches with something adjacent to despair as Jon’s open, almost excited expression falls away.

“Miss Hearne mentioned a chapel in her statement,” Jon says. His voice has dropped down an octave again, into the tone he uses in the Archives. “I can’t find any record of its existence, but I would like to be sure.”

Martin feels suddenly, impossibly cold. Like he will never be warm again. He shivers, and Jon turns up the car’s heaters. “I remember.”

Jon’s hands tighten around the steering wheel again. “You listened to the statement?”

“You—you asked me to transcribe it.”

“No, I asked Tim to transcribe it.”

“But Tim—well, he has an ear infection, he’s on antibiotics and everything, and Sasha’s the only one with access to the hospital records so she was cross-checking those, and I—I thought it was only fair if I transcribed it instead,” Martin says, the words falling out of his mouth in a blurred rush.

Jon deflates, just slightly, with a tired sigh. “Of course. I must have—I didn’t—I’ll apologise to Tim on Monday.”

Martin sits on his hands again. If he was feeling better, he might wonder if Jon has ever considered apologising to him. But perhaps he’s more truthful, when he’s in this place; perhaps he’s right when he thinks he doesn’t deserve it.

Jon sighs again. “So you heard…?”

“Yeah.”

“Brilliant,” Jon mutters, clearly meaning the opposite.

“Do you really think she’s making it up?”

“Of course I don’t—‘making it up’ would imply some kind of fault or, or blame, which is not at all what I was suggesting.” Jon’s jaw is set, tense, even as he spits out the words. “There is nothing made up about trauma and the very real impact it can have on a person’s life. I think Miss Hearne’s experience was significant and, as I told her, she should certainly seek out help from someone more qualified to address the grief of her fiancé’s death. As for empty cemeteries and chapels hidden in fog, well, I’ve read enough statements to know that the point at which they start to sound like an overdone ghost story is the time to deploy a reasonable amount of scepticism.”

Martin stares at the dashboard. The car’s heating is on its highest setting, the warm air blasting from the vents drying out Martin’s eyes, but he’s still shivering. Still so deeply, immovably cold.

“He was…” Martin whispers, but he can’t finish the sentence.

“He was very young, yes, and his loss was unspeakably tragic. That is not what I am seeking proof of, and that is far from Institute’s area of expertise in any case, but—”

“No,” Martin interrupts. His voice still so quiet, but Jon stops to listen nonetheless. “That’s not what I… I was going to say that she sounded lonely.”

Jon’s mouth opens, but he doesn’t seem able to form words. His teeth click as he shuts his mouth and turns back to the road, driving on in silence as the radio idly broadcasts the shipping forecast.

“I—I don’t mean the part with the empty cemeteries and chapels hidden in fog, although I believe her. I do.” Martin pauses, letting himself linger in that realisation. “The loneliest part was when she spoke about him.”

Jon takes a deep breath. He frowns, as if he wants to say something, but he keeps quiet.

The tightness is sitting in Martin’s throat and behind his eyes again, and he wishes he could cry. Maybe if he cried, it would leave him be, he’d be emptied but in the right way.

“They only got two years,” Martin whispers.

“They were…” Jon says, his voice a feeble imitation of comfort. And when his voice fails, his jaw tightens and the defensiveness flashes back across his expression. “Does it matter how long they got?”

“Yes, it matters. Of course it matters,” Martin snaps. He surprises himself with the vitriol behind his words.

“The length of their acquaintance doesn’t change the extent—”

“Their acquaintance? They were in love.”

“I’m aware.”

“They were going to get married.”

“I don’t know what you want me to say, Martin,” Jon hisses. “I’m not unfamiliar with grief.”

“Then why?”

“What do you mean, why?”

“Why didn’t you tell her what to—how to—to move on, or—I don’t know, couldn’t you just have humoured her? Couldn’t you have dropped the act for one day to help someone experiencing the worst thing that’s ever happened to them?”

Jon stares at the road ahead, exhaustion sitting in the lines of his shoulders, the twitch of his jaw. He hardly moves, aside from occasionally checking the mirrors, and Martin doesn’t expect an answer. The silence is cloying and choking and Martin lets it fester.

“If I knew how to move on,” Jon says, very quietly, after an indeterminable amount of time, “Well, let’s just say that’s not information I would withhold. And as for humouring Miss Hearne’s experience, what would you have me say?”

“You could have told her you believed her,” Martin presses.

“That would be a lie.”

“It would be a comfort.”

Jon’s lips twist humourlessly. “Aren’t those synonymous?”

“Then why are we here? Why drive around the Kent Downs in the middle of the night if you think it was all just a trick of the mind?”

“Because I need proof.”

“Of what?”

Jon doesn’t answer the question. Instead, he snaps: “I shouldn’t have bought you.”

“Probably,” Martin agrees, falling back into his seat.

“I’m pulling over,” Jon announces without preamble, as if this is a natural continuation of their argument. “I need to check my notes. I’m sure we’ve passed that sign for Bredgar at least twice already.”

Martin doesn’t say anything. Jon pulls the car into a cramped passing place on the side of the road and then takes his phone out of his pocket. The radio drones, and Martin stares out of the window at the darkness of the stretching rural road, the few specks of light in the distance where the sparse houses state their presence. He thinks about the process of lighting torches in order to send a warning. Smoke signals.

“No signal,” Jon mutters in frustration, and then he opens the driver’s door, climbs out and slams it behind him with enough force that the body of the car shakes.

