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nonasemporium · 11 months ago

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on the direction of colorism as an intentional narrative device in tlt:

(sources pending, I will eventually annotate a copy of the texts and I may choose to grace the internet with specific quotes and a more purposeful examination, but I am not that kind nor prepared right now)

easy source right now, as previously mentioned:

cavaliers are often described as darker than necromancers. yes, one could make the point correlate instead to the draining of life, the representation of death in them, etc. but it's not only on the basis of 'this person is an ashen version of the other,' it will also be related to the base, or seem greater than it, even if they're related, even if they're both white.

examples now under a cut to save your dash some space:

take the twins, where it IS the same base: coronabeth, even, who is not a necromancer nor a cavalier (despite her best efforts) is not only referenced as a more lively tone than ianthe, but legitimately golden, olive-toned, tanned rather than not washed out. also even with hair color, we can see the twins have some shade of gold (coronabeth's actually gold, ianthe's implied to be a lot more washed out) and naberius has brown hair. (when white people are involved, which all three are stated to be imagined as) often-times hair color can have meaning correlating to this ironically.

colum is silas' nephew, and described with tans and yellows, tan-skinned, jaundiced, 'weatherbeaten', brown hair in contrast with all the whites and paleness of silas. again, both white, both relatives, and yet his cavalier is specifically noted to be darker in various manners--both hair and skin.

and personally I love pointing out white-on-white colorism because it's incredibly bizarre and shows the levels of which whiteness is built and maintained on is incredibly fragile and arbitrary.

now outside of that we have our nonwhite cousins, Palamedes and Camilla. Even within the text there's an acknowledgement and focus, despite also putting them both as piles of gray, in what's darker in Camilla and lighter in Palamedes.

"Crouching in front of the hatch was a rangy, underfed young man: he was wrapped in a grey cloak and the light glinted on the spectacles slipping down his nose. Standing next to him holding a big wedge of broken sculpture and the flashlight was a tall, equally grey-wrappered figure with a scabbard outlined at her hip. She had hair of an indeterminate darkness, cut blunt at her chin. Up close, he was gaunt and ordinary-looking, except for the eyes. His spectacles were set with lenses so thick they could make spaceflight grade, and through these his eyes were a perfectly lambent grey: unflecked, unmurked, even and clear. He had the eyes of a very beautiful person, and the head of someone with resting bitch face."

and in the separate description:

Palamedes: "medium brown hair cut short and with no particular thought for aesthetics, dresses just in greys, eyes particularly lovely clear grey."

Camilla: "has very dark cold-brown hair – chin-length, straight and with a fringe – dark eyes. She’s compact and has lots of lean muscle,"

also the specific statement of: "and I imagine her of being Middle Eastern extraction, though due to Sixth House parameters both will be fairly mixed. They’re actually second cousins, so there ought to be a faint resemblance."

I could get into this more but I will not, I'm going to move forward.

I'll come back around to second house, I promise, but I'm going to move forward with four house. I'm just going to take the quote from the post:

"Both Isaac and Jeannemary are around fourteen and have pretty much the same body shape still: Jeannemary is semi-muscular and has lots of corners, Isaac is skinnier. Both are natural brunettes, though Isaac has bleached hair (orange, fauxhawk) and Jeannemary is described as having curly hair. Both have multiple ear piercings and eyeliner and the visual is somewhat Glassons storecard punk. Both have dark brown eyes. Jeannemary has a somewhat dusty, fierce, monochromatic appearance (brown hair, brown skin), and I imagine her as Māori. Isaac I imagined as NZ Chinese."

I italicized Isaac, the necromancer, and bolded Jeannemary, the cavalier, very purposefully, with times their descriptions lined up both bolded and italicized.

I want to give a very short detour onto why I feel like pointing out/drawing attention to times and ways the bodytypes are brought up, because I feel like also it can be easily missed. Bodytypes/muscle/etc have certain ties into racialization, this also ties into class (obviously). I have a lot of personal trauma with this, with the equation of these things and history of them with athletic ability, how that has also been utilized, both as a tool to refer to certain groups as more capable of violence and of receiving violence (as well as labor), it gets complicated and I feel like these allusions to the class structure within TLT either purposefully or subconsciously brings these correlations up.

When reading about the use of a physically stronger, darker featured person that you will, at the end, literally consume to take into you aspects of their strength and to keep as a pool of resource for yourself after you have essentially 'spent' them in the process of your own uplifting, after the 10,000 years of John purposefully leading and shifting the society itself to favor and replicate certain structures based off especially the roman empire and catholicism, I wish I could more succinctly put into words why to me that so clearly correlates to both racism and colorism, but I am very limited in communication despite my best efforts so instead I'm putting this forward and hope those reading have the comprehension skills and knowledge to at least begin to consider the parallels.

Also, in regards to race and colorism, there are specific histories, especially in specific colonial powers, towards indigenous groups that should be taken into consideration when discussing how features may be engaged with.

okay! sorry for that foray now we're moving to the fifth house:

Magnus is a curly-haired, medium built Samoan man, Abigail is a white woman with long, glossy dark hair. She is beautifully and tastefully dressed, and he wears well-tailored and not very flashy outfits.

Because I'm self-indulgent, I do still like seeing black Abigail headcanons and art, which I suppose takes away from some of my points, but not really, because this will circle back to being about how white people interact with these narratives and descriptions within fandom and not about how sometimes people of color might indulge themselves with characters they relate to, that remind them of loved ones, or represent some other self-indulgence.

In seventh house, we have "Dulcinae" and Protesilaus.

Protesilaus: "massive, buff, and also sort of sickly and indistinct-looking in his colouring – he is described as being made up mainly of muddy, ashen browns. Think Greek warrior, but with no vibrant colouring. Biggest on cast, even bigger than Colum Ash. Imagined him as mixed Pasifika."

I have opinions on how men of color overall are discussed in the text and through word of god but I'm going to be very brave and move forward.

"Dulcinae": "a girlish woman who looks extremely fragile and sickly, like a neurasthenic Victorian maiden. Eyes should be extremely blue. Hair is light brown in long curls; skin is pale. Pretty in a frivolous, invalid way. Gives the impression of being slight. Outfits should be gauzy and nightgownish. Imagined her as Pakeha/white."

and now we'll come to the second house:

"The only ones who seemed even vaguely compos mentis were the Second House: as it turned out, they had been the ones to call Teacher to the access hatch, and now they sat ramrod-straight and resplendent in their Second-styled Cohort uniforms, all scarlet and white. They both affected the same tightly-braided hairstyle and the same amount of extremely gilt braid, and also the same serious-business expression, and they could be told apart by one having a rapier and one quite a lot of pips at her collar."

"Captain Judith Deuteros and Lieutenant Marta Dyas are alike in posture, bearing and extremely crisp military uniform (think a cross between US Navy whites and the Regency navy). Unlike every single other necromancer on the cast, Judith never wears necromancer robes, but is dressed in the exact same way as Marta. Judith is somewhat less completely scrawny than other necromancers on the cast, though she should be less built than Marta is; Judith is imposing, solemn-faced and reflective, Marta is more keen-eyed and restless. I imagined both as Tongan."

Here we have a cav/necro pair that is largely described similarly, with the exception being a more understandable difference in build, although while Judith is reflective and imposing, Marta is keen-eyed and restless. Both in the text and the added description give a lot of overlap. Gideon rarely makes an attempt to discern them in GtN.

but what about John/Alecto? what about Gideon/Pyrrha?

and we don't even know about the other lyctors!

okay. see, this is where we're going to get a little more complicated and part of where I'm making an argument it might be narratively intentioned.

John is Māori. He is a man of color, and he is coming from a society where he was racialized. Specifically, at least as a general consensus, his "faceclaim" in a sense is Taika Waititi.

Anyway, without getting into every facet of how I think the series engages with and addresses men of color, because that scope starts getting out of this specific topic and into a different one, I want to state that I think it actually further represents themes of colorism.

John makes himself God. He makes himself god and to him that becomes some strange performance of western civilization roman empire 2.0 space imperialism planet consumption speedrun mixed w New Catholocism or whatever, but where there's a PERFORMANCE of equality where there actually isn't. Just like I argue John not ONLY makes new classes with necromancers and cavaliers (I'm not even getting into everything else with this), but ALSO he did not in fact shatter gender oppression, he just shifted it and patted himself on the ass for it.

YES it is queernormative and as a queer man himself, it makes sense this would be important to him, just like it makes sense for it to be important to him that race manifest very differently (go pretty unacknowledged really) across his New Roman Empire in Space. But he has his own limits and biases and I would argue both colorism and misogyny are present for him.

He chose to make Alecto the way he did. And he had all of his own reasons for it, but surely it can also be noted how linked those reasons can be to both colorism and misogyny as well. I know he made her a specific barbie that had specific history to him, but does this barbie and his choice in her also highlight his priorities, just as blatantly as his choice of empire?

I need Alecto to come out so I can finalize some of these concepts, but it is still colorism for a man of color, especially one wounded by rejection (as we see in Nona) to see power in dominating a white woman. To see a SUBVERSION in the act of it. I think John sees a lot of things as subversion without seriously considering the levels he's actually engaging in. I think John is shallow.

Which brings me also to G1deon and Pyrrha. I think John had some concepts around their dynamics, their relationship, in their interactions that was in these same lines. I think John saw G1deon a specific way, I think he passively compared himself (including how he discusses it in Nona, again), I think the way he engaged with G1deon did now show solidarity or equality (G1deon was also an engineer!) but showed superiority on John's end. Also he made G1deon how he did before he crafted his 10,000 year old weird empire. If I could put it into words more eloquently, I would, but I feel like John saw triumph in G1deon being Pyrrha's necromancer and I also think he then delegated him to "attack dog" for himself (as we see in Harrow the Ninth especially!!!)

I genuinely think 100% that regardless of if G1deon is racialized as black (I think he is personally), he is meant to be darker and racialized more than John was. And I think John subconsciously compares that! I think it is instead further evidence towards narrative on colorism, including the way he's separate from Mercymorn and Augustine through HtN.

This is without getting into Pyrrha as a cop, but I feel like I've used a lot of words already.

I'll get into this more sometime in the future, perhaps even after Alecto when I am free to vomit out all the various concepts I have with a better understanding of where it's building (as an autist, w my specific type anyway, I do struggle with feeling secure in theorizing until I have rest of the content) but ANYWAY.

Long post, mostly about the appearance of Harrow and Gideon.

And before I get into it, I need to put at least two notes:

Trying to find the link for where she stated Erana James is a good fancast for Harrow, but I don't know if I can get a link for that which is frustrating. If anyone has a link or recording of that specific statement, I would appreciate it. **Edit: [thank you to my wife for the links, duckduckgo hates bad bitches who are impatient with poor search results]

But for reference, Erana James:

(winter shade?)

and then go ahead and give a little sunshine:

Personally, in my head I see Nona as out more, skin less covered, more likely to take in sunshine (?), but it is also weird space technicalities so maybe she has less sunlight than Harrow even if Harrow is covered head to toe constantly. Either way, I feel like this is the typical range, with acknowledgement of how skin, especially melanated skin, fluctuates depending on exposure to sun.

edit: adding a couple more for further reference

#tlt #discussion on colorism #colorism in tlt #no I did not proofread this

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gretchensinister · 2 years ago

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Yellow/Gold

Happy 10 years, Rise of the Guardians and Rise of the Guardians fandom! I offer you today what I have always offered: weird blacksand.

So, at one point I thought, yellow and gold are not that far from each other. And I thought, what is the solid lore around the King in Yellow? I read Chambers’ book (the origin point) and there’s very little! You can do almost anything you want with the King in Yellow. And you know I like an eldritch Sandy, and also a Sandy that’s really toning it down to be a Guardian but is really a much more powerful and ambiguous figure. And you know who accepts that? Pitch. And so without further ado, one of my shorts (861 words):

Yellow.

Gold.

The difference between the two can be subtle, one changing to the other with a trick of the light, a trick of the eye, a trick of the mind.

Yellow.

Gold.

They’re always something, but what are they? The bright ubiquity of dandelions, the starburst before the wish; the sickly hue of jaundice, sign of some deep fault within the body; the sun that gives warmth; the sun that burns.

Many have gone mad for gold as metal; perhaps still more have gone mad for the lack of yellow petals.

Yellow.

Gold.

Gold is round, bounded, filling the mouth from the back of the throat to the tip of the tongue like a greedily large bite of some sweet, ripe fruit. Yellow is open-ended, full of air, allowing the tongue only the briefest taste of its center before it becomes only breath and tones once more.

Yellow.

Gold.

The golden hour turns the world soft and magic just before sunset, profligate beauty running liquid over everything like a burst egg yolk.

What of a yellow hour? Can it be imagined? Is it a merciless hot noon in a dry land, still and endless with no hope of shade or night? Or is it midnight in some inhuman city, sodium lights and neon reflecting out from cars’ darkened windows, up from puddles and wet pavement, yellow all in fragments, streaks, and dashes, sending messages in a code indifferent to the human soul?

Yellow.

Gold.

A once-was man walks along a beach of golden sand and contemplates both gold and yellow. He is neither, he is closer to nothing, a thin, dark shadow (like those crafted by the golden hour?), clothed in the fearful uncertainty of featureless darkness. The flesh that marks him as a once-man is gray, and though it borrows little from its cousin silver, still, there is something of him that reflects. The gold of the sand lingers on him where it can, and prevents him from looking out of place in this no-place he walks.

He smiles. One blink: he opens his eyes on the golden beach with pillowy dunes coaxing him down a curving path to a sandcastle swirling upward in towers like the wildest dreams of whelks. Above, the sky twinkles with large, warm stars, and the sky they float in is a rich and shifting violet-blue. Even the dark sea is clearly blue, not black. The faint mermaid songs he hears do not call him toward the water; they are only sweet lullabies.

What a dreamland.

