#also was surprised that wait until dark (1967) was in color. i just thought it wouldn't be.

[stripedtabbycat]

every time i find myself getting indignant at someone saying shit like "kids these days are stupid and don't know anything about movies made before they were born" i have to remind myself that i am routinely surprised by movies made in the late 60s being in color

[aseioh]

Of Cakes and Late Celebrations

Author’s Notes: This was supposed to be posted on Mother's day. But just like this fic, I got derailed and ended up being late. (picture taken from the internet)

It was Mother's day.

Or to be precise it will be Mother's day in 15 hours 25 minutes. It shouldn't be a problem for Alcina, she usually just buys something from the Duke to give to Mother Miranda.

Unfortunately, such a thing is not possible right now. The Duke was delayed with his routine arrival at the castle opening, something about a spooked horse and lycans trying to get a nibble.

Honestly she lost interest after the word delayed was spoken through the phone. How is she going to remedy this. The gift itself was one of the finest silk she was able to obtain, she was sure Mother would appreciate a new ritual robe.

This is bad. To show up without a gift on this special day. She was sure she would be made a mockery during the gathering. Whats worst was that fool Heisenberg would be the first to lead with his pathetic insults.

Just the thought made Alcina's blood boil.

”I should send Bela to switch that man's shampoo with dog shampoo. Although the man still smells like wet dog. No. I'll think of something more devious.“

But back to the matter at hand. It's almost Mother's day and she doesn’t have a gift. Taking a deep drag off her cigarette, she considers her dwindling options.

At western part of the village

Donna is also facing a similar problems.

"What do you mean you're not coming?! Where am I supposed to find a present at this hour?!" Angie's raspy voice filtered through the phone "do you know how hard it is to find a 1st edition book on occult and rituals."

"Apologies Miss Angie, but the horse spooked and the carriage suffered a broken wheel. Even if the servants manage to haul themselves your house to the Duke's location and back it would still be too late." The main servant said trying to sound as apologetic as he can come across.

"This would not do" Donna said finally in her normal voice.

Somewhere inside the Stronghold.

Karl Heisenberg was having a meltdown.

"YOU STUPID LYCANS! I GAVE YOU ONE JOB AND YOU COULDN'T EVEN DO IT RIGHT!!" Heisenberg paces around the small assembly hall. Ten Lycans looked very apologetic, although it was very hard to tell from their looks. One even lets out a soft whimper.

“I told you to stall The Duke for a while. I didn’t said to derail him completely. The man has a package for me, now how am I supposed to get it!?” Heisenberg seethes.

His plan was a simply one really. Stall The Duke so that he would arrive at Castle Dimitrescu late, that way Alcina would not get her package and present it to Mother Miranda. That would show her, a little payback for calling him a child.

What he didn’t count on was the utter incapability of the Lycans to follow simple directions. Now even he doesn’t have a gift. Oh Miranda’s gonna blow a gasket.

“Augh... I hate the consequences of my actions” He lamented

 At Moreau’s Reservoir

“NOOOOOOO!! That’s not fair, that’s not fair!!!” Moreau starts throwing his stuff on the floor. He had finally saved up his money to buy Mother Miranda that nice jewelry that would go perfectly with her black wings.

“Someone’s gonna pay” He vows to take revenge on the Lycans responsible for his problem.

 After all his pet fish has been hungry for some Lycan meat.

 Castle Dimitrescu (13 hours until Mother’s day)

“I have gathered you here today for a very important meeting” Alcina starts looking at the sad (Donna) and tearful (Moreau) faces of her so called ‘siblings’. Heisenberg is surprisingly calm which puts Alcina on high alert, but lets it slide in favour of the more pressing matter

“We have a big problem. The Duke will not arrive on time for Mother’s Day. That means all the presents we bought for Mother will not arrive”

“We need a solution, any ideas?”  

“We kill the Lycans responsible and feed them to my fish”

“Yes Moreau, but that’s after we solve this problem” Donna said and tries to placate a Moreau by patting him at the back.

“Whoa, that’s a bit dark but I like it. And Moreau is right, we’re gonna make fish food out of those Lycans” “Better off those basdards, after all I don’t want to implicate myself” Heisenberg thinks

“People, you’re missing the point here” Alcina says pinching her nose to ward off an incoming headache. “Listen, we don’t have time. You know Mother Miranda, She’ll say she wasn’t really expecting something and then low-key punishes us for missing the day. We don’t want a repeat of the 1967 incident do we?”

Moreau whimpers from the trauma.

Donna goes into a slight trance and starts to shake.

“Alright, alright, that’s enough” Heisenberg stands. “Why don’t we just bake something and say it’s from all of us”

 *beat*

“Do you know how to bake?”

“I work at the Factory, I make steel molds for a living how hard could it be?”

“That doesn’t answer my question Heisenberg”

“We could make a small doll” Donna pipes up

“Sorry Donna that would still take time. And I don’t think we have the right materials on such short notice.” Alcina says

“For someone who’s looking for a solution you sure are shooting down all of them”

“Because it’s not feasible Heisenberg.” Alcina huffs “Can you gather all the materials in less than 10 hours? No? Of course not”

“And I keep telling you just BAKE A CAKE!”

“I don’t know how to bake, child! I’m a BLOODY COUNTESS not hired help” Alcina bellows at Heisenberg

“I know how to bake”

Everyone turns to Donna.

“Really?”

“Of course, I used to watch my Mother bake cakes before the accident. I just need help decorating. I never got a hang of that part” Donna beams with pride as she explains the basics of baking

“And we can gather the ingredients no problem. You have a pantry here somewhere right Alcina?” Moreau asked

“Of course. We always have a full pantry for the servants.” At that Heisenberg looks at Alcina with a hint of disbelief

“What? We need them healthy to serve us. I’m not a complete monster.” Alcina defends

“In any case we should start early. It takes time to cool and decorating is hard”

 Castle Kitchen (12 hours 30 minutes before Mother’s Day)

It was truly a sight to see. In a way it was enough for the Castle’s servants to wet themselves in fear when they saw the 4 Lords gathered at the kitchen in various forms of concentration. Needless to say, everyone was warned to steer clear of the kitchen for now.

Moreau was together with Donna supporting her with mixing the wet ingredients. Meanwhile, at the other side of the cooking station Alcina and Heisenberg are charge of measuring out the dry ingredients.

“You need to be precise, don’t put too much. Remember what Donna said and look at the damn recipe”

“I know what I’m doing you damn woman. I’m all about precision. Why don’t you move away and get that mixing bowl at the top shelf.” Heisenberg grouched

“I’m not your servant. And I certainly will not start fetching stuff for you” Alcina shot back

“Alcina, we need to work together. We don’t have time and you’re the tallest of us all. Please cooperate with Karl just this once. Please?” Donna implored

“Once. I’m helping him for this one time only. When I get my hands on the Lycan responsible for this problem, I’m gutting him and throwing him at Moreau’s reservoir.” At Donna’s admonishment of Alcina, Heisenberg gives a shit eating grin, showing some rather very pointy canines.

“And Heisenberg, stop provoking Alcina.” Donna adds

“Fine, you’re no fun Donna”

Suffice to say, the baking went well. Who knew that the 4 Lords working together would be a great success? If only Mother Miranda saw her children working together peacefully she might have had a heart attack and thought that she suffered one as well.

Or she might have been dreaming.

 Castle Kitchen (6 hours before Mother’s Day)

“Alright, the cake has cooled down completely, So what color will be the icing?” Donna asked

“Yellow” “Cream” “Light Blue” the other three said simultaneously.

