#also finally went all the way to somerville

[vault81]

Map of the Commonwealth (11.12.87)

Featuring all (currently) known factions and their territories.

[mattslolita]

psycho killer - c. sturniolo ( 003. )

in which ... a killer is terrorizing the town of boston and charmaine soon realizes she's the final girl in his twisted game.

ghostface!chris x black!fem oc

warnings ; blood , gore , death , eventual smut , angst , ghostface!chris , final girl! oc

"𝒅𝒐𝒏'𝒕 𝒕𝒐𝒖𝒄𝒉 𝒎𝒆, 𝒊'𝒎 𝒂 𝒓𝒆𝒂𝒍 𝒍𝒊𝒗𝒆 𝒘𝒊𝒓𝒆!"

˗ˏˋ ꒰ ♡ ꒱ ˎˊ˗˗ˏˋ ꒰ ♡ ꒱ ˎˊ˗˗ˏˋ ꒰ ♡ ꒱ ˎˊ˗˗ˏˋ ꒰ ♡ ꒱ ˎˊ˗˗ˏˋ ꒰ ♡ ꒱ ˎˊ˗˗ˏˋ ꒰ ♡ ꒱ ˎˊ˗˗ˏˋ ꒰

news reporters and police officers swarmed the entrance to somerville high school — even with madison riding next to her in officer levine's police car, charmaine still wished she would be swallowed whole by the earth. there was no way she could stand all that.

madison bit her lip as she drummed her fingers along the door, and charmaine could see the girl visibly shaking. she looked up and saw officer levine give both girls a sympathetic smile. "i know it's gonna be difficult for you girls, but you'll be safer here at school."

"yeah, unless we get accused for murder," madison scoffed quietly, glancing over at charmaine, "honestly, there's no way people aren't gonna mob us."

"they've got me on speed dial in case someone does," officer levine reassured the girls. charmaine looked up then, a tired half smile on her face.

"thanks, officer," the older girl mumbled, turning to look at madison, "let's just get this over with, okay?"

madison nodded hesitantly, and both girls hurriedly stepped outside the police the car — no sooner than a minute later just after madison linked her arm with charmaine's the two girls got overran by all the reporters.

"what was the attack like?"

"who attacked you? do you know who it was?"

"did one of you kill morgan maldonado?"

"did you team up to kill her?"

charmaine felt her blood boil at the comment — she was about to lash out right then and there, let every report there have it. but then she saw her friend group hurrying to approach the two girls, causing her nerves to slow just slightly.

charmaine felt her breathing begin to shallow as chris, matt, nick, and alahna all came up to the two girls. noticing her panic, chris was quick to whisk the girl to the side so she could calm herself down. "char, i need you to breathe for me."

looking up at chris, charmaine felt herself slowly beginning to calm as his azure eyes looked into hers worriedly. he steadied her with both his hands on her waist. when charmaine looked past chris though, she could see the eyes of almost all the student body on her. and she began to feel even worse when she saw they were also looking at madison — tears brimmed her eyes.

"hey, it's okay," chris whispered to the girl, pulling her into a hug, holding her close, "i'm so glad you're okay."

"i'm glad madi's okay," charmaine mumbled into chris's shoulder, letting out a breath, "i can't believe morgan's gone."

charmaine pulled away from chris, wiping away at the tears that escaped her eyes. "how're you feeling? i'm so sorry morgan's gone..."

chris's eyes went downcast and her took a grim expression, and the brunette boy shook his head, running a hand through his hair. "me either. we were supposed to go to prom together and everything..."

charmaine's heart ached for her best friend — although she was in love with chris, she knew that morgan made him so happy. she was their number one supporter, and she would always be the one who'd try and resolve it whenever they got into a fight. charmaine was so sad that now she wouldn't get to see them grow together — even if she did wish it was her chris could've grown with.

"oh char," alahna said, coming up towards charmaine and pulling her into a big hug, "i'm so glad you're safe, baby."

"yeah, me too i guess," charmaine said, hugging alahna back tightly, "i'm just glad you weren't there."

"hey, it's my turn now!" nick said, motioning for alahna to let go, causing the curtis girl to roll her eyes and step aside as nick moved to hug her, "i'm so sorry, char."

"it's okay, nick," charmaine said, smiling softly.

"and now everyone's gonna be looking at us like we're criminals," madison scoffed, shaking her head and looking around.

and of course, everyone was staring at the two girls — the whispers weren't so subtle, and charmaine wished she could punch the shit out of everyone. but she knew that wasn't gonna change anything.

"hey, we know you two are innocent," matt said with a frown, rubbing madison's back comfortingly, "especially you madi, you couldn't hurt a fly."

"truth, i've had to kill plenty of bugs for her whenever we hang out," nick added, causing madison to roll her eyes playfully and hit nick's chest.

"we've been best friends for too long for me to ever think any different of you, charm," alahna said, smiling at charmaine softly. 

"well, i'm glad you believe me, lans," charmaine smiled weakly, letting out a sigh, "i just wish everyone else could've been there to know the truth."

as the triplets and alahna attempted to comfort the girls, charmaine couldn't help but notice that chris hadn't left her side once — it was like he was rooted in his spot there, and charmaine could feel the butterflies in her stomach at the thought; even though madison was his best friend too, it was like chris was mostly worried about charmaine.

"listen, the bell's about to ring," chris suddenly whispered to charmaine, "you wanna head to class?"

taken aback by the sudden action, charmaine's cheeks warmed and she nodded. "yeah, i guess so. i'll see you guys later."

"yeah, see you later, char," matt said softly, pulling his best friend into a side hug. "just text any of us if you need someone to skip with you, okay?"

"yeah," charmaine said, giving matt a small smile, "thanks matt."

the second oldest triplet smiled at the girl, as chris and her began walking away from the group. charmaine hoped either nick or matt would walk madison to class, being that alahna and madison aren't as close yet, and she didn't want there to be tension between them. charmaine met alahna and the triplets before she met madison, so naturally she was closer to alahna — but she loved both the girls the same regardless, and she hoped they could get along with each other.

the walk to their class started off silent, until charmaine caught chris sneaking glances at her. "okay, what is it, chris?"

chris sighed, fully turning to charmaine, both of them having stopped in the hallway. chris ran a hand through his hair again. "i'm just really sorry i couldn't be there for you, chari."

charmaine caught herself smiling at the use of the nickname — whilst everyone else either called her char or even charm, only chris had ever called her chari, which was the combination of her first and middle name. it made her feel special in a way, especially since he never had any nicknames like that for morgan.

"it's better you weren't there, actually," charmaine laughed humorlessly, "otherwise that's another friend i would've lost."

"oh, so are you saying i can't protect you?" chris joked with a grin, causing charmaine to roll her eyes playfully, "i'm a lacrosse player, i could easily beat his ass."

charmaine laughed. "mhm, playing lacrosse doesn't make you strong, chris!"

both teens laughed before a serious expression took over chris's face, and he folded his arms across his chest, looking down at charmaine — she raised an eyebrow at him as he narrowed his eyes at her slightly. "you do know i'm always gonna be there, right charmaine?"

charmaine should not be finding what chris is doing attractive, but she does — after all, morgan's not here anymore. wow, she was so horrible for even thinking something like that. she was a horrible friend.

"yeah, i know, chris," charmaine answered slowly, glancing up at him, unable to maintain the eye contact.

"okay."

as the two teens continued walking with each other, charmaine couldn't stop pondering on their moment they shared just now — of course, it was only something between really close friends. there was nothing more that lingered there, and charmaine needed to remind herself of that.

when they reached charmaine's first class, she sighed and stopped at the door, turning to face chris. he looked down at her with a small grin, causing charmaine to roll her eyes. "i'll see you later, chris."

pulling the boy into one last hug for the time being, she hurriedly walked into her first class of the day. all the while, with his arms crossed over his chest and leaning against the door frame, chris had watched the girl's every movement, never taking his eyes off of her. charmaine sat down in her seat and set her bag beside her, and she ran a hand through her hair just then. chris's jaw ticked at the looks she received, and he knew that she'd probably need to get away from them all soon — charmaine looked towards the door and saw chris still there; when she gave him a reassuring smile, is when he finally decided to walk away from where he was head to his own classroom.

💌 lil

i'm giggling i love overprotective chris🤭 a little bit jealous chris in the next part😏

@luverboychris @muwapsturniolo @eyeliketoeatpoosay @mattsturniolosleftnut @mrssturnioloo @mattsivy @guccifrog @prettiest-poision @e1ias3 @breeloveschris @summerssover @l0akkzz

[qrzrrae]

CONFESSION WALL || MATTHEW STURNIOLO

Pairing: Popular!Matt , normalgirl!oc

Caution!: This is PURELY fiction. Made for my and others entertainment. If you don't like, don't read x! Also, no Y/N here! Js using random name :')

Authors note: THIS IS MY FIRST FIC YALL. DONT JUDGE PLZZZ 🥹🥲 also no smut C's idk how to write that shit I ACCIDENTALLY POSTED THIS THE FIRSF TIME AND I WASNT DONE YET BUTBHEREEE (part 2 in da making)

It was another normal day at Somerville high, at least for the other students. They don't know that me, I, Scarlette Genevieve Adams, A normal schoolgirl, runs the twitter account where all the juciest secrets are voluntarily put out by other students; The Somerville High Confession wall

Okay okay, if you don't know how this works is well basically, students will DM me their secrets or confessions and I'll post it, anonymously, of course.

The day was tiring. The only time I was motivated to do my work was when I was in physics class. Okay, first, I love science, and next, My crush, Matthew Bernard Sturniolo, sat next to me! I knew I had no chance at all with him, since he was the campus crush and I was like nothing, but I still loved him. Soon, physics class came, finally!! I packed up my stuff and bolted to the lab. I sat down on my desk, next to Matt. He gave me a sweet smile as I sat down, which I returned back to him.

Wait... Did he just fucking smile at me? I realized what he did and soon my face heated up as I started blushing. "Are you okay? You seem a little red there." He chuckled, facing my way. "Oh sure yeah!" I said, quickly hiding my face with a book. He was making me blush even more! "Alright, sureee." He smirked leaning back into his chair and waited for the professor. He looked so hot slouched down on the chair like that..

Finally, the class ended. It felt like we were trapped in there forever. I grabbed my bag and went straight for the door, which was hard enough since my seat was at the back. "Damn. These people are like fucking animals" Matt chuckled peeking over someone's shoulder to see if the line was getting any shorter. "Right? Like I wish I sat in the front." I reply with a chuckle. "You don't wanna sit with me in the back?" Matt said facing towards me while tilting his head slightly. "N-no! I do it's just I wanna be in the front so I could y'know.. Get out faster.." I said nervously. His head tilting made me go crazy. He nodded as the people in the room started to decrease and we were the last ones in the room.

"Alrighty, bye Scar. See ya!" Matt shouted as he waved and ran off. Finally. I can go home and check my new confessions! Checking my twitter DMS were the best parts of my day. Being the owner of the school's confession wall, I knew everything about everyone.

I opened my laptop and quickly opened twitter. 2 new messages. I clicked on my inbox and chose the first message I saw.

Oh of course. To Matthew Sturniolo, my man! I didn't want to be rude so I replied.

Done. I noticed Matt was very active when it came to replying to his admirers. But I was happy when he kept saying "no" to them, it seemed like he was saving his heart for someone, and I thought it was me.

MATT POV

I sighed dramatically as I opened my door to my room. I threw my bag down on the floor. I took my phone out of my bag and kicked my shoes off and laid down on the bed. I opened twitter and saw a new post from the Somerville confession wall account.

Another post, about me, again. I clicked on the post and saw a random girl confess to me. I loved all the attention but it was too much! Everyday, I see letters in my locker and 100 girls confess to me using twitter. I liked, wait no, I loved someone already and I need people to know that.

I hover hesitantly over the message button but I finally brought myself to click it.

I was scrolling through tiktok when I got a message request on twitter, I clicked on the notification and was shocked. Matthew Sturniolo messaged me, to confess? To who?

Oh my fucking word. HE JUST CONFESSED TO ME! TO ME?!?

I jaw slacked open as I read his message. I was shaking so bad.

[opiumsturn]

More than friends..

⟡C.STURNIOLO ⟡

IN WHICH Chris and Y/n are bestfriends

⟡•STURNSGIRL •⟡

| Y/N'S POV |

"GOD CHRIS, YOU'RE SO FUCKING SELFISH. GET OVER YOURSELF!" I say yelling at Chris.

"ME SELFISH? ALL I'VE DONE IS CARE FOR YOU"

"RIGHT, SO THAT'S WHY YOU WENT OUT, AND KISSED THE GIRL I HATE! 'CAUSE YOU CARE FOR ME?" we shout back and foward

"IT WASNT LIKE THA-"

"OH YEAH SO THEN WHAT WAS IT CHRIS?"

It was silent..

"Exactly." I say biting my inner cheek before running out of their house. I walk out side to see its dark, pouring rain, and thundering that I couldn't hear from all the yelling.

I check my phone *8:57pm* I sigh and walk into the rain in a tube top and sweatpants.

• Flash Back From Earlier Today •

| Y/N'S POV |

Matt and I were walking to our next class that we had together before I realized I had forgot my algebra text book in my locker.

"Oh shit, Matt I need to grab my notebook. You get to class I'll meet you there." I say smiling at Matt and he gives me a reassuring nod before heading off to our class while I walk to my locker which was a few lockers down from Chris', but he rarely needed things from his locker so sometimes he would let me use it to spare extra things.

I walk through the crowded halls being pushed and shoved left and right trying to get to my locker. I finally reach my locker row and just as i turn i see Chris and Aliza full on making out. I dropped the English notebook I was about to switch out to the ground causing a loud bang to the ground, grabbing Chris' attention as well as maybe 40 other people around us.

Chris pulls away from Aliza looking at me with eyes wording 'I fucked up'. and he did, big time.

"Chris?.." I say saddened and hurt but also angry.

"No.. Y/n wai-" He says trailing off as I run away into my class crying.

Now I should have gone to the bathroom but if Aliza came in there god knows what she would do or say to me. plus I needed Matt.

• FLASHBACK- 2 •

| Y/N'S POV |

Back last year our Junior year of high school I was in class with Aliza. Who was the mean girl, and the perfect,pretty captain of the cheer team. She hated me for.. i don't know why, but it seemed like she hated my bond with Chris as because everybody knows she was in love with Chris, but he had zero interest in her.

We were all sitting in English. Me and Chris, and these two other boys Chris was friends with. I was next to Chris as his two friends were sitting in front of us. I was tired, I had gotten maybe an hour of uncomfortable sleep. so I was barely awake laying my head on Chris' shoulder before Aliza, and her friends walk up to us with a bottle of water in her hand.

I lift my head off chris' shoulder to see what she wanted. But before I could even ask what she wanted she opens the water bottle in her hand and splashes it straight in my face causing me to be soaked.

I froze. I didn't know what to do besides cry. I bursted into tears crying as everyone bursts out laughing, and taking photos and videos. I got up out of my seat running out Chris following after me.

I sobbed running before Chris grabbed me by my shoulder turning me around hugging me holding my head.

"Oh love i'm so sorry, its okay just brea-" I cut him off.

"Chris i- why would she do that? she ruined me!" I say sobbing

• END OF FLASHBACKS •

| Y/N'S POV |

And I wasn't over exaggerating because she did. The whole school went on about this for Months!.. now i don't know why, but it did and Aliza did not stop,And ruined who I was at Somerville high.

________________________________

I finally got home and about an hour passes and my phone rings.

*CHRISSS 🫀🫂* Is calling- answer//decline?

I for some reason answer the phone.

"Hey idiot, open the door I'm freezing"

I hang up the phone, got out of bed, and opened the door.

"what does your pathetic ass want?" I say rolling my eyes.

"Can I come in please? its -8 degrees" He over exaggerates.

I open the door wider signalling for him to come in. I shut the door and face his guilty eyes.

"What do u want?" I say trying my hardest not to cry.

"Look.. Y/n I'm so sorry for kissing Aliza, but that's not the full story, And just- before you cut me off let me explain. Okay so..."

• FLASHBACK FROM EARLIER TODAY •

I was walking with my friend Nate to class realizing I had left my AirPod's in my Lacross bag which was mainly the only thing I needed in my locker. The rest of it is my best friend Y/n's stuff.

I walk to my locker and open locker door half way before Aliza slams it shut. God this bitch again. I say in my head. Aliza has been obsessed with me since freshman year, and I hate her. Especially after what she did to my sweet girl y/n she is my best friend, and I hate Aliza for what she did to her last year.

"What do you want Aliza." I huff already pissed and annoyed.

"oh why I just thought you looked really good today so I just wanted to give you this." she says and before I get to ask what, she slams her lips onto mine holding my face so I couldn't move. I could have thrown up right there. She kissed me for about 5 seconds until a loud bang. It was Y/n. Shit.

"No Y/n wai-" I trail off as shes already gone. I try to chase after her, but she was already gone. Fuck.

• END OF FLASHBACK •

Y/N'S POV

"So that's what happened Y/n/n I'm so sorry I tried pulling away from her but her hands literally wouldn't budge. I'm so sorry you know I would never do that to you. I love you so much I'm sorry."

I felt terrible for what I said to Chris. Hes not selfish or annoying. He's the best, He's perfect, and I was so wrong for what I did. I didn't even let him explain. I felt terrible.

"No no no Chris don't be sorry I should be sorry for what I said. I didn't mean any of it, and I'm sorry for not letting you explain I'm sorry I love you." I blurt out quick.

"Shh its okay I know you didn't mean it love." he says hugging me tightly before letting go. "So are we good now?" He chuckles.

I nod my head yes before speaking.