He grins. Another blink: the waves are now roiling clouds, deep gray, threaded through with filaments of every color his eyes can see (far more than when he was a man). Two suns, dim—but yellow—hang low in the sky above the cloudy sea. Golden hour from yellow suns? His shadow, taller and thinner but not blacker than he himself, points like a knife-stroke over humped dunes like crouching beasts toward not simply a castle but a breathtaking ruin of a city, all of yellow stone. Two pallid moons have already crested the tallest towers. Between the moons and the suns, the sky is scattered with black stars in constellations to fill any unknown void in an astronomer’s heart. These are as black as his robe. He had a hand in them. He was invited.

What a dreamland.

Blink. The sandcastle. Blink. The ruins. A change, every time. This is a gift. Or a punishment. He has gazed on yellow, on gold, with the kind of terrible desire that swallows whole. And for this affront or this devotion, his own eyes were ringed in yellow, in gold, and they reveal to him the dreamlands.

No more a man but long a king, he winds through the dunes toward the sandcastle, toward the ruins, toward the labyrinth. Yes, it is always a labyrinth, no matter what face it shows. But he has a clue to find the center: the voiceless call of the king who has summoned him.

The heart of the labyrinth waits for no blinks to change, and neither does its king. If this king was once a man, he wears it far more lightly than the king in black. This has never troubled the king in black, he can recognize what he craves no matter what he sees. And what he recognizes is the king of the dreamlands. All of the dreamlands, from the sweet to the bitter.

This king, in his sumptuous drifting, floating robes.

This king, in yellow.

This king, in gold.

The king in black steps forward, drawn irresistibly by the only being like him he has ever known. By the being who is most unlike him in every one of the infinite worlds that converge at this omphalos. By a sweet face and a tender, sleepy smile. By a dozen writhing boneless limbs of awesome strength and breathtaking perversion.

The king in black rakes his hands over the yellow robe, the golden robe, leaving it in tatters. The king of the dreamlands wants to be seen, and so he will see him. (See gold. See yellow.)

“No mask?”

No mask!

#pitch black #sanderson mansnoozie #blacksand shipping #rise of the guardians #rotg #blacksand

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liron-ao3 · 3 years ago

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It's not that Dean doesn't like Castiel. It is more of an I-swear-on-my-mother's-grave-I'll-kill-him kinda relationship. Because the thing is, Castiel set up Dean's little brother Sam and his stepsister Rowena and it isn't that Dean could say it out loud, but he is worried. To say the least.

Rowena has a power over Sam that makes Dean's stomach flip. She conjures sappy smiles on Sam's face and makes him follow her like a love-drunk puppy. She's a witch, Dean is convinced, but he tries hard not to mention that in Sammy's orbit. He heard the whole that's-a-misogynistic-term speech when Sam was dating that Ruby chick and Dean knows that his brother would only cling closer to the Scot if he knew that Dean thinks that his fiancée is straight from hell.

So Dean grits his teeth, swallows his tongue, and plays nice around her, even going as far as agreeing to be his brother's best man. He will still be there when Sam comes running with his heart broken and with his tail between his legs.

Castiel, on the other hand? That man he can hate in abundance. Not that he has ever met him, but honestly, he has to be Lucifer himself if he thinks their siblings to be a good match.

Dean can picture him vividly—a leer on his face, sweet-talking people into feeling safe and then smiting them with the snap of his fingers. That man has to be evil incarnate and Dean won't pussyfoot around him. No way!

***

"Play nice," Bobby grumbles when they enter the venue for the rehearsal dinner.

"I am nice," Dean hisses back.

"Sure you are," his surrogate father says and makes a beeline for Ellen and Jo on the other side of the room.

Dean shoves his hands into the pockets of his jeans and scans the room for the man he is sure he will recognise immediately. But no one really sticks out from the crowd that is well-dressed and mostly speaking in different kinds of British accents. Family of the bride, obviously.

Dean feels a little underdressed until he spots a man in an ill-fitting suit, draped into a trenchcoat. He is standing next to a redheaded, slim woman, who Dean would probably try to get on the backseat of his Impala if he wasn't set on finding that Castiel guy, sweet talk him today and wreck him tomorrow. Unless Sam does the wise thing and cancels the wedding, which seems less and less likely by the minute. Rowena's spell seems to become stronger day by day. Dean hardly recognises his ever-worrying, self-loathing brother anymore, with all the grinning that goes on on his face.

Maybe Dean is an asshole, but he has pulled Sam from the edge too many times to count. This is too good to be true. Happiness doesn't find a Winchester. Not in his experience.

Dean walks to the other side from where the redhead smiled over to him. Maybe she can point him to the object of his hate. She tilts her head to the side when he comes closer.

"You must be Dean," she says, stretching out her hand. Dean is taken aback by her knowledge.

"How did you…?"

She shrugs. "I know nearly everyone in this room. And the only two men Sam ever mentioned were his brother and Bobby who I assume is the fella over there."

Dean looks in the direction she is nodding to. "Yeah. Sam always had more female friends."

"I think that's what Rowena likes about him. He's sensible."

Dean huffs. "Yeah, I bet she likes that he's soft for her."

"He makes her very happy," the man says and his voice does things to Dean's insides he doesn't want to nurse right now. He needs to focus on his anger. Arousal isn't helpful.

"If you say so," Dean grunts.

Anna furrows her brow. "Are you okay, Dean?" she asks concerned.

"Yeah, just not really convinced about this whole wedding business. Don't you think it's too fast?"

The man tilts his head to the side and Dean starts seeing the family resemblance. "I think that they complement each other very well. I would have expected Sam's best man to see that, too."

Dean can't really argue with that. "I don't know her well enough to judge. I just know that my brother is a different person now."

"And you don't like that?" the woman asks. Hell, Dean doesn't even know their names and spills all the beans, probably making an ass of himself.

"He's my brother. I know him better than anyone and this—" He gestures in the engaged couple's direction. "This isn't the man I raised."

Two pairs of eyes move to the tall men and back to Dean.

"You mean a happy man?" the woman asks.

"No. I mean…" Dean should have kept his mouth shut. They don't know Sam, his dark thoughts, the forced smiles, the brave face. Dean knows it all or at least well enough to know that the chuckling man on the other side of the room is a stranger to him. Okay, maybe Dean is a bit overdramatic. He knows Sam laughing, pulling pranks. But life had been shitty to both of them and the only people they could always rely on were the two of them.

Yes, their circles have widened over time, with Jody and the girls, Charlie and Dorothy. Still, happiness isn't really part of their lives. They might get glimpses of it, but…

"You mean what? That our sister isn't good enough for your big shot lawyer brother?" the man asks.

Dean freezes. He sometimes forgets that Sam isn't little Sammy anymore. That he's one step away from leaving his old life behind, and with it his big brother, probably.

Dean scans the people in the room, mainly the bride's family and he swallows hard. Yes, he's the odd one out. He only owns a single suit, so he couldn't wear it tonight. Is it that? Is he jealous? Or anxious to lose Sam?

He looks back at the bride and groom. Sam presses a kiss into Rowena's hair. From afar, they are a cute couple with the difference in height and the unconventional age gap.

Dean bites the inside of his cheek and tries to unclench his fists. It isn't working.

"She's way out of his league," he hears himself say, not knowing where this is even coming from.

"That's what you said, Anna, the first time you met Sam," the man chuckles.

Anna? Oh, that's the future sister-in-law Sam raved about and Dean thinks he wants to set him up with. Well, that probably flew out of the window a minute ago.

"I didn't, Castiel. I said I was surprised that she went for someone younger. That's all."

Dean's eyes shoot up. That's the man? The man, who he built up as the bogeyman who would get familiar with his fist? A fucking baby in a trenchcoat?

The whole house of cards that Dean has built up over weeks is threatening to collapse. Dean's throat tightens and he pops a button on his polo shirt, but to no avail. He meets Castiel's eyes for a moment, the other man squinting at him as if he could look deep into his soul.

"Are you okay, Dean?" he asks and sounds concerned.

"Yeah. Just need some air," Dean all but spits and heads for the door.

He props himself up on the roof terrace's balustrade and tries to sort through all his contradicting feelings. He hates it. It's all him. His fear to be left behind, for the only constant in his life to leave, like everybody else who has ever meant something to him. He's jealous and the realisation hits him hard.

Yes, he doesn't know Rowena, but Sam does. Well enough to want to marry her. Sam, who thought he was too toxic for a real relationship. Dean always told him that this was bullshit. And now that his little brother is finally listening, Dean acts like a jaundiced ex? Fuck!

"There you are," a too-familiar voice comes from behind. "I thought you left me hanging, man."

Dean chuckles. "I have to lead the bride to the altar, right?" He ruffles Sam's hair. His brother glares at him, but without heat.

"Wanna come in? I'd like to introduce you to Rowena's best man."

"Who's that?"

"Castiel."

Dean's eyes sink to the floor. Of course, he is. "Already met him."

Sam raises an eyebrow. "Don't tell me you already snubbed him."

"Nah. I wouldn't embarrass you in front of your new family." It's enough that Dean embarrassed himself.

"Most of them are kind people," Sam says carefully. "And after tomorrow, Rowena is your family, too."

Dean works his jaw. It's a bit difficult to look at Sam, now that he realised that he's never given his fiancée a real chance.

"You'll be here in California, and I'll be back in Kansas. We'll be lucky if we see each other on Christmas."

Sam squeezes his shoulder. "You could move here, Dean."

The older brother shakes his head. "I don't belong here, Sammy." Another squeeze. "And I can't afford to take off so much to drive over." And soon you'll be too busy to fly back to where everything feels small and like past, he adds in his head. He puts on a smile nonetheless.

"Samuel?" Rowena calls from the entrance. "Dinner starts in five."

Sam smiles over to his future bride. "I just need a minute, mo ghràdh."

"Mo what?"

"It's Scottish Gaelic for 'my love'."

Dean raises an eyebrow and chuckles. "You really got it bad, huh?"

"I wouldn't marry her if I didn't."

Dean pats his back. "I'm happy for you man." He's surprised that he means it.

***

Dinner goes fine and Dean has a nice conversation with Anna, who is seated next to him. Luckily, she's not of the resentful kind. Still, Dean is feeling out of place. Their found family is so much smaller than Rowena's real one with all the siblings and cousins from both sides of the pond. And this is only the rehearsal.

As soon as dinner is done, Dean excuses himself and flees to the hotel. A real one that Sam was kind enough to pay. It makes Dean feel only smaller and not good enough.

He takes a shower and walks out on the balcony, just a towel slung around his waist. He can hear the waves hitting the beach nearby and seabirds screeching. He gets why Sam moved here, why he won't come back. It still stings.

Dean did everything in his power to get him so far and he can't bring himself to regret it. But he's still angry. Maybe he is anger, plain and simple. He's been angry since his mother died and his father gave a shit about giving his sons a home. This anger will probably never go away. It's good that Sam found happiness, Dean muses. At least one of them should.

There's movement on the balcony next door and despite the separation wall, Dean can see the trenchcoat clad arms propped up on the railing. What are the odds?

"Castiel?"

There is a long pause and then comes, "Dean?" This gravelly voice doesn't fail to move him. If Dean didn't decide to scratch the term 'witch' for his future sister-in-law, he would wonder if her stepbrother might be a witcher, too.

"Yeah. Not into parties?"

There is another pause, probably filled with a head shake Dean can't see. "I don't like crowds of people. And my family is, well, my family. I love them, but it's complicated."

"I get it," Dean says, although he probably doesn't.

"You seem to have cooled down a little," Castiel states matter-of-factly.

"Was it so obvious?"

Castiel laughs and the sound vibrates into Dean's heart, churning it in delicious ways. "You looked as if you were out to kill someone."

Dean chuckles. "I kinda was."

"Why? And who?"

Dean swallows hard. What he would give for a beer right now, but he had way too much of that red wine already. Maybe that's why he answers, "You." There is a long moment of surprise that Castiel doesn't seem inclined to break, so Dean adds, "I built up this story in my head that Rowena bewitched Sam and you were at fault because you brought them together."

"And now?"

Dean shrugs his shoulders. "I only want Sammy to be happy."

Castiel hums on the other side of the separation. "Why are you sounding so sad then?"

A flare of anger rises in Dean's chest. The man doesn't know him. What gives him the right to state something like this?

"Blow me, Cass!" he grinds out. That guy is getting under his skin. Why, he doesn't know. Maybe because he's right.

"You'd like that, wouldn't you?"

The retort comes quick like a shot and Dean is struck speechless for a way too long moment. Castiel starts chuckling.

"You're an asshole!" Dean grumbles.

"An asshole who gives good head, though," Castiel says smugly.

Dean groans. No, he won't think of these sinful lips wrapped around his cock. No way, José.

"Is that an offer?" his mouth asks without his consent.

"I'm not a one-off kind of guy, Dean."

Dean wishes he wouldn't have to lie if he said he wasn't either. Is there an expiration date for that stamp if you haven't got laid for more than a year? Probably not.

The silence stretches into an eternity until Castiel quietly says, "Good night," leaving Dean alone in the pale moonlight.

***

Rowena looks beautiful and Sam smart. Dean manages to get through the whole wedding ceremony and his best man speech without a single glimmer of jealousy. Bobby looks at him approvingly and Ellen whispers into his ear that his mum would have been so proud of him.

Still, Dean finds himself on the balcony once again. His thoughts need space to swirl around him. There's a lot to process on this fine day—his brotherly/parent-like love, his own loneliness in a room full of people, the strange stares that Castiel and he have been sharing the whole day…

He presses the palms of his hands against his eyes, hoping to force back the sting of tears building up in them. A warm hand lands on his shoulder, startling him. "You've done well."

Dean chuckles without mirth. "Can't remember when anyone said something like this about me." He bites his lip, hard. Why did he say that? To a complete stranger nonetheless. Castiel doesn't comment on it, though, and Dean sighs in relief.