 *beat*

“Light blue? Really? Not everything needs to be manly Heisenberg”

“And not everything needs to be boring like your color, Alcina”

“It should be yellow, like Mother’s sunny smile” Moreau explains

“And in which ever universe has Mother ever smiled like the sun?” Heisenberg counters Moreau

“Hey now. No need for that tone!”

“Tsk, sorry Moreau” Heisenberg apologizes to a quiet Moreau

“Fine, let’s do pastel yellow it’s easier for the eyes anyway” Donna supplies, getting ready to start coating the cake with the yellow cream

 Inside the Sanctuary

“Happy Mother’s day”

“We hope you like the cake Mother”

“Yes, we poured out our love in baking it. I hope you appreciate it” Heisenberg said

“Why thank you loves. This is a wonderful surprise. And Moreau said that you all worked together in baking it. How wonderful!” Mother Miranda said grateful for once that her children worked together without collateral damage (that she knew of).

“Although Heisenberg, I heard something interesting from Urias” Mother Miranda looks pointedly at Heisenberg, who for some reason starts to sweat and turn pale.

‘oh shit’ “Really Mother? Good news I hope” Heisenberg tries to bluff his way out.

“Why it was quite peculiar really. He said that you got 10 of his Lycans for a special project. I wasn’t aware that you have some side projects”

 The 3 Lords turn to Heisenberg

“Wait what?”

“I KNEW IT!!” Alcina unsheathes her claws

“You’re responsible for this mess in the first place!!”

“Really guy relax, if anything I just proved that we need more than one traveling merchant in the village for a successful and on time delivery” Heisenberg starts to carefully ease his way to the nearest exit.

 “GET HIM”

In the end, Alcina was more than ready to feed Heisenberg to Moreau’s pet fish. Only Donna stopped her, citing Moreau would probably be inconsolable if his pet got indigestion from all the metal.

And that is how Heisenberg saw himself in doggy jail for a week along with his Lycan cohorts. Mother Miranda did get her Mother’s day gifts from her children although a bit later than expected.

 And the cake?

 The cake was surprisingly delicious.

[jasonrae117]

Bad Idea, Good Intentions

Hello, Thank you everyone for reading! I'm currently working from my phone and can't put the whole story under a cut, but I'm working on it! I'll definitely get one there before the next part because it may or may not (definitely will) contain potential nsfw shenanigans. Enjoy!

Part 3

"Nice to meet you Rachel Roth. Tell me something interesting about yourself." Tim leanes in just a bit closer.

"I work with music for a living." She smirked at him, moving so her knee brushed against his.

Tim looked into her eyes, there was something familiar there. This whole time he felt like he knew her or recognized her from somewhere but he couldn't place it. He graduated with a degree in criminal law and took classes in profiling and here he was not making any connection as to why he would know her. He blamed the alcohol and he was frustrated with himself. Career in music, was that a hint? She obviously knew what she was doing this whole time, playing with him. It was sexy as fuck but still messed with the brainiac. 

He took his time in analyzing her features, making it obvious what he was doing. She just tilted her head in response. Large indigo eyes.. he'd never seen ones like them before today. Dark wavy hair that looked like silk flowing down, he never paid so much attention to a woman's hair before unless they were a criminal. Her outfit was all black and nothing jumped out in familiarity...but her shoes, or rather boots. He looked back up, her pale and smooth looking skin, her alluring curves. He hadn't recognized those eyes before today because he saw them for the first time less than an hour ago, except at a distance from her place onstage. He didn't know the color, only that she had winked at him and they stood out against her pale face. 

"Holy shit! You're Raven!" His eyes widened and his eyebrow shot up. How could he not see it before? Fuck he sounded like an idiot. 

She smiled and she looked so gorgeous in that moment. Her laugh fluttered around the bar as her hand fell to his knee. "Wow, Tim. I'm surprised it took you so long. I certainly gave you lots of attention during the show." 

"Hey, in my defense you were at least fifty feet from me, wearing...uh more revealing clothes, and your hair was completely different. Besides I've had a few drinks since and my brain's not working as efficiently." He reached down and laid his hand on top of hers, leaning into her space. Rachel didn't react or move away as if comfortable with his closeness. 

"Excuses excuses." She waved her hand in a dismissively playful manner. "Would you like to leave Tim?" Her voice now was sultry and almost a whisper of seduction. 

Tim froze, he'd never been in a situation like this. These were the kinds of things that happened in movies, not to him. She was asking him to go home with her...unless he misread the whole situation and she was asking him to leave! Oh God, did he make her uncomfortable? No, she came to him, flirted with him! He was overthinking, overanalyzing. Great, now he was taking too long to answer, shit, he had to say something!

"You want to leave with me?" His face was red in embarrassment. Head tilted and eyebrows set as high as they could go, he had lost all steampower of his attempt to be smooth and now he was just an idiot like every other guy, like his dumbass friends. "I'm sorry. Of course you want to leave with me….….fuck me!" He slapped his forehead and then his eyes widened as he then realized how awful the timing of his curse was. "Wait! No I didn't mean that either. You don't want to fuck me. I mean...not that I don't want you to, because I do….uh... this isn't coming out right." His hands were held out and he was starting to sweat. 

Rachel just looked amused at his stupidity and casually waited for him to take his foot out of his mouth.

"What I mean to say is, I'm not trying to be cocky or have any expectations. I was trying to sound less stupid and well I pretty much failed at my recovery. I told you I talk too much when I drink." He rubbed the back of his neck. Good thing none of the guys were near, the bartender gave him some weird looks, but at least Tim didn't have to worry about the guy teasing him about it relentlessly for the rest of time. 

Rachel smirked and stood up, brushing her skirt down and tossing her hair over her shoulder. She took a few steps away and turned halfway giving Tim an expectant look. "I take that your answer was a yes. Or was all that rambling a way to tell me to look elsewhere for company?" 

"Yes. Definitely yes!" He stood up immediately and tossed some bills to pay the rest of the tab and followed after her. His eyes dropped to her swaying hips and he'd never felt luckier. They made it out of a back door and they silently walked by each other taking in the cool night air. 

"So, Rachel." He looked down beside him. Though she had on heeled boots, she was still half a foot shorter than him. He could add cute to the many attributes she held. "Would you like me to drive?"

"Ideally. I don't have a car and it wouldn't be smart to leave yours here overnight. I'll give you directions to my place." She glanced up and smiled softly at him. 

"Great!" He placed his hand on the small of her back and guided her to his car. He was glad he drove his own car, it gave him a chance to show it off. He didn't think Rachel would be easily impressed by a nice car, but his wasn't just any run of the mill nice car. Tim proudly drove an all black 1967 Ford Mustang. Tim's biological family was well off, but when Bruce Wayne took him in, he had more opportunities including working for Wayne Enterprises and getting paid very handsomely. 

Rachel stopped a few feet short and let out a low whistle. "Ok, Mr. Drake. I have to be honest, I wasn't expecting this beauty to be yours."

"What were you expecting? A Prius?" He laughed and opened the passenger door for her. 

"What do you do for a living? This car is immaculate." She adjusted her skirt and ran her hand along the dashboard. Tim just chuckled and closed the door, jogging to his side.

"I work as a financial analyst at Wayne Enterprises. But I want to work in law enforcement soon. That's what my new degree is in."

"Wow, handsome and intelligent. How new?"

"Actually just a few days ago." He smiled and the engine roared to life. 

"Congratulations, Tim." She smiled genuinely back at him and his stomach flipped. She made him feel some type of way. She pulled her phone out and handed it to him, directions already plugged in. He pulled out of the parking lot and followed the instructions given by the device. 

Her place wasn't too far from the club, quiet music played in the background, but he wanted to use this time to get to know her more before…. before they stopped talking. 

"How long have you been in the band?"

"About three years, including the awkward stage of figuring out if we were good enough to be a band and what our names would be."