Martin curls into his coat. His face is wet, he realises, and when he lifts his hand to his left cheeks, it’s cold with tears. Jon is a silhouette caught in the car’s headlights, shoulders up, body tensed. To Martin’s surprise, he seems to have abandoned his phone in favour of lighting a cigarette. Martin recalls Tim mentioning that Jon had quit, a while ago. He considers getting out of the car, too, and trying to convince Jon not to lift the cigarette to his lips. But he can’t move. He’s frozen in place, shaking with a chill that doesn’t belong to him.

In the silvery-grey plume of cigarette smoke, Martin thinks he sees the outline of the chapel they’ll never find.

*

Leaning against the car hood, outside a service station near Preston, Jon sneaks a cigarette while he waits for Martin. His hands are restless, twitching, and if he’s being honest, he has played hard and fast with the meaning of ‘quit’ ever since—well, ever since he started working in the Archives. And he needs a distraction because, for the first time since they left the Lonely the day before, Martin is out of his line of sight.

It hasn’t been long. Five minutes, at most. But Martin had insisted on going alone, had told Jon he was feeling car sick and needed a moment to himself to get cleaned up. To brush his teeth, which he had said with an odd smile, like this was a novelty. So Jon had let him go, and regretted it almost immediately, and began smoking soon after to take the edge off his gnawing anxiety.

Now that he’s alone, Jon finds himself thinking about the journey beyond the heart-pounding panic of getting out of London and the slower-burning worry over Martin’s drawn silence.

His lips curl into a humourless smile around another drag of the cigarette, and he huffs a small laugh. When Jon had turned on the radio after they’d finally made it onto the M6, it was already tuned in to Radio 4. He didn’t have the heart to change it, not least of all because he would have to explain to Martin, after all this time, that he doesn’t particularly like Radio 4. It’s not his station of choice by a longshot. The last time they’d been in a car together—a lifetime ago, it feels like—Jon had still been trying very hard to appear older than he was and, in a moment of panic, decided the only way to do this was to listen to a radio station that didn’t even play music, for god’s sake.

Ironically, he has been listening to Radio 4 recently, if only because Daisy insists they both stay appraised of The Archers. Insisted. Jon’s smile falls. Only a few weeks ago, while Jon had been attempting to organise his office while Daisy complained at the latest pastoral plot point, he had found an old, half-folded Post-it note. A jumbled collection of words in Jon’s handwriting: Martin Secret Santa. Velázquez - The Vanishing Man??

“What’s that?” Daisy had asked him. “I can’t read your handwriting.”

Jon had slipped the Post-it back into the drawer, although this time with his rib rather than the jumbled collection of paperwork it had been coexisting with before. “Then I’m not going to tell you.”

“Oh, come on, Sims.”

“It’s nothing important.”

“I don’t think I believe you.”

The Eye had informed Jon that The Vanishing Man was the name of the book reviewed on Radio 4 on January 16th 2016, in the early hours of the morning, when Jon had been driving with Martin around the Kent Downs. Jon had written the name of the book down so that he’d know what to get Martin, if he drew his name for Secret Santa.

In the car park, Jon’s throat tightens with grief. There was never another Secret Santa after Prentiss. It seemed a silly thing, with everything that had happened, to care about. They’d never been a normal workplace, not really. And yet Jon still craves that brief glimpse of ordinariness, of a pointless tradition everyone rolls their eyes at and complains about but which is still repeated every year.

Jon is just about to walk to the bin and put his cigarette out in the tray resting on top when he notices Martin’s slow, almost unsteady approach. He quickly disposes of the spent cigarette and tries to look as nonchalant as possible, like he is perfectly capable of spending five minutes away from Martin without falling apart.

Except that as soon as Martin’s face catches the light and his expression became visible, Jon has no hope of maintaining the act.

“Martin,” Jon says, stumbling forward to meet Martin before he reaches the car fully.

“Jon.” Martin recognises him. It should be a relief, but there’s a dull echo to his voice that reminds Jon far too much of the Lonely.

Jon can see that Martin shivering, even in the too-big knitted jumper Jon had guided him into when they’d woken up sometime after midday, after sitting together on the sofa all night, Jon crying softly against Martin’s shoulder while Martin slept. He remembers the way Martin’s curls had sprung out of the jumper and how Jon had felt like crying again with how much love he felt in that moment, staring at the crown of Martin’s head, wondering what it might be like to kiss him there.

When Jon takes Martin’s hand, it’s so cold Jon feels a bolt of ice shoot up his own spine.

“You’re freezing,” Jon murmurs, pulling gently on Martin’s hand. “Come on.”

Jon places his other hand on Martin’s back, making small, soothing motions as he opens the passenger door as wide as possible and gently encourages Martin back into the seat. He pulls up the fleece blanket in the footwell up so that it covers Martin’s legs, where the worst of the shivering seems to be concentrated, and squeezes Martin’s hand until Martin’s eyes move to his.

“I’m just going to walk around to the other side of the car and get in, alright?”

Martin nods. Jon squeezes his hand again, one last time, before standing up and jogging around the car to the driver’s side. He climbs in quickly, kicks on the engine so that he can start up the heaters, and then re-takes Martin’s hand. Martin stares straight ahead, his eyes cloudy and fixed on a faraway point Jon can’t identify.

“Martin,” Jon ventures, trying to keep his voice as soft as possible. “What happened?”

“N-nothing.” Martin shudders violently. “It was nothing.”

“It doesn’t look like nothing.”

“Jon,” Martin sighs.

“We don’t have to talk about it now,” Jon agrees, trying to keep the reluctance from his words. “But it might… maybe it would help?”

“To see what we’re up against?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, the Lonely, it…” Martin laughs, a hollow, humourless sound. “It’s not just going to let me go, is it?”