The music coming from the party changes to something slow and Castiel asks, "May I have the next dance?"

Dean turns his head and stares at the outstretched hand for a very long moment. He has never danced with a man before. Not without a beer bottle in his hand and for sure not a slow dance. But he feels a pull to this man, who he hated with all his guts just a day ago. A man with kind eyes, a shy smile, and a patience Dean isn't used to.

He takes the offered hand and Castiel's smile grows wider, just like Dean's heart. Castiel pulls him slowly into his arms, lets him settle against him, and rewards Dean's head leant against his own with a gentle brush over his back.

Dean shivers at the tender touch and bites the inside of his cheek in a last attempt to keep back the tears welling up in his eyes.

"It's okay," Castiel says. "Let go. No one will see it."

And Dean does. In the arms of a stranger under the Californian moon. He doesn't shake off the tender hand carding through his hair, or the strong arms holding him upwards. He lets out the sobs he's been holding and allows Castiel to brush away his tears before their lips meet in a gentle kiss. He smiles at Castiel bashfully afterwards.

"It's okay," Castiel repeats.

Dean chuckles. "Is it? Crying like a baby in a stranger's arms?"

"Crying like the big brother, who raised a wonderful man and has to let him go to live his own life. Crying like a lonely man, who hasn't been touched intimately for ages."

Dean furrows his brow. "How?"

Castiel smiles at him with so much warmth that Dean feels like welling up again.

"Sam loves you. He talks about you all the time. It felt like I knew you before we even met. And the rest? Let's say, kindred souls recognise each other."

Dean huffs a laugh. "You're good, man."

Castiel smirks at him. "And you're a good man, Dean Winchester," he says and leans in for another kiss.

Maybe, Dean muses, Castiel is magical after all.

#dean winchester #castiel #human au #deancas #destiel #fanfiction #destiel fandom #destiel fic #destiel fanfic #destiel fanfiction #deancas fandom #deancas fic #deancas fanfic #deancas fanfiction #emotional hurt and comfort #jealous dean #sad dean #understanding castiel #first kiss

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sanchoyo · 3 years ago

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danny phantom season 2, episode 17-20 thoughts! finishing up season two! the finale is the THIRD 2-PARTER OF SEASON 2. that's so many! I wonder how many season 3 will have?

see prev episode thoughts in this tag <3

-UERGH WHY DOES VLAD HAVE AN AI WITH MADDIE'S FACE ON IT. SOOO CREEPY. AND MORE 'CREATIONS' waiiiit. vlad is Dr. Frankenstein! (despite his ghost design obviously referencing vampires) HE HAS 'CREATIONS' HE MAKES THEN WONT TAKE REAL RESPONSIBILITY FOR!!! this bitch.

-danny was late and his friends immediately start going off about how hes inconsiderate, and has been treating them like sidekicks??? he just overslept, my god. chill. even if he has, be nicer about talking about it with him?? he really can't help that he sometimes has to chase the ghosts, or has a secret identity to protect...

-'what kind of ghost haunts a miniature golf course' umm. me as a ghost. next question

-imagine going home and theres a tiny child on your bed claiming to be your cousin. with as many cousins I have, I would probably believe her. but the 'ran away from home' BIT....SHES 12?? SHES SO TINY. I hate that they have her belly out in her ghost form, but I like how her colors are asymmetrical. something about her design...maybe the proportions?? are weird to me...anyway danny was good to feed her, but he shouldve taken her to his parents FIRST. or, tbh, probably jazz. (JAZZ DIDNT EVEN GET TO MEET HER!!! NOOO. I mean she said she'll be BACK BUT STILL)

-ANYWAY. shes voiced by AnnaSophia Robb, the girl who was in because of winn dixie, played as violet from charlie and the chocolate factory, and was the girl from bridge to terrabithia. (the movie that made me cry hysterically when I was 12 and I never watched it again because it Broke Me!) thats super cool.

-vlad sucks: the episode, basically. what's new!! I love how he's like, I'm Not A Villain. *immediately cuts to him torturing danny to make him transform, to get mid-transformation DNA, to perfect a Clone.* *immediately shows that he doesnt give a shit about his new daughter Dani and just wants a ''more perfect clone'' and will put her in danger to get that. will let her DIE to get that*

-Dani is danny's clone and is a girl? transgenderism....one of them has to be trans. or they both are.

-dani just. leaving at the end. WHAT? SHES 12. DONT JUST. NO!!! SHE WAS PROBABLY JUST BORN, A MONTH AGO AT MOST, RIGHT?? SHE NEEDS...SOMEWHERE TO LIVE. MONEY? FOOD?? A FAMILY?? AN EDUCATION???! WHAT DO YOU MEAN SHE'S LEAVING!!! OKAY BYE I GUESS!!! D: concern!!!

-the next ep opens with skulker chasing a ghost down. ...does skulker count as a ghost hunter in the way valerie and danny do? I mean, sure, he hunts the good guys too, but he. he hunts ghosts...also, we haven't seen his Real Form since his debut episode! tiny...

-the guys in white are back! ngl, I assumed they were a gag for that one episode. you're telling me they might actually be a threat? ok.

-valerie in her lil nasty burger uniform looks so cute!! glad shes not in that mascot uniform this time. I guess she stopped hiding that she's working there now?

-gregor having white hair, dressed in black and white...and green eyes...sam has a Type, I guess.

-danny being unnecessarily hostile about gregor. danny!!! hes been nice so far. he looks a little...tall to be 14, but. danny doesnt know anything about him! (he does Suspect, but...you cant just spy on people and be rude to them from a hunch.) also, gregor kissed her, and when she freaked out, he was like 'oh no!! sorry, we can take it slow! I understand!' which was NICE. I hate jealousy plots still tho.

-altho. umm. tucker, being concerned about danny spying on them??? SAM AND YOU WERE SPYING ON DANNY AND VALERIE A FEW EPISODES AGO!!!!! im not saying its RIGHT, but dont be a hypocrite!!! AND THEN SAM BEING MAD ABOUT IT, TOO.

-DANNY IS A 7 ON THE SCALE OF ECTOPLASMIC POWER!!! out of 10? so I want to know where the other ghosts rank...I mean it's a list from the guys in white, so, it may not even be accurate, like, they havent seen ALL of his powers, have they?

-Lancer being like 'im not cooperating with the FEDS' until they said they could access his tax records. they already did that joke with jack, but like, its still funny. kings of tax evasion.

-tucker's aggressive third-wheeling. but gregor being super into it. gregor/tucker is the real ship here. then gregor kissing danny on both cheeks after hugging him. bi poly king gregor. (he does turn out to be a liar with a phoney accent. unsurprising, BUT THE CONCEPT OF HIM BEING GENUINE AND THEM ALL DATING IS FUN)

-THE...GUYS IN WHITE THINKING GREGOR IS DANNY PHANTOM. LMAOOO. GET HIS ASS. or,, Elliot. lmfao

-sam saying tucker is part of the package because theyre friends was super sweet <3 but also 'part of the package'...polyships are obviously the solution to these dumb jealousy/love triangle plots.

-danny crashed a whole plane. the collateral damage...

-is he....

-you know....

.... (ITS NOT GAY IF YOU'RE DOING IT TO PRETEND TO BE SOMEONE YOU'RE NOT, AND LIE TO A GIRL. RIGHT? he was getting a little too into pretending to enjoy tucker's company, and the above...c'mon, guy.)

-lmao, freakshow is in actual prison. I didn't expect a follow up, or for him to show back up! in the finale of this season, too!

-THE SICK TATTOO GHOST IS NAMED LYDIA!!! more Lore On her. freakshow seemed genuinely concerned about her. also, is she mute? I don't think she talked the first time we saw her, either. and we didn't know freakshow 'envied' ghosts, either, the first time, we just knew he was controlling them. interesting!

-...they literally stole the infinity gauntlet from marvel and called it the reality gauntlet. is that legal. what the fuck. even with the gems in the lil slots, having different powers...they had freakshow in jail, but didnt check his pockets??! hes just still in his lil outfit??? what kind of ...oh, its in amity park. yeah, all of the adults are idiots, okay, sure.

-'freakshow!' 'in the anemic flesh!' dude take some iron pills then. also, sure, the red eyes could be contacts for his aesthetic, but the whites of his eyes are yellow! does he have jaundice?! he severely needs more...like, every kind of vitamin. (this is what im worried about as freakshow attacks danny with giant robots)

-again, goth circus is a sick theme, and I love his goth train.

-oh FUCK every single person saw danny transform. on a stage. including his parents via TV. oh god. the guys in white and immediately like 'youre coming in for experiments!' SCARY. at least the crowd is willing to help him to escape...perks of now being a local celeb! even the kids at school are accepting :) this is what, the third time his family has found out? its always been an alt timeline tho. and danny fully intending to just rewrite things again instead of...I dunno, trying to roll with it this time? hes really worried his family won't accept him, huh...

-'maybe our son IS THE GHOST BOY, but its not as if our family's ghostly activities have EVER PUT YOUR FAMILIES IN DANGER' maddie. mmmmmmmmmmmm. okay.

-danny 100% prepared to run away from home because of this :( oh :( and saying his parents are 'looking for him, or a scalpel to dissect him with' ouch...

-THE GUYS IN WHITE TRYING TO ARREST A 14 YEAR OLD. fuck da feds.

-side note (another one about voice actors...) freakshow's voice actor, Jon Cryer, was lex luthor in pretty much every DC tv show, which is why I recognized his voice, because my dad loves those shows so I've seen a good bit of them without seeking them out...)

-the old man saying 'hey, i still had minutes left!' and danny saying 'you gotta watch those roaming charges!' about danny destroying the people in the diner's phones so no one could report seeing him...would kids today understand these things. can you even BUY minutes anymore...I remember my first phone being a flip phone, and the fact I always had minutes when my sister ran out super fast, because I didnt have friends calling or texting me like she did...:/

-the fentons being genuinely like 'why didnt danny trust us and tell us this, we love him :(' and JAZZ LAYING INTO THEM WITH THE 'DISSECTION/MOLECULE BY MOLECULE' LINES. LITERALLLLY. they need to apologize

-technically, lydias stronger than you! -jazz lesbianism moments! when did you even learn her name!!! but also get freakshows ass. lydia is also cooler looking. looove her design sm still.

-jazz psychoanalyzing freakshow... (also, her also having ghost envy? au where jazz is a ghost!! id like to see it)

-im glad the kids still got to go to their respective vacation things, even if they cant really stick around and enjoy them much...

-furry: confirmed. (also tucker calling her hot. tucker is a furry confirmed)

-danny being mad someone at the comic con is selling comics of him without permission, lmfao. give him his royalties!

-freakshow > thanos because hes a drama clown and does use his gauntlet to be FLASHY AND DRAMATIC.

-jazz's 'USE PYSCOLOGY' to danny about freakshow LMAOO. AND THEN IT WORKING. but, oh, freakshow's ghost form sucks. I like him as a clown better tbh. good thing danny took away his ghost powers!

-his parents hugging him and saying theyre proud :"( and saying 'of course you lied to us, we never gave you a reason not to!' and saying they were in the wrong basically for always talking about hurting ghosts aaaa :""(

-then he WIPED THEIR MEMORIES AGAIN!!! FUCK. I can understand him wiping the goverments/student bodies' memories, but why his parents?? they were being accepting!! ARGHHH. season 3 couldve been them all trying to adjust to them knowing!

-I know, on a meta level the showrunners probably wanted to just reset things to the status quo of him having a secret identity. But. We've been doing that for (2) seasons, I'd love if season 3 could be like, his parents adjusting to this and trying way harder to learn more and accept it (and the shenanigans that could come from that) and for fun, if he didn't wipe the students memories, it could be him being popular for a while, then everyone slowly realizing, oh, he's still Danny. Like. he might have ghost powers but hes Just The Same Guy instead of putting him on a pedestal (and seeing them all try and help him hide it from the giw/people who don't know!!)

-fuck they didn't even explain WHY he wiped everyone except sam, tucker and jazz's memories. he just Did It right when his parents were saying they loved/accepted him!! and sam and tucker didnt question it at all!!! HELLO??? very annoyed about this turn of events.

-anyway. onto season 3! I know its shorter than the first two seasons, and is the last season... I might just do it in 2 bursts if I can... :3c depends on the episodes' content and how much I want to say about each!

#sanchoyorambles #danny phantom #dp thoughts

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renee-writer · 4 years ago

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The Surrogate Chapter 34 The Octopus

“I hear it is like the feel of the missing umbilical cord in their hands.” Ellen explains as she put the last stitch in in the knitted octopus.

“That makes sense.” Claire replies. They sit in the NICU waiting room. Faith is having her week check-up, and what a long week it has been, so her parents and grandparents wait.

“It is a beautiful gesture mam. She will treasure it.” Jamie is nervous, bouncing about, unable to sit still, until he hears how his daughter is doing.

She has gained weight to lose it. Had her oxygen turned down to have it go up again. The one thing that has stayed good is her jaundice. Her wee liver has woken, with the help of the bilirubin lights and her mam’s precious breast milk, and they can now see her eyes. As blue as the loch beside Lallybroch in the spring. Her daddy’s Mackenzie eyes.

“Truly wonderful, my love.” Brian agrees.

“I had to be about something. Claire is wonderful at providing milk.” The poor lass pumps every two hours, day and night. “Jamie sooths her with his Gaelic prayers, Brian, you have been so faithful at keeping everyone informed, well knitting is what I can do.”

“You have done much more then that, Mrs. Fraser. You have been the mum I have needed. I am not sure I would have made it, this far, without you.”

“Oh Claire, you would have, but thank you.” They hug tight in the middle of the room. That is when the doctor steps in.

“The family of Faith Fraser?”

“That is us.” Jamie stands and his da does, placing his arm about him, for support.

“Excellent. I have mostly good news. Faith is maintaining her body temperature, blood sugar, and pressure. Her blood is clear of infection. She has gained and held two ounces. Her jaundice is completely gone.