"Look at you. you're soaked!" I giggle "Its okay I still have your hoodie, and sweats you gave me" I say grabbing his hand, and going upstairs handing him the clothes.

"You know how you have a drawer of clothes in my room cause you're always over?" He asks

"Yeah.. what about it?"

"We should keep one of those here for me" He says letting out a small laugh.

"I would be the one wearing them" I say chuckling

"Yeah you fucking clothe thief" He says holding up his clothes I gave him

"yeah, yeah, shut up" I say before walking out so he can change.

He get's changed, and tells me I can come in.

"So I get the hint you're staying here?" I ask.

"Yeah, but where are your parents?" He questions

"oh they went on a couples vacation i guess" I say as my black, and white 8 month kitty walks in.

"Hey Luna babyyy" I say picking her up. She was super tiny, and very fragile, but shes adorable.

"Ayeee Lunaaa my fav!" Chris says, carefully grabbing her from my hands while I close my door.

"Hey I wanna watch Riverdale so just watch it with me" I tell Chris as i put Riverdale on.

"AGAIN?" He yells startling me and Luna. "Whoops sorry lil Lun (loon), but haven't we watched this together like 8 times already?!" He asks

"Yeah, and we're about to watch it for the 9th" I say grinning

He chuckles but knows there is no changing my mind. I turn my lights off, and turn on my star light projector, and hop in bed next to Chris, and Luna.

Luna lays by Chris' legs and I lay on his chest. Most people might think it's odd that we are this close, but we have known each other since day one. literally! they were in my hospital room while I was being born. Since our parents are best friends, and they were a year older than me, but still our bond is different and I love it.

Eventually I got tired and fell asleep before I knew it with Riverdale still playing, and Chris playing with my hair.

"Good night love" He whisper's shortly before he also falls asleep.

[sturniohoe24]

Season Finale- m.s.

pairing: matt sturniolo x fem!reader

summary: y/n plays for the Somerville girls varsity lacrosse team and the triplets decide to come to her final game of the season.

^for context Somervilles jersey is blue for this game and the competing schools jersey is white

warnings: NOT PROOFREAD, kissing, fluff, slight cursing (lmk if i missed anything)

^^ idk why but this song just kind of reminds me of what i’m planning to write, i might forget and write something different and it might not match sorry😣

blue- matt

pink- reader (#24 blue jersey)

orange- chris

green- teammate/ Bri (#37 blue jersey)

red- coach

purple- ref

bold- the whole team

#15 white jersey- midfield player/ opponent

authors notes: obviously i don’t know how their school works, so im just going to kind of base what i don’t know off of my high school. I also don’t know if they have a girls lax team but idc bc i went to a girls only school and played on a team😘😘

_________________________________________________

y/n’s pov

The third quarter of the game just ended and we are now rounding up on the sidelines. “2 minutes!” the referee announces. “You girls are doing great out there, Alia make sure you really block those goals, alright?-” “30 seconds!” The ref calls out again. “Okay we gotta make this quick, Y/N you’re going to start the quarter and break the ball. Bri really stay on top of #13, she’s doing good; and call the ball!”-“alright.” “got it?” we all nod, “yup” i say. “alright, sticks up y/n call it.” “Somerville on 3, sommerville on 3-” “1 2 3 Somerville!” We all scream loudly as we watch the other school start to sprawl out on the field again. “You got this girls, come on!”

_________________________________________

Matt’s pov

Although Nick did play lacrosse for a little while, if he were here Chris and I both know that he would’ve been asking plenty of questions.

I watch as the ref sets the ball between y/n and the other midfield players sticks. I watch the ref blow the whistle as y/n and #15 chuck their sticks in the air, aiming to catch the ball. The ball starts falling and it lands in 15’s stick. Nearly everybody on Somerville’s side starts booing and i hear cheering on the competing schools side. Somehow nearly as loud even though they only have about 7 people with them. I bring my attention back toward the field and I take notice of how beautiful y/n looks right now. I’m pulled out of my trance by hearing “WOO!” being screamed into my ear. I give Chris a dirty look and focus back on the game to see what everyone was cheering for. I see that 15 dropped the ball and watch as y/n scoops it off the ground. “yes! you got this” i whisper to myself.

y/n’s pov

Once I grab the ball from the ground i start running the other way towards the goal. “Don’t forget to cradle the ball, y/n!” I hear from my coach on the sidelines, that being the reason the other girl dropped it. Unfortunately im being blocked by #15 again. Her stick is in my face, and im not sure how the refs are so oblivious to this that they aren’t calling it. I shove her slightly out of my way and the ref now calls it. “that’s a force to body, white ball.” I roll my eyes and once she gets up I pass the ball to her. I get in position and wait for the whistle to blow.

When the whistle blows 15 turns around running towards her goal and purposefully hits into me and nearly knocks me over. My coach is yelling at me and Bri to grab the ball. I regain my balance and catch up to her before Bri does. As she’s inching closer toward the goal I knock the ball out of her stick and the whistle blows. “24 blue out” And he pulls out a yellow card. “are you fucking kidding me?” i mumble to myself, rolling my eyes and nudge 15 as im walking back to the sidelines. I’m praying Bri can stop her from scoring. “it’s alright, they keep ignoring everything the other team is doing, they’re targeting us.” I nod at my coach, clearly annoyed.

The time starts again and Bri is too slow, letting 15 attempt a score. Our goalie catches the ball in her net, now having the chance to collapse the ball.

Somehow the clock has already went down two minutes with about 5 minutes left on the clock, and i’m now allowed back in.

_________________________________________

Theres 38 seconds left on the clock with a score 12-11, putting us one point in the lead. We’re now back at the starting positions. Bri is blocking #13 and if I get put in the penalty box one more time i’m going to quit right here. The whistle blows and I immediately throw up the ball farthest from my opponent. I immediately catch the ball and run toward the goal pushing past everybody and somehow I made it through easily and now i’m facing the goal. The referees start counting down the time with 9 seconds left. I circle around the crease the fastest I can hoping the goalie is too slow and can’t catch me in time. I come back around to the front of the net, hearing my heartbeat as it almost feels like i can’t catch my breath, people chanting my name and counting down the seconds is almost so low to where i can’t hear it with my heart beating so loud in my ears, nearly popping out of my chest. I take the final shot and it goes right past the goalie. We won. My teammates and I run to our goalie as we all take a hit at the helmet (was it just my school that did that😭)

I turn back and see Matt and Chris exiting the bleachers. I run to my bag to take off my cleats, goggles, my mouth guard, etc. Once I’m finished getting changed in the locker room, i come out to meet two of the Sturniolo Triplets.

_________________________________________

I walk back into matt’s room still drying my hair from the shower i just took. He looks up from his phone smiling at me. I place down my towel and crawl into bed with matt. He turns off his phone and turns to me, staring esch other in the face. We slowly lean in towards each other and meet in the middle as he pulls me into a kiss. The kiss is only about few seconds yet it feels like it has been forever. This is totally the best way to end the lacrosse season.

Authors Note: CHAT IS THIS GOOD??? I FEEL LIKE ITS REALLY MID IF EVEN THAT CAN SM1 BE HONEST LIKE SEND AN ANONYMOUS REQUEST BC I NEED TO KNOW. WRITING ISNT MY SPECIALTY‼️‼️

[nakedpersimmon]

Yesterday afternoon, it was brought to NP’s attention that this post had been made on Michael Nesmith's personal Facebook page. In the post, I (Miss Mini) am called out by name, mentioned as someone instructing others to call the police on Nez, and otherwise painted as a deranged fan who is harassing him and his employees. Further, "Nez" implored his fans and followers to "hurl insults" at me, along with two other women who were also named.

I never wanted to write this post. I never wanted things to get this bad, to where a fandom I once loved so deeply could be in utter shambles, and leave me reduced to tears over an unwarranted and completely baseless attack. But I can't stay silent any longer, nor can I watch as me and others are dragged through the mud and beaten down, with the people doing it using someone I care about as their primary weapon.

Some have said I don't have much in the way of weaponry against these particular individuals. For most people, it would be a daunting prospect, to go up against these people who have become the gatekeepers of the fandom. So I am using the one weapon I do have. The one thing that I have held onto for all these years, and that has kept me sane: The truth.

In 2011, I started talking to Michael Nesmith online. What began as private messaging in Videoranch3D ("whisper," as it's called there) soon became chatting on GoogleChat, and then a few months later, he asked me to Skype with him. I still remember the first time we spoke on video, when he asked me to "have lunch" with him. I remember the Annie Chun Miso Soup bowl I'd microwaved, and how it sat untouched on my desk the entire time because I was too nervous to eat.

I remember defending and passing my Master's thesis a few months later, and Nez being the second person that I told. I remember talking to him for hours, in text chat and over Skype, on topics as far-ranging and wide as God and metaphysics and religion and sex and love. I remember coming home from seeing one of Micky's solo shows at Parx Casino and Nez asking me how it went, eager to know if "Mick" had sold a lot of tickets. I remember having a three-way Skype chat with him and my best friend Lynsey Moon, who was a DJ in Videoranch3D at the time and how--without pretense or prompting--he played music for us.

I remember finally meeting Nez in person in 2013, after one of his solo shows in Somerville, Massachusetts. I remember seeing another show of his later that year in Englewood, New Jersey, and hanging out in his dressing room after. I remember how, again unprompted, he took my hand and held it all the way down in the elevator until we got to the parking lot. I remember another show that same year in Bay Shore on Long Island, sharing laughs and stories with his wonderful band, and how his keyboard player gave me a plate of rigatoni when I said I hadn't eaten, and made me a drink from the bar on the tour bus.

"Gin," I said to Nez as he sat across from me. "So I can say that I went to a sophisticated party where I got a little drunk on gin." He gave me such a pointed, hilarious look, but later insistently asked if I was okay to drive home.

And I remember this comment, in this photo. I'd written about being asked to speak at the United Nations for World Autism Awareness Day, and out of nowhere, Nez commented, and said that he was proud of me.

It was March of 2011. We'd only known each other for two months. He knew me when. And he was proud of me.

I have loved the Monkees since I was 12 years old. I remember watching the show on Nick At Nite's Summer Block Party, and how much of a comfort it was, when I was being bullied so badly in school and already contemplating suicide because of it. The Monkees were four friends that I didn't have then, and who saved my life without even knowing it.

Fifteen years later, one of those men I admired so greatly, who was a hero of mine, told me that he was proud of me.

There just aren't words.

I never wanted to be someone who uses their relationship/friendship with someone to make a point. That is why I haven't talked about any of this publicly, haven't posted endless photos with Nez or video or any of the other countless receipts that I have.

Because I know where I stand with him.

Because at the Chiller Theatre convention in 2017, when I ended up in tears due to a stupid misunderstanding, Nez came over and took my hands again, and asked if I was okay.

Because that is who Michael Nesmith is.

That is the man I know. And that is why I have been heartbroken and worried as I've watched the two women in his employ, one of whom is his assistant, manipulate and use him for their own ends--regardless of what it's doing to his reputation and legacy, and not noticing or caring that all of this is the opposite of everything Nez has ever stood for.

Which brings us to yesterday. To the post that we are meant to believe Michael Nesmith wrote, telling his fans and followers to attack and insult me and two other women. A post that not only does not sound like it came from him, but that is so out of character as to nearly be laughable.

But I'm not laughing.

I know that some people will believe whatever they want to believe, no matter what I say. I know they will believe that I am jealous, because I don't work for Nez, and because the people who do have told them that I am. They can choose to believe that, and I can't do anything to stop them.

I can only say that I have nothing to be jealous of. And I have nothing to hide.

All I can do is share my truth, and that is what I have done. This post is public and will remain so, to be shared freely.

Thank you for reading, and please take care of yourselves and each other.

(This post was originally shared on Facebook.)

[shayprose]

On Sobriety, my Quiet Place, and the Sliver

It’s difficult to wrap my mind around where I am now. Not the physical — my body is in Somerville, MA. That’s easy. I’m talking about the bits in between where my body is and where my mind drifts; the emotional and the spiritual, the elusive two states that are hardest to describe.

I’m sober, you see, and with that comes the immensity of where I was. You can’t think of one without the other, and the shoe that drops on the other side of sobriety is — well, it’s a topic that sells sad artists a lot of albums. The little golden medallion I carry around with me to signify that I’ve made it through a year of “recovery” is so heavy in my pocket because of its significance. It’s a little metallic tomb full of memories made manifest of a very, very dark time.

But if I’m practicing radical honesty, then it — “it” — is actually the pinnacle of so many other things, so many other memories, all interwoven into one point. The threads of a long life of good things and bad things, all culminating in the reason I carry that medallion around with me, despite its heft.

It all started when the quiet place I used to go to, deep inside myself, the safe place with all of its carefully hewn comforts, where pleasant memories and dreams were the wallpaper and the rosewood floors, was destroyed in a 9-alarm fire called addiction. And I miss it there, so, so much.

This thought dump is rambling already, but bear with me. I suppose the nature of what I’m saying is the rambling point I’m trying to make: so much of my days now are made up of trying to grapple onto the thoughts that started spiraling around me like a hurricane when I let myself black out every night. Rambling is par for the course.

Right before I tipped over the edge, after a night (or an afternoon) of drinking, I remember thinking every so often, “Self, you’re really fucking up, my dude,” and having the actual sensation that my mind was melting. It was a vibration that ran through my face, surged through my brain, and then ricocheted down into my outer extremities. A few times, that shockwave made me panic and I filled up my Google search with things like, “Effects of alcoholism on the brain,” and “Can I lose my mind from alcohol?”

Scary stuff, right? I think the scariest thing, though, is that after a while, I stopped Googling those things. It didn’t really matter anymore, after all — neurodegeneration was, according to my 2 a.m. panic-laden internet searching, impossible to reverse, so fuck it, right? Black out, self. Go for it. Let it all fall away, and if you remember anything from the night before, well, try harder to forget next time. The recipe can always be tweaked, after all! Don’t stop at three shots after your four martinis. Add a fourth, and chase it with a Truly. Add a beer if it’s a work night — they fill you up so you don’t have to eat dinner.

The quiet place was still accessible in those early days of my downward spiral, to some degree, fragmented though it was. And then, it wasn’t.

The most painful part of my shredded humanity, I think, was when I tried one day to make the journey to my quiet place, through meditation and soft music, and I stumbled over the corpses of the things that I sacrificed for him. There was Dignity, her face bruised and slapped around, still beautiful in death. Over there was Desire, who held all of my dreams on his back, now reduced to a crumpled-up heap on the floor, barely recognizable anymore. The hardest body to see was Hope, whose glowing effulgence used to be the light that powered my quiet place, her soft illumination the fuel for all the pretty candles that lit up the darkness. Her light was snuffed out completely in death.

And so, my light was dimmed in life.

When I finally waded through the mistakes and the tragedies, I arrived at a place I called home for so many years, the place inside myself I built through all of my childhood traumas, to find the windows shattered, the garden ransacked, the curtains torn. Every square inch of my safe haven was hollowed out. In November, 2019, the last time I tried to go there before I let it go completely, I remember thinking, “You did your best, and it wasn’t good enough. You’re free.”

I had woken up at 3 a.m. to make sure he was safe, and when I saw that he wasn’t, I drowned the terror in half a handle of gin. The next morning, when I got to work, I started packing my desk because I didn’t want anyone else to have to deal with it. A few cigarettes, a few pills, a few coffees later, I unpacked my desk, went to a few meetings, and then purposefully forgot the way back to my quiet place.

In therapy, I learned that something like my “quiet place” is a very real trauma response folks can develop. My therapist explained that I was wise beyond my years to have taken so much pain in my childhood and translated it into a lighthouse, where I could always go if I needed to escape. “It’s healthy,” he said, “to know that you are safe inside yourself. What changed?”

What indeed. Before I started writing this, I took a trip through the pages of this old tumblr and remembered where I used to be then, emotionally and spiritually, and the difference seems to be that back then, when I thought I was giving myself wholly to whatever mission I was on, I still held back just enough to keep the quiet place alive. A sliver of my mind was always tethering me to safety, and I think I knew that. I took comfort in that. It was me remembering to spare some energy to keep my own lights on. Good job, me.

There’s no sense in trying to rationalize addiction, and that’s not what I was doing when I flipped through these pages — people spend their entire careers trying to decipher the origins of that disease, and I’m not going to crack the code by rereading a young adult’s foibles. However, I do think there’s something important in the work of sifting through the examples I’ve left behind for myself. To maybe see where the path I walked so carefully through life became so twisted.

The sliver I mentioned before, the place in my mind that tethered me to safety, took a risk. He reached out a hand to someone who said they needed me, and in a state of perfect trust, I allowed him to free fall. After all, who’s wouldn’t after hearing these things?

“I will always love you. It’s just you and me now. Don’t worry; I got you.”

A running leap over a cliff, and then

“This terrible thing is part of me. I understand if you want to leave, but I can’t stop crying. Do you want to leave me?”

eyes closed,

“It’s not your turn right now — I love him, too — but someday, I’ll give you what you need. I love you.”

I let myself fall.

“I tried to kill myself — it was all set up, and I was ready. But your face is what stopped me. I didn’t because of you. I need you.”

I knew I shouldn’t have jumped, but

“I promise I’m trying to get better. Therapy just doesn’t work for me; meetings just don’t work for me. But I’ll do it for you.”

if I could help someone, someone who needed me,

“I told you I’m working on it. If you don’t believe me, then you are hurting me, and hurting me will just lead me back to the darkness. Don’t hurt me.”

then who cares if I get hurt.

“They don’t love you like I do. Let’s go get breakfast, and I’ll teach you how to take care of yourself.”