"How'd you come up with the names?"

"I've always known my stage name would be Raven. It was my mother's nickname for me. That's also why we ultimately chose Nevermore as the band name too. Jenni felt like she was a curse or bad luck charm for those around her, except us, so Jinx came easy. Toni went with Argent as a kind of fuck you to the bullies that made fun of her super pale skin color. And Wally took inspiration from Kid Rock and combined it with the fact that he's 'the fastest drummer alive'. Thus became Nevermore." 

"Very cool. Does your family come to your shows? You're really good, I'm sure they're proud." He glanced at her and noticed that her shoulders were hunched and she idly played with the rings on her fingers. "I'm sorry, you don't have to answer that if it's personal."

"No..no, it's fine. I..uh.. don't have any family left. My mother passed away when I was eight. She was the only person I had. My father was never a part of my life and never will be."

"I'm very sorry for your loss. It must have been difficult for you being so young." He reached out and reassuringly held her hand.

"It was, but I had a small community of people that took care of me. And before you get the wrong idea, it wasn't a cult. I grew up in Norway."

"Norway? Wow, what part? If it's not too much to ask, how did you end up here?"

"Full of questions aren't we?" He shrugged in answer and squeezed her hand gently. "It was a small village called Azarath and they had such a unique culture. The oldest woman, Azar, was the first baby born in the village a hundred years ago. They named it after her and she became such an important figure. It was most important to her to continue the traditions of her people. They were all pacifists and meditated every day, everyone was so happy and peaceful and thus there was no crime in Azarath, just community. My mother fled from the U.S., away from my abusive father. She took me with her and picked the flight that would get her the farthest away. She had nothing with her except me and an empty bottle. We were starving and nobody helped us. Then one of the Azarathians saw us and gave us a home, gave us hope. They helped my mother raise me. When I was old enough I wanted to learn everything about their culture and every culture. They called me Raven from the Norse mythology of Odin's ravens, symbolizing wisdom and thought. I sometimes think of it as the death omen rightfully earned when my father sent some bad people to locate me to take me away. Azar gave me her journal and my mother gave me all the money from the village. They had all saved me and I didn't understand what was happening, but I ran to the city and got on a plane back to the United states. I found a shelter and lived there until I was eighteen. I found out that those men killed everyone in Azarath. It was all my fault, because I wasn't there. They would have stopped if they got what they wanted. I fled and they killed an entire culture." Tears now flowed down her face. He had put the car in park when they reached her apartment complex. He didn't move to get out and instead slid over to her and wrapped his arms around her. 

Tim gently stroked her hair and let her cry. "Shh, it wasn't your fault. They saved you from a bad man, a bad life. Their culture lives within you and Azar's journal. We don't know what those men would have done, perhaps the outcome would have been the same because they are terrible people. But they knew that you could have a safe future and carry on their memory. Raven has a new meaning now, beyond wisdom and thought. To me it means brave, strong, graceful."

Rachel's sobs were now soft sniffles and she looked up at him. "I'm sorry. You probably were hoping to get laid and now you're comforting a crazy girl."

 

"Hey, I'm not complaining. You're not crazy. And I told you I had no expectations. Come on, let's get you inside, I'm sure it's more comfortable than my car." He felt her nod and he got out to open her door.

"Thank you Tim. I…" She took a breath and tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear. "You're very kind. There's not many, if any, like you."

"I appreciate that, I can confidently say there is no one like you Rachel." He smiled at her and she grabbed his arm guiding him to her apartment door. 

[thegameison97]

Gabrielle [Part 1] (Gabriel x Reader)

A/N: Hello! *waves* 😀 So…

I’M ALIVE!!! 😁😁😁

It feels like it has been forever since I’ve posted an actual one-shot/two-shot. College is insane and is taking up a lot of my time. And I also happen to be kinda planning out a whole new fanfic. So that’s also something that’s been taking up my time.

I’m actually sorta procrastinating on doing homework right now, but I wrote this a few months back and never posted it. So, I thought I’d go ahead and do that now. :)

Anyway…

Enjoy! 😘

“Are we almost there, mommy?” Y/N’s seven and a half year old daughter, Gabrielle, asked as they were riding in the car.

Y/N smiled as she drove an old classic cherry red Cadillac. It was one they had found in the Bunker garage, and it was also one that had become Gabrielle’s favorite. She loved its cherry red color.

Y/N glanced in the rearview mirror to see her daughter looking at her. “Yes, sweetie, we’re almost there. Did you have fun staying at auntie Bess and uncle Garth’s?”

Gabrielle nodded, smiling. “Yeah! Auntie Bess said that the next time we come over that i can help pick out a name for the baby.”

Y/N smiled at that as she pressed a button on the garage remote, making the Bunker’s sizable garage door begin to slide open.

It didn’t take long before Y/N was parking the car next to the oh-so familiar 1967 black Chevy Impala.

“I guess the boys aren’t out on a hunt.” Y/N thought to herself as she got out of the car and began to help Gabrielle out of the back seat. Y/N had taken Gabrielle and gone off and stayed at Bess and Garth’s for a few months while the boys tried to finish sorting out the whole Casifer and Darkness business. The deciding factor that had made Y/N decide to take off with Gabrielle had been when the boys had tried to exorcise Lucifer from Cas. When Amara had taken him hostage was when Y/N and the boys had decided that getting Gabrielle away from all the conflict was probably the best and safest decision. After somewhere around four and a half months, Y/N and Gabrielle were finally coming back home to the bunker because Dean had finally called and said that everything was finally done and over with.

He wouldn’t give her much more information than that. Just that she could come back and that everything would be explained better.

“Here you go, Gabby.” Y/N said as she handed her a small backpack from the trunk.

Once Y/N got all the rest of the bags, she and Gabrielle made their way over to the small staircase that led from the garage and up into the Bunker itself.

“Sam! Dean! We’re home!” Y/N called out to them as they walked to the entrance that led into the war room from the hallway. “Please te–”

Her words died when she came upon the sight of Sam and Dean sitting around the map table with whom she presumed to be their apparently-not-so-dead mother along with who she hoped to be Castiel. Not only that, but Chuck and Amara were also standing in the entrance that lead into the library.

Y/N put a protective hand on Gabrielle’s shoulder as she let her eyes wonder around all the people in the room.

She then turned her head to look down at Gabrielle. “Sweetie, why don’t you go take your stuff to your room and I’ll be there in a few minutes to help you unpack.”

“Okay, mommy.” Gabrielle answered before skipping over towards the library so she could get to the hallway that led to all the bedrooms. She stopped for a second and looked up at Chuck and Amara curiously before just continuing on to the hallway.

Y/N watched and waited until she knew Gabrielle wouldn’t be able to hear before returning her attention back to everyone else.

“Okay…” Y/N started slowly, finally speaking to all the people in the room. “Explain.”

Dean sighed. “So, Chuck is God.”

“Dude.” Sam elbowed him in the side. “Way to break it to her gently.”

“Excuse them, Y/N.” Cas said as he stood up from the table and walked over to her.

She eyed him wearily. “Cas… Is it really you?”

He stopped right in front of her and nodded. “Yes. It’s really me.”

Y/N stared at him for a moment longer until her face broke out into a gentle smile before she embraced him into a tight hug.

“It’s good to have you back.” She mumbled into his shoulder.

“It’s good to be back.” He replied, pulling away from her.

Y/N then turned her head, looking at all the Winchesters sitting at the table.

“Y/N,” Sam began, putting a hand on his mother’s shoulder. “This is our mother Mary. Amara brought her back to life.”

She nodded and walked over to Mary as she stood up from the chair she was sitting in.

“It’s wonderful to finally meet you, Mary.” Y/N said honestly, grabbing Mary’s hands and giving them a gentle squeeze.