“The bad?” Claire asks.

“We hoped she would be ready for kangaroo care by now but we need a few more days. Her suck reflex is still absent. We will need to continue to feed her through the tube. She still requires supplemental oxygen. But in reality, she is doing very well for her gestational age.”

“Thank you doctor.” Jamie let’s out a long held breath.

“May she have this?” Ellen holds out the knitted octopus. “I have read it helps.”

“It does and she may. Let’s go let you give it to her.” They go through the familiar ritual of scrubbing and gowning up before stepping through the NICU doors.

“Hi beautiful. How is our girl today?” Claire coos. Faith kicks her feet at her mam’s voice. “Is that so? Your doctor says you are doing well. But of course you are. You are our Fierce Faith “ She smiles at the sign hanging right outside her isolete that declares her thus. It was made by her cousins.

“Hi Faith. Granny has made you something.” Jamie adds. Ellen steps up and the octopus is handed to the nurse who smiles before placing it beside her.

“To remind you of your first home and that you are never alone. We Fraser’s and Beauchamp’s surround you. We always will.” Her grandda adds.

They watch as her tiny hand closes around one of the tentacles and tugs. She seems to sigh as her eyes drift close.

“Oh my God!” Ellen speaks for all as they watch her relax against it.

#my writing #outlander fanfic #the surrogate #the octopus #jamie and claire #cannon divergence #modern au #outlander fandom

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tsunflowers · 4 years ago

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I hope cure papaya’s eyes look more normal in the actual show bc I hate the way they look. she looks like she has an as yet undiscovered disease. the cousin of jaundice

what is this. my hope is that in the action scenes her eyelashes won’t be very well defined and I wont have to see this and in the transformation the big budget will make them look cute and pretty. the blue eyelashes are just so much

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exercise-of-trust · 5 years ago

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[[i am not writing silmfic instead of studying for my music final, i am writing silmfic as a means of studying for my music final. set at some point after maglor has made his way home, and obviously well after finrod’s rebirth.]]

"I am – I am not saying, don't put words in my mouth -" Kanafinwë Makalaurë wagged his finger at his cousin Findaráto Ingoldo, perched bright-eyed beside him on the edge of the stream - "that it is bad. You know full well that I believe there is no such thing as empirically bad music." They were kicking their feet in the moonlight water, watching the light dance in the fast-flowing spray, and they were both extremely drunk.

"A count on which I heartily disagree with you, but continue." Findaráto took another long draught from the bottle between them and passed it back to Kanafinwë with a nod.

"You are, and always have been, a prescriptivist bastard, but that can't be helped. As I was saying, I do not think the new music is bad. I think it shows less attention to technical skill than I am accustomed to, and it affords the composer less scope for – what's the word -" he collapsed into a run of Sindarin, rendered barely intelligible by a strong Mannish accent and several thousand years of separation from the dialect Findaráto had learned, before resurfacing - "for individual expression, for flourish. I personally believe that declaiming text is not the point of song, and that if you are limiting yourself to one melodic line and an entirely syllabic setting you are wasting worlds of sound, which should be the only concern of new composition – but you are entitled to your own opinion." He drank again.

"By your own definitions of good and bad, which I believe you last articulated to me as 'serving its purpose' and 'not,' I rather think you do consider it bad music, when compared to your hour-long melismas and your reams of incoherent polyphony." Kanafinwë shot him a jaundiced look, which was ruined by Findaráto paying more attention to a fruit bat on the other side of the stream than to him.

"There is only music with and without intention, and it is the level of intention that determines quality," Kanafinwë said with a stab at dignity, steadying himself on the log next to him. "No, that's not right. There is only music with intention. Anything else is sound. If you meant to make music, you have."

Findaráto stared at him in blank astonishment. "Absolutely not." Kanafinwë tried to pass him the bottle, but as Findaráto did not seem inclined to do anything other than continue staring at him, he let his hand fall. "You are telling me, then, that – that – suppose I took a collection of handbells." Kanafinwë raised his eyebrows, and nearly fell over.

"So, you have your handbells. Continue."

"Suppose further that I took, oh, I took one of those – what do you call them, where the ball runs down the pyramid of pegs, suppose I used that to either ring a bell or rest, perfectly randomly, and then sent hundreds of balls down in the first rhythmic mode, long-breve long-breve long-," he counted it out on a stone between them, and would have kept going, save that Kanafinwë kicked his foot.

"Just a moment, that's not evenly random, it's a normal distribution, I don't see how you plan to approximate anything remotely resembling true randomness with this -"

"Suppose," said Findaráto, with a ragged desperation, and Kanafinwë sat back with a gesture both of unsteady contempt and defeat.

"So, I will grant you your random distribution. Continue – name of light, I cannot wait to see in what direction you will bend this argument next."

"Suppose I leave it and go away for a month, and by chance it plays a new variation on, say, the melody of the Cuckoo's movement from Birds of Summer, in the second week. You would say that is not music, even if the contraption played a technically perfect rota, because it happened by chance, without intent?"

"You are drunk," Kanafinwë said, with an attempt at the tones of tolerant sobriety that utterly lacked self-awareness, and so fell short. "Therefore I will excuse your laughable estimate at the amount of time that would require – my god, even leaving out the base feet, you are talking a chance at – how many different bells are there? Say it is the least possible number, that is -" he ran through a bar or two in a flutter of quick, brilliant notes that set the birds singing in his wake, even after he was done and tallying up his fingers - "nine pitches and one empty for a rest, probably more if it is a variation so let us round to twelve, and unless memory fails the Cuckoo movement is a mere twelve or thirteen bars – it is one out of twelve-to-the-ninety-sixth possible songs of the same length, supposing equal randomness, and you would have to go to the Mathematical Conservatory if you wanted the exact numbers for the real distribution, it has been years since I have needed to know them – but over the space of a month, if you kept this running at a steady allegro, your chances might rise to -"

"You are avoiding the question," Findaráto interrupted, because even quite drunk he knew the best way to convince one of his cousins to come down from a tangent was an accusation of cowardice. "Is it music? If it happened, would you call it music?"

"Of course," Kanafinwë said, a surprised frown burying itself between his eyebrows, and Findaráto threw his hands up in frustration. There was a clatter, and a splash, and the bottle broke into a perfectly musical chime on the jutting river-rocks of the streambed. "Of course, because the intent was there when you built your – whatever it is. The intent to have music. You have merely introduced an element of natural interference, no greater than the fluctuations of the voice or the vibrations of a harp-string." He paused, looking morosely down at the glass shimmering across the stones and under the water, and added, "You could have said wind chimes, if that was all the answer you wanted. Now I will have to build the damned thing."

#maglor #finrod #this is about the council of trent and the shift away from extremely complex polyphony as a part of the counter-reformation #i'm also borrowing in part from the development of protestant anthems around the same time #both of which shared age-old concerns dating back to st. augustine about the corrupting powers of music #and the importance of intelligible sacred text #also the importance of 'not having fun' and 'making miserably boring music'#i also stole wholesale from the reading rota/sumer is icumen in #which is indeed mode 1 and is also the oldest surviving example of 6-voice polyphony #anyway it's a great example of english musical tradition and also it /slaps/#more things in heaven and earth #property law #might do more of this depending on how little i feel like going through the rest of my notes but there's plenty for these two to argue about

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wisdomrays · 4 years ago

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TAFAKKUR: Part 95

The Revival of Prophetic And Herbal Medicine: Part 1

Introduction

The example of Prophet Muhammad, upon him be peace, is explicitly commended in the Qur’an as the best pattern for believers to follow. Therefore, the practice and precepts of the Prophet have been a source of legal judgements and general guidance in the affairs of Muslims since the earliest days of Islam, a source which supplements and is second only to the Qur’an. Since health is so important a part of human well-being, it is not surprising that Muslims over the centuries devoted so much effort to recording and reflecting upon what the Prophet taught about maintaining good health, preventing and curing diseases and ailments.

The most widespread book on ‘Prophetic Medicine’ was that written by Ibn Qayim al-Jawziyiah (691-751AH / 1293-1351). But there are scores of manuscripts on the subject in world libraries and museums. After a preliminary study, I found references to some forty different books (some published, most manuscripts, some lost) with the title ‘Prophetic Medicine’. In his 1985 paper on Islamic heritage, S. Abdullah al-Habashi of Yemen mentioned 23 monographs by different authors on plagues and infectious diseases - I could add a further 16 on the same subject. He went on to write a book on infectious diseases as related to Prophetic Medicine, with a Foreword by the late Sheikh al-Azhar. ‘Abd al-Halim Mahmud.

Recently, the number of publications on Prophetic Medicine as a whole or on different areas of it has been growing rapidly. There are many books and articles, referenced with ahadith (sayings) of the Prophet on the curative properties of honey, black seed (Nigella Sativa), senna (Casiacutifolia), henna (Lawsonia Inermis), aloes (Aloe Vera), garlic and onions, olive oil, etc.; on the positive health benefits of breast feeding, and of the Islamic practices of fasting, prayers, ablution, cleaning the teeth and mouth, etc. Doctors in particular have been very active in elucidating the relevant ahadith and their importance to health promotion and disease prevention. Papers are published almost weekly on Islamic teachings related to health concerns, for example on food and drink (prohibition of excess, of pork, blood, and intoxicant drugs like alcohol), on circumcision, on sexuality and marriage (particularly with regard to the spread of sexually transmitted diseases such as AIDS).

There is growing interest, too, reflected in the volume of publications, in spiritual medicine which treats psychological ailments believed to be produced by evil jinn (evil spirits). Die treatment usually includes reciting particular chapters or verses of the Qur’an, certain supplications attributed to the Prophet, and making incantations.

Current issues in medical ethics from an Islamic perspective have also received a great deal of attention in recent times. There are literally hundreds of articles, books and doctoral dissertations on organ transplantation, brain death, new methods of procreation including test-tube babies and surrogacy, abortion, contraception, cloning and genetic engineering.

Traditional Medicine

As lbn KHaldun observes in his famous Muqaddimah, the pre - Islamic Arabs used a sort of folk medicine based on herbs and plants tested by experience and handed down. At the time of Prophet Muhammad, there were surgeons adept at treating wounds, abscesses and other minor operations, and also some renowned physicians like al-Harith ibn Kalada of Ta’if who had travelled to Jundishapur (near Ahwaz in Iran) to gain more knowledge. The Prophet asked his cousin Sa’d ibn Abi Waqqas to consult al-Harith when Sa’d fell ill after the conquest of Makkah in 8AH(630).

Cupping, venesection and cautery were all common pre-Islamic treatments endorsed by the Prophet with some reservation against cautery. Cupping with blood-letting was definitely encouraged by him and there are tens of ahadith related to this procedure. It is interesting to note that cupping and cautery are still widely practised in Arab countries, especially among villagers and Bedouins.

Recently, Dr. Mansoor Suliman of the medicine faculty of King Abdul Aziz University, Jeddah, published a paper on ‘The myth and reality of treatment by cautery’ in Alternative Medicine (1986, 1(3), pp.237-40). He studied 500 patients treated with cautery and modern techniques for different ailments. He found that cautery was useful in treating diarrhoe where 45% of those cauterized showed marked improvement. Cautery was useless for jaundice, haemolytie blood diseases, respiratory diseases, other infectious diseases and cancers, though it was helpful in stopping bleeding. Diathermy (cautery) is also used in modern medicine to treat epistaxis, cervical erosion, to stop bleeding during operations, and to remove warts and other skin tumours. There are also different types of modern heat therapy e.g. infrared and laser therapy.

Cupping and blood-letting were used widely in the past to treat different ailments e.g. hypertension, polycythemia, and even heart failure. Modern medicine rarely, if ever, resorts to such measures.

The pre-Islamic Arabs believed in supernatural forces such as evil spirits, the evil eye and so on, and sought to counter them with spells, amulets, talismans and other animistic practices. The Qur’an (see 72.6) deplored all such rituals of seeking refuge from evil spirits as a pseudo-worship and therefore a sort of polytheism. The Prophet Muhammad scorned superstitious beliefs. Al-Bukhari records his saying: ‘There is no Adwa (i.e. contagion) [except by the will of Allah]; no Safar [the pagan Arabs believed that Safar, the last month in the lunar calendar, can cause malady. Safar could also refer to huge ‘snakes’ that dwell in the abdomen of some people and cause serious disease]; no Ha’ma [i. e, vengeful ghosts of the dead that hover around the living].’ And Tirmidhi records the Prophet saying: ‘Whoever wears an amulet has relapsed into shirk (polytheism). Whoever goes to a fortuneteller or a divine and asks him about anything, his prayers extending for four nights will not be accepted.’ In another hadith, he said: ‘Magic spells, amulets and the like are shirk.’ Polytheism is considered in Islam the worst of sins, the one that will never be pardoned by God until the person repudiates all forms of polytheism and reverts to pure, original monotheism. The Muslim should have faith in God alone, in whose control lie the causes of health and disease, life and death, in fact of all things, small or large.

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thejakeformerlyknownasprince · 6 years ago

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So just for something fun, supernatural AU/crossover?

[Dear Anon, I’m not sure if you meant “supernatural” in the general sense or “supernatural” as in Supernatural the TV series, but I went with the latter.]

Their van belongs to Tobias. The title’s in his name, anyway, even if Rachel does most of the driving. It’s Marco, however, who paints the thing to look like the Mystery Machine.

Rachel blanches at the sight of the turquoise horror that greets her when she walks out of the motel room the next morning. Jake grumbles about it the whole day, complaining that he’s been betrayed by Tobias’s willingness to help Marco with this monstrosity. Now no one will take them seriously.

…which is, Marco says, the whole point.

The cops who investigate grave desecrations and destruction of property have no reason to suspect the six dumb college kids driving the garish performance piece. The otherwise-suspicious locals tend to break their narrow-eyed glares to smile in spite of themselves when they see that van pull up outside. The demons don’t know to be afraid — not until it’s already too late.

