#and i don’t know the last time i felt a sustained amount of joy

[jemamore]

✨

[violettelueur]

— FUSHIGURO MEGUMI || THANK YOU FOR STAYING

↳ featuring : fushiguro megumi from jujutsu kaisen

↳ warnings : mention of blood, mention of injury, mention of death and grammar issues

↳ form : imagine

↳ published : 18 january

↳ pronouns : she/her

↳ word count : 1.6k

↳ request : AAAA YOUR FINALLY OPENN <3 um so for starters i was thinking abt the same scenario for the s/o, where the s/o was megumi’s gf. team tokyo was seeing your *dead* body lying on the ground, not knowing that your actually trying to use the reverse technique slowly. megumi felt he failed at protecting you, when you’re actually still alive but reviving. eventually he came to you, crying, and just kept saying “please dont leave me” “i cant afford to loose anything” “please”. IM SORRY IF ITS TOO SPECIFIC 😭😭 i really want some fluff+angst rn LMAOO. thankyou!! <33

↳ barista’s notes : hello hello hello ʕ •ᴥ•ʔ i had to remove a tiny bit of your request because it is a spoiler for non jujutsu kaisen manga readers ʕᴥ·　ʔ and don’t worry if you think you’re being too specific, i will try my best to make the perfect cup of  coffee for you ʕ •ᴥ•ʔゝ☆ but other than that, i hope you enjoy you cup of classic black coffee (jujutsu kaisen request!) and you’re welcome back anytime!

“Y/N, wake up please”

However, no matter how desperate he sounded nor how loud he was. You were non-responsive.

The grass below your body was struggling to soak up all the blood that had been spilt from your unknown wound caused by the special grade curse that you were fighting against.

No one knew how the curse was able to get into the premises of the battlefield of the Kyoto Sister-School Goodwill Event, let alone how it managed to get anywhere near Tokyo Metropolitan Curse Technical College. However, right now, all Fushiguro knew was that you were in critical condition as you continued to stay silent to his pleas.

“This ain’t some joke Y/N, wake up!” Fushiguro shouted in agony as he lifted your body into his arms, searching for any source of warmth from you that he was desperate to hold. Yet, you were just stone cold.

Frantic, Fushiguro began to search around your body to see if he could find the injury that was the final blow that you took, but there was no visible presence of one leading to the shikigami sorcerer’s anxiety to heighten as he began to wonder what really happened to you. What could have the special curse did that causes you to fall into a coma? A coma right? You were just in a coma? You weren’t dead? You couldn’t be dead?

“Megumi, she’s….Y/N is..” Maki began to stutter, afraid of the junior’s reaction to what she would have to announce as she began to reach out to him, leading Fushiguro to turn to look at her with tears welled up in his eyes which led Maki to look at him with widened eyes.

Never once she ever saw the green-eyed sorcerer have a single tear in his eyes as well as the rest of the sorcerers behind her as they stared at the situation that was happening right in front of them. On the other hand, they weren’t really surprised at the fact that you were the one that brought those same tears into his precious eyes. 

You were the first person to ever make them see Fushiguro smile.

Itadori remembered it as clear as day. It was when he had first met you at Harajuku around the same time when he first met Kugisaki. To his surprise that day, you weren’t the new student that they were meeting but rather a current student at the school he newly attended, it was just that you weren’t the one chosen to collect Sukuna’s finger at Sendai that day due to you having a mission of your own.

                                              ꕥ

“So, you’re the infamous student that ate Sukuna’s finger?” you commented, as you walked towards the two students who were waiting in front of the station Gojo has told you to meet everyone at - but to no shock or surprise from you, the said teacher was not there to greet you.

“Oh? Are you the new student we are waiting for?” Itaodori kindly asked, as he took another bite out of his ice popsicle leading to your boyfriend, who was standing next to the salmon-haired boy, to have a say in the newly started conversation.

“No, this is L/N Y/N, she’s a first-year student like us, she enrolled at the same time as me,” Fushiguro informed the boy leading you to kindly smile at him while holding up a peace sign to seem more friendly.

“I’m Itadori Yuji, I’m from Sendai,” Itadori greeted you as he pointed at himself, causing you to nod your head before asking both the boys where your extremely tall teacher was, only for them to shrug at you indicating they had no idea on where Gojo was at all.

‘He probably is buying snacks or something ha?’

“Now it ain’t just the two of us ha Megumi?” you playfully asked your boyfriend as you poked his cheek, leading him to send you a side glance only for a giggle to be your response. Although it was a small interaction, Itadori was able to instantly pick up on something that confused him slightly.

“L/N, why did you call Fushiguro by his first name and not his family one?” Itadori asked in curiosity as he wondered how you were really friendly with the usually grumpy sorcerer. Turning to look at your new classmate, you smiled at him and quickly answered by saying, “no reason really, he just allowed me to since we’re really good friends,”.

Knowing Fushiguro, you knew he probably didn’t want to reveal the fact that you and him were in a relationship to Itadori too early into his newfound friendship with him, so you decided that it was the best for now to tell your new classmate that you two were really good friends.

On the other hand, what you didn’t see was how Fushiguro was looking at you. The shikigami user really appreciated the fact that you weren’t the type to tell the whole world about the both of you since he was a person that thought that not everyone needed to know if he was in a relationship or not leading to a small smile to dawn his face with a hint of adoration in his eyes as he stared at you.

Which was caught by the sights of Itadori Yuji.

                                             ꕥ

However in his sights right now was not the same expression Fushiguro had that day. But how he wished it was. All Itadori could see right now was fear, desperation and regret in Fushiguro’s emerald eyes as he was holding onto your body like he was gripping the small amount of life that you could possibly have left in your body.

“Please don’t leave me,” Fushiguro muttered in a brittle tone, as he gently shook you, not giving up on the fact that you could have a chance of waking up. Not giving up the chance that he gets to see your beautiful eyes. Not giving up the chance that he gets to see your bright smile. Not giving up on the chance that he gets to see you alive.

“I’m sorry for not protecting you, please just wake up, I can’t lose you too,” Fushiguro begged as sorrowful tears began to lightly hit your cheeks with his throat slowly closing up leading to a slight struggle in breathing. Fushiguro slowly and regrettably came to the realisation that you were now gone, leading to a river of guilt that uncontrollably began to flow down to which caused the grade two sorcerer let out a pained scream as his friends from behind looked at the scene with a broken heart.

Gripping on to your body, Fushiguro held your body against his chest and his face was hidden in the crook of your head wanting to hold you for one last time before you were fully taken away from him.

“Hey….Mimi”

Now he was hallucinating. Fushiguro was now hearing your voice as if you were calling out to him. He couldn’t help but fully accept that fact that you were dead and there was no chance you could possibly be calling out his nickname that he hated so much but was so desperate to hear again if he could.

Suddenly to his shock, Fushiguro felt a light but tight grip on his school jacket leading him to slowly pull away with widening eyes to a hand on his jacket causing him to look up to notice your eyes slowly begin to open, showcasing the coloured orbs that the shikigami user was so desperate to see.

“Mimi….it’s really hard to….concentrate using reverse curse energy….when you’re tightly gripping on to me,” you slowly commented with a small smile on your face, to which then you slowly began to sit up only to fall back into his arms due to exhaustion of using a magnitude of your curse energy to heal the injury that the special curse managed to wound you with.

“Y/N!” everyone shouted, as they crouched down to have a clear view of what they were seeing. To their complete astonishment, you were fully awake with a smile on your face leading everyone’s hearts to fill with joy as they were relieved that you were here right in front of them alive and well.

Kugisaki couldn’t help but instantly let tears of complete joy flow down her cheeks as she launched herself on top of you, tightly hugging you close to her releasing all the agonising tension that she was holding in the second she saw your once lifeless body in Fushiguro’s arms.

Gently lifting up one of your arms to Kugisaki’s body to comfort her, you slowly turned your head to stare up at the pair of emerald eyes that were looking at you with such relief and radiance, leading to your other hand that was previously gripping his jacket to then be placed on his cheek as you used your thumb to caress it to help him slowly come back to reality.

To be honest, you could tell he needed it right now. At the beginning of the Kyoto Sister-School Goodwill Event, you, Fushiguro and Kugisaki were utterly dumbfounded at the fact that Itadori was alive and well after 2 months of assuming that he was dead after Sukuna ripped out his heart and now you somehow you ‘came back alive’ after sustaining a serious injury of your neck being slashed - you knew seeing two people being revived was not what you saw every day.

“I’m sorry for scaring you like that,” you whispered to Fushiguro as you lightly brushed the remaining tears he had on his cheek leading to the stoic sorcerer to softly place his forehead against yours as he began to savour the warmth that he thought he had lost.

“Thank you,’ Fushiguro muttered as he closed his eye tightly, holding in the new coming tears that were threatening to flow down leading to your hand that was on his cheek to be now placed on the back of his neck as your fingers began to caress his hair to help calm him down even further.

“Thank you for staying”

© violettelueur 2021 : written and published by violettelueur - do not steal or repost

[plus-size-reader]

Promise

Henry Bowers x Plus size!reader

Word Count: 2264 words

Warnings: Abuse, proceed with caution

Summary: Reader is Henry’s girlfriend and always takes care of him after his dad gets violent

—————————————————————————————————

You hated him.

Butch Bowers was a monster, who got more joy out of beating down his son than actually being any good to anyone as a cop.

Above all though, and perhaps the biggest strike against him for you was the fact that he was absolutely awful to your boyfriend Henry, his son. There was no real reason for it, as being cruel to the younger male did nothing for him, but that had never been enough to keep him from doing it.

It didn’t matter what kind of day he had or what Henry did, nothing could have stopped Butch or his rage, and that wasn’t even the worst part.

The fact of the matter was that no one around would have believed you if you told them about Butch’s violence, considering his high position in the Derry police force and manipulative personality.

To the rest of Derry, you and Henry were trouble, two people who couldn’t be trusted or believed. For all intents and purproses, Butch could do whatever he wanted and nothing was going to change that.

You understood their hesitance to be fair, but that didn’t make it right. Nothing was going to change your hatred for the man or how wrong his actions were.

It was hard not to be a bit biased seeing as you loved Henry more than anything, but even if you didn’t, anyone would be bothered by all the bruises you’d witnessed that he sustained at his father’s hand.

It wasn’t right.

However, your overarching hatred of the man wasn’t your biggest priority right now. You knew from what Henry told you at school that Butch was in a particularly bad mood this morning, and it wasn’t going to go well when he got home.

Henry didn’t come to you every time his dad hit him, of course, as it would be too often, but he did call you over to his home when he needed you. Sometimes, he got really shaken up and needed to be talked down from the ledge.

Something you were pretty good at at this point in your relationship.

It was awful, and something you would have preferred not to have to do in the first place, but if it was going to make him feel even a little bit better, you were glad to do it. You were just glad that he had someone he could rely on.

Henry was a bit notorious for being closed off and harsh, but that was more of a forced persona that he would have let on. You knew a different side of Henry Bowers that most people weren’t lucky enough to see.

With you, he was vulnerable and sad, angry and lost, so many things at once without any guidance that it would drive anyone mad.

By the time he made it to your house that night, in fact, Henry was shaking like a leaf. It was clear to you that he was angry, the muscles of his jaw tight, but also sad, as you caught sight of his tear stained cheeks.

It really was bad this time.

You had previously been working on your chemistry homework when he showed up, stones clanking against your window pane to let you know he’d arrived. However, as soon as he got there, you found yourself swiping your work to the side.

Nothing was more important to you than Henry, like any young woman in love, especially not school work.

At first, you didn’t realize just how bad it was.

You got up from your bed, bouncing slightly off the edge of your mattress as you headed over to the window. A small smile found its way onto your face as you made your way over to pull back your curtains.

...And your smile only grew when you saw Henry standing in the grass below you.

You had just seen him a few hours ago when he and the guys dropped you off at home after school but you wouldn’t have known that based on how you reacted. You loved him, a whole lot, and any amount of time seemed to be too much.

You couldn’t help that.

“Hi handsome” You called, sliding the window all the way up so that you could lean out to see him better. You always greeted him like that, of course, but when he said nothing back, that was when you knew something was wrong.

Henry always greeted you with just as much gusto as you did, but today, he didn’t even bother. Instead, he stood where he was and waited for you to come down, just like you always did.

“I’ll be right down” you decided, wasting no more time than you already had as you made your way down the stairs and out your front door. Your parents weren’t home, again, so there was no need for you to tip toe or sneak around.

There had been some occasions where you had to finagle your curvy frame out your window without falling to your death, an action you had gotten pretty good at over the course of your relationship.

At this point, it was basically second nature for you.

As soon as you were in front of Henry, he was holding you in his arms. It wasn’t a completely unheard of action but it would have been a lie to say that you weren’t a little shocked by it.

Never had Henry been so brazen about holding you before, but here he was, with his arms wrapped tightly around you and his head tucked into the crook of your neck.

There was silence between the two of you for a moment as you held the man you loved so much, silently racking your brain to figure out what you could do for him. You knew that, realistically, there was nothing you could do to improve his situation at home.

However, you did have something you could do for him tonight. While it wasn’t a long term solution, but your house was empty and could be a bit of a solace for him tonight.

“Do you want to come in, it’s just you and me tonight” you suggested, not even really asking, because before he could answer, you had already taken his hand in your own and were heading inside.

Henry wasn’t sure about your house the first few times he’d been there, but it was a nice place to relax, especially when your parents weren’t around. He could finally take a breath, while being about to drop the façade he so often wore.

It was a nice break, especially when he had nowhere else to go. The last thing he wanted right now was to go back to his house, where Butch was still there, fuming and half way through his third six-pack.

“Do you want to tell me what’s going on?” you asked, not bothering to speak until the two of you were safely behind his bedroom door. You knew that there was no real reason to lock the door, or even close it in the first place, but it made Henry feel better.

That way he knew that it was really just the two of you there.

Henry shook his head again, sitting down on your bed with his back to the locked entrance. You always hoped he would open up to you about it, but he never wanted to talk about it after. More than anything, he seemed to just want to exist.

He wanted to know he was safe, and you couldn’t blame him.

You didn’t bother trying to get him to talk, if he didn’t want to then who were you to push that on Him. Even if you had to sit here in silence all night, it would be worth it if he felt even a little better.

“It’s okay, you’re safe now” you hummed, laying back against your bed, a throw pillow between your knees and your stomach as you curled up to look at Henry, who had now taken to staring out the window.

You sat there for a while, just watching him with curious eyes before you finally spoke again.

“There isn’t anything out there that’s going to hurt you” you promise, flinging the above mentioned pillow at his head, although it fell short on the comforter of the bed, not even close to where he was perched.

“You don’t know that” he muttered, his tone lacking the general smartness that was always present there, tossing a look at you over his shoulder before returning his eyes to their original position.

The male was understandably paranoid, doing his best to make sense out of anything that had happened tonight while also worrying about something terrible coming through that window to snatch him up.

“Come on Henry, come lay down” you tried, tossing your arms open for him although he ignored you once again.

You knew better than to take it to heart, you didn’t do anything to hurt him personally. Henry could be a little touchy when he came over here after taking a beating, but you couldn’t blame him. All you could do was make him feel better, which you intended to do as soon as possible.

“Suit yourself, I guess I’ll just go to bed” you teased, flopping down on your side, hiding your face in your pillow in the most dramatic way you could. You figured that unless you got Henry’s mind off of it, he would be standing there all night.

“You don’t get it Y/N, I don’t understand what I did to him” he starts, startling you out of your act with the clear shaking of his words. He had never asked you that before, not in all the times he’d been here, but it was obviously hurting him.

Henry had always wondered that.

He had never had the guts to ask anyone that before, mostly because it was terrifying but also because he was afraid of the answer. Even saying it out loud had practically choked him up, but you were proud of him.

“You didn’t do anything to him baby, he’s violent and cruel, he’s always been that way” you assured, sitting up gingerly before shimmying down the bed to sit on the edge of it, pulling Henry to stand between your knees by his wrist. As soon as you said it, the tears started coming, and while you could tell Henry wasn’t thrilled about that, it was almost comforting to see him expressing himself this way.

“But why?” he hummed, his voice low as he took your hands in his own and leaned down, resting his forehead against your own to stare into your bright eyes, almost as if you would have all the answers.

If only you did.

“I don’t know” you level, lifting your right hand to brace his cheek “But I do know that I love you, and I will never hurt you” you smile, kissing his cheek in the gentlest way you could, licking away the salty taste that found its way onto your lips from his tears absently.

It was one of the most soft, honest moments you and henry had ever had in the history of your relationship and you could tell that you both needed it. Henry went through so much, and he deserved to know that you would always be there.

That he was safe with you.

“You promise?” he muttered, after a few more seconds of silence breathing in your scent. In all honesty, you didn’t know what to say, because you were telling him the truth but something about his words shocked you into silence.

He was so broken, letting you into the deepest darkest crevices of his feelings, and it was a lot of pressure. Thankfully, you were pretty good at talking to Henry and all you had to do was tell him the truth.

“Of course I promise, baby. Do you see anybody else in here?” you tease, trying your best to lighten the mood although you weren’t as successful as you wanted to be.

As much as he wanted to be as upbeat as you, there was still too much heavy on his mind.

“Come on, I wanna snuggle” you sighed, taking his hand in your own once again to urge him to climb into bed with you. If there was one way to make him feel better, it was to get him all snuggled up with you so that he could finally relax.

You were sure that if there was one thing that you knew that no one else in Derry would believe, it was that Henry was a huge cuddler.

Even when he was in a bad mood, or having a hard time, he was always ready for a good cuddle.

Your back hit the plush bed with a light thud before you pulled Henry into you, wrapping your arms around his broad shoulders. His chest heaved under your touch before he relaxed into your grasp, giving in to what you both knew.

He was safe here.

While you couldn’t do much about the rest of the world, you could always protect him in this place. Right here, curled up in your arms, he couldn’t have been more at home or more protected.

“I love you” he hummed, nothing more leaving his lips as he snuggled in for the night and let his heavy eyes drift closed. For now, all he needed to do was exist, everything else was a problem for another day.

[wolfstar-in-color]

July Colorful Column: Remus is a Crip, and We Can Write Him Better.

There is one thing that can get me to close a fic so voraciously I don’t even make sure I’m not closing other essential tabs in the process. It doesn’t matter how much I’m loving the fic, how well written I think it is, or how desperately I want to know how it ends. Once I read this sentence, I am done.

It’s written in a variety of different ways, but it always goes something like this: “You don’t want me,” Remus said, “I am too sick/broken/poor/old/[insert chosen self-demeaning adjective here].”

You’re familiar with the trope. The trope is canonical. And if you’ve been around the wolfstar fandom for longer than a few minutes, you’ve read the trope. Maybe you love the trope! Maybe you’ve written the trope! Maybe you’re about to stop reading this column, because the trope rings true to you and you feel a little attacked!

Now, let’s get one thing out of the way right now: I am not saying the trope is wrong. I am not saying it’s bad. I am not saying we should stop writing it. We all have things we don’t like to see in our chosen fics. Maybe you can’t stand Leather Jacket Motorbike Sirius? Maybe you think Elbow Patch Remus is overdone? Or maybe your pet peeves are based in something a little deeper - maybe you think Poor Latino Remus is an irresponsible depiction, or that PWPs are too reductive? Whatever it is, we all have our things.

Let me tell you about my thing. When I first became very ill several years ago, there were various low points in which I felt I had become inherently unlovable. This is, more or less, a normal reaction. When your body stops doing things it used to be able to do - or starts doing things you were quite alright without, thank you very much - it changes the way you relate to your body. You don’t want to hear my whole disability history, so yada yada yada, most people eventually come to accept their limitations. It’s a very painful existence, one in which you constantly tell yourself your disability has transformed you into a burdensome, unworthy member of society, and if nothing else, it’s not terribly sustainable. Being disabled takes grit! It takes power! It takes a truly absurd amount of medical self-advocacy! Hating yourself? Thinking yourself unworthy of love? No one has time for that. 

Of course, I’m being hyperbolic. Plenty of disabled people struggle with these feelings many years into their disabilities, and never really get over them. But here’s the thing. We experience those stories ALL THE TIME. Remember Rain Man? Or Million Dollar Baby? Or that one with the actress from Game of Thrones and that British actor who seemed like he was going to have a promising career but then didn't? Those are all stories about sad, bitter disabled people and their sad, bitter lives, two out of three of which end in the character completing suicide because they simply couldn’t imagine having to live as a disabled person. (I mean, come on media, I get that we're less likely to enjoy a leisurely Saturday hike, but our parking is SUBLIME.) When was the last time you engaged with media that depicted a happy disabled person? A complex disabled person? A disabled person who has sex? No really, these aren’t hypothetical questions, can you please drop a rec in the notes?? Because I am desperate.

There are lots of problems with this trope, and they’ve been discussed ad nauseam by people with PhDs. I’m not actually interested in talking about how this trope leads to a more prevalent societal idea that disabled people are unworthy of love, or contributes to the kind of political thought processes that keep disabled people purposefully disenfranchised. I’m just a bitch on Tumblr, and I have a bone to pick: the thing I really hate about the trope? It’s boring. I’m bored. You know how, like, halfway through Grey’s Anatomy you realized they were just recycling the same plot points over and over again and there was just no WAY anyone working at a hospital prone to THAT MANY disasters would stay on staff? It's like that. I love a recycled trope as much as the next person (There Was Only One Bed, anyone?). But I need. Something. Else.

Remus is disabled. BOLD claim. WILD speculation. Except, not really. You simply - no matter how you flip it, slice it, puree it, or deconstruct it - cannot tell me Remus Lupin is not disabled. Most of us, by this point, are probably familiar with the way that One Canonical Author intended One Dashing Werewolf to be “a metaphor for those illnesses that carry stigma, like HIV and AIDS” [I’m sorry to link you to an outside source quoting She Who Must Not Be Named, but we’re professionals here]. Which is... a thing. It’s been discussed. And, listen, there’s no denying that this parallel is a problematic interpretation of people who have HIV/AIDS and all such similar “those illnesses” (though I’ll admit that I, too, am perennially apt to turn into a raging beast liable to harm anything that crosses my path, but that’s more linked to the at-least-once-monthly recollection that One Day At A Time got cancelled). Critiques aside, Remus Lupin is a character who - due to a condition that affects him physically, mentally, emotionally, and intellectually - is repeatedly marginalized, oppressed, denied political and social power, and ostracized due to unfounded fear that he is infectious to others. Does that sound familiar?

We’re not going to argue about whether or not “Remus is canonically disabled as fuck” is a fair reading. And the reason we’re not going to argue about whether or not it’s a fair reading is because I haven’t read canon in 10-plus years and you will win the argument. Canon is only marginally relevant here. The icon of this blog is brown, curly haired Remus Lupin kissing his trans boyfriend, Sirius Black. We are obviously not too terribly invested in canon. The wolfstar fandom is now a community with over 25,000 AO3 fics, entire careers launched from drawing or writing or cosplaying this non-canonical pairing. We love to play around here with storylines and universes and races and genders and sexualities and all kinds of things, but most of the time? Remus is still disabled. He’s disabled as a werewolf in canon-compliant works, he’s disabled in the AUs where he was injured or abused or kidnapped or harmed as a child, he’s disabled in the stories that read him as chronically ill or bipolar or traumatized or blind or Deaf. I’d go so far as to say that he is one of very few characters in the Wide Wonderful World of media who is, in as close to his essence as one can be, always disabled. And that means? Don’t shoot the messenger... but we could stand to be a tiny bit more responsible with how we portray him. 

Disabled people are complicated. As much as I’d like to pretend we are always level-headed, confident, and ready to assert our inherent worth, we are still just humans. We have bad days. We doubt our worth. We sometimes go out with guys who complain about our steroid-induced weight gain (it was a long time ago, Tumblr, okay??). But, we also have joy and fun and good days and sex and happiness and families and so many other things. 

Remus is a disabled character, and as such, it’s only fair that he’d have those unworthy moments. But - I propose - Remus is also a crip. What is a crip? A crip - like a queer - is someone who eschews the limited boundaries placed on their bodies, who rejects a hierarchy of oppression in favor of an intersectional analysis of lived experience, who isn’t interested in being the tragic figure responsible for helping people with dominant identities realize how good they have it. Crips interpret their disabilities however they want, rethinking bodies and medicine and pleasure and pain and even time itself. Crips are political, community-minded, and in search of liberation. 