I fell. That sliver, that tether, fell farther and farther, until I couldn’t see him anymore. He was weighed down by all of the affirmations, all the promises of love and safety, all the hollow words. And the cruelest:

“This is a risk for me, too, but that’s why it’s so important that we do this together; no one else understands.”

Without that tether, without the quiet place, I was numb. And I liked being numb. I kept adjusting the recipe to be number longer, and that was how I lived.

So much of AA is about putting yourself into the shoes of your peers who are going through the same thing. Everyone has a story like mine. They might not think about it the way I do, with personification and magic, but their stories all have a similar energy to them, which is accompanied by a familiar far-away look in their eyes. Every story also has something that ties us all together —

— when all of us felt a spark. A tiny mote of light that flickers behind our eyes and tells us that there’s another path, less twisty and less dark, where we can take a deep breath, if we’ll just follow it. A moment when the free fall stops, even for a second.

Mine came when I woke up next to him one morning, the day after I sobbed my way home on a bus from NYC. We had gotten too drunk at a bottomless brunch, and we went to another bar (probably at my pressuring). I spilled a martini, I fell off my stool, we left, and then the memory becomes hazier. We fucked in our hotel room? We ran through Manhattan to the bus terminal? We almost missed it? My memory picks back up with me weeping because I was confused. Where are we? What are we doing? Please don’t be mad at me — I hate me, too. Will you marry me? Please? When is your next trip? Will you please be safe? Will you be safer if we’re married? I’ll protect you. Just think about me. Am I enough?

My spark ignited. The day after that trip, I looked down at him and, as if I were waking up from a nightmare, I thought, “You will never change. But I can. And fuck you.”

As I climbed out of bed that day, my brain fried from my hangover, I grabbed my phone and sent a message to a friend who had gotten sober the year before. He told me we could get coffee so I could ask him questions. I went. That’s when he told me about a meeting he was chairing. “Come,” he said. “It’ll be easier to explain if you just see it for yourself.”

So I did. My nightmare came with me, supported my decision, held my hand, and while I was watching my friend chair the meeting, as I listened to the stories of everyone in that church basement, I realized I wouldn’t be whole, I wouldn’t be safe, unless I didn’t need that hand in mine anymore.

A year has gone by since then. Over time, the spark grew into a candle flame, which exploded into a fire, and I haven’t had a drink or a drug since. The medallion is heavy, and it brings me back to NYC, to the thousandfold traumas of emotional abuse, to the guilt of allowing myself to be caught up in a whirlwind of self-doubt, but I’m learning to find comfort in the weight of it.

This is the first time I’ve written anything like this since I lost my footing. It isn’t anything like my other posts — my therapist says I’ll probably never get that same easygoing talent back, not without a lot of effort, and so I suppose that’s what this is. My therapist inspired this post, actually. He’s sober, too, and knows what I mean when I talk about not being able to wrap my mind around where I am; when I talk about the weight of the medallion, and the two sides of that coin. He says to me, over and over:

“You can trust yourself again now. You never lost your quiet place, it’s all still there. It’s just different now.”

I’m pleased to report that my new quiet place is in bloom. Hope is alive again and her light is as gentle and steadfast as ever. Desire and Dignity are rebuilding my gardens, and the Sliver, the little tether I hold closest of all, is the gatekeeper, the star in the sky, and the only thing that matters to me anymore. His name is Shay, and I love him again. I can’t wait for you to meet him.

[theuniversitychallengereview]

UC 49 - Grand Final: Imperial vs Corpus Christi, Cam

For the first year since 2013 there is no Oxford college in the Grand Final of University Challenge. In that time they only won a single trophy, when Balliol beat Wolfson in 2017, with various other colleges losing five more, mostly to sides from Cambridge. Manchester’s win over UCL seven years ago also marked the last time a London University had made the final, with Birkbeck’s triumph in 2003 the last time a series winner had come from the capital 

(If you read my Preview then you may have noticed that I’m reusing it as the introdction to the review, so you can just go ahead and skip to the start of play if you’re bored already. Otherwise, get stuck into some stats)

Imperial arrived in the studio looking to add to two previous Grand Final wins, the most recent of which came in 2001 against St John’s, Oxford, and they narrowly missed out on retaining their title against Somerville, Oxford the following year. 

Corpus Christi’s sister college at Oxford was involved in the most controversial moment of UC history in 2009 when their winning side, featuring the first UC celebrity Gail Trimble, was disqualified after the fact for fielding an ineligible player. This is a first final for the Cambridge Corpus though, who had never previously made it beyond the second round in the Paxman-Era.

The past ten years of University Challenge has seen only four women lift the trophy (out of a total of forty winners). Tonight’s match won’t add to that total, as for the third time in four years the final is an all-male affair. The reasons for this are numerous, and have been written about by many people (including Corpus captain Wang). Female contestants apply in fewer numbers and (this being a reason behind the former) receive a different level of commentary to the male contestants, with comments more often unsavoury and focussed on looks, as this thread by Jesus contestant Lucy Clarke details. 

However, one promising aspect of the line-up in terms of breaking the white-male hegemony is that three of the contestants are not white. Only three winning contestants in the last 12 years (thanks again to Ian Wang’s article) have been people of colour, but that number will be added to tonight, either by Corpus stars Wang and Gunasekera or Imperial’s Brandon.

Both Wang and Brandon are players who are well on their way to becoming quizzy celebs in the vein of Trimble (and 2017s Monkman and Seagull, who have fully-fledged (pun intended) media careers now), both in terms of how many questions they’ve answered and in terms of how they have captured the public imagination. 

Corpus Captain (Grandmaster) Wang (who narrowly edges his teammates Stewart and Gunasekera out with 19 starters to their 17 and 18) has gained a following for his childlike glee whenever he gets a head scratcher right. His conferences with teammates over bonus questions can also be a delight to watch, with no stone left unturned in any discussion. 

My favourite moment like this was in Corpus’ semi final music round. The question asked for two composers, one of whom taught the other. He agreed with left-hand man Gunasekera that the first tune was by Ravel, and Gunasekera quickly identified that the second one was by Vaughn-Williams. ‘Do we know if Vaughn-Williams was taught by Ravel?’, asked Wang, wanting to make absolutely sure. ‘Well, I know its by Vaughn-Williams’, replied Gunasekera.

Imperial are also very good at conferring, with a clear hierarchy of who knows best on the various different topics (McMeel on maths, and Brooks for the classical music for example), but they have a less balanced approach when it comes to the starter questions. Brandon (outta Jamaica, Queens) has been their outstanding player on the buzzer, with 32. Captain Rich is next with 13. (The Times list his total score for the series as 482, which is interesting because its exactly 100 points less than @ jack_jmmcb gets using his scoring method. And he scored exactly 100 points in his first match, which may indicate that they missed that out of the calculation)

This is no surprise though, because Brandon has strong quiz experience, winning more than £375,000 over appearances on three gameshows in the States, starting when he was just 14. Well, like his semi-final badge and Twitter bio say, he’s not here to make friends. 

Many “commentators” on Twitter have lambasted him as arrogant, and Paxman himself hit him with a sneering ‘Oh, is this too easy for you?’ in one of the early rounds, the general belief being that he’s acting like the competition is beneath him. But then again, when he seemed to be having a grand old time in the semi final, pointing at his teammates when he knew they had the answer, he got slagged off for that too. You can never win. And I don’t think he’s acting like he’s above the competition either. Like all people who are good at things he’s practised. And practised. And then done some more practising. 

Using the techniques of Roger Craig, the famed Jeopardy contestant who personally taught him as a youngster, he trained himself to be good at quizzing. And then, by watching loads of old episodes of University Challenge, to become really good at University Challenge. 

So he’s clearly very good. But University Challenge isn’t won by one person. There are four players on each team, and when you take the total number of starters answered by Imperial (63) and Corpus (59), there is barely any gap between them. In total Imperial have scored 1170 points to Corpus’ 1075. Pretty close too.

Brandon himself was keen to stress that Imperial were not a one-man team, and said on Twitter after the semi final iwin that ‘if you’re expecting me vs Wang in the final, don’t tune in. This is his team vs our team’. 

Interestingly, there are two teams that both finalists played and beat, so that might provide an insight into who is better placed to win. However...

Imperial 235 - 80 Trinity, Cam ... Imperial 185 - 115 Durham

Corpus 245 - 80 Trinity, Cam ... Corpus 185 - 130 Durham

...they have almost identical records against those two sides.

Anyway, you all know the rules by now. Here’s your first starter for ten...

Its Brooks, not Brandon, who gets Imperial off the mark, with tea, an answer most befitting of his soft teddy beat aesthetic. Bonuses on Italian cities gave them two more in quick succession. Stewart came in early for Corpus on the next starter, but Gothic Architecture is unfortunately part of the question that hadn’t been asked yet, so he loses five points. Brooks tries his luck again, but he misses too, and then its McMeels turn to come in with a rapid buzz of asteroids on the next ten pointer. 

A correct guess of Vivienne Westwood follows, but Brandon laments that ‘This is a weird period for me’, of 1930s Italian fashion designers and they miss the next bonus. He gets his buzzer fingers involved on the next starter though, a typically quickfire attack followed by a fist-pump-y gesture at McMeel, who looked like he knew what it meant.

He picks up the picture starter from Stewart, who guessed quickly but wrongly that it was the First Crusade (it was the Third). McMeel takes his second of the night, thereby matching his best performance of the series before the halfway point. They only manage one bonus, but they are already a hundred points clear.

Wang finally gets Corpus back into positive figures with an excellent buzz on an Art Starter (an arter? No, ignore that). They answer three bonuses on songs in 7/4 time in record time, interrupting Paxman after only a few words on the second two. Indeed he wasn’t ready to hear Wang’s Dave Brubeck so early on in the question that the Corpus captain had to repeat himself.

Brandon got his third of the night to put a stop to any plans Wang might have been formulating. He wouldn’t get another starter for the rest of the match though, and looked hopefully at Brooks on the music question, hoping to pull off another buzz-by-proxy as in the semi final, but Gunasekera beat him to the punch and then spectacularly rattled off the bonuses without so much as a pause. Impeccable.

Rich, who had suffered unfair questions as to his captaincy on Twitter, then took control of the match, silencing any doubters. In his previous three matches he had only taken four starters (though his skill on the bonuses couldn’t be questioned), but he took four of the next seven, with Brooks and McMeel taking one each too, as Imperial glided serenely upwards like a swan who’s forgotten its keys at the top of a waterfall but can’t be bothered to fly. 

The one starter which went to Corpus over that stretch was the second picture round, on movies, which Wang utterly annihilated, taking 4/4 in a matter of seconds. This was unsurprising, his film knowledge has been astounding all series, but it had been clear for some time that it wouldn’t be enough, but it went some way to establishing a respectable score. A couple more starters for Stewart took them above one hundred points, which was no mean feat with Imperial in such devastating form, but at the gong it was the London side who took the applause, and Professor Andrew Wiles presented them with the trophy in Oxford, later on.

Final Score: Imperial 275 - 105 Corpus Christi, Cambridge

With a total score of 380 between them, this was the highest scoring final since 2010, when Alex Guttenplan’s Emmanuel beat St John’s, Oxford 315-100. In recent years the finals have been nervy affairs, with several matches being among the lowest scoring of their respective series. 

Congratulations to both teams for putting on a show. Imperial deserve huge credit and probably to be acknowledged as one of the strongest winning teams of the past decade. And though they were blown away by Imperial’s buzzing power, Corpus still proved an excellent team, taking 13/15 bonuses that they got.

Brandon ends the campaign with 35 starters to his name, narrowly edging out Trinity’s Hughes (34) to be the best buzzer of the series. But, as he was at pains to tell us for months, he was outshone by his teammates in the final, which gives this tweet ‘Everybody who thinks I'm carrying the team is either gonna look real smart or real dumb next wk-soz in advance xx’ a bit of context.

And contrary to what his badge says, he certainly seemed to be having a grand old time with his teammates. He may not have been there to make friends, but it looks like he did.

FIN

Thanks for reading my blog this series, or just this post! I’m very grateful and somewhat surprised that I have any audience at all, and look forward to starting next series.

If you’d like to support what I do here then I have a woefully under-promoted Patreon, here. If I get enough supporters then I might do retrospective series reviews for the ones pre-2017...

Alternatively I have a ko-fi, here, if thats not your bag.

And here is a list of the e-book compilations I’ve made for previous series, that you can get on Kindle.

Cheers, and I’ll see you in July. Stay curious.

[tinkeringwithcannabis]

Tinkering with Cannabis: The First 90 Minutes Episode 48

Strain: Four Lights

Company: Sira Naturals

Location: Somerville, Ma

Cannabis Connoisseur:  Max

Website: www.siranaturals.org

Hello again to all my cannabis loving and canna-curious friends, and welcome back to another episode of The First 90 Minutes! Today we will be toking and talking about an awesome high CBD strain I picked up from my friend Max at Sira Naturals in Somerville, Massachusetts called Four Lights. Now there was not a lot of information available for this strain, but what we do know is this little bud is a cross between CBD Yummy and R4, and has THC levels measuring up to 1% and CBD levels measuring up to 15%. It has been recommended for those battling anxiety and pain, as well as those who are seeking relief from other ailments, yet looking to avoid an intense level of psychoactive effects. Today, I will be using this strain to help with anxiety, stress, fatigue, and a severe lack of focus. Now that we have run through a little bit about this strain, let’s jump ahead to the testing portion of this segment! So, without further ado, let’s light up, sit back, and relax, as we toke and talk about the first 90 minutes!

Opening the container, the scent is very sweet, earthy, and slightly fruity with hints of spice, and the flavor is strong of peppery spice and earth. I am medicating today via 3 hits from a glass pipe, starting at 1:15 p.m. By 1:20 pm I can feel an uplift in my mood and a sort of clarity to my mind. There is also a hint of physical relaxation setting in.

At 1:25 pm, the fatigue seems to be lifting, but the stress and anxiety seem to be holding steady. My focus does seem to be improving along with a sense of mental clarity and a continued mood uplift. Despite the mental stress and anxiety, I am continuing to feel my body slightly relax a little more. There are still strong sensations of tension, but there does seem to be some minor improvement physically.

At 1:45 pm, my fatigue and focus continue to improve, I am feeling a slight decrease in my stress and anxiety levels, but I feel like I could have taken a few more hits of this product to fully address these issues. My mood is uplifting, and my body is continuing to remain in the relaxed state it had previously been in from the last check in. I am finding that the stress has melted away enough that I am finally feeling hungry, which has not been the case all day.

At 2:15 pm I feel upbeat, happy, relaxed, and a lot more calm. My fatigue has faded completely, as has my anxiety and stress. My physical tension has mostly gone away and my focus is on point, with a major improvement from prior to medicating. I do not feel high at all, I just feel clear, upbeat, and ready to take on whatever tasks may come my way. I am finding that creatively, I am on a roll, and am having no trouble getting myself into the zone at this point, where earlier I couldn’t get myself motivated to work at all.

Hitting the 90 minute mark at 2:45 pm, I still feel the clarity and relaxation, but to a lesser extent. My anxiety is starting to creep up a bit, as is the physical tension. I would go and do another session right about now to prevent this from intensifying or fully returning. I still feel some physical relaxation, and I in no way feel the anxiety or stress to the extent that I had earlier, but it definitely more present. I also am starting to notice that the focus is shifting to a little more scattered than it was been earlier. Next time I would probably medicate with maybe five or 6 hits, since I experienced very little psychoactive effects, just to increase the intensity of the benefits.

I clocked the last of the effects tapering off at 4:34 p.m., at which time I conducted another medication session as my stress, anxiety, fatigue, and lack of focus returned. Upon the ending of the second session, I found that I was left in more of a calm and upbeat place, feeling relaxed yet clear. About five days after this test, I was having some major issues with my migraines, tremors, and some of symptoms related to my epilepsy. I was really off, very out of it, and really having a hard time functioning. I conducted a medication session using this strain and went a bit heavier, taking 7 hits from a glass bowl. I found that within half an hour I felt more clear, I was able to interact on a much better level than I had been able to in days, my tremors had significantly decreased, and my migraine, although present, was nowhere near as severe as it had been. After two days of using this pretty consistently, I saw a pretty significant improvement in how I was feeling after this slight setback. Given how effect this strain is, not just for pain, anxiety, stress, fatigue, and lack of focus, but also for flare ups related to my tremors I have to give this strain 5 stars ⭐️. It worked really well, no negatives, the THC provided a nice level of relaxation without feeling inhibited by strong psychoactive effects. Throughout the duration of my medication session, I found myself feeling very clear, creative, calm, and extremely functional, which are all huge selling points for me. Sira, amazing job with this strain. Keep up the great work!

If you are a patient or adult above the age of 21 in Massachusetts, check out the following link for where you can purchase this product:

https://www.siranaturals.org/where-to-buy-cannabis-massachusetts

Well my friends, we have reached the end of this review. Thank you for joining me, and stay tuned for more product reviews!!

Disclaimer

*****Please remember, this blog is an account of my personal experience with this product. Not everyone has the same experience with every product, and that’s okay. I always recommend starting out with one to two hits to see if that is enough, and you can always increase your dose from there.*****

Also, if you find this post helpful, please help me get the word out to other patients by liking and re-blogging this post! Thanks!

[lokiarsene]

i think the pt never mentioning akechi again, and the focus on shido just wronging ren, makes it easier for fans to gloss over it bc the game does. its easy for ppl to write the pt as saying akechi deserved it. poj was good but its too little too late, an ova most ppl dont have to watch. i have too many thoughts about how his writing enables it. i dont think its even the age of fans since most ppl i see saying this are adults in their early 20s. cont

People in their early 20s are still immature. The frontal lobe of the brain is still forming well into your 30s.

In the trials without the noise, the subjects did just as well as people in their mid-20s. But when they were expecting the noise, they did worse on the test.