Anyway, it’s their home. They stop by Marco’s parents’ roadhouse as often as they can, and they’ll spend the night at Toby’s any time they swing through Indiana. If one of them is injured in a way impossible to explain to a civilian doc — striga claw marks, holy water burns, hex bag brands — that’s when Cassie’s mom will stitch them up with no questions asked. But there are six sleeping bags bundled into the back of their van, and six duffels that rarely leave its trunk. Their van has 900,000 miles on it and counting, worn places where Rachel rests her favorite rifle on the dash as Ax drives and a window seat that sags perpetually from Jake’s too-long legs jamming up against the support springs. It’s been with them since Tobias first came to collect them, one by one (“my dad’s on a hunting trip and hasn’t been home in a few days,” he’d said, so casual, as if they didn’t all know what that meant), and it’ll probably outlive every single one of them.

Rachel is fond of pointing out that they are, none of them, suited for desk jobs or apple-pie life. They’re hunters, she says, and they’re better off this way. Jake wonders, sometimes, who she’s trying to fool.

Cassie crouches to close the little girl’s eyes, fingers trembling. The striga was done eating by the time they arrived, too late to be of any help. M-O-L-L-Y, says the hand-painted line of flowers on the wall. Cassie looks for a long time, before she can straighten up and move on.

Marco arches off the bed sometimes, gasping hard like it’s him the kelpie dragged under the waves. Like he’s the one who went down, sailboat and all, to drown in the cold depths of the Pacific. He becomes too bright and too loud and a little too mean, any time they find themselves dealing with a water demon or a ghostly possession.

Jake enters the first four, first five, sometimes the first nine digits of his aunt’s phone number, on burners and payphones and Michelle’s secure lines. He never gets all the way, never actually asks anyone to let Rachel come home, and he’s never even tempted where his own parents are concerned.

“What’d you get for it?” Cassie’s voice is hard-edged with anger in a way that Marco has never heard before. He doesn’t bother to ask how she knows. That tiny touch of psychic, mostly on her father’s side, means that she was always going to figure it out.

“Three years,” he says, offering her his smoothest smile.

Cassie stares at Marco. Both of her hands are fisted in the hem of her flannel, trembling slightly. Her lips are pressed into a tight line.

“You know what?” Marco laughs, the sound more desperate than he means it to be. “That was far more than the demon wanted to offer, even for a top-shelf soul like this one. I drive a hard bargain.”

Cassie continues to look at him, until he feels himself shrinking in his seat. “What did you get for it?” she asks again, still not asking about the time.

Peter called today. For nearly an hour he chattered so much — about the roadhouse, about the new dog, about the wedding in July — that Marco could barely get a word in edgewise. Marco’s not sure about this Nora person, or he wasn’t at first, but Peter smiles every time he sees her or even says her name. The first smiles Marco’s seen, the first complete sentences he’s heard, since the Coast Guard knocked on their door and asked them to sit down.

What’s dead should stay dead. After five years in the business, Marco knows that much. His mother is gone. But happiness… even a lifetime’s worth… that doesn’t have to be out of reach. Not for Peter. Even if it does come with a toy poodle and an excess of algebra.

Marco pushes to his feet. “None of your business,” he says. “It’s my soul, and I’ll do what I want with it.”

He honestly doesn’t know what Cassie has in mind when she stands and crosses over to him. Not until she grabs him in a hug so fierce it hurts, squeezing her whole body around him. “I’m getting you out of this,” she promises. “I don’t care what it takes, I’m not letting them collect.”

Ax was never even supposed to be on the mission to retrieve Marco’s soul from hell. He tells them that a lot, that he was the only cherub included in the entire garrison of seraphim on what was supposed to be a milk run, an easy first mission just to get his wingtips wet.

He wasn’t supposed to be the only survivor. He certainly wasn’t supposed to rebel mere months later when ordered to cut out Tobias’s heart to complete a cosmic ritual.

But then, lots of things that weren’t supposed to happen have happened anyway. Marco was never supposed to die facedown in the half-frozen mud of a South Dakota ghost town. No righteous man was ever supposed to reach the gates of hell, breaking the first seal as Taylor’s claws broke the surface of his soul.

Aftran is supposed to be helping her overlords do their best to destroy the earth right now, not assisting humanity’s rebellion against angels and demons alike. Jake is supposed to be at home with his parents, not wanted by the FBI for his brother’s murder and a dozen corpse mutilations.

For that matter, “hasn’t been home in a few days” was supposed to mean that Tobias’s dad was “dead or worse,” not “forcibly called back to heaven to help set up the apocalypse, ‘cause turns out he left out a few crucial fucking details when explaining my family history.”

“…draco maledicte et omnis legio diabolica, adiuramus te!” Rachel recites. And then waits, arms crossed, holy water at the ready.

Jake’s mouth curls. “Okay, we’ve got the Catholic bullshit out of the way. Now do you believe me?” Two fingertips drum against the arm of the chair to which he’s tied.

Tobias looks over at Rachel. Neither of them makes a move to break the devil’s trap. “What the fuck are you?” Rachel demands at last, feeling her patience fray.

Jake’s shoulder lifts in a half-shrug. “A high school dropout with six bucks to his name?”

“And severe cataracts?” Rachel flicks more holy water at Jake; it continues to do nothing. “We saw your eyes flash white. Cut the crap.”

“Or what?” Something subtle shifts in Jake’s voice, becoming rough and cold. “You’ve killed enough of your cousins for a lifetime, don’t you think? And Tobias…” The thing under Jake’s skin runs his tongue over his teeth. “I know what you and this one get up to in the dark. Either way, I’m guessing neither one of you is ready to hurt this precious meat—”

Wham! The chair back slams to the floor. Rachel’s knee is pressed into Jake’s chest. Her knife blade digs into his throat. “Guess again,” she snarls.

“Rachel!” Tobias’s warning comes too late. Partway loose now, the demon gestures, flinging Rachel across the room. Jake’s body pulls free from the broken chair, motions not quite human. Turning, the demon spots Tobias. It draws itself up. And up.

Jake’s eyes go white with shock when the thing inside him realizes it has lifted clear off the floor. That it cannot move his arms or legs. His mouth opens; there’s an abortive motion as it struggles to escape the meatsuit that now entraps it.

Tobias’s right hand is raised. His eyes shine with a radiance entirely different from the sickly, jaundiced shield over Jake’s. The light surrounding Tobias seems to come from everywhere at once, and yet it all shines on him, throwing the wings of his silhouette into sharp relief against the far wall.

“What are you?” the thing inside Jake asks, half-strangled.

“Been asking that question for twenty-three years, pal,” Tobias says. Blood trickles from his nose. His hand trembles slightly. His eyes are steady. “Guess we’re in the same boat, because I’ve never seen anything like you either.”

Jake’s lips pull back from his teeth, grimace or smile. “I am what happens when a demon eats an angel. Swallowed him up, grace and all, and now I’m a Knight of Hell. And now I’m starting to think that before that happened, Elfangor might’ve got busy while he was here on Earth.” It leers. “So naughty, that one.”

Tobias squeezes his hand inward. Jake’s body convulses, yellow-white flashing under his skin.

“Wait, wait—” The thing gasps air. “I can give you power, information, revenge, I can give you—”

“I want my father back, you son of a bitch.” Tobias closes his hand. Light flares, sharp enough to blind. With it comes the unearthly scream of angelic power.

When their vision clears, Rachel and Tobias find Jake — just Jake — kneeling on the floor. He’s swaying in shock where he stares up at Tobias. “Did we know you could do that?” Jake asks, voice sandpaper-raw.

“I’m gonna vote ‘no,’” Rachel says, looking at Tobias’s flabbergasted expression.

“Okay, cool, still badass.” Jake slumps sideways; Tobias lunges to catch him before he hits the floor. “I’mma take a nap… for the next eighteen hours or so… then we can figure this all out later.”

“It’ll scar, won’t it,” Rachel says, watching Cassie’s neat row of stitches press into her leg as if it belongs to someone else. She’s not bothered, she doesn’t think. It’s not that she thinks scars are cool, or that they’ll impress anyone. Marco will flutter his eyelashes and swoon when he sees it, of course, but that’s about all the reaction she’ll get, all the reaction she’ll want. She doesn’t think scars make her tough, or that they make her ugly. They’re proof, and that’s what she hates and loves about them. Proof that she’s still alive. Proof of what she’s been through and yet survived. Proof that you should see the other guy, only of course there’s no seeing him, because he — it — is always ashes on the ground.

“Tobias?” Mr. Feyroyan says, and Tobias stops at the door. He’s pleasantly surprised to be remembered, given that he attended this high school for a few months at most. “Did you ever get out?” Mr. Feyroyan asks. “Make your own life, the way you said wanted to do?”

Tobias considers talking about the five semesters of college he managed before the same things that’ve been chasing him his entire life caught up to him. Considers explaining that he understands, now, why they had to move so often and why his dad had to be away so much of the time. Considers admitting that the family business pulled him in, the way it was always going to do.

Considers the traces of ectoplasm still embedded under his nails from the ghost possession this morning.

“I help people where I can,” Tobias says, because at least that much is true. “And this life isn’t so bad. Not as long as you’ve got people willing to live it with you.”

Ax wasn’t raised to doubt. He was raised to be a warrior. The right hand of God. Absolute. Unquestioning. Wrathful. He was raised to fight and die in the war against the demons and forces of darkness. Not to make decisions on his own, with no one to guide him.

“Is it a sin,” Cassie asked him once, “to want to know the truth?”

She believes in him, the way that she’s meant to. The way that he’s meant to believe in Jake, in God, in the righteousness of heaven. That doesn’t stop her from asking questions of them all.

Humans are pitiful, evanescent beings. Earthly and evil. Half-clay, half-spirit, and the clay half usually wins. Aximili is supposed to demand their respect, to tell them be not afraid as they quail before him. He is not supposed to let them shorten his name and feed him pecan pie and show him soap opera marathons.

It’s hard to remember that, sometimes, when he and Rachel exchange a bumping of fists over an annihilated vampire nest. When Marco lifts yet another bottle down from the bar, wait’ll you try this one. When he watches his nephew curl an invisible-intangible wing around Jake’s body where they sit at the edge of a reservoir, as if Michael’s sword is not a mere empty vessel but a precious and unique soul, worthy of being treasured.

“An angel, a demon, a nephilim, and their pet humans walk into a bar!” Marco announces loudly. It has the desired effect, which is to say that Nora lowers the shotgun she grabbed the instant Euclid started barking at their approach.

Still in the front entrance of the roadhouse, Marco and Euclid exchange their usual greetings of polite mutual loathing. Even Marco can’t deny that the little monster has his uses, when it comes to smelling unclean things.

Aftran seems solid enough, mostly. But Marco thinks sometimes he can detect a hint of what Euclid smells coming off her: sulfur, smoke, the occasional unsavory whiff of little Karen’s body rotting around the corpse-animating creature within.

Nora thunks half a dozen shot glasses on the bar, pouring holy water-laced whiskey as she goes. That’s for the humans, and Tobias.

“What’ll it be for you, Precious Moments?” Nora asks, using Marco’s nickname for Ax.

Ax refrains from pointing out for the four millionth time that being a fallen cherub doesn’t mean that his true form bears any resemblance to porcelain figurines, and instead sits at the bar. “I would like the usual, if you please,” he intones.

Chuckling, Nora reaches down a bottle of Cinnabon Pinnacle.

Jake swallows his shot quickly, grimacing at the taste of the silver-lined glass. “Does Peter have anything for us yet?”

“It’s nice to see you, too, Jake,” Nora says. “I’m doing well, thanks for asking. Have you killed any monsters since we last spoke?”

Chastised, Jake settles over his second drink.

“There are new omens, of course.” Nora slides a plate of fries and a glass of whiskey — sans holy water — toward Aftran. “All up and down the U.S. The pattern isn’t holding anymore, or it’s just gotten so dense it can’t be detected. Almost like…”

“It’s the end of the world?” Marco suggests.

She smiles grimly. “Almost. Funny, you noticed that too?”

Marco likes Nora, mostly because she doesn’t try to mother him.

“Let’s get to it, if that’s all right with you.” Jake sets his glass on the bar. “World’s not gonna save itself, after all.”

Marco runs off row after row of glossy badges, engraved name tags, exquisitely forged shields. Only to have Ax present them upside-down, wide-eyed and utterly clueless. Only to have Cassie drop the act and start telling the truth the millisecond she thinks a witness or victim has half a chance of believing them. He’s not even sure why he hangs around with these numbskulls. Probably because they’d be lost without him.

“Would you have made a good lawyer, you think?” Jake asks.

He and Tobias are sitting at the lip of an open grave, splitting a beer as they wait for the bones to burn down enough to fill the dirt back in. Their shoulders touch, which is the most affection they ever show, really, living out of each other’s pockets as much as the six of them do.

That’s probably why Jake thought to ask. Because this is the closest they ever come to having a real date: watching bones burn. Jake’s already on the FBI’s Most Wanted list, and Tobias is wanted by forces a hell of a lot scarier than mere law enforcement, so they tend to be the ones to risk racking up an entirely moot number of grave desecration charges while the others clean up the rest of the hunt.

“Probably not, no,” Tobias says. “You’re always telling me I see too many sides of every story. That would’ve made me a crap lawyer, even if…”

Even if he wasn’t a walking grimoire of spare parts. He’s gone through the lore in Cassie’s family’s bunker, enough to know what all those demons and angels are after. A vial of his blood can grant a few hours of invulnerability to harm. A drop of his grace can open an interdimensional rift. Cut his heart out and you can close heaven itself. Stuff an angel inside him, and the resultant being could create and destroy universes with a wave of the hand.

“You could get out, you know,” Jake says. “Now that you can protect yourself.”

Laughing, Tobias shakes his head. “Cassie,” he counters. “Cassie could get out.”