Remus is a character who struggles with his disability, sure. But he’s also a character who leverages his physical condition to attempt to shift communities towards his political leanings, advocates for the rights of those who share his physical condition, and has super hot sex with his wrongfully convicted boyfriend ultimately goes on to build community and family. Having a condition that quite literally cripples you, over which you have no control, and through which you are often read as a social pariah? That’s disability. But using said condition as a means through which to build advocacy and community? Now that’s some crip shit. 

Personally, I love disabled!Remus Lupin. But I love crip!Remus Lupin even more. I’d love to see more of a Remus who owns his disability, who covets what makes him unique, and who never ever again tells a potential romantic partner they are too good for him because of his disability. This trope - unlike There Was Only One Bed! - sometimes actually hurts to read. Where’s Remus who thinks a potential romantic partner isn’t good enough for him? Where’s Remus who insists his partners learn more about his condition in order to treat him properly? Where’s sexy wheelchair user Remus? Where’s Remus who uses his werewolf transformations as an excuse to travel the world? Where’s crip Remus??

We don’t have to put “you don’t want me” Remus entirely to bed. It is but one of many repeated tropes that are - in the words of The Hot Priest from Fleabag - morally a bit dubious. And let’s face it - we don’t always come to fandom for its moral superiority (as much as we sometimes like to think we do). 

This is not a condemnation - it is an invitation. Able-bodied folks are all but an injury, illness, or couple decades away from being disabled. And when you get here, I sincerely hope you don’t waste your time on “you don’t want me”ing back and forth with the people you love. I’m inviting you to come to the crip side now. We have snacks, and without all the “you don’t want me” talk, we get to the juicy parts much faster. 

Colorfully,

Mod Theo

[reluctant-mandalore]

Clan of Two Week 2021 (Day 1): Like Father, Like Son

Sometimes the child will try to copy his Mandalorian father in the strangest of ways. 

Warnings: fluff, no reader, no romance, family fluff, found family, not beta read

Word Count: 1368

Pairing: No pairing! 

a/n: I wanted to participate in this clan of two week ( @clanoftwoweek​ ) because I wanted to write some Din and grogu bonding fluff. I’m late starting but here’s day 1!! Enjoy ^-^

The day had started like any other. The Mandalorian had awoken to the child peering down at him from his little hammock. His wide eyes still laced with sleep, as he yawned and babbled down to the man below. Din had of course had smiled at the sight, before finally getting himself and child up for some delicious food. Then, after the child had eaten his fill, he had been dressed and put down to play while the man got himself into his armor.

“Hey kid you ready to head out?” He had called out into the hull once he had placed on the last pieces of his gear, though to his surprise, he hadn’t received any sort of a reply. The lack of which had made his nerves bounce and tumble. “Grogu? You ok kid?”

Reasonably he had known that Grogu was probably still playing further into the hull like he always did. Most of the toys he had were kept there after all, so it was a fair assumption, but usually the child would at least make a sound in acknowledgement at hearing his father call out for him.

Din did in fact find the child playing not too far off like he thought he would. His little chattered cooing, and the strange clashing of metal, allowing for him to find the little one almost instantly when he had gone to search. Although the sight of the kid struggling to pull off a bucket stuck on his head had thrown the bounty hunter into a frantic panic once he had laid his sights on him.

“What are you doing with that?!” Din had almost yelled in his worry at seeing the bucket refusing to budge from the child's head. He had rushed over quickly, his hands working gently, but efficiently, at removing the bucket from the little one’s head. “Here stay still—I got ya.”

“Buir!” The child had said excitedly when finally freed from his metal prison. His giggles and laughs sounding so cheerful that it was hard to believe he had been trapped in the first place. “Buir! Buir!”

Din had even felt his own bubble of happiness blossom within him at the seeing the joy on the little one’s face, and a smile had tugged at his lips at hearing the child call out to him. Buir had been the first—and so far the only—word that the child had learned to say properly by this point. Anytime he had heard the little creature speak it he had always been filled with unbelievable amounts of love for his son. Although at the moment he still couldn’t help but feel worried and concerned for the kid—it’s not every day you find your child stuck in a bucket after all.

“Yes buir is here.” He had mumbled fondly to the child. Soon finding himself patting a soothing hand over the top of the child’s head, before he had pulled the little one into a tight hug. The quick embrace more for his own relief than anything, though the child had still nuzzled himself into his father’s warmth. “You had me scared there... you could have gotten hurt ad’ika.”

The little creature had only blinked in surprise at seeing his worried father. His head tilting in wonder as the man had soon checked him over for any harm. His little mind not quite understanding why his father seemed to be so concerned for his well being at the moment. Only watching as the man had sighed after he was satisfied with seeing that the child had sustained no injuries from his little adventure today.

“Why did you have a bucket on your head?”

Grogu hadn’t said anything in response of course, and Din hadn’t expected him to do so, especially considering his limited vocabulary. He had more or so asked the question out loud for himself to ponder over. The child had seemed to have that effect on him. The little creature always seemed to be doing strange, and unlikely things that the man had never even thought of him capable of, and he honestly found himself questioning it all on a daily basis.

It wasn’t like he expected him to get trapped in a bucket after all. He didn’t think most parents would assume such things. Although knowing the child, and how mischievous the kid could be, had made it seem like the bounty hunter should have suspected them.

To the Mandalorian’s surprise though, the child did soon make his intentions with the bucket all too clear. While the man had sat lost in his thoughts, the little one’s hands had reached up to place themselves on the cheeks of the helmet he wore. Soon letting out some coos and babbles as his tiny fingers had traced along the jagged edges in unbound interest. The gesture stunning and shocking the man all in one go.

Din’s heart had swelled at the realization, and he found himself not quite believing it at first. The child’s fascination with the helmet was undeniable though, and he couldn’t deny the sparkle that was held in those black pools which gazed at him. The child really was an interesting little thing.

“You wanted… a helmet?”

Grogu had cooed happily at the man’s understanding—babbling in longer waves of gibberish—as his tiny fingers had this time tugged at the helmet. His eyes blown wide and filled with a wonder that the man had only seen when the child was truly entranced with something. Only this time he had seemed to be quite obsessed with the helmet his father had worn every passing day.

“I see... but don’t do that again. Ok?” He had said, his face softening as he had pressed his forehead to the child held safely in his arms. The contact and gentle murmurs from the child at the gesture calming him. “You’re still too young for a helmet like mine.”

Grogu had let out a sad sound at his fathers words as the two pulled back from their forehead tap. The little one allowing a frown to cross his features as his ears had lowered in disappointment.

The sight of which had only made the man chuckle and grin beneath the helmet. He had ended up trailing his fingers along one of the kid’s ears soon after—something he always did to sooth the little one when he had found himself upset. The gesture had worked of course, and even sooner the child had snuggled himself into the man’s hand, all while mumbling his happy baby gibberish once again.

“One day you can have one if you want.” He had promised before letting out another laugh at the happiness he saw cross the child’s features, “It’ll be made out of beskar and everything! It’ll be just like mine if you really want it to be.”

The kid had beamed at hearing him, clearly excited at the prospect of being just like his father one day. The smile that the little one wore the brightest he had ever seen from him, and the man had even felt his own grin spreading wider on his own lips while gazing at it. He had quite liked the idea too after all, and had always secretly wondered if the child may walk the way of Mandalore such as he did. Maybe he would, and maybe he wouldn’t, but the thought was still one that made him brim with pride.

The Mandalorian wasn’t sure what path the child would take in life. Would he be a Jedi like the others expected him to? Or would he dawn a helmet and swear the creed just like any other Mandalorian? Maybe it would be neither. Maybe he would instead choose to live a life of peace and comfort. The child was still so young and still had plenty of time ahead of him after all—it was uncertain of what exactly he would choose to do in the future at this point in time. There was one thing that was certainly clear though, regardless of whether or not the child ever did end up like his father, Din Djarin would still be immensely proud of his son.

Forever and always.

[king-finnigan]

242. Soulmate Au and 27. Sick/Injured, geraskier.

Jaskier’s used to bruises. He’s used to the pain, to being littered with dark and yellowing spots. He’s used to waking up to another gash on his arm or leg or torso. He’s used to the scars that mark his once so clear skin.

He wonders what his soulmate’s skin looks like. Clean, probably, barely scathed. No scars, no regular bruises that take weeks to heal and hurt like hell the second they appear on their body.

Jaskier’s used to the pain, but even more, he’s used to the weird looks people throw his way when they see the healing wounds and yellowing spots. Who the hell is his soulmate? he can hear them whisper, Why would they do that to him?

He’s used to wondering, himself. Everyone knows about soulmates. Everyone knows that your wounds appear and heal on the other person’s skin and vice versa. Everyone knows that.

So why would his soulmate let him suffer like this? Why would they not actively avoid danger to spare him this suffering? 

He gave up on being careful a long time ago.

Surely, if his soulmate was going to make him bruise and bleed and scar, was going to make him bear the burden of the healing process while their own wounds disappeared like a drop of blood in a stream - why should Jaskier try to be careful? Why should he not risk it all just for the sake of living a little? The world is full of people who live their lives carefully just to make sure their soulmates don’t suffer. Why should he be one of them, when his soulmate isn’t, either?

So yes, maybe he does sleep around with people he shouldn’t really be sleeping around with. Maybe he does get chased out of several bedrooms every month. Maybe he’s as careless with his heart as he is with his body. Maybe it gets broken once or twice or a billion times. It doesn’t really matter.

He’s used to the pain.

He decides to become a bard, at one point or another. He doesn’t really remember when, exactly, but he knows why - he’s so used to being stared at, so used to people’s gazes lingering on his bruises and scars and cuts, so used to the pity in their eyes and the indignant hurt he feels every time he sees it - might as well give them a damn reason to stare. And he’s always been rather fond of music, anyways.

So, he buys a lute, and sets out on the road.

And, alright, things go like shit. He gets food and insults thrown at his head, he gets kicked out of several establishments and even more bedrooms, people still stare at the injuries that aren’t really his. But he also feels more alive than he’s felt in a while. The adrenaline in his veins when he runs from an angry spouse, the lashing of his tongue when he throws insults back, the ache in his feet that’s entirely his and his alone - all things he cherishes and clings to, when he’s starting to feel hopeless once more.

And he still wakes up to new bruises, he still has to sit down at the side of the road when he feels a heavy blow to his gut or back, he still has to calm people down when they see a new gash appearing on his skin out of thin air, still has to say that yes, this happens all the time, don’t worry about it.

I’m used to it.

After a few lonesome months on the road, he finds himself in a tavern in Posada, once again getting yelled at, getting food thrown at him, the whole ordeal. Whatever. Free bread for him, none of his singing for them. Their fucking loss.

His eyes land on a white-haired man, sitting in the corner. Jaskier cocks his head, before stuffing some of the bread into his pockets. He stands up, sauntering over to the mysterious stranger, and he can’t help but admire the way the sunlight coming in through the dirty window bounces off those white locks, can’t help but marvel at the man’s smooth, even skin. A luxury Destiny never granted Jaskier - after all, his first scar appeared when he was barely a week old.

“I love the way you just sit in the corner and brood.” The words are out of his mouth before he can even think them. Careless with his body, his heart, his tongue. He’s used to it, by now.

“I’m here to drink alone.” The man’s voice is surprisingly deep, sending pleasant shivers down Jaskier’s spine. 

“Good, yeah, good. No one else has hesitated to comment on the quality of my performance.” He moves so he’s standing in front of the man. He’s used to being ignored or even downright rejected, at first, almost everyone does. It’s been a while since that scared him away, though. “Except for you. Come on, you don’t wanna keep a man with bread in his pants waiting.”

Okay, maybe not his best line, but he’s definitely said worse things - downright insulting things, if he doesn’t watch what he says, sometimes. 

The man merely rolls his eyes. Not a rejection, Jaskier decides, and sits down at the table. “You must have some review for me. Three words or less.”

It’s quiet for a while, until the man says: “They don’t exist.”

Okay. He didn’t expect that. Better than nothing, though. “What don’t exist?”

“The creatures in your song.”

“And how would you know?” 

The man doesn’t reply, and suddenly Jaskier is struck with a realization. Oh, this is great, this is absolutely perfect. “Oh, fun. White hair, big ol’ loner, two very-” his breath hitches in his throat for a second at the sight of the weapons, something primal stirring in him “very scary-looking swords. I know who you are.”

The man- Witcher stands up, taking said swords with him, leaving Jaskier sitting at the table. He contemplates whether he’s going to stay there or follow the man. Sure, the Witcher isn’t going to appreciate his company, clearly, but there are some very good stories there underneath that unmarred skin that Jaskier can’t wait to hear.

For example, do Witchers have soulmates? Probably not, given how perfectly clear Geralt’s skin is, but still, are they born without them? Or do they outlive their soulmate? Ooh, or do they kill them? Now that’s a story.

So, he decides to follow. He hits his hip on the table as he stands up, and hisses in pain, before it immediately disappears again. I’d say I’m sorry, soulmate, he thinks, as he clutches his now painless hip, but I’d be lying. You’ve given me plenty of bruises, now let me return the favour.

He only now notices that Geralt’s stopped in the middle of the tavern, for some reason. He continues, though, and Jaskier pays no mind to the strange behaviour, as he follows the Witcher outside.

---

“Need a hand? I’ve got two, one for each of the uh... devil’s horns.” Okay, maybe this may be his worst line yet, actually.

“Go away.” He can’t help but smile at least a little bit in triumph at that - at least it’s an answer, it’s something, and something is always better than nothing.

“I won’t be but silent backup!” It’s quiet for half a beat, and he takes that as encouragement to continue, to explain himself. “Yes, I heard your note, and maybe you’re right, real adventures would make better stories, and you, sir, smell chock-full of them. Amongst other things. What is that, onion? Whatever it is, you smell of death and destiny, heroics and heartbreak.”

“It’s onion.”

Another reaction. Great, now Jaskier just has to convince Geralt fully to let him tag along on this- quest? Hunt? Contract? To let him tag along, at least.

Another idea dawns on him. An interesting one, to say the least. “I could be your barker! Spreading the tales of Geralt of Rivia, the Butcher of Blaviken!”

Geralt turns around, and hope flares up in Jaskier’s chest. “Come here.”

He smiles at that. Finally, now we’re getting somewhere. “Yeah?”

“I apologize to your soulmate.” Jaskier frowns. What? 

It suddenly makes sense when Geralt lands a heavy blow in his gut, knocking the air out of his lungs. Jaskier’s still half on the ground, wheezing, when Geralt suddenly doubles over as well, hand on his stomach.

“What-”

Jaskier regains his footing again - after all, he’s used to the pain - and stares at the Witcher, mouth open in shock, as Geralt stares right back at him. 

Surely this can’t be. He blinks, unsure of what to do, if what he suspects is truly happening. Only one way to find out. He reaches up, twisting his own right ear painfully. 

And, well enough, Geralt hisses in pain, grabbing at the right side of his head in reflex. Suddenly, Jaskier recognizes little things, little scars and marks on the Witcher’s skin, that shouldn’t be there if he didn’t have a soulmate - a scar on his lower lip from when Jaskier had fallen when he was a kid and split his lip open, a small bruise on the left side of Geralt’s brow, when Jaskier had hit his head on the side of the door, due to his own clumsiness, last week, a small cut on the Witcher’s finger, when Jaskier had cut himself picking up a nice, shimmery piece of glass, this morning.

All injuries that Jaskier sustained, before disappearing like snow under the light of the sun, appearing on the skin of his soulmate instead, healing there.

Which means-

“You,” Jaskier breathes out, the numbness and surprise making way for joy and happiness and-

A surprising amount of anger.

“You!” He shouts, again, pointing an accusing finger at Geralt unconsciously. “So you’re the one who’s been-” he gestures up and down his own body, at the bruises, the scars, the healing gashes “been doing this to me!”

The Witcher visibly pales, swallowing thickly. “I didn’t know. We’re not supposed to-”

“What? Meet the person you’re doing this to?”

“Have a soulmate.”

It’s quiet for a moment, as they stand there, staring at each other. It makes sense, now, that Jaskier’s skin is littered with old and new wounds, it makes sense that Geralt barely has any. It makes sense, and somehow, that only makes it worse. A Witcher and a human - surely that can’t be.

“So...” Jaskier mutters, anger gone as soon as it came. “Soulmates, huh? Quite a surprise really, but now I do understand why I- uh... why-”

“Why you’re getting all these bruises and scars,” Geralt fills in for him. Then quieter: “Why you keep getting hurt.” The Witcher turns away, continues walking. “Go away. For your own good, stay far away from me.”

Jaskier frowns, feet glued to the ground, unable to put the things he’s feeling into words right now. He doesn’t want Geralt to go, doesn’t want to be left behind once again, as usual. Not by his soulmate. He’s used to it, but not like this.

“Make it up to me.”

Geralt stops, turns back around, amber eyes curious but cautious. “What?”

“You feel bad, don’t you?” The Witcher nods. “Then make it up to me. Let me come along on this little adventure or whatever, and if you- and by consequence, I- get hurt, make it up to me. Kiss it better, or whatever it is that you Witchers do with soulmates you’re not supposed to have. Make it up to me.”

“I’m not kissing it better.”

That’s not a full rejection, Jaskier thinks, and he smiles. “We’ll see, my dear Witcher. We’ll see.”

And when Jaskier gets a bloody nose from a blow landed in the Witcher’s face by a she-elf, later that same day, he can’t convince Geralt to kiss it better.

And when he gets a slash in his upper arm from a Kikimora the Witcher was fighting three miles away, a month later, he can’t convince Geralt to kiss it better.

And when he gets a bruise on his forehead from a rock some little shit threw at the Witcher, half a year later, he can’t convince Geralt to kiss it better.

And when, a year after their first meeting, the Bard slips and falls, and a few seconds later, the Witcher’s lip splits open, Jaskier finally convinces Geralt to let him kiss it better.

[coffeeandcalligraphy]

Weeping Statue | Feeding Habits Update #6 & let’s chat about quitting writing

Hello! Are we back for another Feeding Habits update (finally)?? Let’s chat chapter 7, Weeping Statue.

Just a reminder: This is my original work and plagiarism of any form will not be tolerated.

Can we talk about struggle? Because this chapter was IT. I believe I started it in late July and finished it earlier this month. I’ve taken my time with chapters before, but this was next level--the amounts of changes I went through in one chapter was astronomical, and reminded me of drafting chapter three earlier in the summer. I went through so many stages writing this chapter: from enjoying it, to feeling no joy from writing at all, to nearly quitting this book altogether!

Scene A:

Harrison and his mother Suzanna simultaneously avoid each other over breakfast after he failed to return home the night previous

She lowkey calls him out (calling out his denial of missing Lonan)

Scene B:

Harrison goes to a farmhouse owned by Theodore Harvey, a friend of his mother’s, to drop off the rescued litter of kittens from chapter 6. He realizes he is missing one kitten and concludes Reeve has stolen one after dinner the night previous.

Scene C:

Harvey invites Harrison inside for coffee where he admits his coffee machine is broken.

Harrison fixes the coffee machine, and is hired by Harvey to flip the rest of the farmhouse as he and his wife are moving.

Scene D:

On his way home, Harrison stops at a gas station where he buys a bouquet of tulips for his mother, a dog collar for the puppy he found in the kitten litter, a pack of gum, pastries, and sunscreen before heading to a beach.

At the onset of a lightning storm, Harrison swims in the ocean and has an epiphany--he decides to accept his miserable life (a development!)

Scene E:

After the beach ordeal, Harrison returns to his apartment ready to accept the plainness of his daily life when an old ghost from his past (his! ex!) Lonan appears to be having dinner with Suzanna

This chapter brought so many things. A) many... breakdowns lol (I cried a lot!), B) many false epiphanies that wound me back into ruts, C) a desire to quit this series that was just as terrifying as it sounds and D) an ideology I never would’ve gotten on my own. Just have to thank my sister Sarah for telling me a few weeks ago after I insisted that I knew what needed to logically happen but couldn’t write it no matter how hard I tried. She said: “It’s not about what works, it’s about what you want” << literally changed my philosophy on writing, even as someone who tries their best to advocate for care and enjoyment in writing. Not sure if it’s because of the timing when she said this, but I’d probably never had made it out of the rut without having this said to me.

I was *not* planning at all to have my boys reunite so soon in the book. Technically, it is not very soon and we are almost done the book, but for some reason, I really didn’t think it would work so early because I felt Harrison’s POV was so undeveloped already (I still think it is). HOWEVER, the fact of the matter is: it was not working at all. I knew exactly what I needed to do to get to point A to Z but the thing about writing is, it is not formulaic! I tried to make fit what I thought worked, but as time progressed and I immensely struggled, less and less did I want what worked. Writing was miserable and that’s not what I want writing to be for me. So I took Sarah’s advice, and I did what would make me happy, and that was, and has always been, seeing my boys interact.

Now that I’ve finished this chapter, I’m not sure if I made the right decision! I have yet to write the boys interacting so I don’t know if it will work, but what I liked about this method is that it freed me from this constriction I’d written myself into and opened a new avenue to do something that DOESN’T “work” for the story but that does work for me. To me, this project, this series, is more important to me than making something “work”. Sustaining my health and happiness (which were declining on the path I was on) is critical for me and my writing journey.

EDIT: by the time I’m editing this post, I have written the boys interacting and haha yep this was the right decision! Was doubting myself for a sec, added in a lil robbery, and now it’s all good (oops)

Excerpts:

I don’t have too many for you because this chapter does need an edit to “set” it in place (right now it feels like liquid Jello that has been in the fridge but is yet to set up). I know it needs one more scene but I cannot :) write :) what :) it :) needs :) no matter how hard I have tried, and so I am giving that section of the story a break instead of over-kneading it and toughening up the dough unnecessarily.

Here is part of the opening scene! There are things I don’t like about this but I am trying not to self-hate, so !!!

The next morning, Harrison gets up at dawn to drop the kittens off at the farm, and Suzanna makes coffee for one. This is unusual for both—Harrison rarely leaves the apartment, and Suzanna always makes coffee for two. In his room, Harrison combs his hair and twists his earring, its blue gem pearling in dribbles of sunlight. In the kitchen, Suzanna stirs coffee like it’s wronged her. Harrison dabs cologne onto his throat and blinks off his hangover. Suzanna flecks her spoon onto the tabletop so it leaves an egg of amber on the surface.

When he approaches the kitchen, Harrison pretends he does not see his mother and his mother pretends she does not see him. They move like this, repelled, one moving left, the other moving right, one opening the top cupboard, the other opening the bottom.

Harrison stops at a convenience store and buys a hodge-podge of things (also the beach scene which yes mirrors the last scene in Lonan’s POV hehe I indulge myself):

He picks up the best bouquet of fuchsia tulips, a collar for the dog he left in his bedroom even though it’ll be weeks until she’s big enough to fit in it, a pack of spearmint gum he doesn’t need, a package of pastries, and a tube of sunscreen—SPF 30. He almost drops every item at least once on his way up to the register, and definitely drops them when his receipt is spitting from the machine and the store clerk says she likes his earring—is it vintage—and he nearly vomits in the parking lot, trained against the hood of the taxi—is it even his taxi—the plastic bag teetering from his wrist, rain coiling against his cheek, the air so humid, his clothes so heavy, it is no wonder the next place he ends up is the beach.

It is never smart to swim during a storm. If he thinks hard enough, his mother’s voice warns him to keep from the shore, stand behind the yellow line, stay safe, stay where you are, don’t run under a tree, and even more, don’t run into the water. He does everything wrong in an even worse order—dollops sunscreen into his palm before opening the pastry so his teeth freckles with zinc, chews the gum and the pastry at the same time so his tongue becomes a slime of crumbs, rests the tulips too close to the shoreline so they wilt under a wave, misplaces the dog collar in his own left hand, and dives into the water fully-clothed.