Jon doesn’t know what to say. They sit for a while in silence, the only sound the rumble of the engine and the whir of the heaters. In a moment of desperation, Jon almost considers turning Radio 4 back on, and he nearly laughs at his own ridiculousness.

“I—I was in Costa,” Martin says, at last, disrupting the quiet. “I was going to get you some coffee, since you’d been driving all evening. I’m sorry. That I can’t—that I don’t have a—”

“Martin, it’s fine.” They’ve already had this conversation. Jon brushes his thumb over Martin’s knuckles and tries not to well up because Martin thought to get him coffee, when he knows for a fact that Martin despises coffee as a point of pride and refuses to even keep it in his flat.

“I always wanted to learn. To drive, that is.”

Jon smiles, but it fades quickly. “Maybe you can. When we get to…”

Martin hums. “I ordered the coffee, that was… it was fine. A bit awkward, I guess. Haven’t talked to strangers in a while, you know? Or anyone, really. But I got through it. It’s just that when—when the barista called my name, she just—she looked through me, like I wasn’t there.” A brief, bitter twitch of Martin’s lips. “Maybe I wasn’t.”

“Martin.”

“It’s fine. It’s—it has to be—I’m fine.”

“Martin.”

“I just stood there, while she was calling my name. Looking at me, but not,” Martin continues, still staring out of the window. “In the end, she gave the coffee to the person who was cleaning the forecourt.”

“Oh.” Jon tips his head back against the seat. “I can—did you order anything else? Are you hungry? I can go back inside. Or we can go… t-together.”

Martin shakes his head minutely.

“We’ll eat when we get to the house,” Jon says, like it’s already decided. “I can make soup.”

“What kind?” Martin asks, so quietly Jon almost misses it.

“Whatever kind you like.”

“I don’t know. Is that something I—should I know?”

“We can find out.”

Martin doesn’t say anything else.

“Are you ready to move on?” Jon ventures.

At Martin’s minute nod, Jon reluctantly untangles their hands and retakes the wheel. He pulls out of the service station, and once they’ve navigated the helter-skelter of roundabouts and made it back onto the motorway, Jon lets his hand drift towards the radio. Would it be so earth-shattering, to listen to something other than Radio 4? Surely it wouldn’t shake the foundation of their relationship more than everything else that’s happened in the last two years. And yet he feels an extraordinary amount of pressure, like he’s about to expose some vulnerable part of himself to Martin by revealing what sort of music he enjoys.

“Jon?” Martin murmurs.

Jon retracts his hand. It’s ridiculous, it really is, but he’s not ready. “Sorry. Just, uh, just checking I know where the—the hazard lights are in this car.”

Martin doesn’t seem to be in any position to question him. Jon returns his hand to the wheel and stares at the straight, sparse road ahead of them. There’s not a lot of traffic, late at night and mid-week, and Jon loses himself quickly in the motions of driving. It’s strange, he thinks, the way skills stay with you after so much time dormant and unpractised. He wonders if he could remember the cords he used to play on his grandmother’s piano, if he sat down in front of one now, or the lyrics of the song Georgie taught him, his voice matching the gentle strum of her guitar. He wonders if the Eye would let him be bad at it, let him rediscover these half-realised skills or supply him with the unearned knowledge of how to perfect them.

Instead, he thinks about teaching Matin to drive. If the Eye is going to insist on perfection, Jon might as well share it with the person he cares about most. The Scottish Highlands aren’t the easiest place to learn, and they probably shouldn’t attract the attention of anyone nearby by hiring an instructor, but it would be something to do. A reason to spend time together. They’d argue, almost certainly. He can hear it: yes, Jon, I know the highway code and Martin, you’ve missed the turning again and well, maybe your instructions should have been clearer and I resent your tone and I resent your directions and—he smiles. Petty arguments, of course, the kind that don’t hurt, not really. They would laugh about it when they got home.

He turns to Martin, as if this is already a joke between them, already spoke out loud, only to find him fast asleep against the window.  

The suspended moment of surprise lasts far longer than Jon would admit to anyone, even himself, and he has to force his eyes back to the road just in time to avoid a large lorry with smiling cartoon produce on its flank. He takes a moment to breath around his pounding heart as he settles back into the speed limit. And then he can’t stop stealing glances at Martin’s sleeping form.

Martin’s head is tucked between the headrest and the window, a position that will likely give him an aching neck later, but Jon can’t bear to wake him. The fleece blanket—yellow with white flowers, Jon remembers, although he can’t see it in the monochrome lights of the motorway—rests atop Martin’s gently rising and falling belly. One of Martin’s hands is hidden beneath the blanket, curled around his knee; the other lies half-up in his lap, fingers twitching every so often. His mouth is open slightly, top teeth just visible. During one stolen look, Jon notices Martin’s nose curling slightly in sleep, his eyelashes twitching. It’s so endearing that Jon has to smothers the urge to cry.

Once again, Jon thinks about the last time they shared an unfamiliar car to traverse unfamiliar terrain. Martin had seemed to sleep then, too, although looking at Martin now, Jon isn’t sure it was actual rest. More just closing his eyes, because there was no real difference between that and keeping them open, staring absently at the road ahead.

When Jon had dropped the hire car off in Croydon around eight a.m. that Saturday morning, Martin bid him goodbye with a hollow smile, assured Jon he could would be fine getting home, and walked—purposelessly, somehow, even though he had a destination—towards the nearest station. Jon had gotten another taxi back to the Institute, weekend be damned, he needed to write up his notes, and picked up his phone at obsessive fifteen-minute intervals, beset with the need to text Martin to ensure he’d gotten home safely.

He never did text. And he still regretted it, even when Martin came in on Monday—still pale, still withdrawn—and assured Jon his weekend had been fine. Even now, two years later.