She smiled kindly at Y/N. “Likewise, dear.”

Y/N smiled at her once more before finally turning to acknowledge Chuck and Amara.

She walked up to stand right in front of Chuck. “So, you’re God.”

He nodded. “But please, just continue calling me Chuck. Like you always did.”

Y/N nodded slightly before hugging him. She actually become fairly good friends with Chuck right after she and the Winchesters had met him for the first time.

When she pulled away from Chuck she then turned to face Amara completely.

“I definitely didn’t expect to ever see you again.” Y/N told her.

“Believe me,” Amara began. “I don’t think anyone expected for any of us to be standing where we are right now.”

Y/N nodded in agreement. “Thank you for bringing Sam and Dean’s mom back. That was very kind of you.”

Amara actually gave her a small smile. “Thank you for… saying thank you. You are reacting to all of this quite calmly.”

Y/N laughed lightly at that, turning back around to address everyone at once. “Yes, well, in this life and with who all of us are, is there really anything that is truly surprising anymore?”

“Mommy!” Gabrielle voice called out from the distance.

“Oh, that’s my cue.” Y/N said as she picked back up her’s and the rest of Gabrielle’s bags before walking in between Chuck and Amara to go into the hallway. “I’m coming, sweetheart!”

Everyone watched Y/N disappear into the hallway before turning and looking at each other.

“Do you think she’ll like the surprise?” Amara asked.

Chuck smiled and laid a gentle hand on his sister’s shoulder. “I think she will.”

“Yeah, well, she deserves it.” Dean said as he got up from the table and started heading towards the kitchen. He then paused in the doorway, and turned around to look at everyone else. “And so does Gabby.”

With that, he turned back around and continued on his way.

“By the way…” Sam turned his head to look over at Chuck. “How is the surprise coming along?”

Chuck poofed up his ‘World’s Greatest Dad’ mug and took a sip from it before speaking. “Well, it takes a lot of power. It’s not like a regular surprise, so therefore it takes longer. It should be done within a few more days.”

2 days later, Evening…

“How are you doing, Cas?” Y/N asked as she stirred a big pot of homemade chicken noodle soup on the stove. “We haven’t gotten much time to talk since Gabby and I have been back.”

“It’s almost… surreal to have father back. It’s good, though.” He answered as he leaned against the kitchen island, glancing over his shoulder to see Amara and Chuck sitting at the dining table a little distance away. He then turned back to look at Y/N as she continued to cook. “And even though I never really new Amara way back when, it’s… nice to have her back as well.”

“Well, everyone deserves to be surrounded by family. No matter what form.” She replied as she added a little bit of pepper to the soup.

A short distance away, With Chuck and Amara…

“How much longer, brother?” Amara asked quietly as she sat across from Chuck. “I can hardly stand the suspense.”

“Ahhh! Uncle Cas, help me!” Gabrielle squealed in laughter as she ran past the kitchen doorway, followed by Sam and Dean as they chased her.

Chuck smiled fondly as he watched Castiel smile wide and rush out of the room, Y/N laughing and shaking her head before going back to cooking.

He turned his attention back to Amara. “Soon. Hopefully by tomorrow night.”

Amara nodded, glancing over at the doorway and seeing that Dean and Sam were now being chased by Gabrielle and Cas.

“She looks just like him.” Amara commented, turning her attention back to her brother.

Chuck nodded in agreement. “She does. I put a protective hand over her even when she was still in Y/N’s womb. No harm will ever come to her. You know, it’s believed that I made Nephilims forbidden. But in truth, they aren’t really. I’ll allow it if the angel and human are soulmates.”

Amara nodded, glancing over at Y/N before speaking quietly to Chuck. “Aren’t you a little worried she hasn’t brought up or asked about… him, yet?”

“Not really. I know what she’s thinking. She’s only staying quiet about it because she’s scared to ask.” He answered. “But, it’ll all be sorted soon enough.”

1 day later, Evening…

“What do you wanna watch for movie night, Gabby?” Y/N asked as she and Gabrielle knelt in front of the movie cabinet that was under the TV.

“What about…” She trailed off as her little fingers trailed over the many movie titles until it stopped on one particular movie. “The Avengers!”

“That’s sounds like a great idea.” Y/N smiling.

“Yeah, we haven’t watched that in a long time.” Dean commented as he and Sam entered the room, both taking seat down on the couch.

“Yay!” Gabrielle exclaimed as she ran over to the couch and clambered up to sit in between the two Winchester brothers.

Y/N giggled. “I’ll go make some popcorn.”

She then exited the room and passed Cas and Mary on her way to the kitchen.

“Oh, Y/N.” Cas said, stopping her in her tracks. “I believe my father wanted to speak to you.”

She quirked an eyebrow, but nodded. “Okay, where is he?”

“In the kitchen.” Mary replied.

“Good. That’s just where I was going.” She said before continuing on her way, missing the slight and knowing smiles on Cas and Mary’s faces as they watched her go.

In the kitchen…

“I heard I was wanting to be spoken to.” Y/N said as she entered the kitchen, seeing Chuck leaning against the kitchen island.

He nodded as he watched her get out a couple of bowls to put popcorn in. “Yes. So… How are you doing, Y/N? You doing okay?”

“Um… I guess.” She answered, confused at his question. “Why?”

“Just curious.” He replied.

“You’re God. Couldn’t you just figure out how I’m doing without even asking me?”

“I could.” He told her honestly. “But, I prefer to let people tell me for themselves.”

“Ah, I see.” She said as she began popping popcorn in the microwave. “Where’s Amara?”

“She’s up in Heaven. She likes to walk around the Garden in the evening.”

“Mm.” She hummed in response as she grabbed the cinnamon out of the cabinet so she could sprinkle it on some popcorn for Gabby. That was her favorite way to eat popcorn. “Chuck, can I ask you something?”

“Of course.” He replied, standing up straighter.

“Why do you really want to talk to me? I can tell you’re holding something back.” She said, not even turning to face him as she took out the bag of popcorn from the microwave before putting another one in.

He chuckled lightly. “I knew it would come back to bite me when I created you to be so perceptive like that. But yeah, you’re right. There is more.”

“I’m listening.” Y/N said as she started shaking the cinnamon over the popcorn she had put in a small bowl just for Gabrielle.

“I suppose there’s really no easy way to say or ask this, but I guess I’ll just come right out with it.” He said, taking a breath. “Do you miss Gabriel?”

She just about choked on a drink of water she had just taken. “W-what?”

“I know it’s kinda out of the blue. I mean, after all this time, it’s still probably not easy to talk about it.”

Y/N just sighed. “Well… Of course I miss him. I mean the fact that he wasn’t there when Gabby was born. Or when she took her first steps and said her first word. Which was ‘moose’, by the way. Yeah, Sam wasn’t too amused. Although Crowley found it hilarious. I’m telling you, despite all the negative things, you’re granddaughter has brought so much joy to not only my life, but the boys’ and Cas’ lives as well.”

A smile spread across Chuck’s face. “You called her my granddaughter.”

“Well, she technically is.” Y/N answered with a slight smile as she poured the rest of the popcorn from the bags into the other bowls. “Why are you asking me all this?”

“I want to do something for you.” He said, “And for Gabrielle.”

Y/N tilted her head in confusion. “What are you getting at?”

He smiled gently at her before just flipping his invisible light switch, making the kitchen be enveloped by this inexplicable brightness.

Y/N had to cover her eyes to block out the sheer brightness until it dimmed down.

The sight that greeted her when the room was back to its normal lighting was something that almost made her drop the bowl of popcorn she was holding.

“Here.” Chuck said, taking the bowl from her before grabbing the other ones. “I’ll leave you two to talk.”