Brain scans revealed that the regions of their brains in which emotion is processed were unusually active, while areas dedicated to keeping those emotions under control were weak.

“The young adults looked like teenagers,” said Laurence Steinberg, a psychologist at Temple University and an author of the study.

[…]

It’s not enough to compare people using simple categories, such as labeling people below age 18 as children and those older as adults. “Nothing magical occurs at that age,” Dr. Somerville said.

tl;dr, the emotion control centers are still forming well into your 20s, so while you’re neurologically capable of making rational decisions in your teens, your brain still has troubling handling emotional impulses. (As someone who has a mood disorder, this made my teenage years doubly monstrous.) There’s also the possibility they’re just cruel jackasses, which sounds like their problem.

I also think this conversation can relate to Akechi, who was in this early/mid teens when he went to Shido, and was 18 at the time of the game’s events. People who argue that he should be “mature” or “smarter” are falling into the trap of thinking that higher end teenagers are somehow magically more close to being adults, when this has been scientifically proven to be not the case–and it doesn’t take into account Akechi’s other circumstances, such as a lack of emotional support, stable home life, and adequate resources for self-care and expression. There’s also the whole “Akechi was manipulated by the demiurge” thing. Guy had no chance.

The game may do that, but it’s clear based on this conversation, the dozens of Akechi blogs, and how popular Akechi is in fan polls that the game clearly didn’t do that for everyone. That’s important. More important than how the game dropped the ball, IMO. I think it’s cathartic to complain about it, so I’m glad we’re talking, but I’m also like--”AND NOW I’M GONNA LOVE AKECHI EVEN MORE.”

I’m not gonna argue that the game fucked up in its final act. We all know that. But I also know that other people see that, agree with it, and have come up with ways to change it, or hold out hope that it will be changed in a satisfying way in P5R. That’s important to me, moreso than those who are incapable of exerting a single creative thought beyond what the game feeds them.

It seems you’ve given this a lot of thought, and I imagine an ask box’s text limit can be cumbersome. Have you written about this on your blog? I’d be interested in reading it!

[belphegor1982]

Chapter 2 is up!

FAIRY TALES AND HOKUM

Summary: 1937: The O'Connells are required by the English Government to bring the Diamond taken from Ahm Shere from Cairo to London. Things get interesting when Jonathan bumps by chance into an old friend of his from Oxford, Tom Ferguson…

Chapter 2: Familiar Faces (on AO3 here)

“So that’s your office? I must say, I’m impressed, old boy.”

“Knock it off, Jon.”

The room was tiny and rather stuffy, and Jonathan had to wait a while before Tommy could find a spare chair, in this case a collapsible with a cloth back. The mess was indeed impressive – you couldn’t see even a little bit of desk under all the huge, dusty files lying on it and all the loose sheets. All around the desk, the path was more or less cleared, but you still had to be extra careful not to step on books and files of varying shapes and sizes. The whole floor was cluttered up by cardboard boxes, some still held shut by adhesive tape, most of them open; as Jonathan peeped into one, he saw various items wrapped in protective paper.

Despite the messy aspect, Tommy’s office gave an overall cheerful impression, helped by the sunlight pouring in through the window, high up the wall. Dust danced in the rays and didn’t seem to be willing to settle anywhere.

“Sorry for the shambles, mate,” said Tommy, rummaging through the papers on his desk and starting to tidy everything up. “They made me move in here only a week ago, I haven’t had time to clean it all up.”

“Don’t worry about that. I’ve seen worse.”

Tommy’s head shot up from the desk, glancing sheepishly at Jonathan. “Y’know, when I told your sister I was one of the chief agents… Well, I might have overstated the thing a lil’ bit.”

“No! You’re not serious, are you?”

Tommy growled at Jonathan’s smirk, and he fell silent, letting his eyes wander here and there. They finally came to rest upon the only thing that seemed tidy enough – a dozen old-looking books resting on a set of shelves.

Jonathan left his chair to get a proper look. Some of the books came directly from the British Museum, and looked as if they were borrowed from the archives – old and worn, with leather covers slightly frayed along the edges. Not to mention the dust. And they smelt like escapees from the City of the Dead.

“I say, that’s some collection you’ve got yourself here,” said Jonathan amazed as he read the date of print of a particularly shabby-looking one. “My God… Evy would go spare if she saw this.”

“I’m sure she would,” Tommy said, emerging from the layers of paper and straightening himself up. “I just love these kinds of old books, you know; there’s a feeling about them you just don’t get with more – ‘recent’ ones. Now, where’d I put that bloody –”

“Looking for something in particular?”

“Yes,” Tommy sighed as he dropped on his chair, only to jump up and remove something before sitting down. “I’m sure what little I’ve got on Hamunaptra is lying ‘round somewhere in a folder – can’t seem to find it.”

Jonathan put the book he was holding back on its shelf and looked at the desk, his hands in his pockets. “No wonder.”

“Oh, that’s gonna help for sure, Jon,” muttered Tommy. Jonathan was about to retort, when his eyes stopped on a small picture in a frame. It was a photograph of a woman, and the longer he stared at it, the more familiar the woman seemed. Finally, it clicked into place: the freckled face with a round nose and pointy chin, the mass of frizzy hair and the sweet, candid smile could only belong to one person.

“Hey! Isn’t that Elizabeth McAlester?”

An uneasy sort of smile crept up on Tommy’s lips. “Yes, that’s her – ‘cept her last name hasn’t been McAlester for some time now.”

Jonathan stared at him blankly for a full minute. Now this, of all things, was unexpected.

“You mean, she’s – you’re –”

Tommy nodded, still smiling.

“How long –?”

“That’ll make it seven years in October.”

There was a moment’s silence, during which this piece of news sank in. Elizabeth McAlester had been a cousin of a common friend, Arthur McAlester – a tall, gangly fellow with glasses constantly perched on the bridge of his long nose, rather bossy but altogether likeable. She was a year or two older than them, and went to Somerville. Jonathan and Tommy had spent their last year before the war wooing her in turn, although it was more of a game for the two boys than something really serious. None of them had really gone too far, though. They valued their reputation as gentlemen – sort of – and she was too much of a nice girl.

Thinking back on it, Jonathan realised that, had things worked out differently, Elizabeth would probably have been the only girl he could have spent some significant time with. She was smart, sweet, and funny when she wanted to. And he used to make her laugh – she had a nice laugh. But there was also the fact that she didn’t really love him.

Perhaps, if he had been a little smarter, he could have won her over. Of course, that would have also meant spending less time in pubs, gambling and drinking; that would have meant growing up, and he was simply not ready for that, especially after the armistice. Most fellows of twenty-five were not, after all, and he’d made it his business to be as carefree as he could to make up for 1917 and 1918. Problem was, he was now forty, and most of people that age were supposed to be settled. Evy was younger than him, and Rick and her had been married for eleven years now. And Tommy and Elizabeth, of all people, had been together for seven years, and he had a picture of her on his desk. Why, they must even have children.

Perhaps Jonathan should have been jealous – but he just couldn’t be. Tommy was a decent fellow, and Elizabeth was a nice girl; they deserved each other. He had had his chance, had messed up, and there was no way to get back what wasn’t anymore. Petty jealousy was simply irrelevant there.

“That’s great news, old boy,” he finally said, with a heartfelt smile. “Congratulations. Wish I could have seen you in a morning suit, though.”

Tommy beamed in return, obviously relieved, and Jonathan felt a pang of annoyance. Did Tommy really think that he was going to be mad at him for that? That was ridiculous.

“Thanks, Jon. You know, that… that means somethin’.”

Dammit. It was still impossible to be thoroughly annoyed with Thomas Ferguson. He may retain his rotten luck, but he still had that innocent look on his broad face that fooled even the most sceptical of all. Even one Jonathan Carnahan.

A somewhat awkward silence passed. Jonathan was glad to end it when he spotted a folder under his chair and bent to take it for a closer look. “Here – wasn’t that the one you were looking for?”

The file was very thick, with a hard cover, and it was held shut by an old belt. On a little bit of yellowish paper was scribbled, ‘Hamunaptra, City of the Dead – Reign of Seti the First, Dynasty XIX.’

Tommy crossed the room in two strides and all but snatched the file from Jonathan’s hands. “That’s it! That’s the one.” His old enthusiasm was back in his voice. “I haven’t looked at it in years, guess it’s been buried under a ton of other things.”

“You can keep it if you want. It’s not that urgent, Evy can wait a bit.”

“No, take it – just be sure to give it back before tonight, someone could ask for it… Though nobody’s asked for it in years, so I can’t see why someone would just now. Except for Hamilton, but even him –”

“Hamilton?”

“Charles Hamilton, my immediate superior. Odd guy, very thorough, very clean. Might be a very likeable fellow if someone took the umbrella off his arse, but that’s just my opinion… Well. Fact is, I’m not really supposed to show that file to anyone, but as it’s you and Dr O’Connell…”

Jonathan couldn’t help but chortle. Tommy looked at him curiously.

“What’re you laughin’ at?”

“Oh, nothing, really – just the whole ‘Doctor O’Connell’ business. Funny thing to hear someone speaking in so high terms about my baby sister… especially you.”

Tommy shrugged and said with a grin, “Well, get used to it. Seriously, mate, I’ve heard of her since I was offered this job at the Research Department, and that was, what – ten years ago or so. Discovering Hamunaptra wasn’t such a big deal, I bet loads of people (poor chaps!) must’ve managed that in centuries past, but –”

Jonathan, whose first sight of the ancient City had been the skeletons and dried-up corpses of previous adventurers, gave a grim smile. Yes, indeed. Loads.

“– But she, her husband and… and you actually got out. Remind me to ask you how you did it someday, ‘cause I still have trouble believing it.”

“I bet you haven’t heard half of the story,” said Jonathan as a sly smile sneaked back on his lips.

“I hope you’ll tell me some time, then. This and that weird stuff with the Scorpion King two years ago.”

Jonathan opened his mouth, quite taken aback. “How d’you know about that, for cripes’ sake?”

“We, Mr Carnahan, know everything,” Tommy said with a mock smug grin, which he then dropped to finish, sounding almost embarrassed, “Well, not quite everything, I guess. In fact there’s still some huge blanks in the story.”

“Blanks you’d like me to fill, eh?” Jonathan chuckled. “I get it, Tommy old chap. I’d tell you the whole story anytime.”

Tommy’s right eyebrow shot up. “Anytime? That would include now?”

“Didn’t you say you had work to do?”

“‘Work to do’? Man, this is what I work on! Gathering pieces of information, I mean. Can I take notes?”

“Yes, sure,” said Jonathan, a little bit dumbfounded. “All right, you’d better take a seat, because this is going to be long…”

.⅋.

“And you told him the whole story of what happened at Ahm Shere?”

“And Hamunaptra, too. He already knew the main lines, anyway.”

Evelyn shook her head. Jonathan could be a wonderful brother at times, but one of his major faults was and always had been his complete inability to keep a secret the way it should remain – secret.

“I can’t believe you did that, Jonathan.”

“Oh, come on Evy, please trust me on this one, will you? Tommy’s reliable. He’s a decent bloke.”

His blue eyes were almost pleading, and Evelyn found her anger ebbing. The only times he had proved so persuasive were when he tried to cover up for one of Alex’s most foolish stunts. Though she could never admit it, such an attitude was very endearing, in a cheeky, annoyingly efficient sort of way.

Then there was this file. She couldn’t decently stay mad at him when he had been thoughtful enough to borrow it for her from this Ferguson fellow. And to tell the truth, she was positively dying to see what it contained. She couldn’t wait to get home to open it.

“Jonathan, it’s very touching to see you standing up for a friend, but you must admit that so far, the people you have entrusted with our, ah – family secrets – haven’t proved very ‘reliable’, have they?”

“Tom is, Evy. I swear. And he works for the British Consulate, in case you’ve forgotten.”

“Oh…” Evelyn sighed, about to give in, “if only this was a guarantee of safety…”

“Just because What’s-his-name of the British Museum woke our mummy again and bollixed things up last time doesn’t mean Tommy’s not ‘safe’, old mum. Please –” and there he stopped her in her tracks and looked at her in the eye, “– believe me.”

Aw, dash it… It was still impossible to remain angry with him. She never could resist this unique mix of fake innocence, thoughtless cheekiness, and sincerity somewhere in the middle.

“All right, all right – quit pestering me, and I won’t bother you about this Mr Ferguson anymore.”

“Promise?”

“Yes, that’s a promise.”

Jonathan’s ‘persuader’ expression turned into a dangerous smile, one that his sister knew only too well. As a rule, it meant trouble was on the way. 

“That’s nice, Evy, because I asked him if he wanted to see the diamond while it’s still here in Cairo –” 

No exception to the rule today, it seemed. Evelyn was flabbergasted, but she said nothing… She had promised, after all. 

“– And we agreed that a few minutes wouldn’t hurt, and it’s still my diamond in a way, a little – I mean, I know I sold it and everything, but I haven’t looked at it in ages and –” 

Evelyn let him talk until he ran out of words and finished on a rather lame, “And, well, I – I was hoping you could intercede on my behalf, you see…” 

“You don’t have to ask me,” she said in a deliberately colder voice. “You’ll have to see the curator for that. I wish you good luck convincing him.” 

Jonathan’s face dropped. 

“Evy, please! You’re my sister! I’ve hardly ever seen this bloke, you’re –” 

“I’m far more gullible, is that what you meant to say?” 

“No, it’s not – that’s – cripes, Evy, all I’m asking for is two words to the curator from you. Consider it payback for Tommy, he might’ve got into trouble lending you this secret file for the afternoon.” 

The file. She’d almost forgotten it. Although Jonathan’s last sentence sounded a little like emotional blackmail, ugly as the word was, Ferguson had indeed seemed pleasant enough the day before. There was a cultured man, with a proper job – something of a change from the dubious company Jonathan usually kept – who respected and admired her work. She hadn’t heard praise such as he’d given her in quite a long time. And he trusted her enough to lend her this file.

“Well,” she said eventually, very slowly and reluctantly, “I suppose I could talk Dr Hakim into letting the two of you in the diamond’s room… Not alone, of course, and only for a few moments. I’ll see tomorrow if –”

She started when her brother kissed her on the cheek, beaming.

“Dear, sweet Evy, you’re the best sister any decent fellow would ever dream of.”

“Oh, come off it,” sighed Evelyn, who couldn’t help but smile all the same. 

They found the house empty: Rick had taken Alex to the bazaar downtown. Evelyn quickly sat down on the sofa and carefully put the file on the coffee table in front of her, while Jonathan disappeared into the kitchen. She didn’t wait for him and opened the folder.

It contained mainly sheet after sheet of paper covered in tiny scrawl, and as she ran her eye over them she could tell it was a report of sorts, with dates, names, and more or less precise directions. There were newspaper cuttings, some of them quite old, and also some sepia photographs. She was leafing through them when Jonathan put a cup of tea on the table and sat beside her, a tumbler in his hands.

“So? Have you dug some stuff up already?”

“I guess so, yes… I didn’t know Lord Carnavon had worked on Hamunaptra as well…”

“Good thing he kept it quiet, one curse as cause of death is well enough – didn’t need two,” quipped Jonathan. Evelyn elbowed him and picked up another set of pictures. Her brother’s eyes widened.

“Evy, that’s – that’s us!”

He was right. Though the photographs were old, blurred, and of rather bad quality, the figures on it were unmistakable. They must have been taken shortly after Hamunaptra, because Evelyn saw some shots of Jonathan with his left arm in a sling, and several of herself and Rick, arm in arm, both their faces shining with sun and laughter. She remembered how it was, back then – the slight awkwardness between them, the happiness fluttering in her stomach each time his hand brushed against her, even by accident; it had seemed to her that she was constantly walking on a little cloud, inches above the ground, silly as this comparison may sound.

Of course, she had got down from this cloud long ago – but reality had not been as harsh as her school friends had once told her. Rick was a wonderful husband, and there was never a second of boredom between them. Even after eleven years of marriage, he still took every opportunity to seduce her. Not in the romantic, literary way, with tête-à-têtes and candlelight, but something in the way he looked at her over the table, the twinkle in his eye that was for her and her alone never failed to make her melt. And after all these years, he still managed to make her blush, too. Of course, she protested, saying that it was absolutely ridiculous for a thirty-six year old woman to blush; but he’d just laugh softly, his rich chuckle sending shivers down her spine and making her feel as if she were twenty-five again.

Jonathan often said some people were born lucky. Hers was another kind of luck – she may not have a ‘proper’ social life like acquaintances of hers in London had, but the four men of her life, namely Rick, Alex, Jonathan, and Ardeth – in a very slightly lesser extent, as she saw him fairly rarely – were the four people she loved most, and they were wonderful. Lady Maria Evans and her circle of snobby friends would never know how it felt to die and being brought back to life by her eight-year-old son and her brother. She would never know the overwhelming smell of gunpowder, the ache you get in your shoulder from the recoil, the deafening noise, how it felt to be kissed awake by a three-thousand-years old mummy – but then, had Evelyn been able to, she would have gladly skipped this part. Ew.

“I say, Evy, do you think they’ll mind if we took a couple of photos to put them into frames?”

Jonathan’s voice drew her back from the memories, and she looked at the pictures in her brother’s hands. There was another one or two of Rick and her, one of the three of them – in the streets of Cairo, by the look of it – and a full-length one of Jonathan alone, his hands in his pockets, his nose in the air, and a curious look on his face. There was something funny and rather sweet about this one which matched the involuntary subject’s general attitude: offhand, ironic, foppish, forgetful, but altogether loyal and kind. Evelyn was indeed tempted to keep it, as Jonathan had suggested.