Worse still, he knew something wasn’t quite right with Martin that week. Tim and Sasha had been worried about Martin, and had come into Jon’s office before leaving for the night and asked that he ensure Martin wasn’t still there when he locked up. Jon had no real issue letting Tim or Sasha stay in the Archives after-hours; he trusted them, and they were experienced researchers, and they both worked best in their own time. Martin, not so much.

But he had noticed that Martin’s quietness in the days since Naomi Hearne’s statement, the way he drifted distracted through the Archives and sometimes seemed to be somewhere else entirely. Perhaps that’s what compelled Jon to invite Martin with him to Kent. To this day, he’s still not sure why he extended the offer. Why he made that decision over and over again, even when opportunities to turn back presented.

He does know how different he feels now. How sorry he is, that he tried so hard to avoid this. How angry he is, that it took him so long to discover this feeling. And he knows exactly why he invited Martin with him to Scotland.

He supposes it’s good, if Martin didn’t—couldn’t—sleep back then, that he is managing to rest now. Jon makes himself focus very closely on the road, on driving gently so as not to disturb the sleep Martin so clearly needs.

It’s not until they’re about half an hour away from the Scottish border that Martin begins to stir, a deep sigh followed by a more discontented murmur. Jon tries to keep his eyes on the road ahead, tries not to think it’s only been an hour, please let him rest just a little longer, but his gaze keeps wandering to where Martin is curling in on himself against the window, beginning to shudder again.

The car’s heating system is already on its highest setting, which Jon discovers when he reaches to turn it up. Perhaps he’s also running cold from their encounter with the Lonely, and the shivery anxiety still gripping him after their escape from London. Jon thinks about reaching across, waking Martin, but just as he wills his hand away from the steering wheel again, Martin sits up with a noise of confusion, the rasping outline of Jon’s name.

Martin stares at the darkness in front of the car, cut through with the white glare of the headlights. He’s stock still, the only movement the rise and fall of his shoulders at pace with his frantic breathing, and the small quivers running through him at merciless intervals. It’s almost reminiscent, Jon thinks, of the time they drove to Kent, except there is something visibly uncalm about Martin’s posture this time.

“Martin?”

Martin just keeps staring.

Jon reaches across the car towards him. “Martin?”

Martin draws a sharp breath, flinching away from Jon’s outstretched hand so quickly he thumps his head against the window. The impact seems to wake him fully, but his breathing gets quicker, if anything, and he hides both his shaking hands beneath the blanket, gathering it up to his chin as he attempts to stop his teeth from chattering.

“S-sorry,” Martin murmurs, “I’m sorry.”

“There’s nothing to be sorry for,” Jon replies, trying to match Martin’s voice for gentleness, although his does not shake or warp with almost-tears. “Bad dream?”

Martin hums, but says nothing more.

“Would you like to stop? I think we’ll be coming up to another service—”

“No,” Martin interrupts, a new sharpness to his voice. He takes another breath, slower but still unsteady. “No, thank you. I’m—I’m fine. I’ll be fine.”

Jon tries to smile, as soothingly as his can, but Martin won’t return eye contact when Jon glances his way. “Alright. We’re not far from the border now.”

Jon drives, trying very hard to focus on the road rather than Martin in the passenger seat. Every time Jon looks Martin’s way, the shivering seems to get worse, accompanied by a blurring at the edges of his figure that Jon attributes, at first, to the late hour, to the fuzziness of the light and the growing exhaustion behind Jon’s eyes. When he tries to focus on it, it gives him an odd, momentary headache—not dissimilar to when he attempts to Know something too big or too abstract.

It’s then that Jon realises this is the Lonely, clinging to Martin like heat haze to the road, except there’s something distinctly sinister and chilling about it. A claws-out, cloying presence in the car with them.

“Martin…”

“I’m fine,” Martin replies, voice as tense as his jaw as he fights down another teeth-chattering chill. “It’s—it will pass.”

Jon swallows around the ache in his throat. “Can I help?”

“It’s fine.”

“Martin—”

“Jon, I’m—”

“You’re not,” Jon snaps, not meaning to sound so harsh, but the worry explodes out of him sounding closer to anger. “You’re not fine, Martin, and I—I can’t just sit here and watch—”

“Then don’t watch,” Martin hisses back. “Would that be so hard? To just. Not watch. For once in your life just stop—stop looking, stop asking to know things that will—that will—”

“That will what?”

“That will destroy you, okay? Stop throwing yourself into—into the eldritch version of staring directly at the sun!”

“Already been there and done that, I’m afraid,” Jon mutters, with no small amount of bitterness.

“Oh, great! And how did that turn out? I’m not some—you can’t—I didn’t ask for this. I’m not a statement, I’m not—you can’t just Know me, Jon, that’s not—not fair. It’s not—” Martin is gasping now, almost gagging on his words, on the tears threatening to implode his facade of distance. “It’s not fair. It’s not fair.”

When Jon turns to look at him, there is still something blurred and unspecific about Martin, like he is both here and somewhere else. Like half of his image is being left behind by each forward movement of the car. But he is crying, fully crying. And by some cruel twist of fate, Jon can see this more clearly than everything else around them.

“I know what you’re going to say. I know nothing’s fair. I know that’s the—it’s the way our world is now, right? Nothing’s fair, and nothing’s safe, and everything…” Martin coughs miserably, his voice stolen momentarily by the tears. “Everything ends.”

“Martin—”

“Don’t, Jon. Don’t say my name like that.”

“What would you have me say instead?”

“I don’t—I can’t. Not yet.”