Harrison getting very angsty about Lonan’s future (which he’s predicted completely wrong haha):

He will die alone. Reeve will not think of him again and he will deserve that. Somewhere in the city with the missing kitten, drinking bottles of holy water because there is no drink more fitting for a woman so sacred. His mother will miss him only briefly, and then return to her daily life of no longer needing to clean up after him. Maybe she’ll find the tulips. Put them on display until they wither, then use their carcasses as fertilizer. Save electricity. Use the coffee machine less. Downsize to a smaller, cheaper, prettier apartment with arched walkways and stained-glass windows. Harvey will think he is a fluke who missed his first day of work and will never think of him again. The dog isn’t old enough to recognize him. Suzanna will give her the collar. And Lonan will continue his life in Las Vegas, tottering after Eliza, refilling her wine, getting neon at house parties, watching French silent films without captions because he’s probably learned another language, cut his hair, gotten a tattoo, learned how to cross-stitch, bought life insurance, a yacht, a coastal summer home, learned how to play the mandolin, perfected his lamb sous vide. He’s probably married. Him and Eliza family-planning. He’ll expand a future, and Harrison will do the opposite. There is something freeing in being unmissed.

Lightning snaps across the sky like a wishbone, sounds like the prick of tambourines from under the water. Everything turns violet—the clouds, his skin, the waves. Tomorrow will be a better day, as he sinks lower into the current, tomorrow will be a better day, as the light fades and dissolves into blackness, tomorrow will be a better day, as seaweed wraps his throat, as the freezing water impales his ribs, as he burrows under and simultaneously, rises up.

This next part comes right after!

In the stomach of a tidal wave, the sky is so much bluer. An unrolling of cyan like fractals of a baked marble. There is so little to remember. No grocery lists, no fresh turmeric, no shift of portabella mushrooms. No outstanding to-dos—no kibble to by, no resume to update. Harrison folds in blue and lets it gorge his eardrums. He gives his body to that wide chasm of water and breaststrokes not into a second life, but a third.

Here is the last bit:

He buzzes back into the apartment at 3:00AM, tracking in saltwater and SPF, puff-pastry gummed to his palm, a dog collar wound around his ring finger, a sheath of tulips shedding into the elevator behind him.

He hits every floor button twice and is undisturbed when the elevator lurches and reopens in sixty-second intervals. A man rotating a jade cuff on his wrist gets on at the fourth stop and gets off at the sixth. A woman wearing a lynx cape gets on at the eighth stop, breaks up with two girlfriends, and gets off at the eleventh. Two children in coveralls tail in after she leaves and throw jacks at each other’s eyes until one of them bleeds, and by then, they are on the fifteenth floor and the children are leaving like they have not left behind accidental shell casings. On the sixteenth floor, a deer head chihuahua patters in with no owner and barks at the door chime the moment it releases and lets him out. A mother and daughter shell pistachios on the twentieth, a maintenance man introduces himself as David though his nametag says Maxwell on the twenty-second, a flock of teenage girls in whirl about a new way to blend oil pastel on the twenty-third. So it is no wonder by the twenty-fifth floor, Harrison misses his stop and becomes one of these people too—the man with zinc down his eyes like a weeping statue, juggling pastry and a dog collar and a seedy bouquet of tulips.

He tracks seawater in that hallway, parts of him scattering with the zinc, the petals, the crumbs. Like a way to get back home even though he hasn’t started at his destination, he moves through the labyrinth of halls, both starving and nauseated. Tomorrow he will rise at dawn and taxi to Brooklyn and hammer four nails into two pieces of plywood and repeat. He will feed his dog. Learn how to cook something that will impress his mother, something French that he can’t pronounce like brasillé or oeufs cocotte. Find liberation in the constrict of routine or at least pretend to. It will be good for him, the rising, the taxis, the hammers, the nails, the dog food, the cooking—it will all be good.

By the time he gets to their door, his fingers are oiled and dripping with sunscreen. Rising, taxis, hammers, nails, dog food, cooking. He nearly drops the house keys. Rising, taxis, hammers, nails, dog food, cooking. Tomorrow will be his arrival. Rising, taxis, hammers, nails, dog food, cooking. His beginning swelling as he turns the lock. Rising, taxis, hammers, nails, dog food, cooking. There is no other way out.

The apartment is dark when he tracks in. The scent of cinnamon steeping the air like Suzanna’s pulled a saucepan of papas off the stove. At first he doesn’t hear it, but he should, the voices leafing the kitchen like a flit of moths. He steps out of his shoes but never sets anything down, even after he passes the coffee table. Two plates ringing the centre, streaked with and caldeirada and bayleaf. A pitcher of lemonade sweating onto the glass. It is almost like he never left, like he and his mother shared dinner, sipped from each other’s cups, cleaned the tines of each other’s fishbones. And he almost believes it. He never went to the farm. The kittens are where he left them, just a few feet away, not in Brooklyn. He doesn’t have a job to tend to. He never fixed the coffee machine. He didn’t go to the convenience store. He is not slathered in sunscreen, not holding a dog collar or pastries or a bouquet of tulips. He never dove into the ocean like it was some port to asylum and didn’t emerge soaked and walking half-dead to his apartment because he never left. This reality is so easy to believe, he is unfazed by the voices and how they get louder when he reaches the kitchen, when one says “Were you shopping for the apocalypse?” and the other one chokes on its drink and apologizes for its rudeness and stares at him in daydream, those eyes like forget-me-nots, gas fires, seafoam, the wing of a starling, his drop earring.

Harrison is grateful he is soaking wet when he enters that kitchen and Suzanna and Lonan sit at the table sharing a box of petit fours. At least he has an excuse when he drops everything.

That’s it for this update! The tea starts HERE!

--Rachel

[moonlights-inkwell]

Someone You’re Not.

Summary: You know so much about him, but really you know nothing. You don’t even know his real name.

Jaskier x Reader

Word Count: 5,947

A/N: I mentioned how Jaskier told the reader his real name in my last fic and then decided I just had to write this. I guess this is a series now.

Warnings: Drinking, Canon compliant violence, smut, unprotected sex.

For the amount of time you and the pretty bard spent together, you could safely say you knew very little about him. Well, very little might be an exaggeration. Jaskier is exceptionally open and spends so much time talking, and usually about himself, that it would be impossible to not pick up a thing or two. You know in all certainty that his favourite colour is periwinkle, that he spent a good few years studying in Oxenfurt Academy, and how immediately when you decide to stay in an inn or tavern he needs to have a bath with a very specific lavender oil.   You know the way he fingers the frets of his lute even when he doesn't play, just to have something to do with his hands, how he brightens up at even the most minute of praise and how his smile makes you swear he cannot be human because human men can't possibly be this beautiful. You know the feeling of his lips against yours and his hand on yours, but you really know nothing at all. No idea of where he grew up, if he has siblings. You don't even know his name.

It seems slightly sinister when I think of it like that, you consider as you swirl your tankard of ale, sat across from the centre of the tavern floor where he's singing for the clientele songs of Geralt's success in slaying a selkiemore not two hours before. The drunken celebration of the town people, clapping and shouting a familiar chorus of Toss A Coin To Your Witcher over Jaskier's new song, feels worlds apart from the comfortable quiet of the table you share with the white haired man- connected with these grinning locals but only through the bard's song and proximity. He's beaming, eyes glittering, and mouth turned up in the widest smile as he drinks up the praise and adulation. He looks like a child in front of a baker's shop and always does as he performs, your own lips turn up in an appreciative smile as you watch him bound around like an overly excited puppy, plucking the strings of his lute. After travelling together for... you don’t even know how long- time is almost an incomprehensible concept while traveling with the Witcher- and being in your relationship as of two winters ago, you don't even know what his given name is. Something about that strikes you as unfair. Stage Names are all well and good for Bards, needing something that can be cried out easily by an adoring audience like the one in front of you now but he’s more than just a bard to you. No matter where you go, he always charms anyone who listens to him sing. It makes sense. When you met him, working in a tiny tavern in a tiny town not far from Toussaint, you fell in love as soon as you heard him sing. Were anyone ever to ask about your first meeting you would have claimed that you felt his grip on your heart intensify when you saw him smile. Gave up on a job, friends, a life to blindly follow him in his travels with his Witcher friend, all for the sake of that smile, that voice, those eyes. Like a siren, he sang his song and into his hold came your heart. It sounds oh so very romantic- as Jaskier has said time and time again when trying to put the “tale of our love" to music- but it’s not quite true. His voice was beautiful, his eyes wild, his voice like a call to the wild, but that wasn’t what made you leave everything behind; you left because of how sweetly he spoke to you after his show, ignored the rest of the tavern to sit at the bar talking avidly to you until long after you should have closed, and how beautiful his personality was. It sounds far more romantic to say it was love at first sight, first song, than love at first conversation, love at first offer of freedom.

No matter the venue, you watch him pour his soul out into his performances and sustain himself on the praise it earns him, be it these little pubs or wedding banquets. He's like a fae or a puppy, the way he can just lap up positivity and turn it, alchemy like, into song and show. You assume the only person who hasn't fallen in love with the Bard's songs is the person he spends most of his time singing about. The Witcher is never impressed, preferring the quiet of his meditation over the hustle and bustle of a lively performance. You don't entirely blame him. Jaskier is a joy to watch performing, and his voice is like nothing you’ve known in your life; but you travel with him, and Geralt has travelled with him long before you entered their traveling party, it takes the wonder out of him sometimes, when reminded that the same man singing was only this morning composing an annoying little ditty about how Geralt smelled and needed to bathe and how you ought to smile more. Geralt makes a noise of annoyance at all the noise, and you attempt to hide your enjoyment by taking a deep gulp of your beer, only to gag and cringe at the taste. It’s disgusting.

Ale always tastes vile, always has and always will. In your younger years you drank it with friends without complaint so as not to be laughed at, though your male friends had always laughed anyway. Having worked in a tavern meant that it was the convenient to drink and serve during the busiest working hours, in spite of how disgusting it is to you. Even now, you find yourself drinking it to keep up an appearance of stoicism to impress Geralt, determined not to have him believe you delicate and useless in contracts, but even now you couldn’t make yourself like it, or even find it tolerable. If your white-haired companion notices the way your face scrunches up after taking a swig, he says nothing. In your disgust at your drink, you hadn't noticed that the songs have ended and the crowd quieted down, until you feel the press of lips against the curvature of your neck and your bard settling himself beside you, which only serves to draw a shocked squeak from you. He smiles at you with a playful wink, resting his lute on the table,  

“Well, what did the two of you think of my triumphant performance?” He asks proudly, which results in a noncommittal grunt from Geralt. He’s never been much of a conversationalist, and never has much time for the songs either, so you find yourself filling in the silence with your own enthusiastic praise.  

“It was fantastic. You know it was fantastic, Jask.” You coo to him, resting your cheek on his shoulder and watching his chest puff up with pride. “Especially seeing as you only wrote it today.” In return for the compliment, the Bard presses a kiss into your hair. You pull back and smile proudly, resting a hand on his thigh as you take another swig of the beer. The look on your face must have been undeniable as you find Jaskier gently prying it from your hand after noticing your grimace,

“Gods, Dear Heart. Don't dare drink that, it tastes of piss.” He says playfully, leaning in close to gently wipe the ale that had sloshed over your bottom lip in the sudden movement. Dear Heart. As much as you've never been one to use aliases or fake names, Jaskier uses pet names so often they might as well be your true name.  

Dear Heart, Dove, Love, My Breath, Darling Muse, My Moon and Stars; you lose track of the number of sweet names he uses for you. They’re always romantic and lyrical, the kind of terms that would sound stilted coming from anyone but him. He says them like they’re meaningful, and had taken time to construct, even more so than the time it took your parents to name you. At first you had worried that he used them because he's forgotten your name, but you know that it’s just his way. He pairs them with sweet kisses to the back of your hand, or a hand at your hip, using your true name only when annoyed or worried. He likes titles. He still calls Geralt by every pseudonym he can think of much to the ire of the other man.  

“If it gets me drunk then it's fine.” You reply quickly, cheeks flushed at the feeling of his calloused thumb against the sensitive skin of your mouth, trying not to breathe in deeply and to fight off the urge to brush your tongue across the pad. No matter how many times he touches you, however chaste the contact is, you find yourself blushing like the first time. With a melodramatic gasp, the bard pulls back his thumb to stare at you like you had grown a second head.  

“You do understand you're supposed to enjoy what you’re drinking, not just what it does to you, right?” He says, as if he's the authority on drinking, his tone of voice telling you that there's nothing you can say to dissuade him. “I’ll fetch you some of the wine I like. I can promise it tastes better than that.” And with that he smiles and pushes the thumb into his mouth, cringing as the beer touches his tongue. “Gods, I was right. You stay there, don’t touch that, I’ll be back.”  

Geralt rolls his eyes at Jaskier's proclamation and grunts for your attention before he gestures towards the door, got to his feet and walked off to bed. Despite what Jaskier's song would have the people believe, it had not been as easy a fight as either of you had anticipated. Geralt had been slammed into the river bank so many times you thought he would have broken a bone or more, and a rapid movement had seen you sent crashing into a tree and less than useless for an hour or two. He's had a spree of bad luck as of late. You almost feel bad that he has to see you and Jaskier interact with each other like this since his latest tryst with Yennifer ended as poorly as it ever does. The Witcher’s absence sees you return to your earlier thoughts about the Bard's name, or your lack of knowledge of his real name. It shouldn’t matter, and truly it doesn't matter to you, but as you watch him try and navigate his way through the crowd of people around the bar, you find yourself trying to think of what his real name could be. He's no Erik, and certainly you can’t imagine him as an Aleksander or Kacper, but you can't quite imagine a name for him but Jaskier. It suits him. Dandelion’s are bright, beautiful and misunderstood, and so is he. Were you honest with yourself, you have no idea why he's here with you. If his accent and clothes weren’t already loaded with coin and privilege, him saying things like ‘you should enjoy what you drink' just solidifies in your mind that he doesn't belong with you and Geralt. Enjoying what you drink means affording a drink that tastes so good it justifies paying for it, and you can barely justify paying for even ale when it gets you drunk. He's like a rare and beautiful songbird, sweet sounding and brightly coloured and strange to find lingering in places where they don’t belong, like with a Witcher and a girl with such little self-preservation that she'll fight monsters, such as yourself. The sight of Your Dandelion returning to the table with two jugs of wine removes every thought from your mind entirely.  

“Here, Dear Heart. You'll like the taste much more, I swear.” He says with a wide grin, still riding on the high of his triumphant performance, pockets full of coin and head filled with applause. He looks beautiful like this. The two jugs are placed in the space between your hands and his, surrounded on one side by his lute. He reaches out timidly and rests the tips of his fingers on your palm, which lets you slide your palm under his and squeeze it gently. You sip the wine without a second thought and he, in turn, takes a deep gulp. It tastes of tart cherries, cloves and how Jaskier's lips taste when he kisses you in the midnight hours, you find yourself smiling as you pull it away from your mouth, the deep red staining your mouth. He’s right. You do like the taste.  

“It’s beautiful.”  

“I told you as much, Dove. It’s delicious, the night is young, and we have coin. So drink.”

/////////

Once the two of you have reached a delicious sort of drunkenness that can only come with the coins from a successful contract, performance, and spending them on more than five jugs of the sweetest tasting wine you have ever drank, you find yourself pressed against the door on the inside of the room you're sharing with your Dandelion. His lips, chapped but soft, are pressed against your own, tongue dipping into your mouth as if still seeking out any wine that might linger still, making your fingers curl into the blue satin of his doublet and your tongue to timidly lap at his. Nights like this, where you aren’t sleeping in the open or five feet away from Geralt and Roach, are rarer than you would like but the scarcity makes you treasure them more. They feel like a gift. Nights where the two of you can just take time with one another, not just steal quick moments of pleasure when you can be sure you're alone. You wouldn’t give up this life for anything on the continent but if you could sleep in a real building more often you would do it in a heartbeat, just for moments like this, where a knee slots between your own and his lips dart down from your own to the hollow of your throat, to suck bruises the colour of wine against your skin, drawing desperate sighs from kiss swollen lips. Your hips rut against his knee to try to relieve the pressure and wetness gathering between your legs, and a warm hand rests on your hip, guiding you to move quicker still.  

“You’re so beautiful.” Even in moments like this, he can’t keep himself from talking. At this point, it must be a universal constant: the sun will rise each morning, fish live in water, ale tastes disgusting, and Jaskier is still talking. Warm breath fans against your skin as he speaks, as much to himself as to you. “So beautiful like this, Dear Heart. Blooming. Like a flower. You are fucking beautiful.” His tone is reverent and makes your heart ache for him to take from you, anything and everything he needs. He makes you feel so much more than what you are, and in return you groan weakly and pull his head back by his hair to slam your lips into his once more. He mutters something against your mouth that sounds a little like your name, then pries you from the door and against his chest, knee still between your thighs, and begins to stumble blindly towards the bed. Fingers splay across your chest, somewhere between groping at your chest and trying to undo the lacing keeping it tied together, in return you push the doublet off of him and let it fall to the floor without a thought. It’s easy to forget how well built your bard is when he spends so much time around Geralt, but now with a hand pressed against firm muscle beneath a thick thatch of hair you’re reminded that he is so much more than someone pretty with a lute. The brunette pulls back from you with a heavy sigh which turns to a throaty chuckle as you chase after his mouth to continue the kiss. When your eyes finally open to see why he isn’t kissing you, you catch sight of blown out pupils, with only a thin ring of ocean blue surrounding it, roaming along your face and body hungrily.  

“Jask,” Your voice comes out a pathetic whine, which makes him chuckle once more, deft fingers tugging your chemise over your head only to then bunch it up and toss away from you, like prolonged contact would make it catch fire.  

“Yes, Dear Heart...” He replies quickly, voice husky and verging on a growl.  

“I want you...”  

“And you have me.” He cradles a hand against his chest for a second or two, before pulling you closer once more, turning and pushing you onto the bed. “And I have you. And will for as long as you’ll have me.” As long as you’ll have me. He says it every time you’re intimate, anything from him simply pressing his fingers inside of you to bedding each other, it's only as long as you’ll have him.  I'd have you till the day I die, you think to yourself as you land on the mattress, I’ll want you till the day I die.  

“Then have me.”  

The smirk he gives you is feral as he climbs over you, knees sinking into the blanket on either side of your hips, lips pressing into your neck once more then travelling downwards. Without your chemise to keep you warm, the blushed flesh of your nipples hardened in the cold air which hadn't gone unnoticed by your lover, who slides his hands to your chest once more to gently massage your mounds while mouthing down the valley between them and towards your trousers.  

“Oh, Muse, do not worry.” He says reassuringly, pulling his hands back from your skin to the fabric at your waist. “I’ll have you. And Gods, how you'll sing for me.”  

////////

Like all nights that involve Jaskier, drinking, and privacy, you find yourself held down against the soft mattress; one of his hands cradling your cheek, while skilled fingers pump in-and-out of you at an almost agonisingly quick pace. Slick, wet, slapping sounds echo through the room, coupled with reassuring coos from him and your own gasps and sighs. The candle, dimly lit and resting on the table closest to the bed, gave out just enough light for you to stare adoringly up at him- cast in golden light like a god amongst men. He was right. Sing for him, you did, moaning loudly into his mouth as he kisses you sweetly. It's the bard in him, that sees him treat your body like an instrument to encourage noises from, your moans the tune and his sweet nothings the lyrics. Its the most beautiful song of his, you can't help but think, one that you would gladly sing every day for the rest of your lives, a song that’s lyrics consist of a call and response between the two of you,  

“Yes, Dear Heart. Sing for me, my girl.” Or “Sweet thing, you’re so bloody gorgeous.” Which is followed by your own faltering mutters of,  

“Jask... there. Oh. I'll...” and “Dandelion... please. Please.”  

The two fingers inside you curl and rub against that spot that makes your gasp grow louder still, a hand suddenly grasping his forearm tightly to anchor yourself once more.  Buried to the start of his signet ring, he grins, twists his fingers once and then pulls them out of you. Glistening digits are pulled up to his mouth and sucked on while he maintains eye contact with you, rocking backwards to rest on his knees. He's spent an hour with his mouth and fingers working your cunt to orgasm over, and over, and over again, yet the simple sight of him sucking your essence from his fingers is enough to make you flush, as if struck with the perversion of the situation all at once. Darkened eyes, framed by darker lashes rake down your body hungrily, such a hunger that any insecurity you might have felt about being so exposed is gone at once.

“You taste so sweet.” It makes you sound like a pie or tart to be spoken about like that, but you can’t help but be flattered. He says it every time he works you to completion on his tongue, and while you argued the first time or two, you've grown to believe him. Or so you say, just so you can avoid his emphatic lectures about your beauty and how he would kill or die for you to see yourself as he does. The wine has made you brave, though, letting you question him  

“I... I do?” There is an unmistakable quiver in your voice that turns Jaskier's grin wolfish. You'd almost be afraid of the look he gives you were it not for the softness in his eyes. You know his answer. It’s always the same. The swipe of his index finger across the sensitive skin of your slit, circling your clit once, twice, before pulling back and pushing it into his mouth with a loud moan, almost certainly for your benefit. He’s a performer by nature and by trade, and the level of confidence he exudes as he smirks down at you is comparable only to the confidence he has when he sings. Moving down to cage you to the bed, nose touching nose, lips near touching, his member rubs against the wetness gathering at your thighs making you gasp, feeling like you’re being touched too much and too little all at once.

“I’ve never tasted anything so sweet in my entire life.” He sounds so sincere. You know that words are his occupation, and that he’s had many lovers before you, but he speaks with such a sincerity that makes you feel like the only person to have ever existed in his eyes. It’s enough to make your throat tighten and eyes well with overly sentimental tears, so you quickly shut your eyes and press your lips against his, tongue tracing the seam of his mouth, until it opens and your tongue dips within. He tastes of sweet cherry wine, something that can only be described as Jaskier and some thing you can only assume is the taste of yourself. You should feel ashamed, a voice in the back of your mind says weakly, at such a wanton display, licking your own taste from the mouth of a lover who's taken to holding you with such a gentleness you'd swear you were made of glass, but you can’t find it in yourself to care. Lustful acts behind closed doors is hardly the end of the world and Jaskier isn’t one to judge, especially if the appreciative noises he’s making into your mouth is anything to go by, and if description of what happens find itself in his next song then even still you won’t care, save for the blush it'll bring to your face and the wink that will inevitably come as he sings. It won’t be the first time. Adjusting your legs to better accommodate him between them, his member rubs against your slit, but he keeps his touch chaste, holding your face gently before breaking the kiss to rest his forehead against yours.  

“May I?” It’s obvious what he means, but still you tilt your head as if oblivious.  

“May you what?” The playful tone of voice brings from him a near exasperated sigh, coupled with the softest smile you can imagine. He doesn't need to ask, never does, especially when he's had you crying out for him for hours now, but he does and always does. It’s sweet that he wants to ensure that you always want it, but you love teasing him.

“Please may I make love to you, Dear Heart?” The candle flickers as he says that, and for a brief second, you're dipped into pitch blackness, before the light returns once more. Make love. It’s such a pretty term, so much sweeter than calling it fucking, makes you feel loved- even if he’s never said that he does. Cheeks tinged a deep red, you nod quickly.  

“Please do.” The earnest desire in your voice is hard to hide sober, so you don't even attempt it drunk, instead opting to dedicate yourself to more fruitful pursuits like wrapping a hand around his cock and rubbing up the length quickly. The gasp that slips from his lips is musical and makes you smile, but it slips as his hand rises to grab your wrist, stilling the movement and pinning it gently to the bed.  

“As much as I love you doing that, if you keep it up, I won't be able to last.” Your heart swells a little with pride, and your mouth turns up in a small smug smirk. You understand all at once why he smirks at your moans.  

“I don’t recall saying I want you to last.” Your voice is little more than a whisper, making his eyes narrow into cat-like slits.  

“I want to make you cum on my cock. And I don’t see a way of doing that if I don’t last.” He nips at your ear, then presses a kiss to the space behind it as he pushes into you. No matter how many times he beds you, it feels like the first... especially after multiple climaxes. He's thick. You moan loudly into his mouth as he pushes himself to the hilt inside of you, and the earlier stimulation makes him feel bigger still, every inch and vein feeling massive. It’s hard to articulate how good he makes you feel in this moment, filling you and brushing his nose against the curve of your jaw, so you moan out incoherently.  

He's leaned over you, with hair far beyond tousled and hanging over his face, pupils blown out so wide you can barely make out the thin blue ring around them, and lips made plump and pink from kissing. He's beautiful, almost painfully so, covered in a thin sheen of sweat which reflected the flickering candlelight. You don’t feel worthy of the attention he lavishes on you, but it's not something you would have ever vocalised, for fear of one of his long, verbose rants about how much he adores you, loves you most ardently.  