“Cassie will get out. Just as soon as she figures out a different way to help, one that involves less hurting.” Jake’s confidence probably isn’t even misplaced. Cassie’s the one with the clean record, the sane outlook, the skills she can actually put on a résumé. She’s not like the rest of them, dragged into this life because of one tragedy or another. “I have hope for Rachel too.”

Tobias hmmms. That one, he’s not so sure. Rachel’s record is clean, yes, if only because everyone from the cops to the surviving Berensons believes that it was Jake who pulled the trigger on Tom. “Rachel thrives in this life,” he says.

“If she would just freaking call her mom, get a little help getting set up…” Jake makes a gesture of frustration. He went to prison to protect his cousin, only to have her break him out and them both end up living full-time to hunt things like the one that took Tom.

“Marco’s headed for semi-retirement already, you watch.” Tobias changes the subject, because he’s a coward.

That one catches Jake by surprise, causing him to twist around. “You sure about that?”

“Semi-retirement.” Tobias takes a long pull of the beer, passing it back. Their fingers overlap, then lace together, as they talk. “Like what my mom had.”

“She was a hunter?”

“She was the director of the FBI,” Tobias says, smiling at the memory. “On the phone, anyway. She went blind some time before I was born — got a few guesses, now, as to how that happened.”

Jake grimaces. He’s seen for himself what happens when a human looks at the unshielded grace of an angel as powerful as Elfangor.

“So that took her out of field work, and she switched to working the phones full-time.” Tobias tilts his head back, remembering the long row of landlines and cells, the raised bumps of the Braille labels for insurance investigators, Homeland Security, even MI5. “Did that until I was seven, which is when…” When someone came looking for spare nephilim parts. Tore her to pieces instead.

“I stand corrected,” Jake says at last. “Marco would make an excellent full-time bullshit artist.”

Tobias chuckles. “And Ax? Now that he’s all… locked out of heaven?”

“Your taste in music is a crime, you know that?” Jake doesn’t answer the question, which is an answer in itself.

Tobias knew he shouldn’t have asked. There’s no future for fallen angels or freak-of-nature nephilim or alleged career criminals. Not in the private sector anyway.

“So. You, me, and Ax-Man, huh?” Tobias says. “‘til the end of the world?”

Jake levers himself to his feet with a grunt of effort. “That doesn’t sound so bad.” He pulls Tobias up; they lean into each other against the cold graveyard air.

“No.” Tobias takes a breath. Lets himself feel Jake: fragile, human, warm. “Doesn’t sound bad at all.”

#animorphs #animorphs au #au #supernatural #supernatural au #supernatural spoilers #(minor)#jake/tobias #i must be out of my mind #violence #gore #nephilim #long post #anonymous #asks #jake berenson #tobias fangor

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noccalula-writes · 5 years ago

Text

I wrote a long-ass essay about the entire experience with my father, as it was happening, because that’s how I cope with shit.

CW: parental death, discussions of abuse, medical situations, dying.

(7/4/2019)

It’s Thursday. The hospice nurses don’t think he’ll die tonight and I don’t either, but his breathing pattern is beginning to change. The rattling of the gathering fluids at the back of his mouth. The way he sleeps with his mouth hanging fully open, a much further drop than the way he’d nod off in his chair or on the couch, open enough to drool and snore but not the near-scream affectation of his jaw hanging loosely that I’ve been seeing since we arrived here yesterday by ambulance.

His jaundice is returning, albeit more subtly than it was before. Sometimes he sleeps deep. Sometimes his eyebrows move, knitting and raising and fluctuating like he’s in the middle of a very important conversation with someone who just isn’t getting the message. For some reason, I keep thinking he’s talking to his own father. I hope he is. I hope it’s a good conversation.

But his breathing becomes erratic and the emaciated curve of his chest starts to heave a little or goes too still for too long and then rises harshly, and I hold my own breath while I wait to see if his is coming back.

I want to be here when he dies. I will be here when he dies.

***

I had booked a flight on Sunday for 7:45 pm. I made it out the other side of the TSA checkpoint when I got the text that American Airlines had canceled my flight.

I called and explained the direness of the situation, and the best they could offer was 7am the next morning.

Monday morning, I flew into Charlotte NC with a 36 minute layover, just enough to let me pee and refill my water bottle and make it to the gate with less than an hour’s wait til boarding.

No sooner had I sat down than American Airlines sent out yet another text. “Your flight has been cancelled.” I was five and a half hours away from Jacksonville as a straight shot. The next flight they could put me on was at 2:45 that afternoon. The nurses had been encouraging me to come down due to my father’s rapid deterioration – I spent the entire transit up until that point only mildly afraid that he would die before I would arrive.

There in North Carolina? I was terrified.

I called, talked to yet another sympathetic courtesy clerk who could do nothing for me, talked to a far less courteous clerk at the actual airport desk, tried to see if they could just get me a rental car instead. I could either sit for a six hour layover or I could get a car and make it to Jax half an hour before my flight would leave.

Nothing.

I did not have the money to fly here – a dear friend bought my ticket – and I do not have the money to fly back. I’ll work that out after. I definitely did not have the money for my own rental car.

Finally, I went back to the courtesy desk, cried to the older gentleman behind the computer, and how quickly his face changed when I said my father was dying told me he too knew what it meant to need to get home now, now, now.

He handed me a comp ticket for a 1:11 flight that no one else had even brought up with me and told me I had to run if I was going to make it across the airport in time to board.

***

Yesterday morning, he had the last period of real lucidity, unreplicated since we arrived and began comfort-care treatment.

His main doctor came into the ICU and explained to both him and me, freshly awakened by the sound of her pulling his curtain, father and daughter both bleary-eyed but alert and trying to look focused at the importance of the situation.

“There is really nothing else we can do,” she offered with empathy, looking more at me than at him. I don’t blame her for that. It must be harder to look him in the eyes and tell him he’s at the end of the road. We both nod grimly and I ask him, just to be sure, if he understands what she’s saying.

The day before, he slept through my consultations with his kidney doctor and his oncologist and through the group meeting (myself, both half sisters, their mother) with palliative care specialists but naturally was awake when hospice came. The word ‘hospice’ knocked the breath out of him, his left hand searching feebly along the side of his hospital bed, trying to hold on to the edge like he was cresting a daunting roller coaster.

I was crouching to his right, trying to stay eye-level instead of looming over him. I think he reached for my hand. Maybe I reached first. All I know is I took his hand and he squeezed mine.

He asked for a day to consider it, and when that patch of lucidity was gone in twenty minutes, so was his consideration.

That next morning, however, with his lovely doctor standing over us both while I rested my arm and chin on the bedrail beside him, like were co-conspirators instead of a distant father and daughter with a contentious relationship whose power dynamic was about to shift considerably, there was no question of the conversation we were having.

“Do you understand why we need to do this?” I asked him after explaining that we were out of other options. My Great Aunt Jane couldn’t handle home care, even with me present, and he would never get a moment’s peace with her hovering and micromanaging. The hospital was at the end of their ability to care for him, and any measures taken to sustain his life were only delaying the inevitable.

I don’t know if he fully understood that last part, but he nodded, looking away.

I waited for a moment, summoning my courage.

“You understand this is metastatic cancer, right?”

Another nod.

Another moment of gathering courage.

“Your oncologist told me you’ve known about this since last year…” I was cautious, careful not to make him feel judged though I knew it might be a moot point, “Do you remember that?”

He paused, taking assessment, his eyes moving slowly across the ceiling as he pulled through his own memory to find the answer.

“No,” he said slowly, “I don’t… but I must have known.”

***

I arrived on Monday afternoon, my cousin bringing me straight from the airport to the hospital.

I slept on the small sofa in his hospital room both Monday and Tuesday nights. I only left for an hour on Tuesday to meet a close friend at a restaurant right on the other side of the business park from the hospital, a quick catch up to eat and get some take out for Tara.

When I start to worry that I’m doing this because I need to feel like The Goodest Daughter, like I’ve somehow exceeded everyone else’s efforts by miles, I remind myself that I’m still putting chapstick on him, rubbing lotion onto his feet, helping the nurses turn and hold him to change his diaper, enduring the vilest of shit (that systems-are-shutting-down feces is no joke), making sure his dentures are clean and his goatee is free of food despite the fact that he’s called me Tara more than once.

***

My father and I have barely spoken in the last several years.

Nobody seems to suspect that.

***

I’ve been trying to journal but it’s difficult to keep up with considering how tired I am – writing by hand is still a beautiful pastime but I’m at the point where my memory goes so quickly that if I’m not in front of a keyboard, I lose whatever nice prose I thought I had going.

I know from a self-care perspective that I should probably leave a little more often. Go for a walk around the property at a more leisurely pace than my panic-stricken power walk – big body, short little legs, shitty shoes means my legs have been killing me since the day I had to hoof it across the Charlotte airport all the way until I got back from my quick Target trip today, four days later. But I can’t.

The idea of him being alone and afraid makes me feel sick.

But he’s calm now. He’s been calm since we arrived at hospice yesterday afternoon, after I rode in the ambulance beside him that took us from his 8th-floor ICU suite to the Hadlow hospice center on Sunbeam Road, a road only slightly off the path that I rode with my father so many times. We’ve definitely driven down it before together, though, and I can’t stop thinking about time, about how eight years ago today he put “happy 4th, love ya” on my facebook wall and within three years of that we were so strained we barely spoke, existed somewhere not quite yet arriving at estrangement but somewhere further away from familiarity.

***

I’m working very hard to not let that anger I carried for him all the way up until the phone call came on Saturday that he was dying get transmuted into guilt. Of course, it’s happened to some degree, that much I couldn’t fight off – but I’m trying to remember that this anger isn’t the dysfunction of a spoiled kid who couldn’t quit butting heads with her father, but someone who tried very hard to build a relationship that never took, who eventually decided to take her hand off the burner because eventually she stopped accepting pain as a trade-in for affection.

One of the things that has emerged the clearest to me during this transition between ICU to hospice, between periodic lucidity and near constant sleep, is how different a relationship to him Tara has had than Alina or I had. Alina has always carried the bitterness of feeling unfavored atop the conflict that close proximity built between them – she spent the first 7 years of her life with him constantly, traded off every other week after that. She’s angry at him for things that he did or said, for how he chose to shape her life from that vantage point. I spent two months of every summer with him and every Christmas and birthday as they fall during the same winter break from school. I was a part-time visitor in the life he had with both of them; I came and lived in his life, on his terms.

Her anger comes from a sense of entitlement. Mine comes from an ever-present ache of abandonment. Alina has always resented him for what he did when he was there; I resented him for not being there to begin with. I ached for a relationship with my father. I called him sporadically – far apart enough that it wouldn’t cramp his distant style, but close enough that we could maintain a steady narrative of what my life was like (always mine, almost never his – my father was as cagey and distant with me as I often was with other people). The rivers of bad blood between his longtime girlfriend and all 3 of his daughters made matters worse; she was the sort of woman who never made it past high-school level social skills and let pain and depression turn her cruel and callous, and once their relationship was over my father very openly blamed her for the strain between him and his daughters.

I once countered to him that he had made the decision to not step in and stop her. To me, it was more his fault than hers. She was awful but he was complacent with it.

Never being able to consolidate world views in general atop my feelings of having been abandoned to my grief after my mother’s death in a house that felt more like a prison (I once left a cup of water unemptied in the sink and came home to find he had dumped it all over my bed – another time, I arrived home to find my dresser from Alabama pluming up smoke from the burn pile in the back yard without so much as a word to me, because he said he saw spiders in it) made it incredibly difficult to stitch the distance between us closed. I started leaving at 5am to go to my boyfriend’s house before school and have breakfast with his family (or, more often, sneak in and either go back to sleep or have sex). I begged to move out, to leave and go stay at my great aunt’s house instead, and he resisted me only until his girlfriend needed my bedroom for her kids when they visited. Then, I was allowed to leave.

He kept all of my social security survivor’s checks. I only saw the very last one. I worked at McDonald’s to pay for my own gas (I inherited my mother’s car, a 1990 Cutlass Cierra, when she died) and insurance, and I bought my own food as well so his girlfriend didn’t get upset when I ate at the house.

He judged my mother mightily for her mistakes and while my sexuality didn’t seem to hang him up too much – he nearly choked on chicken when I told him I had been dating a girl, but he recovered quickly with a shrug and a “well… shit happens” – and my defensiveness of her put us at odds with each other again. I tried to call and set up dinner dates or ask him to come see whatever new apartment my girlfriend and I were living in. He visited one once and then never again. I brought over a pizza to hang out with him one night and within thirty minutes, Cynthia called me to tell me that one of our cats had died. Spending time together got harder to arrange, and the more he seemed indifferent to how hard I was trying to forge a relationship, the more I resented him for it.

My calls went unanswered. Seeing him required going out of my way, every time. He rarely met me halfway, almost never if it required real effort on his part.

By the time Cyn and I moved to Pensacola, we had been living less than 10 minutes away from one another and had seen each other less than 5 times in a year.

By the time we moved to Columbus, Ohio, I didn’t even tell him we were going. It didn’t seem to matter.

***

The jaundice and edema have returned by Friday morning. His breathing is becoming more and more erratic. Morphine and Ativan are coming in through a subcutaneous port because he no longer wakes up to swallow.

I have to fight the urge to try to wake him, make him take a sip of water for his parched tongue. His mouth stays wide open all of the time now. I gently rub chapstick over his lips a few times a day so they don’t crack, but the corners of his mouth are bruising from the constant tension.

I am letting him die. We are letting him die. It feels like a failure somehow, even though I know I would absolutely encourage literally anyone else to do exactly what I am doing now in exactly this situation.

***

When I was 12 years old, I played my first live show.