So Jon says nothing. He drives. He tries very hard not to look at Martin, who curls against the door, crying in such a quiet, self-contained way that Jon wants to weep with the intensity of grief Martin seems to be denying himself.

By the time they’re nearing the border, Martin is even quieter. Jon risks a glance at him and finds that he is still crying, but sporadically, just tears now, falling silently onto the blanket he’s still holding beneath his chin. His face shimmers when it catches the headlights leeching across the road from the southbound side. The glassy look has returned to his eyes, and Jon wonders if he even knows that he’s still crying.

Up ahead, Jon spots a sign for Gretna Green. It twists a wretched, tearful laugh from his throat.

“What is it?” Martin rasps.

Jon turns to him, not caring if he misses the moment they cross the border—which before had seemed such an important milestone to him, a prerequisite of the journey. Martin is still crying those silent, ignored tears, but his gaze has moved from that absent nothingness to Jon’s face instead.

“I was just—Gretna Green,” Jon says uselessly. “We’re near Gretna Green.”

Martin takes a shuddering breath. It sounds like it could have been a laugh, too, if they were somewhere else, someone else—a perfect twin to Jon’s. “Oh?”

“Did you know that you can no longer get married at Gretna Green without at least twenty-nine days’ notice? In 1856, a law was passed requiring one member of the couple to have resided in the local parish for at least twenty-one days in order to be eligible to marry there. That has since been repealed, but the longer notice period maintained.” Jon didn’t know this until just a moment ago, when the Eye supplied it to him. “The tradition of Gretna Green marriages dates back to at least 1754, although the practice didn’t become commonplace until a toll road made it a more accessible location to those travelling from England. At the time, Scottish law was guided more by Celtic rather than Catholic tradition, and so allowed a couple to be married by anyone so long as there were witnesses, which gave rise to so-called anvil priests—local blacksmiths willing to perform wedding ceremonies.”

Martin swipes at his cheek with the back of his hand. He seems sturdier, more present. “I didn’t know any of that, actually.”

“The most famous anvil priest is Richard Rennison, who was recorded as having performed five-thousand, one-hundred and forty-seven wedding ceremonies before ‘irregular marriages’ were outlawed by the Scottish government in 1939.”

“That’s—that’s a lot of weddings,” Martin murmurs, a hint of humour in his voice. “He must have seen a lot.”

Jon frowns. “Of what?”

“Well, love, I guess. But it can’t all have been good.”

“Perhaps.”

“I mean, I’ve read Pride and Prejudice, for a start.”

“Yes, but Mr Wickham is not a particularly helpful example of a potential husband. Would you hold his entire character against the integrity of Gretna Green?”

“I guess they never actually went to Gretna Green, in the end. But I bet there’s a lot of real-life examples of people manipulating their partners into a shotgun wedding across the border and then—”

“Goodbye happily ever after.”

“I never had you down for a hopeless romantic.”

“I was agreeing with your last point.”

“Yeah, but none of the points before that.”

“Yes, I was.”

Martin makes that noise again, something adject to a laugh that warms Jon’s heart. “No, you weren’t.”

“Yes, I was.”

“No, you—” Martin stops, shakes his head. “This is ridiculous.”

“Fine,” Jon says, lifting his hands momentarily from the steering wheel in a gesture of surrender. “I wouldn’t go so far as to call myself a hopeless romantic, thank you very much. But is it so terrible to imagine that some of those marriages were—well, happy or exciting or—or fairer? Than somewhere else? That there was a great deal of love here for a great deal of time, and that makes this place—unique. You’re right: not all of it could have been happy, or good, or honest. But—”

“But you’re a little bit in love with the idea of this place,” Matin says, and it takes Jon a moment to realise he’s teasing.

Jon feels heat rush to his cheeks, and he’s glad that it’s dark inside the car, that they’re between streetlights and passing vehicles. I’m a little bit in love with you, too, Jon thinks, and feels his blush deepen even further. The thought is so vivid that for a moment, he’s convinced he actually said it out loud. But Martin is just looking at him, his expression still somewhat distant, but there’s something like a smile sitting on his lips. No hint that Jon might have just confessed his love.

“Yes, well.” Jon clears his throat. “Sometimes it’s nice to…”

“Have a little hope?”

Jon nods, just once. When he looks at Martin, his smile has disappeared and there are tears in his eyes again.

“I’m sorry,” Jon whispers.

“For what?”

“For everything. For—”

“Jon, you can’t be sorry for everything,” Martin cuts in. “It will eat you alive. God, you—you don’t have to be sorry. Not for anything you think you’ve done to me.”

“Martin, I—”

“No, Jon, I’m the one who should be sorry.”

“What an earth for? You haven’t—”

“I have. We’ve both—we’ve both made a lot of mistakes. And that’s… probably why we’re here.” Martin sniffs, curls his hands tighter around the blanket. “But I…”

Jon waits. He thinks they must have crossed the border into Scotland now, with little fanfare. Too absorbed in each other’s words to notice the transition.

“Can we stop soon?” Martin asks at last, breaking the silence.

It’s not what Jon is expecting, but he nods nonetheless. “Of course. We’ll stop at the next service station.”

True to his word, Jon stops at the next service station—which just so happens to be Gretna Green. He asks Martin if he wants to keep going, to bypass this service station for another, but Martin simply shakes his head and doesn’t say anything as Jon finds them an empty space.

They walk inside together, only splitting off into separate cubicles when they reach the toilets. Martin says very little, but allows himself to be guided by Jon through Waitrose, which is open despite the late hour. They’ll have to sacrifice affordability for practicality this time, since they’re only two hours away from Daisy’s safehouse and it seems like a bad idea to risk stopping again. Jon fills their basket with tea bags, powdered milk, custard creams, bread, bananas, baked beans and pre-grated cheese. None of it particularly glamourous, but it will tide them over, and he’s not sure either of them is in a state to do more than microwave what they have available.