Y/N didn’t even reply to Chuck and just continued to stare at Gabriel.

They both kinda just stood there, looking at each other and not speaking.

“I-I can’t believe this…” Y/N said in almost a whisper.

“Hey, sugar…” He said taking a step forward. “It’s… it’s really good to see you.”

She swallowed hard. “H-Hi, Gabriel…”

He chuckled softly coming up to stand right in front of her. “Hi, sugar.”

Tears started escaping the corners of her eyes before she launched herself into his arms.

“I-I missed you… so much.” She mumbled into the crook of his neck.

“I missed you, too.” He said, taking a deep breath and inhaling the scent of her coconut shampoo.

“So…” She began, clearing her throat as she pulled away from him. “Your dear old dad brought you back, huh?”

“That seems to be the case, sugarplum.” He chuckled, running his hands up and down her arms. “You mind telling me a little more, though? I haven’t exactly been back for long and I don’t know all the details myself. Why am I back?”

“Well, that’s… that’s a long story. And more of a complex answer than you think.” Y/N said, trying to find the best way to answer him. “I… I guess it’ll be better if I just show you. Come on.”

He took her outstretched hand, letting her lead him out the kitchen and down the hallway towards the living room.

They stopped and peeked around the doorframe to see into the living room, seeing Gabrielle sitting in between Sam and Dean, Chuck and Cas sitting on the floor in front of them and Mary sitting in a chair off to the side as they all ate popcorn and watched The Avengers play across the screen.

Gabriel brought his head back around the corner of the doorframe so he could be completely in the hallway.

“Okay…” He started, tilting his head slightly as he looked down at the floor, trying to pick out the words he was going to say next. “I know four people in that room. And I have a pretty good idea who that woman is, but I’m a little afraid to ask who that adorable little girl is.”

“Well, that woman is Sam and Dean’s mom. Amara brought her back to life. But, come on, Gabe.” Y/N putting a hand on his shoulder. “Think about it. Can’t your angelic properties make you… 'sense’ it?”

He put a hand on the wall and a hand to his head as an overwhelming sensation overtook him, making his grace tingle with something familiar.

“I sense part of me…” He mumbled.

“It’s because she is part of you.” Y/N took his hand and started leading him back to the kitchen. She turned around to face him once they were in the kitchen again and put her arms around his neck. “She’s a part of me, too.”

“When?” He whispered, leaning his forehead against hers.

“She was born almost exactly nine months after you died. Remember our night together before you left to take on Lucifer?” She asked, a faint blush covering her cheeks.

He chuckled, pecking her lips. “Of course I remember… So that’s when it happened, huh?”

“Yeah… She’s about seven and a half now.” Y/N told him, playing with the ends of hair at the nape of his neck.

“What’s her name?” He asked gently, running his fingers through her hair.

“Gabrielle.” She replied.

Gabriel froze for a moment. “You named her after me?”

“Of course I did.” Y/N laughed softly. “Who else would I name her after?… Seems like my soulmate and the father of my child would be a pretty good namesake.”

“Father… I’m a father…” He pulled away from Y/N. “We have a child.”

“Yes we do.” Y/N giggled. “You know, you co–”

“Mommy?” A little voice said from the doorway.

Y/N turned her head to see Gabrielle standing there. “Hi, sweetie.”

Gabrielle’s eyes wandered over to stare at Gabriel curiously. She then let her eyes wander back over to her mother and gave her a questioning look.

Y/N smiled gently at her before walking over and crouching in front of her. “You remember those stories I used to tell you about your daddy?”

“Yeah.” The little girl replied, her eyes flicking back and forth between her mother and Gabriel.

“Well, sweet-pea…” Y/N said, putting a hand on Gabrielle’s shoulder before making a small gesture towards Gabriel. “That’s your daddy. Mr. Chuck brought him back to us.”

Little Gabby’s eyes widened slightly with excitement as she looked back over to Gabriel.

Gabriel smiled gently at her, crouching down. “Hey there, gumdrop.”

Gabrielle smiled wide before running over and launching herself into Gabriel’s arms. “Daddy!”

Gabriel smiled, his hand cradling the back of her head as she hid her face in the crook of his neck. A few tears were escaping his eyes.

Y/N sniffles slightly, wiping the tears from her cheeks.

Gabrielle heard her mother sniffle, making her pull away from Gabriel and run back over to her. “Why are you crying, mommy? Are you sad?”

Y/N hugged her tight, kissing the top of her head. “No, baby. I’m really really happy. These are happy tears.”

“Oh, okay.” The little girl replied, pulling away from her mother’s embrace. “Can I go finish watching the movie now? I wanna see more Loki.”

Y/N chuckled, nodding. “Sure, sweetie, go on.”

Gabrielle nodded, running back over to Gabriel and hugging him once more before running back out of the kitchen.

Gabriel chuckled. “Loki?”

Y/N nodded as they both stood back up. “Yeah, he’s her favorite character. In her words: 'He’s misunderstood, but lovable.’. I happen to agree.”

He smiled at her, wrapping his arms around her. “Is that so? Well, why don’t we go finish the movie with everyone then?”

Y/N smiled up at him. “Sure, that sounds like a good idea.”

With that, the couple linked hands to go and make their way to the living room to enjoy the what was left of The Avengers with their daughter and everyone else.

A/N: There ya go! 😀

I don’t know when I’ll get a part 2 up for this. I haven’t started writing it, yet. I will do it eventually. I will tell you though, that the second part will also be the final part for it. It seems like a two part kinda thing to me.

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this! :)

💋 Love always, 

~Maddy

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[justforbooks]

She Escaped To Become Original.

The relationship between a biographer and his or her subject often takes the form of a one-sided love affair. When the subject is a person of ill repute or a criminal the chances of an attachment are of course less—the most that may usually be managed is a fascinated repulsion. But with a writer, ardent involvement is almost always present, at least at first. After all, the lover and the beloved already share a profession, and the biographer cannot help but feel that he or she understands the subject’s inner life and professional struggles. The fact that this is in effect a love affair is often confessed in public and also in print, at the very end of the acknowledgments in the finished book, when, after thanking interviewees and researchers and editors, the biographer apologizes to his or her spouse or partner for what sounds rather like an adulterous affair, one that diverted time and attention, if not affection and passion, from a real-life partner.

These imaginary adulteries are not one-night stands. The average serious literary biography appears to take about five years of research and writing, and ten years or even more are common when it runs to two or three volumes. Almost always the task involves extensive travel, hours hunched over a computer while your partner or family go on with their lives, and long conversations with strangers in expensive restaurants, bars, and coffee shops. Edmund Gordon is clearly a serious and gifted biographer. He has worked hard, traveling all over the world to speak to people who knew Angela Carter and reading every scrap of her writing he could find. His title, The Invention of Angela Carter, announces both that Carter was a tremendously original writer with a marvelous gift of invention and that, as he puts it, “The story of her life is the story of how she invented herself.”

Gordon discusses Carter’s writing with skill and sense. He also manages to make her self-invention understandable and even sympathetic. He does not leave anything out, but he does sometimes include so much prosaic detail—the names of people she knew, the geography of the places she lived—that astonishing information sometimes flares up like a burst of flame on a damp log. You put the book down, asking yourself: Wait a second. Did he just say that after she slept with the husband of one of her best friends, Jenny, Carter wrote in her journal:

It is good for my ego (happiness is ego-shaped) to see myself as [John] sees me, a sweet, cool, flower in the sun; &, especially as [Jenny] sees me, an exotic, treacherous femme fatale…. I wish Jenny would try to kill herself.