My father brought me onstage at the bar where he played lead guitar in the house band, a vast waste of his natural talent, and had me sing Cyndi Lauper’s “Time After Time” while he accompanied me. We drilled it night after night in his studio apartment during the summer that he split from Alina and Tara’s mother. We worked on Tom Petty’s “Breakdown” but there was something to “Time After Time” that we both really loved – I had only recently gotten very good with pitch control and my young voice was still high and soft, able to curl over the notes gently. Now I sing with the base of my chest and what I suspect are several vocal nodes, my voice getting weak quickly but frankly it suits my style.

I was shaking, I remember very clearly wanting to throw up, but my father beamed at me from his post on the barstool beside me and started to play.

Years later, my Italian macho-typical misogynist of a father would come to the local women’s center where I worked as a victim advocate for a sexual assault response team and play in our courtyard during our survivor event in April. He played an Ani DiFranco song and I sang.

***

Time is a swallowed bomb, waiting. You pay for the whole seat but you only use the edge.

***

On Friday night, they’re saying less than 24 hours. His breathing has changed again, growing labored and strange.

I almost have a panic attack when I have to go to the funeral home to sign papers for a cremation and fill out what of his death certificate I can remember.

Tara is staying beside him. Alina joined us for a while today, all three of us sitting and holding his hands, petting his leg while we listened to his favorite Splendor album and sang “Yeah, Whatever” to him. Hospice brought his lunch; he doesn’t eat or take water anymore. We stole his cookie and split it and talked to him about how good it was, teasing the way he always teased us. We reminisced, talked about the past and our mistakes. We all cried. We all laughed. It was as good a moment as we’d had together in a long, long time.

He didn’t wake up, but we were holding his hands. We were keeping him safe.

***

I sing to him when we’re alone – his favorite Bonnie Raitt songs. Time After Time, of course. When I try singing Warren Zevon’s “Keep Me In Your Heart For A While,” I only make it to the second stanza before I can’t go on.

“When you get up in the morning and you see that crazy sun, keep me in your heart for a while; there’s a train leaving nightly called When All Is Said And Done, keep me in your heart for a while.”

I asked him for guitar lessons once. He tried to teach me a G chord, told me to keep it simple.

“With your voice, you won’t need to learn much,” he said, and I was so overjoyed for the compliment that I’ve never forgotten it.

***

My dear friend Diana comes in to see him, despite having only known him through me.

He would hate this, I think, but I need her to be there, if only for a few minutes.

We met at the abortion clinic we both worked at; she became my boss within two months of my starting and we’ve been close ever since. When she goes to leave, she addresses my father, coming to put her hand gently on his.

“Mister Vance, if I don’t see you again, safe travels.”

I don’t know where he’s going. If there is somewhere, though, it’s going to have so much music. He’s going to be playing his heart out, saying everything his pride never let him say with notes and bars.

Once, back in college, he called me and said nothing, setting the phone beside him on the couch while he absolutely nailed the Eruption solo from Van Halen’s cover of “Girl You Really Got Me Now.”

I have never thought of him as a good father. I have always thought of him as an incredible musician.

***

Back on Sunday, when I knew I would be flying out due to the severity of the situation, I told the nurse to tell Dad I was coming.

I didn’t think he was lucid enough to understand much of anything anyone said, but I missed a call from the hospital by margins of seconds. In an absolute tizzy over what might have been on the other end, I called back.

My father answered, his voice barely a hoarse whisper, his focus obscured by so much morphine.

“Dad? Is that you?”

“Bre?”

“Dad?”

“Bre?”

“Yeah, Dad, it’s Bre.”

His voice broke. “Oh, my baby girl.”

I felt my heart fall out of my ribs and drop down the staircase I fell down the year before and cracked my tailbone, shattered a tooth. I sat down on the stairs. I had been so worried he wouldn’t want to see me, that I’d get there and the ice coating would crawl back over our relationship and I’d have rushed down for little more than maybe a chance to say hello.

“Are you really coming?” he asked, over and over, like a child afraid of the answer being ‘no.’

***

On Saturday, he’s gasping for breath like a fish on a deck. It’s terrifying for me and Tara, who sit on either side of him wide-eyed and panic stricken, waiting for the higher dose of morphine to kick in. It’s violent to watch, but thankfully it starts to subside by that night.

The fear dissipates from the room, but we don’t forget the experience.

***

I show the night nurse pictures of my father with his long dark hair, his brown-tan skin, his brilliant green eyes. I show her pictures of him just two short years ago, round-faced and charming in his straw fedora as he played his guitar, blissfully unaware of all the shitty connotations of fedoras nowadays. She marvels at how handsome he is, how happy he looks holding a guitar. I tell her he’s a really good carpenter but he’s a much better musician, raised by a father who was notoriously talented as well. My father lit up onstage, not as towering as a front man but as the ever-present lead guitarist, just quirky and fun enough to draw your eye from the main microphone but practical, decades of practice and honed skill turning him into the kind of perfectionist he resented in his father.

The lead singer of the last band he played for comes to see him for the third time since Monday. He’s the kind of man who has a natural charm about him, a comfort with being the center of attention that most of us can’t cultivate. He’s sincere in his grief about my father, but he’s also the kind of person who acts as though it’s never dawned on him that not everything he does will come with applause. He performs a very dramatic one man show of his grief when it’s just him and my sister; when I’m here he holds court with his memories and talks about throwing back whiskey with my father at the bar they played at.

“He always said the doctor said it was okay!”

I fight back irritation when I respond, “The doctor absolutely did not say it was okay, he had liver damage.” It’s not this man’s fault my father took big gambles with his health and his addictions. It’s not his fault that my father has always loved a good time. It’s certainly not his fault my father lied about his condition to most people to avoid having to talk about it.

He makes open-ended statements designed to make us ask him questions about himself. Neither one of us do. This seems to bother him. It occurs to me that after a lifetime of being handsome and musically inclined, he might just be expressing himself the only way he knows how – from a vantage point where the world ends at the end of his nose.

Later, when his wife comes, it’s a complete 180. She is calm and warm and immediate, built small and slight like my mother, and between that and her unabashed Mom vibes I’m instantly glad that this virtual stranger is in the room. We watch my father struggle to breathe and she puts her hand on my back, one hand on mine on his, and for a second I shut my eyes and let myself cry – not the way I want to cry, I haven’t found the softest spot to rip that one open from yet, but quietly. If I keep my eyes closed, it feels like my mother is beside me. I can’t think of a not-weird way to tell her I’m grateful for that, so I don’t.

***

Tara and I hold vigil all day on Sunday. His lungs are full of fluid and his face is going grey. His breaths are gentle and small but he sounds like a coffee maker, an observation I make after waking from a catnap in the bay window.

It’s just the three of us and a Law & Order SVU marathon. Dad’s come to like police procedurals in his old age.

We put up a statement on Facebook asking people to send their well wishes via text and phone calls, that we are running out of road and we’d like to focus mostly on spending the last hours or days with him. Alina doesn’t show. She’s been present but sporadically, unable to bear the full weight of the reality of the situation perhaps or too distracted by her own personal demons. I wonder, of the three of us, which daughter will be the one living with the most regret. It’s probably between me and Alina.

When Tara finally goes home for the evening, the nurse comes back to check on him again. Between his blood pressure and his gentle, rattling breaths, he could easily go tonight or go into the morning.

I text my cousin and refer to my father as Captain Refuses-To-Die. She laughs. I feel guilty. She points out that no one would be laughing more than my father. I feel better.

On this, likely the last night we’ll ever have together, I read to him from the book I’ve brought from home (Dessa Wander’s My Own Devices, nonfiction essays that are beautiful and poignant), put Chicago PD on mute and play him Jeff Buckley. I read aloud from the chapter in which Dessa filmed the music video for “Sound The Bells”, and the ending lines crush me all over again: “Some places you need to go, even a chestful of air is too much cargo. Some places you can only go empty.”

I tell him, for the hundredth time, that it’s okay to go if he needs to. His blood pressure is lower and the rattling breaths are a sign we’re growing closer, but he’s still warm to the touch all over. If he’s mottling, we can’t see it. There’s gray in his face again but he reacts to the oral swab of moisturizer to keep his mouth from drying out by furrowing his brows, almost turning away but not quite. The nurses aren’t sure what to make of it. One of these literal angels asks me if I’ve tried telling him it’s okay to go – I tell her that might be what’s holding him up, because now that it was someone else’s idea, he’s just not going to do it.

I hear him in my ear sometimes. Quit rushin’ me. I’ll go when I want and not a moment sooner. Sit down.

We listen to three different versions of Buckley’s Hallelujah – instrumental while I read to him, live, and studio. We move on to the rest of the Grace album.

I’m afraid to go to the bathroom or take a shower when it’s just me and him, so convinced he’ll wait until the second the door clicks shut and then take his opportunity to slip away unnoticed, robbing me of the moment where I get to hold his hand and put some symmetry to our relationship. After all, he was there when I came into the world, purple and defiantly refusing to breathe until suddenly I sucked in air and began to scream. He saw me come in; I vow to at least be here when he goes out. I want to hold his hand the whole time, but if in all his wittiness he decides to kick while I’m half-sleeping on the World’s Okayest Cot, just being in the room will have to be enough.

***

When Alina arrived at my great aunt’s and found him on the floor, slumped against his bed bleeding and unable to get up, he told her he had become addicted to oxycodone since nothing else was helping for the pain. He told her he was done, that he was tired of being sick and tired of fighting.

Despite this, he’s still hanging on. I don’t think he wants to go. He’s only 61 years old. It seems far away to me now the way my mother’s 39 years seemed when I was 16, but now I am 32 and 39 gets more horrible and tragic every day. My father was the life of the party between his sense of humor and relentless flirting and I can only assume that on some base level, he’s not ready for the party to stop yet.

His fingers stopped searching for the fret board days ago. His eyes don’t move behind the lids anymore, and the shadows and bruises around them are coming in fierce. The Haldol is doing nothing to stop the secretions and he’s still in full brew mode, death rattle on all day long. It’s terrifying at first but after a while it’s just a rumble, just a purr. There are moments when Tara and I are perched in our respective chairs on either side of him, eyes turned to the TV or our phones, and this is… ‘fine’ isn’t really the word, but mundane. Just a thing we’re all doing. Boring, even. And then I glance at the bed and see my emaciated, sunken-faced father gurgling through yet another breath and it takes my own away how very not okay it all is.

He’d hate this, is the only thing I can keep thinking. He would hate all of this.

***

There’s a train leaving nightly called ‘When All Is Said and Done.’

Keep me in your heart for a while.

I love him with every ounce of my being. I’m so angry for all the time we missed. I’m so sad that he didn’t let me love him more.

***

It’s Thursday, again. The last few days have been a blur so emotionally exhausting I haven’t had the presence of mind to put pen to paper in any capacity.

When he’ll die is anyone’s guess. For a while yesterday his breathing changed so drastically, came in short little hiccups, that the PRN was sure he was breathing his last. Then, like nothing had ever transpired, he was back to the soft, shallow breaths of before, the rattling having disappeared within a day of its arrival. He started having spells yesterday where he exhales so hard that it engages his vocal cords, making a groan or soft moan like a zombie in a horror film; this terrified the shit out of Tara and me so badly that we grabbed the nurse. His eyes tried to open. It was incredibly upsetting.

The nurse explained that these were reflexive, the deep sighs were him fighting his own heart’s slowing down on some basal level. He’s been unconscious for an entire week now – the eyes opening are a reflex, not intentional and not a sign of any sort of awareness behind the lids.

When they opened after he was cleaned, they had rolled all the way up into his head, leaving nothing but a sliver of white, making me feel sick to my stomach. I knew dying wasn’t elegant and beautiful the way the movies would have you believe, but this is taking so very, very long and it’s so very, very awful.

It’s been a week without water now, so at some point something will have to give.

Tara has spent every day right next to me, sometimes holding his other hand, sometimes napping in the armchair while I nap on my cot. It’s often the two of us in comfortable silence for long stretches or cracking jokes over whatever is on tv. We share his trays when they come in – sometimes the worker slips us a second tray specifically for Tara – or she runs to grab lunch. We tried going out together a few times but no results; he would be exactly as we left him upon our return. Whatever he’s holding on for, he’s holding on with both hands.

I watch his pulse pound in the veins in his neck. I can see his heartbeat through the emaciation of his ribs. I wish to god this was a Death With Dignity state. I wish to god the end would just come gently for him already, and then I feel like a monster for wishing that. How do you want someone you love to die? How do you want them to stay and suffer? Damned if I do, fucked if I don’t.

I play him Joe Bonamassa, more Jeff Buckley, Bonnie Raitt, Bon Iver, Eva Cassidy, Warren Zevon. I sing every song he ever asked me to sing for him, even the ones he chastised me for singing too loudly for him to hear the radio. I hum when I can’t muster the energy to sing, which is increasingly often at this point.

I’m a ghost wandering the hospice halls. The staff greets me by first name and I know most of theirs now – Lisa, who is a literal angel, sent in a dining room cart loaded with sandwiches and chips when a big storm hit yesterday, thinking Tara and I wouldn’t likely go out to get dinner. Gloria dutifully checks on me and my dad and Tara. Jasmine, Victoria, Tinkey, Dolores, the cleaning lady named Cynthia (my wife’s name) is a particular comfort, going out of her way to talk to me every time she comes in to sweep.

The guilt is palpable. I miss my wife and my dog and my apartment; sleeping on this cot has triggered my already flared vestibular disorder and I am so dizzy I worry I’ll fall over at least once a day. I eat what I can when I can but my diet is garbage. I often forget to eat. I’m making it a point to drink as much water as I physically can without getting sick as it helps my headaches.