Just before they reach the check-out, Jon notices the chocolate Martin likes. He remembers, because Tim had once returned from his lunch break having bought the entire box from the nearby supermarket when Martin had been staying in the Archives. Caramel Cadbury, the contrasting purple and yellow wrapper always showing up in the bins after that, and Jon feeling an odd sense of jealousy that Tim had so effortlessly, it seemed, made Martin’s unexpected stay more pleasant.

Jon places two bars into the basket with the rest of their goods. With the hand not holding the basket, Jon reaches for Martin. Martin closes the distance, taking Jon’s hand, and they cling to each other through the transaction and the return to the car.

“Are you hungry?” Jon asks Martin.

Martin shakes his head. Jon adds this to the list of things to address later, when he isn’t so sleep-deprived he’s sure to say the wrong thing, push the wrong buttons. He places their shopping bags in the boot of the car and reluctantly relinquishes Martin’s hand so they can both climb back in.

Jon doesn’t start the engine.

“I can’t stop thinking about Naomi Hearne,” Martin announces, after a long stretch of silence. “I had a dream about her statement. Earlier. It was… different, though. I think it might have been—I think maybe I was—I belonged to that house.”

Jon doesn’t know what to say. His own silence is choking him, and he knows now is not the time to cry, but it’s a difficult thing to wrestle down the onslaught.

“I was so stupid,” Martin hisses. He’s crying again, so suddenly Jon feels like he must have missed something. “I should never have gotten involved with the Lonely. I’m—this is—it’s all my fault. I did this.”

Jon swallows his own tears. “Martin, I don’t understand.”

“The Lonely won’t let me go.”

“It will. It has,” Jon says, quick, desperate.

“No.” Martin shakes his head with a mirthless laugh. “No, it hasn’t, Jon. You remember Evan Lukas.”

“Of course,” Jon replies, although it wasn’t a question.

“He escaped. He escaped, and it took him back in the end.”

“No.” Jon leans back, as if struck. This is—why has he never thought about this? But no, it can’t be true, it can’t be a possibility. “No, that’s—Martin, you aren’t like him. Evan Lukas was—he was born into it. The Lonely was with him for longer than it ever was you.”

“I think the Lonely always had me.”

“Don’t say that. Not again. Not now.”

“But it’s true, Jon! When I listened to Naomi Hearne’s statement—”

“I should never have let you—”

“You didn’t let me. I chose to.”

“It wasn’t a choice.”

“It was.”

“No, it—it compelled you, somehow. The statements, they can do that, they can—”

“I wanted to read it.”

“Exactly!”

“No, I wanted to read it because I was doing my job, because I was helping Tim and Sasha. I didn’t know it would—it just seemed like a normal statement. Until I listened,” Martin continues, voice growing in strength. “It called to something inside of me. I recognised so much of myself—”

“No, Martin.”

“My life is—was—it was just like—”

“Stop,” Jon snaps, “Stop. Please.”

Martin stops, but only momentarily. “We have to talk about this at some point. I know I’ve been putting it off, too, but… we have to.”

Jon drags a hand over his face, suddenly so exhausted he could fall asleep. But his heart is pounding and his hands, he realises as he’s lowering them from his face, are shaking. There’s no rest to be had yet. “Alright.”

“Being cut off from the Lonely might kill me,” Martin says, “Like it killed Evan Lukas.”

“I’ll be cut off from the Eye, too. I’ll—”

“Basira is sending you statements,” Martin interrupts, “And you’re going to read them, okay? You have to read them.”

“Then you’ll have to—to find a way to feed the Lonely, too.”

“I won’t do that.”

“That’s the only deal I’m going to make.”

“I won’t sacrifice anyone to that place,” Martin spits. “You saw it, Jon. You were there. How can you think I would ever send anyone there just to save myself?”

“Oh, and you think feeding the Eye is without its sacrifices?” Jon demands, fury rising to meet his grief in a perfect storm. “Is it okay to subject people to nightmares, to reliving their trauma again and again with me drinking it all in, just so I can survive?”

“At least they’d be alive!”

“Martin, this is ridiculous. You can’t—”

“Stop trying to find a way out of this.”

“Stop acting as if this is the only way!” Jon shouts, loudly enough that Martin flinches back.

With a shuddering breath, Jon tries to contain his anger, to hide it until it’s not so raw. He thinks about the last time they were in the car together. The argument then, and how he had pulled over and gotten out and smoked to avoid finishing the confrontation, to avoid letting his true feelings show.

He won’t do that again. He can’t. Not this time.

“Evan Lukas didn’t—it might not have been the Lonely that killed him. We don’t know for certain that it was,” Jon continues. “And if it was the Lonely… did Naomi Hearne’s statement give any indication that he lived his life differently because he knew it might happen? No. He got a job that he cared about. He surrounded himself with friends. He fell in love. You can have all of those things. You deserve all of those things.”

Martin’s tears drop faster and faster, an unstoppable flood, and Jon wants nothing more than to reach across and wipe them away with his thumb. He would, except that Martin is holding himself so tightly, curled with his back against the car door, and he looks so devastated, so far away, so unwilling to be reached.

“He died,” Martin sobs. “He died, and he left the person he loved behind.”

“Oh, Martin.”

“No, Jon, I—I know what that feels like.”

“Martin,” Jon murmurs. Afraid of what’s coming next. But he knows he has to say it. He has to keep going. “Can I ask you something?”