One way to understand this sort of thing is to see it as a statement from someone who is trying to reinvent herself after a truly oppressive childhood. Psychologists have suggested that there are two classic early fears, both deftly portrayed in the folktale “Hansel and Gretel”: the fear of being abandoned and the fear of being consumed. For most of us, one of these anxieties is dominant. Angela Carter grew up with a mother who, like the witch in the fairy tale, overfed and confined her. According to Gordon, “She was an intensely loved and thoroughly spoiled child, heaped with gifts and goodies:…chocolate and ice cream and books…. She was never put to bed until after midnight.” Soon Angela was a very fat little girl who at eight already weighed “six or seven stone” (between eighty-four and ninety-eight pounds), with a bad stammer and no friends.

Her father, who worked as a night editor for the Press Association, was seldom home, and outside of school hours Angela spent most of her time with her mother, Olive, who monitored her every move: “Even when she was ten or eleven, she wasn’t allowed to go to the lavatory on her own. She was made to wash with the bathroom door open well into her teens.” She was also forbidden to go out with boys, and spent most of her free time at home, reading and writing stories. It is not surprising that her early novels and tales often feature lonely girls who are imprisoned in sinister houses or castles.

What is most remarkable is that Carter was able to escape from the gingerbread house. When she was seventeen she suddenly went on a serious diet. Gordon, though he puts this politely, does not quite believe her claim of having become an anorexic and weighing less than eighty pounds, since none of the friends or relatives he interviewed confirmed it. But in any case she eventually stopped dieting and settled into the normal weight range for her height. She also began to defy her parents: “She came to enjoy provoking Olive, and saying whatever she thought would go down worst, usually something iconoclastic, blasphemous or obscene.” It was a game Carter continued to play with anyone who struck her as pretentious or uptight, and one, according to reports, she never ceased to take pleasure in.

Angela Carter was a brilliant student, and her teachers encouraged her to apply to Oxford; but she refused after Olive declared that if she was admitted they would rent a house there to be close to her. When she left school at eighteen, her father found her a job on a local newspaper, the Croydon Advertiser. Angela Carter took the job, she later said, “kicking and screaming,” though soon began to enjoy it. But she was still living at home and quarreling with her parents. She was miserable and full of self-hatred: later she described herself as having been at the time “a great, lumpy, butch cow, physically extremely clumsy, titless and broadbeamed.”

She was also, obviously, a very determined and courageous person. Not only did she transform herself, in a few months, from a fat, frightened, awkward teenager into a skinny Goth beatnik, she managed to escape from Croydon. In 1959, at nineteen, she met her first boyfriend, a twenty-seven-year-old industrial chemist and folk music fan called Paul Carter, and the following year she married him. In 1961 Paul got a job teaching at what would become City of Bristol College, and she moved finally and decisively out of her parents’ claustrophobic world. She began taking courses toward a college degree, and in 1962 published her first short story.

All was not well, however. As Angela Carter later wrote in her journal, “Marriage was one of my typical burn-all-bridges-but-one acts; flight from a closed room into another one.” Though they seem to have been happy at first, she and Paul were not temperamentally suited; Paul was given to “gloomy spells and touchy, drawn-out silences.” He resented her (lifelong) reluctance to do any housework, though she was an enthusiastic and gifted cook.

Once she had finished her degree, most of Angela Carter’s time was devoted to writing. “My first husband wouldn’t let me get a job after I graduated from university,” she said in 1980. “So I stayed at home and wrote books instead, which served the bugger right.” Gordon tactfully calls this an “exaggeration,” and reports that in fact Paul, who “was never very supportive of her writing,” seems to have put pressure on Angela to find a job. Luckily for her readers, he did not succeed, and over the next decade she published three novels and dozens of articles and stories.

Edmund Gordon has admirably avoided what is known as the biographical fallacy: the attempt to explain a writer’s work by the facts of his or her life. But a reviewer, whose observations will soon dissolve into wastepaper and weak electronic pulses, can be more casual and speculative. It seems quite likely to me that a fat, clever girl with no friends who spends the first seventeen years of her life in a gingerbread house in suburban middle-class South London, reading avidly and incessantly, will have limited experience of life. Her conceptual world, on the other hand, may be rich and full and colorful, populated by the dramatic characters and events—both historical and fictional—that have excited her imagination.

Most writers take off from the worlds they have known. Angela Carter’s stories and novels, on the other hand, can be seen as inspired principally by dramatic historical figures like Baudelaire and Edgar Allan Poe and Lizzie Borden, plus a rich imaginative universe of witches and ghosts and princes and princesses, magicians and clowns, werewolves and vampires, mad scientists and evil aristocrats, incestuous siblings, and murderous seducers. It is a world that would make her simultaneously one of the most derivative and the most original of writers.

Angela Carter’s first published story, “The Man Who Loved a Double Bass,” was a remarkable achievement for a twenty-two-year-old. Its hero hangs himself when his beloved instrument is destroyed. Already, the prose is strikingly good: “Darkness came with the afternoon, dragging mist with it…. [It] fell around their shoulders like a rain-soaked blanket.”

Her first three novels, Shadow Dance (1966), The Magic Toyshop (1967), and Several Perceptions (1968), are set in contemporary Bristol and London, in an intensely emotional counterculture landscape of disguise and artifice, sex, and violence, and they were well reviewed. Later she ranged further in space and time, often setting her stories in a world of fantastic characters and melodramatic events, vast wealth, and violent passions; a world as far as possible from the one she had grown up in. As she put it in her appendix to the story collection Fireworks (1974):

I’d always been fond of…Gothic tales, cruel tales, tales of wonder, tales of terror, fabulous narratives that deal directly with the imagery of the unconscious—mirrors; the externalized self; forsaken castles; haunted castles; forbidden sexual objects.

Carter’s new persona was equally vivid. She started dyeing her drab brown hair with henna, and for the next twenty years was a striking five-foot-nine redhead. She dressed dramatically, often in black, chain-smoked, and liked to say shocking things and use coarse words. She claimed to despise classic authors like Henry James and W.B. Yeats, and “formed an intense dislike for Jane Austen.” Her attitude toward contemporary British writers, especially women, was unfriendly: at a public reading she went up to the realistic novelist A.S. Byatt, whom she had never met, and said: “My name’s Angela Carter. I recognized you and I wanted to stop and tell you that the sort of thing you’re doing is no good at all. There’s nothing in it—that’s not where literature is going.” But she was not always comfortable with the impression she was making, and wrote in her journal:

I talk about myself too much instead of watching other people, I try & exhibit my own original and exciting personality—whereas I am, in fact, merely a stupid young bitch…

Soon Angela Carter had a reputation as someone who would say anything and take any risk. It was not all talk: when Several Perceptions won a prize of £500 in 1969, she used the money to go to Japan for a month, although she knew no one there and could speak no Japanese. Halfway through her stay she met a twenty-four-year-old college dropout called Sozo in a coffee-house, and went with him to a Tokyo “love hotel.” Almost at once, she was in love. When she returned to England two weeks later she did not return to her husband Paul. She also did not see her parents until that December, when she heard that her mother was in the hospital with a heart attack. According to Gordon, Olive “took one look at her and turned her face to the wall.” She died soon after, having cut her daughter out of her will.

In April 1971 Carter moved to Japan to live with Sozo, first in Tokyo and then in a nearly deserted winter beach resort where she began to write her controversial magic-realist fantasy, The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (1972), which a few readers, including Salman Rushdie, consider her best work. Others have found it both lurid and baffling. As Gordon says, it is set in “a dream-version of Tokyo” in which the narrator-hero, Desiderio, who is based on Sozo, pursues the evil Dr. Hoffman through a series of fantastic supernatural worlds full of exotic and in some cases violent and cruel sexual customs, all graphically described.