“I agree that some of those would be worth it,” she said, smiling. “But maybe you’d better ask your friend first –”

An odd thought crossed her mind at the mention of Tom Ferguson. When she had met him the day before, he had clearly shown that he didn’t know Jonathan had been a part of the Hamunaptra expedition. But it just would have taken a look at the contents of this file to know that his former schoolmate had been involved – his full name was written in black and white, and the photographs were faithful enough. Besides, Jonathan had not changed that much over the years.

“Jonathan, I’ve just thought of something – Tom knows this file, does he? I mean, you told me he’s been working in the Department for ages, so he must have read it at some point, right?”

“I suppose so, yes. And your point is?”

“Well, perhaps I’m just being silly, but how come he didn’t know you were at Hamunaptra? Your name and your face are all over these papers, look…”

Jonathan frowned slightly, and bent to look at the sheet she held out for him. There was an account of that night so long ago in the Sultan’s Casbah that had started it all, and it was just as Rick had told her when she had asked how her sticky-fingered brother had managed to steal his puzzle box.

“Whoa, Evy… there’s a fair amount of details in there.” She saw his eyes dart from the top to the bottom of the sheet; then he exclaimed, “Oh, of course! That Casbah barman, what’s his name again… Oh yes, Musa. I bet he was the one who gave them such a precise account. Can’t believe he still held that grudge after –” he looked at the top of the sheet again “– two years. Resentful git. It was only a little fight.”

Evelyn didn’t know what made her insist, but she ignored his last remark and continued. “You see? He could hardly miss you. And yet he seemed to ignore completely your part in the trip to and from Hamunaptra. By the way, my name was Carnahan at the time, not O’Connell. I don’t understand why he looked so surprised to see that his famous Dr O’Connell and your bossy little sister were in fact one single person – it’s just not logical.”

There was a short silence, during which Jonathan seemed to ponder her words. Then he turned to face her, and to her surprise, there was something like anger in his voice when he said, “You’re really something, you know, Evy. Stubborn as a mule, I’d say. I told you Tommy was a decent fellow, I mean – you met him, he’s not some sort of conman or something!”

“I’m not saying he is, Jonathan,” Evelyn said gently; she had not expected this kind of resistance at all. “I’m merely pointing out a fact. You must admit that it does look a bit odd, doesn’t it?”

“Well, don’t point. Fact is, you can’t admit that I know someone that you don’t, who’s smart, trustworthy, who works in the same stuff as you, and who also happens to be a damn good fellow to drink with.”

Evelyn raised her eyebrows. “What exactly are you talking about?”

“Just what I’ve said. Leave him alone. I don’t understand why you’re nagging about him. Besides, Tommy adores you – you should hear the way he praises you to the skies.”

“I’m not nagging. Honestly, Jonathan, from the little I’ve seen of him, I like him well enough – he seems to be good company, a funny, cultured, clever fellow. And I’m flattered to hear that he thinks so highly of me. But rationally and logically speaking, there are some tiny details that bother me.”

She had spoken and chosen her words carefully, not wanting to start a row. She hated being at odds with her brother when he wasn’t the one who had started it – it made her feel uneasy and oddly guilty. He had been her only family for a long time, after all, and neither was likely to forget it. They shared something special.

Anger faded from the bright blue eyes, and Jonathan’s expression turned into something that looked remarkably like a pout.

“Can’t you just leave these out for me?”

Evelyn almost laughed. “I won’t say I’ll forget it, but I won’t pester you about it anymore. Just – I know I’ll sound silly again, but don’t be angry with me for that. I don’t like it at all when you are.”

This time, the usual smile was back on her brother’s face, and he sank back into the sofa, his half-empty glass still in his hands. “Ah, come on, Evy – that was silly indeed… You sounded like a kid. Don’t worry, I’m not angry with you… I’m just annoyed that the one time I haven’t done anything, and I mean anything, you still find a way to be suspicious.”

Of course, when you put it that way… Evelyn could understand Jonathan’s touchiness, and respected his faith in his friend, but still. It was only a few minor things, but the logical, scientific part of her mind was puzzled. Of course, it could just be that Tom Ferguson had a bad memory – she had never seen a folder so dusty, so she supposed he really hadn’t opened it in a long time… She’d find a way to chat about it with him some time. Casually, of course, in passing.

Maybe it was her instinct. Or maybe it was just her curiosity. That particular trait had been said many times to run in the family, and Evelyn was forced to recognise that it had proved true in many occasions.

Especially when it came to herself.

.⅋.

(I have a lot of fun writing scenes with Evy and Jonathan. I absolutely love their interaction in TM, and it was something I missed slightly when I watched TMR. When I write them I can’t help writing with my memories of TM in mind. It’s also fun to imagine Evy, having grown from the girl she is in TM into the self-assured, brilliant woman, wife, and mother, inches from running the British Museum in TMR, being childish enough to bicker with her brother. Both Carnahan siblings are big goofs in their own way, Evy just hides it better :P)

[sinistrosblack]

Magic Hands (soldier Theseus x nurse Reader

Word count: 2,304

Summary: You’re a nurse during WWI, and you meet Theseus, wounded in combat.

Note: this is the start of a miniseries. I hope it’s good!

The days were long at Somerville.

You’d fought tooth and nails to get in, in spite of your parents’ disapproval and the many judgements you’d faced by applying to college as a woman, instead of studying the ancestrals arts of baking, ironing, and satisfying men. You were rather an unusual young woman in this society, chasing academic excellence and a good career of your own rather than a man who would do this in your place. Your parents, traditional Victorian people, abhorred the idea of you spoiling away your beauty and repelling your potential suitors with your ambitions, but after bargaining that you’d get married after your studies, they’d let you pursue an education. They surely hoped that the man you would marry would finally settle you in a home where you belonged, and that your foolish mind would finally rationalize itself. British Literature fascinated you, and you loved and cherished every moment you had at Somerville; but lately, your mind had been elsewhere. Maybe it was the cold days of November diverting you from your work, or maybe it was the looming threat of the War distracting you.

Many of your friends had lost men in their families; just last week, your roommate Vera had received news that her younger brother Edward had fallen in combat, adding this tragic loss to the grief of losing her fiancé. Thankfully, you had no one fighting in your family, no brothers or cousins to lose, and your father had been exempted from enlisting by his health problems. But you felt, deep in your heart, that there was much more you could do in these pressing times, than study for exams.

One sleepless night, you took your pen and ink, and wrote an apologetic letter to your parents, before packing your clothes and some personal belongings. The next morning you were gone to enlist as volunteer nurse. For the first few months, you worked in a hospital far from the actual conflicts, and you learned the hard truth of the job. You weren’t an angel saving these men, and they weren’t the glorious heroes in shiny uniforms that people fantasized about. The men you saw were helpless, afraid, and for the most part, broken beyond repair in both their minds and bodies. As you spoke to them, only a few seemed to comprehend or even listen to what you said. Many died even after their operations and the hours of care you provided. Every day you felt like quitting, but every day you remembered that you helped make their last days a little bit better just by being here, and so every day you rose and did it all over again.

Six months after joining the war effort, an urgent call for volunteers came from the Western Front: the Germans were getting closer and closer each day, and the casualties were multiplying. Without a second thought, you agreed to go, and less than a week later you were in the Somme, in France. What you saw there was beyond what you had ever imagined; the men you saw had little to do with human beings, and most everything to do with beasts. They were mostly French soldiers, sometimes even German, and when English soldiers went into hysterical shock, you were often called to soothe them with your familiar accent and gentleness. It worked for the most part, and the soldiers would calm down as you spoke slowly of the English countryside and asked them about their home, all the while you worked on their wounds as fast as you could.

You would never forget the day you met him. “Nurse Britain!” someone called from the other side of the barrack. This was your code word that an British soldier needed to be calmed down, so you dropped the sponge you were cleaning a soldier’s body with and rushed to where you had been called. The man was in a frenzy, and two nurses struggled to keep him on the cot against his will. A bloody circle on his side tainted his brown uniform, and the specks of blood on his face gave him a frightening, demented look. The wide open blue eyes and dilated pupils indicated the stress shock he was going through, and that he wasn’t in his normal state. You were briefly reminded of the short trip you had done to London with your parents once, where you’d witnessed a carriage accident: you’d quickly been ushered away from the scene, but you could vividly remember the wounded horse trying to run free, foam in his mouth and showing the white of his eyes in terror. And today you were seeing the same terror in a man.

“Let him go,” you said. Seeing as the nurses didn’t comply, you repeated in a more pressed manner. “Let him go, now!”

The two women let go of the soldier, who stood up immediately, his eyes darting every which direction for a way out.

“Woah, woah, big guy,” you called, holding your hands in front of you and trying to get him to look you in the eyes. “Calm down, lad, it’s all good now. Look at me, look at me, down here. Alright.”

He finally looked into your eyes, and his breathing seemed to calm down. “Yes, you’re alright now.” You moved slowly towards him, and he kept his gaze locked onto you as you held his hands. “What’s your name, then?”

“Theseus. Scamander,” he replied, his voice hoarse from the shouting he’d done earlier.

“Right then, Theseus. I’m (Y/N). I’ll take care of you, if you’re alright with that.” Guiding him to the cot, you kept looking into his beautiful blue eyes, who didn’t seem neither frightened nor frightening anymore, only lost and interested. “If you just sit here, I’ll have a look at your wound.”

Theseus complied, letting go on your hands to set on the cot and leave you to remove his uniform jacket. The injury was quite deep, but nothing that required heavy surgery or couldn’t be fixed, so you took a basin and clean cloth to clean around it. Not once did he ever stop to look at you as you did all that.

“Where are you from, Theseus?”

“I’m from Dorset, but I work in London. I have for a few years now.” His speech was naturally flowy and confident, as if he hadn’t been in hysterical shock a few minutes before. “What are you doing so far from home, (Y/N)?”

“Same as you; I’m fighting the war by helping the best I can.” He hissed as you rubbed closer to the gash. “Sorry. So London, uh? What do you do there?”

“I’m afraid I can’t say much. But it does have to do with Ministry work.” At this, he even smirked mischievously. You did a half-smile.

“Aren’t you a mysterious young man,” you teased. His chuckled, his eyes crinkling with laughter. You couldn’t help but smile in return, and for a few seconds, the conversation was suspended as you studied his features. You’d just noticed his brown hair, falling in locks on his forehead, and the discreet freckles sprinkles around his face, on the thin bridge of his nose and on his remarkable cheekbones. Despite the grime and muck on him, there was no hiding that he was a handsome young man. Finally realizing you were staring, you snapped out of it and looked down at your work, hoping to hide the pink of your cheeks.

“You have such gentle hands,” he commented out of the blue. “So delicate. It’s like... magic.” He said the last word with such a convinced passion that you could help but blush again, smiling bashfully and thanking him. He smiled as well.

“I hope you’ll forgive my lack of tact, (Y/N), but I’d like to know if you know someone in the war.” You raised your eyebrows, curious as the enquiry. “A brother… a fiancé perhaps?”

Finally understanding the meaning of his question, you shook your head.

“You’re quite the straightforward type, aren’t you then? No, I don’t have anyone. No fiancé, no husband, no…” The word repelled you. “Betrothed. What do you say to that?”

He took a few seconds to think, then fondly smiled. “I say that the men in your village are blind fools.”

You said nothing, too embarrassed at the compliment, and instead focused on the difficult task of suturing the wound. Theseus remained bravely still and silent through the process, refusing morphine which he deemed unnecessary for his case. After you’d finished stitching him up, you got up and told him you’d come back to check on him later. Before you could leave, he caught you by the wrist and you had to turn to him once more.

“Thank you, (Y/N),” he whispered. “I really hope to see you again.” And by the look in his eyes, you knew he meant it from the bottom of his heart. So did you when you said that you hoped for it.

Theseus stayed a week in your ward, healing his wound and resting, and you made sure to make time for him every day. You were loaded with work, but at the end of a long day, when all the extreme cases had been taken care of, you could visit him. You quickly grew very fond of him, his charm and good spirits. He had a talent to make you forget it was the middle of the war, going on about his family which raised horses and about London, and asking you countless questions. He was a fantastic storyteller, but also a great listener, and he was genuinely interested in what you had to say.

“So you got into Somerville, uh? What do your parents think about this?” He playfully asked, knowing full well what the society of your time thought of young women like you. “Aren’t you afraid you’ll turn into a blue stocking?”

You rolled your eyes, but played along. “If a man is afraid of my education, then I don’t want him. Only sad, sad men believe that women should stay in their shadows, and I don’t want a man like this.”

“Spoken like a true revolutionary, (Y/N),” Theseus chuckled. “I don’t think I’ve ever met a woman as bright as you. Heart of gold, magic hands, so beautiful and intelligent…” He reached for your hands, and your heart skipped a beat as he placed a kiss on them. “I simply wish we had more time.”

“What do you mean?” It came out as a gasp.

“I’m getting picked up tomorrow with other soldiers, they’re putting us back on the front lines.” Although he put on a brave face, you could feel the slight tremble in his fingers, and you noticed how his breathing was sharper and more intense than before. “I wish I could just go home. Then I’d have time to know you, outside of this horrible barrack and away from this disaster of a war.”

“Theseus…” you started, but the words got stuck in your head and throat. Truth be told, you didn’t know what to say. If you were honest with yourself, you’d fallen for him, and now you had to suffer through seeing him leave. A few tears escaped your eyes without you even noticing them.

“Shh, (Y/N), don’t cry please.” He said, wiping your cheeks and cupping your face to make you look him in the eyes. “You will make it out of this Hell, and you’ll return to Somerville. Then you’ll go on to accomplish great things. I know you will. I don’t want you to make me the person you know who’s fighting the War. You will forget about me.” He went to reach in his pocket for something, but the “No!” you said in protest stopped him in his tracks.

“I don’t want to forget you, Theseus,” you admitted. “You are the most extraordinary man I’ve ever met, and I don’t ever want to forget i ever met you. Even if it must break my heart, I want to remember every precious moment we’ve had.”

He reflected for a while, then drew in a sharp breath and suddenly closed the gap between your faces, pressing your lips together in a desperate and needy manner. You’d never been handled like this before, much less kissed by a man, but you couldn’t pull away. It was rough and gentle all at once, soft and generous, and it felt good. This was how it was supposed to be like, and how you always thought it would be. Theseus pulled away, his hands still on the sides of your face.

“Then promise me this, (Y/N).” You nodded, your eyes deep in his. “Write. Every day. Every week. Write to me.”

“I promise.” You rested your head on his shoulder, and he squeezed you in his arms, his body warmth diffusing through you and his embrace gentle and secure. “I’ll write.”

You don’t know how long you stayed there together, the head nurse finding you both asleep the next morning. Neither of you spoke a word as he retrieved his uniform and pack, and you simply follow a few steps behind him. As he was about to step into the truck bringing him back to the front, you caught his hand, squeezed it and said: “Be brave, Theseus.”

He turned back to you, smiling in his special way (the one that made him look like a fox, which made you melt), and kissed your hand. “I will be, (Y/N). And trust that I’ll come back.”

You reluctantly let go, and he climbed into the vehicle, which soon after departed. You waved it goodbye until it was out of sight, your heart sinking in fear of losing the man you had unfortunately fallen in love with.

[qqueenofhades]

Starlight & Strange Magic, Chapter 21: In Which Lucy Makes An Executive Decision

Rating: M Summary:  Lucy Preston, a young American woman, arrives in England in 1887 to teach history at Somerville College, Oxford. London is the capital of the steam and aether and automatonic world, and new innovations are appearing every day. When she meets a mysterious, dangerous mercenary and underworld kingpin, Garcia Flynn, her life takes a turn for the decidedly too interesting. But Lucy has plenty of secrets of her own – not least that she’s from nowhere or nowhen nearby – and she is more than up for the challenge. Available: AO3 Previous: In Which The Best Laid Plans, Etc., Etc.

Lucy doesn’t stir a single eyelash until ten o’clock the next morning, which coincidentally is when the sun is finally coming up. Admittedly, “up” is a bit of a misnomer, since it remains low enough to cast long shadows for most of the day, but she becomes aware of the weak glow on her face, peering through a break in the curtains, and grimaces, mumbles, and raises a hand, a cave-dweller suddenly disturbed by news from the overworld. She is extremely comfortable and could sleep another few hours anyway, but as memory trickles slowly into her rebooted brain, that possibility seems unlikely. Not even like this, engulfed in Flynn’s arms with her head on his shoulder, her legs thrown over his, her –

Wait. What? Not that she objects, but she can’t remember when exactly she ended up in Flynn’s arms, other than a brief and general memory of him crawling in next to her last night (and if she hadn’t insisted, she has the distinct feeling that this idiot would have tried to tough it out on the floorboards with a full-body beating and a badly broken leg). Even with that, she was expecting the same stiffness and distance of their night in St. Petersburg, when he caught himself apparently relaxing too much and hastily tried to separate them. But she has woken up instead with both his arms wrapped around her, practically spanning her twice, and her entire body fitted into the cracks and crevices and rugged places of his, like a lost hiker sheltering on a mountainside. When she moves as if to pull away, he rumbles in his sleep and unconsciously, reflexively draws her closer. He is warm and solid and very strong, somehow – incredibly – real, after everything they went through to get him, and it takes her breath away.

Since she doesn’t really want to get up anyway, and since she might as well savor this before he wakes up and wigs out again, Lucy wriggles around to look at him better. There are a few flecks of silver in his stubble and in distinguished touches at his temples, but his hair is thick and dark and just the right length to flip over his forehead. He has faint lines around his eyes, deep grooves around his mouth, and his nose is long. A few scars that look like claw marks stripe the heavy muscle of his upper arm, making her wonder how many were-beasts he’s tangled with apart from Wyatt, and he has clearly lived a hard life. There is a small red cicatrix just under his collarbone that looks like a healed bullet wound, and she hopes he won’t go around catching any more of those. She is overcome by a sudden desire to put her lips to it, to kiss it, to soothe this evidence of old hurts since her ability to help the new ones is so limited. She doesn’t even exactly know why, and she shouldn’t. He said no, before. He said no.