Martin hesitates, wiping at his eyes, digging his fingers into his sockets. After a protracted moment, he nods.

“Do you think Naomi Hearne wishes she never met Evan Lukas?” Jon asks.

Martin stares at him, still crying. “I don’t know.”

“I think you do.”

“I don’t…” Martin takes a shuddering breath. “No. I don’t think Naomi Hearne wishes she never met Evan Lukas.”

Jon almost smiles. “Neither do I.”

“But she was lonely again, afterwards.”

“Maybe she wasn’t. Maybe she reached out to Evan’s friends. Maybe she realised they were her friends, too.”

Martin stares at him with red-rimmed eyes. “Do you know that?”

“No.” Jon sighs. “No, but I—I can Look.”

“No, that’s not fair.”

Jon steadies himself. Across the car park, he watches a young father bounce a little baby, pacing the length of his sedan as he does so. In the car, the faint silhouette of his partner is just visible; they look peaceful, at rest. Jon’s heart aches.

“Can I ask you one more thing, Martin?” Jon whispers.

“Yes,” Martin rasps, reluctance replaced with resignation.

“Do you wish you had never met me?”

Silence. Jon forces himself to keep watching the father, murmuring now to the fussing baby, giving Martin time to consider the question, all of its sharp angles, its gentle core. He wishes, more than anything, that he could reach for Martin’s hand and hold it. Hold it tight, kiss his knuckles.

“Jon?”

At last, Jon turns to look at Martin. Their eyes meet and then, in a blur of movement, Martin reaches for him, his hands pausing on Jon’s shoulders for just a moment, giving him time to pull away, but Jon reciprocates in full, grabs hold of Martin’s jumper and pulls until they’re a tangled mess, holding each other, crying and clinging and trying to move closer than the small car will allow.

“No,” Martin says into Jon’s shoulder. “I don’t—of course I don’t regret meeting you. God, Jon, I—please don’t—never think that, okay? I don’t want you to ever think that.”

Jon lifts his hand to Martin’s hair, runs his fingers through the tussled curls where they’re fuzzy from sleeping against the door. “Martin, meeting you—it was a gift. It’s always been a gift.”

Martin sobs, his face wet against the seam of Jon’s jumper. “I wish I’d never agreed to Peter’s plan.”

“I understand why you did. And I forgive you, if you need to hear it.”

“But I’ve ruined everything.”

“Nothing is ruined beyond repair, Martin.”

“What if the Lonely calls me back?”

Jon holds tighter, as if the Lonely is already at their backs, creeping closer. “We’ll deal with it.”

“You said yourself…” Martin sobs again. “You said—when we went to Kent—you said—”

“I said it didn’t matter how long Naomi and Evan had. I remember.”

Martin is shaking against him. “Did you…?”

“I meant it. Not because—it’s not because I didn’t care, although I know I was trying very hard to give that impression, at the time. I meant it because no amount of time would have been enough. Love is… it’s outlasting. It makes its own time.”

“Jon—”

“No, please, Martin, I—I need to say this. No matter how long we get, whether it’s days or—or years. It won’t be enough. I’ll always…” Jon laughs, a small, fragile thing. “Well, I’ll always want more. Perhaps you don’t believe me, or you—you can’t, right now. But you, Martin, you are enough. Always. I will spend every moment we get together ensuring you believe that. If you’ll have me, of course. There’s—of course, there’s no obligation, and I would—I’d understand if—but it’s true. It’s all true.” Jon laughs again, feeling giddy. “I want to spend all of my time with you, Martin. For as long as you’ll have me.”

Slowly, they pull away from each other, but not far. Jon moves his hands up Martin’s arms, over his shoulders, until they rest on his cheeks, and he finally allows himself the privilege of wiping away Martin’s tears with his thumb.

“I wish it hadn’t taken—well, all of this—” Martin makes a vague gesture with his hand, which still somehow encompasses everything: tea stains on statements, worms at the door and shoulder-to-shoulder against the wall, trips to the café heavy with paranoia, quiet goodbyes, missed moments. “To get here.”

Jon rubs his thumb against Martin’s cheek. “We can’t go back.”

“I know.”

“Will you…?” Jon takes a steadying breath. There are so many questions, but only one matters, in this moment. The rest will follow, one day. “Martin, will you take it day by day with me? And if that doesn’t work—hour by hour, minute by minute. Together.”

There’s a breathless pause. And then Martin laughs, a genuine smile splitting his face for the first time in—well, Jon can’t remember how long. It’s small and tentative, but it’s there. And it means everything to Jon.

“Yes,” Martin tells him.

Jon smiles, too.

“I’m scared,” Martin murmurs, smile wavering slightly.

“Me too.”

���But I—I want to try.”

Jon feels his smile grow. “That’s enough. Always.”

Martin’s smile finds its feet again.

“Are you ready to keep going?” Jon asks.

Martin lifts his hands to Jon’s and squeezes. “I’m ready.”

In the silvery-grey headlights on the tarmac ahead, Jon thinks he sees the outline of the words he is still looking for the strength to share.

I love you.

Soon. He’ll say it soon. He has time.

*

The sun is just rising when they reach the safehouse. It welcomes them like an old friend, worn stone bathed in newborn sunlight as if to say hello, as if to smile at their arrival. Jon insists they are safe here, though his heart is unsure. Martin can’t shake the feeling that this is won’t be forever, though his heart wants to hope this might be it.

Maybe they will have a lifetime here. Maybe not.

Love makes its own time, Martin thinks. And Jon smiles and leads them both towards home.

[period-dramallama]

Spanish Princess episode 6: my tired chronological thoughts

Say it with me now: “previously, on the Spanish Princess!”