“Jaskier-" You moan softly into his mouth as he kisses you chastely, which causes the corners of his lips to turn up into a satisfied smile. He always smiles like that when you moan, proud like each noise is a medal or triumph. Somewhere in the back of your mind, you tell yourself you should be embarrassed by how vocal you’re being, but you also know you would make a million noises just to make him smile. You couldn’t have been silent if you tried anyway.

“Julian.” He replies, hips bucking back slightly only to push back into you. What? Julian? Your eyes widen then narrow in confusion, the combination of that and the pleasure of the thrust causes you to let out a moan, tinged with confusion. He chuckles once more, but less self-assured this time. He seems to have realised that saying a name that isn’t yours, while inside you, was not likely to go down well. “It’s my name. My... name.” He becomes shy for a second, leaning back onto his knees so that he’s no longer draped over you with his body, member pulled out until only the tip remained inside of you. You push yourself up onto your elbows, staring up at him, his face childish looking in a sort of guilt you've never seen before. “I was... I was hoping you could-"  

“Julian.” You cut him off, reaching out to brush your fingers across his chest and threading through the shag on his chest. Julian. Your mind replays the name over and over again, and it's wonderful. A real name. It suits him, but it’s not Jaskier. It's not the name you know him by. Julian is a real name for a real man who would have real responsibilities, not a beautiful foppish bard who follows adventures and travels around the continent without a second thought like your Dandelion. “Julian, Jaskier, Dear Heart, Dandelion, Buttercup... It’s all the same to me.” It isn't though. Maybe to him it is, but you’re struck by how... insecure he looks now. Jaskier is never insecure, occasionally cruel and more often than not jealous, but insecure? Not your Jaskier.  

Somewhere in your mind, back, far beyond the thought of sex and satisfaction that is taking you over, you think about those names that you call him. Dear Heart, Dandelion, Buttercup, Jaskier. All of them are the same wild, beautiful, charming man. This Julian, still beautiful and charming, is afraid; you don’t like that look on him. You like his stupid, over-excited grin, and so you lean up and peck his lips.  

“It's all the same to me, Julian.” You repeat with a soothing smile. “As long as you’re mine, I really don’t mind what I call you.”

Ocean-blue eyes light up with a bright grin, and with a drunken laugh he pins you down once more, face buried in the crook of your neck at the same time that his hips snapped against yours, which draws a loud moan of each other’s names in unison.

“Oh, Dear Heart.” Jaskier, Julian, whispers sweetly against your skin and you swear in that moment that had he asked you to pull down the moon and the stars, you would have immediately done it.  

“Julian.” You moan out, clinging onto his back as his thrusts continue at a near brutal pace.  

“My Dearest...” He moans, mouthing at your collar and throat, one hand holding your thigh to his hip and the other holding onto your hand like someone will steal you away from him at any moment. The changed position makes you feel fuller still, each and every thrust bringing stars to your vision until, with a shaking gasp, you feel yourself overwhelmed by the oh so familiar feeling of your own completion washing over you once more. Julian, no Jaskier, continues his frenzied pumping into you, talented fingers working at your sensitive pearl, just on the right side of painfully pleasant. Any thought you had had even a second beforehand melded into an incoherent mess of the same few words,  

“Good. Oh fuck, Jask. So fucking good.” Then, while your mind was overtaken by the lust and wine, you whine out a weak, “Julian.”  

At that he stills, with a painful sounding whimper, and you feel the sensation of warm release flooding into your cunt. Eyes snapping open, you catch the sight of him leaning over you once more. For a moment of silence, a reprieve from the moans, gasps and wet slap of skin on skin that had filled the air, he remains leaned over you, forehead pressed to your collarbone before dropping down and collapsing on top of you. Absentmindedly, you reach up to card your fingers through his damp hair. He has so much fucking hair, you consider lazily and smile.  

“You'll be the death of me, Dear Heart.” It’s muffled, and a little hard to make out, but you hear him clear as day; it makes you smile, the image of him dying mid shag. He peaks up at you from beneath those long eyelashes and repeats it, peppering kisses along the goose-pimpled flesh of your chest and the top of your breasts, making you giggle. It was a bad idea to laugh, as it encourages him in his journey of kisses, hands moving up to tickle you while using his body weight to hold you in place.

“Gods, Dandelion. Get off of me.” You cackle, trying to buck him off without much luck. “You weigh a tonne!”  

“Are you calling me fat, Darling?” He sounds incredulous and insulted, but the wide grin on his face proves that he’s anything but. Rising slowly, he rests over you on one elbow and cups your cheek, pulling you into a sweet but deep kiss while he delicately pulls himself from within you. The loss makes you whimper under your breath, eyes slipping shut once more, and Jaskier breaks the kiss momentarily to watch transfixed for a second as some of his seed drips from you. You blush under his gaze, as you always do when he looks at you in this way. Skilful fingers scoop up some of his own seed, mixed with your essence, and push it back inside you, the sensation drawing a loud moan from you once more. Mouths pressing together once more, the mattress dips beside you, and you pull back once more to smile,

“I cannot believe you just called me fat.”  

“I would never!”  

“I weigh a tonne? That’s what you said.” His tone is matter of fact and you lean in and press a playful kiss to the tip of his nose.  

“A tonne of muscle and talent?” You offer, and he smirks, grasping you by the hips and all but flinging you on your side.  

“Flattery will get you nowhere, my love. Now sleep.” He says with a sigh and swats playfully at your bottom, pulling the sheets around the two of you. He never makes demands of you, so his light comments like sleep carries far more weight than they should. The blanket, combined with him curling himself around you, head between your shoulders, makes it too warm for you to fall immediately asleep; but you find yourself drifting into the warm, incomprehensible space between sleep and awake.  

“Julian, eh?” Your voice is little more than a croak, yet it’s enough to make him huff out a short laugh with a squeeze of your hip.  

“Yes. Julian. Julian Alfred Pankratz. I. I thought you should know.”  His confidence has faltered once more and instinctively you place a hand atop of his and squeeze it. “...I realised earlier I hadn't told you.”

“Julian Alfred Pankratz.” You repeat, testing how the name feels in your mouth. “I like it.” He nods tiredly, and you curl up into a ball, rolling onto your side to let him take his usual sleeping position, forehead between your shoulders. “...but I like Jaskier more.”  

“Same here.” He mutters tiredly and presses a kiss to your spine. “But if anyone is to call me that, I'd rather it be you.”

“...thank you, Jaskier.”  

“For what, Dear Heart?” He asks and lifts his head, resting his jaw on your shoulder.  

“Telling me? Letting me know?” In this tired headspace you're finding it harder and harder to keep any thoughts out of your mouth. “I don’t know. I appreciate you telling me more about you. You’re just so... private. I worry I barely even know you sometimes.” Voice dipping into a near whisper, sleep begins to overtake you, eyes slipping shut.  

“I’ll tell you anything you want to know, My Muse.” He whispers, the last thing you hear before falling asleep. Once you're asleep, he smiles, pressing a kiss behind your ear before returning his head to your back, “Anything you want to know from my past. My future is already yours; you may as well have what I was as well as what I might be.” Your rhythmic breathing causes his eyes to droop once more. “...I love you.” Before that confession can give him reason for concern, sleep engulfs him, bringing him to dreams of your future together.  

[sambinnie]

1. Happy Mabon! Every autumn, I forget that the darkness comes clanging down in a great rush in the mornings. One day, I am greeted by a pinking sunrise. 48 hours later, it’s so dark on my run to the river that I have to stop a passing runner and check the time, in case my disturbed sleep sent me dressing and leaving the house at 2am. This summer may not have given us those mornings where it’s so hot I can barely get out of the water, where those early hours feel like full silent days carved out just for me to sit in the light and wait for everyone else to wake up, where the only extra thing I put on to run home is my trainers — I look at my waiting winter gear, neoprene socks and gloves, head torch, two more thickening jumpers, hat, thermal mittens — but every season, every day, is beautiful.

Today we go early for celebrations, and the water is silky, and Orion hangs over us with his phallic sword dangling and Betelgeuse winking on one shoulder. The near-full moon spotlights us and I feel almost ready for the shortening days.

2. Hilary Mantel continues to be a literary god. How does she write with that clarity? How can I ever speak with her calm good sense and wit? 

3. We have two main problems at the moment, as far as I can see. a) What we’re doing (“curating” our lives; twitter spats; purity spirals; division and isolation; wanting ‘debates’ that can only be won or lost; encouraging people to buy more things; trying to buy our happiness; letting marketers tell us how we feel about the world rather than encouraging major moral lessons from throughout the ages to challenge us on our weaknesses; refusing to accept that life is suffering; asking self-care to be a plaster for everything we don’t have) and b) what we’re not doing (joining together to stand against those with more money and power; protecting the people who have even less power and voice than we do as a matter of course; learning from history; protecting nature above all else; prioritising going for walks; learning to repair things and campaigning to make things repairable; having a basic belief in human dignity for all, not just those with whom we agree; accepting that truly, we are all different and no amount of shaming or disgust will change that; working to shape our societies, culture, economies, production, food supplies and communications around improving — not just sustaining — the air, water and land, and fighting to ensure all of those new shapes protect women and children).

Individualism has morphed into something so completely self-destructive that we’ve forgotten we need nature more than anything — literally, more than anything — and we need to unionise and unite and put aside differences and work together even with people we don’t like. 

Because when there are wicked people in power, when it’s genuinely exhausting to think about all the corrupt, venal, toxic, divisive, false, and cruel things they have done since coming to power, those people love to watch everyone below pointing their fingers at one another, saying, You, You’re The Enemy, You’re The Problem, while corrupt populist leaders rub their bellies and chuckle at another promise broken, another mass death on their hands, another building site on a protected forest. Do you understand the stakes here? Do you understand that it’s actual survival? It’s not about being right any more, it’s not about besting someone in the argument. It’s about having decision makers who can not only ensure there is still food to eat and air to breathe, but that relations both within a country and between countries are built on care, and support, and compassion, and believing in human dignity. And while it sounds wishy-washy and hands-clappy it’s the schmaltzy, sentimental truth. It’s the only one, really. 

If we instead continue to believe every single day that my feelings are the most important, that my beliefs are the right ones, that I’ve got to prove those baddies there are evil and awful and wrong, then honestly, what the fuck? If we’re happy to live in a country where hostile architecture is the starting point for all public builds, where we send refugee boats away from our shores, where affiliate links are a career goal, where we haven’t stormed the Daily Mail offices with accounts of all our lovely immigrant friends and family and had a huge feast together and compared our long and tangled family trees, then come on. It’s only a race to the bottom if we all keep running. 

Because, pressingly, whatever the spark of a major global conflict — assassination, fuel shortages, hyperinflation, invasion — the kindling is almost always a populace fed pure hatred for months, for years, until they can’t even taste it anymore but are ready to spew it out again, and are ready to use another populace as the receptacle. And hatred is brewed up in silence and isolation, and in the ashes of bridges burned between disparate groups. 

And on that note, I’m not a conspiracy theorist, mainly because I don’t believe governments are generally competent enough to manage Grand Plans, but it’s annoying that technology and social trends and culture have developed in such a way that no one knocks on anyone’s door for a chat as a matter of course now, that it’s a given that a ringing phone triggers anxiety, that it’s not the norm for cups of tea with your neighbours, that we don’t know each other’s neighbourhoods, that we don’t even talk on the phone, with live words and intonation and synchronised laughter, but in text, in WhatsApp chats, in tapped out words and symbols that we know can be screen-grabbed and misinterpreted, that we know are kept, filtered and sold by the tech companies. It’s not a conspiracy. It’s just a reality that every single one of us can choose to do differently. 

Sometimes exactly the right thing comes along at the right time. All of us here watched About a Boy at the weekend, a film which is so wonkily weighted and oddly rhythmed, but a perfect depiction of everything I’m banging on about here. Hugh Grant’s character likes being alone. He’s happy that way. It suits him. It’s his choice. Then, between one thing and another, he finds himself drawn into a world of a suicidal single mother, a duck-murdering young boy, more single mothers, more tricky teens, plus exes and mothers-in-law and awkward support groups. And it turns out that actually, being with people is better. Being uncomfortable often develops you as a person. Constantly prioritising only yourself produces a waxen, pointless baby. Making shared sacrifices might just be the point of being alive. Remember that to be human is to be flawed. That no one is ever completely right, and no one is ever completely wrong. That the boring stuff makes us feel good, and the glossy stuff, if all we strive for is gloss, doesn’t. 

If you want anything practical, here are the things that have really helped me over the last few years:

Writing a letter or email regularly to my MP, to CEOs of organisations, to anyone I want to communicate my strong feelings and how I’d like things to be done better. Tweeting eats your soul. It’s a horrible myth the media pretends is important. It really, really isn’t.

Inviting people to go in front of me in queues, in traffic, getting on to buses and trains. It lowers my stress levels right down.

Learning the names of my neighbours and people I meet regularly on walks and letting them learn mine. (I definitely haven’t just decided I loathe a neighbour because they cut a bird-hatching tree down in their garden on the last day of the year it was legal to do so. It’s fine.)

Joining a few political parties, and the closest thing I have to a union

Making something, anything — everything can be done with love, and learning to not get sucked into the capitalist conceit of having to make it perfect, sellable, exhibitable is a genuine gift to yourself; making a cake or a film or a coaster and not putting it on social media, letting it be ugly or serviceless and loving it anyway. I felt extremely overwhelmed the other evening, but instead of doom-scrolling I knitted a… I don’t know, something flat and woollen, and it helped to have my hands and eyes working on directionless introspective creation. 

Trying to stop hating. Every time I want to tell a negative story in my head about someone, I attempt to turn it into something positive: how unhappy that person must be, what they must be missing out on. It’s so nauseatingly Pollyanna-ish, and of course it isn’t always successful, and of course every single day brings a hundred thousand examples of cruelty and injustice and wickedness, but the alternative only makes my life feel worse, so why would I indulge that? 

Teaching myself the names of birds, trees, flowers, clouds and constellations. I’m still at the most basic levels on all of these, but the difference one feels in the world when you can name things  — let alone use them and know their stories — is a very real sort of magic. (For that reason I hope to read this book very soon.) This episode of The Cut is also good on the wonder and power of learning the names of the weeds that grow in your nearest pavement crack. 

4. Creating anything is always a gamble, isn’t it, but writing a book you actually like for once and seeing it slowly and beautifully sink to the bottom of a river never to be seen again is ever so slightly crushing. However, it turns out even Thom Yorke feels that way, so I am comforted. 

5. I’m sure I’ve mentioned plenty of these before, but if you want some suggestions of where to find joy, here are my favourites from the last year or so:

I was given Lucy Easthope’s book, When the Dust Settles, for work recently, and I was surprised and delighted to discover the most uplifting, hopeful, human and rightfully angry book I’ve read in a long time. Do yourself a favour and preorder it. I bought this other book for my own birthday, gave it to a housemate to give to me, forgot about it, and was delighted to later unwrap He Used Thought As A Wife. Laughed a lot, cried twice. Marvellous. 

Now even the youngest housemate here can recite John Finnemore sketches and sing the songs. Has also taught them various composers, gods, logical fallacies and gothic story tropes. Also v funny. Oh, Kate Beaton! Her two books (Hark! A Vagrant and Step Aside Pops) are a bit like a comic-book version of Finnemore, but swearier and sexier and utterly unsuitable for all the housemates who have read it and been educated about the Brontes, Katherine Sui Fun Cheung, Tom Longboat, Nancy Drew, Ida B. Wells, Sacagawea, and the Borgias. 

Had to give Inside a restraining order against me for the sake of us all, but Bo Burnham’s Eighth Grade is a masterpiece of writing, acting, sound design and optimism. Spy is dumb action comedy polished to perfection, and Yasujirō Ozu’s Good Morning seems like the inspiration for almost all US arthouse films since 1990, and is also beautiful, funny, thoughtful, and good. 

Taylor Swift’s Evermore, like all brilliant albums, isn’t completely perfect. But most of the songs are. And Hole’s classic Live Through This is still just ideal for turning up very, very loud after a tricky day, for the enjoyment of any neighbours who may have hacked down a bird-friendly tree on the last day of February. 

Watched both series of Liam Williams’ Ladhood when I had a week off this summer, and really relished the location, the intention, and the writing. More please. 

Miles Jupp and Justin Edwards continue to be my comforting bedtime listening in In and Out of the Kitchen. Has it ruined Nigel Slater for me? Well, a bit, but no more than any of us deserved. 

I thought this would be a book I’d mumble through the first chapter of, then let get buried in my To Read pile, never to re-open. Instead, I found Whatever Happened to Margo? laugh-out-loud funny, drily written, and full of humanity. Excellent Women has made me want to read everything written by Barbara Pym, a goal I am slowly but surely working towards. 

6. I’ve spent the last few years trying to find hazelnut trees, and finally found a copse between a car park and a play area, full of nuts the squirrels hadn’t noticed. Now I’ve found them, the spell has been cast and I see hazel trees everywhere, on walks and on pavements and running along motorway slip roads. A tray of green and brown frilled hazelnuts now dries with the laundry. They are so beautiful. 

[boneswriteswords]

The Lost Boys - Reincarnated Mate

 A/N:This was a selfish thing. Its unbeta’d because we die like men here. I hate my writing like always and I struggled but I tried my best.

I head canon that no two vampire mate-bonds are the same and that they exist even if they aren’t vampires. They just can’t be sensed outside of the vampirism. I gave each boy a different way that they sense the mate-bond and their mate based loosely off soulmate AUS that I am obsessed with.

Enjoy.

~~~~

David:

It was early in the night when he felt it. The pull - the tight and incessant pull from inside him - was active for the first time in ages, jerking him from his phantom state of being.

David fled the cave, following the pull, allowing it wash over him. The moon winked at him as he made his way to the boardwalk. If he had a heart, it would be thumping. He could feel his boys following him, their concern palpable, but he paid them no mind, determined to wrap his arms around you again.

He remembers the last time he saw you, before Max decided you weren’t welcome in the family. He had fed from you, his teeth sinking in your neck as he thrust inside of you, your blood the strongest aphrodisiac. You had arched so prettily, squeezing around his cock like a vice as he drank you down. He had licked at your wound, sliding his arms under your back to pull you that much closer as he dragged his lips up to meet yours. 

David hadn’t been able to stop himself, murmuring words of love into your mouth. The mortifying ordeal of being known had long passed. He threatened forever. You were his. He was yours. Mates, meant to be, tied in this life and the next, and he would turn you. Twisted wedding vows that dripped like honey. 

You had kissed along his face and promised that you loved him, wanted him always. 

David shivered as he remembered how you drank from him. How he sliced his arms and chest to give you his blood and how you didn’t waste a drop. You had smiled like the sun was coming out from behind your eyes, his blood on your lips and dripping down your neck and he remembers how he had never seen something so beautiful. His mate. His.

He had planned to take you hunting the following night to complete your transformation. He bundled you up in the room where he and his brothers slept and then fell into the sun-sleep with a smile. 

You were gone when he woke up. He felt hollow, the mate-bond fizzling under his skin. He knew you were dead. Paul had found your body and Dwayne had held him down when Max came by to scold him for falling in love with his food. He remembers starving, unable to hunt through his grief. Marko spent months bringing food back to their dwelling, dripping the blood over his mouth so he could be sustained. Time passed. He had gotten stronger. He had overcome. He missed you every single night, a soul deep tiredness that he couldn’t shake settling on the slope of his shoulders. He had waited for a sign that it wasn’t over. That you would be back. Max had once said that reincarnation happened sometimes, especially with the supernatural so he had never lost the hope that you and he would be together again. 

And seeing you on the boardwalk, looking more stunning than he remembers, he feels like he’s come home. 

Almost as if you can feel the pull too, you turned to him as he approached and smiled at him. 

He couldn’t help but smile back. 

~~~~

Marko:

Marko would forever be grateful to David. He had brought him into the life, had found him frozen in the alley between nameless streets clutching a bottle of medicine he had swiped, and had given him a chance to survive. He gave him a taste of a life that was beyond starvation and fighting for territory. 

David had offered the same for you, once he felt you along the lines of Marko’s thoughts. The power residing inside you and Marko was strong and he knew that Max would be annoyed. Max didn’t like when David made friends.

Especially if those friends were a bonded pair that would not be influenced by him. 

But you had been too weak to drink. In the pitiful, run-down shack you and Marko called home, David watched as his new brother pleaded with you.

“See baby doll? We were always meant to be. We need to go back and show them that they were wrong about us. You can’t leave me now. Please don’t leave me now.” Marko had begged as he held you to him, the cold of your skin matching his in the most frightening of ways. “You’re my mate. Please.” 

Smiling sadly, you had whispered that you loved him and succumbed to the cold and illness that ravaged your malnourished body. Even the strongest of vampire blood wouldn’t have been able to save you. 

David arranged for you to have a proper burial and Marko spent the next few decades rampaging to dull the pain. Time doesn’t heal wounds, it just lessens the impact of them. He could never properly thank David for the surprising amount of respect he paid to you but he did his best. 

When David walked into the cave, telling him that he spotted you on the boardwalk, Marko knew that he’d be thanking him for a long time. 

He could hear his brothers hollering as he transformed, unable to stop himself. He needed to find you before you disappeared. People came and went through Santa Carla daily, he couldn’t let you slip away now. Not when he finally had a chance to give you everything you deserved. 

And oh. You were still so lovely. Even more so now, eyes devoid of the hardships you endured to be with him and a layer of fat hiding your bones. Emotion bubbled to the surface as you turned to look at him, as if you could feel him close by. There was a look of confusion, then apprehension, then joy and Marko knew you remembered him. His newly revived thrum jumped under his skin. 

Oh yeah, he’d be thanking David for eternity. 

~~~~

Paul:

Paul relives the day you drowned on the nights where he can’t be bothered to drink the memories away. The day was bright - sunny, the kind of days he loved. You had been radiant. You always were but on that particular day, you were even more so. 

He remembers that he took you to the beach to celebrate your anniversary. You had stuck with him for 3 years, something people had joked as being a miracle, proof that God existed, and you loved the beach. He was indifferent but you had agreed to let him pick dinner if you spent the day at the beach.

Compromise.

You had been in the cutest little swim outfit, the space between your shoulder blades riddled with suggestion as he smoothed sunscreen across your skin. He could admit that he spent a little too long rubbing it into your skin. Its not like he could stop himself. Paul desired you above everything else, an addiction, and he would be damned before he’d restrained himself. 

He doesn’t remember how it happened - between the drugs and alcohol he consumed nightly and his own unwillingness to remember - but he knows you were pulled under a riptide. You disappeared for long minutes. There had been screaming and people diving in to pull you out. He hadn’t been able to find you in the waves. 

But another girl had and she pulled you to shore with the help of her group of friends. A flurry of motion, a rush as CPR was performed, as an ambulance was called, as medics pronounced you dead. 

You had been concussed when you went under. A brain bleed. You died in the water.

When he was turned - a decision made to escape the cotton candy skies you loved, Max told him that he should feel something - a pull, a thrum, some sort of guidance - and it would lead him to his mate. Paul told him that he didn’t have one anymore

His was dead. He wasn’t sure how he knew it was you but everything inside of him felt it. 

He was prepared to spend an eternity with the throbbing in his chest.

At least, he was until he heard your voice. It was an echo inside his head, compelling and soft, and he followed it, pushing through throngs of people. He could feel his brothers watching him, smirking with all-knowing grins and eyes glinting with mischief but he paid them no mind. All his emotions got together to overreact at the possibility of you and he was determined to see where it had come from.

The sound faded and he tried to focus, tried to concentrate to bring it back to him. The vibrations trickled to a stop, replaced with the harsh, cacophonous sounds of large gatherings of people. It felt like a hand clasping his throat and squeezing. He growled in irritation, ignoring the taste of his own broken heart and deciding that he’d take his frustrations out on the next group of victims he and his brothers herded to the beach. 

So he turned around to head back.

And ran right into you. 

It took everything inside of him to not fall into your arms and weep but, from the tears gathering in your eyes, you wouldn’t have minded it too much. 

~~~~

Dwayne:

A whiff of your perfume was enough to stop him in his tracks, his body tensing as he scanned the boardwalk. It was faint but he’d know it anywhere. Without a word, he nodded to David and walked away from his brothers. The wind was almost nonexistent but it was enough for him to follow the scent. 

It was a unique smell, one that you had crafted yourself. He watched you make in your kitchen enough times to know it by heart. You had told him that the formulas for other perfumes were too synthetic for you to handle. They blistered your skin or gave you migraines. It was cheaper to make your own instead of spending countless dollars buying store-brand perfumes that you weren’t sure were going to work for you. 