Lucy bites her lip, shifting still closer, finding nothing else to do with her left hand apart from settle it on Flynn’s chest, slowly rising and falling to the rhythm of his breathing. Moving it down feels like an invitation to awkwardness and disaster, so she slides it up instead, into the hollow of his breastbone. He doesn’t seem to be sleeping fitfully, so maybe he isn’t in too much pain from his leg, and when she lifts her hand and ghosts her fingers over his forehead, he isn’t running a fever. He was yesterday, so maybe he’s on the mend, though this would be a fast healing by anyone’s standards. Maybe the Raven King stepped in.

At that, Lucy frowns, trying to remember a dream that she’s fairly sure she had last night. Another one about ravens, though this one wasn’t seeing them above the train. This time, she was in a boggy grey field, the wind blowing in her face, and there was someone standing on the far side of the fog. She thought it was a man, but the shadow he cast was an endless forest, and ravens kept rising in whirling storms. He did not say a word, or come closer. Merely remained there, in some sort of stasis, as if waiting for a moment, for a sign. Waiting. Waiting.

That, however, reminds Lucy a little too uncomfortably of the forest in her room during the revenant attack, and since it stems from the same magic, perhaps that is understandable. But it also suddenly makes her wonder if the Raven King, if he is the maker and master of the revenants, might be considerably more dangerous than they are. She already noted Priscilla’s leery reaction to the idea of contacting him, and while she knows that Flynn reveres Matija Korvin, that Korvin is responsible for however they got out of the jam with the train, and whatever else, it makes Lucy feel that further reliance on him might be something to avoid. She doesn’t know what Korvin is, other than a very powerful otherworldly magical being that clearly has not let earthly death stop him from doing his thing, and might in fact have leveled up as a result. She has not taken his magic seriously before, and it got her attacked by the revenant. It is more than time that she takes more than a little caution with it now.

There is, however, still the fact that Emma and Rittenhouse are looking for Korvin’s lost library, and the idea of contacting him directly might also occur to them, rather than muddle fruitlessly around the Balkans in search of it. As far as Lucy knows, Emma hasn’t heard for sure that she herself is in Russia, but the news of Flynn’s capture was definitely sent back to London. Rittenhouse might not yet know that Flynn has escaped, given as the tockers on his train were all destroyed, but someone will have been waiting for him to arrive in Arkhangelsk, realize that he has not (as far they know), and start asking questions and mounting a search. Even if Flynn was in a state to be walking around the city, he shouldn’t do that. Someone here is looking for him. Might have gone to the station master, asked questions. Not to mention, Rufus and Jiya are now here too. If Emma could catch them in the same place, together, she could wipe out the whole team at a stroke, and end all further resistance to Rittenhouse and everything they could achieve across the multiverse. The chance would be too tempting to resist.

These troubling thoughts are starting to cut into Lucy’s enjoyment of the carefree, comfortable moment she woke up in, and she supposes that she can’t loaf around in bed, or in Flynn’s arms, much longer. Her leg is still sore, but her feet have been messed up in some way since she got here, and she’ll find some liniment or bandages to splint it up if she has to do a lot of walking. She pauses, then pets her fingers over his cheek, since she doesn’t know when they’ll wake up like this again and, selfishly, wants to keep it that way for a moment longer. This time, however, he stirs, eyes closed, hand rising out of the quilts to catch hers and curl his fingers around it. “Moja ljubav,” he murmurs, voice thick and hoarse with sleep. “Dobro jutro.”

Lucy’s heart turns over. She doesn’t know exactly what he said, but the tone makes it more than clear that it’s an endearment, and the fact that it was spoken in Croatian means that he – understandably – is not yet awake and thinks, however briefly, that he is back in bed with his wife. She doesn’t get the sense that he has been remotely near any other woman since then, and as much as she tries to tell herself that it’s understandable, that she doesn’t grudge it to him, she turns her head away, so she doesn’t have to see the disappointment in his eyes when he opens them and realizes otherwise. “Good morning,” she says. “It’s – it’s me.”

She’s still halfway in his arms, and she feels them tense. She steadfastly keeps her gaze on the window, waiting until she feels it would be safe to look back at his face. There’s a long pause. Then he says, “Yes.”

It doesn’t sound disappointed. It doesn’t sound – well, like anything. She’s not sure what sort of answer yes is anyway, unless it’s confirming that he has recollected himself and remembered who he was speaking to. He opens his arms as if to make it easier for her to slip out, and Lucy does so, not sure that she’s ever felt more mortified in her life. (That includes the drunken hookups in her acting-out freshman year at UCLA, when she woke up in some dorm room smelling of rancid socks, next to some pasty-ass kid she didn’t know, and had to scramble to remember if they’d used a condom.) She disentangles herself from Flynn and sits upright, on the edge of the bed, to make it clear she’ll put space between them and wasn’t trying to sleazily make a move on him when he was asleep. Her cheeks burn. Silence.

“So,” Flynn says, after an excruciating pause. “How… how are you?”

“Fine?” Lucy can’t tell if he’s taking refuge in inane pleasantries to smooth things over, if he’s asking if she’s physically on the mend, or – or what. “I’ll do. I really should be asking about you. How’s your leg? Is it any better?”

Flynn wiggles it experimentally, which does not cause more curses or grimaces. “Better,” he agrees. “I had a dream that – well, anyway, maybe there was some leftover magic for it. It still feels like someone stuck it with a thousand hot needles, but that’s an improvement.”

“Either way, I don’t want you running around on it,” Lucy orders, sounding like a stern hospital matron to her own ears. “It was broken literally yesterday, and besides, there have to be Rittenhouse people in Arkhangelsk looking for you, if they were sending you here in the first place. You stay in today and rest. I’ll go out and see what I can find.”

Flynn looks briefly inclined to protest, but stops with a wince as he moves his leg again; evidently it’s not completely healed, and even his absurd pain tolerance has its limits. Nonetheless, he does not agree to be confined to bed and fed gruel like an invalid, and heaves himself up, the too-short nightshirt hiking up his muscled thighs and nearly giving Lucy a look at something she would rather not see. Not that she would find it unattractive, but really, the opposite. She is trying with all her might to mind her manners and maintain the boundary he asked – the kiss was an emotional, spur-of-the-moment, enchantment thing, she can’t count on him wanting to do it again – and she does not need to be taunted like this.

After considerable effort on both of their parts, they get washed and dressed, which almost feels familiar from their room-sharing in Oxford, and head downstairs. Rufus and Jiya are awake, talking cautiously with the landlady, who has cooked an enormous breakfast since it’s the off-season for trade and they are the only guests in the boarding house. “What about your friend, in cellar?” she asks, spooning more eggs onto Rufus’s plate even as he protests that he couldn’t eat another bite. “I bring him also some food? Bacon, sausage?”

“I – yeah, I think he’d probably like some meat,” Rufus says, visibly chewing his cheek. He’s been reluctantly persuaded that Wyatt is safe to be around after he’s been removed from the Raven King’s magic and taken a large dose of medicine, but he also has the look of a man who spent the night jumping at small noises. “Whatever large carnivores eat.”

“We could ask him to come up here,” Lucy says. Wyatt probably feels enough like a dirty animal, tied up and stuffed in the cellar and shunned, brought down scraps from the kitchen table, and while she doesn’t know if it would help, it certainly can’t hurt. “He – it’s all right, you know, he’s not… it’s controllable.”

Rufus, who has had a far too eventful time since his crash-landing in Westworld, gives her the fish-eye. “Lucy, I know I’m new around here, but it feels like rule number one would be don’t get too cozy with the – ” At that moment, he notices the landlady listening avidly, remembers that they haven’t told her what’s up with their extra tenant, and waves his hand. “You know.”

“I’ll see if he wants to come up,” Lucy repeats stubbornly, ignoring the communal wince. She gets up, goes to the cellar door, and after calling down reveals that Wyatt is awake (“was he howling at the moon?” Rufus asks behind her), asks if he wants to join them for breakfast. It takes a while, as evidently Wyatt is no more eager to be around them than Rufus is to have him, but he finally appears, pale and haggard-looking. He glances around at the tense expressions of everyone at the table, then sits carefully at the end. Rufus watches him like a hawk.

“Hey,” Wyatt says, once the silence has gotten excruciating. “I’m – sorry about – you know. The other night.” He glances at Flynn in particular, since the goose egg on his head is still quite purple, as is the corresponding eye. “Did you have to hit me so hard, though?”

“Did you have to keep a secret like that?” Flynn arches a cutting eyebrow back at him. “You’re lucky I only hit you. If I’d had the right gun with me, I would have shot you.”

Lucy doesn’t really feel that this is getting everyone off on the team-spirited foot that she had hoped for, and clears her throat, trying to break apart Wyatt and Flynn’s staring contest. “We can all agree that nobody was expecting it. So – ”

“Yeah,” Rufus says. “You know, like the Spanish Inquisition. Also a noted bad thing.”

Lucy gives him a look, and Jiya giggles, even as Flynn, the only person at the table who doesn’t get the joke, stares at them like they’re crazy. Even Wyatt has to snort. Once he has been served by the landlady, and she has stepped out of the dining room with some of the dirty dishes, he says, “I just – I thought I could keep it under wraps until I found a way to get rid of it. Yeah, I didn’t tell you, I’m sorry. But do you think anyone would want to help me, or even be seen around me, if I’m like, cool story bro, I’m a werewolf? I asked someone what happened to them. They said they either went insane, got shot by hunters, or did horrible things and turned into scary stories. Funnily enough, none of those options sounded that great.”

“When did it happen?” Flynn asks, ruthlessly practical as ever. “How long has it been?”

“About ten months after I got here.” Wyatt rubs his face. “I was looking into some supposed associate of yours in Romania, I got lost in a thunderstorm, and had to bunk up in some ruined castle. Next thing I know, it’s a fuckin’ horror movie in there, and I…” He trails off. “I don’t remember most of it. I had to visit some crazy old witch and she told me what happened. That I had to get my hands on some special kind of medicine, or it was, you know. What went down the other night. That’s why I kept working for Rittenhouse. I needed the money for it.”

“You stayed in a ruined castle in Romania? At night, in a thunderstorm?” Flynn looks absolutely incredulous, as if Wyatt could not have more eagerly jumped up and down in front of the universe begging it to turn him into a werewolf if he tried. “You couldn’t pay me to do that. All of them are under Dracul’s curse. Some more than others, but everybody knows that.”

“Yeah, well,” Wyatt says, with a very sharp edge. “I’m not from here, am I? I didn’t know that.”

Flynn shakes his head, half in horror at Wyatt’s professional incompetence and half in grudging acknowledgement that he was terribly briefed for this job and it’s not his fault that he was dropped into a magical, dangerous world without so much as a memo. At that, however, Rufus looks up sharply. “Wait. So you – Flynn, you’re up to speed on the whole… thing? About where we’re from, and – all that?”

Flynn shoots an odd, oblique glance at Lucy before he says, “Yes. I’m aware that all of you are from a neighboring reality and have arrived here by different means and methods. I assume the question of how to get you home will be sorted out later.”

“There’s something called the Mothership,” Wyatt says. “It’s how I got here. Rufus said back in St. Petersburg that he knew how to drive it, if we could steal it.”

“It’s the only way we’re all getting out of here,” Rufus says. “The Lifeboat was only modified for one, and it’s back in New York anyway. The Mothership can take six. Plus, we’d leave Rittenhouse without a time machine, which kind of seems like an important strategic move.”

“But Emma could find the Lifeboat, if we left it here in Westworld,” Jiya points out. “She wouldn’t turn a hair in leaving everyone behind to use it for herself. We’d have to find it and destroy it, or remotely detonate it, or have someone go back in it separately. Maybe you or me, in case something went wrong.”

Lucy looks away. All this talk of how they’re getting home is, of course, very important, but it makes something odd and unhappy squirm like cold lead in her stomach, and she doesn’t even know why. She’s been here a while, maybe it’s natural that she’s ambivalent about leaving. She’s met Ada and the Sokolovs and other people she likes a lot, she’s had her time at Oxford, she’s even managed to enjoy herself between the kidnappings and monster attacks and other events that have consistently occupied her time since she got here. She reminds herself that she wants the Internet and jeans and modern life again, trashy television, proper medicine, not getting side-eyed by misogynists in monocles and top hats every time she dares to venture out of doors alone. (There is plenty to be said about the modern world still being misogynist, but at least not so overtly.) Her time in Westworld has been very interesting, but there’s no reason she can’t go, no reason that she’d feel some sort of inexorable gravity pulling her back, when her life, her existence, her friends, are all in her birth reality. When she can’t give that up for a man who doesn’t want to, who is still in love with his dead wife and devoted to –

Rittenhouse is in her birth reality. Her childhood, her entire life, the Cahills and the youth groups and Noah and the brainwashing. Her mother telling a ten-year-old that she was a princess, Henry Wallace’s face, I’m not your real father, Lucy – a week later, he was in the coffin, pale and stiff with formaldehyde, she wonders now if Rittenhouse killed him, had a hit put out to punish him for spilling the beans, anything that might lead her from her true destiny as –

Lucy can feel the breakfast threatening to come back up, and swallows heavily, bracing her hands on the table. Rufus and Jiya glance at her, concerned. “Lucy?” Rufus says. “Lucy, are you okay?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I’m fine.” She manages a very forced smile, still feeling a little sick. “We really need to find out what Rittenhouse is doing here. What’s the plan?”

It turns out that frankly, they don’t have much of one, but they try to thrash out a few particulars nonetheless. Of their four Russian speakers, two (the Sokolovs) are in the hospital and one (Flynn) can’t walk. As before, that leaves Karl, so if anyone is going to ask questions and pick up rumors, it has to be him. Rufus is, unfortunately, conspicuous as a black man in nineteenth-century far-north Russia, so he’s going to draw a lot of attention if he walks around town. He is also very leery about being paired up with Wyatt, though Wyatt, as a private bounty hunter and ex-soldier, is pretty good at investigative work. ���Look,” he says at last, sounding frustrated. “I can’t help that I’m a damn werewolf, but if we run into the Raven King’s magic and I start transforming again, just run really fast in the opposite direction. Otherwise, I have the medicine, it shouldn’t be a problem. I want to get out of here too, so… allies for now, all right?”

Rufus continues to eye him suspiciously, as if to say it’s always idiot white people that die in a horror movie, because their black friends are smart and know not to fuck with things that will kill them. Finally, however, he says, “Okay. So what, pee on the fire hydrant as a warning if you feel it coming on?”

Wyatt gives him a death stare, and Rufus raises his hands. “I only want to make sure we’re clear here. I’ve never worked with a werewolf before, I’m just trying to establish the rules. If we determine that I don’t taste like kibble, then – ”

Wyatt growls, sounding not-unlike his lupine self, and Rufus jumps, apparently deciding to can it with the dog references for now. There’s another awkward silence, and then they clear their throat and rise to their feet at the same time, jostling the table. Lucy and Jiya get up as well, as if sensing that interference may possibly be needed on any number of fronts, and go to get wrapped up, since they’ll be the other half of the recon team. As they’re pulling on coats, fur hats, and mufflers, Jiya says quietly, “So, what exactly is it with you and Flynn?”

“What?” Lucy was under the impression that she was managing to be generally circumspect about looking at him (or not looking at him) during breakfast. “What about Flynn?”

Jiya gives her a look. They haven’t exactly had girl talk about anything in a long time, especially not boyfriends, since there hasn’t been anyone in Lucy’s life remotely fitting that description. But Jiya and Rufus know Lucy well, and Rufus might have filled her in on some of the things that he observed while recovering in the warehouse. At last Jiya says, “You were more determined than I’ve ever seen you to get him back, and I’ve seen you be determined about a lot of things. You were stuck to him like glue that entire night on the train. And now you’re looking at him, like – well – ”

“Like what?” Lucy’s voice sounds briefly high and unnatural to her ears, and she tries to modulate it. “How exactly do you think I’m looking at him?”

“Like you…” Jiya looks as if she can’t decide whether to say this out loud, when she has a feeling Lucy already knows damn well what she’s going to say and is being deliberately obtuse. “Like you’re completely gone over him, and have no idea what to do about it.”

That, Lucy is forced to grimly admit, is an unfortunately accurate précis of her present situation. Even so, she feels some instinctive need to modify it, to push back on it, to make it sound somehow less consuming and terrifying than it is. “It’s not that,” she says quickly. “Not exactly. I just – all right, I guess I have a little bit of a crush on him. It’s been a long time, and he – he understands me. But it’s not – ”

“Crush, huh?” Jiya winds a long knitted scarf around her neck, pulls her dark braid out, and ties it. “So that’s what you do for all your crushes? Come on, Lucy. Is that why you were sitting there looking like you were being boiled alive when we were talking about how to get home?”

“I wasn’t,” Lucy says weakly. “Of course I want to go home with you.”

Jiya eyes her for a moment longer, then shrugs, pulls on her mittens, and steps to the door. “Well then,” she says. “We’re not going to have much daylight, we shouldn’t waste it.”

Grateful for the abrupt change of subject, Lucy follows her out, winces as the full blast of the cold hits her in the face like a fist, and can feel it even through her multiple layers of heavy clothing. She and Jiya trundle through the several inches of fresh spindrift, glancing back to make sure they know where the boarding house is, as Wyatt and Rufus emerge on their heels and they split in opposite directions down the street. Lucy swings by the gang’s accommodation to chivvy Karl off his ass and out into the cold, which he does with a deeply resentful look at her, and then tries to guess where Rittenhouse might have been expecting to stash Flynn. Not that they can storm it with just her and Jiya, and the last thing they need is another Sibley’s-office fiasco, but they have to start somewhere.