-Is it just me or is tsp!koa sympathetic in this episode? 

-charlotte was actually acting really well in the first scenes. I really felt for her. Probably because she wasn’t spouting any stupid dialogue. 

-SO WE’RE JUST GOING TO FORGET ABOUT BABY STEALING HUH

-i wish i could forget

-”Cardinal Wolsey has been speaking with your daughter” if More and Maggie are now Mary’s adopted co-parents, can Wolsey please be the cool uncle?

-Please can we have wolsey speaking to mary in the fawning tone he uses with Henry and Mary’s just like...unimpressed.

-I will say this for tsp!koa, she does give good Hugs

-Yet again, Thomas More is babysitting the girls. While it’s good that Mary has adopted parents, it’s only sadder given her biological dad will execute both of them.

-it is actually historically accurate to have maggie p looking after Mary, she was Mary’s governess IRL, IIRC.

-also you wouldn’t leave the princess with just one person. She’d surely be supervised by at least 2 people, in case like one person had a heart attack or smth.

-PLEASE go back to calling her Lady Pole. AND GIVE THOMAS MORE TO DO

-”it will all come to nothing” sounds like something that WON’T come to nothing

-and now Henry and Wolsey have had a lover’s quarrel, they are such boyfriends they even quarrel like boyfriends.

-’summit’ sounds too modern

-Are Angus beefburgers named thus because of hard Meg roasted him this episode?

-”I wasn’t expecting to see you” yeah bc wasn’t the Field just F and H? 

-The cinematography was great last episode, and now we have weird close ups on the riot ringleader’s face. Why. I can practically see his saliva. Yum.

-Someone else got to the “Wolsey whispers like David Attenborough” joke first.

-What is that weird af flooring? It looks like they stole it from the set of Rivendell in LOTR.

-No dancing? No revels? No tongue in cheek allusions to Glastonbury or Woodstock? This Field feels more like parent’s evening at school.

-I’m now certain Flodden swallowed the budget whole and it was not worth it.

-”we are being threatened” “they drew a gallows in pig’s blood” This is so frustrating. You didn’t need Lina to spell it out for the audience. It would have been so much more suspenseful if you just saw the drawing, and then Lina’s terrified face, and we cut to the next scene. But you think the audience is so dumb we won’t realise a gallows drawn in blood is a threat? GTFO. And stop making Lina state the obvious!

-How good is Rosa’s hubby at his navigator job if they’re wearing brocade at a royal summit?

-To be fair to the show, “she’s only six years old,” is said by Rosa, not Catherine, and Rosa has been living outside England, so easy mistake.

-I like the compass gift, that was cute.

-Maggie watching the shadow play reminds me of the shadow puppets her mother and aunt played with in twq :’)

-THE WINE FOUNTAIN YES I CAN SEE THE WINE FOUNTAIN i was worried we wouldn’t see it

-I misheard Rosa and thought she called Buckingham Aardvark instead of Edward. I will now call him Aardvark. Yes I am very mature.

-I get that Wolsey is meant to be the Bad Guy, but he was literally just standing there with his wine, doing nothing. Stop shouting at him, Aardvark, YOU walked into HIM.

-”raise the price of ale” do you have any idea how much ale people were drinking in this period, Henry? That’s like the government putting up the price of water. You raise the price of ale and you’ll make the unrest worse. 

-People have been discussing Bessie’s behaviour, I think the issue is classism rather than xenophobia, cause she's worried for Lina and Oviedo and their kids but they’re servants of the crown, like she is, so they’re not ‘riff raff’, and she’s also dismissive of the rioters and wants “order restored” she said “heads on spikes” but I assume the heads are the rioters’ heads. Idk, either way the dialogue is clunky and stupid and this whole plotline is badly handled anyway and i do not care enough to rewatch that scene. 

-given how rude Francois was to Mary, IN PUBLIC, I kinda love the idea of her taking the mickey out of him. and look at that, Reggie Pole’s silence finally has a plot purpose! Given that Reggie was Mary Tudor’s archbishop and right hand man, it’s kind of touching that they’re connected in this way.

-Twenty minutes left of episode and the Field is over. Le disappointment. 

-”he’s gone!” Oviedo, I get that you’re probably in shock but... are you honestly trying to do CPR on a man who’s been skewered with a sword. I love you, Oviedo, but you were holding the show’s single braincell and now you’ve dropped it. I’ll give you a pass if you genuinely panicked.

-wtf henry pole your mother will hear about this

-The climax was very emotional...but ruined by the fact it’s total nonsense. Everyone in this show continues to be a total idiot. FINALLY we can be finished with the “not loving Mary” BS that should have lasted no more than 1 ep, if you had to do it at all.

-To be fair to the show, Mary comes across to me at least as traumatised, not as a gleeful baby tyrant. She’s not happy about men getting executed

-”My father cuts their heads off” it would have been such black comedy if koa was like “No darling, he won’t cut their heads off. Beheading’s for rich people”.

-please tell me you’re not hanging them by trapdoor method. The trapdoor method was invented in the nineteenth century.

-”grant them mercy” dude you said “they can die without me watching” so they’re probably all dead by now. 

-”first time he’s agreed” I will give the show a tiny tiny benefit of doubt and say maybe they mean this particular pope?? Actually scrap that they probably mean all popes.

-This should have been Thomas More’s time to shine, IRL he was involved in the govt response to Evil May Day, (I think he even addressed the mob to get them to surrender to the king) which I assume this riot is based off of. But because he was also at the Field, and the showrunners forced these two events to happen simultaneously, the showrunners decided to keep him at the Field...doing nothing. 0/10. 

-some lovely choral singing this episode.