You also like to be ecological. Use all of it or use nothing at all.

Down the line, you ended up making him his own scent too and he still has an untouched bottle of it hidden in one of the cave’s alcoves. The bottle he has open is used sparingly, only on the nights where the edges of his memories of you shift like clouds of smoke. 

He knows he can make more - it was incredibly simple to make - but these were the last bottles you had made for him and he knew he’d never be able to replicate the importance of it. It had been those bottles that made him realize he loved you. 

He never had a chance to tell you how important it was to him. You had died before he could. Dwayne had wanted to kill the animal that gored you but he knew you wouldn’t have wanted that. You had gone out of your way to free the creature from the traps poachers had set up and you would not have wanted the animal punished for attacking. 

“They don’t know any better,” he could hear you say, “If they get caught, they are likely hurt. They won’t know if you are a friend or a foe. They’re going to lash out. I keep tranqs on me but sometimes that isn’t enough to subdue them.”

The regret settled like acid in his stomach. Your mother had given him a scarf you made because she knew he’d want something to remember you buy. It had your scent on it and he can admit that he spent endless nights breathing it in.

The smell had long since faded but he had sewed the scarf into the lining of his jacket to keep it close to him.

He didn’t think he’d ever smell it again.

The more he walked, the more potent the smell got. It wafted around him, embracing him tightly, and the anticipation of what that could mean thrummed inside his chest. 

And just like that, he turned his head and he found you, sitting on a bench. Waiting. He pauses, taking you in, alive and beautiful and whole. 

Something causes you to jolt and you turn to look at him. You meet his eyes. 

A pause.

A smile spreads across your face as you launch yourself at him. He meets you halfway. 

~~~~

End

~~~~

[coreymichaelsmithson]

The Lights of Treasure Island

For the past few years, I've been living on a barrier island named Anastasia. A sandy, sleepy, slow place, just off the coast of our nation's oldest city, Anastasia Island features tall palm trees and gorgeous beaches, along with excellent sushi and a surprisingly active arts scene. Its most splendid attraction, though, is an old lighthouse, one striped with a black and white spiral and crowned by a bright red lamphouse. It towers commandingly over the dunes, casting a long beam that can be seen from nearly anywhere in town.

I've always liked lighthouses. In days of old we set these magnificent lanterns on the edge of the sea, to guide sailors through dark and treacherous waters, to show them the way home. Lighthouses represent so many things we need: safety, comfort, reliability, navigation. But in my mind, these structures hold the magic of candles, the magic of illumination itself. When we speak of enlightenment, we may be speaking specifically of rationality and discovery, but we are also conjuring images of light prevailing over darkness. And in this way the lighthouse emerges as a powerful symbol of the spirit.  

This February, for my 47th birthday, I explored the Outer Banks of North Carolina, where I saw several amazing lighthouses. Impressive as they were, I did not think they quite compared with the singular majesty of the structure that stands on Anastasia Island. After a harrowing return journey, one in which I drove with no working alternator (and sometimes without headlights or windshield wipers) through nearly 700 miles of tornadic thunderstorms, I felt the most profound relief when I finally crested the peak of the SR-312 bridge, which connects my island to the mainland, and I saw those familiar black and white stripes in the distance, signaling that I had made it home. Less than half a year later, my feelings about this special lighthouse of mine would be forever changed by a chance encounter.

Just under two months ago, I received a brief and rather unremarkable message from a stranger on Scruff, a queer dating platform that I use. One might charitably call Scruff "a social club for discerning gentlemen" ... it appeals to men who are hirsute, meaty, perpetually horny, and even a few of us freaks who defiantly straddle the line between "butch" and "nancy". Since this man's profile didn't really offer all that much information, and his one available picture wasn't particularly compelling, I promptly tucked his message away and forgot about it, and went for my customary sunset walk on the beach.

I live exactly one mile from the southern boundary of a state park, which offers a four-mile stretch of pristine dune habitat, completely undeveloped and sparsely occupied. The only man-made objects in sight are a few empty lifeguard stands, the city's sightseeing pier, a radio antennae, and our lighthouse. Dolphins gather here, their dorsal fins rising and falling between the breakers. Squadrons of pelicans fly in tight formations, gliding only a few feet above the water's surface. Terns and sea turtles nest in its sands, and I've found many shark teeth among the sea shells and ghost crab burrows. This is a special place, a holy place, and I've made a daily ritual of enjoying its cloudscapes and crepuscular glow as I explore the edge between land and sea.

After a pleasant stroll, maybe an hour or so of blissful meditation, I turned around and started heading back towards my car when I caught sight of a man who had just walked out of the water and was now drying himself off. We locked eyes.

He was the most beautiful man I had ever seen. Arrestingly beautiful, the kind of handsome that stops you dead in your tracks. I just kind of gulped for a second, and then walked right up to him, with an audacity that I didn't even know I possessed, turned on every damn bulb in my Christmas tree, and murmured, "Hi!", making the word shimmer like tinsel. In a short amount of time, I learned that he was a Russian artist, born in St. Petersburg but living in Moscow. I had met him during a brief pause on his long drive from Jacksonville to Key West; he had only intended on stopping in St. Augustine long enough to explore our old Spanish fort and take a swim on our nicest beach. He possessed a keen intellect, a quick wit, and a laudable command of English. As we spoke, he kept giving me flashes of the most mischievous smile, and so when I finally asked him what he was grinning about, he revealed that he was the same man who had messaged me earlier. This came as a surprise, for I hadn't recognized him at all ... I had only been drawn in now by his gorgeous movie-star looks, the undeniable sex appeal of his dripping wet body, and some weird sense of destiny.

We talked. We talked some more. We went to dinner. And then he stayed for the better part of three days.

In my bed, we enjoyed the most astonishing kind of communion. Our nights and mornings were filled with such tenderness ... soft eyes, soft caresses, fearlessly sustained gazes, the kind of kisses that tell a hundred little stories. One by one, various secrets were brought to light. We shared toe-curling carnality, thunderous climaxes, an unalloyed and unembarrassed intimacy. We shared joy.

On our second day together, I took him to the top of Anastasia Island's lighthouse. We lingered on each landing to kiss and giggle, and our embraces grew more intense. We felt a stronger and stronger pull towards one another. I knew that this was more than just a simple infatuation. By the time we reached the lantern's round balcony, and stepped out together onto the most spectacular view of St. Augustine, I knew that I was falling in love.

I don't blame you for rolling your eyes at this. You may, in your justifiable cynicism, think it ridiculous for a man to utter such a powerful phrase within such a short time. But if you've ever known me, you've come to recognize by now my considerable capacity for love. My passions and appetites may rise to the surface with little interference, and will I admit some recklessness in how I've invested my energies, but I am no fool. I am neither naïve nor desperate. And I can say in all sincerity that what we felt then was, at least for a short while, genuine love.

From the top of the lighthouse we could see everything. The old downtown, with its mixture of colonial and Spanish Renaissance buildings. The Matanzas River, named for the 1565 massacre of shipwrecked Huguenots, separating my island from the mainland. The harbor of St. Augustine, crowded with sailboats and pleasure craft, a forest of masts. And then the sea, blue and inviting, the sea that would soon separate us. We held each other tightly and looked upon the Atlantic together, casting our dreams towards the horizon, into this vista of seemingly endless possibility and hope.

On our last night together, we took a naked midnight swim in my pool, which is lit from above by a row of blue lights. A light and warm rain fell on our heads as we twined our legs underwater, and our ardor cast a web of rippling refractive patterns on the pool's concrete bottom. He looked me in the eyes, kissed me with the utmost gentleness, and formally invited me to come stay with him in Moscow. I accepted with my new magic word, "Да."

The following morning, our parting was so sweet, and so warm. We solidified our promise to be reunited. He drove down to Key West, enjoying a music playlist I assembled for him, and then he flew up to New York for a week's visit with old friends. After he returned to Moscow, we embarked on a passionate long-distance affair via telephone and social media apps.

I plunged right away into the Russian language, practicing for hours a day, rediscovering my knack for linguistics. I bought books on the cities of Moscow and St. Petersburg, books on Russian verbs, flashcards, a portable dictionary. I subscribed to online learning programs, put apps on my phone, read up on the country's history. I was all in, bringing every available bit of my enthusiasm, work ethic, and inventiveness to the challenge. Every day, I would send him sweet little videos or text messages ... sharing good news, conveying small but significant events of my daily life, showing off my rapidly accelerating grasp of Russian. I sent him notes of encouragement, pictures of me looking my cutest, small but enjoyable details of my life on Anastasia Island. I sent him a short clip of the black skimmers that sliced back and forth across the thin swash of the surf, their beaks dipping into half an inch of water. I sent him pelicans, beach crabs, waves, paintings, difficult words, idioms, cute terms of venery, sunsets, clouds, kisses, evidence of my changing body. I sent him love, every day. "каждый день," I promised him, placing my hand on my heart, "каждый день." Every day.

My love deepened by the hour. I know this is going to sound so gushy and gross, but I really pushed the lighthouse metaphor pretty hard, calling myself "твой смотритель маяка" or "your lighthouse keeper". I meant this in all sincerity, without a drop of bathos or schmaltz. Our time atop the lighthouse was sacred to me. I promised him that I would keep its light burning bright.

Over time, however, things shifted. As my interest grew, his began to dwindle. He sent less and less of himself, slowly removing from our conversation his humor, his sexuality, his warmth, his trust. It was like seeing a fully assembled jigsaw puzzle get lifted into the air, and watching all the pieces falling out ... at first only a few at a time, then more and more, until there was only a jagged perimeter where there had once been a lovely picture.

The nadir came when he lost his temper with me over my visa. I was confused about the process, as the Russian consulate and other sources were providing patchy and often conflicting information, and his own explanations changed from day to day. During our last video chat, I asked one too many questions, and he snapped. He rolled his eyes, effectively called me stupid and childish, and hung up on me three times. My many attempts at reconciliation were completely rebuffed. It was both baffling and extraordinarily painful.

Two days after our fight he was in a terrible car accident, one from which he miraculously escaped unharmed. He posted on social media an impassioned paragraph about the event, and how it drew into sharp focus all the love he had in his life, how he felt that he wasn't deserving of such love, how grateful he was for his friends. Yet instead of contacting me, inviting me into this experience, or trying to repair our frayed connection, he spent his evenings logging back into Scruff, the aforementioned dating app. He continued to ignore me, choosing instead to pursue (or perhaps refresh) other opportunities. I tried in vain to reach him, to restore our bond, but was met with only the most chilling silence.

How had I been so wrong? Had my desire devolved into mere obsession, albeit one artfully disguised as love? Had my zeal somehow suffocated him? The irony for me was that this disastrous affair unfolded during a period of rapid and positive transformation. In the space of the last seven months, I'd already changed my diet, fixed my teeth, joined a gym, paid off a chunk of my debt, reorganized my home office, purchased a standing desk, resumed my daily beach walks, started seeing both a psychiatrist and a therapist. My relationship to my body was improving, I was working at a higher level of professional responsibility, gaining new clients, writing my fourth novel, and churning out the finest paintings of my career. A recent experience with ayahuasca had given me valuable insights into my adulthood. It seemed only right that this Russian should be the cherry on my sundae, a prize I had been working so hard to deserve.

And so, after admitting my own disenchantment, I surrendered. Reeling from an overwhelming feeling of loss, I wrote him a heartfelt letter in Russian, one in which I explained the hurt his indifference was causing me. I poured a lot of benevolent energy into this letter. And then I said to him the saddest word I've learned in Russian, "Прощай", which is the type of goodbye you use when you think you are not likely to see someone again. It translates, literally, into "forgive me."

Here is the letter I wrote to him, translated into English:

***

"V_____, beautiful V____:

Okay. I give up.

Your silence gave me a very clear and very painful answer. You have been entrusted with something rare and beautiful, and you have shown that you do not want it. So now it's gone.

I'm sorry my heart bored you so much. I will no longer annoy you with my desires.

The love that I offered you ... pure and strong, given without demands or jealous limitations ... does not come often.

It pains me to realize that you do not appreciate what I have tried to give you. It is even more painful to realize that I may have aggravated the situation with my zeal. But the distance that you put between us is your choice, and I must respect that.

It seems that the epiphany you experienced in the car accident, the moment you thought of all the love in your life, did not include my love for you. Your priorities are yours, and I accept that. But you almost died yesterday, V_____. And instead of choosing to bond with a man who cares about you so much, your focus shifted to Scruff. Your indifference is so obvious now. Please do not say anything ugly or cruel in response. There is already enough sorrow on my island. I feel both grief and embarrassment, but not anger. I've always wanted the best for you, and it's still true.

I sincerely wish you a long and happy journey. I hope you enjoy many successes and find many pleasures. I hope you stay healthy. I hope the man you choose deserves your best gifts. I hope you find a better lighthouse. I must direct my light now to those who are really looking for it. So now I must tell you the saddest word that I have learned in your language.

Goodbye."

***

Please allow me now to rewind a few years, and tell a correlative story.

In the autumn of 2019, during a period of intense sadness and frustration, I fled from Anastasia Island and drove impulsively across the state to the Gulf Coast. I didn't have a clear destination, I didn't pack enough clothes or supplies, and I was so blinded with tears and unexpressed rage that I didn't know where I was, or even care much about where I might land. While getting lost somewhere in the vicinity of St. Petersburg, I glanced at a map, dragged my finger along the squiggly coastline, saw the name Treasure Island, and thought, "That's gotta be the place."

I don't know what I was expecting to find there. Something about the name sounded so exciting, so exotic. And as the evening wore on, my anticipation grew. I thought, in my desperation, that everything would be all right once I got to Treasure Island. Over the next few hours, I convinced myself that I'd finally feel good again in such a place, that my pain and confusion would certainly evaporate once I reached this safe haven. I'd check into a nice hotel room, preferably one with 300 thread-count sheets and a coffee maker, and I'd dream about pirate ships and gold doubloons, and when I opened my eyes and yawned and stretched against the sun-dappled pillows my life would basically feel like a commercial for some bougie brand of almond milk. When I arrived, however, I was deeply disappointed to see another narrow stretch of high-rise hotels, littered beaches, rank seaweed, and greyish-brown water. I found the cheapest hotel room around, one of the few remaining vacancies on the shore, and there I found neither crisp bedsheets nor good coffee. The view from my balcony, however, was utterly amazing: I could see not only a broad curving swath of the beach, but also a glow of distant resort hotels, some of them reflected in the waves. It was strangely romantic, seeing these twinkling lights ... red, gold, green, blue ... and their silent conversation with the stars, a dialogue of jewels above the warm churning waters of the Gulf. But it wasn't the salvation I had been hoping for.

When I got up the next morning, I was still facing the same problems, the same irritations, the same heavy sorrows. Treasure Island would not, could not, rescue me from myself. So I drove back home to my own island, back to my lighthouse, and was relieved to discover that it was in fact even more stirring than I had remembered. During my absence Anastasia Island had become a magical and restorative place, quite different than the one I had left only days before.

What I should have learned back then, but have only come to realize now, was this: I didn't need to travel to a distant island of treasure and twinkling stars, for my own island already had plenty of both. I didn't need to seek the incandescence of a handsome man to light my way, as my own inner flame was at last beginning to shine without the shutters of inhibition or profligacy.

I am now recalling my disappointment with Treasure Island, while concurrently considering my grief over the Russian. At first, I wanted to hate him for his carelessness, for how he squandered my gifts. But I don't hate him. Not really. There's no need to wring my hands any further over his callousness. I don't even mourn his absence anymore. My mood has shifted today, and I no longer choose to see this abortive liaison as being so devastating. For I know, deep down, that the failure here was not really mine. I am not a loser for investing myself unreservedly in someone who could not fully appreciate me, nor I am not the weaker man for feeling injured. I will not be permanently depleted for having offered all that kindness to an undeserving recipient, as my wellspring of love remains inexhaustible.

I tried to share my lighthouse with the Russian. But he did not recognize how special it really was, and he declined to follow its beacon to a rewarding harbor. And thus, our romance was destroyed, and his memory became just another broken boat littering the shallows.

I have seen so many ruins in my years: bad relationships, lousy jobs, soured opportunities. My life story reads like a ledger of dashed hopes. It seems sometimes that both the island I occupy and the more elusive island I am eternally seeking are surrounded by shipwrecks. Yet the lighthouse of my spirit still stands, sturdier and stronger than ever. The waves may batter its bricks, salt may scour its surfaces, it may occasionally groan under its own weight ... but it will not crumble, it will not fail, and even in the darkest of hours this lamp of mine will continue to shine: bright, focused, undiminished.

[shianhygge-imagines]

Sundown 勿忘草 [Reno/Reader]{Final Fantasy VII} Episode 2

AN: Here’s the next part of Sundown Wasurenagusa! I’m sorry that I’ve been slow on posting any new story material! I had a bit of a writers’ block, and I’m still trying to work through it!

I had intended for this to be much longer, but I felt like this part was a good length to post. The first part of this ‘episode’ is going to be formatted weird because I can’t get Tumblr to format a text conversation in the way that I want.

If you like the content I create, please consider donating to my Ko-fi! Please help me feed my tea addiction!

|Masterlist Link|

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

December 12

Reno {07:10}

[Good morning, sleeping beauty]

Me {08:30}

[Morning]

[Do you not need sleep?]

[You probably went to bed late last night]

[And while it truly does make my day to hear from you]

[Why? It’s so early ;.;]

Reno {08:40}

[Can you blame a guy for being eager to talk to you?]

[Lol, Sorry. I didn’t disturb you, did I?]

Me {08:59}

[>///<]

[No, you’re good. I gotta get up to get ready anyways.]

[Flatterer]

Reno {09:34}

[I mean, can you blame me? ;) ]

[So, I was thinking about taking you on a date outside of Midgar, but I realized that I should probably get your opinion on it first]

Me {10:01}

[I mean, that depends? How early do I have to get up on my day off? And how long will it take to get there?]

Reno {10:05}

[Um… well, it’s getting pretty chilly in Midgar, so I was thinking about taking you to Costa del Sol… beach date :P]

Me {10:30}

[…]

[Costa del Sol is pretty far, Reno…]

Reno {10:31}

[And?]

[I’ve got a way]

[Don’t sweat the details]

Me {10:32}

[You’re taking a company helicopter, aren’t you  -.-]

Reno {10:33}

[Ack! You’ve figured out my master plan!]

Me {10:34}

[Are Turks even allowed to take company assets out for joy rides?]

Reno {10:35}

[ TT^TT I told you not to sweat the details!]

Me {10:40}

[I just don’t want you to get into any trouble.]

Reno {10:50}

[Awww, don’t worry about me.]

[You have a party to attend later, so do me a favor and have fun, okay?]

Me {11:03}

[That reminds me…]

Reno {11:05}

[??]

Me {11:11}

[bluedress.jpg sent]

(The image is of you in a sapphire blue dress, the sleeves long and neck high. The dress itself ends just below your knees)

[This dress?]

[reddress.jpg sent]

(The second image is of you in a backless ruby dress that ends just above the knee. There are no sleeves to this dress despite the fact that it has a high neck)

[Or this dress?]

Reno {11:13}

[…]

[Y/N]

Me {11:15}

[Reno]

[???]

Me {12:01}

[If I don’t look good in either of them, just be honest ;.;]

Reno {13:05}

[Gah! Sorry, I got pulled away for something]

[The red one. For sure]

Me {13:06}

[Just because red’s your color… >.>]

[I hope you’re okay, Reno ;.;]

Reno {13:15}

[Hey, first of all, remember what I said about red being your color?]

[I don’t lie, k?]

[But also, yeah. Also because it’s my color, you should wear it ;)]

[Do you have a sixth sense or something?]

[image.jpg]

(Opening up the image file gifts you with a selfie of Reno, looking minorly roughed up and being supported by an infrantryman. He looks like he’s by the old church that Aerith likes to visit. Despite needing to be supported by the infantryman, the red headed Turk’s winking and holding up a peace sign)

[Just a few minor bruises ;P I’ll be fine]

[Unless….]

[You want to kiss me better? ;)]

Me {13:30}

[… Well. I’m sorry for worrying (¬_¬) ]

Reno {13:45}

[Joking, joking! :D]

[All patched up]

Reno {14:07}

[Y/N?]

(´༎ຶོρ༎ຶོ`)

[I’m sorry.]

[Please talk to meeeeeee]

Me {14:00}

[image.jpg]

(It’s a picture of you in the red dress. Your hair is done up with an attractive amount of make up. You’re wearing a sensible set of black flats.)

[The party starts in an hour, so I might be answering my phone too often.]

[And Costa del Sol sounds perfect for tomorrow ;) I’ve got my outfit all picked out]

Reno {14:15}

[Uh, yeah, that’s gonna be your new contact photo]

[I’m picking you up earlier than we agreed so that we can have more time to relax in the sun]

[Duty calls. Have fun tonight, okay?]

Me {14:20}

[And what? My contact photo for you is going to be this?]

[screenshot.jpg]

(It’s a screenshot of your mobile phone screen. There’s an edit with a red arrow pointing directly at the photo icon for Reno’s contact…it’s the photo that he sent earlier except you’ve photoshopped cartoon ‘uwu’ eyes and added pink anime blush to his cheeks)

[And don’t worry, I’ll probably have enough fun for the both of us.]

[We’ll have fun tomorrow, be safe, okay?]

Reno {14:30}

[I’ll try ;) But if not, I’ll have you to take care of me.]

[Also? That picture?]

[P.E.R.F.E.C.T]

Me {18:30}

[Hope you’re safe!]

[Message me after work to let me know you’re okay!]

[image-2.jpg]

(It’s a group photo of you and your friends in silly poses)

Me {19:21}

[image-3.jpg]

(It’s a close up shot of a delicious plate of food)

[I should have brought you with me ;.;]

|You called Reno| 20:58

[Unable to leave voicemail]

December 13 - 08:21

The morning after the confrontation with AVALANCHE at the Sector 7 Pillar, one would expect the medical bay in Shinra HQ to be jam packed full of patients. There should have been a horde of doctors and nurses, running around to treat the injured infantryman and civilian survivors. But there were only two individuals in the med bay, Reno and Rude. When the plate fell, only a handful of infantryman were able to escape the chaos. Many were left behind to fend for themselves.

Despite surviving a helicopter crash and the brawl with Tifa, Barret, and Cloud, Rude only sustained a few bruises and minor bone fractures. He had been assigned bedrest after being treated by the doctors, but the weight of what he and his partner had been tasked to do twelve hours ago felt like an overwhelming burden. Needing something to keep his mind occupied, the taller of the iconic Turk duo simply engrossed himself in a novel that Elena had brought over during her visit.

On the bed beside Rude’s, Reno groaned in pain as he sat up, eyes still not open and alert as he raised a hand to press against his pounding head. “Gah, what the hell.” Reno’s face stung at the cheeks when his face scrunched up at the pain that seemed to come from every part of him. Even the act of sitting up proved too painful due to his newly broken ribs.

Rude watched his partner sink back into the sheets from his own medical bed, sunglasses on as was usual of him. He wondered how long it would take Reno to realize that it had been nearly twelve hours since they had dropped the plate. He also wondered when his sassy partner in crime would realize that he had a date this morning. Of course, Rude didn’t think you’d get angry at Reno for missing a date when he was hospitalized, but the taller of the iconic Turk pair knew that Reno would never forgive himself for skipping out on you.

While Rude watched, Reno allowed his body to collapse back into bed, an exhausted and pained groan escaping his lips as he want, arms flopping onto the bed as he fought to remember what had happened to land him in such a pitiful state.

Oh yeah…Rude and I went to Sector 7’s plate… and we fought blondie’s group of self righteous freedom fighters… and then…I blacked out. Cracking both eyes open, Reno furrowed his brows and turned his head to examine his surroundings. Med bay back at HQ… The red head swiveled in place to stare at Rude, “The mission….” He trailed off with a questioning tone.

His partner merely grunted, “We finished it and escaped.” Lacking in detail, but still straight to the point.

Sighing in relief that his work track record wouldn’t have a stain on it, Reno flopped back down, “Whooo…” The red head cheered sarcastically, pumping a fist without any energy or cheer behind it. Gah, and I promised Y/N that I’d be safe… Reno’s eyes snapped open and he bolted to a seating position with an alarmed cry, “Crap! Y/N! What time is it?” Shit, I gotta message her to let her know that I’m going to be running late! The Turk second in command thought as he pat down his person for his cell phone.