The day remains a low, chilly shade of blue as Lucy and Jiya search through the warehouses on the waterfront and some of the outbuildings around the railway station. The port is locked in with ice, an eerie white carapace spreading out to the horizon, and all the ships are in dry-dock to avoid being crushed, making Lucy think of Shackleton and the Endurance. That, of course, was at the literally polar opposite side of the earth, but it has the same wild winter ferocity, the sense of a place only incidentally lived upon by humans, where the might of nature could rise up and flick these insects off its back at any time. The tip of her nose has gone numb, she hopes she doesn’t get frostbite, and while it’s not as cold here as the interior of Siberia, at Yakutsk or some other place where you can throw boiling water out the window and it freezes instantly, it’s more than damn cold enough, and Lucy is feeling cramped and sluggish. “This is pointless,” she says, breath gusting in white billows. “Rittenhouse has some other safe house. They’re not – ”

At that moment, they’re cut off by the crunch of footsteps from just around the corner, and Lucy throws out her arm, pushing Jiya back against the wall, as she draws her gun with the other. It’s too cold to run automatons regularly around here, since their joints and gears would freeze up, which means that the approaching entity is likely human. It could just be a confused merchant or whatever, but as the man appears, face just visible under a fur hat, Lucy recognizes one of the thugs who was with Emma in Mr. Li’s opium den, back in London. They stare at each other, it hits in the same moment, and then he goes for his gun.

He’s fast, but he has to get it out from under several layers, and Lucy, who has hers already out and ready for action, is faster. She nails him right in the kneecap, and he goes down with a crash, spraying snow. He’s still fumbling, trying to get his gun one-handed, so she strides over and kicks it away, spinning the revolver and pointing the barrel dead at his head. “I wouldn’t.”

“What the h – ” The Rittenhouse goon grabs at his bad leg, groaning with pain. “What the hell are you doing here, you crazy bitch? You’re supposed to be in England!”

“Yeah, well, doesn’t look like I am, am I?” Lucy is tempted to shoot him again for the crazy bitch part, but she is savagely enjoying having the drop on Rittenhouse for once, and she needs a lot of answers. Not that she thinks this one will provide them without acute persuasion, and she isn’t someone who will torture a suspect into talking, but there are other ways. “Sorry to mess up Emma’s evil plans. And you were here, what, to get the sacrificial altar ready? Kill a few black cockerels first?”

“I don’t know what Emma’s doing.” The goon tries to find something, to no avail, to wrap around his shattered knee. “Just go and – ”

“I think you do.” Lucy keeps the gun trained on him. “Why are you in Arkhangelsk? Is Emma supposed to join you here? What did you have planned for Flynn?”

“Go to hell, I’m not – ”

At that, again, something very weird happens. There’s a shift in the air, a faint smell like wet earth and starlight (she didn’t know that starlight had a smell, but she does), and then another man steps into sight from behind the brick wall. He is handsome, black-haired, and very pale, almost the same color as the milky sky, and is wearing a long black fur coat. His brows are thick, his strong nose reminiscent of a raven’s beak, and it might be Lucy’s imagination, but he doesn’t seem to leave footprints in the snow. Despite the cold, he isn’t wearing a hat or gloves, and comes to a stalking halt in front of the whimpering Rittenhouse agent. “You. Thomas Brent?”

Both the agent – Thomas Brent, apparently – and Lucy gape at him. He’s spoken in English, but with a strong Slavic accent, and with a conscious cadence as if thinking hard about it. Something about his voice makes you want to kneel down in front of him, and Lucy finds her legs starting to bend unconsciously, before she stops. Jiya shoots a look at her in complete bafflement, and Lucy shakes her head, mouthing, I have no idea. The mysterious black-haired, black-dressed newcomer stares down at Brent, who winces for seemingly more reasons than his smashed knee. Then the man says, “I recognize you. You were the one that the woman sent to search the dark places in Slavonia. You were searching for my books.”

Brent stares blankly at him, drop-jawed, as a sudden realization hits Lucy. This is probably a very bad idea, but she can’t help it. Shocked, she blurts out, “Matija Korvin?”

“You know of me.” He turns his head, cocking it as a bird does to look at her, as the full force of his uncanny eyes train on her. They are just as black as the rest of him, with no visible pupil or iris. “I know you as well, Lucy Preston. Perhaps you are surprised to see me here, in this mortal ken, in a form that can be perceived by your eyes. I have been less obvious until this moment.”

“You helped us the other night, on the train,” Lucy says. “With the ravens destroying the tockers, and – and making the locomotive move. Thank you.”

Matija Korvin seems amused that she thinks he wants her gratitude. The edges of his form blur slightly when she looks at him directly, as she remembers Flynn telling her that they believe the Raven King never really died, only took up a throne in Faerie instead, and now lives forever beyond the gates of the human world. Sometimes he still returns to wander his old domains, and to assist those who call upon him, but he must always go back. “I know this man,” he says, turning that stare back on Brent, who now looks thoroughly unnerved. “His mistress wants my library. She has many plans for it, apparently. Is that so, creature?”

“Y – yes?” Thomas Brent might not be great at making life choices, judging by his employment as Rittenhouse bruiser, but even he is smart enough not to lie to a terrifying fell being. “Look, man, I don’t know anything about this magic shit, I just do what Emma tells me. I knew there were some books she wanted me to find, some raven guy, but – ”

“Silence.” Matija does not raise his voice, exactly, but it’s distant and rumbling and inexorable as a thunderstorm, and Brent shudders. “Do not profane yourself by speaking of what your filthy tongue and your rodent brain cannot begin to comprehend. You greedy, vicious, short-sighted mortal, ruled by your baser impulses like the rest of them. I should kill you, Thomas Brent, since the lady is too gracious to do it. But I suspect first that she has some questions. Is that not what I interrupted you in, Lucy Preston?”

“Ah – yes, you did.” Lucy does want Brent to talk, but she is also oddly wary of getting too close to Korvin himself. The air feels still colder around him, and she has that brief sense of the forest, as if the revenant is drawing close again. Lucy isn’t sure what the protocol here is exactly. Finally she says, “So, we were on the subject of what you were doing here in Arkhangelsk.”

“I don’t – ” Brent’s gaze flickers fearfully between her and Korvin. “My leg, I can’t – ”

Korvin utters an exasperated noise and waves his hand, and Brent howls as the shattered pieces of bone snap back into place with an audible, wet pop. “There,” the Raven King says. “You humans and your much-troubled legs. I was unaware that the leg had any bearing on the ability of the mouth to speak. Now answer her, or I will break it again, and others.”

“We – ” Brent licks his lips, breathing fast and shallow. “There’s something here called the Angel’s Gate. Emma sent me to find it. It’s the place where we can establish a permanent passage back to our world, once we have enough aether, and once we worked out how to stabilize the singularity. She thought it and the rest would be in the library, that’s why she wants it. That way, we wouldn’t have to risk taking the Mothership back and forth every time, and with the railway in operation, we’d have a constant pipeline for. . .” He hesitates. “For magic.”

“Oh?” Lucy recalls what Anton told her, the legend of Arkhangelsk standing on the spot where the Devil was defeated, and her thought that there might be some kind of shield wall between the branches of the multiverse. Apparently, that is essentially it, but this is where Rittenhouse intends to permanently jam that door open, to drain away this world’s magic into ours. “So that is what you wanted Flynn for? The sacrifice to open the gate?”

“Emma doesn’t know how to open it for sure.” Brent has turned almost as pale as Korvin himself, though Lucy can’t tell why. Maybe shock, or cold, or something else. “I was supposed to help figure that out. She said that most of this old kind of magic would take a human sacrifice, and Flynn’s a pain in the ass. Once we finally got him, yeah, I was gonna see if killing him would finally do something useful for us and – ”

Lucy stares down at him. She is aware of her blood beating in her ears, rushing in her head, in a way that almost frightens her – not least because she wants to pull out her gun and finish Brent off on the spot, interrogation or no interrogation. It is briefly all she has space for inside her, the knowledge that this man would have killed Flynn as part of some attempted black-magic ritual for Rittenhouse’s ultimate power if he got the chance, and it takes her a very long moment to recover herself. At last she says, “Where is Angel’s Gate?”

Brent hesitates. Korvin clicks his fingers. Something snaps in Brent’s leg with a crunching sound, and he gags. “Ah! Dammit! Solovetsky, dammit! Solovetsky Monastery! On the island! About a hundred and fifty miles west of here, in the White Sea! I  was trying to figure out how to get there with everything frozen up, so – ”

Lucy is dimly familiar with that name from somewhere. She thinks Solovetsky might have been the prototype for the gulag system; it was a place of exile for the enemies of the tsars beforehand, as well as religious objectors to Russian orthodoxy, and many writers were imprisoned there after the Russian Revolution. The monastery has a spirited history of independence and idiosyncrasy, and in this reality, the monks must also be magicians, the guardians of untold mystical secrets, including a gateway between worlds. However, as Brent says, getting a hundred and fifty miles out into the frozen White Sea at this time of year is not a walk in Hyde Park. Lucy thinks briefly, and wildly optimistically, that this logistical difficulty might also stymie Emma, but that would be extremely foolish to assume. She’ll probably ice skate out there if she has to.

“Anything else?” Lucy asks. “Anything else at all?”

“No.” Brent gulps. “No, come on, that’s all I know. I swear, I swear. Come on, just – ”

Lucy eyes him coolly and pitilessly, unmoved by his pleading. Nobody stirs, until Korvin clicks his fingers again. Brent convulses, as fine black cracks spread up his face, like a piece of porcelain dropped on the floor. Then he smashes like glass, and a flock of ravens come soaring out of him, screeching and cawing, as his body crumbles to dust. In an instant more, there’s nothing but a heap of grey ash in the snow in front of Korvin, who bends over and regards it dispassionately. Then he straightens up and turns to Lucy. “My apologies for that mess,” he says, with grave, old-fashioned courtesy. “But it was a maggot, not a man. He should have known better than to be discourteous to you.”

“Ah – thanks?” Lucy was prepared to kill Brent herself for a moment there, but it’s still slightly disconcerting to see him literally dusted. “Your – Your Highness, this has been very informative, but maybe we should – ”

“Why do you hasten away?” Korvin has the air of an immortal to whom time is only a vague and mildly irritating concept, like the distant buzzing of a fly. “There is more that we could speak of, Lucy Preston. You are an impressive woman, and clearly most powerful. For a human,” he adds, as if she shouldn’t go getting too carried away. “Yet you grieve. You wear heartbreak like a shadow on your brow. Why is this?”

“I – ” Lucy isn’t sure if the goddamn Raven King just asked about the dismal state of her love life, but that was what it sounded like. “It’s nothing. I’m fine.”

“Is it a man who turns you the color of woe?” She has to admit that he has an unusual, poetic way with words, though that probably comes from being a very well-read, four-hundred-year-old magician. “You should wear a crown of roses, not of thorns. I could fashion you one, like so.”

With that, Matija holds out his palm, and a delicate silver tiara materializes it in, bedecked with fine, tiny pearls and a diamond as clear as cut ice. Lucy has an urge to put it on, as reflexive as the insistence to kneel earlier, which startles her. She is aware, however, that that would be a bad idea, and if she did so, it would be very difficult to take it off again. She is aware that she is being enchanted, and it is a strange, dissociating, giddy feeling. “It’s beautiful,” she says, having to work harder for words than usual, “but no, no thank you.”

“Is it the warmth of human flesh you wish?” Matija raises a hand, as if to set it alongside her cheek, but not quite, and she can feel the chill radiating off it. “Yes, I forget. I could make it so for you. My last wife died many years ago. I was quite fond of her and did what I could, but she never took to Faerie, not entirely. You, though. I think you would. You would be a dread and lovely queen, and no man would ever mistreat you there, or speak you ill, or give you anything less than what you deserved. Certainly not this one who seems so ignorant of what he has, so determined to stubbornly spurn you, as Garcia Flynn. He owes me a debt, you know. I have recently been to remind him of it. Shall I ask for you as my payment?”

“What?” Lucy has been struggling to stay awake, as her eyelids are starting to feel heavy and she can hear the distant, unaccountable sound of bells. That, however, jolts her back to consciousness. “What do you mean, your payment?”

“I have done great magic for him.” At close range, Korvin’s eyes are matte black, with no reflection or light in their depths at all. “He owes me something of equal value in return. Those are the laws. Those have always been the laws. I think it would be an arrangement not to the dissatisfaction of either of us. Shall I ask for you?”

“I. . .” Lucy’s head is still fuddled with the scent and weight of magic, like heavy incense, but at that, she manages to shake it. “I – no. No, thank you. That’s very generous, but no.”

Korvin does not answer for a long moment, looking her up and down. She has the sense he is not used to being refused, which indeed probably doesn’t happen when you’re a demi-god prayed to for centuries by your people, their patron saint and their legendary hero. Nor does he seem very pleased by it. “Neither of you can break the laws,” he says. “You would be most unwise to try. You would be a most powerful Raven Queen, Lucy Preston. It is a great destiny I offer you, a choice given to few. I will ask again soon. Perhaps you will have reconsidered. I urge you so.”

With that, with no further ado or pyrotechnics or movement whatsoever, he isn’t there anymore. Lucy feels as if she’s had a bucket of cold water dumped on her head (in this already-too-damn-cold place), staggers, and blinks very hard. She glances around, sees that she is still standing in the rundown warehouse, and she takes a few anxious steps. “Jiya? Jiya!”

In a few more moments, she finds Jiya, who seems strangely unclear on what has just happened or where exactly Lucy was. She can vaguely recall that there was someone else there, and that she saw him, but can’t put it exactly to words. “Was it – did we just meet some sort of major Westworld cryptid? Is that what happened?”

“Honestly, I think that’s probably the best way to put it.” Lucy rubs at her eyes again, trying to chase off the remaining haze. “Did you hear the part about Angel’s Gate?”

“I. . . think so?” Jiya frowns. “It was. . . somewhere?”

“Solovetsky,” Lucy says. “Solovetsky Island. That’s where Rittenhouse wants to go, that’s where they want to set up their permanent wormhole and magic supply route to our world. Emma doesn’t know how to open it – yet – but she’s probably not far off. That’s what Flynn was for, a test human sacrifice. We need to figure out how to get there.”

Jiya frowns at her. “Where did you learn all that?”

“From the Rittenhouse agent,” Lucy says, which is true enough. “You were there, do you not remember any of it at all?”

“It’s just really fuzzy,” Jiya says. “Who was that man in black? Was there a man in black?”

“That was the Raven King.” Lucy debates how much to explain. It occurs to her too late that she didn’t ask him about the revenant, about how to free Amy, while they were face-to-face, and yet she can’t help but feel that that information would definitely not have come for free. “He’s a famous magician, kind of a big deal around here. I found out a little about him, but Flynn told me more. You don’t think I still have any of his magic on me, do you? The last thing we need is to go back and set Wyatt off again.”

“I guess not?” Jiya says, in a tone of voice indicating that this is way past anything that even she understands. Almost any kind of science or math, she can get, but magic was never on the curriculum at Caltech. “Lucy, you’re feeling okay, right?”

“I’m fine.” Lucy is surprised by the question, since Jiya is the one who doesn’t seem to remember anything that just happened right in front of her. “Look, at least we have something to report, and it’s still freezing. Let’s go back.”

They trudge through the frozen snow to the main promenade, as Lucy looks out at the ice sheet of the White Sea and tries to think how they are ever going to get to Solovetsky Island. She has definitely been put off the idea of calling on the Raven King again, since what he said about the debt Flynn owes has considerably rattled her. That is definitely not something that Korvin is going to just graciously put aside and forget about, and it sounds very much as if he knows exactly what he wants to settle it. Lucy said no once, but is she going to be able to do it again? Fucking off out of reality to go be an awesome fairy queen and live forever in a magical land is not a terrible fate (you know, if the alternative was coming home to Trump, maybe she should seriously consider it). And yet, Lucy knows it’s not what she, at her deepest and most fundamental level, really wants. It’s not something she appears likely to get. But it still is.

The sun has edged very low on the horizon, even though it’s only midafternoon, by the time Lucy and Jiya, huffing and puffing with cold and exertion, plod back up the steps of the boarding house and knock to be let in. The landlady opens the door, and the air inside is almost scalding in comparison, so Lucy strips off her wraps too quickly and then feels her body complaining vehemently that it doesn’t know what temperature to be. She is somehow both shivering and sweating at the same time as she walks into the kitchen, which is a very stupid state of affairs, and stops short at the sight of Flynn sitting at the table, bent over a stack of books. “Shouldn’t you still be in bed?”

“I told you that I wasn’t staying stuck in there like some weakling.” He answers without looking up, turning the page and frowning at whatever he sees on the other side. “I haven’t been walking, like a good boy. What did you find out?”

“Several things,” Lucy says. “Apparently you were supposed to be sacrificed to see if it would open something called Angel’s Gate. Rittenhouse wants to use it to move aether into my world. It’s on Solovetsky Island, and I have no idea how to get there. And. . .” She hesitates. “And I met the Raven King.”

“What?” It’s only at that last one that Flynn looks up, with a rather wild expression. He pushes back his chair and jumps up, bad leg or not, as if to run toward her. “You – are you – you’re not, he didn’t – ?”

“I’m fine.” Lucy debates whether to mention the rest of it, as she herself is increasingly unsure if it happened, and it is starting to turn jumbled and unclear in her head. “He appeared while we were. . . talking to the Rittenhouse agent I caught. He helped get him to talk. That was how I found out about Angel’s Gate. He said something about a debt you owed him.”