But I haven’t cried in what feels like days. I can’t anymore. I talk about the increasingly mottling on his fingers, his toes, his ears like it’s a matter-of-fact conversation about the weather. The sound of his sighs and groans still make my heart catch in my throat every time but I’m going numb to the rest. We’re just kind of trapped here in limbo between being able to care for him, which we no longer can, and being able to mourn him and grieve, which we cannot yet do. It feels like torture. I mentally calculate out how much therapy I’m going to need to get out the other side of this. I watch more cop procedurals than I’ve watched in years and hate every last one of them unless Olivia Benson is in them (except Criminal Minds, which I have a complicated relationship with but Tara and I both share a deep abiding love of Spencer Reid, so.)

I want to go home. I feel like dog shit for wanting to go home. I can’t leave him. Not like this. I don’t know how to ask for help but I feel like I’m drowning.

***

The only slices of time where I feel like I can breathe is when Tara and I run to Target for no good reason or when I’m in the shower late in the evening. At first I was too afraid to so much as use the bathroom, scared he would slip off the second I left the room in one final act of independence to prove once and for all that he didn’t need anybody else’s input or help.

Dad’s hospice room has a huge walk-in shower built to accommodate a sitting toilet for those who are still resisting the sponge bath with all their might. Dad was unable to walk for the three days he was in the ICU, much less now, so I drag the entire rig of pvc and toilet seat out into the bathroom proper and enjoy a shower with enough space to comfortably fit three people. In my apartment back home, we haven’t had a functional shower in months; the whole set up fell out of the wall, leaving us only with our very deep and very beautiful porcelain tub. It’s hard to complain about such a tub but the reality is that cup baths get tiring very quickly when you’re disabled and getting into and out of that gorgeous porcelain tank is real work.

This shower comes equipped with safety rails, which at the ripe old age of 32 send my chronically ill self into pure joy. I find reasons to stay in the shower longer than I normally would, water conscious as I try to be. My legs haven’t been so shaven so frequently since I was a teenager. I don’t always have the energy to slip off and stand in hot water for twenty minutes at a time but when I do I try to take advantage; we don’t know when he’s going to decide he’s had enough and I’ll be quickly packing our things into all these Zaxby’s carryout bags I keep hoarding.

***

At some point, this has begun to feel deliberate. Am I locked in one final battle of wills with my father? Is he testing my mettle – and Tara’s, for that matter – to make sure we’ve got the stones to follow up on our promises?

My father made a lot of promises he didn’t honor. Whether they haunted him or if he just forgot is anybody’s guess.

***

I’m on the lanai near my father’s room when I noticed a few people going in and out of the room. I tell my aunt Sharon, “If he slipped off while I was outside on the phone, I swear to god.” He hasn’t, but we’re close; they’ve repositioned him to try to help things move along. The doctor tells me the mottling has moved quickly up his legs and that we’re looking at hours now, maybe even sooner.

His eyes are partially open again. I grimace and close them gently. I remember my mothers’ open eyes, dead for hours when I found her, and it’s something that sixteen years of road between that moment and now have never been able to rub free from my memory. I wonder what about this will haunt me in specificity – the whole experience, sure, but the little things. If I’ll smell someone wearing his nurse practitioner’s perfume and it’ll send me straight into fight or flight. If I’ll be so consumed by my grief that I can’t eat but the second I can I find I can never eat trail mix again. If something will slip just under the edge of my self awareness and then one day I’ll be crying in the aisle at Kroger for no reason.

Bronze nail polish, unexpected splashes of Daffodil yellow, and “Girl You Really Got Me Now” stop me in my tracks in regards to my mother, but she was part of my life every single day. This man laying in this hospital bed is undoubtedly someone I love so much it makes my chest hurt to think of, but not much in my day to day life will change when he is gone – he wasn’t a part of it, hadn’t been for years.

A storm is rolling in. I call my sister.

***

He dies at 10:40 on July 11th.

Tara is asleep on the cot on one side of him, I’m sitting in the armchair on the other, listening to him breathe and texting my wife. Chicago PD is on because of course it is. I get a strange prickle of discomfort and pause, realizing that I no longer hear the heaving of his breath.

At that exact moment, my sister wakes for no reason and goes into the bathroom, passing me as I quickly come around the bed to look at my father’s face in the blue tv light, his eyes slit just barely open. His chest unmoving. The thrum of his heartbeat, so visible for so many days, stilled. I pressed two fingers to his neck, fought the urge to recoil, and pressed the call button to the nurse’s station.

We get an hour and a half with him before the funeral home arrives at nearly 1 am. With my mother, my shock and fear kept me from being able to go anywhere near her body after I dropped her when I tried to turn her over. My criminology studies made me slightly more comfortable around the dead but that quick recoil didn’t leave me and before long I was doubly nursing a burgeoning drinking problem and a crippling fear of death. I’ve done the reading. I’ve pushed myself past my comfort zone. When my beloved dogs died in 2015 and 2017, I spent time with them before burying them myself in the backyard of my aunt’s home.

When the doctor backs out of the door gracefully, quietly, I press my ear to my father’s chest and hear nothing. I put my arm over both of his. I let myself sob into his still, unmoving shoulder and I remember for a moment how he held me in my bedroom at his house the day I moved in, when my mother’s death was suddenly too real to stand under the weight off. How he let me lean fully into him and slid down to the floor with me, let me sob until I was too sore to keep crying, how for that one blessed moment he was the father I needed at exactly the moment I needed him.

They come to take him. The funeral home worker watches me with a soft expression as I dip down one last time and tell him, “On to the next adventure. Thank you for everything. I love you, Dad. Goodbye.”

***

I love you, Dad.

Goodbye.

***

I think I’m going to feel better but really, I’m just tired. Bone-deep tired. A tired I can’t put a name to. I want to go home and be held by my wife more than I want anything in the world. I spend the day with my sisters, alternating between being mostly-okay and having my breath snatched from me by how not-okay I am. Alina submits herself back to rehab to return on Monday. We make plans to go through his things, together, in September, when I’ve returned for a wedding. It feels okay-ish, and then it feels less okay, and then it’s so awful I can’t wrap my head around it.

And it will continue to be awful. I know that. But it will gradually become less awful, the edges rubbing down until it doesn’t cut me every time I brush against it. It will always be awful. But it will turn into a shape of awful that I can breathe around.

I take stock of what I’ve got left in my hands now that my watch has ended. I went from “my father is not in my life” to “my father is dying and I am caring for him in his final days after a lifetime of his antiseptic behavior to my attempts at building emotional bridges with him” to “my father is dead” in the space of about 13 days. There was no time. It all happened too fast.

On my last day in Florida, I drag both of my exhausted sisters to the beach. Alina sleeps on a towel. Tara and I wade out into the ocean, and I let the salt water of my sweat and my tears remind me how we all came from the sea, how we all return to the earth, and how one day this planet will keep spinning without me, regardless of whether I’ve left a list of things undone or not.

I don’t scream. I don’t cry. I just float for a while.

#personal #noccalula updates

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ajoraverse · 5 years ago

Text

I mostly just wrote this on a whim. Trotting out a couple of OCs from the 20-year-old FFV fic. Ben and Ridha versions 2.0, on the outside looking in and being concerned about Faris and Lenna’s relationship.

Also, it should be noted that Ridha was always meant to be intersex and had no real attachment to any gender. He just presents himself as male most of the time, but has no qualms with presenting herself as female either. Or androgynous. Really, they find this whole gender thing tired and unnecessary.

Ben’s accent is West Country/Cornish Tulish as a nod to Cornish being frequently pillaged for the infamous mass media “pirate accent”. I tend to use Scottish dialects for Carwen; in my ficverse the Highwinds migrated from North Mountain (north of Carwen) to the west (what would become Tycoon territory after Grandpa Tycoon annexed Tule and the surrounding areas to acquire the Wind Shrine) after the world split in two. The Highwinds still retain a bit of that north Carwen accent.

There are three things Ben does well: numbers, haggling, and keeping his best mate's secrets. It's the last what keeps him on his toes. Seems there's always some new secret he's finding out.

The bit about this lad he grew up with being a lass? Well, that checks out, he supposes. Faris was always a bit teazy about personal space and hiding to keep from being seen in the altogether, 'specially starting from puberty on. Certainly explains Faris' monthly absences as a deck hand and minching to the cabin more frequently as captain.

The long-lost princess bit? 'Twere proper comical. But Ben reckons it explains the way Faris gets all facety when she's right tired and slips into that snooty Tycoon accent of hers that he was never able to pin down as a child.

It's the bit about the sister that hauls his legs out from under him every time. He recalls the jokes made over royal families and their tendency for inbreeding. He recalls that more than a few of the eight-pagers from back in the day included right filthy cartoons about Faris and King Tycoon, shortly after the bold attack by ten united pirate captains against the Tycoon Navy. Faris had a good laugh about them back then.

Ben suspects she's not as likely to laugh about those types of cartoons now.

The subjects change a bit after Faris' identity as the long-lost Princess Sarisa came out, mind. Queen Tycoon being a sweet young lass, it's expected that the artists tend to be kinder to her than they were to Queen Karnak. Thing is, folks love a proper scandal, and Faris' history sets the imagination ablaze. More and more, Ben finds himself arguing that Faris would never touch the pretty bird like that. She's had choice aplenty, and for years she'd been a known womanizer. What'd she get from her own sister but her ruin?

'Twould bleddy 'elp if the cap'n weren't makin' a right cauch of it. Proper answer would be to just up and haul out. Disappear or something. Do what most sailors do and drown her feelings in spirits and opium. Faris opts to stay by the pretty bird's side, instead. Oh, she'll sneak out every now and then, but she always goes back. And she's good at hiding their relationship, but Ben knows Faris probably better than any man alive and can tell. Cap'n doesn't look at anyone else like that.

So Ben runs up the numbers in his head. Credit: the two met in adulthood, before they knew about their blood relations. Debit: incest. Credit: at least they can't have children. Debit: still incest. Credit: they didn't grow up together. Debit: royal incest, at that. He can count his justifications like beads on an abacus, but they're still all zeroed out by incest. What keeps the account in the black is that Faris is still a friend, and one who saved him and had his back often enough that he'll still defend her to the lathered carousers wagging their tongues.

It's that loyalty that brings him to Tycoon. He's a sound hand with numbers and Faris suspects some embezzling, so he'll just take a gander at the books and see what all he can find.

Ben turns up at the castle in the morning of the queen's dragon's first mating flight's underway. Now, he remembers something of Syldra's...whatever it's called when sea dragons go acourting...and it concerns him because Faris had always been extra teazy when that happened. Would lock herself in the cabin if it happened too far from shore, and in a room at the nearest inn elsewise.

While the guards knew him from his last outing here, they still watch his every step. Ben hardly cares--he'll not rob from his own best mate or her family, no matter his profession. Doesn't need to. In the interest of divorcing herself from her past and keeping her pretty bird safe, Faris passed her enterprises to him.

Once he makes it to the well-guarded room which splits to two doors, he finds that sallow-faced, red-headed cousin of the Queen standing watch at her door. The light from sconces does him no favors. Ben isn't quite sure whether more sun would do the boy any good, or just make him look jaundiced.

"The Queen will not be available today," the cousin says, hand tightening on his spear's shaft. There's a right peculiar trace of something else to his voice. Almost northern Carwenish under that Gentry Tycoonian accent everyone in the castle seems to speak.

"'Ere for the princess, lad. Faris anywhere abouts?"

The hand tightens at the shaft until the lad's knuckles show yellow in the light. "And you are...?"

"Ben Inomoto." Though he'd refrained from spitting in his palm before stretching out his hand, the cousin still eyes it dubiously. "Served as Faris' quartermaster for 'bout five years. Wasson?"

"You don't sound Istorian," the boy says. But he shakes his hand anyway, 'least before he pulls it away quickly.

"Pressganged into playin' Faris' minder when I was but a tacker meself." Ben has no regrets, not regarding that. Istory had never been a place that welcomed boys like him.

The boy nods, still looking a bit wisht. "I'm Ridha Highwind. Queen Lenna's third cousin on the father's side. The, ah, princess' dragon caught the queen's during her first mating flight. She will, um, likely be as indisposed as the queen for the day."

Now Ben isn't the brightest among the brethren of the Great Tycoon Sea, being as he'd grown up with Faris and never once noticed that she was a woman all along, but he can add up the numbers when enough of the variables are available. His voice drops low, quiet enough that he's sure no one else can hear him. "They're in there together, aye?"

The boy tries not to flinch at his candor, but he can't seem to stop himself. "I haven't seen the princess all day, even before the flight. It's not, er, advisable that the mating dragons' riders be, um, in the same space if they're not, ah, already romantically involved. Or so inclined."

Ben reckons one might hear a pin drop in the silence afterwards. Part of him wants to cuss up a storm, because this isn't helping. Part of him resorts to taking action to minimize backlash, instead. "Yer lookin' wisht, lad. Go rest. I'll keep watch."

"Thanks." The boy manages a faint smile and shoulders his spear.

The boy almost passes him on the way out, but Ben grabs his elbow to impart some words. "Unless someone gets hurt, whatever the queen and the princess do with each other is none of our business. Like your cousins? Don't say a thing against them. It'll be hard enough as it is."

"But, it's--"

"None of our bleddy business." Ben sighs and looks over the boy. Can't be more than a teenager. "Take 'e from an old queer, lad. The heart wants what 'e wants, and 'e'll listen to no talking-to."

Despite the nerves on full display, the boy snorts. "You don't look that old."

Ben smirks and waves him off. Almost lets the boy go completely before he minds why he's here. "Oh, send up the ledgers, would ye? Won't let the Cap'n find me takin' caulk when she shows 'erself."

Ridha waves in acknowledgment, leaving Ben alone to consider how to deal with this mess.

#fic:dragondance #only one person I know still around from the old days will probably recognize them haha #a side note: Ridha is magically sensitive and as such feels a bleedover effect of the mating flight and that's why he's peaky #also a nod to his original incarnation being sickly all the time on account of magic dependency #Ridha does not care what pronouns you use for him tbh #also: Ben is still that recurring joke pirate with a crush on the captain. in this incarnation the crush dies when Faris is outed #Ben is still ridiculously loyal though

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