Passionate as it was, Carter’s relationship with Sozo had problems. Sozo was younger than she, and not really ready to settle down. As a Japanese man, he expected a woman to stay home at night and mind the house while he went out drinking with friends, often not returning until the following morning.

In April 1972, Carter went back to England to do publicity for her newest novel, Love. When she returned to Tokyo a little over two months later, Sozo was not there to meet her as he’d promised. When she finally tracked him down, he told her that he had slept with three women while she’d been away. A week afterward the affair was over. Carter always maintained that the break was her idea, but Gordon does not believe this. For the first time in her life she was the rejected one, and it hit her hard:

She returned to worrying that she was unattractive and unlovable, and that her work wasn’t any good. All the same, she had enough self-awareness to realise that she hadn’t objectively changed when Sozo left her.

She stayed on in Japan, writing and seeing expatriate friends; for a week she worked as a bar hostess, but quit when she found she was expected to go home with at least some of the patrons. In November 1972 she took up with a nineteen-year-old Korean called Kō who spoke very little English. The relationship made her happy, but she didn’t take it very seriously, though she did spend the New Year holidays with him and his parents in Osaka. In the spring she returned to England; Kō desperately wanted to go with her but she discouraged him. Back home she wrote in her journal, almost as Lieutenant Pinkerton might have written of Madame Butterfly:

I can’t think what will come next or who will come next; Kō is in my heart, for ever, and maybe I do not want time to blur his perfection at nineteen, his warm, clean, golden flesh, his eyes like the hearts of anemones…. You can’t possess people; you only borrow them for a time.

Carter’s stay in East Asia was the source not only of The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman but of two of her most brilliant early stories, “A Souvenir of Japan” and “The Smile of Winter.” They are clearly autobiographical: the narrator sees her lover in great detail, but as an object. “I should have liked to have had him embalmed and been able to keep him beside me in a glass coffin, so that I could watch him all the time….” She realizes that both of them are engaged in a kind of intense sex tourism. “He found me, I think, inexpressibly exotic.” She is also enthralled by the mannerist style and elegant formality of Japan, and eager to take part in the performance: “Here we all strike picturesque attitudes and that is why we are so beautiful.” The darker side of the culture especially fascinates her: “This country has elevated hypocrisy to the level of the highest style. To look at a samurai, you would not know him for a murderer, or a geisha for a whore.”

After Angela Carter returned to live in London in 1972, her reputation and confidence increased. She published more novels and many stories, essays, and reviews, and bought a house in South London. The Company of Wolves (1984) and The Magic Toyshop (1987), two films based on her work, appeared; she joined the board of Virago Books and was recognized as one of Britain’s leading feminist writers. In the fall of 1974 she met a young carpenter from Bristol called Mark Pearce who was working on the house across from hers. Angela described him as looking “like a werewolf,” but in fact he was essentially stable and kind. They soon became lovers, and Mark moved in with her. They would be together for the rest of her life, and he was the father of her son Alex, born in 1983.

The most difficult task for a biographer, in the long run, is not how to write both sympathetically and honestly about a subject’s bad times and bad behavior, but how to keep the reader’s attention when all the news is good. As Penelope Fitzgerald put it, “The years of success are a biographer’s nightmare.” Gordon’s book inevitably loses some of its dramatic interest as he reaches the years when Angela Carter was living happily with Mark and Alex. Now we hear a steady rising melody of achievement and recognition: respectful interviews, favorable reviews, escalating advances and sales, meetings with other famous people, trips to writers’ conferences, literary and film and theater projects, and well-paid gigs as a visiting writer at top universities all over the world.

At the same time, a new Angela Carter gradually emerged. She stopped dyeing her hair and wearing all black. I remember her during this period at a literary festival in the garden at Charleston, the former home of Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell: a tall, slightly smiling woman with long white hair in a long pale blue sweater and a flowered Liberty print skirt, like a benevolent ghost from the Bloomsbury years.

But it was not just Carter’s outward appearance that had changed: now she was often described by journalists as a warm, affectionate wife and mother, and/or a wise, generous, and benevolent white witch or fairy godmother, with magical narrative and imaginative powers. According to people who knew her well, and to her biographer, this wasn’t a pose. It seems very likely: after all, happiness is usually good for the character. “I haven’t always been nice,” she used to say to interviewers, but nobody believed her. Though she never became close to any contemporary woman writer, she was loved and admired by her agent, her editor, and many friends.

Meanwhile her reputation kept on growing. In 1979 she published two of her best and most famous works: The Sadeian Woman and the Ideology of Pornography and The Bloody Chamber. The first is a remarkably erudite and ardent examination of the way that men have limited women to the roles of victim and victimizer, or virgin and whore, with a proposal for an alternative myth in which a good woman can be both strong and passionate; it is still widely read and a set text in college courses.

The second, The Bloody Chamber, dramatically illustrated these ideas. It is a brilliant revision of some of Grimm’s best-known stories, and presents striking alternatives to the characters and plots of the old tales. In the title story, the bride of the wicked marquis, a Bluebeard figure, is rescued not by her brothers, as in the original, but by her mother, who rides into the castle on a rearing horse and shoots the murderous husband with a revolver as he is about to cut off her daughter’s head. In “The Tiger’s Bride,” a revised version of “Beauty and the Beast,” the Beast does not become human; instead Beauty joyfully, and perhaps metaphorically, turns into a tiger herself.

In Angela Carter’s next two novels, Nights at the Circus (1984) and Wise Children (1991), she continued to take off from the historical and literary persons and scenes that had always inspired her. But now she moved from the exotic and fantastic worlds of her earlier work into a more familiar and local territory. Instead of Surrealism and fairy tales, she drew on Shakespeare and music-hall comedy. In Nights at the Circus there are still both historic and fantastic elements: its narrator is a journalist based on the young Jack London; and its heroine, Fevvers, is a trapeze artist who can really fly. But in both books the setting is essentially the real world—a world of theatrical boardinghouses, provincial road companies, backstage romance, Christmas pantomime, Cockney hoofers and comics, stage magicians, singers, charwomen, and taxi drivers. Angela Carter celebrates not exotic, erotic violence, but working-class humor and vulgarity, loyalty and courage and comradeship.

The title characters in Wise Children, the identical twins Dora and Nora Chance, are based on two real-life music hall performers, the Dolly Sisters. Now they are tough, wise old Cockneys who still sometimes, in their local pub, burst into song and dance from their old routines. They are the illegitimate twin daughters of a family of Shakespearean actors, the Hazards, whose last name is an upmarket synonym of theirs. In some ways the book is like a night at a Victorian music hall or early cinema. Melodramatic events are thick underfoot: murder, suicide, extravagant parties, intense sexual encounters, burning mansions, and the return of characters presumed dead, but everything turns out all right in the end. Gordon manages his subject’s years of success as well as anyone could, leavening the list of achievements with quotes and anecdotes, but he doesn’t really escape the problem. It is in a way his good fortune as a biographer, and our great misfortune as readers, that this period of Angela Carter’s life was short. In March 1991 she was diagnosed with lung cancer. “Things happened very quickly after that,” she wrote to a friend. In order to make sure that Mark would have custody of their son Alex, they married in May 1991. She worked whenever she could, planning a new novel and collecting the best of her articles for the book that appeared in 1992 as Expletives Deleted. But in less than a year she was dead.

As soon as Angela Carter was gone a flock of fans and critics of all kinds descended upon the body of her work. It was naturally attractive to them: not only was it highly original and imaginative, it drew both from folklore and from history. It was full of dramatic stock characters and events, both real and traditional, and therefore encouraged comparison and interpretation. Feminists, postfeminists, structuralists, poststructuralists, anthropologists, Freudians, and Jungians came to feast and praise, to interpret and overinterpret. As more schools of criticism appear, no doubt they too will be drawn to this tasty and inexhaustible meal. And why shouldn’t they be? At the very least, they will encourage the reading and rereading of one of the twentieth century’s most gifted and original writers.