Flynn has an expression of total and badly managed panic on his face at that. He raises a hand as if to run it through his hair, stops, starts to say something, and likewise can’t get it out. “You didn’t. . .” He seems to be forgetting all the words he knows, in any number of languages. “Did he ask if you. . .”

Lucy wants to say that he did, but she can’t remember, and she’s a little thrown by his apparent horror, since this doesn’t seem to be where she recalls leaving things off with them. “I decided against it,” she says. “Whatever he was asking.”

This appears to do nothing for Flynn’s ambient terror level. He mutters a curse under his breath and turns away, almost losing his balance on his bad leg, and has to grab for the table to steady himself. Back to her, he says, as if needing to put it into words to see how unbelievable it sounds, “You rejected the Raven King.”

“Would you rather that I didn’t?” Lucy takes an angry step. If he’s going to tell her that he wished she did vanish into Faerie forever and never saw him again, she’s going to – she doesn’t know, but there will be a lot of slapping involved, which he is possibly fortunate to have evaded. It hasn’t felt sporting to hit him when he’s been in such decrepit shape, but still. “Did you want me to say yes? Or just – go?”

Her voice chokes on the last word, she can’t quite get it out, and she thinks just then that if he says yes, if he does say anything remotely in that vein, it will in fact break her heart, and she doesn’t know what to do with that. It’s not a crush, it’s not a passing fancy, it’s not something casual and commonplace and easily replaceable. As she stands there, staring daggers at Flynn and strongly tempted to kill him – which you’d think would not be the correct moment for this realization, and yet, that is Garcia Flynn for you – Lucy feels it settle into her like the snow itself, as cold and frightening and unshakable, elemental, unbearable. Oh shit, she thinks. Oh, shit.

At last, slowly, Flynn turns around and meets her eyes. “I don’t,” he says, as if still struggling to remember how to words. “I don’t – I don’t want you to go. Lucy, how – Lucy, I don’t, I can’t – that’s not why I’m here.”

“Oh?” Lucy takes another step. They’re almost nose to nose despite the height difference. “Then why are you here?”

Flynn opens his mouth. The look on his face is hard to categorize, aside from a blend of shock, confusion, alarm, and consternation, none of which feel like a prelude to an impassioned love declaration. He raises his hand to cup her cheek, as if it’s too hard to say it aloud and he is going to struggle with all his might to demonstrate it instead. That’s not a kiss, right? It can’t be a kiss. But the look in his eyes is heartbroken and tender and more devoted than Lucy thought was possible for one human man, and she rises on her toes, opening her mouth, closing her eyes, ready, so beyond ready to give herself to him, if he will have her, and –

Just then, the kitchen door bangs, a snowy Wyatt and Rufus barge in, and Lucy and Flynn spring apart as if they’ve been electrocuted. It’s good to see that Wyatt is in fact un-wolfed, but Lucy practically wants to throttle him herself for the interruption – even as she is, ridiculously, almost relieved. If it was then, if it was real, if it was what she thought it was just then. . . she doesn’t know if her heart could bear it. She knows it, she knows it, and it’s possibly the first time in her life that she’s been absolutely sure, and she is terrified. She’s in love with Flynn. She’s in love with him. She feels sick at the idea of leaving this reality because it means leaving him and never seeing him again. That every step they get closer to beating Rittenhouse, if they can even flatter themselves that they will, means one step closer to permanent goodbye.

“Well,” Rufus says. “I’m really not sure how much use that was, because we didn’t learn anything. Aside from the fact that it’s freezing, which was obvious. Lucy?”

“Yeah?” She struggles to recollect herself. “What, Rufus?”

“Did you find anywhere about where we’re supposed to go, or do, or – or what?”

“Yes.” Lucy doesn’t know for sure what’s waiting out there in the dark, in the frozen sea, in the night and the wild, and yet. All the woods belong to him. She might not know what, but she does know who, and it gives her a chill beyond all sense or speech. “Solovetsky Island.”

[nothingnothingaaa]

Walk of the Week: St Mullin's to Graiguenamanagh

By Christopher Somerville, April 09 2011 (Irish IND.)

The Norman lord who had a castle mound heaped up at St Mullin's, and a wooden-walled keep erected on top, intended the fortification to overlook the tidal limit of the River Barrow just below, a great place to extract tolls -- and to overawe the locals.

Castle, palisade, lord and tollhouse are long gone; the locals remain, and so does the motte, like a green suet pudding on a well-mown plate of grass. It's a fine place to scramble up for a panoramic view of the monastery founded by St Moling that made the name and fame of St Mullin's for close on a thousand years.

Girdled tightly inside a stone perimeter wall, weathered stubs of monastic buildings rise from a sea of ornate graveslabs and crucifixes like ruins in a fable. St Mullin's monastery is a remarkable sight, poignant in its death-like stillness and silence.

Looking down from the flat-topped motte, Jane and I let our imaginations supply the drifting smoke, scurry of lay workers and pacing of monks, crowing of cocks, barking of dogs and tolling of the church bells.

St Moling's life spanned almost the whole of the seventh century AD. He was a remarkable man, quite unlike most of the hermits who founded those early monasteries -- poorly educated men with fierce convictions in their heads and fish scales in their beards.

Moling was born a prince and ended up an archbishop. He was a poet and thinker, but also a man of his hands, who dug his own mile-long mill race, ground corn for anyone who asked him, and ferried folk across the Barrow on a raft he built himself. He managed to negotiate the abolition of taxes that were crushing the local peasantry.

The saint never knew the monastery's handsome abbey church, the ornate High Cross with its broad-faced crucified Christ, or the Round Tower, whose base stands alongside the abbey. All

these post-date him by many centuries. But the memory of the ferryman prince, the cures he wrought and the good he did in his long life are still well remembered around St Mullin's.

Jane and I spent an hour exploring the ruins. Then we went down to the River Barrow and turned upstream along the towpath, following the puddled track of the Barrow Way. The day was starting cloudy and thick, with drifting mist through the valley, so that the summit of Brandon Hill, when it appeared at last rolling free of the vapour beyond the river, seemed a slate-grey leviathan breaking clear of a level white sea.

'Do not fish for salmon or sea trout,' admonished the notice by the keeper's cottage at St Mullin's lock, a reminder that here, 20 miles from the sea, the Barrow finally reaches its tidal limit.

Short sections of canal bypass weirs, complete with locks, white-tipped gates and neat lock-keepers' cottages in immaculate gardens.

A swiftly walking shape ahead on the path resolved itself into the trim, alert figure of Brian Gilsenan. We'd made friends on a Blackstairs ramble last year, and here he was coming down the Barrow to walk back to Graiguenamanagh with us.

The weirs across the Barrow roared and frothed, the copper-brown water moving with the implicit power of a big snake. The narrow grass causeway of the towpath separated the river, its overspill ditches where lichen-bearded hazels and willows stood up to their hips in swampy floodwater, a Co Carlow version of the Everglades.

A floody, half-drowned, misty landscape through which we tramped the bank upriver to Graiguenamanagh.

Beyond the beautiful old seven-arched bridge and partially restored warehouse quays of the town loomed the square bulk of Duiske Abbey.

Forbidding from the outside, what a revelation within -- a soaring interior, delicately carved embellishments, arches and columns so slender and fluted they seemed hardly fit for the purpose of holding up the great walls and the intricate, boat-like roof.

Duiske, the greatest Cistercian monastery in Ireland in its heyday, wielded a temporal power of which the rustic monks at St Mullin's could only have dreamed.

Now both foundations stand in humility, one roofless and empty, the other magnificently preserved, for walkers and wanderers to wonder at.

WAY TO GO

MAP:

OS of Ireland Discovery Sheet 68. TRAVEL: R705 or R729 from Borris; R703 from Thomastown; R702 from Enniscorthy — all to Graiguenamanagh. Leave one car here; drive other car to St Mullin’s (minor road). Park in riverside car park below monastic site.

WALK DIRECTIONS:

From car park, uphill to explore St Mullin’s and monastic site; return to car park; right along River Barrow towpath (‘Barrow Way’) for four miles to Graiguenamanagh. LENGTH: 4½ miles. CONDITIONS: Level riverside path, can be wet and muddy.

REFRESHMENTS:

St Mullin’s: Blanchfields pub (00353 51 24745) or Mullicháin Café by river (11am-6pm, closed Mondays). Graiguenamanagh: Coffee On High café (00353 59 972 5725).

DON’T MISS:

Saint Mullin’s monastic site; view of Brandon Hill from the riverbank; Duiske Abbey, Graiguenamanagh. INFORMATION: Barrow Way: tcs.ireland.ie/dataland/TCS Attachments/311_TheBarrow Way.pdf. Guided Walks: Contact Brian Gilsenan on 00353 53 937 7828/00353 86 838 6460; mosscottage ireland.com. TIC: Tullow Street, Carlow. Tel: 00353 59 913 1554; carlowtourism.com

[aarontap]

19 Years Later... It’s Betty Goo!

In case you were unaware, I fronted a band in the 1990s called Betty Goo. We came about as my previous band started falling apart and I realized that I’d wanted to write quick and tuneful songs, in stark contrast growing prevalence of the jammy (or worse, nu-metal) side of “alternative rock” that had begaun to take hold in the wake of Kurt Cobain’s death. So I grabbed longtime drummer compatriot Chad MacDonald and friend-since-age-three Doug Fraim and formed Betty Goo. We released a dreadful eponymous debut cassette tape but then started to get our heads on straight and found some like-minded melody-and-rock-focused bands in Boston and we hit our stride. In 1997 we released the quasi-conceptual ‘gooicide’ and had planned to break up in its wake. Unfortunately, the record garnered us a modicum of attention that had hitherto been lacking, and so I vowed to soldier on. Chad preferred the original plan and went back to school to start the journey to his now very successful career. On the verge of destruction, in stepped Doug’s friend Jeff Norcross. And Betty Goo was re-born. We had a good run for a couple more years, playing some pretty fantastic shows, and making some good friends along the way. Hell, you could say that I’d never have met my awesome partner in life, music, and otherwise, Paula Kelley, were it not for Goo having continued on. 

But all Goo things must come to an end and for us, it was pretty anticlimactic. In 1999, after a great show supporting our friends Permafrost in their final show, we spent the rest of the weekend in a recording studio in Boston, tracking a dozen songs for what would have been the follow-up to gooicide. Upon reviewing the rough mixes on Monday, I called Doug and Jeff, saying, “this isn’t very good, should we break up?” They both agreed. And that was the end.

Or so we’d thought! Fast-forward a couple decades and I start fucking around with Garageband’s iPhone app. I do a bunch of #instamusic creations, the idea being ‘conceive and record a 30-second-ish soundtrack to a random video/image in less than an hour and post it.’ Most of them are ambient and rambling. But then later in 2016 there’s a presidential election. And this chorus hits me. “Don’t cast your eyes on the emperor’s new clothes…” I followed through and made it into a kinda good, kinda shitty 2000s fakepunk song snippet and posted it. People seemed to dig it. And here’s the thing: it was catchy as hell. I kept revisiting it and thinking, maybe I could make it into something. I tried for about ten minutes to see if it could fit on The Architect’s Daughter but quickly realized, nope. And so I forgot about it.

But when TAD was finally completed and out in the world I got an idea. Maybe a crazzzzzy idea. This was never a Frank Shirts song. It sounds way more like a Betty Goo song. And, know what? There are a couple other Goo songs that I wouldn’t mind revisiting. I emailed Doug (who basically hadn’t played since our last show) and Jeff (who now primarily plays guitar, in The Weisstronauts and The I Want You) and asked if they might be interested in reconvening. To my great joy, they each replied with an enthusiastic yes! So now I had to make it happen. After all, they are both still based in Massachusetts and I’m here in L.A. A few months passed and I played around with turning the chorus into an actual song, but honestly, I was otherwise preoccupied. But then a Nathanson gig in NY presents an opportunity. I check in with the boys and book a session at Zippah in Brighton, MA and we are well and truly on our way. Oh, shit. Now I have to actually write the song. Thankfully, I am not alone. Jeff kicks in a couple ideas over the internet. And then we convene in Somerville, not two blocks from where PK and I first started living in sin, and Doug throws his ideas in. By the end of the afternoon we have a song, and some fine reimagining of two very brief old tunes from Goo days gone by.

It was both very familiar and kinda strange to get in a room with these guys after such a long break. We ran through a couple old timey songs - Buzz and Handbag - to grease the wheels but it was startlingly easy and took no time at all to just get to work as if no time had passed at all. Those guys are great.

That night, after a very long three days, I crashed very early at a quaint B&B in Brookline and before I knew it, it was Sunday morning and the session loomed. We loaded in and it was like stepping in to a time machine (see video). Zippah has undergone numerous upgrades to its gear but the building and the live room remain much the same. What an inspiring place! gooicide, PK’s Nothing/Everything, the Monsters of Id, numerous Weisstronauts recordings, a harp session for The Trouble With Success in the midst of a fierce nor’easter, and so much more. But we had work to do. In the able hands of both Brian Charles (who recorded gooicide and MOI) and Pete Weiss (of the Weisstronauts, who recorded both PK solo albums and so much more) we were under way in no time.

Here’s where, to me, it gets interesting. I knew we would have a ball but I didn’t expect to learn (or re-learn) stuff that day. We recorded three songs (most everything aside from vocals) in an easy-going 8-hour session, just like we used to do “back in the day,” though truth be told we would get double or more that done in one day by necessity.

Being “in a band” is distinct from “playing music with other people.” And I’ve been doing the latter for so long now that I had maybe forgotten what a band was like. Even Frank Shirts hasn’t been a band in the traditional sense, as I do most of the song arranging alone in my studio before bashing the songs out with Eric and Paula - and later with Rick. With Betty Goo, the difference became apparent in the studio. We wanted to record the songs live, with no click track, and so, even though we had rehearsed for a whopping three hours, we knew we were going to have to play the songs a bunch. And play we did. We would run a song a few times, work out some kinks, then go listen in the control room, pick out a few moments that need further work and go back and do it again. And everyone fell into their role with ease. It was fantastic, really. No egos, all creativity, and a healthy work ethic without being businesslike.

The next morning I awoke feeling kinda high from the experience. It had been years since I worked like that and back then I a) think I took it for granted and b) was psychologically a bit of a mess and didn’t really feel connected to much in the way of my own agency. One of the great things about taking stock of one’s privilege is that rather than it limiting you or locking you in some kind of prison of guilt, it actually frees you to look realistically at yourself and in so doing you can assess your actual strengths along with weaknesses and areas where the leg-ups you’ve been handed has been more of a hinderance than an asset. Working with Jeff & Doug on those three songs reminded me of part of music-making that I’d maybe lost touch with over the years and also reminded me of how lucky I am to be doing what I’m doing. I’ve resolved to make sure I make the most of it and also to make sure that the music is always the thing, no matter how much business needs to be taken care of.

Anyway, the whole experience was pretty great and I finished up the mixes this week. I think the results speak for themselves. Judge for yourself on July 4th* when the NEW BETTY GOO LIMITED EDITION HAND-CUT 7” SINGLE goes up for sale on Bandcamp!

* Vinyl Singles (w/ fab Deluxe Edition merch) will ship in September. Instant downloads are de rigueur.

[waitingforminjae]

[...] I go off into a very long, elaborate question about his impression of how their first album, Please, seemed to share a lot of common ground with Bronski Beat’s Smalltown boy, and how he felt about Jimmy Somerville’s much-publicised accusation that he and Chris Lowe were exploiting gay culture for career purposes, and not putting anything back. Neil Tennant draws a deep breath. “The thing is,” he says, rearranging himself on the sofa, “we were kind of stitched up by the NME on that one. They did an interview with us, and then they went on and on about hamsters. They never actually asked us, ‘are you gay?’ And then Jimmy Sommerville was quoted everywhere, slagging us off. I thought it was quite arrogant of him, actually. He obviously thought that he had a right to talk about us in that way, and that his views on the subject were more important than our own views. His view is that the entire point of being a pop star is to be a positive role model. I reject any notion of being a positive role model to anyone. I personally find that an arrogant way to think of oneself…” He pauses for a moment, realising perhaps that this line of argument is only likely to open old wounds. “When Bronski Beat came along, I was still assistant editor at Smash Hits. I loved those first few records. I loved the fact that they were gay, and that they were so out about it. It was the whole point of what they were doing. Jimmy Sommerville was, in effect, a politician using the medium of pop music to put his message across. The Pet Shop Boys came along to make fabulous records, we didn’t come along to be politicians, or to be positive role models. Having said all that, we have supported the fight for gay rights.” He reminds me at this point that the Pet Shop Boys were the only pop group to play before the act, a benefit for the fight against clause 28. “And what’s more,” he goes on, “I do think that we have contributed, through our music and also through our videos and the general way we’ve presented things, rather a lot to what you might call ‘gay culture’. I could spend several pages discussing the notion of ‘gay culture’, but for the sake of argument, I would just say that we have contributed a lot. And the simple reason for this is that I have written songs from my own point of view…” He pauses again. “What I’m actually saying is, I am gay, and I have written songs from that point of view. So, I mean, I’m being surprisingly honestly with you here, but those are the facts of the matter.” Having finally got all that off his chest, Neil Tennant pours himself a glass of mineral water and takes his sweatshirt off. He is looking distinctly pink around the gills. Maybe it’s the effect of suddenly admitting that for all these years he has been singing nothing but the truth. Or maybe it’s just the unbearable heat in here. “Well,” he says, in a voice which carries a distinct of ‘moving swiftly on’, “what’s your next question?”

Neil Tennant with Attitude magazine, August 1994