When he couldn’t find it, Reno turned to his partner, who gestured towards the bedside table. “It was damaged during our fight with AVALANCHE, but it should still be working.”

Not paying any attention to the fact that he was now bleeding through the bandages wrapped around his abdomen, Reno grinned, “Whooo boy! Partner, you’re a life saver!”

The sheer amount of relief within Reno voice made Rude stop and stare at his partner. Hmm… maybe Reno’s serious about her after all.

Meanwhile, Reno quickly unlocked his phone screen, ignoring the fact that the glass display seemed shattered beyond repair. When he pulled up the chat room that he shared with Y/N, Reno cursed, “Five missed messages and one missed call.” Quickly reading through the text messages, and smiling at how much fun you were having at the party, Reno tapped out a quick message in reply to you before listening to the voicemail that you had left.

Yesterday

Y/N {19:21}

[image-3.jpg]

(Reno’s mouth watered at the sight of the food in the picture)

[I should have brought you with me ;.;]

|Missed call from Y/N| 20:58

[Click to listen to voicemail]

Today - December 13

Me {08:43}

[Gah, sorry Y/N, I may have bit off more than I could chew yesterday.]

[I just woke up in the med bay at HQ]

[I’m going to be a little late picking you up]

[And I’m a little roughed up]

[But nothing is stopping me from taking you on our date!]

[See you in an hour?]

When Reno lifted his damaged cell phone to listen to the voicemail that you had left him, the only sound that reached his ears was an error notification that the voice recording app had failed. “I’m sorry, but the voicemail recording that you wish to listen to failed to load properly. Please quite all applications before trying again. If the problem still persists, please contact Shinra Mobile’s technical support service to resolve this issue.” The phone recording informed Reno, pleasantly.

Knowing from experience that getting through to technical support at the current hour was next to impossible, Reno merely tapped out another message.

Me {08:47}

[Hey, the voicemail that you sent to me didn’t go through.]

[What was it about?]

Satisfied with the messages that he’d sent out, Reno shifted to get out of bed, an excited grin on his lips. “Welp! Time to get going! Got a wonderful day off with a gorgeous gal!”

Sighing, Rude lowered the novel to look in his partner’s direction. “Your date with Y/N?” When Reno only gave a sassy shrug in reply, Rude shook his head, “Just remember, you’re still injured.”

“Will do, partner!” Reno saluted the older man before dashing out of the med bay, dodging the nurses swiftly as he made his way to the elevators, itching to get back to the Turk dorms to change into something that would help him blend into the slum crowds of Sector 5. On his way to his room, the red headed Turk would raise his phone to check for any new messages, lowering it in disappointment every time there was no response.

“That’s weird, normally she responds by now.” Reno mused, sending out another quick text once he’d changed into dark jeans, a red hoodie, and a dark beige trucker jacket.

Me {09:12}

[I’m on my way to your place now.]

[Are you awake?]

Around twenty minutes later, on the helicopter ride down to the Sector 5 slums, Reno furrowed his brows and bit the inside of his lip when you didn’t respond again.

Me {09:32}

[Y/N?]

[Please answer.]

[I’m on a helicopter down now]

[Message back. I’m getting worried.]

When there is still no response, Reno taps on your contact and brings the phone up to his ear, trying to call you.

“Hey, this is Y/N. I’m probably away from the phone right now, so leave a message, and I’ll call you back as soon as possible.”

Straight to voicemail.

Something wasn’t right, and Reno could feel it in his bones.

When the helicopter started to land in the Shinra barracks, Reno didn’t even wait for the helicopter to fully land before jumping out of the aerial vehicle, landing solidly before taking off in a sprint towards your apartment.

She’s not answer any of the text messages… Did she lose her phone last night? Did she accidentally break it?… Did she find out what I did yesterday? Is she ignoring me?

The worries and thoughts that raced through Reno’s mind became more and more self-depricating as he neared entered the main town area and brushed past the crowds of people gathered in the streets. I know I said it was too late to grow a conscious, but damn it, please don’t let this be the reason she decides that she doesn’t want me around.

All but flying up the metal steps to your apartment, Reno starts to bang on your front door, calling your name in the meanwhile. “Y/N!” Bang bang bang “It’s Reno!” Bang bang bang “You weren’t answering your phone. Are you ready to go?” It took another few minutes of knocking before Reno head a door open below and slow footsteps ascend the metal stairwell.

Turning and expecting to see you standing there, Reno’s shoulders visibly slumped when he came face to face with a tiny old lady. “Oh, uh. Sorry for causing a disturbance.”

“Are you looking for Y/N, young man?” The old woman inquired, tilting her head to look up at Reno through friendly old eyes.

Feeling as if he was being judged by the elderly woman, Reno stood ramrod straight and nodded, clearing his throat, “Uh, yeah. We had plans for today.”

The old woman nodded sagely, “I see, I see. Ah, to be young again. I’m sorry to disappoint you, young man, but Y/N hasn’t been home since yesterday afternoon. I think she’s still at her friend’s home.”

The first traces of alarm flashed through Reno’s head, and suddenly his Turk persona was back, “Do you happen to know where her friend lives, ma’am?”

The old woman shook her head, “I only know that dear Selene doesn’t live in Sector 5. I’m sorry, young man.”

Suddenly jittery, Reno only nods and descends the metal staircase again, “Thanks for the help. I should get going.”

Reno doesn’t hear the old woman’s reply because he’s sprinting back towards the Shinra barracks, ears ringing and vision narrowed as he contacts a friend in Shinra’s tech department for help tracking down your cell phone’s location and retrieving the voicemail you’d left him. And while his friend works on it, Reno decided to change into a clean set of his uniform, mind suddenly kicked into overdrive as he tries to recall where you said your friend’s party was.

Gah, Reno… you pay attention to everything else she says, but you can’t figure out where her friend Selene lives? Some Turk you are! Reno scolds himself as he paces back and forth in Y/N’s office, somehow trying to find comfort in familiar surroundings. Damnit, think! What has she mentioned in the past about her friends. I only remember her talking about living in Sector 7 for a whi- Reno pauses in his steps as dread begins to pool in his stomach. “No.” He doesn’t want to entertain the possibility that you had gone to a party at your childhood sector the same night that he was tasked with dropping the plate on top of hundreds. But the more that Reno thinks about it, the more likely the possibility is, and he sinks to his knees in the middle of your office, eyes wide with horror and denial. “No… I refuse to believe it. Gotta wait for-”

His phone chimes with a notification.

Pulling out his phone as fast as possible without fumbling the already hazardously damaged device, Reno unlocks the screen, only to see that a voice file had been sent to him along with tracking coordinates.

Clicking on the voicemail and tracker, Reno’s frown deepens and his face pales as he stares at the map of Sector 7 Slums with a red dot in the center of it, the sounds of your final message to him playing in the background.

No.

The voice recording loops until Reno regains his bearings, body shaking and eyes burning as his ears pick up the sounds of explosions in the background, of your sobs as you fought to leave a last message for the man who had thoughtlessly killed you, and of your fear and acceptance that you wouldn’t live past that moment. The phone slips from his hands and clatters to the floor as Reno’s fingers go slack. “No… I didn’t… Y/N…” A strangled sob escapes Reno’s lips as he raises a hand to grip onto his hair, trying to maintain his composure, “I didn’t mean to… If I’d known, I would have…” The Turk second in command paused and hunched in on himself, not caring if anyone could see him through the glass walls of your office.

M-maybe she left her phone behind when she ran? But… if she’s not there, then where would she have gone if not home?

There weren’t any excuses or any other reason he could come up with. Reno knew that. If he had known beforehand that you would be in Sector 7 Slums, he would have warned you, but you would have tried to evacuate as many people as possible from that sector, and AVALANCHE might have managed to leave, therefore ending in a failed mission. He would have done everything he could to make sure you stayed away from Sector 7, but in the end, he’d still go through with the mission.

“I killed her.” Reno sobbed in realization, biting his bottom lip so hard that he tasted copper, “Just like I killed all those people.” Shaking his head, inconsolable, Reno could only mourn quietly. “I’m just the worst. This is karma for all the shit things I did in life, isn’t it?”

Eyes dulled and slightly puffy, Reno hastily wiped at his face and sat down with his back against your desk, his phone ringing with notifications as Tseng and Rude sent him requests for ‘status’ updates. And the Turk second in command ignored his colleagues, eyes staring into nothingness as he wreaked his brain for what to do next.

I really was looking forward to the date. Reno’s thoughts trailed off, It’s sappy as hell, but I wanted to ask her to be my girlfriend. Tseng said that relationships for Turks never ended well, citing Veld as an example, but… gah! This is the worst situation for Tseng to be right!

It was only the early afternoon… maybe he could start a search party for survivors… it was probably too late, but Reno knew that he had to do something to look for you. With renewed purpose, Reno got to his feet and marched out of your office, blue eyes burning with fiery determination as he hung onto the faint hope that you might have survived.

December 13 - 12:13

You groaned in pain and shifted your body, eyes cracking open to be met with blinding industrial lights. The pain from the glaring lights startled you into closing your eyes again, turning until your body was facing away from them. For a moment, you wondered why you were laying on some sort of weird metallic floor instead of your soft bed, and then the memories of a falling sky sent your eyes flying back open as you took in your surroundings.

The floor was indeed cold and metallic because it looked as if you’d woken up in a maintenance passage. Despite most maintenance passages usually being dimly lit, the one you found yourself lying in was lit from both of the walls. The ceiling above your face had a hole in it, though it was covered with metal and concrete chunks. You assumed, as you clambered to your feet, that you’d fallen through that hole and rolled a few feet away due to the pile of rubble directly beneath the hole. Wincing slightly, you poked and prodded your person for bruises, broken bones, or fractures. Slightly satisfied with just a few small skin lesions, bruises, and maybe a fractured rib, you patted yourself down for your mobile phone, hoping to call for help. Frowning, you found that you did not have your cell phone on you, nor was it anywhere on the floor near you.

Since you hadn’t expected to live through a plate falling on top of you, you could only look on the bright side of things, turning to walk down the metal tunnel with determination set on your face. I didn’t almost die from a plate falling just to give up in an empty tunnel. Plus, a fond smile appeared on your face, I have a date waiting for me when I get back topside.

It seemed pretty simple to you. You’d falling who knows how far down, but you knew for sure that the way out was up. So the only thing to do was to keep walking until you found a passage up. Easy peasy.

December 13 - 15:35

There’s a fierce snarl on Reno’s face as he stands by several parked helicopters. All around him, emergency responders and Shinra infantrymen scrambled to load up supplies and equipment. The dark look on the normally sassy, easy-going Turk’s face seemed like a literal beacon for anyone not bearing good news to stay the away. Though, if some of the troops were to be honest, Reno had very good reason to be irate. The Turk second in command had called in an emergency rescue operation for survivors trapped among the plate wreckage nearly three and a half hours ago, and they were only just beginning to start the rescue operation.

After Tseng, the Turk commander, had authorized the mission to rescue anyone buried under the rubble, the mission had quickly been side-tracked by Shinra executives Scarlet and Heideggar. Scarlet had protested against the operation simply because of the notion that dogs living in the slums were of no use to Shinra, and therefore, the mission was a waste of resources. Heideggar, meanwhile, had agreed that while in times of disaster, Shinra’s army bore the responsibility of launching operations to rescue civilians affected, the members of AVALANCHE were widely unknown and could easily disguise themselves as regular civilians.

It took nearly two hours of careful negotiations and subtle ego inflating by Tseng and Reeve, before both executives agreed to support the relief effort. Viewing it as a strategic move to improve public opinion of the Shinra Company, President Shinra gave little to no resistance when Tseng forwarded the mission brief to be sanctioned.

Now, an hour after the mission was sanctioned, Reno felt the beginnings of a headache forming as he directed the flow of supplies to each helicopter before making sure that there were rotations of supplies and emergency responders that would journey to and from the wreckage of Sector 7 once he landed with the first round of helicopters.

When he had deemed all in good order to head out, Reno sighed and hopped into the helicopter cockpit, buckling himself in to the pilot’s seat. Plopping the headset on while he waited for the rest of the crew to load up into the helicopter, Reno busied himself with flipping switches to make sure that pre-flight and the ride down to Sector 7 would be as smooth as possible. When his co-pilot buckled himself in and gave Reno the thumbs up, the red headed Turk spoke as clearly and seriously as he could into the mic. “Alright guys and gals in all active units, hope you’re all buckled up with headsets on because I sure as hell will not be repeating this briefing.” After a brief pause, Reno continued to speak while directing the helicopter off the platform. “You all probably heard about what happened yesterday. The official reports from HQ state that AVALANCHE launched an attack to compromise Sector 7’s plate pillar. Despite all efforts directed to stop the terrorist attack, the plate still fell. Our job is to go down to the disaster zone to provide relief to all affected civilians. We will also be launching search and rescue operations for survivors.” Reno paused once more as helicopter gained enough air to safely fly out of the landing zone. “I’m gonna be real with you all. Someone important to me was in Sector 7’s Slums when the plate fell and I’m going to try my damnest to look for her. So if any of you fuck this up… not gonna lie, I’m gonna be pissed.” Nobody replied to Reno’s admittance… not that he really expected much of a reply after he dropped that bomb on them. Having enough of the silence, Reno exhaled, “Alright… good talk.”

December 13 - 16:03

It wasn’t easy peasy. Definitely fucking not.

The chrome walkways and exposed piping-lined maintenance passage that you had fallen into hadn’t been a simple few meters under the surface as you thought. No. It’s was more like several meters down with a layer of minor blocked off passageways right above. And, as if that weren’t terrible already? The maze of pathways that made up the layer above seemed to take joy in bringing you up a level, just to drop you back down a level because some asshole decided to seal off the passages at various points.

Your eye twitched in annoyance when you walked down a metal walkway only to be face to face with another fenced off passage lined with reinforced plating. To your surprise, you could see a man stumble around the corner of the opposite side. When you saw one another, your eyes widened. “Holy shit!” The man gasped, stumbling forward with a noticeable limp and sliced up arm. “I didn’t think there’d be another person down here!”

“This place is like a maze, so I’m not surprised that any survivors had yet to meet up. A-are… are you okay?” The blood leaking from the deep scratches in his left arm seemed to ooze a poisonous purple color.

The stranger bit his bottom lip as he hastily hid his injury, “Yeah… I’ll be fine. Listen, girl, you should watch out while down here. I think the rumors about the underground lab were true after all. There are monsters running around everywhere.” Your expression must have been one of utter dismay and despair because the man coughed and reached into his pocket to roll two materia under the fence. “Uh. Shit. Well, it looks like you could use these then. It’s a Cura and a Fira. Hopefully you won’t need it, but it’s better to be safe than sorry. Anyways, I hope you make it out of here, girl. I gotta keep looking for other AVALANCHE survivors.”

When the man made to jog away, you called out to him, “Wait! You said that you’re looking for AVALANCHE members? Are you one of them? Do you know what happened?” You pressed yourself against the fence in order to see the stranger from around the corner.

The stranger turned around to stare at you with a grim expression. “Whatever you’re thinking, AVALANCHE didn’t cause this, okay? We were framed by Shinra.” At your confused expression, the man scoffed, “C’mon, you really think that Shinra was going to let civilians protest and riot against them? They couldn’t figure out who was a member and who wasn’t, so they figured they’d drop the entire plate on top of us to get rid of us all.”

“But that’s such a drastic move!” You protested, wanting to believe that your employers wouldn’t have such blatant disregard for human life. “They wouldn’t just sacrifice thousands to eliminate AVALANCHE!”

“Believe what you want, girl. But the reality is that my friends and I all went to the pillar to stop Shinra from dropping the plate, and it dropped anyways because two Turks were sent to finish the job.” The stranger didn’t allow you to retort as he limped away. Not that you would have responded anyways with how the stranger had said that two Turks had arrived to help ensure that the Sector 7 plate dropped.

Pulling away from the fence, you knelt down to pick up the two orbs of materia, the color of your skin taking on a sickly pale pallor. Two Turks were sent to the pillar to drop the plate on top of all of us. Your mind instantly supplied the first Turk pair that you could think of and you felt like you were going to dry heave. I don’t know Rude too well, but from what I know, he and Reno wouldn’t do something so horrendous. Surely, there must have been another pair of Turks who were sent to do it. But you did work in a different department as them, how did you know that there were more members of the Turks? And with Reno’s position within the group… He could have known what was happening…

You told Reno that you would be hanging out with your best friend… that you guys were having a party. He’s smart enough to deduce that your friends still lived in Sector 7… Did he forget? Or… Your stomach churned violently as you sank to your knees on the cold metal walkway. Did Reno just decide he didn’t care if I survived or not?

The edge of your vision burned with tears threatening to spill down your cheeks. A simple blink sent them trailing down your cheeks as you stood upon shaky legs. “Can’t worry about that now.” You muttered, eyes filled with determination as you gathered the excess fabric of your dress to gird up your loins. “I need to find a way out of here. The tunnels might not be able to hold for long.”

Lifting your arm, you pressed one of the materia into your forearm, like you’d seen a few SOLDIERs do before, marveling at how the orb of power sank into the flesh of your arm. Smiling at how seamless it was to merge flesh with Materia, you pressed the other faintly glowing orb into your other forearm, concentrating for a bit before casting Cura upon yourself.

Newly rejuvenated, you back tracked through the metal corridor to find the ladder leading down. “Welp, there’s no time like the present,” you mumbled to yourself as you descended further into the tunnels below.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

[prongsisabadger]

TWP Chapter 26

Turns out having no intel on something didn't mean it wasn't there, just like Cody had pointed out. So having no reports on weaponry in the southern hemisphere didn't mean there wasn't any. Getting through the blockade was hard enough, the 212th lost two gunships and the 501st lost one. That was almost a hundred men we had lost even before landing. I tried my best not to think about it and to close myself off the Force so as not to feel their pain, their agony, their sadness and anger. I held onto the overhead handle even tighter, closing my eyes and forcing myself to breathe even more deeply. Then, I steeled my resolve. They would not die for nothing. I opened my eyes to see T.H. looking at me, he tilted his head as the gunship shook from a nearby explosion. He wondered if I was okay. I looked right into his visor with determination and nodded sharply.

The pilot announced we were two minutes away from the landing site. The blast doors opened and the men retrieved their blasters from where they had been hanging on the ceiling. I had been assigned a single platoon. That was four teams of nine, thirty six men, thirty six lives that were mine to protect. Thirty six soldiers that were mine to lead. The LAAT/i shook one last time as we touched down and the light turned green as the doors opened.

Master Kenobi had already landed with the ground assault troops, and Master Skywalker was right behind me with the tanks and heavy weaponry. We got to work immediately, setting a perimeter and securing it as the rest of the gunships and equipment arrived. We knew we had a limited window of time before the seppies sent their ground forces to try and take us down, so we decided on sending our patrols early.

I did disagree with the plan, we had not been expecting fire this heavy when we first came up with the it, separating our forces now would be suicide. Even more so when we had a single company trying to make a dent in a planet that was already occupied. But I was outnumbered, the mission was to take as much of Felucia as we could before the rest of our forces arrived and the fastest way to do that was to spread out. Master Kenobi understood my reluctance and told me it was not a decision they made lightly, even if it looked like it to me. The entire GAR was being spread past its capacities and we were not the only ones who seemed to be going into a blaster fight with a single bioblade. But orders were orders, and I could only bend the rules so far when it came to protecting the troops' lives. Ahsoka was given the western patrol and I was in charge of the eastern. We each took a platoon and, in no time, we departed.

True to their word, T.H. Waxer and Boil flanked me as we made our way through the Felucian forest. I did my best to expand my awareness of the terrain through the force, feeling any disturbances within the flora or fauna that may give away the presence of droids. Things were quiet, a little too quiet for my liking. It wasn't that I believed we would be jumped upon by droids any time, no. It was the kind of trepidation where you can feel something bad is about to happen, but not to you.

"I want someone monitoring comm chatter, I have a feeling we'll be needed back at central." I said out loud, knowing someone would take the directive.

I could feel the clones' reluctance to leave command with so few troops to guard them, and I understood. I felt the same way. Being sent on a planetary invasion with a single company was suicide, just like the mission to Teth had been. Rex -from what little he had told me- didn't look back on the battle with much joy.

Time passed differently on each mission. The Abregado system was crystal clear in my mind's eye. Christophsis had gone by way too quickly, as if I had been in a fever dream. Orto Plutonia had been a strange mixture between slow motion and real time, some things I remember very clearly and others are a complete blur. This mission seemed like it was going extremely slowly, as if my mind was trying to have me remember everything from the color of the plants to the sound of the soil beneath my boots. I guessed it all depended on how my psyche decided to process the situations I'd been through, but a humanoid's brain was a curious thing for sure.

I sent two teams out -one to the north and one to the south- to set up the marker beacons that would make up our perimeter. Each team would set the beacons within a two click range from our current position and then return. Once that had been accomplished, we would be going back to central to, hopefully, receive the rest of the invasion forces. Meanwhile, the remaining teams and I decided to scout ahead for possible enemies.

As it turns out, we found two probe droids lurking around, which -fortunately- had not seen us before we took them down. For the first time in quite some time, our mission had been completed without any casualties or wounded, and every threat we had found had been neutralized. The two teams I had sent out came back in one piece, they had both completed their assignment and one of them reported to have taken down yet another probe.

This concerned me a little, if there were so many probes in this area, it meant the seppies were scouting the area for something. One of the possibilities was that they had been trying to establish a safe route towards central in order to box us in. But at this point it was all speculation. Now, we just needed to go back and reinforce the other two platoons that had been left with the Masters.

"I'm not saying this to try and test Murphy's Law, but I don't like it when things are this quiet." Said one of the troopers behind me. And I couldn't agree more. Even when I had expanded my awareness of our surroundings and had kept it that way the entire time, things were too quiet.

"Me neither, trooper, so look alive, I think things will definitely get more interesting whether we like it or not." I answered. "We'll report the probes as soon as we get there. There were too many for my liking."

"Yes, Commander."

…

"Three hours," I yelled, taking cover from the tank fire we were receiving. "I leave you alone for three hours and I come back to this?"

My men spread out to reinforce the perimeter central had created. The floor was hot alright, Master Kenobi and Master Skywalker had been attacked from the north, as I had expected and were now trying to fight off wave after wave of battle droids.

"Spare me the lecture, Kriari, did your troops complete the mission?" He asked deflecting blaster fire with his lightsaber.

I huffed, having lost my patience.

"Of course we did, we found three probes as well, which is not good. I think they were scouting for a safe route here." I said adjusting my position and the grip on my own lightsaber. "I think we'll be outflanked in no time, and I do reserve the right to say 'I told you so' when it happens."

As if on cue, the comlink on my wrist started beeping. I had made it a habit to wear the earpiece at all times, so when I pressed the blinking button, I was the only one that heard what Boil had to report.

"Better call off the invasion and ask for reinforcements instead, Master." I said moving in front of a trooper to shield him from a stray blast. "The marker beacons to the south east picked up at least two droid battalions headed our way."

I thought I heard him curse under his breath, but I couldn't be sure. Master Kenobi didn't strike me as someone who would lose his temper over something like this, but we all had our bad days, and this one had certainly not been a good one. We were sustaining very heavy fire, and the tanks we had brought didn't seem to be enough to make a dent in enemy ranks. I covered Master Kenobi as he retreated to make the call, we all knew we wouldn't make it out of Felucia if we didn't get reinforcements or an extraction team.

I continued to serve as a shield to the troopers while they fired on the droids. there was such an amount of them that it seemed the battle would never end. Lines upon lines of shiny yellow battle droids kept advancing as we tried to make a dent. Behind me, Waxer, Boil and T.H. fired round after round and their concentration was such that they didn't even have the time to curse, yell or even complain about the entire situation.

"All done, an extraction team will be here soon," Said my Master, retaking his position and activating his lightsaber. "Where is Ahsoka?"

Right, Ahsoka. I hadn't been in contact with her since we left for our patrol, and I felt a little guilty for forgetting about her right then. I had been too busy to notice she hadn't returned yet.

"She isn't back from her patrol, she will though." Said skywalker as he returned blasts back to their source.