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at http://justforbooks.tumblr.com

[samosoapsoup]

Differences

The next morning it was cold in the apartment. She sat on the edge of the bed, wrapped in an old plaid bathrobe and warmed her clothes over the electric heater. He was still asleep. Without his glasses, he seemed accessible, someone who could be talked to with understanding, without self-consciousness: his hair curling up into funny ringlets and the lines of his profile imprinting on the air a certain naive justice. A large suitcase lay open on the floor, overflowing with sweaters and socks. She wondered if anyone wore socks in Israel. Probably not.

She was leaning over, a frayed slip dangling from her hands, when he said, “What in Christ’s name do you think you’re doing?”

“I was just trying to—who’d ever think Rome would get this cold. You know there’s something sort of ungraceful about clothes when   you’re not wearing them? I mean all the straps and hooks and things, they’re ungraceful.”

That wasn’t at all what she meant but she knew it was useless to pursue any discussion that even hinted at the possibility of becoming personal.

"I’m hungry,” she said, feeling hunger somehow a safe and noncommittal state of being.

“So am I. We’ll go out to eat, all right?”

He got up then and walked into the other room, leaving her alone to adjust to her ungraceful clothes as best she could. She dressed hurriedly, buttoning up the blue woolen suit she had worn the night before and ran to the mirror in the bathroom, hoping that some miraculous transformation might have taken place. It hadn’t. She continued to look not the least bit Slavic, eastern European or even faintly Semitic. She was combing her ordinary-colored hair when he came back, dressed with his usual care, the inevitable corduroy vest, the gray suit he’d had made by a Roman tailor. He had his glasses on and also his air of inviolability. She turned away from the mirror.

"Do I look awful?”

“No, of course not. Come on, let’s get going. I’ve got a lot of things to do today.”

She followed him into the living room that also served as his studio. It smelled of turpentine and burnt sienna. One of his paintings was standing on the easel, huge and dark with many edges separating, dividing, crossing each other. He had a flair for edges.

She noticed a new book lying on the table next to Goodbye Columbus and Act One—A History of the Italian Jews. She decided not to mention it and concentrated on putting on her gloves, an apologetic birthday present he’d given her. All his kindnesses were apologies though she could never discover exactly what he was apologizing for.

“Have you got everything?” he asked, holding out her coat for her.

“Yes, everything.”

They left the apartment and started down the stairs. There was an old piece of bread somebody had left behind on the landing. She called his attention to it.

“Look,” she said, pointing, “just like one of those neorealistic movies, all that’s missing is the girl in the black slip standing in the doorway.” She didn’t feel very clever today. He wasn’t amused.

Outside, the little piazza was deserted, except for a group of young Italians in front of the cafe, leaning against their motorcycles and arguing about something in Roman dialect.

“We’ll go to Rosatti’s,” he said, and they got into the car.

Driving through the morning traffic and then on the road that ran along the river, she looked out the window, concentrating on the moments jerking past; the trees that still in December managed to have leaves, how the sunlight was peculiarly clear today and sharpened everything you looked at until you wanted to blink it back into a more blurring normalcy. He appeared not to notice her silence.

He parked the car at the Piazza del Popolo and they got out and admired the obelisk with that proprietary admiration of people who have lived in a foreign country for more than a year and no longer feel obliged to react to every monument with extravagant enthusiasm.

 “It’s one of the nicest spots in Rome, you know?” he said.  “It’s my favorite piazza.”

Having said all there was to say on the subject, they went to have breakfast. The door of Rosatti’s had an imposing sign on it, imploring everyone who entered to have a Buon Natale. Inside, the cafe was deserted except for a short man with a hat who leaned against the bar, seemingly hypnotized by the espresso machine. She thought he was probably a literary critic; they were always short and wore hats. It was too early yet for the writers and the painters who came everyday for an aperitif before lunch. The cashier contentedly counted up money and the short man continued to stare at the espresso machine.

“Please, can we sit down? I hate standing at the bar,” she said.

“All right.”

She followed him past a large table displaying stuffed animals with tinsel draped around their necks. She wondered which of the people who came here would ever be tempted to buy a pink giraffe. Certainly not Moravia or Pasolini or any of the other writers who argued at all hours about censor-ship and the stupidity of the Catholic Church.

He chose a table in the back and they sat down and order capuccino and a dolce.

“Just think,” he said, “the day after tomorrow I’ll be in Israel working on some kibbutz. Finally, I’m really going to go there.”

“Yes, just think.” She wanted to look brightly interested but the expression somehow eluded her.

The waiter set down the coffee cups and two dubious buns. She picked one up and began munching on it. She no longer cared what she said.

“What’s SO great about working on a kibbutz anyhow? All this mysticism about getting your feet in Israeli sand. After all, you are American.” She dared him to get angry.

“You don’t understand. It means going back to your people, the old traditions, belonging, all that jazz. It means being proud to be a Jew.”

“But why should it matter so much? It’s people that matter.”

She took another bite of the awful bun. It had bits of minced fruit inside, a further affront. “Because Jews are different. We’ve always been different and we’ve suffered for it. You don’t know what it’s like to be Jewish.”

“Oh, yes, I do. I do know what it’s like,” she said vehemently. “When I was in grammar school practically everybody was Jewish but me, and everybody took lessons: horseback riding and piano and ballet. And I didn’t take any lessons at all.”

“That’s not what I’m talking about.”

She went on anyway.

“And everybody lived in marvelous houses with finished basements and they gave parties where you danced and drank cream soda. And in the seventh grade there was a boy I liked named Joel who gave a huge party for his bar mitzvah. Only I wasn’t invited. He told me about it afterwards. He said they gave him lots of presents. I remember he was very pleased about the presents.”

“It’s hard to be a good Jew, to know who you are and stick up for it. Take Maxine, for instance. She’s a good Jew, her grandfather was a rabbi and her family sends her religious calendars with all the holidays marked out. She can laugh about the whole thing and she doesn’t go to synagogue the way they’d like her to, but she’s a good Jew.”

She had listened to him so many times before tell her in the same mumbling incoherent way the story of the good Jew and she still didn’t know what he meant, except that Maxine was one.

"Yes, of course, Maxine.”

“Or me, even. So maybe I haven’t seen the inside of a temple for a long time but the holidays, lighting the candles, all that stuff, it gets me. I don’t know, it really gets to me.” His face had that inspired expression, the one he always had whenever he talked about his people and his tradition and his unique difference.

She carefully put the bun back on the plate and picked up her purse. She mustn’t cry here, she simply mustn’t. He would be very annoyed. The cashier would stop counting her money. The little man by the espresso machine might even take off his hat in surprise. She mustn’t cry.

"Excuse me, I have to go now. I just remembered I have to be some place.”

She got up abruptly.

“Wait a minute. You haven’t finished your coffee. Wait just a minute and I’ll drive you home.”

“No, it doesn’t matter. I’ll be all right. Call me before you leave, if you have a chance.”

She hurried past the table with the pink giraffe and ran out the door, running down the street toward her pension, running, not willing to cry yet, waiting until she got home and it seemed to her that she was running away from the sunlight, the clear peculiar sunlight that sharpened all the edges of things, dividing one from the other, running also from the field of brightness behind her where line after line of young men were bending, cutting, gathering in grain. And working, they sang together, the words strange and proud, they sang and he was there among them singing too, not really knowing the words but he was proud and suntanned like the others. He had his glasses off.

- Carolyn Gaiser, The Paris Review, Issue 40, Winter-Spring 1967