I tuned out the rest of the conversation after that, concentrating on keeping myself and my men alive. The separatists were advancing steadily and the distance between them and us continued to reduce. One of the droids had managed to shoot one of the tank operatives, so I signaled one of the nearest trooper to follow me.

"Get that tank operational, I'll shield you from blaster fire!" I yelled.

I had a much better view of the field from atop the tank, and it did not look good for us. For a second, I lost my concentration. Someone was reaching to me through the force, someone familiar. A presence I had not felt in a long time was trying to reassure me. I am here now, it said. And I knew exactly who it was.

"Master!" I yelled. "The 104th has arrived!"

I heard the troopers yell in relief and renew their fighting effort. Extraction team was here, we only had to make sure we were here to be extracted. But the enemy was splitting up their forces, which was never good. They were either going to regroup with the two battalions five clicks northeast of our position, or they were going for Ahsoka.

"Boil," I said as I tapped the closed channel I had with my three shadows. "How far out is the enemy northwest of here?"

I heard grunting and panting on the other end of the comlink before I got an answer.

"They should be here in ten minutes, Commander- eat laser maker damned tin cans." He said under his breath.

Ten minutes. I had to report to my master, but before I did I heard someone yelling my name. A vulture droid was spiraling out of control and headed right towards me. Before I could think about it, I took the trooper from the driving seat and threw us both off the tank. I managed to soften our landing a little with the Force, but the blast still knocked the air out of my lungs. I was panting for air when I asked the trooper if he was okay. He was, thank the force.

"Kriari, are you-"

"The droid battalions to the northeast will be here in ten minutes, Master." I interrupted as I helped the trooper to stand up. "We need to get the men out of here."

I tried to dust myself off as best I could and when I went to grab my lightsaber, it wasn't on my belt. I sighed, already done with the damned planet. The last thing I needed was to lose my lightsaber.

"Commander!" yelled someone from across the perimeter. "Catch!"

The trooper threw my lightsaber in an arc towards me and returned to the fight before checking if I'd caught it.

"Thanks, Waxer!" I yelled back.

"So," I turned to see the amused smirk on my master's face. "Where the hell is Ahsoka?"

[jade4813]

Like Moths to a Flame, Chapter 10

Fandom: North and South

Title: Like Moths to a Flame

Rating: NC-17

Pairing: John/Margaret

Synopsis: “I hope you realize that any foolish passion for you on my part is entirely over.“ Margaret decides to confront John about his unjust judgment of her character, but the two have always been drawn to each other, and things quickly get out of hand. In the aftermath, she agrees to marry him to satisfy propriety, but she cannot forget how ready he was to believe the worst of her. Can love survive without trust, or will the two find a way to work through the misunderstandings that have plagued their relationship from the start?

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Though John would never consider time spent with Margaret wasted – nor would he ever regret a single second of it – it did make the subsequent days longer as he strove to find a solution to his financial problem. The debt owed to the bank was a few hundred pounds – a paltry amount compared to what was owed him for orders that his workers had rushed through. He hoped each day for a miracle, that he would receive sufficient outstanding payments to satisfy the bank loan and secure his workers’ payroll, but he waited in vain. The bank’s deadline drew ever nearer, his coffers dwindled, and no miracle loomed on the horizon.

Had he been foolish to refuse Watson’s proposed speculation? If it succeeded, the profit from the venture would clear his debt and secure payroll for months to come. If it failed, however, what little funds he had to pay his people would be lost, with no hope of recovery. He would have left his workers destitute, and he felt he owed them more than to gamble with their livelihoods.

But if it succeeded…

He’d never before understood the siren’s song of speculation, which had led his own father to his death. In the aftermath of the elder Thornton’s self-inflicted demise, John had been forced into a life of poverty and self-deprivation, leaving school to care for his mother and sister and sparing as much money as he could each week to pay his father’s creditors, long after they’d given up any hope of satisfaction.

He’d worked hard, and in the secret recesses of his heart, he’d judged his father harshly for throwing away their fortunes on what amounted to little more than a game of chance. He’d never spoken of his recrimination or his shame aloud, out of consideration for his remaining family’s feelings – though his mother had never been one to mince words when it came to her own judgment, and Fanny had been too young and lacked the sentimental disposition required to be overly protective of either her affection for or her memory of the father she’d lost.

Now, however, he understood the temptation that had lured his father to his ruin, though his own sense of honor and the duty he owed those in his charge had caused him to shy away from the risky venture, no matter how high the potential reward. His refusal had angered Fanny, who had sworn that reward was certain and promised to be considerable, but John knew better than most that speculation was merely that, and not even the wisest of men could guarantee a positive result.

And yet, if it succeeded…

If he’d gambled his mill’s future on the speculation and it turned a profit, his business would be clear of debt. His workers would be paid. He could continue to care for his mother in the manner he had for most of his adult life. He could provide Margaret with the life she deserved, if not the life she’d wanted. And nobody would ever have to know how bad things had been.

John shook his head, running his hands through his hair in a gesture of frustration and despair. No, there was no use in thinking about what might have been. He’d rejected Watson’s offer. He’d refused to engage in speculation, not when the cost of one ill-judged gamble could ruin so many lives. If he’d thrown his hat into the ring and the speculation failed, he’d lose the mill. The house. His workers would be out of jobs and left to starve, if they were unable to find work elsewhere. His mother’s situation would fall to what it had once been, after many years spent in comfort and security. And his wife…

If he’d speculated with his workers’ livelihoods and lost, recklessly subjecting them possible starvation, to the poverty from which he’d once uplifted himself, he wouldn’t be able to look at himself in the mirror without feeling shame. A man who could be so inattentive to his responsibility to others could never hope to deserve Margaret or the love he still wished in his heart might one day be his.

So he applied himself to work, each day seeming longer than the last. His beloved Margaret never chided him for his absence or his neglect, though she always seemed to anticipate the point at which reason was driven to the edge by exhaustion, as she would come to him on those evenings and silently draw him home with her, to sleep by her side. He could not fully confess his fears to her, but neither could he resist her, and his love for her sustained him every bit as much as her tender consideration brought him comfort.

But as the days passed, a nagging sense of doubt grew in his mind, a quiet whisper that warned that Margaret might not be as content as he would wish. Even as his financial apprehensions eclipsed other concerns vying for his attention, he noticed her increasingly troubled expression when she thought him unaware, though the worry lines smoothed from her countenance each time he turned her way. But she never spoke of her concerns, and he – weak, lovesick fool that he was – couldn’t summon the courage to ask, for fear that her preoccupation lay elsewhere. If her distress stemmed from regret, perhaps exacerbated by increasing concerns that he would fail to live up to his promise to provide her comfort and security, his heart would break anew.

Desiring to reassure her of the fidelity of his promise, John was determined to redouble the attention he paid his wife. To that end, he returned home one evening earlier than he typically had of late – the lure of Margaret’s company being far greater than that of the paperwork on his desk – to find her father in their drawing room, the other man having stopped by for a visit. Although slightly disappointed that his more amorous intentions would by necessity be delayed, John always enjoyed Richard Hale’s company and was pleased his calendar was free enough to appreciate it.

His pleasure was only heightened when he saw Margaret’s cheerfulness at the visit. “Mr Bell has invited Father to visit him in Oxford, and I’m encouraging him to go. Don’t you think it’s an excellent idea?” she explained, before turning her attention back to their guest. “It’s been so long since you’ve been to visit, and the weather’s turning warmer, so the roads will be a little easier.”

Mr Hale seemed encouraged by her enthusiasm. “I might go,” he acknowledged. Nodding, as much to himself as to her, he murmured, “Yes, yes. I think I might.”

With that decision seemingly fixed, their conversation turned to other matters for a while, until Richard stood to leave. “I think I will go to Oxford,” he declared, the idea clearly breaking him much joy. John and Margaret wished him well – the latter admonishing him to dress warmly, as there was still a chill in the air – and then he was on his way with their blessings.

Had John known it would be the last time Margaret would share his company, he would have begged the man to stay a while longer. Sadly, prescience was not among his accomplishments.

Although Margaret tried to find contentment in her present circumstances, the things left unsaid between husband and wife preyed upon her thoughts, seemingly increasing her anxiety by the hour. She loved John – more ardently than she ever would have ever supposed – and her silence on that score felt suffocating. She wanted to tell him of her feelings, but questions plagued her mind, sapping away both her contentment and her courage.

She had no illusions that John had come to trust her before taking her hand in marriage. Did he still doubt her integrity? Did he question her faithfulness? Would his opinion of her, once tarnished in his mind, forever carry a shadow of his distrust, even once the truth was known?

Even if she were to put her fears behind her, she couldn’t find the words to share her confession. It seemed impossible to do so without broaching the subject of the scene he had witnessed on the train platform, which had caused him such disgust and brought her so much pain. With so much weighing on his heart already, was it fair of her to upset whatever peace he’d managed to find thus far in their marital harmony?

What if he didn’t believe her? What if he was hurt she hadn’t spoken up before? His anger gave her no cause for alarm, but she couldn’t bear the thought of inflicting additional pain upon him. She would never wish to exact injury upon anyone, him least of all. Not her husband. Not the man she loved. And certainly not now, when his troubles were otherwise so great.

As the weeks passed immediately following her self-revelation, Margaret often found herself on the brink of confessing all to her husband. On each occasion, fear and inconvenient timing silenced her tongue. When the time was right, she promised herself that she would broach the topic of his suspicion and determine whether the trust she so needed to find true happiness in marriage had been regained. If so, she would tell him the truth. And confess to him her love.

In the meantime, she strove to provide him with such contentment, peace, and comfort as was within her power to give. She gave such assistance at the mill as she was able during the day and let her love wash over him at night, her body betraying the secrets of her heart, even if her lips could not. She felt his overwhelming weariness when they made love, pressing her mouth against the deep lines in his brow and offered him her strength when he sagged against her, his cheek pressed against her shoulder. In the aftermath of their coupling, he would fall asleep in her arms, the steady rise and fall of his chest and rhythmic beat of his heart soothing her own cares.

They had been married long enough for Margaret to grow accustomed to the idea but not long enough to overcome the full measure of her shyness – engrained in her from the time she was a child – at her husband viewing her nakedness when she awoke early one morning to see John standing before the fire, preparing his ablutions for the day ahead. He was stripped to the waist, his skin gleaming in the faint light. The fire in the grate was newly lit, its illumination weak and almost begrudging, but it was bright enough for her to see the ripple of muscles beneath his skin as he bent to splash cold water upon his face. She found herself entranced by the solid cord of muscle in his stomach and arms, the play of light and shadow against his upon his bare skin.

Though she doubted he would consider it a compliment, looking at him like this, she could only think how beautiful he was to her. How cherished. He stole her heart and took her breath away.

The sight of him drew her out of bed, the floor cold beneath her bare feet as she crossed the room, resting her hand gently upon his lower back as he straightened. He turned to face her, beads of moisture trailing down his face, and she placed her hand over his, gently tugging the towel from his grasp. He watched in silence as she tossed it aside and didn’t protest when she pressed her free hand against his chest and gave it a firm push, leading him into a nearby chair.

John didn’t say a word as he lowered himself into the seat, but his gaze missed nothing as she cast a critical eye upon the implements he’d laid out beside his washbowl. The shaving razor was open, its blade gleaming, already sharpened upon the strop in preparation for the task at hand. His soap had also already been prepared, the applicator brush resting nearby.

Margaret picking up the brush and mug of shaving soap, working up a lather as she turned back to her husband. His gaze had fallen to her hips, and she realized with a start that, standing before the fire as she was, the outline of her body would be visible through the thin fabric of her nightgown. The thought made her flush, but she feigned ignorance of the view she presented, even as she showed her body off to its best advantage, bending over him to lather his cheeks and chin.

John reached for her, bracing her hips in his palms. His hands were still damp from his morning wash, moistening the fabric of her dress. She shivered, biting back a soft moan of longing, when he pulled her forward until she straddled his chair, her thighs brushing the coarse fabric of his trousers. Unwilling to allow him to distract her from her purpose, she forced her attention to the task at hand, casting a critical eye upon his face to ensure the lather was sufficiently distributed. Then she reached for the razor, her hand trembling slightly as she lifted it to his cheek.

What had seemed like a good idea when she’d started was much more daunting now, when she held the sharpened razor in her hand and prepared to apply it to his bare skin. What if she made a mistake? What if she slipped and injured him? She hesitated, preparing to draw away, but he reached up and wrapped his hand around her own. His eyes were trusting, his gaze warm, as he drew the razor toward his cheek, adjusting the exact angle of the blade before pressing it gently against his skin. Then he dropped his hand, putting his fate entirely in her hands.

Margaret sucked in a sharp breath and narrowed her eyes, focusing the entirety of her attention upon the blade as she scraped it gently against his skin, breathing out a heavy sigh of relief when she managed her first pass without causing injury. Feeling more confident, she applied the blade again, her motions slow and cautious. As she worked, the back of her neck grew damp from the warmth of her fire, and the caress of John’s breath fanned her face as she leaned forward, intent upon her task. She could feel his gaze upon her, but it wasn’t distrust in his eyes. It was desire. Her answering need nearly overwhelmed her, and she required a moment to recollect her composure before she could continue.

With one side completed, John adjusted the angle of his head so  that she could complete the job. Her heart pounded when she felt his hands slide under the hem of her nightdress, teasing the soft, sensitive skin of her thighs, and she sucked in an unsteady breath.

As she pulled the razor away, he slipped his fingers inside her, stroking her gently. Her head fell back with a moan, but she strove to gather her wits and regain control. Bracing her free hand on his shoulder, she cast an accusatory glance at his face, only to receive an unrepentant smile in return. However, the consciousness of his own well-being  was such that he returned his hands to her hip when she wiped the lather off the blade, lifting it to continue her task.

Margaret’s heart pounded as she slid the razor along the curve of his jaw, and he tilted his head back to allow her greater access to his neck. Her efforts were perhaps not as clean as his would have been, but he didn’t seem to mind. When she finished her last pass, she grabbed a damp towel to wipe away the rest of the lather, but John gently tugged the blade from her hand, letting it fall to the floor. Then his mouth was upon her, teasing the bare flesh above the neck of her nightgown.

She opened her mouth to sigh his name, but the sound was captured by his lips as he pulled her firmly against him, pressing her against his hardness. Grabbing the bottom of her nightgown, he lifted it over her head and tossed it aside, and even in the increasing warmth of the room, she shuddered as she was bared before him. John didn’t seem to find anything amiss, however, as his attention was captivated by her smooth perfection.

Lifting his hand to cup her breast, Margaret found herself enthralled as she always was by his caress. The calluses on his palms were rough against her sensitive skin, but his touch was far from unpleasant. Her head fell back, exposing the curve of her neck, as he brushed a thumb against her aureole until her nipple beaded under his palm.

Her hands had fallen on his shoulders, and she gave in to the temptation to trail her fingertips down his chest, tracing the curve of muscle and bone. She felt first the rapid beat of his heart, then the muscles of his stomach shudder as he sucked in a sharp breath, and knew he wasn’t unaffected by her touch. In the light cast by the fire and the soft sunrise, his eyes were dark and filled with need. She wove her fingers into his hair, pressing him to her, as he bowed his head and sucked her breast into his mouth, teasing her with his tongue. She could feel the strength in his hands when he grasped her hips, guiding her motions as she rocked against him.

Only one layer of fabric separated their bodies, causing Margaret no end of frustration. Pressing her hands against his chest, she lifted off him far enough to reach for the buttons of his trousers. In her haste and her desire, her fingers were clumsy and awkward. Their hands tangled together when he attempted to assist her, causing her to laugh, the sound soft and strained.

She had only just managed to pull him free when he grabbed her thighs and pulled her into his lap once more, pausing only long enough to carefully guide himself inside of her. Margaret gasped as she sank onto him, her response inspired as much by the ominous creaking of the chair beneath them as the sudden fullness of his thrust. Anxious about the unsteadiness of their perch, she tightened her thighs around him and wrapped her arms around his neck, slowly rolling her hips against his.

John tucked his head against the curve of her neck, tickling her with the faint traces of stubble she’d overlooked in her earlier ministrations. His mouth scraped against her skin, eliciting a soft moan, while his hands explored her body, lingering in every spot which had previously brought her pleasure. He kissed the curve of her ear, her cheek, her chin, and Margaret rewarded his efforts with another slow roll of her hips.

Once again, she wrestled with the temptation to speak of her feelings, but this was hardly the time to do so. Her confession – or, rather, confessions, as she believed she had identified a multitude that must be made by now – deserved more consideration than a rashly uttered declaration in the midst of lovemaking. They also required more deliberation than to be hastily blurted over breakfast, or on the way out the door to attend to more pressing concerns and outstanding appointments.

Still, her secret feelings nearly overwhelmed her, swelling within her breast until she couldn't speak for love of him. Leaning back slightly, she wrapped one hand behind his neck to hold him in place as her gaze swept over the face that had engraved itself upon her heart. Their eyes met, and she found she couldn’t tear her gaze away, entranced as she was by the play of emotions upon his face and in his eyes…

Once again, she marveled that she ever could have thought him to be cold and cruel, that she ever could have mistaken his hardness for lack of feeling. Though his features were under his command, frequently schooled into either an impassive mask or a glower of disdain, his eyes betrayed him. Even when he had accused her of impropriety, when he’d told her his passion for her had ended, the chill of his words hadn’t wounded her half so much as that which lay behind those blue eyes, which revealed much, but also saw more than she wished.

Margaret was overwhelmed by a sudden wave of fear at what he might comprehend of her own feelings. In an act of self-preservation, she tore her gaze away, pressing her cheek against the curve of his shoulder as he lifted his hips, plunging inside her.

As she met each powerful thrust with a roll of her hips, Margaret clung to her husband, wishing for nothing more than to prolong this interlude. She felt the muscles beneath her tense and knew he was nearing completion, so she increased the rhythm of her hips, pressing her mouth against his neck to taste the saltiness of his skin as his muscles grew taut and he poured himself inside her. The momentarily respite didn’t last long, however, as he cupped one hand behind her head, holding her against him as he slid the other between her legs, stroking her deftly until wave upon wave of pleasure crashed over her and she found her own release.

She collapsed against him, spent and unwilling to let him go, although she knew she couldn’t hold him in this moment forever. The harsh rasp of their breathing filled her ears, but as their hearts slowed and breathing steadied, the room grew quiet, save for the soft crackle of the fire in the grate. When she could put off the inevitable no longer, she lifted her head off John’s shoulder, though she wasn’t yet able to meet his eyes, still uncertain of what her own would reveal.

“Margaret?” His voice was soft and uncertain, and her heart wrenched at the aching vulnerability it betrayed. She was unequal to the task of giving voice to her inner turmoil, so she stared at his lips as she stroked her fingers along the side of his face. Cupped his cheeks in her palms, pressed her mouth against his, drawing his tongue inside her parted lips. In unspoken reassurance, she deepened the embrace until she felt his lingering tension ebb away. When the kiss ended, she drew back to meet his eyes, confident that her own would no longer divulge her secrets.

Climbing off his lap, Margaret rushed to retrieve her nightgown from the floor, quickly pulling it on before turning her attention back to her husband. In the early morning light, Margaret was forced to acknowledge that she made for an imperfect barber, more than one small patch of stubble having escaped her blade, but John issued no complaint. Instead, he used a towel to wipe away what remnants of shaving soap remained, though Margaret noticed that a fair amount had transferred to her person.

Once he had dried his face with a towel, he began to toss it beside the bowl when Margaret grabbed his hand, staying his motion. There, on the bright white fabric, was a small red stain, a sign she had not been as careful with the razor as she had wished. Stretching onto her toes, she examined his skin and noticed the tiniest nick just below his right ear.

“I’m sorry,” she said, speaking as much for her continued silence as the injury she had inflicted upon him.

Touching a finger to the wound, he shook his head. “It’s not deep. It’ll heal soon enough.” He cast a glance at the window, and Margaret knew his mind was turning toward the mill, to the work left undone and the hours that lay ahead of him. Longing to steal just a few more precious moments with him, she helped him to dress, asserting the privilege of such intimacy that only a wife could claim.

The hour was growing late, and Margaret knew her husband was eager to begin his day, but still he hesitated, brushing a lock of hair off her cheek once she had finished straightening his cravat. “Margaret—” he began, a line of worry creasing the skin between his brows, “Forgive me for pressing, but you seem troubled. If something is bothering you, you can confide in me.”

Her heart twisted at the understanding that he had seen more than she’d wished, recognizing the fact of her preoccupation, although he did not yet understand the cause. Pulling him to her, she pressed a kiss against that telltale evidence of his concern. “It’s nothing,” she attempted, though she didn’t need to see his face to anticipate his answering skepticism. Taking his hands in hers, she remarked, “It’s getting late, and work is more important. I don’t want to keep you any longer than I already have.”

John wasn’t willing to be so easily deterred, tightening his hold on her hands. “My work may be necessary, but there is nothing in the world more important to me than you.”

His words gave her hope, and she smiled at him with all the sweetness she felt in her heart. “Very well, but it’s not – I’m not troubled, precisely, but – do you think we could steal some time alone together this evening? There are some matters we should discuss.”

With obvious reluctance at the delay, he agreed, capturing her lips in one more kiss before heading out the door. Little did either of them know that a visit from Mr Bell later that same day would bring news that would drive all other concerns from her mind. For a while, at least.

[theseerasures]

Conspicuous Media Consumption, 2020

it’s that time of year again! *saddest toot from the party horn*

for those of you just joining us: it’s a “consume a different content every week for 48 weeks of the year” challenge. for a longer explanation, check out last year’s write-up here, and as always, feel free to pop in and ask questions about any and all of this content.

(same disclaimer as last year too: content for this project ONLY here, and not certain...*looks at my billion Sad Cop Lady posts*...hyperfixations.)

(man remember when i was big into X-Men comics earlier this year? better times than these, if only because no one's discoursing about Emma Frost’s woobie/war criminal ratio anymore--her w/w, if you will)

(...i swear at one point i didn’t exclusively like platinum blondes but alas)

Bitter Root (comic, 1 issue finished 1/1/2020): still very cool on a basic concept level, but runs into the Image Comics problem of just not having enough content to keep my interest beyond that. part of that is on me, for picking it up again BEFORE the second arc rolled out, but the first five issues didn’t really follow (or resolve) any cohesive story either, so...meh.

Immortal Hulk (comic, 3 trades finished 1/17/2020): still not gonna be something i care deeply about (maybe one of Bruce’s Hulksonas dyed his hair???), but i do want to give kudos to Al Ewing for sheer consistency in terms of sustaining this level of quality storytelling month by month for more than two years now. working with the dense archive of the Hulk mythos and managing to make it interesting and thoughtful is impressive even if i personally would not expend the same effort.

Disco Elysium (game, finished 1/18/2020): honestly i should have twigged onto what this year was gonna be like when the third thing i drew from the barrel was pure uncut Eastern European flavored depression. i faintly recall people ragging on it for being pretentiously cynical, but i actually thought its core slid more towards idealism than people give it credit for. also gratified that i haven’t heard anything about Robert Kurvitz using slave labor to finish it, which is a thing we have to say about our video games now!!! fun.

Watchmen (TV, 7 episodes finished 1/27/2020): i am a fool who wants to believe in Damon Lindelof and I WAS RIGHT!!! honestly still cannot believe that he pulled off this highwire act with such deft aplomb. might be my favorite TV this year, which is a pretty high bar given how much TV i ended up watching.

On a Sunbeam (comic, finished 2/1/2020): Tillie Walden rightly deserves all the praise for inventive queer storytelling, but i will say that on reread--since i first read this as a webcomic--there ARE some issues with pacing here that clearly come from the foibles of its original intended medium. still just excellent, even if after some plot significant haircuts i was having trouble telling a few folks apart.

Lazarus (comic, 1 trade finished 2/8/2020): it’s so good and i want moooooorrrreee--though obviously Rucka and Lark have the right to take all the time they need. the newer longer issues work really well with the epic prestige drama vibes of the story! i’m into it.

The Good Place (TV, 4 seasons finished 2/18/2020): i’m gonna be super honest: i actually wasn’t a big fan of the finale, nor the last season as a whole. it felt like all of Eleanor’s flaws vanished for a majority of the season, and the Chidi-centric episode where they tried to give a legible justification for why he’s Like This was...i didn’t care for it. still, it’s so good and unique on the WHOLE that we’ll literally never get anything like this ever again, and that counts for a lot.

The Old Republic (game, finished 2/21/2020): it’s an MMO so it will never actually Be Finished so long as the servers aren’t shut down, but i caught up on the content i’d missed in the intervening months. Onslaught thus far has mostly been...kinda bland tbh; going back to Imps vs. Rebs after all the shakeups in the previous expansions feels like a waste.

High Road (album, finished 2/22/2020): someone should tell Kesha not to say that word!! otherwise i was very happy with this album, and happy FOR her even though we don’t know each other. being able to find joy again in the same genre of music you made while you were being horrifically exploited is very cool.

Young Justice (TV, 13 episodes finished 2/28/2020): given how much the middle stuff dragged--STOP KILLING YOUR HIJABI CHARACTER IN HORRIFIC WAYS--i was...actually kinda mad by how the end managed to stick the landing anyway. the day being saved by Vic’s self-acceptance and Violet’s sublime compassion was A+, and even the Brion/Tara switchup was a pleasant surprise, though it relied on me caring about Brion MUCH MORE than i actually did.

Manic (album, finished 2/29/2020): do people still care for/about Halsey? i feel like even That One Song that was on every tumblr gifset ever has kinda faded into obscurity at this point. this album was...okay. i feel like people give Halsey a pass for extremely obvious lyrical turns that they wouldn’t for other folks because of her subject material--which is fine. not really my cup of tea, but i also listened to lots of Relient K this year, so that’s probably a good thing.

Jade Empire (game, 3/10/2020): the only 3D-era Bioware game that didn’t franchise out, and for good fucking reason!!! the Orientalism and appropriation really haven’t aged well, and even beyond that the story was...standard Bioware faire. even my usual “my wife’s a bitch i love her” Bioware type didn’t do it for me, and i just ended up romancing no one. it did make me think a lot about what level of cultural borrowing is accepted nowadays, and why: people still look fondly at Avatar and talk about how ~accurate and respectful it was, for example, despite it being staffed almost entirely by white folks, and the Orientalism ALL OVER the monk class in DND is still fine for some reason.

Alif the Unseen (book, finished 3/31/2020): interesting to have read this AFTER reading The Bird King last year, because it highlights how the intervening years have shifted G. Willow Wilson’s thematic interest and improved her craft. i’m actually quite fond of how her characterization work is rougher here--Alif is extremely flawed to the point of being insufferable, but it makes his development by the end more satisfying. Dina is also just good and i love her

Baldur’s Gate (2 games, finished 5/31/2020): well, having finally finished the series i’m happy to say that it...still doesn’t really do it for me, sorry. any awesome story moments were overshadowed by the EXCRUCIATING inventory management system and the combat (i still don’t know what a THAC0 is and at this point i’m afraid to find out). these games crucially lack the Home Base that later Bioware games were so good about, and that (coupled with the huge cast of characters you can drop off and never see again) really hurts the intimacy for me. by the time we finally did get one it was the Hell Dimension in Throne of Bhaal, and i was just...trying to get through it. (yes, i did just say that about one of the most beloved expansions ever to one of the most beloved games ever.) THIS particular iteration of “my wife’s a bitch i love her” was very good, but the game wouldn’t let me romance her :(

The Underground Railroad (book, finished 6/19/2020): honestly what is there even left to say at this point! it was exactly as good as every critic on the planet said it was, even with my usual aversion to hype. draining and horrifying in turns but still insistent upon a future for Black folks.

Steven Universe (6 seasons and a mooooooviiieeee, finished 7/11/2020): yes, i DID finish the show and almost immediately begin a rewatch. this series is now one of my top five most formative things, and the amount of love and respect i have for it is incalculable. that said: i once again did not love how the central conflict of Future was resolved (just the resolution--i loved the finale just fine). for all of Steven’s breakdown was built up, resolving it with “EVERYONE HUG HIM UNTIL HE CRIES” felt...cheap, especially since up until this point the show had been so good about treating trauma and mental illness with the respect and nuance it deserves. it made me wish some of the earlier, less substantial episodes had been cut so we could spend more time at the end.

What It Is (comic, finished 8/19/2020): y’all i love Lynda Barry SO MUCH. for the longest time i was worried that One Hundred Demons was more a lightning in a bottle situation but every book of hers i pick up makes me feel obscure emotions i didn’t even realize existed. the compassionate way she’s able to describe her child self and how weird and fucked up she was (and still is) is honestly aspirational.

She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (TV, 5 seasons finished 9/26/2020): so here’s a reversal of what i’ve been complaining about with other shows: i was mostly lukewarm-to-warm about She-Ra, but the later seasons and the finale made me much more into it as a whole. more shows should improve in stakes and overall quality as they age tbh!! i still don’t actively love Catradora (my sole quibble with season 5 actually has to do with the way Adora kept backsliding as a character to make certain Plot/Relationship things happen), but i’m very happy for them nonetheless. i can certainly appreciate a show that will go for High Feeling over tight plot. dark horse standout moments: trees growing everywhere proving that Perfuma Was Right, and Hordak and Adora seeing each other--that weirdly intimate moment of recognition.

Fetch the Bolt Cutters (album, finished 10/7/2020): again i find myself not having much to say that no one else has said. it’s good! once again love it when an artist reclaims something they’d attached with negative affect (anxiety, depression, disordered eating) for better and brighter things.

Solutions and Other Problems (comic, finished 10/25/2020): i was very into Allie Brosh’s ambition with this book, which feels weird to say but i stand by it. it’s cool to see an artist try to make a new medium work for them instead of just sticking to what already works. not all the experimentation was 100% effective, but it was still delightful and occasionally devastating to read, so.

Legend of Zelda (3 games: Ocarina of Time, Majora’s Mask, Link Between Worlds, finished 11/1/2020): this was the third time i’d played Ocarina of Time, which made it the nice, comforting groove i settled into before Majora’s Mask blatted me in the face. i’m not usually a completionist Zelda person because...the gameplay in Zelda is bad, do not at me it just is, but i really felt like i HAD to be one for Majora’s Mask since the whole point is to get attached to the banalities of the town. i’m sure nobody’s surprised that i loved it, even if it gave me an existential crisis about how life goes on in the game for NPCs when you’re not there to save them from it, and there’s not enough time to save them all all the time (also not a surprise to anyone: Romani and Cremia gave Personal Feelings). Link Between Worlds...bad. not like in a “this is a bad story by every measurable gauge” way, but i was already struggling with the 2D playstyle shift enough that for the whole story to end with some “yes it’s v sad that Lorule is Like This but trying to steal Hyrule’s privilege is Even Worse Actually” noblesse oblige bullshit left a VERY poor taste in my mouth, this year of all years. i did audibly gasp when Ravio took off his mask, though. i’m currently playing Breath of the Wild in cautious increments; it’s the first time i’ve enjoyed early Zelda gameplay, but if they wanted fully voiced cutscenes i wish they got voice actors who...knew what words sound like.

folklore (album, finished 11/6/2020): my belief that Taylor Swift is Just Fine continues, i’m afraid. i LIKED this album, don’t get me wrong, and respect her constant drive to innovate, but i didn’t love it substantially more or less than any other Taylor Swift album. mostly i’m just tickled by how she thinks leaning into the indie aesthetic means borrowing Vita Sackville-West’s entire wardrobe, though i will admit to feeling Something when she swore in a song. i think it was like. savage vindication?? you go ahead and swear, Taylor Swift. you deserve it.

Shore (album, finished 11/19/2020): do people still care about the Fleet Foxes? i think there was some Drama with Josh Tillman a while back but i don’t remember where the discourse landed with who was being more problematic. it was nostalgic for me to listen to their new album--made me remember being an undergrad who exclusively listened to men who mumbled and played acoustic guitar all over again.

Star Wars (3 movies: original trilogy, finished 11/27/2020): there is So Much bad Star Wars these days that every time i rewatch the original trilogy i’m afraid that they will suddenly be bad, but guess what! they’re not. i love these children and their hot mess stories, i love that Lando doesn’t know how to say his best friend’s name. what stood out to me this time was the way Obi-Wan described the Force in A New Hope, which strongly implied that ANYONE can be Force Sensitive; that obviously faded with each subsequent movie, but part of me does wish they’d kept it.

X of Swords (comics, 22 issues finished 12/5/2020): i am enjoying Hickman’s X-lines!!! not so much here for the Grand Conspiracy or whatever, but the character work and highkey weirdness is fabulous--they FEEL like X-Men, despite all the shakeups in-universe. this crossover is a nice microcosm of all that: grandiloquently all over the place, but still full of cool standout moments and genuine hilarity. ILLYANA DOESN’T KNOW HOW TO SPELL MAGIC.

Fire Emblem (4 games: Sacred Stones, Path of Radiance, Radiant Dawn, Awakening, finished 12/14/2020): this was the thing that i was closest to giving up early on, but i ended up hyperfixating on it instead. that’s a credit to what the gameplay does to my lizard brain more than anything else, because the story and character writing is...insipid. it was very bizarre to witness this franchise blunder around with its animal-people racism allegory around the same time i was getting back into RWBY, and ITS animal-people racism allegory blunders. Awakening was the first time i felt anything for the franchise beyond “teehee red units disappear make exp bar go up and brain go ding,” so i’m excited for more mature storytelling in subsequent games (they MUST get better. they MUST). the child husbandry thing is...very bad tho, and Apotheosis being “challenging” entirely through the game changing all the rules is also bad.

once again no vidya games that came out this year--i’ll probably pick up Spiritfarer or Hades after the New Year, though (or maybe TLOU II! but probably not. sry Laura and Ashley). more TV and franchises this year, which made me feel In Touch with the Children but was also kinda exhausting. nothing was so egregiously terrible i dropped it without finishing! in a year like this that feels almost like an accomplishment

[aboutcaseyaffleck]

Casey Affleck Gets Philosophical About Life, Time & The Whole Damn Thing

“Time,” reflects Casey Affleck, “is something I have been thinking about lately. It is ironic how the older you get, the better you are at being patient. With less time left, people become better at waiting. But this year, I feel much older and a lot less patient. I guess you’ve got to accept that time is never wasted? That doing is no different than not doing? That you can’t kill time no matter what you do, and that no matter what you do you can’t prevent the opposite from happening either? I don’t know. It’s a double-edged sword.”

It’s a Wednesday afternoon in early January, and Affleck and I are doing the Zoom thing, ostensibly to discuss his two new movies, the recently released indie Our Friend and the upcoming 19th-century period drama The World to Come. Yet our virtual tête-à-tête has become far more interesting, jumping wildly from his love of trains and travel to weightier topics like family, the future and the search for something more, something meaningful.

“I like the idea that time is an illusion. That past, present and future are all happening at once. I like it even though I can’t totally get my head around it. But either way, the me in the mirror gets older every day.”

Like most of us, he’s not only had plenty of time on his hands in recent months, housebound in L.A., but he’s tried to use his downtime wisely. “I tried to use this year of quarantine constructively,” the 45-year-old Oscar winner says. “I tried to see it as a winter season for shutting down and restoring something inside, but I just couldn’t. I’m not that evolved, I guess. I didn’t take up a new hobby or learn an instrument or get better at ‘self-care.’ If anything, I let my better habits and routines fall off. It was all I could do to keep my head above water and help buoy my friends and children when I could.”

As a guy with two teenagers at home — Indiana, 16, and Atticus, 13 — it hasn’t been easy, but he’s doing his best. He tried taking his sons on their annual camping road trip over the summer, but it was short-lived. Instead, he’s been focusing on making a happy home. “My kids don’t get to see their friends a lot, so I’m doing a lot more stuff with them, coming up with activities for the three of us, which they mostly hate, and I mostly let drop. And then I try again with the same outcome 90 percent of the time.”

While trying to create innovative plans to sustain his boys, he came up with one he thought might do some good, too. In June, he launched Stories from Tomorrow, a social-media initiative focused on creative writing by kids.

“At the beginning of all this last March, the first thing that occurred to me was that the quarantine would have a big impact on young people’s emotional well-being — the disruption they’re going to feel is really going to affect their mental health more than anyone else,” he says. “When I would sit down to write creatively, I felt better. But I couldn’t get my sons to journal or do creative writing much. I didn’t want to twist their arms about it. So I was like, ‘I’ll make a social media platform that inspires young people to write creatively, because it is such a good way of working out difficult feelings. And the way I will do that is have well-known people read the kids’ writing publicly.’ I knew that hearing your own writing read was exciting. I thought it would be really inspiring, that creative writing would be a great outlet for kids stuck at home.”

He enlisted some of the biggest names in Hollywood, including Robert Redford, Matt Damon, Don Cheadle, Jon Hamm, Matthew Broderick, Kyle Chandler and Danny Glover, as well as two current costars, Vanessa Kirby and Jason Segel, and arranged for donations made through the program to go to children’s hunger nonprofit Feeding America and Room to Read, which supports female education. He reached out to schools in Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Haiti, hoping to create a global community.

Affleck was excited to make progress, to have done some good, but the initiative didn’t take off as planned. “In the end, an Instagram account for creative writing by tweens just couldn’t possibly compete with the quintillion bytes of daily data generated online. I don’t know. But I tried! And anyway, since then lots of other organizations started doing basically the same thing, and they are more organized than I am, and they have done a better job. So be it.”

Yet, adults have been disrupted, too, including Affleck himself, who is aware that, relatively speaking, he has gotten through mostly unscathed. “Am I happy? I mean, I’m relatively okay. It’s been a hard time to find balance and to keep it. I would say it’s been a hard time in my life, but I know that it’s been harder for other folks. So far we haven’t lost anyone, and we haven’t lost our house. And I rediscovered that when you’re feeling bad, there’s nothing better to do than to try to help other people. Being of service not only helps others but is a great way of getting outside of yourself. Also — and I really believe this — I think this time will be remembered as one when our country made leaps and bounds in the right direction; we are changing and growing and it’s uncomfortable, but we will be much, much better. I wish I could see the next couple hundred years. It’s going to be amazing.”

At the end of the day, it’s family that’s keeping him going. “Having my kids around and being able to spend so much time with them has been amazing. It is the brightest silver lining in all of this. They are what gives me the most joy. They are funny and smart and interesting and interested. They are just the best company ever,” he says. “Anytime I try to parent out some ‘teaching moment,’ I find they are two steps ahead. They help me make sense of stuff just as much I help them, if not more. I don’t have any answers, but batting the questions around, back and forth, is a good way of coping.”

CALEB CASEY MCGUIRE AFFLECK-BOLDT feels he is luckier than most. Although he and many of his peers have gone jobless for a full year, he spent 2019 working hard. He had not one but three films done and dusted prior to the start of the pandemic; the last one wrapped a week before mandatory quarantine. Two of these have back-to-back release dates: the tearjerker indie Our Friend came out in January, and sweeping period drama The World to Come will be released February 12. Thriller Every Breath You Take is slated for later this year. “I am so, so, so glad I spent 2019 working that much. It is what kept us afloat all through 2020,” he says.

The films themselves are radically different, but there are a few common threads. In both of his winter releases, Affleck plays a man who has lost a family member and whose marriage is in shambles. In both, he is a man in pain.

In the LGBTQ masterpiece The World to Come, which revolves around the love that blossoms between two married women on the mid-19th-century American frontier, his character, Dyer, says very little but manages to convey a wealth of emotion with his eyes alone. He may seem stoic, but he is suffering.

“The World to Come is a story about a couple who have lost a baby. They’re dealing with the grief in totally different ways and having a very hard time coming together again,” he explains. “My character wants to heal that by having another, but his wife [played by Katherine Waterson] is coping in a different way. She is severing all emotional attachment to him because it triggers more and more grief. She [only] seems to come alive when she is with their neighbor, a woman on the next farm [played by Vanessa Kirby]. He wants his wife happy, but he also would like her to love him. To me, this is the story of how couples can have their relationship shattered by a sudden loss. And it’s definitely a beautiful story about two women who feel that they have to hide their love and find the courage to love each other anyway.”

Affleck likes layers. He himself has many, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that he’s drawn to roles written as fully formed characters, not caricatures. With Dyer, that’s abundantly clear. “Crisis is fun to play, [and Dyer] is in an interesting crisis,” he says. “I think he’s a really good person — a really decent, solid, loving person — which is what I loved so much about playing him and what I love so much about the writing. It’s more interesting when there’s no bad guy, just a conflict of circumstances and feelings that get so complicated that it drives two people apart.”

In Our Friend, a different set of circumstances drives the leads apart. Affleck and Dakota Johnson take on the true story of Matthew and Nicole Teague, whose imperfect marriage was strained by his long absences and her affair, neither of which seem at all important when she’s diagnosed with terminal cancer.

“To me, Our Friend is really a story about how petty grievances between people can divide them and then be forgotten when a gigantic tragedy is dropped in their laps. [Matthew] was wronged, it’s true — his wife cheated on him. On the other hand, he wronged her in a bunch of ways; [they] were just more passive and not quite so salacious. He wasn’t around. Matt got to be a dad and he got to travel the world as a journalist. He left her to take care of the kids. She wanted to have a life too, she had dreams of her own — she wanted to be a singer, she wanted to work — but she didn’t get to do that. She just got to be a mom. She was left holding the bag, and it wasn’t fair.”

He spent a fair amount of time immersing himself in the journalist’s life while filming in Fairhope, Ala., in 2019. (The film’s title is taken from Teague’s award-winning Esquire essay, “The Friend: Love Is Not a Big Enough Word.” The friend in question — played by Jason Segel — is a man who puts his life on hold to help the family during their darkest days.) But he did not become Matt Teague, which is an important distinction. “[Director] Gabriella Cowperthwaite asked that we not portray the personality traits of the real people. No accents, no mannerisms. [But] I did steal his style, because I had never seen someone nail the dad look any better than Matt. I say that with affection.”

As for the dreams Nicole gave up for her family, Affleck says, “If you were to ask Matt, I’m sure he would acknowledge that he was neglecting his role. He was neglecting her dreams, and that is a part of marriage, supporting what the other person wants. Like all relationships, it was complicated.”

Like life itself, really. This is why he can identify with both sides. He understands Nicole’s pain about the deference of her dreams as well as Matt’s desire to escape through travel — especially now, when Affleck himself has been completely grounded. Since the age of 17 he’s taken 20 cross-country road trips. His love of driving is secondary only to his enthusiasm for trains: Amtrak is his jam. He even fantasizes about owning his own train car one day.

Immersing himself in each location — whether it’s the sleepy Alabama town of Fairhope or the more exotic locale of Romania, which served as a stand-in for the East Coast of the U.S. in The World to Come — is actually one of the most desirable parts of the acting life, he says. “One of the things I love about working as an actor is that you go to some brand-new place and the community invites you in in a way that they don’t usually if you’re a tourist,” he confides. “You get to see what it’s like to really be there and imagine yourself living there.”

And he has — over the past ten years he’s spent so much time in cities including his hometown of Boston; Vancouver, British Columbia, the location of Light of My Life; Atlanta, where he shot the 2016 action flick Triple 9; Argentina, where he made Gerry; Dallas, for A Ghost Story; Calgary, Alberta, where much of the epic western The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford was filmed; Our Friend’s Fairhope set; Cincinnati, for The Old Man and the Gun; and Braddock, Pa., where he filmed the 2013 drama Out of the Furnace. “I have loved moving in and settling down and living a character’s life and then moving on. But I feel most at home in places that are struggling to get by. It reminds me of the neighborhood I grew up in. I feel lighter in those places, more relaxed. I feel like myself. I fit in.”

For him, the where is almost as important as the who — immersing himself in the place is imperative to understanding his character. This is part of what makes him such an accomplished actor — he and most of the parts he plays merge. I draw a crappy analogy about how the characters are like a coat, which he very obligingly works with. “You have to build the coat from all of the scraps and pieces of yourself; all these characters are made up of little pieces of me,” he says, noting, “Obviously, sometimes they can’t be. Sometimes I have no connection whatsoever, and those are the jobs I look back on and I either feel nothing for, or worse. But sometimes you have to take the job that is available, like most people in the world. You know? I don’t think my dad wanted to be a janitor. But he did it.”

He’s won an Oscar, a BAFTA, a Critics’ Choice Award, a Golden Globe and an Independent Spirit Award, among others, and appeared in films that run the gamut from box-office juggernauts like the Ocean’s 11 franchise and Tower Heist to indie darlings like brother Ben’s directorial debut Gone Baby Gone and Manchester by the Sea. He has even written and directed, most recently 2019’s Light of My Life, a bizarrely prescient movie about raising children in a pandemic. At this point in his career, he should have his pick of parts. “Not really,” he says. “There are a lot of people out there who have done good work, who are driven, and who have something to share. I have never been someone studios embraced as a ‘movie star,’ never knighted. I have always had to fight for the parts I have gotten. And you know what? That’s fine. Let me fight. It’s how I cut my teeth, and it is how I will keep them sharp. You can’t ask for more than a chance to be in the ring. Also, movies and TV aren’t all I care about. Sometimes I think, ‘Well, jeez, I have to work, and there are two jobs available to me, and the one that isn’t as good is the one that is close to home and I can see the kids, so I guess I am doing that.’ I love movies and really try hard to make them good. I really bust my ass every day when I get the chance to make one. I care more about my family than any movie. It’s not [always] the job I love, but this is the reality of my life. But maybe life will be long enough for a few more chapters.

The forward momentum of his future is an interesting topic. At the moment, he isn’t so much planning for the future as he is exploring it, because Affleck is not someone who likes to live with regret.

“I guess [at the end of the day], regret should be reframed as a reminder to be different,” he observes. And so, with this in mind, he embarked on a personal journey several years ago and decided to go back to college (at the Simon Fraser University in British Columbia). He had completed two years at Columbia University, but he never graduated — his film career kept getting in the way.

“I went back to school because I hadn’t finished, and I wanted to think about new things in a way that school can help you do,” he says. “I couldn’t go in person, so I found a strong online school and got started. You know, I’m 45, and I just thought, ’This is halftime. This is where you hit the locker room and think about how you want the rest of the game to go.’ You know what I mean? Like, ‘Okay, we went out, we played our best, we didn’t know what the other team was going to be like, we made some mistakes, we are in the game, so let’s adjust like this.’ Also, I’m not sure I want to be an actor forever. I had made a small pivot from acting into directing, and into producing more. And I like to direct movies. The most satisfying creative experience I’ve had in a long time was being a director. But ultimately it wasn’t quite enough. So I wanted to go study some of the things I was interested in. I wanted to do more with my life.”

Although he needed general credits to graduate, he found an unexpected passion for juvenile justice along the way, with a particular focus on alternative accountability programs. “I don’t know where this will lead me, or why I am so interested in it, but finding and implementing better systems for addressing harm and conflict among kids, adults too, but mostly young people, is something I care about. And the work that I have done so far has been fascinating and deeply rewarding.”

When I ask if this stems from his own experiences as a troubled kid growing up in Cambridge, Mass., with Christine, a single mom — his parents divorced when he was 9; his father, Timothy, an alcoholic tradesman, checked into a rehab facility in Indio, Calif., when Affleck was just 14 — he muses thoughtfully, “I love my parents and think they both did the very best they could and cared a lot. Period. Did I get into some trouble as a teenager? I got into some trouble when I was a kid, and I struggled a lot through high school with depression and substances, yes. Much of it I didn’t even know wasn’t normal. I don’t know if I was ‘troubled.’ Either way, as an adult, I’ve come to see that, regardless of how I compare to anyone else, I want less conflict in my life. That might be part of the reason why I’ve been so interested in learning about better ways of resolving conflicts, both with children and with grown-ups. It isn’t something they teach in school for some reason. Man, there is a lot they don’t teach you in school, huh? A lot you’ve got to learn on your own.”

And on this journey, mistakes will be made. That’s par for the course, and Affleck is no exception. “I have made so many mistakes, but life is the time for mistakes. I do believe people should hold themselves accountable and repair harm they have caused. That is important to me, and I try hard to do that whenever it is called for: apologize for mistakes and repair them,” he admits.

This is when our conversation, as such conversations are wont to do, comes full circle. Before we say goodbye, Affleck remarks, “You know, I heard Bono talking on Howard Stern’s show, and he said something about Frank Sinatra that was interesting. He said that he heard two versions of Frank singing ‘My Way.’ One version was recorded when Frank was young, and the other version was recorded when Frank was old. Each had the exact same words, same arrangement, same everything. But when Frank was young the line ‘I did it my way’ sounded proud, and when Frank was old it sounded humble. Whatever else time does to a person, I think it also does that.”

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